Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730–1820

• 3. Scotland and the Invention of Voice
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 93-119
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CHAPTER 3
Scotland and the
Invention of Voice

Perhaps the most controversial English language text of the eighteenth century was James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760). Replete with warriors and ghosts, desolate landscapes and chivalrous romance, these fragments of poetry were considered by some to be an invaluable cultural artifact illuminating the past and by others to be a cunning forgery. Macpherson’s collection purported to translate the work of Ossian, a semimythical third-century Scottish bard in the mold of Homer, who preserved his culture’s traditions in song. The epic storytelling of Macpherson’s Fragments, and of his subsequent expansions of the Ossian myth in Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), foreground high-stakes issues about the authenticity of oral voices and performance as a means of cultural continuity. As with the Anglo-Welsh authors discussed in the previous chapter, Macpherson positioned himself as merely a translator of a much older song that had been preserved for centuries in oral storytelling. Thomas Gray’s complicated depiction of Welsh bardism had caused serious consideration of orality among London’s intellectual elite, so when Macpherson’s Fragments appeared three years later, readers responded with intense curiosity. The most profound claim of Macpherson’s collection—that it was the “genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry”—attracted passionate adherents and provoked debate about the cultural functions of orality.¹ Gray himself declared that he was in “extasie” after reading the poems, characterizing Macpherson as a thrilling “demon” of poetry, and he was not alone in his admiration.² The fragments spread widely across Europe and America, gaining diverse readers, ranging from admiring tourists in Scotland to notable authors and prominent national figures (such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, and Napoleon Bonaparte). Readers were drawn to Macpherson’s depiction of ancient Scotland as both civilized and exotic. For nationalistic Scots, Ossian provided a tantalizing image of an advanced culture comparable to and contemporaneous with those of classical Greece and Rome. For many English authors, Ossian served as an example of native British creativity that superseded the neoclassicism of the early eighteenth century.³ Not everyone was so complimentary, however, and the fervor of Macpherson’s admirers was matched by that of his detractors. Many critics suggested that Macpherson had invented Ossian and had forged the poems to succeed in a literary marketplace that had largely ignored his earlier publications.⁴ Samuel Johnson unequivocally asserted that the poems could not be genuine because they were “too long to have been remembered” by an ancient people who had not developed writing and therefore must have been uncivilized.⁵

The controversies over the legitimacy of Macpherson’s Ossian poems have tended to obscure the role that Macpherson played in eighteenth-century British poetry and in the emergence of modern poetic voice. Macpherson’s Ossian is more than an example of native creativity or Scottish nationalism. The Ossian poems are the best-known instance of a wider tendency, shared by many mid-and late-eighteenth-century authors, to make oral traditions—considered politically and geographically marginal to civilized Britain—central to the period’s most innovative poetic experiments. Macpherson expertly positioned his text along an oral-literate continuum. While Macpherson claimed that he merely uncovered and translated the spoken traditions of Scotland, examining the Ossian poems as a printed object reveals that he actually reconstructed oral traditions by using literary devices such as personification, mode of address, archaic language, obsolete diction, and diacritical indicators like quotations marks. The narrative style of Macpherson’s Ossian poems imitates the characteristics of oral discourse, particularly in its use of repetition and tense shifts, to create what I call “restored voices,” moments when the text approximates the experience of aural reception. Macpherson emulated bardic speech and the intimacy of the bards’ implied audiences as a means of creating a participatory mode of reading in which readers could imagine themselves as auditors. Some connection among authors, readers, and texts—which we might label “voice”—is arguably part of any reading experience; yet the species of readerly intimacy constructed in Macpherson’s poems is predicated on reproducing the passion and intensity that eighteenth-century scholars believed existed between oral performers and their listeners.⁶ In lieu of the corporeality of actual speakers functioning in a living oral tradition, Macpherson’s works offer a set of conventions that materially structure the representation of voice on the page so as to enact these idealized expectations of performed poetry.

In summoning the spirit of bardic voice, Macpherson extended the new conceptualization of printed voice first developed in the poetry of William Collins and Gray. Beginning with the Fragments, Macpherson established a system to represent the oral voices of traditional storytelling as literature. He further developed new metaphors of how texts can act on readers. Rather than suggesting that through texts readers could see an ancient Scotland, he inculcated the sense that through texts they could hear it. This notion of hearing the sounds of the past, so important to the national cultural revival going on in Wales, was central as well to the eighteenth-century understanding of Ossian. The Ossian poems, in using such innovative literary and typographical techniques to portray traditional customs, proved to be a crucial turning point in the emergence of modern British poetic voice.

Macpherson’s poems are not oral performances, or even transcriptions of oral performances, in the way we might think of the Iliad or the medieval Welsh storytelling collection the Mabinogion. He developed an intricate mixture of well-understood literary devices to produce new readerly effects. The benefits of his attempt to approximate oral discourse were literary, felt most earnestly through the strange and confusing printed artifacts that he composed. With the Ossian poems, Macpherson complicated the Enlightenment debate about poetry as a means of cultural preservation and forced eighteenth-century readers to contend with differing claims about the materiality of oral traditions. He likewise provided an alternate understanding of the reciprocal relationship between orality and literacy, in which verbal content migrates back and forth between media.⁷ Early modern scholars thought of the oral and the spoken as ephemeral. Macpherson’s work reminds us that the oral can be material, although its materiality is different from that of writing and print, and therefore more difficult for modern users, educated in book cultures, to comprehend. Macpherson thematizes a cultural situation in which performed poetry and song are communal memory. Yet, because he presented oral poetry as a “total technology” for preserving cultural communication, the practices of his texts heralded fresh attitudes and techniques with which to invent a sense of the oral on the page. Within the Ossian poems, the aura of the oral world is (re-)made by print.⁸

PRIMITIVE PASSIONS, POETRY ADDICTION, HISTORY

Scotland played an essential role in this refunctioned oral world. By the time Macpherson published his poems, there had already been a long artistic and critical history of associating Scotland with orality, examples of which include Elizabeth Wardlaw’s forged ballad, “Hardyknute” (1719) and Allan Ramsay’s 1724 collection of Scots songs, The Tea-Table Miscellany. For English authors like Collins, Scotland was a reservoir of novel artistic techniques for those willing to seek them out. Such enthusiasm for Scottish culture was natural, Penny Fielding argues, because orality served as a “site of contested authenticity and a figure of national origin” that survived in an English-dominated Britain.⁹ Indeed, Leith Davis and Maureen McLane have claimed that Scotland (and Scottish poetry in particular) was the context in which emerged a “new, multi-valent literary orality” that challenged the “political and aesthetic presumptions [of] the … English language and the homogeneity of the British nation.”¹⁰ Scotland was not the only locale involved with the creation of a “literary orality,” but its songs and ballads were essential (especially after the 1707 Act of Union) to preserving Scottish culture and to popularizing the century’s poetic experiments with printed voice and oral performance.¹¹

