on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
This inventor of historical fiction was an “antiquary” well before he became a novelist. In this personal narrative by Scott’s disciple Washington Irving, one can see that Scott regards antiques as historically-reversed “diegetic prototypes.”
Scott intuits that these mute objects have a narrative. They were what they were, and are what they are, for historical reasons, and if this is properly understood by the sympathetic poet, then most any eldritch piece-of-junk can become a kind of “diegetic archetype,” which suggests a lost world.
Since he’s a Romantic landscape poet, Scott also feels much the same way about certain historically-suggestive landscapes. Scott makes many personal pilgrimages to these sites, for reasons of his own — hunting, fishing, ruin-sketching and so on. However, whenever it comes to these antique objects, his involvement is very social. Scott was intensely involved with societies of antiquaries, networks of collectors and traders who were accumulating these objects and lending meaning and value to them.
When Scott became famous, he rarely searched for antiques by himself; instead, his fans would offer him these objects, in the hope that the “Wizard of the North” could relieve these relics of some of their muteness, and historicize them for the public.
In this Irving anecdote we can see Scott indoctrinating Irving with some of these insights — that a rusty old lump of iron from a Roman campsite in Scotland is not mere trash, but a set of fossilized social relationships and potentially a popular entertainment.
One can see that, although the rural laborers might have simply tossed this junk aside, a woman he knows carefully holds onto the object for Scott, and when he examines it and pronounces on it, all the locals gather respectfully around him to hear whatever he says.
Washington Irving, “Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey”
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7948#:~:text=The%20book%20recounts%20Irving%27s%20visit%20to%20the%20renowned,history%2C%20and%20the%20illustrious%20figure%20who%20inhabited%20it.
In the course of our morning’s walk, we stopped at a small house belonging to one of the laborers on the estate. The object of Scott’s visit was to inspect a relic which had been digged up in a Roman camp, and which, if I recollect right, he pronounced to have been a tongs. It was produced by the cottager’s wife, a ruddy, healthy-looking dame, whom Scott addressed by the name of Ailie. As he stood regarding the relic, turning it round and round, and making comments upon it, half grave, half comic, with the cottage group around him, all joining occasionally in the colloquy, the inimitable character of Monkbarns was again brought to mind, and I seemed to see before me that prince of antiquarians and humorists holding forth to his unlearned and unbelieving neighbors. (((“Monkbarns,” ie Abbotsford, was a fictional antiquarian character that Scott invented as his alter-ego in the novel “The Antiquary.”)))
Whenever Scott touched, in this way, upon local antiquities, and in all his familiar conversations about local traditions and superstitions, there was always a sly and quiet humor running at the bottom of his discourse, and playing about his countenance, as if he sported with the subject. It seemed to me as if he distrusted his own enthusiasm, and was disposed to droll upon his own humors and peculiarities, yet, at the same time, a poetic gleam in his eye would show that he really took a strong relish and interest in them.
“It was a pity,” he said, “that antiquarians were generally so dry, for the subjects they handled were rich in historical and poetical recollections, in picturesque details, in quaint and heroic characteristics, and in all kinds of curious and obsolete ceremonials. They are always groping among the rarest materials for poetry, but they have no idea of turning them to poetic use. Now every fragment from old times has, in some degree, its story with it, or gives an inkling of something characteristic of the circumstances and manners of its day, and so sets the imagination at work.”
For my own part I never met with antiquarian so delightful, either in his writings or his conversation; and the quiet sub-acid humor that was prone to mingle in his disquisitions, gave them, to me, a peculiar and an exquisite flavor. But he seemed, in fact, to undervalue everything that concerned himself. The play of his genius was so easy that he was unconscious of its mighty power, and made light of those sports of intellect that shamed the efforts and labors of other minds.