The Private Memoirs
and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner 2
Outline
•
•
•
•
Justified Sinner and the uncanny
The said and the unsaid in literary texts
Gothic terror beyond the Romantic era
The interest of James Hogg today
JS and the uncanny
• JH arguably a writer who is interesting
because rather than in spite of his contradictions
• . . . i.e. both non-realist and middle-of-theroad
• Beyond this, perhaps the haunting power
of this curiously contradictory work of fiction known as JS comes from its presentation of the uncanny
JS and the uncanny
• ‘Uncanny’ a word that comes from the traditions
of Scottish folklore – see Gil-Martin described as
‘uncanny’ in JS, p. 186 – used to refer to persons that appear mischievous or untrustworthy
and to objects that appear supernatural or
strange
• . . . subsequently popularized in psychoanalysis
and related forms of textual analysis through
Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919)
JS and the uncanny
• Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’ – a detailed account of phenomena typically referred to
as ‘uncanny’
• Thus, ‘uncanniness’ is often manifested in
terms of a) the appearance of the ‘double’
b) the activity of making the inanimate animate and c) the activity more generally of
‘making strange’
JS and the uncanny
• The above key components of the uncanny are already figured within the text of JS.
For example . . .
• The figure of the ‘double’ – doubling of the
Colwans and the Wringhims; Gil-Martin’s
ability to double as virtually anyone he
likes; JS a curiously doubled text: the
Editor’s narrative + the Confessions
proper
JS and the uncanny
• Making the inanimate animate: George
Colwan brought back from the dead
through being doubled by Gil-Martin
• ‘Making strange’: all the inexplicable events recounted by Robert Wringhim,
reported by him while he is under the
devil’s influence – or, ‘I was a being incomprehensible to myself’, as Robert himself says at one point (p. 182)
JS and the uncanny
• In sum, JS comes to us as a powerful evocation of the uncanny, done almost a hundred years prior to the Freudian formalization of ‘the “uncanny”’
• The above a way of describing the peculiarly haunting quality of JS as a Scottish
novel of the earlier 19C
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• The haunting uncanniness of JS is realized in
terms of both the said and the unsaid about JH’s
text
• The ‘said’ and the ‘unsaid’ represent a further instance of the uncanny doubling of literary texts –
silence acts as the radical otherness that shapes
the text
• Macherey: ‘[I]n order to say anything, there are
other things which must not be said’
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• See, for example, CR: Thady Quirk (‘honest’,
‘loyal’) never has a bad word for the Rackrent
dynasty – it is the silences that are doing the
speaking in his damning Rackrent chronicle
• MP: colonialism revealed as the price to be paid
for the country house way of life through the absence of discussion – the ‘dead silence’ – of the
slavery issue in JA’s novel
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• W: Only passing reference to ‘the affair of
Culloden’ during Edward and Rose’s wedding nuptials discloses an ‘unspeakable’
English lack of moderation at the end of
the Jacobite uprising
• F: Victor Frankenstein’s speechlessness of
horror at what he has done in his laboratory becomes the pretext for the ‘return’
of Elizabeth into his affective life
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• And JS . . .?
• JH makes Robert Wringhim speak the diabolical
presumptuousness of the Calvinist idea of the
elect in the course of his private memoirs and
confessions as a ‘justified’ sinner
• JS: ‘I beheld a young man of a mysterious appearance coming towards me . . . [this was] the
beginning of a series of adventures which has
puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I
am no more in it’ (p. 116)
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• Robert’s confessions (the said) are a confession about what practically goes without
saying (the unsaid) in JH’s novel, namely
that Gil-Martin is the devil
• The terrifying nature of the devil (Satan as
shapeshifter) in JS is suggested in terms
of the idea that his domain is that of the
unsaid: he is always there in what goes
without saying
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• The above represents JH’s way of making the
force of evil as present as possible in his fiction
• JH thus turns the paradox of what is absent is
present because it is absent
• Turning the world upside down like this, along
the axis of ‘the said’ and ‘the unsaid’, is arguably
the strongest source of terror for a rationalist
consciousness in JH’s novel
The said and the unsaid
in literary texts
• No wonder this is an ‘uncouth’, ‘unpleasant’ work – ‘extraordinary trash’ – without
‘one single attribute of a good and useful
book’!
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• Realism and nineteenth-century fiction – a
story of realism’s hegemonic triumph
• What then becomes of the Gothic as realism’s Other?
