Gracious Heaven! - the Brocken Specter and common sense in James Hogg

Is the Gothic novel the right place to defend common sense?  I’d hardly think so – a parody like Northanger Abbey, sure, that might work, but not the real thing.  But James Hogg does it, somehow.

Nicole wrote, today, about the various peasant characters. The rule of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is:  if the character speaks in Scotch dialect, she’s not a complete fool.  Peasants and servants are not skeptics – they’re almost all superstitious, for example – but they don’t waste their time trying to game their own religion, and, whatever their doctrine might say, they believe in the efficacy of good works.  Come to think of it, in a novel where the devil is guiding the protagonist to multiple murders, superstition is purely rational.

The pinnacle of this idea is the joke I mentioned yesterday, in which James Hogg refuses to assist with his own novel because he’s too busy selling sheep.  Nicole points out some of the other Scottish common sense highlights.

I want to glance at something else, though, a great scene in the first part of the novel, the vision of the devil on top of Arthur’s Seat.  George Colwan has been stalked through Edinburgh by his sinister, devilish brother.  Early one morning, George climbs Edinburgh’s peak.  He becomes closely attuned to natural phenomena – “a fairy web, composed of little spheres” on his hat, and a rainbow and “a bright halo in the cloud of haze” caused by the dawning sun hitting the fog a certain way.  George admires these rare natural phenomena, but, but, but:

“Here,” thought he, “I can converse with nature without disturbance, and without being intruded on by any appalling or obnoxious visitor.”  The idea of his brother’s dark and malevolent looks coming at that moment across his mind, he turned his eyes instinctively to the right, to the point where that unwelcome guest was wont to make his appearance.  Gracious Heaven!  What an apparition was there presented to his view!  He saw delineated in the cloud, the shoulders, arms and features of a human being of the most dreadful aspect.  The face was the face of his brother, but dilated to twenty times the natural size.  Its dark eyes gleamed on him through the mist, while every furrow of its hideous brow frowned deep as the ravines on the brow of the hill. (42)

To the rationalist observer, George has seen a Scottish version of the Brocken Specter, a huge reflection of – of who?  Well, it turns out that it might be a reflection of his brother, who has followed George up the mountain, possibly under the guidance of the devil, in hopes of murdering him.  So what’s a reasonable explanation here?  Is the natural explanation sufficient, even if true?

I wonder if this is the first literary appearance of the Brocken Specter.  The Brocken, in the Harz Mountains, is the traditional setting of the Witches’ Sabbath, so Faust and Mephistopheles visit it during both parts of Faust (1808/1832).  I don’t remember if the Specter is mentioned, but it seems rather unnecessary during Walpurgisnacht, when the real demons come out to dance.

Thomas De Quincey, in his opium-fueled Suspiria de Profundis (1845), includes a short chapter on “The Apparition of the Brocken,” for the purpose, I think, of introducing a vision that is not the result of opium and that clearly exists outside of the hallucinating mind.  I guess.  Dang strange book.  Maybe Dorothy W. can explain it to me.

Speaking of which, Tyrone Slothrop sees the Brocken Specter on page 330 of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) which leads, almost logically, in that book, to Brocken Specter sex.  I understand that David Foster Wallace, nodding to Pynchon, drops the Specter into Infinite Jest somewhere.  I’ll have to let someone else tell me what any of this means.  Neither De Quincey or Pynchon were writing in defense of common sense.

Some mystery that mankind disna ken naething about yet - a crackpot reading of James Hogg - why, this novel is fictional!

Well, here’s what I was looking for.  Nicole is reading The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and I’m reading it, and between us we’ve come up with an idea which is either preposterous (in which case, feel free to blame me), or promising. The problem is that I would need to reread the novel, again, now, to really follow the idea.  Oh well.  Nicole can tell me if I’m nuts.

If I think of The Private Memoirs as merely a Gothic novel, I get an anonymous editor’s account of a hundred year old murder story, followed by the firsthand confessions of the murderer, which generally confirm but on some key points contradict the editor.  The murderer claims to have acted under the direction of a figure who he thinks is an incognito Czar Peter but who we recognize as the devil.  We’ll never know exactly what happened.  This is enough for a good novel.  If Hogg has stopped here, The Private Memoirs would still be a classic Gothic novel, easily worth reading.

The editor, though, is not quite done.  Once the memoir ends, the editor returns.  He suggests that the memoir might be fiction, an allegory or parable (which the memoir’s author has claimed himself).  Or not.  He tells us how he acquired the memoir, and proceeds to demolish the stability of the novel in the process.

