SOURCE: Harries, Elizabeth W. “Duplication and Duplicity: James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Wordsworth Circle 10, no. 2 (spring 1979): 187-96.

[In the following essay, Harries examines the inherent ambiguity of Hogg's double narrative in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.]

As I wrote, my imagination warmed to the task; everything took on the shape of a rounded work of art; and the tissue of lies, with which I hoped to veil the truth from the judge, became more and more closely-woven.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

One of the strengths of Romantic fiction is one of its apparent weaknesses, its failure to create rounded forms, complete and self-contained like Archibald MacLeish's mute globed fruits. This fiction is not mute but talkative, openly mulling over choices, presenting experience not as experienced but as told. We are not permitted to live in the world of a narrative for long without being reminded that we are seeing that world through a frame, the frame of a shaping—or sometimes distorting—discourse. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, Coleridge often reminds us of the presence of the Wedding Guest, breaking the continuity of the Mariner's story to keep us aware that this is a story being told to a listener. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the monster's story of his life is embedded in his creator Frankenstein's story of his life, and these are both embedded in the letters of Captain Walton to his sister; yet the formal symmetry of Mary Shelley's “hideous progeny” cannot contain the explosive, Promethean subjectivity of its three tellers and must end “in distance and darkness.” To read Wuthering Heights we must piece together the interlocking evidence given in Lockwood's commentary, in Nellie's tales of the past, in Cathy's diaries and Isabella's letters, yet the ambiguity of the ending calls our construction from the evidence into question. Romantic fiction, precisely because it is fragmented and inconclusive, makes us re-examine our assumptions about what narrative can and cannot, should and should not do.

James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) makes that re-examination imperative and interesting. Like many other novels of the time, Hogg's is a mixture of forms: editorial and subjective accounts, eyewitness reports, “authentic” letters, diary fragments, legal documents, and traditional Scottish tales. Like many of the better-known narratives, Hogg's is told by two narrators: first by an editor, removed in time, who bases his sardonic account on “curious traditionary facts and other evidence,” and then by Wringhim, the justified sinner himself, in an overwrought confessional mode. Unlike them, however, Hogg's two central narrators tell essentially the same story. In Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights each narrator recounts events that could not be known to the other; overlap is rare and usually tends to clarify a mystery present in an earlier narrative (as in the puzzle of the miniature of Frankenstein's mother found in Justice's pocket, which, as the monster later reveals, he put there). Hogg chooses to have both his narrators rehearse the same sequence of events in the same chronological order. Their emphases vary, of course; there are omissions and drawings out; Wringhim in his confessions describes the events that lead to his suicide after his disappearance, which ends the editor's narrative. Still the two sections are not cumulative but repetitious, not continuous but a doubling back. Wringhim shuns narrative which is “as a tale that hath been told—a monotonous farrago—an uninteresting harangue—in short, a thing of nothing” (ed. R. M. Adams [1970], p. 104). Hogg deliberately runs the risk of the twice-told tale.

These double narratives, like and yet unlike each other, are part of a series of complex and baffling resemblances that haunt Hogg's book. This is a novel of doubles, as critics have often pointed out. Wringhim has a shadow or second self who acts, it seems, in his absence. Drummond, a bit player in the editor's narrative, is seen striding away in one direction and simultaneously approaching in another. Wringhim late in the novel meets someone who looks exactly like his murdered half-brother, George Colwan. This sunny and sociable brother is haunted by the dark and isolated figure of Wringhim, “always in the same position with regard to himself, as regularly as the shadow is cast from the substance, or the ray of light from the opposing denser medium” (p. 35). This shadow is then repeated and magnified in the menacing figure of Wringhim that George Colwan sees in the mist over Arthur's Seat, an interesting variation on the spectre of the Brocken that recurs in the German and English Romantics. Characters are duplicated and reduplicated as the narratives unfold: their identities become correspondingly less certain. As Wringhim says, “over the singular delusion that I was two persons my reasoning faculties had no power. The most perverse part of it was that I rarely conceived myself to be any of the two persons” (p. 140). Duplication in the novel always involves loss, the loss of stability and wholeness. A self multiplied is no self at all.

Gil-Martin, the devil figure of the novel, is powerful because he can “translate” himself (even the self in the reflexive pronoun seems misleading here) into the bodies and mental habits of others. He has the “chameleon art” (p. 113), as Wringhim calls it, of changing his appearance to resemble and to understand his victims: “‘by contemplating a face minutely, I not only attain the same likeness but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts”’ (p. 114). Through his diabolical fluidity, possible because he has no identity of his own, he invades and appropriates the identities of others.