Macpherson, a native Gaelic speaker, probably came into contact with these songs and ballads in both oral and printed forms. As an adult, he traveled through the Highlands, collecting manuscripts and interviewing other Gaelic speakers, so he claimed. After publishing the Fragments, he went back to the Highlands to conduct more research, returning to Edinburgh with material for later expansions of the Ossian myth into Fingal and Temora. These new collections depict a Scottish past abounding with supernatural voices, honorable warfare, and a sentimental warrior-king, Fingal, whose heroic accomplishments were recorded and memorialized by his son, Ossian, ostensibly their original bardic performer. It is impossible to confirm the veracity of Macpherson’s claim that his Ossian poems originated in Scotland’s oral traditions, but there is ample evidence for the continued existence of these traditions during the eighteenth century.¹² Although the epic storytelling associated with Scottish heroic poetry had all but ceased, the Gaelic ballads which provided much of the source material Macpherson reworked into some of the characters and plots of Ossian had endured for over seven hundred years by the time he arrived for his proto-anthropological Highlands trip.¹³ By claiming that the Fragments (and all the Ossian poems more generally) were “genuine remains,” Macpherson invested these folk traditions with the sense that they are an authentic historical record of ancient Scottish customs and practices.

Samuel Johnson famously discounted these claims of authenticity in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1773). He doubted that lengthy oral poetry existed at all, and he rejected the idea that oral traditions could remain coherent over time.¹⁴ To Johnson, supporters of Macpherson were deluded, ignorant, or superstitious; he noted sourly, “[H]e that goes into the Highlands with a mind naturally acquiescent, and a credulity eager for wonders, may come back with an opinion [about Ossian] very different from mine.”¹⁵ Johnson’s reaction shows that the debate about Ossian was not just cultural and political, but also aesthetic. Those feelings of credulity, primitivism, and wonder that troubled Johnson were precisely the characteristics that Macpherson hoped to cultivate in his poetry. What for Johnson was the most dubious element of the poems was for Macpherson and his numerous admirers a crucial aesthetic feature and pleasure. Macpherson’s contemporary, Jerome Stone, argued in 1756 that, because the Highlands’ peasants were “far removed from what may be call’d the modern Taste of Life,” they retained the “custom of singing the praises of their ancient Heroes,” songs “daring and incorrect, passionate and bold.”¹⁶ Stone asserted that the performances of these peasants were “hardly to be equalled among the chief productions of the most cultivated nations.”¹⁷ Hugh Blair, an influential critic, university lecturer, and ally of Macpherson, perceived a similar antithesis between the primitive past and the civilized present, as well as between culturally peripheral locales like the Highlands and the more influential English south. Blair insisted that, in its “ancient state,” language was “more favorable to poetry and oratory”; and he lamented that in “modern times” it had become “more correct” and more “accurate” but also “less striking and animated.”¹⁸ The Ossian poems were a central example of language and customs in this “ancient state,” when men were “much under the dominion of imagination and passion.”¹⁹ For Blair, the Highlands exemplified a location out of step with modern time and thus a repository of artistic vibrancy. Highlanders’ natural propensity for imagination and passion, he believed, created a style of expression more potent than the tepid poeticizing of civilized culture.

In fact, Blair found Highlanders so interested in poetry that he described them as “addicted” to it.²⁰ The early-nineteenth-century Scottish author John Sinclair likewise asserted that the Celts were “addicted to Poetry”; he observed that they needed to remember everything important to them, since they lacked writing, and oral poetry made this possible.²¹ John Smith, in a two-volume collection of “Gaelic antiquities” from 1787, warranted that Highlanders were “addicted to song” and spent “most of their leisure hours” singing and listening.²² He compared Highlanders to Native American orators and Persian poets.²³ This appeal to a concept of worldwide orality, in which the comparisons among Scottish bards, Scandinavian muses, American Indian chiefs, and Persian poets, all of them passionate about poetic performance, established what we would now think of as a comparative ethnology that seemed to buttress them against the advancements of anglicized print culture. For these Scottish thinkers, the comparison of Ossian to foreign poetries and the insistence on the Highlands’ poetry addiction generated a new history and an alternate logic for linking community and performed memory.

Macpherson’s poems engage and solidify these fantasies of a Scottish predisposition toward the communal performance of poetry. And, by assuring readers that Ossianic voices originated in a context like the ones that Stone, Blair, Sinclair, and Smith described, they reflected an imaginative past that had never been corrupted by rational thought. The climax of Fingal, for example, explicitly portrays singing as the formation of history: during the feasting that follows Fingal’s final victory, the speaker recounts, “we sat, we feasted, we sung.”²⁴ “A hundred voices at once arose,” he states, “a hundred harps were strung; they sung of other times, and the mighty chiefs of former years.”²⁵ Collective singing is figured as an act of remembrance and bardic voice functions as a custodian of traditions. Ian Haywood sees the innovation of the Ossian poems as being their ability to reproduce what readers could imagine is a credible version of oral culture. Macpherson establishes this credibility by aligning his poems with these songs “of other times,” repeatedly dramatizing their status as spoken chronicles.²⁶ Thus, the turn to the oral past as a gesture toward authenticity proves to be at work in Macpherson’s Ossian as well. Singing preserves the past because it performs what Ossian collected in his memory and passes it on to future generations. Ossian is history, Macpherson suggests; historical events and their commemoration by a bard are indistinguishable, and the audience is connected to this history because of its participation in the performance.

Macpherson legitimized these memories, however, by using avowedly literate techniques and attitudes. The historicity of the Ossian poems is a result of style and printed presentation as much as an authentic attempt to approximate orality. His bardic speakers are presented using archaic language and obsolete diction. In Fingal, for instance, an intricate courtship scene is recounted in obviously outdated English:

From the hill I return, O Morna, from the hill of the dark-brown hinds. There I have slain with my bended yew. There with my long bounding dogs of the chace.—I have slain one stately deer for thee.—High was his branchy head; and fleet his feet of wind.

