One City

The mission of the OneCity Trust is to promote social inclusion in the City of Edinburgh. The OneCity Trust aims to fulfil its mission by both carrying out and funding projects and initiatives that advance, facilitate and promote education, social welfare, human rights and the tackling of extreme inequalities in income and the alleviation of poverty among people in Edinburgh. The Trust places great emphasis on bringing together different groups to work together in innovative and creative ways to tackle the problems of social exclusion.

My Fringe

Sadly this isn’t a post about my hair. My stylist doesn’t like me talking about his methods.

Rather, I thought that I would share with you a few of the shows I’ve seen at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August. There are thousands of things going on in the city at this time of year so you end up just having to dive in somewhere and float up gradually to the surface. It can be quite expensive and debauched too what with all the clubs licensed to keep their doors open until 5am. I’m not actually terribly fussed about what I go to see usually, as you always seem to find things to enjoy in most shows. I try to give each performer or troupe of performers a fair chance but will occasionally descend into heckle-mode after a few sherries. This year I have been fairly well behaved – although my counseling group still agree that sherry is no good for a person of my temperament and that I should avoid all major brands including my beloved Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

Re-Animator The Musical

This is a musical based on the 1985 cult hit Re-Animator, which in turn was based on an H.P Lovecraft story about a crazed medical student who has inadvertently discovered how to revivify the dead. I’m not a musicals man but this one wasn’t too painful. We sat in the second row and were given a poncho to wear during the performance. We soon discovered that this was to stop our clothes getting spattered in all manner of exciting fluids that would be flying around during the show, blood, brains, guts and even rogue droplets of the lead actor’s spit which your narrator found particularly unpleasant. Came out happy though and appreciated the general gore.

Marcel Lucont – Gallic Symbol

Marcel Lucont is a raconteur, flaneur, bon viveur and all-round French piss-artist. In his extremely funny outing at this year’s Fringe he insults and enlightens his vulgar British audiences and divulges the bizarre details of his tantalisingly outré sex life.

 

Late & Live

I try to make it to at least one Late & Live each year. It is on at 1am every night during the festival. Each show comprises of sets from three or four random comedians handpicked from across the festival. You are never quite sure what is going to happen and there is a sort of coliseum atmosphere to proceedings with the audience suddenly able to turn on whoever is on stage at any point. A brutal, funny, boozy place to be at one in the morning. I love it.

 

Jessie Cave: Bookworm

Went to see this as one of my friends was in it. I won’t gush but I had an enjoyable afternoon. Bookworm is full of shambolic literary ephemera and at times sheer shameless madness. Like this blog.

 

Iain Banks in Conversation

I’ve wanted to see Iain Banks talk for a while now and it was good. There is usually a really boring journalist type asking the questions at this kind of event but Banksy just came on stage himself and took questions from the audience. Quite brave. One woman started getting all ‘Freudian’ (intrusive) and asking him about whether he had any childhood traumas that might have influenced the dark bits in his work. He said no. Interesting guy, funny too, in a charmingly rambly and nerdy sort of way. Below is a video of him in his house.

 

P.S If you are in Edinburgh and you are reading this before the Fringe ends – in about a week and a half – feel free to send me your expert recommendations.

Sea Story Blue Sea Red Story Blue

This story took a respectable second prize in an Edinburgh University writing competition not all that long ago. A feat that I rank with my winning time of 2.27 in an 800m race back in the heady summer of 2001. It had been a miserable school sports day. As I approached the final bend my energy levels were dipping to a dangerous, possibly life threatening all time low, I was panting, heaving, dribbling, hoping – ah! the audacity of hope! – hoping I could just hang on for a few more metres, and all I could hear were the stirring strains of Nessun Dorma … anyway, sorry, that’s another story.

 

 

SEA STORY BLUE SEA RED STORY BLUE

I handed it to her.

‘No, I don’t want to read this,’ she said.

I said… well … I don’t know what I actually said.

But she kept saying no, no, no, and then she yawned and fell asleep.

I left her sleeping on the boat. As I climbed ashore I undid the rope tied to the jetty and let the boat drift out to sea. She would wake up in a few hours or so and sail back to land. She would be alright.

Two days later the story was all over the news. Local Lady Missing Out At Sea. I read the newspapers and watched the story unfold on the television. I felt acutely self conscious all through that day and the next.