Gil-Martin's “chameleon art” and his description of his technique are like Keats's description of the poetical character in his famous letter to Woodhouse of October, 1818: “As to the poetical character itself … it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character—… What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. … A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for [informing?]—and filling some other Body—.”¹ Both Gil-Martin, the devil of the Confessions, and Keats as poet are chameleons, protean creatures who exist only by taking on the characteristics of or by “filling” some other body. As Keats learned from Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (“On Shakespeare and Milton,” January 27, 1818), this power of entering another is crucial for Shakespeare, who “had only to think of anything in order to become that thing.” But Keats also, in a marginal note to Paradise Lost (IX, 179-91), speaks of “Satan having entered the Serpent and inform'd his brutal sense.”² The power to become another is diabolical as well as poetical. The artistic, tainted in Keats, is far more dangerous in Hogg; the amorality of “the camelion Poet” becomes the satanic perversity of Gil-Martin. The artist who becomes another also manipulates the other, “annihilates” him, to use Keats's term, as well as himself: duplication involves duplicity.

Hogg hints at this duality by including, in the brief editorial section that concludes the novel, a deceptive figure of himself. This James Hogg has written the letter about the discovery of Wringhim's petrified corpse, the “authentic letter” that actually did appear in Blackwood's in 1823, the year before the novel was published. But he no longer shows any interest in exhuming the corpse or even in directing the “editor” to the grave: “‘I hae mair ado than I can manage the day, foreby ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld banes”’ (p. 223). With “his paulies, Highland stotts, grey jacket, and broad blue bonnet” (p. 223), this Hogg seems to be the rustic clown of Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae, the clumsy Ettrick shepherd who wandered into the literary circles of Edinburgh by accident. Hogg, in this cameo appearance, disassociates himself from the tangled duplicities of his twice-told tale, presenting himself as artless and unconcerned observer rather than as artful artificer.

When Mozart quotes himself from The Marriage of Figaro in the ball scene in Don Giovanni, or when Fielding introduces Parson Abraham Adams from Joseph Andrews as tutor for Tom and Sophia's children in the last chapter of Tom Jones, we are amused and reassured by the continuity of their fictional worlds and of their artistic personalities. Hogarth's portrait of himself busily sketching in the corner of O Roast Beef of Old England, The Gate of Calais (1748, Tate Gallery) presents the artist as artist, if not as the artist of this picture. (The menacing hand and halberd of an arresting soldier, not otherwise visible in the painting, suggest the dangers of Hogarth's art.) Hogg, however, in his self-portrait, denies his own craft and its dangers. He takes refuge in his other self, his bucolic alter ego, his double. His choice of persona reflects his awareness that his art and Gil-Martin's, the poetical and the diabolical, were—as Keats also realized—very close.

Like Frankenstein, Hogg attempts to refuse responsibility for the thing he has created, for the bones he has unearthed and animated. Like the monster, the novel accuses him: “‘You, my creator, would tear me to pieces. …”’³ By publishing the novel anonymously, Hogg protects himself from criticism. By including a figure of himself in the novel, however, he explicitly denies his connection with it and obliquely affirms the questionable nature of his art. Like all the doubles of the novel, the “James Hogg” of the last pages is the product of a kind of duplicity, and produces uncertainty and suspicion.

The double narratives, which at first seem Hogg's attempt to “tear his creation into pieces,” produce a similar, and deeper, uncertainty. As Robert Kiely has pointed out, Hogg reverses the usual Gothic order of things, presenting first the editor's “objective” account, then Wringhim's “subjective” confessions. (The usual sequence would be the subjective and supernatural account, then explained or rationalized away by an objective observer. See, for example, the unfolding of the supernatural in The Mysteries of Udolpho, or in Hogg's own The Brownie of Bodsbeck, published in 1818.) Though the Justified Sinner does end with a second, brief editorial section—the section in which the spurious “James Hogg” appears—it merely recounts the story of the discovery of the manuscript, and ends with typical ambiguity:

With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it. I believe no person, man or woman, will ever peruse it with the same attention that I have done, and yet I confess that I do not understand the writer's drift … we must either conceive him not only the greatest wretch, on whom was ever stamped the form of humanity; or, that he was a religious maniac, who wrote and wrote about a deluded creature till he arrived at that height of madness that he believed himself the very object whom he had been all along describing.

