From Alexis to Scott and De Quincey: Walladmor and the Irony of Pseudotranslation

17 Pages·2014·0.15 MB·English

107
doi:10.3828/eir.2014.21.2.2
From Alexis to Scott and
De Quincey: Walladmor and
the Irony of Pseudotranslation
Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans
Towards the end of 1823, the first volume of a new historical novel appears in Berlin,
under the title of Walladmor: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott, von W****s.1
Walladmor is published at the height of “Scottomanie,”2 which, one contemporary
review relates with dismay,
runs rampant not only in Scotland and England … but also in
Germany and France, and even in the New World, accompanied by a
variety of more and less alarming symptoms and crises. In Germany
it is presently raging among the translators as an inflammatory disease
of the nerves [hitzige Hetzkrankheit], among the ludicrously cheap
publishers as a constant pursuit of speculation, and as a rampaging
devourer of paper [wüthende Papierverschlingerin]. … After all, those
today with the capacity and the willingness to read novels …, what else
would they desire than something by Scott, or after Scott, or like Scott?3
When an additional two volumes are published in early 1824, just in time for the
Leipzig book fair, at that time the most important event of its kind in the world, “the
book shot off and became famous” (66), especially when Walladmor turns out to be
the only new Scott fare on offer that spring. Every major literary journal between
1 Willibald Alexis, Walladmor: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott, 3 vols, second edn (Berlin:
Herbig, 1825).
2 As Frederick Burwick has noted, Alexis was partly responsible for this “Scottomanie” with his
1821 translation of The Lady of the Lake and critical essays and reviews on the Waverley novels in
literary periodicals in 1820 and 1821. See Frederick Burwick, “How to Translate a Waverley Novel: Sir
Walter Scott, Willibald Alexis, and Thomas De Quincey,” Wordsworth Circle, 25.2 (1994), 93–100. For
the reception of Scott in Germany, see Frauke Reitemeier, “The Reception of Walter Scott in German
Literary Histories, c.1820–c.1945,” in The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe, ed. Murray Pittock
(London: Continuum, 2006), 95–116.
3 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung vom Jahre 1826, vol. 2 (Halle & Leipzig: Schwetschke & Königliche
Sächsische Zeitungs-Expedition, 1826), 65–71. All translations from German sources ours.
108 Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans
Scotland and Poland carries notices and extensive reviews of what appears to be a
translation, if a free one, of the latest novel by Walter Scott.4
Walladmor brashly publicises its authorship, but its reviewers soon find out that
there was never any English-language novel called or even resembling Walladmor, not
by Scott, nor by any one else. In the absence of an English original, some periodicals
nevertheless maintain that the work is a genuine Walter Scott. Perhaps, they say,
Walladmor has first been published in German simply because Scott likes gaming
the system, and because he has now found that translation offers an even cleverer
gambit. Or maybe, John Lockhart opines, “a set of suspended sheets might have been
purloined” from the printers’ “and sold to a pirate”:5
We challenge the publishers to state such minute circumstances as will
convince us of its German origin. … We do not believe they can do so.
… It has been asserted in the public prints, and never contradicted, that
real Scotch novels appeared in Germany before they showed themselves
in the British metropolis, and why may not Walladmor be one of those?
… The original Walladmor may have been transmitted to Germany,
[and] translated.6
Others argue that the work is a vulgar forgery, “an impudent imposture upon the
literary world,”7 occasionally pointing to Washington Irving and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge as possible jokesters.8 Most, however, are simply very confused: “the
articles,” the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung laconically notes in the aftermath of the
affair, “became ever more confused and ever more bizarre [curioser]” (66). One
German critic condemns the work as a fraud on reading the first volume; on reading
the second volume, he issues a public apology and accepts the novel as Scott’s:
Does it often happen that a critic orders these words printed of
his own free will, “I made a mistake?” This one did just that: with
noble candour [Offenherzigkeit] he revoked his complete review,
4 The novel was also translated into various languages: these include English, Dutch, Polish,
French, and Swedish. A detailed analysis of the reception of Walladmor, including its multiple
adaptations, is yet to be written: for a brief overview of the different translations and most significant
reviews available, see Lionel H. C. Thomas, “‘Walladmor’: A Pseudo-Translation of Sir Walter Scott,”
The Modern Language Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (1951), 218–31, especially 231, notes 2 to 4.
5 John Gibson Lockhart, Narrative of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Cadell,
1848), 550.
