Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship

Chapter Two: Deciphering The Private Memoirs: James Hogg’s Napoleon Complex

Two Deciphering The Private Memoirs James Hogg’s Napoleon Complex While Lamb found magazine collaboration to have uniformly positive effects, James Hogg underwent a more malignant process. His bizarre Gothic novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the 1824 work for which Hogg is best known today, is commonly recognized as an autobiographical allegory about the author’s wranglings with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the powerful monthly with which Hogg was affiliated from the magazine’s inception.1 In the novel, set in Scotland mostly during the era of religious controversy and the move toward Union in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Hogg allegorizes Blackwood’s power over him through the figure of Gil-Martin, a mysterious personality who befriends Robert Wringhim, a religious zealot, and who either convinces Wringhim to commit crimes or frames Wringhim by committing the crimes himself. In this symbolically suggestive narrative of impersonation and corruption, Gil-Martin’s Svengali influence over Wringhim is a compelling allegory of both the initial appeal that Blackwood’s held for Hogg and the detrimental effect the magazine later exerted over him through the “Noctes Ambrosianae,” a comic series that appeared in Blackwood’s from 1822 to 1835, and which disseminated buffoonish caricatures of Hogg that competed with his hard-won authorial reputation. Thus, in the novel, as the friendship that Wringhim first thought to be a sign of divine favor increasingly reveals itself as Satanic possession, the Private Memoirs’ Gothic plot charts Hogg’s growing disillusionment with Blackwood’s by symbolically portraying magazines as a demonic power capable of the worst feats of impersonation and disempowerment. The critical scholarship on the Private Memoirs, however, rarely con- Deciphering The Private Memoirs 67 nects this autobiographical allegory to the 1817 “Chaldee Manuscript,” Hogg’s contribution to the first issue of Blackwood’s, and a controversial text that would greatly shape the magazine as well as Hogg’s future relationship with the periodical; nor does the scholarship connect Hogg’s conflicted relationship to contemporary magazines with the distinctive discursive complexity for which the Private Memoirs is best known. The latter includes a metafictional, highly self-reflexive narrative that depicts its own composition and publication—at one point in the novel specifically portraying Blackwood’s itself—as well as an overall discursive and generic heterogeneity, described in a contemporary review of the novel as an “exaggerated and extravagant style of writing,” and by a modern critic as “a fitful narrative, characterized by numerous false starts, false endings, and digressions.”2 This convoluted narrative form alternately takes up and discards various genres (ranging from Gothic to historical novel, supernatural tale, and comic folklore), careens through various discursive voices and aesthetic tones (such as religious fanaticism, antiquarian scholarship, and Scottish dialect), and layers and embeds narratives with lunatic abandon. For much of the critical scholarship that first rediscovered the novel in the twentieth century, the deeply heteroglossic and almost internally contradictory style of the Private Memoirs has been celebrated as a proto-modernist trait, as demonstrated by the novel’s indeterminate ending, which leaves unresolved the question of whether Wringhim’s memoir is a historical mystery or the ravings of a religious maniac.3 But in the more contemporary context of postNapoleonic periodical engagements, the Private Memoirs’ distinct style could also be recognized as an extreme instance of the calculated motifs of some late Romantic writing, and hence a result of the quintessentially modern experience of commercial capitalism. Certainly as a text developed in response to Blackwood’s, one of the most popular and influential monthly magazines of the era, the Private Memoirs is consistent with the tropes of exotic materialism found in other magazine collaborations such as Lamb’s. In the Private Memoirs, this turn to an exotic artifact arises, literally, in the novel’s denouement, in the form of an exhumed “Scots mummy.”4 This corpse, believed to be the mummified body of Robert Wringhim, is unearthed in the contemporary frame with which the novel concludes, and it is accompanied by a “rolled,” “rotten, and yellow” document whose physical attributes, particularly when adjacent to an excavated mummy, strongly evoke Egyptian papyri (173). 68 Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs This second chapter thus presents Hogg as an antithetical figure of post-Napoleonic magazine collaboration, whose periodical engagement begins with all the optimism of Lamb’s collaboration with the London, but soon shifts, with the worsening...