(pp. 229-30)

The editor's doubts about his material force the reader to attempt to resolve the ambiguities in the two accounts. As the editor says in his brief introduction to the confessions proper, “I offer no remarks on it, and make as few additions to it, leaving everyone to judge for himself” (p. 85).

This judgment, however, becomes more difficult as we go through both, or all three, parts of the novel. Our expectation that the second part of the novel will clarify the first, or that the final editorial section will clarify the others, is never fulfilled. Instead, we have two long narratives that seem to describe the same events, yet fail to tally on important points, and a final section that if anything deepens their mysteries. We are given no principle by which we can reconcile the divergent tones and worlds of the two narratives.

Their contrast can be seen in miniature in the first sentences of the editor's narrative and of Wringhim's confession. The editor begins in a remote, impersonal, historical vein: “It appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, that the lands of Dalcastle (or Dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of Colwan, about one hundred and fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to that period” (p. 3). The diction is formal, the verbs colorless and inert, the statements carefully and pedantically qualified with inserted phrases and parenthetical remarks. The editor has promised on the title page to give “a detail of curious traditionary facts, and other evidence”; his first sentence emphasizes both detail and fact, and stresses our chronological distance from the events to follow.

The first sentences of Wringhim's confession, on the other hand, are personal, immediate, and highly charged: “My life has been a life of trouble and turmoil; of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries. Therefore, in the might of Heaven, I will sit down and write” (p. 89). In contrast to the editor's cautious and convoluted syntax, Wringhim's is apparently simple, based largely on a quasi-Biblical repetition of syntactical patterns and key words.⁴ His formulations give each word and clause the same force; everything is in the foreground, as opposed to the careful sifting of levels of background material that we find in the editor's narrative. His parataxis is also subtly misleading; the ands of the first sentence begin as a sign of identity (“trouble and turmoil”) but end by joining words that are almost opposites, (“anger and exultation”). This rhetorical duplicity is reinforced by the alogical use of “therefore” at the beginning of the third sentence; there is no cause and effect relation between what precedes and what follows it. In other words, Wringhim's sense of causality, as well as his sense of identity, is askew. His “rage of fanaticism,” as the editor says (p. 85), is as evident in his rhetoric as in his judgments.

But the editor's judgment is also partial and faulty. Neither his vision nor his language can encompass the story he is attempting to tell. His scrupulous documentation and his hearty, complacent moralizing reveal only the inadequacy of his approach. The last sentence of his narrative points to that inadequacy: “The Honourable Thomas Drummond became a distinguished officer in the Austrian service, and died in the memorable year for Scotland, 1715; and this is all with which history, justiciary records, and tradition, furnish me relating to these matters” (p. 85). Unable to supply any hints about the fate of Wringhim or of his mother, the editor is obliged to end with the only secure, limiting fact that he has, the death of a minor and rather uninteresting character. The bland helplessness of the last half of the sentence underlines the insufficiency of that fact, and of the factual or editorial approach.

Wringhim's narrative, too, degenerates from consecutive memoir to fragmented diary. He becomes steadily less able to provide a coherent account of his life, or to avoid long chronological gaps: “one-half, or two-thirds of my time, seemed to me to be totally lost” (p. 165). The subjective continuity of his first pages is replaced by the jerky and incoherent diary entries of the last. The certainty with which he began, “in the might of Heaven,” has disappeared; instead we have the crossing-out and despair of the next-to-last entry (reproduced in facsimile by the editor as an “authentic” frontispiece). Like the editor's narrative, Wringhim's is incomplete and inconclusive: “Almighty God, what is this I am about to do!” (p. 217). In his last sentence, he suggests the hermetic impenetrability of his own story: “Amen for ever! I will now seal up my little book, and conceal it; and cursed be he who trieth to alter or amend” (p. 217). The book must end as his life ends, as he moves toward suicide; like his life, it can neither be changed nor understood. Neither his account nor the editor's can make his life comprehensible. Neither perspective is adequate.