DUCHOMAR! calm the maid replied, I love thee not, thou gloomy man.—Hard is thy heart of rock, and dark thy terrible brow. But Cathbat, thou son of Torman, thou are the love of Morna.²⁷

Using “thee,” “thou,” and “thy” pointedly recalls the speech patterns of medieval and Renaissance English. By the end of the seventeenth century, such patterns were rare and largely confined to ornate literary discourse.²⁸ In addition, this passage, like many others, is in metrical prose. Together with self-consciously epic epithets—such as the reference to hunting dogs as “dogs of the chace” or bows and arrows as “my bended yew”—Macpherson’s cadenced writing and uncommon lexicon imparts some sense of Ossian’s alien history and hints at an origin in public performance. All of these elements of Macpherson’s style are meant to appear as the linguistic manifestation of legitimate historical distance.

Macpherson coupled archaic diction with equally outmoded syntax that inverted the rules of contemporary English to reinforce the sense of antiquity he associated with his speakers. He used inverted phrasing to compose one scene from Temora, which describes the vastness of Fingal’s army in a lengthy dramatic monologue, like those found in the Iliad:

Do the chiefs of Erin stand … silent as the grove of evening? Stand they, like a silent wood, and Fingal on the coast? Fingal, who is terrible in battle, the king of streamy Morven.—Hast thou seen the warrior, said Cairbar with a sigh? Are his heroes many on the coast? Lifts he the spear of battle? Or comes the king in peace?”²⁹

Stilted phrases like “Do the chiefs of Erin stand,” “Stand they,” and “Lifts he” were obsolete in the eighteenth century, and they strengthened the sense that Temora must be old. In this way, Macpherson created what Andrew Elfenbein has described as a moment of stylized grammatical usage.³⁰ In this stylization, Macpherson satisfied the expectation for otherness by creating archaic English equivalents for the speech that readers imagined might once have existed in ancient Scotland. The diction and grammar capture what Macpherson hoped to inculcate in his readers—an ancient culture of performance made available more in the style of the work and the events of its plot than in the authenticity of its documents or the accuracy of his fieldwork. Authenticity in Macpherson’s poetry thus presents a dual problem. For Johnson, who demanded manuscripts to certify that Macpherson’s poems were, in fact, translations, the authenticity of poetic voice was undercut by the lack of documentation. Macpherson, however, attempted to transcend this distinction by materializing oral voices through printed documents, arguing for their authenticity by the style in which they are presented. Macpherson did not explore new and innovative literary techniques simply for the sake of experimentation; rather, he invented these printed voices as a way to reclaim the heroic, passionate style of Scotland’s past, and he linked this style with performed poetry. The credibility of this depiction of collective singing and communal memory depends on these literary techniques that construct it.

AMBIGUOUS SPEECH

To portray Ossianic voices as the revivification of the past, Macpherson detached voice from its usual association with human speech. He mixed quotation marks, points of view, and discursive modes. The proliferation of speakers and voices in the Ossian poems makes apparent that Macpherson sought to do more with his textualized voices than simply translate ancient Scottish poetry into English and into print, as he initially claimed.³¹

It is often overlooked in criticism of the Ossian poems that the term “voice” encompasses more than collective history or oral performance; it designates more than oral tradition in the process of creation or verbal narration modulated by a singing bard. Not just a function of social memory, voice also appears to be a defining characteristic of the geography and a property of inanimate objects. In Macpherson’s fourth fragment, for instance, one speaker asks, “[W]hose voice is that, loud as the wind, but pleasant as the harp … ?” (Fragments, 19). Later, another speaker claims that a voice is “like the streams of the hill” (38). These two references demonstrate the close relationship between human voices and natural processes, where the former become coherent only by referring to the latter. The speaker of Fragment III sets the scene by stating that “no voice is heard except the blustering winds” (16). In another fragment, the speaker mourns a friend who has drowned by wondering “if we might have heard, with thee, the voice of the deep” (16) and states, “[T]here, was the clashing of swords; there, was the voice of steel” (29). Significantly, in these instances inanimate objects and natural processes are personified: they are given voice in a way that relates them to the articulate human speakers found throughout the poems.

Voice is even associated with ghosts. This link dramatizes the difficulties and the possibilities involved in creating printed texts that try to establish more intimate connections to readers. In making voice independent of human bodies and detaching it from its common alliance with verbal articulation, Macpherson enlarged the range of objects that could possess voice and thus redefined it. In the process, he imagined new possibilities for what it could do. These possibilities are revealed most fully by the confusion about who is speaking that pervades the Ossian poems, especially the Fragments. Speakers often ask, “What voice is that?” or “Whose voice is that?” The Preface to the Fragments hints that a single bardic speaker organizes the various voices of the poems, and Fingal and Temora extend this idea by more obviously figuring Ossian as the primary speaker. But these questions reveal that voice exists in a perpetual state of transformation and uncertainty.

The purposeful absence of typographical marks and the rapid shifts in temporality and point of view reinforce the uncertainty about who is speaking. This confusion, which is particularly salient in Fragment I, demonstrates the importance of printed form and rhetorical devices for Macpherson’s depiction of oral performance. The fragment is presented visually as a dialogue between two lovers, Shilric and Vinvela, but they seem not to be in each other’s presence when they first speak. Vinvela describes Shilric in the third person, as if he is not there, so she cannot directly address him. She begins by stating, “My love is a son of the hill. He pursues the flying deer.” Even though Shilric repeats many of Vinvela’s images, the separation between the two lovers is confirmed when he replies, “What voice is that I hear? that voice like the summer-wind.” That voice is Vinvela’s from the stanza-paragraph before; like the summer wind, it traverses the physical distance that separates her from Shilric and the graphic space that distinguishes each voice in this dialogue (Fig. 10).

A change occurs toward the middle of the fragment when Shilric, away at war and concerned about its dangers, asks Vinvela to remember him if he dies. She responds to his request as if she has heard his statement, suggesting that some kind of direct discourse has commenced between them. Voice is particularly acrobatic here. The distance between the speakers that was formalized by their initial third-person address is overcome with a shift in point of view. Macpherson reunites the two speakers across the physical distance that is implied by the white space that blocks off their individual enunciations. A narrative for this first fragment is created from these graphical cues and variations in mode of address: at their widest narrative separation, Shilric’s and Vinvela’s voices likewise could be said to be at their most grammatically distant—that is, in the third person—while a sense of immediacy is made evident at the end of the dialogue by the transition from third-person to second-person address, as when, in response to Shilric’s request to remember him, Vinvela says “Yes!—I will remember thee” (11, emphasis mine).

