The telling of this tale and its reading, the writing of it, the publishing of it, the printing of it (think of its famous and crucial title page): all have been incorporated into the work, which emerges as a complex textual condition. Sixty or so years later James will deplore a fictional imagination that could so bare its own artifice as to produce such regular, casual demystifications as the Author's reference to "the hero of the following pages."

Some of the most distinguished Scott scholars have urged readers to forego these paratexts and begin further along, where the text picks up the actions of the core characters—for instance, with Old Mortality , in Chapter II, "The Wappenshaw." Disagreeing with scholars like Angus Calder, Jane Stevenson, and Peter Davidson isn't easy to do, but on this matter I must disagree. To enter this great book at Chapter II means you will not read Jedediah Cleishbotham's "Dedicatory Epistle" to the first of the Tales of My Landlord series or Peter Pattieson's Introduction to Old Mortality and the oral narratives and anecdotes comprising the archive of his materials.

Why are these matters and materials important? Simply, they establish the basic narrative terms of Scott's fiction. These are not Jamesian terms. They are terms that have far more in common with works like At Swim-Two-Birds, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Gravity's Rainbow, and Lanark—that is to say, they make the subject of tale-telling an explicit and governing preoccupation of the fiction. The first series of Tales of My Landlord comes in four volumes headed with Jedediah Cleishbotham's "Introduction" where we are introduced to Scott's complex scene of tale-telling. The key figures here—others will be invented later—are Cleishbotham and his "young friend" Pattieson, the "now deceased" recensor of the tales. Then come the first two stories, The Black Dwarf, in the first volume, and Old Mortality, which makes up the next three volumes. Each of the stories has a chapter "Preliminary" where Pattieson gives "a short introduction," as Cleishbotham explains, "mentioning the persons by whom, and the circumstances under which, the materials thereof were collected."

All this is simply—simply?—to put the reader in the most self-conscious relation to the whole fictional enterprise that the books are unfolding. The Black Dwarf's "Preliminary" chapter literally italicizes its purpose here with a series of passages that are set off from the main body of roman print. The first of these comes at the point where the subject of "the Black Dwarf" gets raised in an adventitious way, as a mere rhetorical flourish in the speech of a character whose name we never learn and who figures not at all in the tale his casual remark will provoke. Cleishbotham's interest is piqued, and Pattieson's narrative records the moment: "The Black Dwarf!" said my learned friend and patron,* Mr Jedediah Cleishbotham, "and what sort of personage may he be?" The phrase in italics, my learned friend and patron, is asterisked to the following "Note by the publisher":

So we are dealing with a text, with a tale, where the boundaries between fiction and fact have been made as porous as possible. Characters in the tale revise the text and its publisher turns out to be himself a minor character of its fiction.

Scott's framing personages pass from our ken throughout the core narrative treating the Black Dwarf, but they return in a new and even more remarkable way when the tale of Old Mortality begins in volume II. Here the "Preliminary" chapter comes with another witty typographical signal. Printed entirely in inverted commas, the chapter explicitly mediates Pattieson's narrative through the editorial devices of Cleishbotham, Pattieson's "worthy and learned" friend and patron. This is how the chapter begins:

The narrative now comes with a series of footnotes authorized by the publisher and signed by Cleishbotham, who annotates a text he seems to have scripted from Pattieson's original manuscript. But if the inverted commas tell us this text is a verbatim report of Pattieson's original, they also, by that very move, raise a question about their textual status. Why put all this material in quotation marks at all, why not simply give Pattieson's "Preliminary" exposition as it was given to us in The Black Dwarf? That text's series of minor scriptural interpolations "may [here] be seen to explode, as it were," like restive schoolchildren, into a condition of indeterminate freedom. Just how faithful is Cleishbotham's recension to Pattieson's original? Scott works to provoke that question here for the same reason that he plays on the public mystery of his authorship at the beginning of The Bride of Lammermoor. He is urging his readers to attend to the artifice of the work before them.

From such attention comes awareness of the reflexive character of this chapter's own small narrative. Quasi-allegorical in form, it draws an explicit set of parallels between Old Mortality, on one hand, and Peter Pattieson on the other. Both cultivate a knowledge of the past and work to preserve it from effacement. The education of society being the purpose of what they do, the running references to schoolmasters and schoolchildren are much to the point. Both are, moreover, irregular kinds of instructors, operating with their tales outside the schoolroom. If all of these relations are easy of enough to register, they prepare us to see others of equal, perhaps even greater, note. Putting the entirety of the chapter in quotation marks underscores the further parallel, never far from our attention in any case, between the recensor Pattieson and his literary agent Cleishbotham. And that equation entirely "explodes" the Chinese box structure of the narrative as a whole. The legendary figure of "Old Mortality" dissolves and mutates into the invisible Author of Old Mortality, "renewing . . . the half-defaced inscriptions" of the past with his fragile fictions.

Framed as they are in this way, Scott's narratives regularly, if also randomly, break out of their narrative enclosures into the freedom of self conscious romance. Often the moments are brief—for instance, in chapter 23 of Quentin Durward. Having been fitted out in disguises by the Syndic Pavillon and his family, Quentin and Lady Isabelle set off from Liege. Two brief paragraphs intervene at that point before the narrative returns us to the central characters:

The passage inevitably turns our attention to Scott's own novel, whose core situation Mother Mabel has simply summarized. The text all but demands that readers be prepared to formulate the response that Gertrude did not give. What is the point of romance fiction, of reading this very book? For Scott that is precisely an historical question and problem. There are fifteenth-century answers to the question and there are nineteenth-century answers, as this very text reminds us to remember.

