James Hogg as Peacemaker
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us – a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.1
I hae mair ado than I can manage the day, foreby ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld-banes2.
This essay will look, principally, at two works by the Scottish writer James Hogg which are involved with cultural memories of past conflicts – The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. With reference to the history of Scotland leading up to the events of these novels – both of which are set, roughly, around the turn of the 18th century – and of the period between this setting and Hogg’s own writing, it will show how Hogg centres marginalised, vernacular narratives of past conflicts. It will then relate this project to the work of contemporary peacebuilders concerned with narrative and storytelling, and thus argue that Hogg’s literary project can be read as a form of peacebuilding in relation to historic conflict.
The 17th century saw decades of brutal religious and political conflict within Scotland, often centring on what Ryan Frace describes as a “century-long tug-of-war” between Episcopalians and Presbyterians for control of the established church (the Kirk) and, by extension, for dominance within Scottish society3. During the latter reign of Charles II, and that of James VII (James II in England), whose sympathies lay with the Episcopalian party, Presbyterian worship was suppressed and those committed to the party broadly excluded from public life, leading to a series of armed rebellions building to a major Presbyterian defeat in 1679. The period between 1679 and 1688 is often referred to in Presbyterian sources as “The Killing Time”, with Presbyterian worship suppressed, illegal open-air services violently disrupted by the authorities, and committed militant Presbyterian groups, known as Covenanters, living as outlaws4. However, in the revolution of 1688-9, the Stuart monarchy was overthrown and William and Mary installed as joint monarchs broadly supported by, and at least tolerant of, the Presbyterian party in Scotland, and by 1690 Presbyterians had regained control over the Kirk, as a result of which, argues Tom Devine, “a nationwide crusade was launched to enforce Presbyterian conformity… the victors of the Revolution of 1688-9 ruthlessly and energetically purged Episcopalians from both church offices and university posts.”5 The resultant marginalisation of Episcopalians, and strengthened persecution of Catholics, would lead to the Jacobite Rebellions over the first half of the 18th century.
However, Devine also convincingly suggests that the Presbyterian Kirk’s burst of persecutory energy was, in part, a reaction to its consciousness that its hold over Scottish society was tenuous and likely to decline. The State, on the whole, supported a moderate and tolerant church which would act as a cohesive, rather than a divisive, body, and manipulated the government of the Kirk to ensure the dominance of a moderate minority6. By the middle of the 18th century, the Kirk had been altered to such a degree that many hardline Presbyterians ceased to support it, and several waves of conservative secessions left it a far more liberal body, with the hardline Presbyterians sitting once again at the margins of Scottish society.
While all this went on within the Kirk, still more dramatic changes were taking place within broader Scottish society. Scotland, and especially the cultural capital at Edinburgh, had become a centre of the Enlightenment, and a new generation of intellectuals and cultural elites formed a new conception of the Scottish nation as modern, secular, and rational, with its radical Presbyterian tradition left firmly in the past7. Simultaneously, industrialisation and urbanisation shifted economic power from the country to the cities, and the rural oral storytelling tradition was increasingly supplanted by an urban-centred literary culture. One result of this was to leave the communities of Scotland’s very rural, very Presbyterian Border regions marginalised in relation to the national culture, unable to maintain their oral traditions on their own terms, and finding their cultural memories of the conflicts of the 17th century buried under the dominant national narrative of progress.
It was in Ettrick, one such rural, Presbyterian community, that James Hogg was born in 1770. Born into a family that had for generations been prominent in the area’s oral ballad tradition, Hogg was personally involved with the overshadowing of the oral by the literary tradition, as a young man assisting Walter Scott in the transcription of the oral ballads for Scott’s collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border – a project which Hogg would later criticise8. Scott became a friend, and for Hogg a bridge from Ettrick to the literary society of Edinburgh, where Hogg moved to live and publish extensively in poetry and prose, primarily for Blackwood’s Magazine. His frequent nom de plume, “The Ettrick Shepherd”, is suggestive of some of the contours of his literary career; his rural, working-class background, unusual in a writer of the time, gave him a credibility in writing about the rural which he was fully capable of exploiting, but which could also act as a constraining influence, preventing his being taken seriously as a writer except where he fulfilled the role assigned to him. He was often savagely caricatured, often within Blackwood’s itself. Inevitably, then, Hogg was keenly aware of the unequal relationship between the oral traditions of the Borders and the new literary tradition in Edinburgh. His argument for the continued validity of rural traditions and rural narratives was also an argument for his own place within the evolving Scottish nation.