6 The Newcastle Magazine, 4.4 (1825), 169–70. See also Allgemeine 66: “The literati who knew about
the English book market assured [everyone] that there was in England not a single Scotch or any other
type of novel [called] Walladmor. Others saw deeper and with more distinction, and asserted that this
did not disprove the genuine character of Walladmor, since the English publishers often shared with
their foreign counterparts the proofs of new Scotch works.”
7 The Monthly Critical Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 11 (1825),
455.
8 See respectively Abendzeitung, Wegweiser 11 (1824), and Zeitung für die elegante Welt 176 (1824).
Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans 109
explained to the public the reasons for his entirely understandable
deception [verzeihliche Täuschung], and loaded what he had previously
denounced as a clever piece of fraud [but now considered] an original
work with such praise as exceeded even my own [W****s’s] appraisal.9
It is only after having read the novel’s third and final instalment that the critic
recants both his condemnation and his endorsement and decides that the novel
ought to be classed as a literary hoax (Thomas 218). The Literary Gazette had offered
this theory as early as December 1823, mere weeks after the publication of the
inaugural volume, when it boldly pronounced Walladmor “a pseudo-translation.”10
As more journals line up behind this description, they seize on the Gazette’s
terminology to rebrand the novel and control its problematic status. It is a
testament to the intensity of the critical debate that even journals like the Dutch
Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen feel the need to get involved and signal that they
now deem Walladmor a “quasi-translation” and a “Pseudo-Walter Scott.”11
The critical debate on Walladmor’s generic denomination subsequently lapses into
an exceedingly long stretch of silence, broken only occasionally by brief moments
of scholarly engagement. While the novel has seen a limited restoration in German
criticism,12 the only investigation in English before Patrick Bridgwater’s chapter
in his De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade and a 1994 article by Frederick Burwick
dates back all the way to an article by Lionel Thomas in 1951.13 It is only relatively
recently that a context has arisen in which Walladmor might return to its exceptional
position. Together with the volume edited by Murray Pittock on The Reception of Sir
Walter Scott in Europe, the work of Ian Duncan, Ann Rigney and several others has
demonstrated the integral significance of diverse types of translation and adaptation
to the considerable influence that Scott exerted on British, European and American
literature.14 In addition, De Quincey’s English translation of Walladmor was recently
reissued as part of the 2001 edition of his Works, providing scholars with a complete
and annotated version of his own retranslation of the German pseudotranslation.15
9 Willibald Alexis, Erinnerungen von Willibald Alexis, ed. Max Ewert (Berlin: Concordia Deutsche
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1900), 276.
10 The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 362 (1823), 818.
11 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, 67 (1826), 494 and 68 (1827), 274.
12 See Michael Niehaus, Autoren unter sich: Walter Scott, Willibald Alexis, Wilhem Hauff und
andere in einer literarischen Affäre (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2002) and Jochen Golz, “Willibald Alexis:
Walladmor,” in Deutsche Erzählprosa der frühen Restaurationszeit: Studien zu ausgewählten Texten, ed.
Bernd Leistner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 233–71.
13 Patrick Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
14 Pittock, Murray, ed. The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2006); Ian
Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007); and Ann
Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
15 Thomas De Quincey, Walladmor: Freely Translated into German from the English of Sir Walter
Scott, and Now Freely Translated from the German into English, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed.
Grevel Lindop, vol. 4 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), 262–448.
110 Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans
While certainly not a phenomenon unfamiliar to Romantic literary practice,
pseudotranslation has remained somewhat under the critical radar of Romantic
studies. One need only refer to the influence of Ossian’s poems across Europe, or
to the numerous other German pseudotranslations of Sir Walter Scott, or to Thomas
Carlyle’s pseudotranslation of the philosophical manuscript of the fictitious German
Idealist Professor Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, to realise that pseudotranslation
was as prominent during the Romantic era as in any other.16 As Carol O’Sullivan
has indicated, the issue of pseudotranslation (or “fictitious translation”) was first
introduced into translation studies in Anton Popovič’s 1976 taxonomy of translation
types, and has since then opened up the field to a wide variety of theoretical
questions pertaining to textual originality, generic definition, and the relation
between original and target culture.17 O’Sullivan outlines a variety of functions that
pseudotranslations perform. They might function “as a way of importing texts not
otherwise acceptable as ‘original’ into a literary system,” or as a means to explore
and experiment with literary “style and norms” (123). Alternatively, O’Sullivan
argues, pseudotranslation may serve to destabilise “the basis on which translation
studies is built” in the sense that it subverts the relation between original and
translation and instead, in the words of Emily Apter, revaluates the latter as “a
technology of literary replication that engineers textual afterlife without recourse
to a genetic origin” (124).