Hogg has taken the two most common fictional forms available to him and shown that neither editorial fiction with its encircling rings of documents and reports nor confessional first-person fiction with its subjective continuity and intensity can give a satisfactory account of things. The two central narratives, their ambiguities, and their failures are designed to cast doubt on the ability of conventional narrative forms to render experience. In his earlier novel, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, Hogg often draws attention to the artificial constraints of narrative: “Before proceeding with the incidents as they occurred, which is the common way of telling a story in the country, it will be necessary to explain some of the circumstances alluded to in the foregoing chapter”; or “Indeed, all such diffuse and miscellaneous matter as is contained in this chapter, is a great incumbrance in the right onward progress of a tale; but we have done with it, and shall now haste to the end of our narrative in a direct, uninterrupted line” (ed. D. S. Mack [1976], pp. 10, 112). In the Justified Sinner, Hogg no longer is worried about the “right onward progress of a tale”; the double narratives work against progress, or a “direct uninterrupted line.” Rather Hogg stresses that the fictional models designed to make the fictional seem “truer” must break down. He tests an editorial framework of a novel like Scott's Old Mortality (1816)—with its elaborate receding structure of editors within editors corrected or verified “from the most authentic sources of tradition.” He tests a confessional model, based perhaps in part on De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)—with its elaborate Biblical diction and labyrinthine, vertiginous self-revelation.⁵ Neither of these forms can withstand the pressure that Hogg puts on them, the pressure of inexplicable experience.

Nor does the juxtaposition of two forms, of two different perspectives, produce one deep stereoscopic view. Part of the disturbing power of Hogg's book is the failure of the double narratives to complete or illuminate each other. We expect Wringhim's account to explain his ghostly presence at the top of Arthur's Seat, but it only compounds the mystery. We expect the editor's closing pages to show that Wringhim's suicide was the result of his growing dementia, but instead we find that he has hanged himself with a rope of hay “‘so brittle … that they will scarcely bear to be bound over the rick’” (p. 219) and that there were two people seen at the hayrick just before his death. The double narratives fail to provide rational explanations for supernatural events, or to become part of a whole. The juxtaposition of two perspectives does not give us a fuller vision of a coherent world, but rather disconnected glimpses of a world in fragments. Hogg's deliberate ambiguities and discords, often mentioned in recent discussions of the novel,⁶ have a deeper and more disquieting source than most explanations suggest. More than a naive attempt to leave room for the supernatural or for opposing interpretations of Christian doctrine, Hogg's novel makes us question the grid that all narrative tends to impose on experience.

Coleridge, in a letter to Joseph Cottle in 1815, suggests that narrative must rearrange events: “The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems, is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with it's Tail in it's Mouth” (Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs [1956-72], IV, 545). The Ourobouros, or image of Eternity, becomes for Coleridge a symbol for the creation of a whole out of the fragments of experience. Narrative, in his view, must order what would otherwise be a disorderly stream of events, must shape the otherwise shapeless.⁷ Yet many of Coleridge's, and Hogg's, contemporaries found this imposed order disturbing or dangerous. Coleridge himself presents “Kubla Khan” as a fragment or “vision in a dream,” though he needed the elaborate fiction of the man from Porlock to justify it. The poem as fragment is free from the constraints of the ideal of the unified whole; it can reproduce experience in a series of only loosely connected images, leave the snake in a more extended or linear pose. As Friedrich Schlegel suggested in his Athenaeums fragment 24: “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.”⁸ The Romantic fragment, whatever its origin (deliberate or accidental, planned or simply unfinished—like Keats's Hyperion poems), implicitly questions the ideal of the rounded aesthetic whole, the conversion from linear to circular.

In E. T. A. Hoffman's Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Potions of the Devil) (1815-16), translated by a friend of Hogg's for Blackwood's in 1824 and sometimes mentioned as a possible source for Hogg's Justified Sinner, the diabolical monk Medardus describes his own reconstruction of his past: “As I wrote, my imagination warmed to the task; everything took on the shape of a rounded work of art; and the tissue of lies, with which I hoped to veil the truth from the judge, became more and more closely-woven.”⁹ The perfection of “a rounded work of art” is equated with a tight web or fabric of lies; Coleridge's circular motion has become a falsifying gesture, a motion which illegitimately binds events together and makes them assume a teleological shape. The wholeness and compactness of Medardus's story is an index to its duplicity, its distance from the truth. And storytelling has again become a diabolical activity.