The editor says that he read an 1823 article in Blackwood’s Magazine describing the recent discovery of a body that is associated with a number of odd legends.  The author of the letter is James Hogg.  This is an actual letter that was published in an actual magazine in the actual world by the actual James Hogg.  The letter is liberally excerpted by the editor, who says it “bears the stamp of authenticity in every line” yet may be a hoax (which, in our world, it is).  He “half form[s] the resolution of investigating these wonderful remains personally, if any such existed” (228).

He tries to attain the assistance of James Hogg, author of the article, but Hogg says he is too busy:

I hae ither matters to mind. I hae a’ thae paulies to sell, an’ a’ yon Highland stotts down on the green every ane; an’ then I hae ten scores o’ yowes to buy after, an’ if I canna first sell my ain stock, I canna buy nae ither body’s. (230)

Hogg was known as the Ettrick Shepherd so I assume all this gibberish is somehow related to sheep.

The editor finds another guide who contradicts every important claim of Hogg's.  The century-old corpse does, however, exist and when exhumed is discovered to possess a “leathern case” containing “a printed pamphlet” and some handwritten pages, one of which is visible just inside the front cover of the novel.  An assistant says:

I’ll tell you what it is, sir: I hae often wondered how it was that this man’s corpse has been miraculously preserved frae decay, a hunder times langer than ony other body’s, or than even a tanner’s.  But now I could wager a guinea, it has been for the preservation o’ that little book.  And Lord kens what may be in’t!  It will maybe reveal some mystery that mankind disna ken naething about yet. (235)

We learn in the memoir how the pamphlet was printed, and why the story has to continue in manuscript.  But aside from the oddity of the manuscript pages, there is no reason to think that the body is that of the justified sinner.  Maybe the poor fellow, just as an example, picked up the pamphlet somewhere, was driven crazy by it, and added his own ending.  Maybe the story really is fictional – I mean, fictional within the novel – but based on true events.  Like it’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Moll Flanders (1722).  The timing is right.  So the editor’s reconstruction is imperfect but “true,” and the supposedly authentic memoir is written by a compatriot of Daniel Defoe, except for the manuscript pages, which are written by someone else.

The next step would be to figure out if this idea means anything.  Who knows.  What’s clear to me, though, is that the reader is deliberately encourage to read the embedded memoir as both fiction and non-fiction, while simultaneously, of course, understanding that the whole thing is “really” fiction.  I did not do that – I assumed that the fiction was non-fiction, so to speak.  So now, I wonder.  Next time.

* All page references are to the 2002 NYRB edition of the novel.

The private memoirs and confessions of a justified blogger - also, James Hogg's novel of a related title

So I distinctly remember asking the same question in two different college classes, and getting the same answer.  In one class we were discussing the settlement of New England, and in the other Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Puritans and related groups, I was told, believed in predestination.  Salvation and damnation were unrelated to worldly acts, good or evil.  God had already decided who was going where after death.

Clear enough, I thought.  But then why not sin, sin, and sin some more?  I acknowledged some possible reasons – doubt, for example, fear that the rules are not as clear as they look.  But let’s say a person knew, just knew, that he was saved, or knew that he was damned?  Was there any constraint on his behavior?

The same answer, twice:  The Puritans just didn’t think that way.  A little glib, I thought, and especially ridiculous in the context of Weber.  Calvinists respond more forcefully to economic incentives than anyone else, but do not respond at all to clear incentives embedded in their own beliefs.  Anyway, my question wasn’t about “the Puritans,” but about some Puritans.  Even one.  I didn’t know it, but I was asking about Robert Wringhim, the sinner in the title of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

Bibliographing Nicole is writing about Hogg’s wild, odd novel as her Scotch Challenge book, so I recommend that the interested reader start here.

Summary version:  Robert knows that he is saved, and goes on a rampage.  He sins to the extent he does because he is under the influence of the devil, or a psychopath, or both.  He still has a conscience, though, and still has doubts, which is why he decides to write up, and even publish, this story.  “Justified” means elect, but Robert is also justifying his sins in the more usual way, deflecting blame.  The devil made him do it, even if he is that devil.  Hogg never lets the reader settle on a solution.

The truth of the novel is actually more unstable than it seems, a topic for the future, perhaps.  One of us should write about that.  And the Brocken Spectre, who’s going to write about the Brocken Spectre?

The most important point to make about the novel, and I’ve taken care of that here, is that I was right and those two professors were wrong.