Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"

Abstract

Since [Scott], since a certain break or rapture that took place with [Scott], [poetry] is no longer what was understood by this word, but rather agency (or insistence) of letter in unconscious. [Poetry] is letter and hence what passes in and through unconscious.(1) I LIKE TO THINK OF THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL AS THE GREAT UNREAD poem of romantic period for several reasons, each of which puts a different pressure on key terms of that phrase, the unread poem. Perhaps least important of terms for my discussion is great; to advertise an unread, untaught text as great is usually merely to insist that it is qualitatively indistinguishable from texts that are already anthologized, taught, written about. But to examine concept of literary greatness in relation to Scott's Lay is valuable, I wish to suggest, because Scott's own literary career--from collector and editor of Minstrelsy of Scottish Border to his rise to prominence as single most popular poet of first decade of (British) nineteenth century to his abdication as Parnassus' chief and self-reinvention as anonymous Author of Waverley and world's most popular novelist--appears to offer an allegory of historical fortunes of conception of itself. The absence of a theory of poem seems to me a glaring blank in critical discourses of cultural studies and print culture, for, with exception of John Guillory's fine account of development of a vernacular canon in Mute Inglorious Miltons chapter of Cultural Capital and Susan Stewart's Notes on Distressed Genres, there has been little reflection on persistence in 1800 and after of what would appear, by most contemporary accounts, to be outmoded medium of poem.(2) Consider extent to which Enlightenment theories of origin of languages regarded poetry as most archaic form of discourse, and meter and rhyme chiefly as mnemonic devices for preservation of cultural history in absence of writing. The problematic archaism of a written poetry culminates with development in eighteenth century of print capitalism as a truly massive medium. Influential arguments advanced by Habermas and Anderson, among others, about normativizing and nationalizing effects of print culture presuppose that print is a more or less silent medium; by silencing actual speech differences--class, provincial, and gendered vocal inflections--print is medium of a virtual community of speakers.(3) Within such a framework, poetry's identification with residual sound effects of meter and rhyme--especially those rhymes that, as in Burns and Scott, play upon northern pronunciation--seems to threaten Enlightenment ideal of transparent communication. The most widespread solution to this evident dilemma is to identify poetry as language of passions; poetry represents that excited utterance which, according to grammarians of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is registered in prose only by unmeaning interjection (oh!, ah! alas!).(4) We might see here a kind of mental geography of uneven development working in concert with familiar Enlightenment and romantic ethnographic interest in rural; in same way that oral history projects like Scott's Minstrelsy attempt to fix and preserve vanishing traces of folk expression, so (written) lyric comes to be seen as an attempt to arrest semiotic babble and rapid evanishments of emotion. One understands almost immediately, in this context, transitional function of Scott's and Lake School's attempts to reanimate lyric by linking it with ballad tradition, with oral traditions still part of low and rustic life. But question remains: given prevalent understanding of poetry as a medium, as a specifically oral medium to be eventually supplanted by more efficient media of writing and of typography, how might poetry claim any but a marginal position (antiquarian or domestic) in print culture? …