On the fourth day I decided to notify the authorities of what had happened. I told them that I knew the lady well and that she would understand why I had done it.  I said that we would have a good laugh together once this was all over and asked if they needed to know anything else. I was encouraged to come down to the police station to give a formal statement – I declined.

On the fifth day there was a knock on the door of my house and it turned out to be two plain clothed police officers there to escort me down to the station. I told them that I had spoken to their superiors the day before and that everything had been sorted out. Still, they insisted that I accompany them down to the station and warned me that, if I did not do exactly as they asked, they would take me there by force as they had a warrant for my arrest – I agreed.

At the station, after filling out a number of forms, I was ushered into a small room with no windows. One of the walls of the room was a mirror. As I had seen many police dramas and films on the television, I was aware that were probably people behind this mirrored wall watching my movements and assessing my character. I tried to look calm. I sat down and waited, sitting very still. For ten or twenty minutes nobody entered the room and I was left to my own thoughts. Calmly thinking over my situation, I decided to try and make a daring escape.

I am at the table now, thinking out my escape. In my pockets I have a coin, a packet of cigarettes and a cigarette lighter. I can think of no escape plan involving these objects. Other things in the room: there is the chair I am sitting on, the table I am sitting in front of, the door (which has a silver handle, shaped like a moth without wings) and the mirrored wall. I am not handcuffed. I also believe that the door is unlocked, as I do not remember anybody locking it. I am going to get up from the chair and simply walk out of the door and then out of the station.

My plan has worked. I am now on the street outside of the police station walking back towards my house. On second thoughts, I will not go back there as shortly, I expect, the police will be looking for me and my house will surely be the first place that they will look. I am making a right turn down a side street towards the sea. I now plan to get a boat and look for her, as finding her will put an end to the trouble I am in.

The sirens have started. Great wailing sounds. I have lived here all my life and have heard them only once. And that once is this time. I do now feel a little bit worried and sick: perhaps I should not have escaped from the police station without talking to the police. Now they may think I am a danger to society and shoot me when they find me. There is a blue boat bobbing on the quay. I will take this boat and sail towards the horizon.

I am at sea. The wind is breezing through my hair and the salt spray has dried out my skin, the sun is beginning to set. I can no longer see land behind me.

A cloud covers the moon. Her boat is red, but I am well aware that I will not recognise any colours when it is pitch black.

In the night I feel safe, like a little spider crouching on a bit of dark in the carpet. I fall asleep on deck, closing out the stars behind my eyelids.

That was a week ago, I am beginning to starve. I also think I am going a little bit mad. Over the past days I have kept a record of my thoughts in a black diary I found somewhere in the boat. I forget where. I have written something down four days in a row.

Day 1 – I am happy that I am on my way to find her but worried about the police. Hungry.

Day 2 – I am happy that I am on my way to find her but still worried about the police.       Very Hungry.

Day 3 – I am no longer worried about the police but I am starting to doubt whether I         will find her. Extremely hungry. Slightly Mad.

Day 4 – I am starving and going insane. No police. Her not found.

I have made a friend called Jim Lad. He is a cabin boy but he is sick, and I must continue nursing him back to health. Jim Lad is the descendent of a great admiral who sailed the high seas killing pirates and crooks. Jim Lad has the fever but still has a glint in his eye. He talks of doubloons buried on an island in the region and says I must find them before the evil Captain Barnacle and his crew of crooks. I pity him, as he is slowly dying and talks little sense.

Jim Lad I say, Jim Lad how do you feel today. Jim Lad says he’s fine, surviving at least. Jim Lad I say, do you know of a red boat with a cargo of one sleeping lady? Jim Lad says yes, he does, it be on the horizon.

I run to front of the boat and indeed see a vessel on the horizon. Jim Lad I say, it might be the pirates, might it not? Aye, he says, but I am sick and you are starving, that vessel’s our only hope. Right you are Jim Lad, right you are.

I pitch a course for the vessel.

The vessel is red and a woman waves from on deck. Jim Lad, I say, Jim Lad it’s her, it’s her. Mooring up beside the vessel I climb aboard, leaving Jim Lad on the blue boat. I embrace her. She takes me into the cabin and introduces me to a friend of hers.

Her friend is a mermaid called Ariel, who is sick because she cannot swim. I am greatly saddened by the tale and tell both women of my new friend Jim Lad who is also sick and is lying on my blue boat. Leaving Ariel in the cabin I walk out on deck with her and discuss what must be done.  I tell her in no uncertain terms that Ariel and Jim Lad are dying and that if we are to get home we must leave them together on the blue boat and take the red boat home. Though distressed by this prospect, she agrees.