In the case of Walladmor, it is clear that the novel was by no means produced with
the intention of smuggling an unacceptable original into a hostile literary system.
Quite on the contrary: its publication was part of a commercial strategy to meet
with the expected demand for a new Scott novel in the wake of the Leipzig fair.
The characteristics of pseudotranslation that do apply are those of experiment and
destabilisation: Walladmor challenges existing literary codes in that it infuses Scott’s
historical Romance with self-reflexive irony. As Burwick has extensively argued in
his discussion of De Quincey’s translation of the novel, Walladmor is premised on a
confrontation of two modes of Romantic irony: a German-Romantic narrative play
with fictionality meets with a British-Romantic paratextual play with “‘language
about language’ held within the frame as in a Scott novel, which examines the
pretences of rhetoric and style rather than the efficacy of fiction” (100). Burwick’s
analysis, we argue, invites a reassessment of Romantic pseudotranslation in terms of
Romantic irony. We aim to demonstrate that, together with the critical responses
that it calls forth from De Quincey and Scott, Walladmor generates a proliferation of
ironic gestures that lay bare certain complications inherent in Romantic notions of
16 On Ossian’s European reception, see Howard Gaskill, ed. The Reception of Ossian in Europe
(London: Continuum 2004). For a critical analysis of Sartor Resartus in terms of translation, see Tom
Toremans, “Sartor Resartus and the Rhetoric of Translation,” Translation and Literature, 20.1 (2011),
61–78.
17 Carol O’Sullivan, “Pseudotranslation,” in Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier and
Luc van Doorslaer, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 123–5.
Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans 111
authorship, authenticity and aesthetic value. It is this ironic potential of pseudotrans-
lation that draws Alexis, Scott and De Quincey into a vortex of reversed chronologies
and disarticulated textual identities, which emerges from the void left by the absent
original.
“Frei nach dem Englishen des Walter Scott”: Walladmor as an ironical
pseudotranslation
At first sight, Walladmor is shot through with all the clichés of the historical Romance.
Its plot follows an exceedingly formulaic pattern, and its setting is more animated by
sensation than it is by historical accuracy. The novel tells the tale of the eponymous
house of Walladmor, a noble family, brought low when its last scion, one Sir Morgan,
has his twin sons and sole inheritors misplaced. Both ultimately return prodigally,
thereby restoring the house to its former glory. This action takes place in Wales in the
early 1820s, albeit a version of Wales beset with some wildly inaccurate geography,
bizarre local customs, and a pronounced propensity for black marketeering.18
Underneath this rather conventional surface, however, the novel affects an
incisive critique of the British historical novel. It is indicative of this critique that
the contemporary critical debate to a substantial degree centres on the opposition,
or on the possible lack thereof, between artistic, original creation on the one
hand and commercial commodification on the other. Almost all of Walladmor’s
nineteenth-century reviewers, conscious as they are of the “extensive popularity”
and marketability of the Scott epithet, initially explain away the novel by pointing
to mechanisms of commerce and fashion.19 The Westminster Review imagines an
especially detailed scenario:
It appears that the great half-yearly book-fair at Leipsic cannot go
on to the satisfaction of the parties concerned, without a new novel
professing to be translated from the pen of our British Unknown; and
that, at the last Easter congress of continental booksellers, their high
ally in Edinburgh [Archibald Constable, Scott’s preferred publisher]
had … not supplied them with the legitimate means of gratifying this
18 As Frederick Burwick has rightly pointed out, neither this plot nor this setting is at all common
for Scott’s oeuvre (97). Scott’s only novel set in the nineteenth century is St Ronan’s Well (1823); his
only novel set in Wales is The Betrothed (1825). Contemporary readers, however, while taking some
exception to these infelicities, generally tolerated and even approved of them. “The case of a man’s
swimming on his back from Bristol to the Isle of Anglesea [sic], was more than the most indulgent
public could bear,” De Quincey notes in his review of the novel, but all in all, “topographical sins
dwindle into peccadilloes in a romance.” (“Walladmor: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott,” in
The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, vol. 4 [London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000], 269)
In addition, even though Walladmor’s inclusion of a character spouting topical radical propaganda
draws some ire as “a most revolting absurdity” (Eclectic Review 24), to say nothing of its even more
daring use of a character with connections to the traitorous 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy, such
outbursts do not impact the tone of the reviews all that much.
