Dumbiedikes, Ratcliffe, and a Surprising Jeanie Deans: Comic Alternatives in 'The Heart of Mid-Lothian.'
1998; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoAs Hardie informs Peter Pattieson in The Heart of Mid-lothian's opening chapter, Tolbooth prison provides compelling evidence of guilt, crime, imposture, folly, [and] unheard-of misfortunes.(1) Hardie's comment apparently confirms Beiderwell's argument that Scott wastes no time in establishing seriousness of main story line, and if comedy grimly appears, it not prevail.(2) A Dumbiedikes looking unco gleg and canty (p. 93) may indeed, then, seem only ludicrous (p. 271) and a merely humorous, peripherally comic figure isolated from real action of novel.(3) Recent critical approaches to Scott's novels, however, have begun to consider more fully how comic motifs, and especially carnivalesque, are an essential feature of Scott's artistry.(4) Particularly suggestive. Ina Ferris identifies the lightly carnivalised chronotope of as it operates in Waverley. A Legend of Montrose, and The Abbot, although she claims that chronotope does not turn Scott into a carnivalesque reveller, rooted in earth and lower bodily strata, chronotopic interval only allowing his writing certain liberties.(5) More than providing just certain liberties, carnivalesque and carnivalized chronotope enable Scott to destabilize how we perceive significance and meaning that inhere in events and details of his novels, especially in The Heart of Mid-lothian. Like Dumbiedikes's, Daddy Ratcliffe's words and actions exhibit carnivalesque codes of laughter, joking repartee, and references to feasts, drinking, and swearing that consistently pose critical problem of effect produced when such comic structures intrude into novel. That is, as Bakhtin suggests, potency of carnivalesque lies in its irrepressible linguistic vitality(6) that too frequently remains unexplored even though carnivalesque represents a kind of linguistic topos that, once it appears, suggests an intrinsic power to shape alternative responses to a text's narrative. If, perhaps, a Dalgetty in A Legend of Montrose inhabits a comically liberated zone but seems singularly disconnected from course of events, Dumbiedikes and Ratcliffe possess a carnivalesque freedom that integrally weaves its linguistic vitality into heart of novel's most central themes and conflicts. In fact, carnivalesque and corresponding carnivalized chronotope pervade The Heart of Mid-lothian and provide a specific organizing principle, a particular narrative attitude, of Scott's fiction that Alexander Welsh encourages us to examine.(7) With regard to such an attitude, Scott himself suggests that the direct and obvious moral to be deduced from a fictitious narrative, is of much less consequence to public, than mode in which story is treated in course of its details.(8) It is precisely this narrative mode, developed throughout The Heart of Mid-lothian, that I wish to explore, particularly since that mode is narratively carnivalesque and reveals how Scott's fiction fully does embrace laughing revelry. Indeed, neither mode nor story's evolving course of details indicate quite so clearly what Balzac and others have believed these details advocate: unyielding [characters] who stand four-square against temptation, to whom slightest deviation from straight line of rectitude amounts to crime.(9) Actually, as a carnivalesque topos reveals, to degree that everyday reality affirms impermanence and ambiguity of a present moment always eliding into an uncertain and infinitely variable future, then neither steadfast resolution nor principle satisfactorily provide certainty. To be sure, agelasts that carnival mocks invariably pursue such a certainty, codifying a monologic perception that life experience can be reduced to a finished and completed order: they do so, however, doomed to live in gloomy eschatological time.(10) Juxtaposed to such agelasts are Halkits and Hardies through whom, in opening chapter of The Heart of Mid-lothian, Scott offers a carnivalesque alternative, one that celebrates virtues of synchronic time (comic time) with its emphasis upon the world's revival and renewal. …
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