Back on the blue boat I speak quietly to Jim Lad of a beautiful mermaid that cannot wait to meet him. By now he is very sick but he smiles as I carry him onto the doomed red vessel. Laying him down on the floor I say Jim Lad, you will be very happy here.

She and I watch the blue boat sink into the distance over the horizon. I ask her why she would not read it. Laughing softly, she says she knew it would be too sad and that she would cry if she finished it.

The Edinburgh Novel

Book Launch

Menzies Menzies gave his agent the most important thumbs-up of the evening. The one that meant it was time to let the punters and the fans in. The thumbs-up, the back-pat, the clinkety-clink of champagne flute against champagne flute were all stock in trade for this heavyweight of the British literary scene.

As the doors of the grand Edinburgh hall were thrust open into the icy night the harp player Menzies had requested for the evening began to pluck delicately at Pachelbel, Canon in D. Satisfied, tickled by the melody, the author thought about his books. This was the eighty-eighth. Some had been more successful than others but he had no substantial regrets. Confident now with his craft, he was at an age where he could observe and analyse others without feeling, as a younger man might, that he was analysing a part of himself. I’m good at what I do … well, he thought … I do my best … it is as that most model Victorian George Meredith once said;

‘Genius does what it must, and Talent does but what it can.’

He swept his hand over his bumpy bald crown. He was certainly getting older now. Not to worry, he thought.

As people began making their way down into the hall the lights were dimmed and champagne served. Menzies descended from the main stage into the body of people before him. He picked up a glass of champagne himself and began warming up the gathering crowd – shaking outstretched hands, exchanging words and glances. Smile knowingly at the people you know, he thought, nod benevolently at those you don’t. Butter up at will, but keep it dignified. And don’t get caught by anybody dull for God’s sake.

Several people caught his glinting eyes; eminent physicians, lawyers, philanthropists, gynecologists, solicitors, professors;  a fine selection of Edinburgh’s finest and … but what is this! Edith! No! Absolutely not! Plague! Viper!

And what’s more – he couldn’t quite believe it – Trevor the Trousersnake was by her side. A horrified Menzies then let out a most curious sounding guttural groan. This was simply outrageous. More, more than that: this was evil, this was actual evil. This woman and that, that bloody personal trainer had between the two of them ruined his bloody… oh Christ… he could see it now … that shapely sculpted (hairless) bottom throbbing away at something small and wife-shaped bent enthusiastically over the kitchen counter…

‘Edith…?’

‘Ming …oh God…Ming it’s not what it looks like… oh TREVOR!’

Slamming the front door he had walked through the throbbing rain up Dundas St towards the Balmoral where he had booked into the Royal Suite and gorged himself on Kobe beef salads and bottle after bottle of Chateau Latour. Pay-per-view porn of the most vulgar sort took up the bulk of that evening. And as a peach dawn rose over a dove-grey Edinburgh skyline, pished and emotional he had looked about frantically in the bedside cabinet; but there was nothing there.

He phoned down to reception.

‘Where’s my damn Gideon’s bible! Will you bring me a bloody Gideon!’

‘Of course Mr Menzies, right away.’

He took to the good book, piously attempting it cover to cover. Doggedly he read throughout the wee hours eventually reaching somewhere around Genesis 7:16, luckily the Gideon had a user-friendly subject index for the casual reader – he went straight for Betrayal;

Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.

He knew then that Christianity just wasn’t going to cut it. For affairs of this nature, Menzies surmised, one would need something a little stronger. In the morning, he left the Gideon on the bed and walked calmly out of the Balmoral. Later that week he bought a Porsche 911 GT3.

Why, he thought, why me? I cannot I absolutely will not have this evening soured by Edith and that pony-tailed piece of genitalia standing beside her. I must do something. Menzies Menzies took a second to compose himself;

Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.

Spurning many incensed society ladies he crossed the hall at a trot.

Champagne, Chatter

Mathew (20, wiry, a little sneery, wearer of a synthetic leather jacket, Camus’ La Peste peeping out of his back pocket) looked around the hall and up at the chandeliers, casting a wry and cynical eye over everything. One day this would be his life. If everything went according to plan that is, and his first novel Bedroom Journeys took off. He had sent the first chapter (‘Sock’) off to a pick n’ mix of publishing houses about six months ago. Or was it ten months ago?