Hogg's own doubts about the legitimacy of perfect closure or of gestures toward closure can be seen in his parodies of Wordsworth in his Poetic Mirror (1816), a collection of satiric imitations of various contemporary poets, including himself. Hilarious reproductions of Wordsworth's later diction, the parodies are also a critique of Wordsworth's attempt to combine narrative and lyrical moments of insight. In “The Stranger, being a further Portion of The Recluse, A Poem,” for example, Hogg ends with a description of “a hideous messenger” which travels “o'er sluggish leaf and unelaborate stone” towards some significant bones lying at the bottom of a lake:

                                                            Onward it came,
And hovering o'er the bones, it lingered there
In a most holy and impressive guise.
I saw it shake its hideous form, and move
Towards my feet—the elements were hushed,
The birds forsook their singing, for the sight
Was frought with wonder and astonishment.
It was a tadpole—somewhere by itself
The creature had been left, and there had come
Most timeously, by Providence sent forth,
To close this solemn and momentous tale.

(Works of the Ettrick Shepherd, “II,” 166)

Here, of course, Hogg is mocking the ponderous description of a small and insignificant creature, so much verbiage leading up to the laconic anticlimax: “It was a tadpole.” But he is also suggesting, in his comic exaggeration, the problematics of unity and of closure that he saw in Wordsworth's narrative poetry. The tadpole has been “sent” to provide an ending; its providential appearance provides an artificial resolution for the fragment.

In “James Rigg, Another Extract from The Recluse, A Poem,” Hogg parodies another kind of conclusion, or failure to conclude, in his description of the ringing of a parlor bell:

                                                            Fast at first,
Oh, most unearthly fast, then somewhat slower,
Next very slow indeed, until some four
Or half-a-dozen minutes at the most,
By Time's hand cut from off the shortened hour
It stopped quite of itself—and idly down
Like the sear leaf upon the autumnal bough
Dangled! …

(Works of the Ettrick Shepherd, “II,” 171)

“Dangled” here dangles obviously at the beginning of a line, cutting short the final, inconclusive spasms of the last lines. In both parodies Hogg stresses the difficulties of endings, which he either baldly manufactures or abandons.

Hogg's playful preoccupation with endings in his Wordsworth imitations also reveal his deep suspicion of narrative itself. Wordsworth's attempt to render visionary experience within a narrative framework, as Hogg sees it, leads to considerable creaking of that framework and detracts from the imaginative intensity of the experience. But, most important, it shows the ways the demands of narrative continuity and closure force the storyteller to rearrange and reshape events and their connections. The comedy of the tadpole and of the dying fall of the parlor bell points up the arbitrary nature of narrative itself. Hogg's work is not an exploration of “the ‘true’ ways a story can be told,” as Robert Kiely would have it (p. 228), but an exploration of the inadequacy of narrative forms to the mystery of experience.

The double narratives of the Justified Sinner are Hogg's most sustained examination of that inadequacy. Hogg rejects a rounded form like the one Hoffman's Medardus creates, since he believes that such a form would distort or negate inexplicable experience, would become “a tissue of lies.” The novel demands that we contemplate two incompatible versions of the same sequence of events simultaneously without insisting on a third version that mediates between them or rounds out the gaps in the circle. In placing these narratives side by side, Hogg is challenging our comfortable assumption that this kind of juxtaposition will be illuminating, that it will make it possible to construct a coherent reading of two narratives that are incoherent in themselves.

Hogg was interested in leaving room for the supernatural, for the irrational, for the fantastic. The reader can never decide whether Gil-Martin is an urbane and fleshly devil, or a creation of Wringhim's diseased and tormented psyche; whether Wringhim, or Gil-Martin in the shape of Wringhim, or a spectre is haunting George Colwan; whether Wringhim is driven to suicide by the devil, or by his imagination and twisted antinomianism. Tzvetan Todorov has defined the fantastic in literature as “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”¹⁰ He says that the reader's hesitation is usually the result of his identification with a character who is unable to classify his experience as reality or dream, truth or illusion. In Hogg's novel, however, this “hesitation” is primarily the result of Hogg's formal decision to juxtapose two inconsistent narratives, and to leave their inconsistencies unresolved. Though the editor and Wringhim occasionally doubt what they have heard or seen, the reader's doubt is sustained by Hogg's daring use of double narratives.

But Hogg's novel is more than a virtuoso fantastic, or Gothic, performance. Part of the “voluptuous torment” that André Gide felt in reading the novel must have come from his half-conscious realization that this was not simply an exercise in horror, but a challenge to our continuing belief that novels must fall into a rational, closed pattern. At one point late in the novel Wringhim says of Gil-Martin, after determining that his foot was not visibly cloven, “but the form of his counsels was somewhat equivocal, and, if not double, they were amazingly crooked” (p. 185). The equivocal form of Hogg's Justified Sinner and the double, or crooked, nature of his narratives have an invisible cloven foot as well: they insidiously undermine our conception of what a novel must be, or what narrative must do.