Figure 10. The opening two pages of Fragment I of Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry as they appeared in its first edition (1760). Courtesy of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

The shifting of speakers’ positions and modes of address becomes more pronounced in those fragments that include the voices of the dead, which are numerous in the Fragments. Eighteenth-century Anglo-Welsh poets used dead voices to create connections throughout Welsh culture. The dead legitimized a national revival that appropriated English literary traditions to give it shape. As in the Anglo-Welsh examples, dead voices appear frequently in Macpherson’s Ossian poems, linking the antiquity of Ossian to contemporary British cultural norms. The distinction between the living and the dead, however, is significantly eroded in the Fragments, since the landscape and the social order are populated by the spirits of those who have died. These ghosts are an important part of Macpherson’s conceptualization of literary voice, because they occupy a liminal point between literacy and orality. Their voices are unmoored from the constraints of human corporeality, allowing them to circulate in inventive ways (much as print extends the possibilities of distribution in ways speech and handwriting cannot). The confusion about who is speaking and how one is meant to read these ghostly voices is an explicit effect of the Fragments’ form, and readers’ delight or consternation arises in part from puzzling over these moments. The second fragment, which continues the narrative of Shilric and Vinvela, provides an excellent instance of this dynamic:

BUT is it she that there appears, like a beam of light on the heath? bright as the moon in autumn, as the sun in the summer storm?—She speaks: but how weak her voice! like the breeze in the reeds of the pool. Hark!

RETURNEST thou safe from the war? Where are thy friends, my love? I heard of thy death on the hill; I heard and mourned thee, Shilric!

YES, my fair, I return; but I alone of my race. Thou shalt see them no more: their graves I raised on the plain. But why art thou on the desert hill? why on the heath, alone?

ALONE I am, O Shilric! alone in the winter-house. With grief for thee I expired. Shilric, I am pale in the tomb.

SHE fleets, she sails away; as grey mist before the wind!—and wilt thou not stay, my love?

(Fragments, 14–15)

This fragment is difficult to follow due to its depiction of voices. The majority of the fragment appears in Shilric’s voice. He has returned from abroad only to learn that Vinvela has committed suicide after mistakenly believing that he was dead. While he mourns this tragedy, the spirit of Vinvela appears to him, interrupting his thoughtful first-person reminiscence. Unlike the first fragment, here Macpherson supplies few signs that specify who is speaking or that identify the transition between different voices—there are no character titles in this fragment and there is no standard punctuation, such as quotation marks, to differentiate one individual’s speech from another’s or from the narration. How are readers supposed to know which voices are external and which are internal? How can they distinguish verbal conversation from characters’ interior thoughts? Readers must infer these details from the content, syntax, modes of address, and the use of names. The lack of diacritical marks is a deliberate strategy to amplify the sense of ephemerality surrounding Vinvela’s voice: the absence of printed conventions reinforces Vinvela’s uncertain corporeality. When she disappears, Shilric returns to his monologue, referring to Vinvela again in the third person, demonstrating that her spirit has left and their direct conversation has ceased. His question “wilt thou not stay, my love?” seems addressed to her absence. Or her voice may simply be a hallucination produced by Shilric’s grief, Macpherson’s way of indicating the disconnection between her voice and her body. In all of these scenarios, identifying and comprehending these spectral voices requires a high degree of literacy and the ability to attend closely to the form of the text.

By reserving indicators of reported speech, Macpherson encourages readers to decide whether Vinvela’s voice is “real” or not. Susan Manning argues that the “literary ghost is an interpreter” who acts as a “go-between from one culture to another … an ambassador from the edge of cultural memory.”³² The power of ghosts is that they are liminal: they can cross borders, especially social borders and cultural divides.³³ Macpherson extended and built on the trope of the ghost as vehicle for boundary crossing, making the apparitional speaker a thought-experiment about the phenomenological state of voice. Voice is one of our strongest indicators of human subjectivity; in the act of speaking, we are assumed to assert our personhood, which is why politics is often described as involving the vox populi and why modern political disenfranchisement is so often associated with being silenced. If, as Steven Connor argues, voice has the dual purpose of producing articulate sound and producing “myself, as a self-producing being,” then the ghosts of Macpherson’s Ossian test this border, questioning exactly what “self” is produced by the articulate voice.³⁴ Further complicating the connection between self and voice is the fact that Macpherson’s ghosts speak with their loved ones alongside talking swords and screaming winds. In this sense, poetic voice is a written self and the imaginative processes by which that self comes into being; yet it is also an oral specter, that which remains outside and beyond the written self and the Enlightenment subject, as intangible as Vinvela’s ghostly light.

The humans in Fragments therefore can be thought of as being constituted primarily by their voices, by the conditions of utterance. Their voices are not entirely divorced from their bodies, and their corporeality is registered most vigorously at those moments when they provide accounts of physical separation, mourning, or loss, all of which are tied to the disposition of bodies. Ghosts like Vinvela, who drift into and out of the narrative, reveal most clearly the motive behind tethering humans to their voices, and then testing the strength of that connection. These apparitions are literary voice in its most rarefied and purified form, because they transcend the restrictions of human corporeality. For Macpherson, these ghosts were so attractive (and are thus so pervasive in his text) because they are not limited by the body or by the seeming impermanence of oral dissemination: they range across physical states and temporal boundaries. The mobility of these ghostly voices and their survival after death identifies one of the advantages of print publication. In a sense, Macpherson did not just recreate oral culture but invented a printed voice that first reenacts and then surpasses bardic voice by deemphasizing the significance of living bodies (while indicating the tenuousness of his texts’ connection with actual bards). Creating poetic voice is an act of impersonation, of fabricating persons, potentially without end. It creates written subjects but also forges their lives in a way that is repeated in the spectral presences of the poems and the poems’ uncertain and contested origins.

