But to offer a purely psychological explanation is clearly problematic, as a number of critics such as Douglas Jones and Nelson Smith have pointed out. Such a reading asks us to view the diabolical Gil-Martin as a psychological doppelganger of the antinomian Calvinist Robert Wringhim, but according to the traditional history, two people, Belle Calvert and Arabella Logan, witness Gil-Martin as a physical presence. Hogg's text may gesture toward a viable psychological explanation, but in order to accept this reading, one must disregard as specious the eye-witness account reported in Scottish tradition. While dismissing this account may allow us to vindicate some of our suspicions about Robert, taking this approach to the novel results in the homogenization of an inherently dialogic text. Such a reductive practice, Bakhtin points out, conforms to a mode of stylistic interpretation which attempts to neutralize the discursive and social conflict within the novel by foregrounding one style as indicative of that author's practice (263). In this particular instance the effort to contain the dialogism of the text effectively undermines the legitimacy of the folk discourse by privileging the psychological or rational discourse in the novel.

With this in mind, I suggest a dialogic reading of Confessions, one that focuses on the dynamic at work between discourses which can be broadly categorized in two groups. The first group includes the urban and hegemonic discourses which engage themselves in the project of rational explication. For the purposes of this discussion, I will consider these discourses (which include the legal and psychological or otherwise scientific) as falling under the general rubric of rational discourse. The other grouping, one which encompasses the rural and marginalized or disempowered languages, is characterized by fascination with mystery and irresolvable experiences, and can variously be located in the speech of the rustics and the accounts from Scottish folklore.

Confessionsinvites a dialogic reading along the lines of competing hegemonic and marginal discourses through what amounts to an allegorical representation of the tensions between these two discursive systems in the final pages of the novel. Here, the discovery of the Rober Wringhim's memoirs is recounted, and present at this scene are the editor and two other men: one is a Mr. L--t, a reference to John Gibson Lockhart, a novelist whose education as a lawyer aligns him with the hegemonic discourse of rational explanation and whose connections to Edinburgh firmly places him in the urban context; the other is a Mr. L--w or William Laidlaw, Hogg's grandfather, a shepherd whose character and social context markedly contrasts Lockhart. Hogg once referred to Laidlaw as "the last man of this wild region [that is, the Scottish Lowlands], who heard, saw, and conversed with the fairies" (Works, vol. 1, 409).

The debate that ensues between the two men over which should have control of the text pivots on the role that mystery plays in the two discursive systems. Laidlaw, the Lowland shepherd, claims to value the pamphlet not for its potential to explain, but rather for its potential to exceed understanding, or, as he says, "It will maybe reveal some mystery that mankind disna ken naething about yet" (240). Mr. Lockhart instantly picks up on the reference to mystery and engages that term as a point of contention between his ideology and the shepherd's: "If there be any mysteries in it . . ." he says "it is not for your handling, my dear friend, who are too much taken up about mysteries already" (240). Besides serving as a dig at Lockhart, whom Hogg had chastised for his abandonment of Scottish tradition, this little drama depicts the way in which the text--here Robert's pamphlet--is the site of a contest, a location where differing intentions collide and compete for possession. Presumably if either one of these two characters had obtained possession, the text would have appeared imbedded in a different context. In order to resolve the debate, however, the text goes to the editor who, like the Bakhtinian novelist, represents a variety of discourses in all their inherent dialogic conflict.

Before leaving this allegory behind, we should also note that this scene situates Lockhart, and by association rational discourse, in a position of hegemony. Laidlaw, unable to dictate who controls the text, must pay tribute--if only strategically--to Lockhart's importance in order to achieve his end of removing the pamphlet from the lawyer's control. The old shepherd must rather submissively request that the editor be allowed to have the text since Lockhart "had so many things of literature and law to attend to," and it is likely that "he would never think more of it" (240). Clearly there is an implicit acknowledgment that Lockhart ultimately has the authority to dictate who possesses the text.

I would argue that this differential in power between the two discourses has a causal relationship to the contention over mystery that also distinguishes these ideologies. To allow for the inexplicable within a discursive system is tantamount to admitting the insufficiency of that discourse or to acknowledging the presence of boundaries which delimit its efficacy. Put in other words, an acknowledgment of mystery is an acknowledgment that a gap exists between one's discourse and the real, and the admission of such a gap poses a threat to a hegemonic language since it marks a spot of vulnerability; it amounts to accepting that another discourse may be equally legitimate or perhaps more legitimate than one's own. Such an admission could be lethal to hegemony.

In order to maintain hegemony, then, a discourse must keep up the ruse of its universality. In Bakhtinian terms, the discourse must pose itself as a unitary language, a language that disavows its boundaries, its specificity, and its historicity; it works toward ideological and political centralization, toward assimilating and thus neutralizing marginal discourses.

