[In the following essay, Oberhelman reorients the debate concerning Scott's historicism in Waverley from a dialectic of history and romance to a thematic opposition of genealogy and teleological history.]

As the first English “historical novel,” Walter Scott's Waverley introduces a set of complicated genre distinctions that affect his entire corpus. “History” and “romance,” the two terms Scott problematizes in his presentation throughout the Waverley Chronicles, become the focal points in a critical polemic revolving around his general claim to “historicism”—to a coherent theory of history manifested in his novels.¹ Indeed, the abrupt shift from one of those generic terms to the other in the third volume of Waverley, “the romance of his life was ended, and … its real history had now commenced,”² does not simplify the task of classification. Faced with such a dilemma, the critic of Scott must attempt to sort out the differences between genres operative in the Waverley Novels and in Scott's criticism before undertaking any consideration of Waverley itself (and its position between “history” and “romance”). Following such an analysis, then, the generic polarities of Waverley can be reformulated and, as I contend, replaced with an entirely different, more profound, opposition, but an opposition which in the end folds back upon itself.

Most critical studies of Walter Scott tend to revolve around the axis of historicity with each reader taking a slightly different view of Scott as the chronicler of the past. Lukacs sets the tone by regarding Scott as a dialectical historian, as a quasi-Hegelian tracing the (r)evolutionary sublation of the timeless Enlightenment man and subjecting human consciousness to the (necessarily time-bound) struggles of social upheaval and ideological contests. He writes of Scott's work as a whole that he “endeavors to portray the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces.”³ Such doctrinal readings have been challenged by Wolfgang Iser who sees history in Scott as a mode of human perception dependent upon the empirical validation of the witness. Writing of Waverley in particular, Iser states:

Historical reality, then, is a cohesively patterned phenomenon that has to be communicated; its relative homogeneity is brought about by the fact that the authenticity is guaranteed each time by an eye-witness, who does not allow the past to disintegrate into a pile of amorphous facts, but instead reports on how own world, which seems to him to be a complete and unquestionable one.⁴

Iser's perspectivism introduces the problem of history in Scott as written, as a textualization “of” the now lost and inaccessible events of the past. As J. M. Rignall notes of Waverley and Scott's “histories” in general, “The writing of historical fiction, like the writing of history, builds on other narratives, other texts. There is no access to the historical past, to acted history, that is not imaginatively mediated.”⁵ This textualization has been formulated in those generic terms by Joseph Valente who claims that Waverley details “the collapse rather than the combination of generic categories”:⁶ for him, Scott's sense of history is that it is never itself since “what one approaches is always already romance.”⁷ Jane Millgate echoes Valente when she asserts that the “romance” and the “history” of Edward's journey are intimately interconnected: “Romance is not in competition with historical truth in Waverley; it is the medium through which that truth is expressed.”⁸ Thus “history” and its generic other “romance” appear in Waverley and more broadly in Scott's whole corpus as two versions of the same discourse, as two related textual transcriptions of past events.

Scott himself compares history and romance in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article on “Romance” where he situates the two not as enemies, but as relatives, specifically as father and son. This familial analogy introduces a third term to the discussion that can redefine the nature of Scott's historicism entirely. Scott argues that “Romance and history have the same common origin,”⁹ that both discourses grow out of a patriarchal narrative of social origin, what Scott calls the “father's” story of the founding of the tribe. The two differ only because one, history, precedes romance in a line of descent that moves increasingly away from “veracity”—from historicity. Scott outlines the paths the Ur-narrative of the patriarch take on its progress from history to romance using the model of a father and his progeny disseminating different accounts of that original founding:

The father of an isolated family, destined one day to rise into a tribe, and in further progress of time to expand into a nation, may, indeed, narrate to his descendants the circumstances which detached him from the society of his brethren, and drove him to form a solitary settlement in the wilderness, with no other deviation from the truth, than arises from the infidelity of memory, or the exaggerations of vanity.

