SCOTT AND HIS LITERARY STYLESCOTT AND HIS LITERARY STYLE1. SCOTT'S BACKGROUND
Scott, the "great romancer," was trained as a lawyer. Steeped in the traditions and customs of the Scottish highlands, Scott's novels are backdropped with the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and set with scenes laid out in remote and uncultivated districts. His novels are filled with superstitious and mannerly characters, entangled with the intrigues of war, religion, and politics. Though Scott wrote verse he is at his best when writing prose. Scott "told his story in incident, and not in reflection or in adjective."
Scott discovered that, indeed, facts are better than fiction; he wrote of events from real life and not "the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain." Scott's writings were politically based, he equated the mobs of the previous centuries to the "modern rabble" of his day, those who were rising up against tradition and custom such as the mobs of the French Revolution. He backed his friends who had a "horror of all reform, civil, political or religious." During his time he was a most popular figure with numerous readers and admirers, "quarrelling which of his novels is the best, opposing character to character, quoting passage against passage." William Hazlitt thought Scott to be a genius, but one "who took the wrong side and defended it by unfair means."
2. SCOTT'S KIND OF WRITING
Scott's greatness "is not the product of a 'search for form' or some ingeniously contrived 'skill' ". It derives from his insight into the precise and complex dynamisms of society and history. This repudiation of Aestheticism comes with a critique of traditional, uncritical views of Scott. "What in Scott has been called very superficially 'authenticity of local colour' is in actual fact [the] artistic demonstration of historical reality. It is the portrayal of the broad living basis of historical events in their intricacy and complexity, in their manifold interaction with acting individuals".
This kind of writing—so replete in Scott—installs neither a truth of fact nor a truth of fiction but the truth of the game of art. It is more than make-believe, it is conscious make-believe. Scott wants to draw his audience into his fictional world by assuming and playing upon his reader's distance and disbelief. His Romantic reconciliations therefore begin in an imaginative deployment of a non-fictional idea of truth and reality. There can be no romantic escape to imaginary worlds unless there is first of all a real world, or rather the idea of a real world, from which to escape. Scott's game of authorship forms a crucial part of his elaborate method for imagining the audience's idea of the real world and integrating it into his fiction. More than that, the game largely organizes his general method for directly involving his audience in a social, a cooperative venture of fictional making. Ultimately this encompasses more than the epical creation of past history, it necessitates the invention of the present as well. Scott doesn't create that history by himself, however. His fictions become the means by which individuals, isolated readers, are led to become willing participants in this large cultural enterprise.
3. SCOTT'S CHARACTERS
And yet Lukács might have fitted his argument to the Shandean material scattered about the Prefaces, Postscripts, Appendices, and Notes of Scott's novels. Lukács, that is to say, might have pursued the implications of one of his most acute insights about Scott: that the books feed off a deliberate and "necessary anachronism." Unlike "post-1848" writers, Scott "never modernizes the psychology of his characters", and Lukács shrewdly connects this commitment of the writing to Hegel's view that a true historical insight is only possible "if the past . . . is clearly recognized and experienced by contemporary writers as the necessary pre-history of the present". In this view of the matter one would have wanted Lukács to treat Jedediah Cleishbotham, Peter Pattieson, et al. as fictional materials that define more precisely the historical divisions joining and separating the past from the present.
Why doesn't Lukács elaborate that argument? To answer the question I would return to James's critique of Trollope, and through Trollope to the whole line of fiction writers who "bare the device" of their artistic presence. In Scott, "the Author of Waverley" is a character of conscious make-believe; as such he is the determining focus of the fiction's recurrent patterns of comic spell-castings and spell-breakings. For his part Jedediah Cleishbotham is a similar fantastic creature, like his many framing and prefatory cronies. All are characters drawn from the contemporary historical setting that is as crucial to the historicality of these fictions as are the scenes and events called from the past. For James, of course, all are equally characters drawn from a primitive stage of the art of fiction.
www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/snodgrass/scott99/mcgann.html
The text from the last two sections comes from: