Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Book Review) -- by Janet Sorensen

Robert Burns and Cultural Authority. Edited by Robert Crawford. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 242.

The 1996 bicentenary of Burns's death occasioned a series of reflections not only on his poetry but also on the cultural authority he continues to enjoy, as evidenced in the Burns Suppers celebrated for two centuries on multiple continents. This fine collection of essays, drawn from the University of St. Andrews/British Library Centre for the Book Bicentenary Lectures, examines the basis of that cultural authority, both as it was contested and constructed through Burns's own shrewd self-fashioning and as it has been revised and amplified by subsequent generations. The essays contribute to an increasingly complex understanding of the ventriloquized, multilayered, and fundamentally textual qualities of cultural authority--qualities all the more salient in the case of the "Scots bard." Nicholas Roe, for instance, in his essay "Authenticating Robert Burns;" traces what might best be characterized as a moebius strip of mutually exclusive, but interdependent, claims regarding the obscure yet `genuine' status of Burns as native Scots poet. Thus, competing strategies of cultural authorization present "the contrary possibility that Burns's `natural' poetry might arise from an obscurity which veiled the uncouth genius of the literary fake, the cultural betrayal of the `Scottish bard' revealed as a shapeless, nameless impostor" (p. 165). Notoriously ambivalent in his location between the genuine and the reproduced article, between metropolitan and local knowledges, between discernible beginnings and obscure origins, between Scots vernacular language and standard English, and between Enlightenment reason and romantic sensibility, Burns, it turns out, might be the most representative figure of the "partitioned" literary authority associated with the incipient modern culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.[1]

Those familiar with Robert Crawford's work will not find such a claim surprising. Deeply invested in exposing the Scots underpinnings of what we now identify as British canonical literary culture, Crawford has assembled a fascinating collection of essays which reveal the cultural politics that haunted Burns and his posthumous reputation, as well as the manner in which he could be said to "ghost" major developments of British Romantic literary culture, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Scots literature, and even central institutions of literacy instruction in the United States in the nineteenth century. Perhaps most suggestive is the implication that the posturing and appropriation we have come to understand as fundamental to the operation of cultural authority in this period is most directly modeled in this Scots writer's responses to his particular political and cultural positions. For Douglas Dunn, in his essay "`A Very Scottish Kind of Dash': Burns's Native Metric," the linguistic pressures of an encroaching English language enable Burns's linguistic virtuosity, as he turns to the past and to the demotic, hoping to ensconce them as alternative linguistic authorities. In recent years this argument has become common. Yet Dunn's sophisticated discussion of the origins and implications of Burns's stanza forms, particularly the "Standard Habbie" (later known as the "Burns stanza"), eloquently illustrates the ways in which cultural critics can and should bring analyses of literary form to the conversations opened up by cultural studies.

<!--pagebreak-->The language of Burns's preface to the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, a Standard English quite distinct from the Scots vernacular of the poems, further displays his masterfully doubled and self-aware position. More than a few writers have noted the strange turns by which Burns, who resisted cultural authority, for instance, in his use of the Scots language and in his frequent attacks on conventional representations of power, was installed as the ultimate cultural authority. This collection also points to the ways in which Burns himself deployed that resistance in his own bid for a complicated form of authority. Many of the essays explore what Susan Manning calls Burns's "negative rhetoric" (p. 124), an "expressive authority ... appropriated from elsewhere," which is, she claims, a characteristically Scots literary device.[2] For Manning, it is the particular character of Scots religious discourse, and Burns's oppositional stance to much of it, that drives him to adopt extremely dramatic rhetorical positions, such as that of Satan. For Marilyn Butler, in her essay "Burns and Politics," it is the repressive political environment of the post-1790s Scots Treason Trials that motivates Burns to take up the song form in his expressions of radical politics.

The essays, then, bring late twentieth-century critical concerns to bear on our understanding of Burns, including long overdue articulations of the vexed intersections between Burns studies and gender studies. The collection is more provocative than exhaustive. Robert Crawford's own "Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns" explores the relationship between Burns and his cheeky compatriot and predecessor, not simply to examine the literary channel of vernacular culture worked by Fergusson and then Burns, but also to assess their shared participation in the homosocial space of eighteenth-century Lowland clubs. These clubs, the legacy of which lives on in the Burns clubs of our own day, were crucial for the circulation of "the cultural codes which characterized eighteenth-century Scotland" (p. 8), specifically those codes regarding masculinity. Crawford thus applies pressure to Burns's "celebration of fraternity" in his poetry to discover a specifically "sexual celebration of masculinity" (p. 13) in connection with his participation in the clubs of his day. These clubs offer an extremely productive site from which to ponder the relationship between nationalism, "Scottishness," literary culture, gender, and sexuality. In one especially brow-raising case--the scandalous Beggar's Benison club, which Fergusson was rumored to have visited--ritual activities included masturbation, phallic exhibitionism, and bawdy wordplay. If most clubs stopped short of such sexually explicit practices, the veneration of "male exclusivity and dominance" (p. 11) in the all-male clubs suggests a common ground between the homoerotic and Burns's dedication to a heterosexual logic through which women, as objects, remained outsiders.

Foregrounding women's status as outsiders, Kirsteen McCue, in "Burns, Women, and Song," maintains that while women were responsible for a large number of the Scots songs produced in the eighteenth century, fear of "family backlash or public disdain through publication" (p. 47) forced them to conceal their authorship. These women songwriters' "insistence on anonymity ... resulted in public ignorance," and in one case, Mrs. Colquhoun's "The Land o' the Leal" was falsely attributed to Burns. Manning and Butler too identify the songs as significant, and this collection is particularly important for its attention to them--an attention made available by cultural studies' invitation to widen the field of study beyond the literary.

Essays in this collection also manage to turn up unexpected transformations of a Burnsian authority. In her wide-ranging "Haunted by Authority: Nineteenth-Century American Constructions of Robert Burns and Scotland," Carol McGuirk tracks the ghost(s) of Burns in the sometimes bizarre ways in which nineteenth-century American readers and writers understood him. Burns is feminized by writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier, who in comparing his transgressions to Mary Magdelene's renders his threats of criminality "dear" (p. 143). Conflated with English writers, Burns becomes, on the one hand, a specter of resentment among American writers wary of the British colonization of American letters. On the other hand, Burns, openly antagonistic about class, represents to American readers--for whom class was increasingly mystified--the "ghost of American readers' discarded class origins" (p. 146). Alternatively, while Walt Whitman attacked Burns's dependence on a past "peasant" culture for the material of his poems, McGuirk asserts that the unsigned songs offer the political projection into the future for which Whitman himself strove. And yet it is in children's fiction and the tune to their alphabet song that Burns's songs achieve their greatest fame, as he is assimilated into U.S. cultural heritage, minus the threat his overt class politics presented.

Like recent studies in the popular reception of Jane Austen yesterday and today, these critical essays avoid an easy dismissal of the cult of their author. Instead, they illuminate the complex relations of cultural production, of which such cults are mere effects. If the case of Burns is an early, representative moment of the myth of the Romantic poet, these studies stalk that mythic ghost as it continues to haunt our own present.

NOTES

1 On this partitioned form of cultural authority, see Deidre Lynch, "`Beating the Track of the Alphabet': Samuel Johnson, Tourism, and the ABCs of Modern Authority," ELH 57 (1990): 357-405.

2 On this claim, see Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (University Press of Edinburgh, 1958).