(“R” [“Romance”], 134-135)

With the subsequent retellings of those circumstances, romance begins to replace history: “But when the tale of the patriarch is related by his children, and again by his descendants of the third and fourth generation, the facts have assumed a very different aspect” (“R,” 135). Romance, then, takes the form of “the mythological and fabulous history of all early nations” (“R,” 135); the “veracity” is subsumed into the fabulous—the father into his mythic counterpart. History and romance therefore have the same origin, the same genetic ties, but differ in that romance is the son who replaces and venerates the patriarch. Father begets son just as narrative begets narrative: both come from the same stock and have the same descent in Scott's model. In other terms, the sons “kill” the father/history and make him the primal father, his word the Law.¹⁰

The structure of kinship ties Scott foregrounds in his discussion of the genres raise numerous problems, for the absolute certainty of the “origin”—of the father and his tale—is never to be found. The paths of the narratives could conceivably be traced back to the “tale of the patriarch,” but also beyond that father to the one who begat him (the father of the society of “brethren”) as well as the father of that father (not to mention the mother, the great lacuna in Scott). Genealogy, the retracing of the lines of familial descent, is implicit in such a patrilineal model, but genealogy threatens to undo that structure altogether, for it disrupts the unitary path of the father-son legacy.¹¹ A genealogy of the narratives that follows the paths history and romance have already trod could form a true generic “other” to that dualism and could sharply reorient discussions of Scott's Waverley Chronicles and of Waverley, the “father” of that series.

The issue of genealogy, of familial descent, is a crucial thematic in Waverley itself: the novel turns upon the connection of the individual to the family and patrilineal rights/obligations. Yet genealogy also functions as a check on the historicism of Scott—more precisely, on the progressivist historicism Lukacs discerns. The straight paths of father/son succession, the topic of history (and its progeny romance), erode under the scrutiny of genealogical investigation, and Scott dons the cap of the genealogist throughout the Waverley cycle. Both the construction of the Magnum Opus edition of the novel (with its appendices and the other critical apparatus) and the role of genealogical tracing within Waverley itself redefine the terms of generic opposition in Scott. The chief problematic in his work is not the distinctions between history and romance, but rather between those two categories grouped together as the patrilineal lines of succession associated with history, with history in its teleological sense, and genealogy as the unraveling of those lines, as the disruption of patrilineal authority and teleology.

Scott's “genealogical” tendencies are most dramatic in the construction of the Magnum edition of the Waverley novels in which Waverley stands as the first in a series of narratives. He includes the “fathers” of the Waverley stories—his preliminary attempts at romance-writing—as well as the aborted “fathers”—those abandoned efforts that did not directly lead to the formation of the Waverley Chronicles. Scott effectively opens up the “history” of the writing of his own text here by calling into question the clear paths of succession between the various stages of his composition. The account of the lost Waverley manuscript (started in 1805 and then rediscovered and continued to become the 1814 edition) is supplemented by other abandoned texts that appear only in the Magnum apparatus.¹² Scott defends his actions in the “General Preface” where he writes of the inclusion of his additions to Strutt's Queen Hoo-Hall by declaring that “It was a step in my advance towards romantic composition; and to preserve the traces of these is in a great measure the object of this essay” (W [Waverley], 353).

“Preserv[ing] the traces”: Scott thereby opens up the history-romance line of development to include additional (and partial) “parents” in the form of other narratives, legends, and fragments—the repressed “others” of his discourse. The attention to the genealogy of narratives places these documents in the territory covered first by Nietzsche in his attacks on nineteenth-century historical positivism and later theorized into a mode of discursive analysis by Michel Foucault. The polemic on genre played out in Scott's texts offers a critique of teleological models of history similar to that given by Nietzsche and Foucault in their conceptions of genealogy.

For Nietzsche, “genealogy” (as in the On the Genealogy of Morals) is the answer to the repressions, the Will to Power, of history; he works to undermine the project of the historians by creating an “effective history” [wirkliche Historie] which, as Foucault glosses it, “deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations.”¹³ Foucault appropriates the term “genealogy” to critique discursive structures and the relationships of power they manifest. He analyzes discourse, power relations, in their most interior way, focusing on the (normally repressed) modalities that go into them. Foucauldian genealogy thus questions history, its ties to the notion of “origins,” and its teleological function.¹⁴

Foucault's genealogical project accordingly looks at the rifts and breaks in discursive formations—“the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and to have value for us.”¹⁵ History, as Foucault sees it, seeks to disguise those deviations and in so doing mask the structures of power that go into its shaping. Thus by articulating those repressed traces of “other” discourses, Foucault can analyze the most intricate workings of history in its own terms. In his “Two Lectures” Foucault outlines this procedure using “genealogy” and its companion, “archaeology”: “‘archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play.”¹⁶ This two-pronged attack lays bare the repressions hidden in the closets of the “family” of history (as in the cases of madness, sexuality, and punishment).

Genealogy in Waverley functions in much the same way: Scott's discursive analysis of history, both that of the Jacobite revolution (in its textualizations) and that of his own writing of the text, articulates that which would otherwise be forbidden. In the Magnum edition, for example, the origin, the “tale of the patriarch” and its offspring of the third and fourth generations (the alpha and the omega of the Encyclopaedia Britannica paradigm for genre) cannot claim absolute primacy, legitimacy, for the genealogical tendencies operating in the Magnum appendices, Scott's “archaeological” collection of fragmentary narratives and his putting those texts into play against the finished Waverley, undermine the father/son legacy. In a note Scott gives to the fragment of “Thomas the Rhymer” (Appendix I) Scott writes of those “other” pieces:

It is not to be supposed that these fragments are given as possessing any intrinsic value of themselves; but there may be some curiosity attached to them, as to the first etchings of a plate, which are accounted interesting by those who have, in any degree, been interested in the more finished works of the artist.

(W, 361).

The “first etchings”—the lines of development that do not lead directly from father to son—disintegrate the clear linearity of development from an Ur-narrative to its “mythological” final heir. As Scott observes of the Canobie Dick legend reported in that appendix,

This legend, along with several variations, is found in many parts of Scotland and England—the scene is sometimes laid in some favourite glen or the Highlands, sometimes in the deep coal-mines of Northumberland and Cumberland, which run so far beneath the ocean. It is also to be found in Reginald Scott's book on witchcraft. It would be in vain to ask what was the original of the tradition.

(W, 367)

The genealogy of this legend pushes the “original”—the “father” of the tribe—infinitely back and disperses it among many “variations,” many branches of the genealogical tree.¹⁷ Narratives ramify outward into new clusters that do not adhere to strict lines of succession from one father to one son. What Scott indicates is that the traces of the earlier narratives always radiate out from the present one in a series of abandoned paths, broken and incomplete lines of succession. Scott the genealogist, then, is the one who takes these paths (as given in an “archaeology” to use Foucault's terminology) and reassembles them, giving a history of what history has forbidden, an “effective history” of romance-writing.

Scott's genealogical bent is most apparent in the second appended fragment, “The Lord of Ennerdale” (Appendix I) in which he presents another genealogist involved in the activity of tracing the lines of discursive succession. In that incomplete narrative the visitor Maxwell draws a “parallel” between the seventeenth-century conflict over royal succession and the “present evil days” (W, 364) of the late eighteenth century using the fragmentary records offered to him by his host Sir Henry. The exchange between Sir Henry and Maxwell following the debate with the Vicar illustrates the “utility” of the discarded narratives in the formulation of a genealogical history and provides a convenient emblem for Scott's own task in the Waverley Novels. I quote their exchange at length:

“Have you found any thing curious, Mr. Maxwell, among the dusty papers?” said Sir Henry, who seemed to dread a revival of political discussion.

“My investigation amongst them led to reflections which I have just now hinted,” said Maxwell, “and I think they are pretty strongly exemplified by a story which I have been endeavoring to arrange from some of your family manuscripts.”

“You are welcome to make what use of them you please,” said Sir Henry; “they have been undisturbed for many a day, and I have often wished for some person skilled as you in these old pot-hooks to tell me their meaning.”

“These I have just mentioned,” answered Maxwell, “relate to a piece of private history, savouring not a little of the marvelous, and intimately connected with your family; if it is agreeable, I can read to you the anecdotes in the modern shape into which I have been endeavoring to throw them, and you can judge of the value of the originals.”

(W, 369)

Maxwell the genealogist, the one skilled in “old-pot hooks,” takes the fragments of unfinished familial discourse (such as the unfinished “Journal of Jan Van Eulen” and the pieces from Garbonnette Van Eulen's letter) and stitches them together, makes some use of them to articulate that which history has forbidden, the parallels between the inner turmoils of power in the past and in the “present evil days.” This procedure is then itself broken off with ellipses and “Cetera desunt” (W, 367) to mark its own incompletion. Maxwell's tactical act of fashioning a narrative out of the undisturbed fragments becomes but another fragment to be fitted into another such patchwork narrative, another genealogy formed from “disjecta membra” (W, 367).