WRITING, RE-PERFORMANCE, AND RESTORED VOICES

Macpherson’s printed voices were inspired by bardic performance and the immediacy of a listening audience, but they do not depend on actual singers or auditors. And, by filling his history of Ossian with the ghosts of heroes and the songs of bards, Macpherson carefully excluded the role of writing from the ideology of his poems and maintained the consistency of Ossian’s oral traditional setting.³⁵ But a close inspection of Macpherson’s poems reveals that the construction of Ossian’s oral voice required writing, if not within the imaginative logic of the poems, then at least within their printed manifestation. His ghosts are the figure for the possibilities and the limitations of transposing orality into a printed environment. Even as Macpherson wanted his readers to focus on the Ossian poems’ origin in oral traditions, he employed a wide range of written and printed techniques to create this effect. This is especially clear in Fragment VI, in which the present tense of Ossian’s song brushes up against its thematization of memory. This fragment begins with a request by an interlocutor, who is referred to as the “son of Alpin,” for Ossian to tell a tale:

SON of noble Fingal, Oscian, Prince of Men! what tears run down the cheeks of age? What shades thy Mighty soul?

MEMORY, son of Alpin, memory wounds the aged. Of former times are my thoughts; my thoughts are of the noble Fingal. The race of the king return into my mind, and wound me with remembrance.

ONE day, returned from the sport of the mountains from pursuing the sons of the hill, we covered this heath with our youth.

(Fragments, 26)

As with many of the Ossian poems, here the transition between voices and tenses is abrupt. But unlike the dialogues between Shilric and Vinvela, the Son of Alpin’s appeal to Ossian fosters a sense of a present performance within which a tale from Ossian’s memory is embedded. The explicit invocation of a listening audience is a consistent feature of the Gaelic ballad tradition, and Macpherson signaled this convention in the way he composed and related the printed voices of this fragment.³⁶ When Ossian begins to remember (“ONE day”), which is also when he begins to perform, the fragment shifts into the past tense.

While Ossian’s stories concern his memories and thus appear in the past tense, the voices of his story’s characters often appear in the present tense. These tense shifts presumably denote the way he recalls and performs the voices from the past, acting them out for his listeners. Fragment VII, which recounts the death of Ossian’s son Oscur, begins, like Fragment VI, with an invocation of memory, and changes quickly into the past tense to signify the beginning of Ossian’s reminiscence. But the present tense returns again when the fragment introduces the voices of other characters, such as Oscur and his friend Dermid, and the daughter of their enemy Dargo, whom they both love. When Dermid learns that Dargo’s daughter is infatuated with Oscur and not him, he asks Oscur to kill him and end his misery. The return of present-tense narration in the poem at this moment offers the feeling of immediate action and encourages readers to become absorbed in the plot, as if it were happening rather than being remembered.

SON of Oscian, said Dermid, I love; O Oscur, I love this maid. But her soul cleaveth unto thee; and nothing can heal Dermid. Here, pierce this bosom, Oscur; relieve me, my friend, with thy sword.

MY sword son of Morny, shall never be stained with the blood of Dermid.

WHO then is worthy to slay me, O Oscur, son of Oscian? Let not my life pass away unknown. Let none but Oscur slay me. Send me with honour to the grave, and let my death be renowned.

(Fragments, 33)

This passage illustrates what many scholars have noted is an affinity between the Ossian poems and actual techniques of oral performance: the use of epithets, the repetition of phrases, and what Joseph Roach has described as “re-performance,” a process whereby culture is perpetuated through pairing “a collective memory with the enactments that embody it through performance.”³⁷

According to Roach, re-performance operates through “surrogation,” the idea that culture has no beginning or end but simply reproduces itself by filling vacancies as they appear.³⁸ Surrogation’s continuous temporality of endless substitution is, for Roach, a constitutive characteristic of oral traditions. But in the seventh fragment, written techniques, and the temporality that they denote, are another critical part of invoking Ossian’s re-performance of bardic voice. Os-sian, in the present of the poem, turns to the past tense to tell the historical events surrounding his son’s death. The interjection of “said Dermid” conveys the sense that Ossian is “restoring” the characters’ voices through his song; it delineates Ossian’s position in regard to other speakers and clarifies whose words he speaks when they are not his own. It cues Dermid’s words as reported speech for an audience who presumably has not heard what Dermid said or witnessed his actions.

These indicators of reported speech gradually diminish, however, as the fragment highlights the interactions of characters. The shift into the present tense reanimates these characters’ voices for Ossian’s listeners and accentuates the sense of dramatic action. The jarring shifts between past and present become more pronounced as the fragment switches quickly between the voices of the characters and the voice of their performer and narrator, Ossian, who frames their speech: “And fallest thou, son of Morny; fallest thou by Oscur’s hand! Dermid invincible in war, thus do I see thee fall!—He went, and returned to the maid whom he loved; returned but she perceived his grief” (34). Only a single dash divides the present-tense description of Oscur murdering Dermid from the reminiscent narration of Ossian. In this complicated framing of voice, Ossian sings to an audience and in the process re-performs Oscur calling out to Dermid. The past and present mingle ambiguously at such moments, pronouns become elusive and perplexing, and writing’s ability to manifest or withhold tense changes, speakers’ identities, and framing gestures is an essential part of representing how voice functions in these poems and how readers experience it. Changes in temporality and the presence (or absence) of speech markers such as “said Dermid” encourage readers to read Macpherson’s poems in the way that auditors would supposedly listen to Ossian’s storytelling. This framing structure insists that readers understand that they are removed from the oral telling described in the poems while nonetheless being addressed as a participating public. It allows Macpherson both to reassert and to revoke the distance—temporal and spatial—involved in the act of writing these poems and in the act of reading them.

Macpherson refined this structure in later volumes of the Ossian poems. In Temora, for example, Ossian recounts Fingal’s revenge for his son’s death. Quickly shifting between the past and present tense disorients readers by forcing them to consider simultaneously two different temporal moments—the past of Fingal’s actions and the present of Ossian’s tale: “Fingal heard the sound; and took his father’s spear. His steps are before us on the heath. He spoke the words of woe. I hear the noise of war. Young Oscar is alone. Rise, sons of Morven; join the hero’s sword.”³⁹ By shifting between tenses, Ossian seems to experience these events (again) and recollect them for his listeners. The simultaneity of telling and retelling, of the original event and its remembrance by a bard, make the plot described in this passage seem present and distant all at once. Fingal’s actions are narrated in the past tense—he “heard the son” and “took his father’s spear”—but the speaker also slips into the present tense, raising the figure of Fingal as if from the dead for his audience—“His steps are before us on the heath”—and enjoining his listeners to see him, hear him, and rise to help him. It is unclear whether “us” refers to the implied auditors of Ossian’s performance, to Fingal’s loyal warriors, among them Ossian, who participated in the battle with their king, or to readers who are supposed to imagine the scene of carnage the text describes. Nonetheless, the imperative mood addresses readers as if they were present at the site of the battle while Ossian implores them to action. The grammar of the passage makes readers into present(-tense) witnesses of Ossian’s performance. Swaying back and forth between tenses, these sentences reposition readers as listeners, as those “sons of Morven” who should respond to Ossian’s act of oral telling.