Ticket stamped he went down to stand amongst the other peeps on the floor – he seemed to be the youngest person at the event but that wasn’t at all unusual for this flinty forward-thinker and renegade iconoclast.

Busy, very busy. But none of these people know M.M the way I do, he thought. They’re just here to be seen here. I’ve read at least twenty of his novels. He peered around for the great man. That was him over there.

Nursing his bubbly Mathew tuned in to the general hum around him. Ming this, Ming that. Much drivel. Desperately he tried to focus on his own vital and penetrating thoughts but eventually the distractions became inviting, immersive, irrevocable…

The blurb on the back said it was fiction. Like no fiction I’ve ever read darling – you might even say it was … non…fiction.’
‘Ha…ha ha …ha. Lloyd that’s rather funny.’
‘Indeed Meredith, I was always famed for my dazzling wit.’
‘Lloyd, dearest, you are wicked.’

‘“Oh Mr Buonarroti!” I said, “you’ve done a lovely job on the roof, I wonder, would you be able to tile the bathroom?”’
‘And did he?’
‘Oh yes, and he did a sterling job. I really would recommend him.’

‘Doesn’t The Trainspotters give you a tickle. Doesn’t it just. Oh I do like to read about the places I know well. Oh – well – when he started talking about the Leith, oh, and in the original accent – well – I nearly had a baby.’
‘A baby?’
‘Oh it’s just one of my many catchphrases. Of course I wasn’t actually pregnant at the time.’
‘I see, I see.’

‘It was a little piece o’ Tartan Noir, Lord Copper. ’
‘The Tartan noir, my yes – how very fashionable.’
‘And the man himself. So very decadent my Lord – an Oscar Wilde for the face book generation.’
‘We shall have a full page spread on him in the literary supplement on Monday William – have it arranged.’

‘That’s funny – my Godson drinks in the Oxford Bar – no, no sorry – The Cambridge bar.’
‘A fine establishment – lots of Accies.’
‘Yes. Yes that’s right.’
‘And you say he knows Mr Rebus personally?’

…The young pretender came to with a wobble. He put out his nicotine stained fingers in a vain attempt to steady himself. They landed on what felt like a raw chicken breast. He clutched it whatever it was. Raw chicken at an Edinburgh book launch? Surely not. No this was a woman’s breast, hot and round, alive. There were a few gasps and salvos of champagne flew up in the air. Disorientated, Mathew looked up to see his favourite author approaching with a smirk on his face.

One City, Two Faces

Peering keenly ahead to see what was going on (and with his keen novelistic brain realising nigh on immediately what was afoot) Menzies Menzies was surprised to see a young man. You don’t get too many of those at these things, he thought. And had there not been so many prying eyes he would have cordially shook the lad’s hand. The sight of Edith’s uncompromising face dripping with champagne had pleased him greatly. A shame though, thought Menzies, for this young flaneur. He must be feeling very isolated. You can’t just go around squeezing the boobs of your elders and expect not to be singled out, especially in Edinburgh. Sartorially speaking this young Byron looked like a frog in a hen-house in his far-fetched leathery get-up, flanked on either side by elegant Edinburgh literati as he was.

Menzies was deeply familiar with the look that young men like this one were at pains to cultivate having meditated on the subject unflinchingly in his thirty-ninth novel Frog in a Hen House. It was a kind of bohemian oddball chic. Scruffy but not dirty – like Tracy Emin’s unmade bed – it was really quite endearing. He had crossed the hall now and was beside the boy.

‘I’m so sorry … I … I …’ said Mathew.

‘My boy, my boy, come now I’m sure it was an accident.’ said Menzies Menzies putting a hand on Mathew‘s shoulder.

‘Well really Ming,’ snapped a very wet and angry Edith Menzies, ‘This young rogue, this … this … adolescent … you must have him thrown out. Immediately!’

‘Oh be quiet Edith. You’re embarrassing yourself. Now what did you say your name was young man?’

‘He has designs on me Ming. He’s a sexual predator. Look at him. Just look at him Menzies! Leather!’

‘Edith!’ hissed Trevor the personal trainer.

‘Come on young man, walk with me. Mathew, was it?’

‘Ming? What are you doing? Don’t walk away from me.’

‘Edith. Why don’t you go and dry off. Go on Trevor, you go with her. You did bring your sports bag didn’t you?’ Trevor blushed and lead Edith off before she could reply. ‘How old are you my boy?’