The branches of Scott's genealogy in the Magnum appendices spread, intertwine, and fold back on themselves. But “history” as either a dialectical process or as a mode of perception, indeed, history as the father of romance in narratival succession, is revealed to be nothing but the systematic repression of those fragments. Maxwell's “piece of private history” can only be related through genealogical analysis; history would ignore those texts as mere “dusty papers.”

The genealogy in the Magnum edition shatters the apparent patrilineal schema of history in Scott's writings. The process of composition, the production of discourse, always takes this genealogical form—always grows out of the lack of a clear origin. The end result is that the disjecta membra of Scott's romance-writing prove that paternity is but a legal fiction.¹⁸ This insight redefines the place given to history in Scott's individual novels and offers a new perspective on his first completed attempt at historical fiction.

The opposition between genealogy and history present in the appendices of the Magnum edition of the Waverley Novels also affects the narration of Waverley, a novel which, in its depiction of the Jacobite rebellion, is from the outset inextricably lined to genealogical investigation. On the broadest plane, Waverley thematizes the attempt to reinstate interrupted lines of genealogical succession and challenges the exclusion of the Stuart line from the throne. By focusing on the campaigns of Bonnie Prince Charles, “one who,” as Scott writes in his History of Scotland, “prepared to act as the restorer of an ancient dynasty,”¹⁹ Scott foregrounds issues of paternity and genealogy in their political ramifications for eighteenth-century Scotland. His historical novel, to that end, functions as a counter to such “official” histories as John Home's History of the Rebellion in the year 1745 (1802) which champion the Hanoverian line; the intersection of genealogy and history so central to the Jacobite rebellion is put into question by Scott's fiction.

Genealogy, though, permeates Waverley to an even greater extent and determines the very structure of its narrative. Edward's encounter with Talbot, the most crucial episode in the novel, is an account that is subjected to a rigorous genealogical scrutiny. In the final “Postscript, Which Should Have Been a Preface” (III.xxiv) Scott writes:

Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact. The exchange of mutual protection between a Highland gentleman and an officer of rank in the King's service, together with the spiritual manner in which the latter asserted his right to return the favour he had received, is literally true.

(W, 340)

Then in the 1829 “Introduction” he adds that “The plan of this edition [the Magnum edition] leads me to insert in this place some account of the incidents on which the Novel of waverley is founded” (W, 386) and proceeds to recount “one of those anecdotes which softens the features of civil war” (W, 386)—the story of Alexander Stewart of Invernhyle and Colonel Whitefoord. Genealogical lines intervene in even the most basic aspects of the novel's plot. The earlier “anecdote” of Stewart and Whitefoord, the “father”/history, as it were, is appended onto the “son,” the account of Edward and Talbot, to remind him of his origins.

Yet that reminder of narratival paternity is also supplemented by other instances of genealogical study occurring within the 1829 footnotes. Here too these alternate lines disrupt paternity as a clear line of succession from history straight into romance. Scott admits in one of the notes that, for example, that the Laird of Balmawhapple “is entirely imaginary,” but that “A gentleman, however, who resembled Balmawhapple in the article of courage only, fell at Preston in the manner described” (W, 403). The paths of descent from the “Perthshire gentleman of high honour and respectability” (W, 403) to the Laird of Balmawhapple represent a break in paternity: the latter is the romantic “son” of the former in one “article” only. Those other “articles” in the “father,” his honour and respectability, are, Scott indicates, omitted from the history-romance transfer and only to be recovered by the genealogist who questions that history.

Such a stance is taken by the narrator of Waverley who establishes himself as the genealogist, as the one who picks up the “old pot-hooks” discarded by the forward-moving path of history and allows, in the Foucauldian sense, “the subjected knowledges which were thus released [to be] brought into play.” Genealogy appears most vividly early in the novel when the narrator describes Pembroke's discovery of Edward's unfinished love poem to Miss Caecilia Stubbs. The “fragments of irregular verse” (W, 22) are given to Aunt Rachael and then are

transferred … to her common-place book, among choice receipts for cookery medicine, favourite texts, and portions from high-church divines, and a few songs, amatory and jacobitical, which she had caroll'd in her younger days from whence they were extracted when the volume itself, with other authentic records of the Waverley family, were exposed to the inspection of the unworthy editor of this memorable history.