In fact we do witness rational discourse undertaking this project in Confessionsrepeatedly, primarily through acts of judgment which serve simultaneously to validate rational categories of experience and delegitimize those categories associated with marginal discourse. There is an intimate relationship between judgment and unitary language. When dialogic contention arises, a unitary language must vindicate its hegemony by demonstrating its ability to resolve the conflict, thus vindicating its privileged relationship with the real.

If the hegemonic discourse posits itself as a universal in order to maintain its position and, further, engages in repeated acts of judgment in order to sustain its universality, then the converse is true of the marginal discourse of the rustics. Without having to sustain the pretension to universal status, such a discourse is in a better position to openly accept the inexplicable or the mysterious since, in this case, the acknowledgement does not pose a threat of loss. The capacity to accept mystery is intimately related to an ability to suspend judgment. Consequently, we find this marginal discourse holds a sense of its own limitations and the act of judging, when it is carried out, is never definitive.

Already we have seen the alignment of mystery with the rustic character of the Lowland Shepherd, William Laidlaw, but Hogg represents the deferral of judgment most explicitly among the disempowered rustics with whom Robert takes shelter in the course of his flight away from Edinburgh and into marginal culture. Such is the case with the weaver who harbors suspicions about Robert's character from the start, but when his suspicions are confirmed by a dream (hardly rational evidence), his response is to offer only a limited judgment: "My dream has been true! My dream has been true! The Lord judge between thee and me; but, in his name, I charge you to depart out o' this house" (211). And again, as Robert travels further into the Lowlands and takes a room at a rural inn, one of the impoverished residents, Tam Douglas, like the weaver before him, refrains from making his decision definitive by stating it as a conditional: "If ye be the deil, rise up, an' depart in peace out o' this house. . . . There's nae body here wishes you ony ill'" (223). In each of these cases, the capacity to accept the inexplicable in this rustic discourse has a direct relation to the recognition of limitations on the scope of his judgments and the subsequent avoidance of universality.

In contrast to these instances of withheld judgment characteristic of the discourses of an increasingly marginalized rural Scottish culture, the editor's introduction, which details events occurring in the urban vicinity of Edinburgh, presents instances of judgment which are rooted in the rational discourse of the legal system and which are rendered casually if not haphazardly; summary judgment in this section of the novel becomes nothing short of a theme. In this brief introduction, four courtroom scenes are described and an additional three instances of legal judgment are alluded to. But what is of particular note in these judgments is the repeated failure of the courts to arrive at satisfactory verdicts.

In the first court scene, which attempts to sort out a mob upheaval at The Black Bull tavern, the "completely puzzled" (54) magistrates get well into the questioning of prisoners before realizing that they are questioning members of both of the contending parties. In a second trial, George Colwan is misleadingly convicted of assaulting Robert Wringhim; this conviction comes in part because George defends his actions as the result of a supernatural vision he had of his malevolent brother, and the court finds such explanations unpersuasive. Thomas Drummond is briskly and wrongfully convicted of the murder of George Colwan (and when Drummond is later vindicated it is by a judge who is a close relative of his). And while Belle Calvert is perhaps correctly accused of stealing from Arabella Logan, Belle makes clear that her actions were in part necessitated by her destitute condition, a condition which is itself the product of a previous act of justice on the part of the legal system: "I had been abandoned in York, by an artful and consummate fiend," she states, "found guilty of being art and part concerned in the most heinous atrocities, and, in his place, suffered what I yet shudder to think of" (87).

In short, not only has Hogg associated judgment with rational discourse and its assumption of unitary status, but he has called that unitary status into question by representing questionable and wrong verdicts. Once rational discourse is taken to be delimited and dialogic rather than unitary, the judgments rendered within that discourse lose this grounding in their claim to the real. Without this grounding judgment becomes an act of self-justification in which the power that validates a discourse's hegemonic position is derived from the performance of judging itself rather than the legitimacy of the verdict.

Effectively removed from its unitary status, rational discourse--be it legal, psychological, or scientific--becomes one discourse among others, none of which is wholly satisfactory in itself. The irrational rustic discourse inscribes an experience that is different in its interests and intentions than rational discourse, but we can rest with neither entirely as the privileged discourse which best accounts for the novel's events. James Hogg's own position as a rustic poet-novelist aspiring to acceptance among a community socially and geographically remote from his own seems to have provided him with an ear for the dialogism of socially stratified discourses and alerted him to the strategies employed by the dominant culture in its effort to arrest dialogic tension. In his autobiography he rebukes the type of reader "who goes over a simple and interesting tale fishing for indelicacies, without calculating on what is natural for the characters with whom he is conversing" (Works, vol. 2, 485). By denying dialogism, such reductive literary judgments perform the same self-justification that Hogg represents in the rational discourse in Confessions. Indeed he goes on to claim that "The walks of learning are occupied by a powerful aristocracy, who deem that province their own peculiar right; else, what would avail all their dear-bought collegiate hours and degrees? No wonder that they should view an introuder, from the humble and despised ranks of the community, with a jealous and indignant eye, and impede his progress by every means in their power" (Works, vol. 2, 456). Hogg here explicitly ties the power to judge to self-validation, or more specifically the preservation of the institutions that signify one's power. As in his novel, judgment functions a kind of self-justification, a device wielded by the hegemonic community which functions as a Nietzschean will to power under the guise of a disclosure of truth. Thus the status of rational discourse as a unitary language is exposed as a fiction employed to deny the power of irrational or superstitious discourses and the rural communities associated with them.