‘I’m twenty sir.’

‘Ah…I remember it well. Your wrist watch coos “no time, no time.” Do you write my boy? Are you lyrical?’

‘A little Mr Menzies,’ Mathew thought about mentioning Bedroom Journeys but decided that this wasn’t the time, ‘but nobody wants to hear what a twenty year old with not a great deal to say about, well, anything has to say,’ said Mathew, ‘let alone you Mr Menzies.’

Menzies pursed his lips and looked at Mathew. ‘You must not take it personally my boy. Many years ago,’ he looked up at the ceiling for a moment, ‘many, many years ago I was once where you are now … the wilderness of youth. Ah yes… I had penned a few charming little things by the time I was your age, but alas, nobody would ever dream of publishing them. Just like you, my boy, I had not the faintest idea why. But I kept at it my boy and what eventually transpired was the publication and immediate success of my magnum opus One City, Two Faces – which did very well, I can assure you, made my name. Lots of people wanted to be my friend after that. So my boy, my advice – keep at it, just keep at it. Ha.’ Menzies paused, pleased that he could proffer on this young scriptor some advice that he himself would have gratefully appreciated at the tender young age of twenty.

‘Well,’ said Mathew, ‘Maybe. But I don’t know. I have been considering the Law Mr Menzies. As a vocation you know. Something to fall back on.’ Mathew looked down at his feet, a little sheepishly.

‘A vocation? My my, you don’t want one of those. You must be free,’ the author’s hands rose in conductor like fashion, he moved them gracefully along to the climbing notes of the harp, ‘free like the very birds in the trees my boy. You must never be bound. Oh what a tragedy it is to be bound! You must never be bound to anyone my boy or anything.’ Menzies Menzies – who Mathew now saw in a slightly different light – lowered his hands and continued talking, a little more prosaically, ‘local chap are you?’

‘Yes. I actually went to school round the corner.’

‘Ah…a young Edinburgh man. Well then? Surely you know what you must do?’

‘No, I don’t sir,’ said Mathew.

‘You must write The Edinburgh Novel my boy.’

‘The Edinburgh Novel?’

‘Yes my boy. The Edinburgh Novel. Not The Edinburgh Novel, not The Edinburgh Novel but The Edinburgh Novel. It’s a right of passage for a smart young chap like you.’

‘Ah…’ said Mathew hesitantly, wondering what his favourite author was getting at. ‘I’m not sure I know exactly what you mean Mr Menzies?’

‘Drat.’ Menzies looked at his delicate silver wristwatch and then up at his agent who was signalling something with his hand. ‘No time my boy, no time. I’ll have to speak to you later on. Come and get a signature at the end of the evening. I must go, I’m on the stage in five minutes. Help yourself to more champagne. The Edinburgh Novel my boy, I’m sure you’ll work it out. And don’t worry about Edith, she’s a pushover really.’ Menzies turned to go towards the stage but paused – struck by a thought – and turned back to Mathew. ‘Don’t ever get married Mathew. Remember, remember what I said about being bound boy. And if you do decide on a wife, don’t for God’s sake let her have a personal trainer.’ And off he went.

‘OK.’ Mathew said, quite bemused, ‘thanks then’.

The End

The Waverley Novels

In the 1960’s and 70’s when Feminist historians began rewriting history to include women, they were conscious, as were their readers, that an ideology lay behind the writing of such histories that was just as  important if not more so than the histories themselves. Such a rewriting of history is possible if we concede that ‘history’ is not a given ‘reality’ or agreed upon set of ‘facts’ but conversely that it is contingent upon the values and ideals of those who write it.  History, in this respect, can be usefully conceptualised as a history of historiographies. On the one hand Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels operate in the terms of a teleological historiography which values commerce over feudalism, civility over barbarism and rationality over superstition. However, on the other hand the novels radically displace the notion of historiography altogether. Through the use of elaborate framing narratives, the tropes of romance fiction and playful self-referentiality Scott continually reminds the reader of the fictive nature of his versions of history, and by extension, all ‘versions’ of history. In this essay I will evaluate the ways in which more or less contradictory historical perspectives operate in two of Scott’s novels: Waverley and Old Mortality.