(W, 22)

The common-place book, like the “dusty papers” of Sir Henry in the unfinished “Lord of Ennerdale” narrative, falls into the hands of a genealogist, here the narrator as an “editor” (using the trope of authenticity most frequently employed by Defoe, the figure Scott canonized) who assembles them into a “modern shape.” To that end, the editor gives that fragment of verse to the reader since it can show Edward's spirit “better than narrative of any kind” (W, 22). This fragment and its accompanying “transient idea of Miss Caecilia Stubbs” (W, 23) do not belong in the pages of history, but they do figure in the genealogy which can highlight the breaks in “development,” here, Edward's romantic education.

Indeed, the narrator comments on such “common-place books,” such concatenations of (archaeological) relics, when he describes Sir Everard's antiquarianism:

Family tradition and genealogical history, upon which much of Sir Everard's discourse turned, is the very reverse of amber, which, itself a valuable substance, usually includes flies, straws, and other trifles, whereas the studies, being themselves very insignificant and trifling, do nevertheless serve to perpetuate a great deal of what is rare and valuable in ancient manners, and to record many curious and minute facts which could have been preserved through no other medium.

(W, 16)

Edward, the romantic, “From such legends … would steal away to indulge the fancies they excited” (W, 17), would begin to formulate romance based on the particular “trifles” of history he selects and simply discard the rest. His activity is that which Scott outlines in the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, the son taking the father's tale and converting it into mythology, romance. But the “editor” puts a check on that history-romance conversion by preserving those “curious and minute facts” Edward's romantic medium cannot; he gives the genealogy of Edward's tales, the fragments and facts repressed by the historical shaping which nonetheless alter it, redefine its contours.

Hence the antiquarianism in Waverley becomes a major concern in determining the actual shape of the narrative. The two chief antiquarians, the Baron Bradwardine and Flora Mac-Ivor, thus supply the raw material, form the archaeology of “local discursivities” that the genealogist utilizes in rewriting history, although the nature of the “trifles” they offer differs.

Bradwardine gives the forgotten traces that persist, the relics discarded in the writing of history and romance that adversely affect their forward momentum, in other words, the dead-end paths history clips away.²⁰ Flora, however, presents another side of genealogy—those traces that form counter-lines not acknowledged in accepted histories, the repetition and resurfacing of long-forgotten relics in the present that history attempts to erase with its monological path. The editor's task in this novel is to insert those relics into the history-romance succession and accordingly restructure it along the lines of a genealogy.

Bradwardine and Edward appear to correspond to the history and romance poles of narratival succession (as they do to the roles of father and son given Richard Waverley's non-presence in this novel). The way the two “[meet] upon history as a neutral ground” (W, 57) is dramatized in I.xiii during Edward's tour of Tully Veolan, the mine of Waverley's archaeological excavation.

Bradwardine “attache[s] some anecdote of history or genealogy” to the sites on their “pleasant and circuitous route” (56) which Edward then sifts through for his romantic renditions. The narrator describes the two thus:

The Baron, indeed, only cumbered his memory with matters of fact; the cold, dry, hard outlines which history delineates. Edward, in the other country, loved to fill up and round the sketch with the colouring of a warm and vivid imagination, which gives light and life to the actors and speakers in the drama of past ages.

(W, 57)

The history (Bradwardine) then turns into the romance (Edward): “Mr. Bradwardine's minute narratives and powerful memory supplied to Waverley fresh subjects of the kind upon which his fancy loved to labour, and opened to him a mine of incident and character” (W, 57). Thus the rough sketch is filled out by the romance, but it is also pared down and (from the Baron's perspective) distorted by that process. As the Baron says of an exemplary romance, Rose's song of “St. Swithin's Chair,” “It is one of those figments … with which the early history of distinguished families was deformed in those times of superstition” (W, 61); romance with its coloring presents a mere “figment,” “superstition” (as with legends) that ignores the minutiae of genealogical lore so cherished by Bradwardine, the pieces that he would have added to history and romance.

