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

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

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Scott's perception of nation is topospatial and modern, and it exhibits affinities with Henri Lefebvre's. A topospatial perception historicizes space: on the one hand, it invalidates the concept of space as an abstract "aesthetic reification," and, on the other hand, it asserts that space is a construct criss-crossed and pitted by time and politics. Thus, space is both "actual and synchronic" and is "inscribed" by temporality. Nation, Lefebvre concludes, is a "focused space embodying a hierarchy of centres-commercial centres for the most part, but also religious ones, cultural ones, and so on, and a main centre-i.e., the national capital" (110-17). AsJose Saldivar explains, a topospatial conceptualization of nation is synthetic; it asserts the "profound interaction of space and history, geography and psychology, nationhood and imperialism"; it defines space not as a mere "setting" but as a "formative presence throughout" (79). In The TwoDrovers, the courtroom, which totally occupies the narrative's closure, is the absolute, transcendental space that guarantees and perpetuates the hierarchy of the larger focussed space of nation. It is at every liminal border and yet it is beyond all borders. The closure glorifies the courtroom as a spacial crucible that promises to synthesize the three ethno-racial nativist spheres of Highland, Lowland, and England. In short, the courtroom is an anti-border, meta-racial, meta-ethnic cathartic patrolling force. M'Combich's hubris, his feudal, un-English concept of revenge as justice, is partly blamed on the failure of this patrolling force to infiltrate the place of his origins; the judge declares,

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We may repeat to ourselves, in alleviation of this poor man's unhappy action, that his case is a very peculiar one. The country which he inhabits was, in the days of many now alive, inaccessible to the laws, not only of England, which have not even yet penetrated thither, but to those to which our neighbours of Scotland [i.e. Lowlands] are subjected, and which must be supposed to be, and no doubt actually are, found upon the general principles of justice and equity which pervade every civilized country. (319)

In effect The Two Drovers itself is an aesthetic space: on the one hand, narration about entrepreneurial crossers and their border and market crossings is intended to offer the novella's nineteenth-century historical readers a therapeutic space for overcoming the fear of the failure of an overarching national culture to consolidate because of European hostilities; on the other hand, the text stands at the liminal cross roads between the Augustan Age, with its emphasis on rationality, order, the golden mean, and universal man, and the Romantic Age with its fascination with the past, folklore, and larger-than-life heroes. The narrator exhibits a Burkean conviction of the necessity of the hegemonizing tendencies of the monarchial state, yet he expresses a muffled yearning for the past and for old Scotland, a paradoxical sentiment Renato Rosaldo aptly terms "imperialist nostalgia"- i.e., the "phenomenon of people's longing for what they themselves have destroyed," or, I may add, have passively watched being destroyed (qtd. in Saldivar 23).

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

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

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