Concurrent with the powerful Romantic desire for organic unity, for that “complete and circular work” that recurs in Coleridge's letters, there was an equally powerful distrust of such artistic perfection. The Romantic novel, as well as the Romantic poetic fragment, calls the aesthetic of ideal form into question. It reminds us that the artist can be devil as well as god, that there is something questionable as well as exalted about the creative enterprise. And it makes us question our easy “readings” of its formal inconsistencies, the way our “rage for order” bridges gaps that were deliberately left open.

Much Romantic fiction, like much of the sentimental fiction before it—Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), which begins with Chapter XI, is only a particularly obvious example—does not fulfill the expectations of unity, formal cohesion, satisfying closure that we tend to bring to novels written, say, before 1890. If we continue to expect novels with beginning, middle, and end that close with what Karl Shapiro has called “a click like a box,” we will continue to find the fiction that Hogg and many of his contemporaries wrote “embarrassing,” awkward, and technically inadequate. (See the first sentence of Kiely's book: “The English romantic novel is, in some ways, an embarrassing subject.”) If, however, we can see that in the house of fiction there are many mansions, some apparently unfinished or architectonically unsound, we will begin to see Romantic fiction on its own terms. We will be content to do without what Wringhim calls “a key to the process, management, and winding-up of the whole matter” (p. 201). Rather we will examine the questions such fiction asks: Is it possible to make sense of our experience? To what degree is our experience like that of others? How can fiction suggest the possibility that our experience does not make sense, must be distorted to form the perfect circle of conventional narrative? If we listen to these questions, we will begin to attend to the real and challenging problems of Romantic fiction, and of narrative itself.

Notes

1. The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (1958), I, 386-87. See also Shelley's letter of July 13, 1821: “Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.”

2. Quoted in W. J. Bate, John Keats (1966), p. 254; emphasis mine. Lamia's metamorphosis from serpent to woman and her destructive artistry would also be relevant here.

3. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Mario Praz (1968), p. 412 (chap. 17). See also Hogg's disclaimer (“it being a story replete with horrors, I durst not venture to put my name to it”) in his “Autobiography,” Works of the Ettrick Shepherd, (1873), II, 459. Robert Kiely, in The Romantic Novel in England (1972), has suggested that Hogg as artist was related to the “destructive weaver” of the end of Wringhim's narrative.

4. For a discussion of Biblical echoes and rhetoric in Wringhim's section, see Ian Campbell, “Author and Audience in Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner,” Scottish Literary News II (1972), 66-76. The title, however, promises far more than the essay delivers.

5. It seems likely that Hogg would have known De Quincey's popular book, and there are some striking parallels in imagery and diction. See for example the “wings of the dove” passages in both, as well as their feelings of oppressive eternity and infinity.

6. See for example Kiely, pp. 213-32; L. L. Lee, “The Devil's Figure: James Hogg's Justified Sinner,” Studies in Scottish Literature 3 (1965-66), 230-39; Douglas Gifford, James Hogg (1976), pp. 138-81. The ambiguities in these readings, however, all form part of a consistent and comprehensible pattern, though the pattern is different in each case.

7. In “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” M. H. Abrams points out that Coleridge used this principle of narrative to give his own experience a satisfying shape in many of the conversation poems (in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom [1965], p. 532).

8. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, ed. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (1968), p. 134. For a recent and interesting study of Keats and the question of aesthetic wholeness, see David Luke, “Keats's Letters: Fragments of an Aesthetic of Fragments,” Genre, 11 (1978), 209-26. According to Luke, Keats's imagery “emphasizes a process which alludes to, but acts against, the image of a circle and the idea of closure” (p. 220).

9. “Im Schreiben erhitzte sich meine Fantasie, alles formte sich wie eine gerundete Dichtung, und fester und fester spann sich das Gewebe endloser Lügen, womit ich dem Richter die Wahrheit zu verschleiern hoffte.” Hoffmanns's Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel (1961), II, 171; translation mine.

10. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (1973), p. 25. Todorov also suggests that most novels remain in the realm of the fantastic only until sometime before the ending; Hogg, however, maintains the characteristic uncertainty of the fantastic throughout.