James
Macpherson's Ossian poems, consisting of a collection of fragments and two
complete epics, are one of the greatest literary frauds of European history.
Supposedly the work of a third-century Scottish Gaelic bard, the poems were in
fact mostly fabricated by Macpherson. When the claims of inauthenticity that
dogged the poems from their first publication were conclusively proved, they effectively eliminated the Poems
of Ossian from the canon and
extinguished literary criticism of the texts.
Ironically,
it is that very inauthenticity that has attracted twentieth- and
twenty-first-century critics to return to the study of Ossian. By accepting
Macpherson, not Ossian, as the author of the poems, scholars have begun to
situate the poems’ themes as a reaction to eighteenth-century culture and politics,
examine the reasons for their enthusiastic reception throughout Great Britain
and continental Europe, and reevaluate the beginning of the Romantic period.
Within that burgeoning field, this paper will focus on the
motivations of Macpherson in writing Ossian
and the effects of his publications on Scotland and England. The fraudulence of Ossian is essential to this understanding of
the work. Precisely because it is a fraud, Ossian can be read as a performative text
attempting to alter Scotland’s status within the racial and national hierarchy
of eighteenth-century Britain. Macpherson employs a sentimental and Romantic
medievalism throughout the poems to create sympathy and nostalgia for the Scots’
glorious past while subtly denigrating the Germanic Englishness that has
contributed to its loss. The epic prose poem Fingal,
in particular, exemplifies the performative nature of the text and its attempt
to redefine the contemporary imaginative relationships between the Norse,
Irish, and Scottish, and between England and the cultures it identifies as
‘other’.
1 comment:
Andrea,
This is a really rich and exciting proposal for a project that will interest an unusual set of audiences (nice interdisciplinarity, in other words!). One of the first points I would ask you to consider as you develop it is the idea of authenticity. Yes, Macpherson’s poem is a forgery of a 3rd century work, but its ambitions to authenticity, are, as you imply, more complex than this. The poem transmits a spirit of Caledonian nationalism that is, to Macpherson, deeply ‘true,’ and this seems to me the purpose of the enterprise: not to pass off a faked document, but to recover an ur-myth of Scotland. Taking our cue from Roach, we could read the Ossian as a surrogate for an original that has no textual iteration, but that lives in public memory. Which is to say that performance theory gives you a way to think about this fraud as a kind of truth—a nice way of reframing the usual account of the false or faked text. It seems likewise important to understand the performative force of this work within the larger historiographic context of your project. While this is certainly a case of fiction infiltrating the archive, the wider culture of emerging Scottishness of the 18th c. suggests that history—especially archaic history—was ripe for conscious re-imagining; Ossian is not much different from the fakery of clan tartans. What is it about the climate of Ossian’s invention that made nationalist-myth making so effectual a practice, regardless of its (often manifest) unhistoricity? This seems to me a necessary complement to any account of how Macpherson may have intended to move his public: that his public was willing to be performatively moved.
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