Although it appears at the end of Waverley, ‘A Postscript,Which Should have been a Preface’ with its ironically vacillating title suggests that what it contains is both a prerequisite for the novel as well as the afterthoughts of the author. What we get in this postscript is a sense of comfortable distance from a turbulent past (a sense which is  also established before the beginning of the novel in the subtitle: ‘Tis Sixty Years Since’). The narrator reflects that:

There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or              little     more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of             Scotland. … the total eradication of the Jacobite party … commenced this     innovation. …we are   not aware of the progress we have made, until we fix           our eye on the now distant point from which we have drifted (492).

The idea that society was continually progressing, that society was perfectible, was a popular view during the Enlightenment, particularly for Whig thinkers; many of whom believed this perfectibility to be an indisputable fact of European history. For these thinkers the moral, political and social order of the present day could thus be constantly ratified by a comparison with a less civilised past. The Waverley postscript passage reflects this type of concern; historical change is described as a process of ‘innovation’ and ‘progress’ that hinges on the ‘eradication’ of the Jacobite party. Yet Scott seems to undercut the Whig party line (so to speak) by encouraging the reader, in line with more reactionary Tory ideals, to reconcile what is gained with what is lost:

This race has now almost entirely vanished from the land, and with it,         doubtless, much absurd political prejudice – but also many living examples of singular and disinterested attachment to the principles of loyalty which they     received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and          honour (492)

Apart from being a good old swords and sandals (or cutlass and kilts) romp through the Scottish Highlands the narrative of Waverley functions as means of discursively balancing these two opposing views of history.

At the centre of the novel we have Edward Waverley whose early development forms the beginning of the narrative. Edward is brought up in an environment – very carefully constructed by Scott – to reflect both Whig and Tory views of history. Edward’s family are split down the middle. Uncle Everard Waverley is a nostalgic Jacobite supporter while Edward’s father Richard is a politically active Whig. The distinction between the backwardness of Jacobitism, emphasised in Everard’s fixation on the heroic past of his ancestors, and Whig politics, which play an active part in society, is quickly established. Edward Waverley’s mixed affiliations throughout the novel stem from this quietly divided upbringing. The structure of the novel relies on each successive character he encounters reflecting an aspect of the political standpoints he begins with. While Edward’s uncle inhabits the role of the nostalgic yet perennially inactive Jacobite (perhaps symbolised by his vow of celibacy), Flora Mac-Ivor – whom Edward meets later on – whose ‘ruling passion’ is ‘loyalty’ represents the noble side of Jacobitism. Her brother Fergus, in his lust for personal gain, represents its mercenary self interest. Through each successive character, Scott builds up the full picture.  It is in deposing the negative elements of Jacobitism whilst retaining the values of ‘old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour’ that constitutes balance in the novel. This is reflected in the death of Fergus and compounded in the marriage between Waverley and Rose Bradwardine at the close of the novel, in which Rose’s domesticated Jacobitism is married off to Waverley’s newly realised Whig progressivism. Having projected the older forms of social life as obsolete and dangerous despite their virtues, the novel then rescues the virtuous representatives of the past and destroys those it has conceived as dangerous.

This then is not a ‘real’ view of history in any sense, but a considerably engineered one that could be described as a masterful exercise in ‘fence-sitting’. Scott ends the novel with a handpicked selection of Jacobite and Whig values that reflect his own particular worldview, rather than historical reality in any concrete sense. But the historical reality of Scott’s novel is never a given, the reader is never coerced into taking things as ‘fact.’  Although we might think that Scott tries to authenticate his narrative by his detailed descriptions and textual notes – he is always giving us involved footnotes – this is only ostensible. Scott’s reservations about the historical veracity of Waverley are often coded in the text. One particularly significant instance of this occurs towards the end of the novel as Waverley and the Baron of Bradwardine look upon a new painting in Tully-Veolan:

There was one addition to this fine old apartment… which drew tears into the Baron’s eyes. It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac- Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress; the scene a wild, rocky and           mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background.         It was taken from a spirited sketch drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a        young man of high genius, and had been painted on a full-length scale by an    eminent London artist (489).

 This instance of ekphrasis, as the two men look into the painting, directs the reader outside of the text. The painting of Waverley in his Highland dress seems to suggest itself as a microcosmic representation of the novel itself. As the Baron weeps at the painting in acceptance of the decline and fall of the Stuart claim, so the reader has to evaluate their own response to the book. Yet it becomes apparent, somewhat ironically, that the Baron is weeping at a ‘painting’ of ‘a spirited sketch’ drawn in Edinburgh of a Highland pass. Scott stresses the absolute artificiality of the image, though it is important that this still elicits an authentic emotional response from the viewer. This would seem to suggest that Scott is very aware of the particularity of his own ‘version’ of history, its fictive status, and the extent to which it is always twice removed from the events themselves. Scott’s novels turn literature into historiography by not only providing a particular vision of historical process and change, but also a reflection of how that vision is constructed.

