Under Construction: Walter Scott on Being Scottish

Important books solely on Walter Scott have a habit of turning up in orderly fashion each decade. To add to Judith Wilt's Secret Leaves (1985) and Fiona Robertson's Legitimate Histories (1995), we now have Caroline McCracken-Flesher's Possible Scotlands. With such regular chronological spacing it is tempting to a trace a Scott for each decade at the turn of the twentieth century. McCracken-Flesher joins in this game by situating her work alongside the opening (or reopening) of the Scottish parliament. Where Wilt and Robertson both offer brilliant readings of Scott's textual complexity as it invents and subverts the role of fiction as a form of historiographic authority, McCracken-Flesher's intriguing new Scott spills out of the Waverley novels into the contexts of Scottish media and political spectacle. The story of tomorrow, of the book's title, is really a story of a continually reforming present, a Scotland performed by its own fictions in a never-to-be-completed search for the means by which nationhood might be valued.

The book starts by reviving an old question which refuses to lie down: why is Scott so implicated in the whole business of national identity? McCracken-Flesher's Scott is a ghost who still haunts contemporary Scotland, and whose willingness to experiment with the fictionalising of the nation has something to say to current debates about the nation's self-representation. McCracken-Flesher argues that Scottish modernity is dogged by 'an argument that required romance and history to produce one another as opposites, rather than to work symbiotically to offer a site for national identity' (p. 7). Instead of this, she offers a Scott who pre-empts any choice of national value by addressing head on the question of value itself. In a study of the best-selling novelist of his age, McCracken-Flesher's principal metaphor is financial. As she assesses the notions of worth, value, exchange, and circulation that went into producing Scott as a national author, she draws productively on post-Marxist economic theories of symbolic exchange. Throughout the book, she expertly weaves the course of Scott's literal investment in his work (he was a partner in Ballantynes, the firm that printed his books) as he circulates money, credit notes, and novels through the nation, with the narrative strategies of the author of Waverley, testing his readers' creditworthiness, their willingness to exchange one version of national identity for another.

Not surprisingly, one of the best case studies in the book is a discussion of The Antiquary, a novel full of financial skulduggery. Antiquarianism is now (in the work of Susan Manning, Ina Ferris, Yoon Sun Lee, and others) rightly seen as a defining trope for Romanticism's fragmentary and affective historicism. McCracken-Flesher makes a very significant contribution to this debate as she shows how 'the deracinated data of a fractured past can be twisted into a new present' (p. 39). Fracturing, or the multiplying of forms of valuation (of memory, proof, money, and narration), is seen as a condition of modernity in a novel where being a conman, as McCracken-Flesher argues, is surprisingly hard to distinguish from the role of the supposedly authentic historian.

Occupying the centre of the book, and central to its argument, is a wonderful chapter on George IV's visit to Scotland in 1822. Nowadays this trip tends to be casually dismissed as the ushering in of a pre-Victorian mode of tartanry, with Scott as the self-serving showman behind the absurd spectacle of the king in a kilt and flesh-coloured tights. But in McCracken-Flesher's outstanding reading of the event it is revealed as a complex performance of national politics, drawing in a host of players, from Scottish peers to London parodists. In a complex structure of cultural determination, this admirably researched chapter investigates how the cross-currents of the gaze of diverse subjects go to make up a nationalist spectacle based on provisional equivalences...