19 The Eclectic Review, 24 (1825), 14.
112 Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans
appetite. It is to be hoped that there are more ‘great unknowns’ in the
world than one; and it would be strange indeed if Germany had not her
share of them … to one of these the Berlin publishers applied, to furnish
their stalls with a stipulated quantity of historical romance, fabricated
after the true Scottish fashion … the above bargain was made, the
commodity manufactured and called Walladmor.20
The resulting commodity certainly carries all the marks of being created with
commercial appeal in mind. As Richard Humphrey has suggested, “it has Scott
down to a T – his plotting, his characters, his excursus, even his mottos.”21 As a
result, Burwick observes, “critics have seen it to abound in Waverley topoi” (96).
At the same time, however, Walladmor resists this reduction to a mere product of
Scottomanic profiteering, as it appears to operate to other “attractions of imitation”
(Allgemeine 65) than monetary motives, leading the Eclectic Review to wonder at the
exact status of the novel:
We scarcely know whether the Writer of Walladmor can be legitimately
ranked amongst the imitators of the Waverley school. … he is original
and inventive, far beyond the aspirings of an intentional copyist. …
Walladmor appears to have been, at first, devised as a playful piece of
waggery upon the Scottish novels. (16)
While The Eclectic Review describes Walladmor as an “original imitation,” closer
inspection of the novel reveals a much more fundamental originality, especially in
its experimental incorporation of the dynamics of commodification. This is most
immediately noticeable from Walladmor’s paratexts. When he learns of the critical
ferment that his first volume is starting to attract, the anonymous writer jumps at
multiple opportunities to confound the public further still. In the second volume of
the novel, W****s announces that his full name is Willibald Alexis, and in his third
volume, he uses this name to sign off on a dedication to Walter Scott, full of apologies
for any errors of translation (590–4). He even publishes a second pseudotranslation
under this name, Schloß Avalon: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott vom
Uebersetzer des Walladmor (1827).22 Even Willibald Alexis, however, it will turn out
some years later, is a mask, hiding the identity of the actual author-translator Wilhelm
Heinrich Häring.23
20 The Westminster Review, 3.5 (1825), 273.
21 Richard Humphrey, The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History: Three German Contributions:
Alexis, Fontane, Döblin (London: University of London, 1986), 75.
22 Willibald Alexis, Schloß Avalon: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott vom Übersetzer des
Walladmor (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1827). See Lionel H. C. Thomas, “‘Schloss Avalon’: A German
Historical Novel with an English Setting,” German Life and Letters 10.2 (1957), 97–105.
23 Alexis takes this kind of manoeuvring well beyond the confines of his creation: see Thomas 1951,
218–19. For a biographical sketch of Häring, see Lionel H. C. Thomas, Willibald Alexis (Oxford:
Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans 113
This paratextual masque announces an intricate ironic gesture. As an inherent part
of his pseudotranslation, Häring also copies the latter’s performative paratextual play
with authorship. That is, as he produces a narrative that could pass as a translation of
an original novel by the Great Unknown, Alexis simultaneously produces an allegory
of this process of pseudotranslation. As Humphrey has argued, Walladmor emerges
as the site of Alexis’s “constructive encounter with Scott [emphasis ours]” (78), as
much as it emerges as the site of his separation from Scott: Alexis is “out-Scotting
Scott” (76).
From its second volume onward Walladmor infuses even its narrative with this
allegory of pseudotranslation. The novel openly develops the Walladmor twins into
figures reflective of the structures of duplication and substitution that are so significant
to Alexis’s paratextual interventions. One lost son has ended up a citizen of Germany,
where he has been rechristened Bertram. The other, who has been renamed James,
has stayed in Wales. Bertram, the German, is an aspiring historical novelist. James,
the Welshman, is a confirmed pirate, one of the leaders of the novel’s impressive cast
of smugglers, beachcombers and traffickers. While James’s and Bertram’s vocations
appear to be as unrelated as the nations of Germany and Wales, Walladmor suggests
that they are merely different expressions of the same essential genetic information:
Bertram and James, after all, are twins, and identical ones at that.
These structures of kinship assume an even greater suggestive effect when the
twins’ father fully enters into the novel’s action. Sir Morgan has chosen for his own
profession one whose essence it is to diametrically oppose Bertram’s and James’s.
