Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition by Timothy C. Baker (review)

In 2010 Monica Germanà’s Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing made a notable entrance to the otherwise underworked critical landscape of Scottish Gothic in the twenty-first century. Five years later, a handful of significant articles aside, Timothy C. Baker’s Modern Scottish Gothic further reinvigorates a critical field which once seemed weighed down by a number of important but reductive earlier critical conceptualisations. Baker, refreshingly, is not convinced of the efficacy (or possibility) of defining a contemporary Scottish Gothic, since the Gothic ‘has no clear Scottish provenance, nor an uninterrupted Scottish genealogy’ (p. 165). While familiar benchmarks such as Hogg and Stevenson crop up, they do so naturally and productively as Baker identifies a set of regularly recurring Gothic features in recent texts, arguing that ‘Scottish Gothic can best be understood as a system of [. . .] intertextual and intratextual correspondences’ (p. 16). Elements in this schema include found manuscripts and archives, haunting (as a correspondence between national and literary histories), islands and peripheries, the relation between humans and animals, and journeys north.

The study is underpinned by the theme of mourning as ‘a way to define the self and the nation in relation to both the past and the catastrophic present’ (p. 19). Mourning is a process characterised by narrative and linking the individual to history, community, and death. As such, ‘Gothic, as arguably the literary form or tradition that most clearly imagines death as well as questioning that imagination, becomes a way of destabilising narratives of national or cultural progression’ (p. 21). This focus persuasively fills a critical gap which, as Baker points out, has been indicated by David Punter and others without sustained elaboration. While mourning is, paradoxically, a form of progress which inevitably brings the past with it – ‘a space in which to approach loss and to construct new narratives in relation to fundamental absences’ (p. 163) – Baker is concerned with the new, not only in terms of contemporary writing but in the necessity to move Gothic and national literary paradigms forward.

For a work which decisively moves on from the tired notion of Scotland’s supposedly schizophrenic national identity, it is surprising to see the first of the five chapters centred on Walter Scott. Thankfully, Baker’s ingenious account focusses on Scott’s body of work as a haunting inter-textual presence in itself, reappearing in the works of other writers – notably on the shelf of Gideon Mack’s study in James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack, Baker is not interested in Scott as some inescapable forefather of a national imagination, but in his texts, operating today as do the found manuscripts of traditional Gothic – as stories which, when read or remembered, become sites of flux, ‘caught between opposing ideas of authenticity and subjectivity’ (p. 53). Scottish Gothic is concerned with the textuality of daily existence, Baker argues, a world experienced through the accumulation of often contradictory narratives.

The found manuscript, lying outside of established notions of history and community, activates processes of intertextual decoding on the part of the reader, and Chapter Two expands on the ambiguity conjured by this multiplicity of irreconcilable correlations and disconnections through which ‘texts constitute, as well as reflect, the world’ (p. 58). The Gothic, then, emerges through ‘unofficial history’ (p. 90). Baker moves on to consider the island as a location where the relation between text, history and community are heightened by remoteness and geographical reduction. Chapter Four figures the separation of human and animal as another binary opposition which the Gothic complicates, by way of, among many others, Iain Banks’s wasps, Elspeth Barker’s jackdaw, John Burnside’s fox and, most unexpectedly, James Hogg’s orang-utans. The concluding chapter moves the discussion to Scottish novels set in the arctic.

Baker’s selection of texts is wide-ranging and it is invigorating to find newer and lesser-known writers such as Linda Cracknell, Andrew Crumey and Jess Richards alongside the likes of Alasdair Gray...