What is evident in these examples of carefully cultivated ambiguity concerning speaker, voice, temporality, and point of view is that Macpherson drew from both mimetic and diegetic practices to generate his idealized sense of oral performance. Reported speech, third-person narration, and direct address each corresponds to a different degree of intimacy within a framing narrative in which a storyteller performs and in the process re-produces the voices of his characters. This mixed mode of writing tends toward immediacy—readers are offered the fiction that they are present at the scene of action, as they would be in an oral performance. What seems so experimental, and sometimes simply confusing, about Macpherson’s work is not just the intermixture of these tenses and time frames within the same text but the way in which he slips quickly from one into others with little warning. This feeling of surprise and of improvisation may be one of the effects provoked by Macpherson’s sense of virtualized immediate performance. As we are subsumed into the story of Shilric and Vinvela or Dermid and Oscur, the intermediary apparatus of narration and designation of speaker is peeled away, presenting characters’ voices without framing. This movement from direct address to recollection and from reminiscence to reported speech collapses the difference between speakers, making how we know who is speaking ever more difficult to ascertain; but it also gets closer to the passion and immediacy that many—such as Macpherson, Blair, and Stone—believed was the experience of ancient Scottish poetry.

INTIMATE HAILING

Macpherson’s Ossian poems invent an oral style for a printed text, using rhetorical techniques to impart to readers a sense of performance and to distinguish among different types of intimacy for them. In these poems, therefore, bardic voices are unveiled as a literary technique in themselves, akin to personifying the north wind or the ocean’s depths. Voice is embedded within the literary, creating a connection to readers like the sense of communal belonging that attends embodied oral communication. Macpherson thus figured his poems as an extended instance of readerly interpellation, simultaneously addressing readers and conjuring them as an imagined audience of proximate auditors. This figuration, and the innovative printed techniques that promulgate it, are an illusion intended to offset print’s potential for solitariness and alienation. By striving to recreate in print the immediacy of ancient oral voices, Macpherson sought to construct a participatory mode of reading that establishes a close connection between the speakers of his poems and their readerly audience.

The impassioned reactions to the Ossian poems by readers confirm the success of Macpherson’s experiment. Blair fondly calls them “the poetry of the heart” and describes Macpherson as having “an exquisite sensibility of heart.”⁴⁰ The playwright Frances Sheridan, wife of the elocutionist Thomas Sheridan, claimed that people’s reactions to Ossian fixed their “standard of feeling.” Ossian, she remarked, was “like a thermometer by which [one] could judge the warmth of everybody’s heart.”⁴¹ Werther, Goethe’s hero of sensibility, reads Ossian and promptly pronounces that Ossian has “ousted” Homer from his heart.⁴² The emphasis on the “heart” as the location of feeling and sentiment appears in many readers’ responses.⁴³ As these reactions demonstrate, Ossian elicited sentimentalized effects from contemporary readers, who imagined that they were hearing bardic voices and absorbing them into their bodies. These readers with rejuvenated hearts express the immediate connection they feel between their interiorized sentiments and the history recounted by the texts. Their bodily reactions to Macpherson’s textualized voices in turn authorize the feelings provoked by those voices. Macpherson’s poems propose the satisfying delusion that, by reading, one can hear Ossian speaking and can feel the emotions that a listener in the exotic world of ancient Scotland would have felt upon hearing his voice burst into song. So, while the debate continues to this day about the claim that the Ossian poems are “genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry,” Macpherson seems to have instilled a sense of intimacy and passionate expression that eighteenth-century authors and readers perceived to be characteristic of traditional art forms and the experience of oral performance.

These reactions evince what Helen Vendler has called an “intimacy effect.” Poetry, she argues—lyric poetry, in particular—presents “tones of voice” that represent “by analogy” relationships among “invisible listeners,” that is, relationships among readers distant from the author and from one another but who nonetheless imagine themselves to be listening in on the same speaker’s voice.⁴⁴ Macpherson’s work shows the degree to which eighteenth-century poets sought a new ethics of intimacy in the wake of print culture and the alienation it created among readers. Macpherson attempted to design a text that would overcome the distance of printed poetry and connect to his readers through the perceived immediacy of voice. I call this kind of immediacy “intimate hailing.”

What is the difference between the intimacy of communal oral performance—an intimate space or event—and the intimacy of personal contact, the kind we typically reserve for sexual or familial relationships?⁴⁵ In the humanities many theories about intimacy have grown out of studies of politics and the public sphere. Print has played a significant role in these discussions, most notably with the idea of a nation as an “imagined community” that functions through shared reading experiences, or the connection that Michael Warner calls “stranger relationality,” which distinguishes public belonging from the “co-presence” of an immediately available communal performance.⁴⁶ This active participation creates a version of what Lauren Berlant has defined as an “intimate public,” by which strangers “share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience.”⁴⁷ Since, as Adela Pinch puts it, feelings and emotions were described by late-eighteenth-century authors as “transpersonal, as autonomous entities that do not always belong to individuals,” they were also fundamentally “social stories” about communal membership.⁴⁸ Pinch details how feelings were viewed as originating in individual experience, while being impersonal, conventional, and collective. In her calculation, feelings are influenced by their public performance as much as they are an authentic upwelling of interior identities; the personal idiosyncrasies of emotions were helplessly intertwined with their wider political importance.⁴⁹

Macpherson’s Ossian poems are a paradigmatic example of applying print to an idealized version of oral performance to construct an intimate public in which passion can be felt among strangers at a distance. Since this intimacy is textual, and thus virtual, one need not be in the physical presence of others, because that presence is implied in the experience of shared reading (those same elements that were essential for the construction of the public sphere and the nation). The intimate hailing that Macpherson achieved in his poetry was created when he adopted the tactics of public belonging and transpersonal feeling, adapting them to the modes of intersubjective connection and making them the basis of a common historical experience. In this way, Macpherson’s invocation of a participatory mode of reading aligns with the role of printed voice in cultural nationalism. In crafting a text that solicits active participation from its readers, creating a sense of virtual co-presence and common sentimentality, such as we witness in the description of Oscur’s death in Temora (“rise … join,” Ossian screams), Macpherson borrowed techniques that had been honed in the public sphere and in the incremental changes in how eighteenth-century subjects structured intimate emotional relationships with others.

