James Hogg and British Romanticism. A Kaleidoscopic Art by Meiko O’Halloran (review)

There are (at least) two ways in which the kaleidoscope can provide an analogy for literature: on the one hand, the symmetrical arrangements which each turn of its cell produces may suggest the carefully balanced surfaces and structures of literary texts. On the other hand, as these symmetrical arrangements are ever-changing, making the objects placed in the cell collide unpredictably, the kaleidoscope can be aligned with a type of literature which is anything but carefully balanced: rather, it features generic juxtapositions and abrupt changes of narrative directions, thus opening up a plethora of interpretative possibilities. It is in this latter respect, as O’Halloran demonstrates convincingly, that James Hogg’s art can be considered ‘kaleidoscopic’. That some of these juxtapositions and changes of direction may make for a profoundly unsettling reading experience is, in O’Halloran’s account, not a weakness but the strength of Hogg’s texts because in the absence of authorial narrative voices readers are encouraged to think for themselves.

O’Halloran’s argument proceeds through a series of case studies. Laterally, these open up to situate Hogg and his preoccupations in the literary marketplace of his time, to whose volatile conditions he responded by creating flexible authorial identities for himself. Longitudinally, O’Halloran traces Hogg’s kaleidoscopic imagination back to eighteenth-century textual experimentation, and at the same time identifies those features in his writing which point towards Modernist – and perhaps even Postmodern – multiperspectival narration. In both horizontal and vertical directions, as it were, Hogg’s texts are braided into a complex web of intertextual references which O’Halloran patiently untangles: sometimes with surprising results, as in the ‘hidden conversation’ between Hogg and Byron (p. 51).

O’Halloran’s case studies include popular works such as The Poetic Mirror, The Queen’s Wake and, of course, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, but also lesser-known texts like The Hunting of Badlewe, Queen Hynde, and Tales of the Wars of Montrose. In The Poetic Mirror–ostensibly a collection of poems by contemporary poets who, however, in a mixture of ventriloquism and parody, are impersonated by Hogg himself – the kaleidoscopic plurality of voices represents Hogg’s interest in bardic communities, and bridges the gap between (high culture) anthology and (low-culture) miscellany. In The Queen’s Wake, Hogg’s concerns shift from the synchronic to the diachronic as he explores, via a competition between different poets presided over by Mary, Queen of Scots, the possibility of an alternative Scottish literary tradition. In these two works, according to O’Halloran, Hogg’s strategic marketing of himself – as a performing author playing multiple roles in The Poetic Mirror, as a Scottish pastoral poet competing for fame in Scotland’s epic story (The Queen’s Wake) – is aesthetically and commercially successful. By contrast, The Hunting of Badlewe and Queen Hynde attest to the fact that multi-perspectivity may prove as challenging to authors as it is to readers: when heterogeneous source material threatens to escape narrative control by the former, the latter’s flexibility and understanding are taxed (and perhaps overtaxed). In this respect, The Hunting of Badlewe and Queen Hynde emerge as companion pieces from O’Halloran’s analyses, as do, in a different sense, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Tales of the Wars of Montrose. While, in Hogg’s most famous novel, the absence of a mediating narrative voice does not, ultimately, signal the destruction of bonds of community – in fact, these bonds, inasmuch as they are grounded in what might be called the folk, appear to have survived the test of time (and crime) – the proliferation of voices in Tales of the Wars of Montrose reflects the discord of a society at war with itself.

The kaleidoscopic does, then, emerge from O’Halloran’s case studies as an overarching principle of Hogg’s oeuvre – employed by him for a number of purposes, and with very mixed results...