Adjusting the borders of self: Sir Walter Scott's The Two Drovers

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001 by Ali, Zahra A Hussein

The concept of universal man offers a viable alternative to the conflict between the narrative's two proffered modes of existence, feudalism/tribalism (Scotland/M'Combich) and capitalism/modernism (England/Wakefield). Scott's cultural project of universal man is attuned to a bourgeois lay society that accedes to the market practices of laissez-faire, as it is attuned to his Toryism and his Burkean beliefs. As a social type, universal man comprises the best qualities of the Highlander M'Combich and the Saxon Wakefield-that is, he comingles the "resolution" and the "pride" of the former with the "common sense" and the "mirth" of the latter. He is a successful crosser of bordersgeopolitical, racial, cultural, and linguistic- and is an entrepreneur who conforms to the aesthetics of the markets, where he partakes in the circulation of goods as well as the circulation of progressive values. This process of double circulation intensifies his sense of living and his undivided allegiance to the currently uppermost national center. As a cultural ideal he is a confident dreamer, shrewd trader, practical optimist, and a social contractor, in the Burkean sense, who is adamant about his intracommunal bonds. 13 He recognizes the mutual indispensability of the categories of law and market, and thus he is an unwavering defender of the institutional power of the state's law, the very guardian of flourishing markets, especially regional border markets. In order to guarantee the centrality of this institution he continuously adjusts the borders of self by engaging in the dynamics of multiple identities and subjectivity-grafting, and by ever holding in his mind a bourgeois, secular vision of progress.

Although a hybrid, bicultured personality, he is not a split subject who moves back and forth from one nativist ethnic axiology to another. What orients his psychological equilibrium is the Augustan concept of the "golden mean"; he neither refuses to exchange altogether, as does M'Combich, nor exchanges excessively and in an unconventional manner, as does Wakefield. His consciousness is governed not by the dialectics of difference but by that of sameness and functionality. Despite his preoccupation with self-interest, self-cultivation, and private accounts, he is a political being absorbed in the dynamics of nation formation. In sum, universal man is total man; his outstanding trait is the versatility and willingness to permit the power of the new state centers of capitalism-their "governmentality" to use Foucault's term-to infiltrate his intrasubjectivity and transform it into intersubjectivity.

Once we have fixed on this concept of universal man as the didactic pursuit of The Two Drovers, the narrative's thorough preoccupation with space rather than temporality becomes understandable. Juan Bruce-Novoa's remarks on time and space, discontinuity and continuity are revealing:

Discontinuity is the social order, founded on work and time, the concept of the individual which rigidly defines us as separate from others. Continuity includes spaces in which human individuality is violated and depersonalized, resulting in the dissolution of the normal order, the interruption of temporal flow and the unity of all particular beings in spatial simultaneity. (qtd. in Saldivar 78)