Old Mortality is a later novel about an earlier period of history: The Killing Time. Scott’s use of multiple framing narratives in this challenging work allows him to further develop the theme of how historical visions are constructed. The narrative can only begin once Scott has established that the reader is being presented with a set of papers which have been preserved by a schoolmaster, Jedediah Cleishbotham; these papers in turn contain a novel written by his deceased colleague Peter Pattieson, which is based on oral accounts of ‘The Killing Time’ by an old survivor of the extreme Covenanting Calvinists, Old Mortality. These narrative frames ensured that there was suitable distance created between Scott’s nineteenth century readers and a period of history that he perceived as radically different from their own. And yet the framing devices also operate, perhaps paradoxically, as a means for these readers to access the narrative – once it eventually gets going – instantaneously; without this ideological bridge, the whole structure becomes merely unsorted experience. Scott is aware that the ‘sorting’ of historical experience is not only practical, a device to make his books reader-friendly, but that it necessarily constitutes historical writing. This is part of a realisation that all history is founded upon the process of narrative.

The violent opposition between Whigs and Royalists in Old Mortality is obviously comparable to that between the Jacobites and Government forces in Waverley. Also, much like Edward Waverley, Henry Morton occupies a position of centrality in the text to which the opposing forces in the novel gravitate towards. The opposing sides in the novel are both characterised, at numerous intervals, as violent fanatics; Claverhouse the head of the Royalist troops admits of himself and his enemies ‘we are both fanatics; but there is a distinction between the fanaticism of honour and that of dark and sullen superstition’ (356). Both varieties of fanatacism, however, end up causing violence and conflict in the novel. Between them Claverhouse, Burley, Olifant and Bothwell start a bar-fight, persecute peasants, steal a castle, commit murder and provoke a war. By the end of Waverley it is relatively clear which aspects of the novel’s conflicting value systems are to be appropriated and synthesised before a resolution will occur; conversely Old Mortality seems to reject wholesale the ideologies of each of the armies it follows as fanatic and destructive. Scott has written elsewhere that ‘as to Covenanters and Malignants, they were both a set of cruel and bloody bigots…neither had the least idea either of toleration or humanity…’. The inevitable consolation for Scott is in the implied nineteenth century comparison.

The figure of Old Mortality in the novel represents what little residual heritage Scott perceives, or would like to perceive, is left of seventeenth century fanaticism. We come across Old Mortality as Peter Pattieson strolls through a graveyard;

An old man was seated upon the monument of the slaughtered Presbyterians, and busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the   inscription, which, announcing, in scriptural language, the promised blessings of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematised the murderers with corresponding violence (290).

If Scott’s vision of history is one in which a conciliatory balance is always sought after, here he brings to life a character with values completely opposed to his own. This passage represents another significant instance of Scott’s use of ekphrasis. Just as Old Mortality is employed in preserving the memory of the Covenanters, so Pattieson, and Scott set themselves a task which equally involves preserving the past. Yet whereas as Old Mortality wishes to reawaken old conflicts in the present ‘generation of vipers’, Scott wishes to leave such conflict firmly in the past, whereupon the Enlightement project of understanding historical influence can take place. Old Mortality’s ‘peculiar opinions’ are laughed off and eventually edited out of the anecdotes that Pattieson will use to construct the main narrative. Old Mortality is for Pattieson a ‘singular’ character, both in the sense of novel from an antiquarian’s point of view, and literally singular, the last of his kind, a remnant. He is associated, quite explicitly, with death. He dies soon after he appears in the narrative, leaving his work in preserving the memory of the Covenanters to ruin and decay (34). Pattieson’s story is a ‘re-chiselling’ of a new history onto what Pattieson, and Scott see as an old history of Whig bias: with this new story, Scott seeks to overcome the distortions of the Whigs and their persecutors and to forge a position epistemologically superior to their mutually destructive fanatacisms.