As the region’s ranking magistrate, it is his duty to bring James to account and to
force him into compliance with the official system of conducting business. He is not
aware that he is pursuing his own son, and he is not aware that he is often confusing
Bertram for James, and arresting the former for crimes committed by the latter. His
ignorance is neatly mirrored by that of his sons, who consistently fail to deduce their
shared parentage from the striking resemblance between themselves, or between
themselves and a series of relatives. The Walladmor genealogy is hidden to those most
intimately involved in the fiction, then, but its structural operations are plain enough:
novelists, pirates and magistrates do what they do in very different spheres, but all
are engaged in organising forms of circulation within and between communities.
Whether that circulation is textual, commercial or a combination of both, its different
forms are close enough to throw up effects of interference.
There is more to these effects of interference than some casual mistakes over faces
and surfaces. Sir Morgan’s premises may be faulty when he has Bertram arrested, but
his intuitions are not: his German son is doing something that approaches very nearly
indeed to his Welsh son’s favoured activities. After all, Bertram is not planning to
Blackwell, 1964). For historical and narrative studies of his works, see Caroline Hobi, Willibald Alexis,
“Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht”: Eine erzähltheoretische Analyse und Interpretation (Bern: Lang, 2007)
and Wolfgang Beutin, ed., Willibald Alexis (1798–1871): Ein Autor des Vor- und Nachmärz (Bielefeld:
Aisthesis, 2000).
114 Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans
write just any kind of historical Romance: he has his sights set on a German novel in
the vein of Waverley, and his journey to Wales has been undertaken with the express
purpose of gathering and exporting materials before Scott gets to them. Bertram
and James divide between them the figurative and the literal senses of piracy and
its related terms: they make for a double figure of non-traditional, peripheral forms
of circulation, and they figure how these derive from and constantly struggle with
traditional channels, embodied in their turn by their estranged father.24
The third volume raises matters to a new and final level of complexity in adding
a fourth pivotal character to the constellation of Bertram, James and Sir Morgan.
There is a man called Thomas Malburne (a telling misspelling for Melbourne) who
has been dogging Bertram for reasons unknown, often intruding onto the action with
impossible suddenness and becoming ever more invasive as Walladmor approaches its
ending. He even starts transgressing into dreams:
He appears like a ghost and disappears like a ghost. … Last night I
dreamt that I was walking by the lake. He suddenly stood behind me
and pushed me, saying these words: Here I must walk, as I am a rightful
descendant [Hier muß ich spazieren, denn ich bin vollbürtig]! I fell from
the cliff [vom Felsen], and I awoke.25 (602)
In this heavily proleptic passage, Malburne obtrudes onto an intercalated narrative,
onto a lower-level fiction within the fiction of Walladmor, and subsequently ejects
Bertram: the only motivation that he volunteers for this remarkable manoeuvre is
his Vollbürtigkeit; the fact, that is, that he is a full relative of Bertram’s. Malburne is
performatively announcing his status as the novel’s newest double, and he is phrasing
his announcement through the novel’s preferred structure of familial connection. He
is also usurping that logic, however: far from saying that he is a Walladmor himself,
he is proposing a type of filiation that operates on an altogether different level; a type
that relates to the genesis not of the fictive house of Walladmor, but to the genesis of
the fiction of Walladmor as such. It is a link, then, that is primed to push through
the links between context, paratext and actual text.
24 This double figuration also appears from the distinct ways in which Bertram and James handle
their identities. Whereas Bertram has his identity imposed upon him by others, James is so very
soundly Welsh that he has mastered the regional propensity for trafficking and for disguises. He
consciously manipulates the magistrates’ and sheriff’s readings into misreadings, and so easily does he
slip in and out of his disguises that not even the narrative can keep his transformations in check and
prevent the wild oscillation of his surname between different German and English spellings (Nichols,
Niklas, Nicholas, Nicolas, and so on).
25 Bertram’s further hypotheses regarding Malburne’s precise nature are also interesting: “It seems
to me that he is an evil demon, patiently watching each of my deeds in order to serve as my prosecutor
[Ankläger] to some secret tribunal [Gerichtshof]. But at other times I am tormented by a fear that he is
no grim demon, but a spirit of truth, come to teach me about the nature of lies and deception” (602).
This kind of equivocation further sharpens the conflicts between truth and deception that the novel is
based upon, and it predicts the novel’s constant refusal to definitively break through its own ironies.
Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans 115
It is the last scene of Walladmor that delivers that push. Having suffered one
bewilderment too many over Malburne’s identity, Bertram challenges him as
follows:
Sir! who are you? …
I am the author of Waverley.