Hogg’s first novel, published in 1817, was The Brownie of Bodsbeck, which concerns a group of fugitive Covenanters during the “Killing Time”, who are persecuted by the real historical figure of the Laird of Claverhouse, referred to as “Clavers”. The text’s most remarkable aspect is its sympathetic rendering of the Covenanters and its condemnation of the Stuart authorities in contradiction to the established opinion of the time among Scotland’s literary elite, including, notably, Hogg’s friend Walter Scott, who had written his own book on the subject, Old Mortality. This difference in opinion stemmed primarily from Hogg’s grounding in the oral historic tradition of his native Ettrick, in the Borders, where the Covenanters were remembered as defenders of freedom of religion against authoritarian state interference9. Hogg thus prioritises a vernacular, marginalised narrative of the Scottish 1680s.
In the novel, the fugitive Covenanters, living in hiding, are often mistaken for brownies, mythical creatures also prominent in the folklore of the Borders who were believed to help those they favoured by working for them in secret; when the Covenanters assist the farmer Walter Laidlaw with the harvest in exchange for sheltering them, the community in general attributes it to the “Brownie of Bodsbeck”. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson argue that not only is Hogg’s treatment of the Covenanters a social commentary in support of the working class as against the largely Episcopalian aristocracy, but that the Covenanters constitute an “alternative community” independent of the orthodox social hierarchy10; Hogg’s reprioritisation of marginal narratives constitutes a radical re-imagining of the potentialities of Scottish society.
In 1824, Hogg published what is now his best known work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Memoirs is set during the decades after the 1688 revolution, and depicts the sectarian violence which accompanied the ongoing religious conflict of the time. In its treatment of national memory and competing historical narratives, it reflects the cultural faultlines which had carried through from the 17th century to the time of its writing, and Hogg’s complex relation to them. It principally concerns Robert Wringhim, a fanatic Presbyterian who comes to believe in a distorted version of Calvinist predestination – he believes that those chosen by God to be saved, the Elect, can perform no sin so grievous as to lose the surety of salvation, and that he has been chosen by God as “a scourge in the hand of the Lord”11 to punish those who oppose what he considers to be the true faith. To this end, he commits several murders, including that of his brother, George Colwan, who is an Episcopalian. This story is told twice: first by an unnamed Editor, unmistakably an Enlightenment figure, who has ostensibly compiled a reliable narrative from “history, justiciary records, and tradition”12, and then by Robert himself through a manuscript which he wrote, and of which the Editor tells us he has come into possession. These two narratives effectively take place in different worlds – the Editor’s narrative is rational and presents Robert’s actions as an aberration stemming only from psychological factors and extreme social division, while that in which Robert’s takes place is a world of frequent interaction between the supernatural and the everyday, in which Robert’s violence is induced by a shapeshifting figure called Gil-Martin who, it is strongly implied, is Satan, and who at times takes on Robert’s identity. The two narratives clearly depict the same events, but beside contradicting each other, they operate with such different assumptions and worldviews that they are almost mutually unintelligible – the Editor remarks “WHAT can this work be? Sure, you will say, it must be an allegory; or (as the writer calls it) a religious PARABLE, showing the dreadful danger of self-righteousness? I cannot tell.”13 The Editor finds himself unable to incorporate Robert’s narrative into his own framework. Before he shares it with the reader, he insists on its being merely historical, a specimen of “the rage of fanaticism in former days”14,an insistence which is undermined by what follows it.
In the book’s short concluding section, the Editor describes his own journey to what he believes to be the burial site of Robert Wringhim, where he finds the corpse mysteriously preserved, clutching the manuscript which the reader has just read. At this point Hogg enters his own story, caricatured as a shepherd speaking broad Scots, who refuses to assist the Editor in finding the burial site, saying “I hae mair ado than I can manage the day, foreby ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld-banes.” When the Editor the corpse, it is an incomprehensible, contradictory object – it is not buried where he had expected, it is impossible to work out how it has been preserved, and it is wearing clothing of different periods and regions. The supernatural and the irrational thus force themselves into the Editor’s narrative in the undeniable reality of a material object; the “rage of fanaticism” which the Editor laboured to relegate to the past refuses to remain buried.