The editor consequently must supplement that romance-writing Edward effects by retaining the pieces of those “dry, cold outlines” not colored in by romance—the fragments and anachronisms otherwise discarded. Yet retaining them in such a genealogy here preserves them as dead and not as parts of a new romance. The Baron's tendency to cling to ancient traditions, to traces not accounted for in the writing of history-romance, becomes crucial for the genealogist since those relics must be retained to show what directions history might have taken (and those which it never did). The debate over the translation of caligae (III.i) is one such case: the incommensurability of caligae, “boots,” with the “brogues” worn by Charles Edward is emblematic of the lack of connection between the Chevalier and the old kings of the Scottish past. The lines of descent between that particular relic of the past and the present moment have worn away like a dead branch on the genealogical tree, but the genealogist adds them to his “history” to unmask the unilateral claims of history.

Bradwardine's obsession in Waverley is precisely the fact that there are dead branches in any genealogy. He even prefaces his tirade with a lament about the break in his own father-son line of succession: “Well, as I have said, I have no male issue, and yet it is needful that I maintain the honour of my house; and it is on this score that I prayed ye for your peculiar and private attention” (W, 230). The Baron's anxiety over his lack of a son to perpetuate his line and his refusal to settle his estate upon anyone but a male heir highlight the most basic fact of genealogy: the aborted lines of familial succession can only be incorporated into a history as aborted, as dead. Those traces are not in the romance precisely because they are not endowed with the “light and life” romance gives. The Baron's function in this novel is to embody the deadness of such lines, their deadness yet presence “in” history (as rewritten).

If the Baron exemplifies the broken lines forgotten in history, Flora Mac-Ivor represents those lines which recur, which repeat in the present, but are omitted or repressed from the straight paths of history. Her minstrelsy corresponds to a collection of traces that reappear and take modern form, albeit an unrecognized form. She thus serves as another archaeological gravesite (of the revenants to use Freud's term for the repressed) the genealogist can plunder and utilize in rewriting history.

The “extraordinary string of names which Mac-Murrough has tacked together in Gaelic” (W, 102) and which Flora translates in her song is the best place to undertake the exploration of her archaeological function in Waverley. She describes her song to Edward as “little more than a catalogue of the Highland clans and their distinctive peculiarities, and an exhortation to remember and to emulate the actions of their forbearers” (W, 104); it is, in a sense, a genealogy unto itself—a list of the varied forbearers—but a genealogy accompanied by the “exhortation” to emulate that past, to replicate the long-dead deeds of the ancestors. The seemingly insignificant actions of that “bootless host of highborn beggars” (W, 108), actions history would discard and discount, do affect the present by offering connections and analogies (as the one Maxwell draws between the two centuries in “The Lord of Ennerdale”).

Flora's point comes across when Edward “repeats” the actions of Captain Wogan narrated in the lines of verse she gives him. Edward even tells Fergus that Flora is “more in love with the memory of that dead hero, than she is likely to be with any living one, unless he shall tread a similar path” (W, 147), not knowing that “the politic Chieftain was desirous to place the example of this young hero under [his] eye” (W, 147). Melville later confirms this imposed connection between Edward and Wogan when he says “I cannot but find some analogy between the enterprise I have mentioned [Edward's ‘desertion’] and the exploits of Wogan” (W, 158). Only the activity of the genealogist would allow this analogy to be made, would allow that suppressed knowledge to reconfigure the power relations present at that moment (Edward's true relationship to the conflicting national powers).

This rewriting of history with its inclusion of Edward in conjunction with the Highlanders has already been figured by Flora's description of the interpolations in Mac-Murrough's song:

The Gaelic language, being uncommonly vocalic, is well adapted for sudden and extemporaneous poetry; and a bard seldom fails to augment the effect of a premediated song, by throwing in any stanzas which many be suggested by the circumstances attending the recitation.

(W, 104)

The song is never the same catalogue progressing from one name to another in an unchanging path of succession. The new “circumstances” force its rewriting, its inclusion of the new relationships within that “premeditated” narrative. Such a song is the work of the genealogist: the past in this instance is never merely past, divorced from the present circumstances, but is always existing in a dynamic relationship with it, a changing one fashioned out of new connections between events and new analogies revising the older chronicles. The past can be dead, a branch of the genealogical tree that has given rise to no further issue, but it can also produce unexpected offspring, bastards impossible within a strict father-son model. Flora (and even, to a lesser extent, Fergus) allow those analogies to become visible by repeating those relics, but repeating them with a difference—the inclusion of the present to rewrite them and the history to which they belong. Flora, along with the Baron, provide the valuable assistance which the editor/genealogist needs to produce his work.