The appeal to the communal tradition of intimate public performances is an alternative to other postures of eighteenth-century poetry, such as the antihistorical “literary loneliness” described by John Sitter or the “habits of solitude and Anchoritism” found in the mid-eighteenth-century poetry of enthusiasm described by Shaun Irlam.⁵⁰ The intimacy expressed in Macpherson’s Ossian poems was not inspired by the avoidance of historical topics or the adaptation of religious passion to poetic epiphany. Rather, it originated in the ability of oral performance to evoke a model of collectivity and a passionate enunciation that counters the deprivations of rational language, civilization, and solitary reading. The invisible ties among readers and intimate publics that Macpherson’s poetry creates and that authors like Blair championed were intended to mitigate this solitariness, which isolates readers. The Ossian poems reveal an aspiration to use oral performance—and its sense of immediate passionate affects—as a model for intimacy that can be felt and shared despite the fact that readers operate silently and in isolation.⁵¹

Thus, it is the feeling of a close connection among readers that turns them into the intimate publics hailed into being by Macpherson’s enunciations. The intimate publics created by Macpherson’s Ossian poems possess a different form of group feeling and public belonging, constituted not so much by the emotions that readers believe to be uniquely their own but rather by the feelings that they imagine to be shared with others. To the extent that feelings and emotions are perceived to be extravagant and contagious, circulating among individuals as much as produced by them, they resemble the forms in which they are made. Some eighteenth-century visual illustrations of Ossian performing help to explain the contradictory manner by which literary form can evoke a sense of virtual, communal auditory participation. The title page of Fingal, for example, shows Ossian in a rugged mountainous setting surrounded by attentive listeners (Figs. 11 and 12). Ossian is dressed in loose, almost Roman robes.

Figure 11. Title page of James Macpherson’s Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem … (1762), engraved by Isaac Taylor. Courtesy of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

Figure 12. Detail of the title page of Macpherson’s Fingal. Note the orientation of the figures, toward Ossian, showing readers what it looks like to listen. Courtesy of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

He is bearded and blind, features that recall Homer and that had become associated with British bards by the mid-eighteenth century. His arms are in motion and his mouth is opened wide, presumably singing or chanting exactly those poems that are collected in the volume. The figures in his listening audience peer over his shoulder or leisurely rest on rock outcroppings. The key aspect of this image is the placement of the audience members behind Ossian; while listening to him, they are also facing the reader. And while Ossian cannot see the audience, the reader can, a visual cue that suggests that the picture functions as a model for what it means to be an auditor hearing Ossian perform. The openness of the composition allows the viewer to enter the space, to join the audience, and be part of the narrative.

A similar attention to audience is visible in Alexander Runciman’s sketch for The Blind Ossian Singing and Accompanying Himself on the Harp (1772); it shows Ossian singing to a crowd of listeners (Fig. 13).⁵² After the publication of Macpherson’s Fragments, Ossian became a popular decorative subject in eighteenth-century Scottish homes. This sketch, for a wall-sized mural painted in Penicuik House in Scotland, portrays Ossian as an active performer—bearded, heavily muscled, playing a gigantic harp. It emphasizes the ongoing action of performance, as Ossian is shown drawing his fingers across the harp strings. Eyes closed, with a contemplative look, he seems as if he is about to break into song. As in the Fingal illustration, this sketch reveals the function of audience. The auditors listen attentively to his song. A number of figures are folding their hands or cocking their heads, looking as though they are following along rapturously. This is a visual presentation of the kind of passionate listening that Macpherson wanted to suggest to his readers.

Figure 13. Alexander Runciman, sketch for a mural, The Blind Ossian Singing and Accompanying Himself on the Harp (1772). Courtesy of the Scottish National Gallery.

The peculiar composition of the figures in both of these illustrations suggests the importance of the ghostly in the construction of intimate listening. The majority of the listeners on the title page of Fingal seem enshrouded in mist, recalling the spectral figures prevalent throughout the Ossian poems. Unmoored from the earth, they seem to float, as if apparitions like Vinvela. And the unfilled outlines of dogs at the center of Runciman’s sketch seem consistent with Macpherson’s description of the “dogs of the chace” repeatedly invoked in Fingal and other Ossian poems. They may be the characters of the Ossian poems, imaginatively brought to life from the dead by Ossian’s singing, conjured by the engraver for readers to see, yet they are also portrayed as Ossian’s audience, placed in such a way that they become a proxy for listening in on Macpherson’s poems. In these illustrations, the participatory mode of reading which Macpherson promoted to readers overlaps with the characters and figures of his poems, so that readers are given a sense not only that they may experience the heroic culture of Scotland but that these figures serve as models for their own participation. Readers become like the characters they read. These images supplement and give shape to the literary techniques with which Macpherson constructed this experience, encouraging readers to imagine themselves as listeners, not just as users of a silent printed book. These listening figures are the visual instantiation of the intimate public that Macpherson sought to create between texts and readers.

OSSIAN’S AFTERLIFE

A text’s intimate hailing is the way it represents the intersubjective relations of author and readers. This intimacy is a series of relations that are evoked by Macpherson’s metaphorization of oral voicing. Authors like Macpherson who felt the expansion of print culture as a type of alienation and cause of solitariness responded to these effects by trying to change the way print worked upon its readers. Some readers responded in kind, reworking the Ossian poems through new imaginings of their intimate publics, as found in a number of reprintings and rewritings of the Ossian poems, especially by women. One collection from 1789, put together by Mary Potter, reproduces the Ossian poems in italic type to resemble handwriting, lending an intimate and personal aspect to the printing (Fig. 14).⁵³ The heavy gothic type Potter used for the character titles in “Vinvela and Shilric” accentuates the delicacy of this virtual handwriting. Meredith McGill claims that handwriting can be a figure for printedness, rather than something explicitly opposed to the impersonality of print.⁵⁴ In this instance, the intimation of handwriting is meant to personalize the poem; it makes this printed text seem more unique and idiosyncratic, with a “typographical elegance” and a “style entirely new,” as the collection’s title page claims. Potter’s choice of typeface was attuned to early modern theories that saw handwriting as a more immediate form of transmission than print because it directly engaged with the body of the writer. This contradictory performance—in which print masquerades as another medium—mimics the similar processes at work in Macpherson’s poems, which evoke communal performance and transpersonal feeling. Potter’s typographical experiments are a memorial to Ossian’s voice as well as an attempt to modernize it.