As Hogg’s self-insertion to the narrative suggests, the author refuses to endorse either version of the events of Robert’s life; he leaves the competing narratives unreconciled. We will hardly be inclined to like or to agree with Robert, but Hogg makes it impossible to ignore his narrative and experience of the period he lived through. If a unified national narrative is to emerge outside the bounds of the novel, it cannot, Hogg suggests, elide or suppress the experience of any party in Scotland’s historical contexts; most especially, we must not ignore the traditions of the vernacular and the marginalised. As Douglas Mack notes, “Confessions of a Justified Sinner ensures that the voices and insights of non-elite people are heard and valued, for example when the powerful oral testimony of the prostitute Bell Calvert plays a crucial role in undermining the certainties of the Editor’s world view”15. The novel not only performs important work in expanding our awareness of the narrative history in Scotland, but challenges us pay proper attention and respect to the vernacular narratives which are so often ignored or overlooked in peacebuilding processes and post-war reconstruction in our own day.
Important work has been done in recent years emphasising the importance of narrative and storytelling within peacebuilding, on both the practical and the theoretical level. One of these is the Everyday Peace Indicators project – a research project operating by means of focus groups, which distinguishes itself from similar projects by allowing the focus group participants themselves to come up with peace indicators which with to assess the extent to which they are living in a peaceful situation. They contrast this with the standard model, whereby indicators of peace are imagined by western institutions in the west, and then used to assess situations in non-western areas of conflict, despite often not reflecting the real concerns of those directly affected by these conflicts. Prioritising the vernacular and the hyper-local in this way can thus, they argue, allow political actors to enact policies that better reflect the interests and concerns of those they actually effect16. We find a similar focus in the work of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, an NGO which aims to assist societies in transitioning out of conflicts and crises by promoting “secondary narratives”, especially narratives of the marginalised and underprivileged, because, they argue, the acknowledgement of a variety of narrative reduces polarisation, which tends to develop when one or two dominant narratives of a conflict shut out other narratives that might be more nuanced or moderate17.
The work of the Irish project Towards Understanding and Healing (TUH), which operated community-based storytelling groups, makes another useful comparison. Benjamin Maiangwa and Sean Byrne argue that the region had experienced a top-down peace process conducted primarily at the level of state governments and international institutions. While this process mostly ended violence in the region, it left intact the popular narratives that had maintained, and been strengthened by, the conflict, preventing the status quo being experienced as a comprehensive peace by ordinary people living in the region18. A project such as TUH, by bringing people into contact with the narratives of the other side of a conflict, makes it possible to create a new narrative which all members of the community can share in. Some participants reported a sense of being “rehumanised”19 by the experience, or of finding that other participants were rehumanised for them; the storytelling process enabled a sense of “emotional justice” which could not be derived from top-down peace processes20.
These sources and others indicate the power that storytelling possesses as a means of peacebuilding, and the impossibility of achieving a genuine, profound peace or national reconciliation when certain narratives are marginalised, suppressed, and prevented from being heard. This framework allows us to read James Hogg’s literary project as a form of peacebuilding, creating a more comprehensive national narrative, permitting the memories of conflict of marginalised groups to take their place within the national narrative. Not only can Hogg’s work act fruitfully as an example for those writing about the legacies of past conflict in their own societies, its negotiation of competing narratives can be of use to those working in practical peacebuilding today, in the invariably complex circumstances in which new narratives of conflicts are formed, many of which will only be allowed their proper place in the collective memory if that place is built by those with the means to do so.
Bibliography
1. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962. (London: Faber and Faber, 1974): 220.
2. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2000).
3. Ryan K. Frace, “Religious Toleration in the Wake of Revolution: Scotland on the Eve of Enlightenment (1688–1710s)”, History 93, no. 3 (July 2008): 356.
4. Ibid.
5. Tom Devine, The Scottish Nation (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999): 64.
6. Frace, “Religious Toleration”, 373-4.
7. Ibid., 66.
8. Valentina Bold and Suzanne Gilbert, “Hogg, Ettrick, and Oral Tradition” in The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg, ed. Ian Duncan and Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012): 12-3.
9. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson, “Hogg and Working-class Writing” in The Edinburgh Companion: 68-9.
10. Ibid., 61-2.
11. Hogg, Memoirs and Confessions.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Douglas S. Mack, “Hogg’s Politics and the Presbyterian Tradition” in The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg ed. Ian Duncan and Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012): 67.
16. Roger Mac Ginty and Pamina Firchow, “Top-down and bottom-up narratives of peace and conflict”, Politics 36, no. 3 (August 2016): 319-320.
17. Roger Mac Ginty, “Circuits, the everyday and international relations: Connecting the home to the international and transnational”, Cooperation and Conflict 54, no. 2 (June 2019): 239.
18. Benjamin Maiangwa and Sean Byrne, “Peacebuilding and Reconciliation through Storytelling in Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of the Republic of Ireland”, Storytelling, Self, Society 11, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 102-3.
19. Ibid., 100.
20. Ibid., 102.