The basic outline of the genealogical procedure offered in Waverley can be summarized thus: the editor takes these traces and, as he does with Aunt Rachael's common-place book, uses them to create a different species of narrative, a genealogical history that incorporates both the aborted lines of development and the unacknowledged ones forbidden in history. This approach to history in the novel must qualify the received conception of historicism normally associated with Scott's work, for it introduces a more fruitful opposition than the traditional history/romance dualism. Yet despite the emergence of this genealogical history, the attempt to subsume those lines into a master narrative of history nonetheless resurfaces at the end of the novel and points to a certain structural necessity in such familial narratives. Genealogy in Waverley does seem to be transformed back into history at a structural level, suggesting that the desire to fashion a stable historical narrative still affects the development of a genealogical history.

The rebuilding of Tully Veolan with which Waverley concludes presents special problems to the fulfillment of the editor's genealogical enterprise since in that castle's plentitude, its mixing of “new moveables” with “old furniture” in order to maintain its “original character” (W, 334), it defies the fragmentation of a genealogical schema. Like the pseudo-Gothic Abbotsford castle Scott grafted onto the Scottish countryside,²¹ the new Tully Veolan embodies not an effort to preserve the broken lines of development in their disarray (as a genealogy would), but rather one to establish a concrete text or narrative which draws diverse stands of historical development together, fusing the old lines with the new. The structure becomes a concrete marker of a structural tendency that becomes manifest only after the history/genealogy opposition has been put forward. The ruins of genealogy are not able to be retained as ruins, but are rebuilt, reincorporated into a unified text—a text that must be termed “history.”

The portrait of Edward and Fergus that dominates the new castle most dramatically exemplifies this remnant of an historical narrative:

It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background. It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a young gentleman of high genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist. Raeburn himself (whose Highland Chieftans do all but walk out of the canvas) could not have done more justice to the subject.

(W, 338)

The painting is an attempt to contain Edward and Fergus in a coherent narrative (of Scottish history, the two of them continuing the work of the former clan chieftans), to ground them in a history which would monumentalize them like the old chieftans in Raeburn's portraits. This new portrait represents an historical, not a genealogical, text which crowns Waverley. Such an emblem strategically located in the ending of Waverley qualifies the text's championing of the genealogical model: the novel proposes genealogy as the alternative to history, to the inaccessible “tale of the patriarch” which is actually not a father at all, but in the same movement implies that the broken lines of development inherent in genealogies are, in what may even be characterized as a violent act, reintegrated into history during the process of narration. Genealogical narratives can only be presented thus in the guise of history; narratives can only be historical narratives since a pure genealogical narrative cannot appear as such.

This final qualification of the genealogy and history model in the novel has far-reaching ramifications for Scott's entire canon. Scott himself observes that even though history and romance may be father and son, such a formulation cannot account for the vastly complicated nature of familial/narratival relations because it represses the aborted fathers and bastards. History must take its place in a network of genealogical relationships among narratives, other narratives, and other versions of those narratives. The generic distinction between “history” and “romance” finally becomes irrelevant once their narrow grounding in origins and telea has been uprooted by a genealogical enterprise.

The backwards trek through family traditions, the “flies, straws, and other trifles” only forces the father-son succession of history and romance into the background. But genealogy does not appear as the full replacement for history, for as the erection of Tully Veolan and the emblematic portrait imply, any attempt to present the flies and straws in a narrative resembles a history, is forced into that historical mode once again. Genealogy, Scott argues, may be the only “history” that can be written, but genealogy cannot appear without being contaminated by history. Hence the claims made about Scott's historicism must be even further modified: genealogy supersedes history, but genealogy cannot emerge as such since in his novels it is always already presented, represented, as history.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of “history,” “romance,” and the third generic term “novel,” see Michael McKeon's first chapter, “The Destabilization of Generic Categories,” in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 25-64. Using Marx's theory of a “simple abstraction,” McKeon contends that the generic “history”/“romance” dialectic (in early eighteenth-century discourse) is resolved by the introduction of the “novel” as the sublating term of resolution.

2. Waverley, of 'Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 282. All subsequent references to the text will be cited parenthetically in the text and preceded by “W.”

