Écrire la frontière, Walter Scott, ou les chemins de I’errance by Céline Sabiron (review)

Écrire la frontière is an intricate yet well-directed intellectual journey across both physical and abstract ‘frontiers’ in Walter Scott’s Scottish novels. It demonstrates both the many and changing faces of Scott’s frontiers and the writer’s desire to find a middle way between extremes, be they intellectual, psychological, cultural, political, historical or social, essential to a strict Calvinist education that would exclude extremism and immoderation. It is suggested that Scott’s frontier enjoys a dialectical quality marking a point of passage both open and closed, limited and unlimited, finite and infinite. Scott’s principal characters move across frontiers during an important detour (‘Grand Détour’), a voyage of discovery that focuses on the furtherance of their knowledge of the world, and of themselves, rather than contesting the established social order. Scott’s ‘Grand Détour’ departs from the eighteenth century norm of the ‘Grand Tour’ with its focus on urban discoveries in so far as his characters cross frontiers in search of rural, primitive and exotic climes, primarily northern, as yet only superficially known. Thus Scott’s position is on the frontier between geographical detour and literary divergence. Sabiron suggests the term ‘historico-géopoétique’ to describe Scott’s work; this marries the temporal, poetic, and topological aspects with the geographical in her instructive pursuit of the significance of the writer’s ‘frontier’.

The work comprises three main Parts. The three chapters in Part I deal primarily with two principal physical or concrete frontiers from an historical perspective: the English-Scottish border seen from the outset as a frontier that separates and limits but evolving nevertheless with time into a threshold that ultimately facilitates communication and exchange extending equally across the internal frontier marked by the Highland Fault, and eventually across the British colonial empire after the 1707 Union. Chapter 1, ‘Retracer la frontière dans l’Histoire’, considers the overlapping of geographical and political frontiers, inextricably linked, and forming a British political space that is as rigid as the concrete fortifications of the Borders resulting in regional tension. This ‘debatable space’ is shown to be the ideal setting for the plot of most of the Scottish novels or ballads. It is noted that new frontiers or enclosures surrounding parcels of land mark the evolution of frontiers in so far as they have now an economic role rather than a political or military role as was historically the case. The author argues that exile and displacement, the result of the Clearances, in both the Lowlands and the Highlands, result in a frontier that is moveable, unfixed and forever extending further afield. Chapter 2, ‘Repousser la frontière coloniale’, considers Scotland as both a colonised (by England) and colonising nation (Orkney and Shetland, and the colonies) and as both victim and perpetrator. The evolving geopolitical frontier in Scott’s novels, Chapter 3, ‘Préserver et recréer la frontière comme espace d’entre-deux au centre de l’intrigue’, is seen as a fluid, unstable, porous and readily crossed threshold facilitating at once legal commerce, including slavery, and illegal commerce, the latter due to a perceived unfair act of English aggression in the form of surcharge on goods. Thus Scott’s fictional universe is heavily populated with professional smugglers yet also, conversely, with less unsavoury characters at times under the guise of tourists seeking the sacred and spiritual significance of crossing frontiers, the latter announcing the theme of Part II.

The two chapters of Part II, ‘La Désacralisation de la frontière’ and ‘La Violation du tabou’, evidence the writer’s slick transition from concrete to abstract. In chapter 1, the national frontiers of Scotland are superimposed with the frontiers of Israel, the Promised Land, and the Scots, one of the lost tribes of Israel (see the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath), are fused with the original Israelite tribe to give a sacred dimension...