Bertram jumped back, as though he had been struck by the most
terrible electrical shock, and, only after several minutes composing
himself, … he stammered—of Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Rob
Roy, The Tales of My Landlord? …
And also of Ivanhoe, The Monastery, The Abbot, The Pirate, The
Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, and so on.
So you are not a metaphysical person after all.
I eat roast beef and drink port.
Whatever the case may be, my good sir, whose true name I do not know
[den ich nicht zu nennen weiß], I do hope that by “and so on” you do
mean yet another novel, which I have already fragmentarily outlined
[bruchstücksweise ausgeführt], as these documents will prove. (904–5)
Malburne is revealing himself as Sir Walter Scott; or rather, he is revealing himself
as the Great Unknown, as the persona that Scott assumes whenever he appears in
his official capacity as one of the prime movers behind Romantic historical fiction.
Malburne serves as the manifestation within the narrative of the alleged creator of
that narrative. In other words: his claim to Vollbürtigkeit has to do with his spiritual
fatherhood, not with his actual consanguinity. This repositioning of the topos of
kinship significantly enriches the encounter excerpted above: just like Malburne
substitutes for Scott, or for the guise under which Scott appears when he enters into
literature, Bertram may be read as a replacement for Alexis, for the pseudonym that
Häring uses. These two characters meet in a highly fictionalised version of Wales,
reimagined as a space given over to the most diverse forms of circulation.
Bertram’s encounter with Malburne caps off the infusion of what started out
as a purely paratextual game into every tier of the narrative of Walladmor. It also
demonstrates how Alexis manages to use translation, a mode associated with
imitation, for creative and innovative purposes. Through his metafictional gestures,
Alexis manages to assert his own voice, appearing as a unique phenomenon in the
history of the historical novel, confronting and combating Scott’s “spectre-like
presence hovering over the nineteenth-century literary landscape.”26 Walladmor
even allegorically encodes this anxiety of influence in its narrative. When Malburne
reveals himself as the Great Unknown, a battle for authorial priority ensues, in which
26 Tamara Gosta, “Sir Walter’s Palimpsests: Material Imprints and the Trace of the Past,” European
Romantic Review, 22.6 (2011), 708.
116 Brecht de Groote and Tom Toremans
Bertram and Malburne cite passages from earlier in the novel to prove their respective
mettle. Malburne inevitably wins, gaining the copyright to Walladmor, in which
Bertram will now only figure as a character.
We have seen that both Burwick and Thomas address Walladmor’s parabasic
disruption of fictionality in terms of cultural difference: that is, both frame the
force of the novel’s ironic gestures in terms of a distinction between German and
British modes of Romantic irony, according to which Walladmor alienates its British
readership primarily because it is fundamentally German. While there are many
merits to this cautiously comparatist approach, Burwick’s and Thomas’s arguments
nevertheless remain framed within a logic of translation rather than pseudotrans-
lation: they assume that Walladmor transplants the genre of the historical novel to a
German context, replacing as a precondition to successful transmission those ironical
elements that are prototypically British with elements that are prototypically German.
We suggest that Alexis does something altogether different: he engages with Scott’s
formative ironies, imitating and complicating them.
It should be noted in this context that Scott himself already keeps far from the
British mould as it is defined by Burwick and Thomas. Like Alexis, he is highly
attentive to what Rigney has referred to as the possibilities of ironical “hybridity,”27
and while she defines this hybridity primarily as the play between “fact and invention”
(21), and situates it primarily in his paratexts, it is a principle that is strong enough
to remove his literary practice from “the Romantic poets in England” (Burwick,
94), whose poetics both Burwick and Thomas use to support their comparisons.
As Ian Duncan has argued, Scott’s fiction is itself an instance of a self-conscious,
performative “novelistic practice … that constantly produces its own theoretical
reflection” on issues of writing, authorship and narrativity (127). Alexis observes this
potential and runs with it.
While Alexis’s difference from Scott appears to be one of degree rather than
kind, it is imperative to note that his parabasic interruption of Walladmor’s
narrative is part and parcel of a more fundamental critical gesture. Through the
incorporation into its own narrative of an allegorical account of pseudotranslation,
Walladmor effects an intricate ironic disruption of the assumed priority of original
over copy, of author over translator, of Scott over Alexis. By substituting the
oppositional logic of translation for a more experimental, creative and critical logic
of pseudotranslation, his novel disrupts the distinction between organic creation
and mechanic replication across the field of literary production. It is precisely this
broad critical impact of Walladmor that determines the ironic substance of Scott’s
and De Quincey’s subsequent responses.
27 Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 2001), 21.