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TWO ROMANTICISM’S LAST MINSTREL Scott, Ideological Fetishes, and the Technology of the Book Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are among writers now living the two, who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of the age . . . . In their poetry, in their prose, in their politics, and in their tempers, no two men can be more unlike. —William Hazlitt WHEN HE DECIDED TO TURN TO THE ROMANCE FORM IN HIS 1805 Lay of the Last Minstrel, just a few years after Wordsworth attacked the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” fed by “idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Prose 1.128–30), Scott was engaging a rather embattled generic form. And yet, over the next few years, Scott managed to turn the rhetoric of nervous sensibility and disease completely around, claiming for himself and for his metrical romances a rhetoric of manly and invigorating health. Reviewers followed suit, making use of the very pathologization of civilization that we saw in the medical tracts of the eighteenth century in order to claim for the chivalric romance the ability to reinvigorate a society driven to idleness and effeminacy by the luxuries and advances made possible by the rise of capitalist “culture.” By presenting his romances as healthy antidotes to the political troubles of his age, Scott set up the medieval past as an uncorrupted principle of health in a society made soft by the market-driven luxuries of British civilization. In so doing, however, Scott also acknowledged that past as past, persisting only in his own invigorating fictions. Scott’s orchestration of King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh, which Scott organized in 1822 and which I will address as the most obviously politicized extension of the ideology found in Scott’s metrical romances, proceeded by a similar methodology: Scott provided the British monarch with a powerful form of self-legitimation and self-invigoration in the fictional traditions Scott created; however, those traditions were, at the same time, acknowledged as both superseded and fictionalized, thus at once facilitating and undercutting both Sir Walter’s and King George’s political influence. 33 34 the perversity of poetry This chapter, then, makes two apparently competing arguments: on the one hand, I wish to take seriously John Gibson Lockhart’s statement that Scott’s “services, direct and indirect, toward repressing the revolutionary propensities of his age were vast—far beyond the comprehension of vulgar politicians” (Alice Chandler 48–49); on the other hand, I wish to explore how the rhetoric of health employed by reviewers and Scott himself to describe his poetical romances and his fantasized medievalism served to obfuscate and, ultimately, undercut Scott’s political influence. The key to this situation lies in the same logic of the fetish I explored in the last chapter with regard to Solomon’s Guide to Health. In addition to the anthropological and Marxist fetish already discussed, this chapter explores a third psychoanalytical version of the fetish that structured the fantasies of the emergent bourgeois subject in the nineteenth century, allowing contradictory claims to stand together in Scott’s fictionalized version of medieval tradition. Following Octave Mannoni’s influential article, “Je sais bien mais quand-même,” we can express the logic of this psychoanalytical fetish as follows : I know very well that these medievalist fantasies are not real but, nonetheless, I will act as if I believed.1 This logic at once allowed those medievalist fantasies to assume political influence and ensured that no one ultimately took Scott’s influence with regard to those ideological fantasies seriously. The same fetish-logic that drove the romance fantasy of King George’s visit to Edinburgh, particularly the king’s donning of Highland garb at the Holyrood Levee, also drove Scott’s earlier reaction to the transformations beginning to occur in the production, marketing, and dissemination of texts. Scott, as this chapter illustrates, used the romance as a bulwark against change, as a means to familiarize the past and harmonize the present. He also attempted to reinvest his works with both the power of the minstrel’s voice and the aura of the magical book, thus combating—while never succeeding to eradicate—the effects of mass production. In so doing, Scott established a principle of uncorrupted health in a fantasy of precapitalist totemic magic that was at the same time acknowledged as impossible in and superseded by the industrial present. Before this chapter can turn to Scott’s dressing of King...

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