Scott and the Scene of Explanation: Framing Contextuality in 'The Bride of Lammermoor.' (Sir Walter Scott) (the Romantic Novel)

No issue in the field of Romanticism over the last fifteen years or so, the period of the so-called rehistoricization of literary studies, has been more exercised than the question of contextuality. The most heated debates have had to do with poetry, foremost among other genres, and the working assumption has been that Romantic poems have provided insufficiently powerful, subtle, or relevant means for contextualizing themselves. The case needs some revision even in this form, since a complex and compelling account of a relation to circumstances is more explicitly on offer in some poetic texts than we have allowed. It is especially hard to maintain such a view, however, when we extend the analysis to include the fiction of the period, and hardest of all with the fiction of widest appeal to that contemporary readership: the novels of Sir Walter Scott. That Scott's histories can and do supply terms for historicizing Scott ought to have been clear enough from reading the most influential account of Scott's fiction in our century, Georg Lukacs' The Historical Novel. It has gone strangely unnoticed that, in showing how various circumstances led inevitably to Scott's development of the new narrative form, Lukacs employed precisely the notion of historical necessity that he believes is the most distinctive conceptual feature of that new form.(1) But there are other ways to construe the terms of Scott's innovation, and other ways to redeploy them. Readers of Scott's fiction, and their number seems to be growing again, know well enough that the central tale in each of the Waverley novels appears within an immense and intricate framework of introductions, prefaces, postscripts, notes, and commentaries.(2) This apparatus, extensive in the earliest publications, becomes only more so in later editions, as new introductions are added for individual novels and a General is affixed to the whole corpus with the publication of the Magnum Opus of 1829-33. Scott also developed subseries within the Waverley sequence, most notably the Tales of My Landlord (1816-19), with yet another set of frames supplying information about Scott's invented narrators, redactors, and editors, and about the overall provenance for the fictional narratives he presents. Taken in sum, all this amounts to a vast metacommentary on his stories, and much of it offers itself as in one way or another of the narrative corpus it frames. Moreover, this body of supplementary material is itself supplemented by the many detailed explanatory commentaries he wrote for a collection of earlier British novelists and by articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica on such apposite subjects as Chivalry and Romance. Scott's fiction pursues the problem of contextuality so relentlessly that it is hard to imagine coming to terms with his work, or with the literary culture in which his work and his figure loomed so large, without following that pursuit with some care. Since they are so obtrusive, or anyway so engaging, and so apparently germane to the practice of the novels, Scott's metadiscursive writings tend to claim serious attention in any critical representation of what Scott is doing. Lukacs, for instance, relied heavily on one of Scott's longest and fullest accounts of his practice in the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe (1820). Though Lukacs failed to respect the Romantic ironies of this text, and so left his account seriously open to question, it must be said that the subtlety of Scott's brand of reflexivity is not easy to read, especially in view of the lability of his various framing texts.(3) One begins to glimpse the difficulty of working with the prefatory material from the first such exercises that Scott composed for his new line of writing: the first and last chapters of Waverley (1814) itself. Scott entitled these chapters, respectively, Introduction and A Postscript Which Should have been a Preface, thus suggesting a kind of rivalry in their relation to the narrative they frame about the involvement of a young English captain in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. …