Blogging Rob Roy
The first bit of unfinished business is Andrew Fairservice and, more importantly, the way he talks. If there is one overwhelming reason why (almost) nobody reads Sir Walter Scott anymore its all the dialect writing.
Although it is hard to believe now, dialect was once hugely popular and people sought out books for the dialect. Why? I think two reasons. The first was that in the era before electronic media, there were all sorts of different accents and dialects floating about. You didn't have to travel far from home to run across several.
The second reason was that while different dialects were familiar, they were also frightening. A friend of ours who lives in California was here recently and he was describing what it was like to take the wrong exit and end up in Oakland. What he saw at the bottom of the exit ramp was familiar in that he wasn't surprised to see groups of men standing around metal cans with fires in them but he was a fish out of water and he knew it.
We drive by odd subcultures and we wonder what it is like and we want to find out. That is one service Scott provided for his readers. He did something very like anthropology, digging into the language, accents and cultural traits of what were exotic peoples. Did you ever drive by a group of Hassidic Jews or Goths or Mennonites and wonder what it's really like in that culture? Even today there are novels that claim to take us inside these subcultures to see what it is like. Scott did that and it was incredibly popular with his readers.
Andrew Fairservice is the first Scotsman (Update; someone across the room has pointed out that we have met "Mr. Campbell" but I would argue we haven't really met him just yet). The Andrew we meet is a caricature. That isn't a prejudice or incompetence on Sir Walter's part. He takes it as a given that the culture he represents—the post Enlightenment culture of educated men—is a superior culture and the caricature we see here is what he believed to be true.
Is that wrong? I don't think so. The other night the Serpentine One and I were in a seedy bar. If I were to write honestly about the people I saw there it would be a caricature of a culture that I genuinely believe to be inferior to the one I believe in. Today, we regard that sort of thing—even though we all believe it—to be a form of hatred.
Sir Walter's intention here is to make us love Andrew Fairservice even as he presents us with a caricature because he genuinely believes that people fit caricatures.
That brings me to another bit of unfinished business: Rashleigh Osbaldistone. Rashleigh is described as physically unattractive but that ugliness is more a function of his character than his actual physical characteristics.
He is also described as being short whereas Sir Walter Scott was more than six feet tall. But, wait a minute, why am I contrasting him with his author? Well because he shared one important characteristic with Sir Walter. Here it is:
... and, from some early injury in his youth, had an imperfection in his gait, that many alleged that it formed an obstacle to his taking orders ...Sir Walter limped as consequence of childhood polio. It had a huge impact on his life and we can never see it as just an accident when he gives another character a limp. He spent his entire life compensating for this injury and was very sensitive about it.
He goes in the paragraph I cite above to take a slur at the Catholic church for supposedly not accepting men as priests if they had deformities. There may be some truth to that but what Sir Walter is leaving out here is that prejudice against his sort of affliction was common in his society (as it is in ours). As I say, Sir Walter himself spent his lifetime performing physical feats to compensate and, not incidentally, this was a characteristic he shared with his rival Lord Byron who had a club foot.
The other quality Rashleigh shares in common with Sir Walter and Lord Byron is the ability to express himself beautifully. And it is important that the very first thing Rashleigh's beautiful voice is linked to is its potential power to seduce women. The abuse of the power to seduce is a constant subtext of this novel.
There is something very dark happening here. Is Rashleigh a projection of what Sir Walter himself might have become? Is a he a sort of counterfactual of himself? Did Sir Walter see anything like Rashleigh in Lord Byron?
And how does religion fit into this? Not just Catholicism but Calvinism and perhaps even Anglicanism. We'll see some Calvinism in the upcoming chapters.
Blogging Rob Roy begins here.
Next post will be here.
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