3. The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 34.

4. “Fiction—The Filter of History: A Study of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley,” The Implied Reader (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 90.

5. “The Historical Double: Waverley, Sylvia's Lover's, The Trumpet-Major,” Essays in Criticism 34 (1984), p. 15. Rignall cites Fredric Jameson's words on history and textualization which are worth repeating here: “History [Jameson's capitalization] is not in any sense itself a text or master narrative, but … it is inaccessible to us except in textual or narrative form, or in other words, … we approach it only by way of some prior textualization or narrative,” “Marxism and Historicism,” New Literary History 11 (1979), p. 42. The exact constitution of this “History” that is non-textual, though, is left undecided: it is present somewhere but not accessible.

6. “Upon the Braes: History and Hermeneutics in Waverley,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986), p. 272.

7. ibid., p. 269.

8. Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 40. Millgate believes that Edward's journey as his process of learning the “grammar” of romance, the romance as “a mode of explanation as well as appreciation” of history (p. 39).

9. “Essay on Romance” in Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), p. 134, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text with “R.”

10. Compare Scott's model to Freud's discussion of the totem meal in Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), pp. 141-145.

11. Freud's analysis of the genealogical relationships of hysterical symptoms in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1895) has substantial bearing upon the “overdetermined” genealogical structure of narratives (other signifying elements): “If we take a case which presents several symptoms, we arrive by means of the analysis, starting from each symptom, at a series of experiences the memories of which are linked together in association. To begin with, the chains of memories lead backwards separately from one another; but, as I have said, they ramify. From a single scene two or more memories are reached at the same time, and from these again side-chains proceed whose individual links may once more be associatively connected with links belonging to the main chain. Indeed, a comparison with a genealogical tree of a family whose members have also intermarried, is not at all a bad one,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, III, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962), p. 198. Texts can be branched back to two or more other ones in a genealogical analysis: the single origin of paternity is always being broken into diffuse chains.

12. As George Levine comments on the historicism of Scott in light of the Magnum Edition, “His historicism, which implied for him a steady progress in history to the present moment, also pointed to all kinds of unfinished stories, meaningless experiences, alternative possibilities, and a cultural relativism,” “Sir Walter Scott: History and the Distancing of Desire,” The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 91. Levine, however, stops short of reformulating that “historicism” based on the two (contradictory) paths it takes. Scott's stance towards those other texts in the Magnum edition has been effectively summarized by Edward Said in his discussion of the “dynastic” relationship of narratives versus their relationship of “adjacency” in which “the text itself stands to the side of, next to, or between the bulk of all other works—not in a line with them, nor in a line of descent from them,” Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 10.

13. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 88. For an instance of Nietzsche's “effective history,” see his discussion of the concept of “guilt” in The Genealogy of Morals III, 19-21 (trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1969], pp. 136-143).

14. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault observes that the “origin” [Ursprung] in Nietzsche is dismissed in favor of a pattern of “descent” [Herkunft] and “development” [Entstehung] which better reveal the machinations of power.

15. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 51.

16. “Two Lectures,” trans. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 85.

17. Said mentions an interesting (and repressed) “etymology” of legend: from gens, the root of genealogy. Legends therefore may be always already involved in genealogy, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 122. His chapter “On Repetition” (pp. 111-125) may be useful in the context of genealogy and history.

18. Jane Millgate adds an even new dimension to the genealogical nature of the Magnum edition by discussing how it “supplements” the individual novels that were issued separately and are then reissued as a (magnum) unit, Scott's Last Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987), pp. 108-109.

19. History of Scotland (Tales of a Grandfather), New Edition. Vol. III (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, n.d.), Part Second, p. 21. Scott's attempts for an objectivity in his presentation of Prince Charles, to “[qualify] the exaggerated praise heaped upon him by his enthusiastic adherents” and to “avoid repeating the disparaging language of public and political opponents” (Part Second, p. 21) reveal the extent to which he seeks to realign the historical discourse on the rebellion.

20. They function as monuments in the sense Jean Starobinski has described them, as markers of “the absence of persons and places, the better to evoke their memory fervently,” The Invention of Liberty, 1700-1789, trans. Bernard C. Swift (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1964), p. 196.

21. See Stephen Bann's discussion of Abbotsford in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 93-111.