Susan Manning

Finding the Boundaries

‘Hogan Mogan’ (derived from Hooge en Mogende, ‘High and Mighty’, the formula for addressing the States General) was the familiar, derogatory eighteenth-century term for the Dutch. Fergusia’s challenge to Heptarchus is both a taunt and a threat: from previous insignificance, the Netherlands had become England’s most dynamic trading rival and enemy at sea; might not Scotland, in analogous circumstances of political oppression, prove the same? Trade was not the only source of instruction offered by the Netherlands to Scotland: politically, they were a successful confederation of Republics, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the great legal and medical schools of Leyden and Utrecht were the training grounds for some of the prominent figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Holland carried other, more imaginative and mythological associations, too: physically, its boundaries were uncertain, under constant encroachment and redefinition from the sea; it was reputed to be the home of austerity and industry (the severity of the Dutch Reformed Church loomed here), but also, paradoxically, of peace, plenty and contentment; a land of excess and indulgence, where men smoked and women baked and everyone ate enormously.

Mapping the Language: A Scottish-American Stylistics of Consciousness

Jefferson’s assemblages of Indian vocabularies had a curious, and equally obsessive, counterpart in the lists of ‘Scotticisms’ produced by Anglo-Scots. In 1778, James Beattie wrote We are slaves to the language we write, and are continually afraid of committing gross blunders; and, when an easy, familiar, idiomatical phrase occurs, dare not adopt it, if we recollect no authority, for fear of Scotticisms. In a word, we handle English, as a person who cannot fence handles a sword; continually afraid of hurting ourselves with it, or letting it fall, or making some awkward motion that shall betray our ignorance. An English author of learning is the master, not the slave, of his language, and wields it gracefully, because he wields it with ease, and with full assurance that he has the command of it.4

The Grammar of the Imagination

An anonymous pamphlet printed in Scotland in 1706 embodies the mutual saturation of political and personal, discursive and fictional discourses in the debate surrounding the Union. Its titlepage carries an enigmatic warning similar to the graphic caveat of ‘Join, or Die’: He that diggeth a Pit, shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an Hedge, a Serpent shall bite him. Whoso removeth Stones shall be hurt therewith: And he that cleaveth Wood, shall be endangered thereby.3

Introduction: Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment

“Character” has a long history and a dense literature. In both its general and particular manifestations it permeates the writing of the Greek and Roman classical authors that formed the basis of eighteenth-century education and by which cultural standards were set. Ethical norms, both public and personal, deferred to the authority and the examples of Tacitus, Cicero, and Seneca. The dominant mode of character writing in the West at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the Theophrastan ethical type, derived from short studies of Greek personalities construed by Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. Theophrastus’s exemplary figures included the Boor, the Loquacious Man, the Social Parasite, the Miser. A sixteenth-century text of Theophrastan fragments prompted English sketches such as Samuel Butler’s Characters of 1667–79 (published in 1759) and the Caracteres of La Bruyere. Character in this context is defined by public manifestation; it is a functional and rhetorical product of characterization, character-as-represented either by oneself or by another. These were portraits—images—in words of ethical types. Alexander Pope’s Moral Epistles, for example, took a broadly Theophrastan line: the “Argument” to the first, “Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN,” outlines the semantic range of the term: Some Peculiarity in every man, characteristic to himself, yet varying from himself…Some few Characters plain, but in general confounded, dissembled, or inconsistent…The same man utterly different in different places and seasons…No judging of the Motives from the actions…Yet to form Characters, we can only take the strongest actions of a man’s life, and try to make them agree: The utter uncertainty of this, from Nature itself and from Policy…Actions, Passions, Opinions, Manners, Humours, or Principles all subject to change…It only remains to find (if we can) his Ruling Passion.1

Introduction: ‘Join, or Die’

