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  • Loss and Permanence
  • Nigel Leask (bio)
Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. pp. 262 + ix; ISBN 9780748617869

‘What is modern memory and how does it affect the way we see the nation?’ (p. 1). Such is the tricky question with which Alexander Blaikie (professor of historical sociology at Aberdeen University) begins this thoughtful if rather diffuse study. Much of the book reads like a series of attempts to catch hold of its slippery quarry, drawing upon the burgeoning field of memory studies. It’s an area that gained new impetus from the comparatively recent English translation of Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (1996–8), which proclaims the dispersal of communal memory (the ‘milieux de mémoire’) and modernity’s compensatory invention of the past as ‘lieux [End Page 273] de mémoire’.1 Even in conditions of modernist atomization, Blaikie argues, the most private memories are inflected by social belonging and radiate out from the family and intimate circle of friends, through the wider nexus of community, to the nation at large. Writing in post-devolutionary Scotland, where the media endlessly rehearse the imminence of the independence referendum, Blaikie’s Scotocentric focus is understandable, for the relations of self and nation which concern him are especially pertinent to current questions of Scottish identity. He claims in conclusion that the ‘evocation of Scotland, and by extension any nation, [is] central to understanding modern memory as a way of knowing the world’ (p. 248). Maybe so, but one is left wondering if outside Scotland the book will be read widely as a contribution to the sociology of memory, rather than to the more particularized field of Scottish studies.

The introduction has Ian Rankin’s fictional detective Inspector Rebus (from the 2001 novel Set in Darkness) reflect upon memories of the golfing and university town of St Andrews as he knew it half a century earlier. Rebus can’t quite find words for the quiddity of his recollection, as if ‘loss and permanence had mingled and become some new entity, one tasting of the other’ (p. 1). Such mingling, it turns out, is symptomatic of ‘modern memory’, where loss and recognition combine in binding personal and public experience of the past, often connected to particular places. The key issue isn’t so much the nature of that private memory, however, but rather the way it connects with the widening gyres of communal and national memories. In redefining Benedict Anderson’s account of nationalism as ‘remembered’ rather than ‘imagined’ community, Blaikie maintains an appropriate scepticism regarding the epistemology of social memory, especially when it turns out to be ideological confection. After an introductory glance at ‘modernist’ versus ‘primordialist’ theories of nationalism, he follows David McCrone in proposing a ‘post hoc’ nationalism in which a nation ‘depends upon people defining a community as such’, therefore one built upon its representations, images, objects, symbols, descriptions and so on, rather than existing as a primordial essence (p. 7).2 Blaikie considers sociologist David Bell’s concept of a ‘national mythscape’, a set of myths associated with places and historical events, which substitute for personal memories in constituting a sense of national belonging.3 This might seem more serviceable in the analysis of the shared memory of the Scottish nation, but Blaikie has qualms about a theory which has little time for either personal ambiguity or the pressure of alternative memories, in its eagerness to affirm a quintessential realm of ‘mythic’ belonging. Memory research has an ethical obligation to articulate the idiosyncratic and atypical, and it’s a laudable concern of this book to clear a space for memories that don’t fit the mythic mould. Nevertheless, the power of the new media, combined with social fragmentation, has resulted in a situation where national memories tend to be ‘fabricated, “top-down” signification[s], [End Page 274] not “authentic” lived representations’ (p. 12), so how can one go about establishing a more inclusive field of shared memory?

One possible answer lies in the theory of civil society, especially the Scottish Enlightenment’s positive account of that concept, as opposed to Marx’s more critical version. Blaikie’s opening...

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