Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory by Evan Gottlieb (review)

Evan Gottlieb invokes Slavoj Žižek’s “unorthodox methodology” (4) to justify his “pairings of Scott’s early and later novels with major theoretical concepts” in order to “illuminate the complexities of Scott’s fictions while simultaneously using Scott’s fictions to explain and explore the state of contemporary theory” (4). Gottlieb chooses Scott for these purposes for his novelist prominence in the Romantic era, “that important hinge between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (3), indeed that “integral hinge” between “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century generic neighbors” (5). Besides, “inasmuch as Scott’s historical novels in particular tend to juxtapose the past and the present, they are already engaged in asking some of the same questions about modernity that theory excels at pursuing” (8). This combination, Gottlieb several times promises, starting with his jaunty chapter title “Everything you always wanted to know about Scott but were afraid to ask Contemporary Theory (and vice versa),” will be fun.

It is sometimes fun. Sometimes intentionally. The pairings are not equally happy in their results, though. The ungainly and stunted mix with the better-favoured and more promising. Not that we should imply anything too intimate here—the brevity of the sketches of both novel and theory and the relatively superficial discussion tend to produce something more like speed-dating than brief flings. One shuffles through one’s impressions afterwards.

Waverley, for example, is introduced to Žižek. “Feeling cast out of one sociosymbolic order—what Žižek, following Lacan, calls the big Other—Waverley now eagerly accepts the place offered him in another” (18). This might be so, but it does rather ignore the plot of the novel, in which young Edward is skilfully deceived by his Highland seducers and trapped by circumstances. But “Waverley’s entire Jacobitical episode now begins to appear structurally akin to the psychoanalytic process that Žižek, again following Lacan, calls “traversing the fantasy.” Rather than learning to free oneself from a given fantasy, as traditional Freudian therapy would prescribe, “traversing the fantasy” involves totally identifying with it in order to “pass through it” (19). Lacking a Freudian analyst, Edward opts to traverse perhaps. This may not be the least useful way to describe what happens to him, although there have certainly been better ones. At any rate, a Scott emerges here brimming with things that “begin to appear structurally akin” to various contemporary theoretical concepts.

The reading of Waverley may not have gained too much from Žižek, but is hardly exceptionable. The same may not be said after this theorist’s brush with Ivanhoe. The lustful and villainous Brian de Bois-Guilbert shows “a measure of real courage” in urging that Rebecca join him in lawless concubinage in Palestine; his “ability to imagine a symbolic order other than England’s current status quo is encouraging” (28). Encouraging? What is wanted, apparently, and a marriage between Rebecca and Ivanhoe would have served the purpose too, is “what Žižek calls a true ‘Act’” (29). This would be like traversing the fantasy, only better. Such an “Act retroactively changes the very coordinates in which it intervenes,” Žižek says. One is “engaging oneself into a kind of Pascalean wager that the Act itself will create the conditions of its retroactive ‘democratic’ legitimization” (29).

If only. “However,” Gottlieb mournfully notes, “no such Act occurs.” This one can hardly deny, but it seems a little unfair also to claim that “Ivanhoe hardly dreams of any such subversive action” (29). He at least daydreams about it, as do the readers into whose minds Scott has introduced the idea. Gottlieb does notice this, after his fashion: “Does Ivanhoe’s union with Rowena even qualify as the generic, happily-ever-after ending of Romance? Or might Scott be offering the fictive equivalent of what Žižek calls a ‘parallax gap,’ after the phenomenon whereby a single object appears to change location when viewed from two different perspectives?” (30). I leave these questions...