MacDiarmid and Muir: Scottish Modernism and the Nation as Anthropological Site

Abstract

MacDiarmid and Muir:Scottish Modernism and the Nation as Anthropological Site1 Paul Robichaud (bio) The cosmopolitan and international dimension of European modernism was often paradoxically bound to an acute concern with local and national cultures. Marinetti's projected renovation of Italian culture, Yeats's politically engaged drama and poetry, and Joyce's attention to the minutiae of Dublin's life and language suggest that an engagement with questions of national identity forms a crucial part of the modernist project. Such questions are particularly acute for historically colonized nations such as Ireland but also for a country like Scotland, for long a willing partner in the United Kingdom, but one where incipient national aspirations lacked the autonomous institutions necessary for political expression: only in 1997 did Scots vote for the restoration of limited self-government. The question of forging a post-imperial identity for Scotland arose much earlier in the century, however, and the contemporary devolution of powers within the U.K. is prefigured in the work of many modern Scottish writers, none more than C.M. Grieve, better known by his pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid. Both modernism and nationalism in Scotland found their major exponent in MacDiarmid, whose 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle offers a searching exploration of Scottish identity. MacDiarmid's major Scottish contemporary, Edwin Muir, assesses the possibility of national independence from a much more skeptical perspective in his poetry and cultural criticism. Muir's achievement has not been fully assessed in the context of Scottish modernism, which has tended to be identified almost exclusively with MacDiarmid's Scottish Renaissance movement. Consequently, the profound affinities in their diagnoses of the modern Scottish condition have not been explored, yet it is here that the two [End Page 135] poets can be seen to belong most fully to a shared cultural formation, in which lack of nationhood, linguistic division, and the problem of historical development are urgent issues demanding sustained analysis and imaginative redress. From the discipline of anthropology, MacDiarmid and Muir both appropriate ethnographic methods to analyze Scotland's national identity. Their analyses paradoxically reveal a nation stunted by its treatment as anthropological site from the discipline's Enlightenment origins through the twentieth century. While appearing to approach Scotland as ethnographers, MacDiarmid and Muir make a powerful indictment of ethnography itself, revealing its deleterious effects on living communities and national aspirations. This consciousness of the impact of ethnographic practices on collective history distinguishes Scottish modernism from other, more aesthetically oriented modernisms, such as that of T.S. Eliot, for whom anthropological investigations yield mythic forms transcending history.2 The origins of twentieth-century political nationalism in Scotland coincide with the rise of a modernism powerfully influenced by Frazer's comparative Golden Bough, but when modern Scottish writers take an anthropological perspective on their nation, they typically employ ethnographic methods to critically assess Scottish culture and society, including its earlier antiquarian leanings. The meanings of anthropology in Scottish culture change with the development of the discipline itself. Beginning with antiquarian investigations into local customs and practices in the eighteenth century, British anthropology becomes an imperialist, comparative discipline during the Victorian era, before refining its ethnographic methodology during the modern period. From the Enlightenment onward, anthropology in Scotland plays an unusually prominent role in constructing the nation's cultural identity, as Robert Crawford and others have shown.3 Writers as diverse as James Macpherson, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott approach Scottish society as a proto-anthropological site rich in endangered cultural practices, to be textually preserved and passed down as part of a continuous Scottish identity. Macpherson's Ossian fragments and the ballads collected by Burns and Scott are early examples of what would later be called fieldwork in a residually oral culture. Their efforts anticipate the work of professional anthropologists like Sir James Frazer, who "knew also that his own land was invested with sacred sites, and that topography, lore, and landscape were bound together" (Crawford 157). A common theme uniting Macpherson's Ossian, Scott's Waverley, and Frazer's Golden Bough is the persistence of the "primitive" in spite of the relentless progress of modernity, and this is intimately linked to Scottish Enlightenment ideas...