The conclusion of Old Mortality seems ambivalent as to whether such a position of superiority, a position where the past has been laid to rest and conflict ceases, has been achieved. The marriage between Henry Morton and Edith Bellenden in the last line is so quickly dealt with as to seem almost ridiculous. In comparison to the constant to-and-fro of the novel it seems out of place, bathetic. It is tempting to see it as a parody of the marriage in Waverley. Scott then ends the book with a conversation between Pattieson and his gossiping friend Miss Buskbody the draper, who is only able respond to the romance elements in Pattieson’s text. The ‘Conclusion’ is on one level a throwaway piece of levity, a dig aimed at the superficiality and escapism Scott attached to readers of romance novels. On a deeper level the ‘Conclusion’ is a commentary on the failure to fictively interpret and manage the destructive forces of the past. Scott is conscious of his version of history in Old Mortality as precisely that, his own version of history determined by the limits of his literary historiography. There seems to be real uneasiness concerning the degree to which the dead past will stay suitably dead, the degree to which a novel which is intended to be explanatory and reassuring has succeeded in these aims.

You have been reading about the ways in which Waverley and Old Mortality are simultaneously dictated by an Enlightenment historiography of ‘progress’ and a drive to consider what constitutes the particular historiography behind literary productions of the past. I have emphasised Scott’s philosophy of mediation and balance, which, in some respects, seems to stand at odds with historical veracity. The structures of these two novels allow for partial viewpoints to stand in close proxy to each other without one viewpoint necessarily overwhelming the other. This is a supremely rational way to approach a subject for understanding. In these novels, Scott is able to make his own value judgements and yet avoid dogmatism: ultimately his debates remain ambivalent and open ended. In each novel the terms of the argument are again refigured. Scott may structure his narratives so that his characters end with their faces turned bravely towards a progressive future, but at the opening of each new novel the future turns out to have again acquired the features of a barbaric past which, once more, has to be expunged from the kingdom of progress.

David Hume Documentary

A very interesting conversation about David Hume, one of Edinburgh’s most famous residents.

 

Rick Steves: A Few Technical Issues

Here is a video by the renowned travel writer Rick Steves about Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Below I have highlighted where I think he goes a little off-piste.

 

 

0.01: Bagpipes Rick? Bit Brigadoon is it not.

0.04: “Old Edinboro’s main drag”. Edinburgh Rick. Not Edinboro.

0.06: “Nicknamed the Royal Mile”. The Royal Mile is not nicknamed The Royal Mile Rick: it is in fact called The Royal Mile.

0.14: “This colourful jumble is the tourist’s Edinburgh”. It is only the tourist’s part of Edinburgh because people like you say it is in your guidebooks.

0.20: ” A dense tangle of old buildings, fun museums and cultural cliches on sale”. What are the real cultural clichés Rick? The stuff on display in these shops or the people who come back year after year and pay money for the stuff?

0.25: “Edinburgh was a wonder in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. Edinburgh was fine in the seventeenth century I suppose – if you could cope with the smell – but  it is usually just the 18th century that people describe as the city’s Golden Age.

0.29: “It was famed for its skyscrapers”. Skyscrapers? No Rick, just no.

0.42: “It is said they knew each other not by how they looked but by how they smelled.” Really Rick, think about what you are actually saying here. They weren’t dogs.

0.43: not a great piece of music really is it now Rick?

1.03: “The buildings were narrow and tall, crammed shoulder to shoulder with little courtyards … these closes were connected to the main drag by skinny lanes.” The closes were usually named after a memorable occupant of one of the nearby apartments, or by the occupations of those that traded therein. Generically they are termed closes, although individually they may be named entries, courts and wynds – all of which are Scots terms for an alley. A “wynd” was one wide enough to take a cart, a “close” was too narrow for a cart. Most slope steeply down from the Royal Mile. Many have steps and form huge flights of stairs. To be a true “close” it requires to be built on both sides, giving a canyon-like atmosphere. I lifted this from Wikipedia Rick. You didn’t even bother to do that did you?

1.09: “400 years ago Edinburgh was nicknamed ‘Auld Reekie’”. Auld Reekie: good research there.

1.26: “For several centuries Scotland was ruled from London”. For many people it still feels like Scotland is ruled from London. Because it is Rick. There is rather a crucial difference between devolution and independence.

1.56: Triumphant music commences. We look at various shots of The Scottish Parliament for forty seconds. Thanks for visiting.

I’m only joking Rick. Don’t take it personally. Thanks for visiting and come back again soon old boy.