‘JOIN, OR DIE’, announces one of the earliest American cartoons. It was published in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754, on the occasion of an English Board of Trade plan to unify Britain’s American colonies against French aggression. ‘JOIN, OR DIE’ is an expressive, ironic, premonition of the colonies’ later unification against Britain itself: casting New England, New York, New Jersey and so on into serpentine shape, Franklin’s cartoonist may have been the first to represent their covert collected potential to be a snake in the grass, a hidden enemy, and to hint at the danger to each of them individually, if they did not unite. The gaps in the coiling figure are of particular interest: they both define the shape and interrupt its completion; they draw attention to the fact that, like American identity, the snake is still in the process of integration. Or, to look at it another way, the ‘idea’ of colonial unification is complete, but the representation has fragmented it, by incorporating the interruptions and incompletion so emphatically into the picture. The gaps are also spaces, areas of potential, unmapped political and imaginative territory: the nature of these linking areas is not yet specified. Fragmentariness involves the reader’s imagination in uniting the shape.

Composing a Self

Only ‘[a]fter integration’, writes Donald Winnicott, ‘the infant begins to have a self; as he describes it, the process begins with ‘a collection of impulses and sensations’ which gradually stabilise through repetition and memory.4 Chapter 2 considered complex fictional histories which evoked unintegrated states of ‘infantile chaos’ in passivity and idleness; images of division announce the labour of putting anarchic primary impulses for gratification to work in the service of personal and national unity. Adult identity, in Byrd’s, Thomson’s, Cheyne’s, Irving’s and Scott’s narratives of Lubberland, follows the establishment of firm boundaries between internal and external states (in many senses of the word). These ‘histories’ of personal and national development sanction the temporary occupation of indulgent, fragmentary realms of imagination where primitive desires enjoy defiant if doomed triumph over the forces of Industry which come to unite and subdue them to participation in the public realm. The History of the Dividing Line, The Castle of Indolence, A History of New York and Scott’s ‘Dutch’ novels are all fully ‘composed’ public works: the amorphous state they offer is made possible in each case by the writer’s prior act of rhetorical and imaginative control. Thematically, emotionally, and formally, these are stories of plenitude.

Gathering the Nation

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence sustained a double identity for America in both a unifying and a seceding frame. In this chapter I consider some attempts to describe the nature of this America (and, by extension, this American) so ambiguously. Following the analysis of Hume and Reid, I have assumed throughout that subject and the language used to describe it were mutually constitutive: ‘what’ America was conceived to be is revealed in how it was described. Chapter 2 showed how rhetorical division of the land was a prelude to identifying it: boundary-running (surveying) and naming became synonymous activities in both topographical and corporeal construction, necessary stages in the formation of identity. Chapter 3 looked at the ‘composition’ of identity in terms of the activities of consciousness, and Chapter 4 investigated the significance of the relationship between decomposition and re-composition in a cultural sphere which was coterminous with the personal. This chapter returns to the idea of nationhood, and how it could be assembled (rather like a Humean account of the mind) from catalogues of enumerated items. Where Chapter 4 discussed the psychoanalytic dimension of fragmentation, I turn now to its grammatical correlatives in writing which attempts to find political unity mirrored in and derived from the physical features of the land.

Savaged Texts and Harmonising Sentiments

By recording the past Boswell’s journals aimed to compose the self he wished to assume in the present. The pun on ‘composition’ actively ushered the wished-for unified ‘Boswell into written existence — and registered the inevitable failure of the project in the shadow of continuing parental domination over the structures of self-description. This chapter turns to Scottish and American writing which attempted to compose (and re-compose) a current national identity from the fragmentary survivals of the past. Here the model was one of reestablishing lost links, associations with a previously whole, now ruined but desired national life. This was a rhetorical as much as a political or nationalist enterprise: exhuming the fragments of the past raised the question of whether the ‘original composition’ might ever be retrieved by the act of cultural translation which attempted to reclaim it for the present. And, to a surprising extent, in this writing the completeness of the recovery appears contingent on the restorer’s capacity for personal relationships, his degree of connectedness. Expressed political beliefs notwithstanding, Thomas Jefferson’s writing, I shall suggest, takes a much more sombre view than Franklin’s of how completely paratactic relationship may replace the hypotactic ties ruptured by symbolic parricide.