Figure 14. The opening of Macpherson’s first fragment, “Vinvela and Shilric,” as reprinted in Mary Potter’s The Poetry of Nature … (1789). Courtesy of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

While Potter extends Macpherson’s typographical experiments as a form of homage, the author Catherine Talbot conceived a version of Macpherson’s intimate publics composed primarily of women. Talbot, a member of the Bluestocking Circle, produced three imitations of the Ossian poems from the perspective of his female speakers. First published in a collection of “essays,” Talbot’s poems are “directed to women and their concerns about ethics, economy, manners, and learning.”⁵⁵ The representations of gender in Ossian’s ancient Scotland and in the eighteenth-century world of Macpherson’s poetry overlap in Talbot’s rewriting. These imitations work as a sequence of dialogues on the subject of female vocal performance. The first opens by asking, “Why dost Thou not visit my Hall, Daughter of the gentle Smile”—ostensibly the voice of Ossian—yet concludes with its female speaker, Therina, wondering, “Will no Voice reply to my Song? I too have a Harp” (139). The latter question is taken up and answered by Talbot’s poems, in an eighteenth-century version of call-and-response. Talbot cleverly conflated Macpherson and Ossian, replying to Ossian while imagining her poems in dialogue with Macpherson. She did this by taking up the voices of his poetry’s female characters, establishing herself as that “daughter of song” who replies to Ossian and thus counteracts the male bardic voice with her imitations.

One of Talbot’s goals was to insert Christian elements into Macpherson’s pagan mythological poetry. By speaking back to Macpherson’s Ossian, Talbot’s poems volunteer an alternate bardic voice premised on Christian female chastity, as opposed to the heroic warrior culture of Ossian. Female Christian fellowship is more durable and lasting, Talbot argues, than the martial accomplishments recounted in Ossian’s storytelling. Worrying about Ossian’s salvation, Talbot’s speaker declares: “Bright was thy Genius, Ossian! But Darkness was in thy Heart: It shrank from the Light of Heaven” (142). Ossian is chastised for ignoring the “true” singing that is God; “The lonely Dweller of the Rock, sang, in vain, to thy deafened Ear” (142). Ossian’s deafness—metaphorically paired with his oft-represented blindness—leads Talbot to conclude that Ossian is a sad, isolated figure, a singular voice unaware of the Christian brotherhood that surrounds him. Concerned for his eternal soul, Talbot’s female speakers implore Ossian to remember that he has a “Kindred higher in Heaven” (142) and to join the community of Christianity. Of course, this would be historically impossible, and thus the conclusion of Talbot’s third imitation is characteristically dramatic and final: “Harp of Ossian be still,” the daughter of song states (142). Silencing Ossian was a means of criticizing Macpherson for focusing on pagan mythologies rather than current Christian issues: “While thou sattest gloomy on the Storm-beaten Hill,” declares Talbot, “still Destruction spread[s]: still human Pride rises with the Tygers of the Desart, and makes its horrid Boast!” (143). As JoEllen DeLucia notes, for many women writers—and Talbot in particular—the Ossian poems were ripe for rewriting; these female characters become a version of female authorship and propound an “Ossianic women’s history.”⁵⁶ The poems presented an opportunity “to track the development of manners and the role of women in civil society,” in much the same way that the Ossianic world was indebted to the mid-eighteenth-century aesthetic categories of the Enlightenment.⁵⁷

The plea for a Christianized Ossian demonstrates that Talbot perceived a different interpretation of the cultural significance of Macpherson’s poems. By imitating Macpherson’s female voices in a way that interrogates the content of the Ossian poems, she adapted the conceits of his invented oral traditions to expand what she presumed were its religious and historical limits. The re-gendering of bardic voice occurs by rewriting what is presumed to be a masculine warrior culture, expanding upon what were already feminized elements of the Ossian poems. Pinch argues that by the end of the eighteenth century, poetry possessed a “special relationship to the cultural prestige of feminine feeling.”⁵⁸ In the reprinting by Potter and the rewritings by Talbot, this special relationship is routed through the sentimentality of a male bardic voice. Much like the revisions of Gray by Welsh authors discussed in Chapter 2, such sentimentality is set to new, even contradictory ends by women. For Macpherson’s imitators, therefore, oral voices are more than relics of past traditions; they emanate into the present, via textuality, and revive a civic intercourse modeled on the bond thought to exist between oral performers and their listening audience. The reprintings and rewritings of the Ossian poems, as exemplified in Potter and Talbot, demonstrate how the literary devices of Macpherson’s poems could be used to construct new social intimacies and readerships. The aura of authenticity that Macpherson invented in his texts could in turn be revised by female authors looking back to bardic culture as a model with which to reconceive the gender and religious politics of the mid-eighteenth-century world. In each of these examples, the voices of the Ossian poems prove to be avenues by which new publics could be described and brought into being.

Thus, the cultural notions and literary devices typically seen as nostalgic for an oral world before print were in fact the ways these eighteenth-century authors registered a new kind of presence in texts and crafted a more intimate relationship with their readers. The popularity of Macpherson’s poems stemmed in part from the heroic manners and pleasing sentimentality described in them, from the sense that they were sophisticated remnants of an indigenous Scottish culture, and from the feeling of national pride sparked by their assertion of a cultural tradition worthy of Homer. However, the central reason that Ossian still entrances us is that Macpherson’s texts permit readers to indulge in the fantasy that we are inheritors of heroic Scottish values, which in turn can be modified by different audiences with alternate politics in mind. His texts recreate the intimate intercourse of an imaginary ancient past that is reclaimed and made present again through reading. Print culture, as scholars have observed, provokes a shift in understanding about the difference between the past and the present by its ability to preserve and codify accounts of historical events.⁵⁹ Yet, Macpherson’s printed forms reject this shift by a deliberate, even inevitable, interpenetration of the past and the present. The Ossian poems establish continuities with the past that elide the feeling of rupture that occurred in Scottish culture with imposition of anglicizing norms subsequent to the defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden in 1746. Macpherson’s poems draw readers in by offering the possibility of reading differently, that is, of reading the sounds of Ossian as ancient listeners might have heard them, and then of relating the communal feelings and emotions that result to the contemporary world around them.