Scott's books are all conscious efforts to reflect upon that question, if not to answer it directly and definitively. The problem is vigorously brought forward in Kenilworth. Lounging in her barge on the Thames, Elizabeth starts a conversation among her courtiers about the relative merits of bear-baiting and play-going as civil entertainments. When Shakespeare's plays come to focus the issue, the scene immediately turns reflexive. To an 1821 reader the debate initially seems comical, a moment for the reader to stand back from the tensions of the romance narrative and observe for a brief space from a cool and amused distance. The Author of Waverley is at his ventriloquist games once again, most plainly, I suppose, when he uses Elizabeth as his mouthpiece in the following text:

The text says "this Shakespeare" but it (also) means "The Author of Waverley."

But the scene involves far more than a diverting moment of reflexive comic relief. When the Queen asks for some serious judgments on the question, Sussex begins by debunking the "nonsensical bombast" and irreality of the theatre, arguing that blood-sports are more effective means for training a vigorous citizenry. Leicester responds "in behalf of the players" by arguing that the "rants" and "jests" of the theatre are useful means of social control. The plays

keep the minds of the commons from busying themselves with state affairs, and listening to traitorous speeches, idle rumours, and disloyal insinuations. When men are agape to see how Marlow, Shakespeare, and others, work out their fanciful plots . . ., the mind of the spectators is withdrawn from the conduct of their rulers.

Cutting as it does into the "fanciful plots" of Scott's own fictions—of this fiction even now being transacted by the reader—Leicester's argument seems highly equivocal, and not least because Leicester is himself at this point deeply involved with a fanciful and labyrinthine plot of his own. So when the Queen quickly responds "We would not have the minds of our subjects withdrawn from consideration of our own conduct," the remark applies as much to the immediate technical management of Scott's fiction as it does to his work's social and educational aims.

The stakes are raised further when the Dean of St. Asaph's weighs in against the theatres in a puritan diatribe that carries, for later readers, the substance of historical prophecy—that is to say, the coming closing of the theatres. Shakespeare and his fellows promote lewdness, profanity, social discontent—"blaspheming heaven . . . slandering . . . earthly rulers [and] set[ting] at defiance the laws both of God and man." The Queen answers by drawing a distinction between moral and immoral artists, and she closes her response with the passage, quoted earlier, about how artists like Shakespeare bring "useful instruction [to] the generation which may succeed to us." In this highly reflexive moment, that remark comes as much to comment on the work of Scott and Byron as on Elizabethan theatre. Unlike Byron, Scott is not like those artists denounced by the Dean of St. Asaph's, he is the contemporary avatar of Shakespeare. This passage is the fictional equivalent of Scott's view of Byron's ideas about "religion and politics." Nor is it the first time he would use his fiction to mount a critique of his famous contemporary and close acquaintance. The judgment on King Richard that comprises the final paragraph of Ivanhoe involves a concealed reference to Byron. When Scott ends by (mis)quoting Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes":

one can scarcely not recall Byron, as "rash and romantic"—these are Scott's words—as the crusading king the words describe. For it was Byron who reclaimed those lines for his age when he reworked them at the end of The Corsair:

It is important to remember that these reflexive interludes in Scott's work are rarely disengaged from the central plot action. This scene, for example, takes place when Leicester's duplicity toward the queen has thrown him into a dangerous position. Caught in his own web of deceit and the complicating intrigues of the Court, he almost decides not to join the river party. "Go, say I am taken suddenly ill," he tells Varney, "for, by heaven, my brain can sustain this no longer." But politics forces him on, and throughout the scene we are kept as much aware of the extreme tension and anxiety in his mind as of the external events transpiring before us. As is almost always the case, Scott explicitly gives us the formula governing the fictional events: "Leicester . . . endeavoured to divert his thoughts from all internal reflection, by fixing them on what was passing around . . . abstract[ing] his thoughts and feelings by a strong effort from every thing but the necessity of maintaining himself in the favor of his patroness." This formula explains why "what was passing around"—the eventualities of the action—here serves primarily to index Leicester's mental state and "internal reflection." And by giving the formula so explicitly Scott ensures that his readers will not lose themselves in the psychology of the characters and forget "what is passing around"—forget, in other words, that we a transacting the passages of this text. Leicester's behavior is a textual signal indexing Walter Scott in 1821—as involved in the current issues raised by his tale-telling as his characters are in the events of the plot.

This reflexive inertia persists in his work to the very end—I mean, to late works like Count Robert of Paris, a preposterous undertaking that yet involves a remarkable feat of style. The book opens with a series of reflections on the decadent world of the Byzantine Empire, which will be the scene of the action, and in particular on the euphuistic style practiced at the court. In attempting the recreate that world for his tale, Scott moves to become what he beholds, as it were. And so we get the remarkable Chapter IV where Scott lays out a pastiche of the decadent and all but unreadable prose of the Byzantine historian Anna Comnena.

The event is comic both at the textual and at the narrative level. It is also boldly reflexive given the way Scott has put the issue of Byzantine style at the foreground of his tale. For Scott's own style has over the years grown increasingly elaborate and formulaic. To pastiche Comnena's prose at this point is to fashion a critical measure of his own.

That second-order awareness is written large in the reception history, though perhaps not exactly as Scott himself would have liked. For readers have closed the book on Scott's book as a stylistic disaster. That judgment, plainly correct, also seems to me not correct enough. Count Robert of Paris isn't a good book, a "neglected work." It is all but unreadable. But the book, and in particular its opening chapters, involves an important and characteristic feat of style: the pastiche of Comnena's notoriously decadent prose. The move turns reflexively on Scott's own tale, suggesting that we might register certain equations between Comnena and Scott.

The whole text comes from:

www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/snodgrass/scott99/mcgann.html