• Gothicism duly persists as the haunting
‘bad dream’ of realist consciousness and
of bourgeois culture
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• . . . as the ‘unsaid’ that goes without saying in the realist ‘said’
• . . . as the uncanny double of realism itself,
always threatening as such realism’s position of dominance through a symbolic return of the repressed
• See, for example, Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto (1848)
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• KM & FE: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the
spectre of Communism’ (Selected Works, p. 35)
• KM & FE: ‘Modern bourgeois society . . . is like
the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has called
up by his spells’ (p. 40)
• . . . here, for bourgeois vs proletarian read realism vs Gothicism (see further Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx (1994))
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897): the vampire the
figure who has no ‘spectre’ (reflection or shadow), and thus is unrepressed – has no superego – thereby allowing Lucy Westenra, e.g., to
live out others’ bourgeois sexual fantasies
• Compare Roger Hough, dir., Twins of Evil (1971)
– a ‘post-Victorian’ or ‘modernist’ Gothic
• (Vampires – whether ‘pre-’ or ‘post-Victorian’ –
are never a pain in the neck (!), since their ‘bite’
brings about a sexual awakening . . .)
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• Angela ‘We live in Gothic times’ Carter, The Bloody
Chamber (1979): a collection of short stories presenting
a return of the repressed of the ‘adult’ (violent, sexual)
sub-texts of children’s fairy tales
• . . . from the Brothers Grimm to Carter represents a
movement from the ‘Romantic’ to the ‘postmodern’ Gothic
• (Compare the Gothic’s return of the repressed regarding
the ‘undead’, in the following postmodern novel: Jane
Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice
and Zombies – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged
that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of
more brains.’)
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• See also Al-Qaeda in the ‘war on terror’ (George
W. Bush, 2003) – the language of the ‘war on
terror’ implies a replay of the pre-existing struggle of realist orthodoxy vs Gothic terror
• Faisal Devji, ‘Al-Qaeda, Spectre of Globalisation’, Soundings, 32 (2006): ‘[Al-Qaeda] functions as the dark side of America’s own democracy, as inseparable from it as its evil twin’ (p.
27)
• . . . note the suggestion of Al-Qaeda as America’s uncanny double in a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’
Gothic terror
beyond the Romantic era
• Thus, realism and Gothicism exist in a dialectical relationship with one another
• What always makes the Gothic appear
threatening to realism is its appearance as
the uncanny double of realism itself
• The ‘uncanny’ names the haunting power
of the Gothic’s threat to realism in their ongoing ‘class’ struggle, their genre war
The interest of James Hogg today
• JH as a novelist remains interesting, arguably,
because rather than in spite of his contradictions
• The non-realist in him allows the uncanny to find
an extraordinarily potent expression of itself
through the idea of a devil, a Satanic shapeshifter, who is always there in what goes without
saying, and is made all the more present by being absent and ‘unsaid’
• Thus, the Satanic Gil-Martin is easily a more
frightening prospect than, say, the familiar stage
or pantomime devil of the 19C
The interest of James Hogg today
• At the same time, JH appears ‘middle-ofthe-road’ in terms of his portrayal of sympathetic characters – e.g. the George Colwans – as ordinary, fallible, conciliatory
• See George Colwan after his weddingnight row with his wife, Rabina: ‘for my
part, I fear I have behaved very ill; and I
must endeavour to make amends’ (p. 7)
The interest of James Hogg today
• The Editor, taking sides with George against Rabina in this particular dispute,
says: ‘against the cant of the bigot or the
hypocrite, no reasoning can aught avail’
(p. 5)
• JS appears a novel that throws its weight
behind the cause of good sense against
bigotry and hypocrisy, especially within
Calvinist doctrine
The interest of James Hogg today
• Here, the Calvinist ‘saved’ as well as the ‘damned’ implies a form of fanaticism or extremism
that JH determines to speak against with his
novel
• Thus, JS now seems precisely the sort of text
that speaks to present-day forms of fanaticism
and extremism
• Somewhat in spite of itself, the novel makes us
see the attractions involved in going to extremes
(thereby going over into the Gothic’s uncanny
doubling of reality), even as it asserts a code of
moderation as heroic
The interest of James Hogg today
• For JS read against the fanaticism of a
mid-20C totalitarian age (Nazism, Stalinism, etc.) – see André Gide’s ‘Introduction’
to a 1947 French translation of JH’s text
• . . . the text is read as a post-war cautionary tale about the evils of extremism: a realist antipathy to extremism finds its voice
in Gide
The interest of James Hogg today
• A new age of fanaticism appears in the late 20C/
early 21C: Islamic Jihad (‘holy war’, as opposed
to ‘spiritual struggle’), September 11th and after,
the West’s ‘war on terror’, a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ . . .
• Thus, JS as an anti-extremist novel – Wringhim’s confessions become a confession of his
evil – comes to speak directly to our own times
The interest of James Hogg today
• What does it say in this regard?
• It advocates a policy of making amends instead of making war
• Here, the dialectic of realism and the Gothic is resolved in such a way as to expose
the terrible sameness of opposing sides
within today’s new age of war
The interest of James Hogg today
• As Devji has suggested, an ‘equivalence
of terror’ appears ‘the only form in which
the two [Al-Qaeda and America] might
come together and even communicate
with one another’ (p. 27)
• In sum, all please form an orderly queue
for the asylum!