This connection between the overtly political judgments of the courtroom and the scene of reading is not remote from the text of Confessions. We recall that the character of Lockhart is described as being a man of both literature and law. But more importantly the editor, who provides the account of seven trials and their problematic judgments in his introduction, concludes his account by implicating the reader in this play of discourses. He presents the text of the pamphlet by claiming "I offer no remarks on it, and make as few additions to it, leaving every one to judge for himself" (106).

This request is certainly problematic in this context, but the reader's judging for himself becomes even more fraught with difficulty as the pamphlet the reader is asked to judge exposes a character whose glaring flaw is his propensity to judge according to the assumed universality of his discourse. Robert Wringhim's antinomianism fortifies him with a supremely universal and rigid foundation, and his (self-perceived) power is--like that of the courts--contingent upon his maintaining the universality of that system. Subsequently, Robert is led to maintain that power through quick and summary judgments; he doles out death sentences in a way that parallels him to the court system itself which comes perilously close to condemning to death both Belle Calvert and Thomas Drummond. His killing of George is fittingly couched in a narrative of justice as Robert asserts "'there will I smite him and slay him, and he shall trouble the righteous no more," (168), and he sees this fatal act as "the bringing down of the wicked and the profane" (169). And later, as Robert reflects on his life, he sounds as if he is a magistrate upon retiring his gavel: "I had dared for the exaltation and progress of the truth" (219). Even the title of his narrative with the term "justified" (which, significantly, the editor wants to change to "self-justified") draws attention to his capacity for judging.

Robert's antinomianism is, then, an ideal device for highlighting the problems attendant on an ideology that claims universality, and when the connections between Robert's judgments, the judgments of the courts, and the solicited judgment of the reader are made, rational discourse becomes implicated in the same self-justifying corruptions that antinomianism is heir to. Rational and scientific (includeing psychological) explanations--at least when they are taken as resting upon universal tenants--are motivated by self-empowerment. Robert can be dismissed as mad, and the source of his evil psychologically justified (as it has been by Cooper and other critics), or the tale can be a parable or a fable, and thus its mysteries are rendered innocuous through the negation of any claim they may have to real conditions (as the editor tentatively concludes). But neither of these judgments can be made without the reader hearing echoes of Robert's personal election in his or her decisions. This is especially the case when we consider that in these readings that privilege rationality, the traditional reports compiled by the editor must be either disavowed or openly dismissed as either fables themselves or the ramblings of an irrational and primitive community, thus placing the reader in the position of determining what actually occurred.

The manner in which the editor arranges the text reflects his unwillingness to present the tale either as a fable or as a bona fide mystery. By assembling a conflicting which brings rational discourse into dialogue with rustic discourse, the editor has deferred the judgment needed to resolve and homogenize the text to the reader who is to "judge for himself."

Through the device of the editor, Hogg found a way to both provide a tale of mystery and expose to the reader the social and political implications involved in the reading of that text. Does the tale get appropriated by rational discourse that is out to defend its own institutions through the dismissal of marginal discourse, or does the reader acknowledge mystery thereby accepting the incompatibility of the narratives? Confessionsis best understood not in terms of one solution which most adequately resolves the tensions of the novel but rather in terms of elucidating the politics of reading itself.

RETURN TO PANEL 4C HOME

Bibliography

Brown, Byron I. "John Gibson Lockhart." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 116. Ed. Bradford K. Mudge. Detroit: Gale Research International, 1992. 177-86.

Cooper, Andrew. "James Hogg." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 116. Ed. Bradford K. Mudge. Detroit: Gale Research International, 1992. 138-150.

Hogg, James. James Hogg: Selected Poems. Ed. Douglas Mack.

London: Oxford U P, 1970.

---. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. John Wain. New York: Penguin, 1983.

---. The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd. 2 vols. Ed. Rev. Thomas Thomson. London: Blackie and Son, 1869.

Jones, Douglas. "Double Jeopardy in the Chameleon Art in James Hogg's Justified Sinner." Studies in Scottish Literature23 (1988): 164-185.

Smith, Nelson. James Hogg. Boston: Twayne P, 1980.