Reading Group #35 (The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner)

I'm due for a reread of this brilliant piece of lit, but as it is novel-length and quite dense, we can consider this our longer-term reading group material. Not sure if there's a reliable full text online, but if not, there are very reasonably priced editions on Amazon et al.

I reviewed this at one point; but, like most of my reviews, it's more a scant meditation on my own reaction than it is a critical analysis or anything like that. It may help, though, to serve as a litmus test on whether or not this is something you'd like to devote the time to reading and discussing at length...

http://therealmoftheunreal.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-private-memoirs-and-confe...

So now we have two to keep us going: the Le Fanu piece and a little James Hogg. Oh boy!

j

Project Gutenberg has a version:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2276

I've started this book today. I'm reading the Folio Society edition from 1978, which I got fairly cheap second-hand (and it's printed letterpress, which is a nice extra).

I'll try to come to the text as "innocent" as possible, so I've skipped the introduction.

I'll report my initial thoughts and impressions when I'm a few more pages in.

After Veil's blog on this work, it's more than a little daunting to record my own thoughts, not least because I have to mention how surprising comedic - even rumbustious - the start of 'The Editor's Narrative' struck me.

It's my fault, no doubt, but I found it almost impossible NOT to mentally cast Sid James and Joan Sims as the laird and his new bride!

It did occur to me, in those early pages, that the treatment of Lady Dalcastle could have been told in the 'Female Gothic' style of Mrs Radcliffe or J. S. Le Fanu, but the tone was too broadly comic, and events moved too fast, for this to be of any importance to the main narrative (or so I supposed, at this early point in the story).

The Rev. Mr Wringham too, is initially introduced as an almost Dickensian comic grotesque, but Dickens's grotesques can of course cause real harm, and Wringham is not ineffectual. He has God on his side - if only because of the laird's "good manners, and...inherent respect.. for the clergy, as the immediate servants of the Supreme Being".

It's difficult to know how much to say. I don't know how many others are reading this book, or plan to, and I don't want to lob spoilers everywhere.

One thing that's struck me, so far, is that the first part - the 'Editor's Narrative' - takes a rather amused, rational, and sceptical tone. It could, I suppose, be described as a very 'Enlightenment' voice.

For all that, there are gaps in the narrative - this gives the piece of faux journalism a sense of verisimilitude I suppose, but is clearly setting up what comes later. In addition, it could also be setting up conditions to undermine the rationalistic narrative.

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I think the comedy is certainly there! Which makes the latter half of the novel all the more disturbing...

The tone, even in the first part of the novel, gets more serious with its account of murder and false accusation. Even so, it's a genuine jolt to start on the confession proper of the second part. This - although in the form of a confession - reads like an interior monologue, a form in which many modern novels are cast.

I haven't managed to give a "running commentary" - but I will try to post something more substantial soon. In the meantime here's a trailer I found for a stage version of the novel, from 2009.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oup_OT3_u8U

This isn't a review - I don't want to give away too much of the plot for anyone who is still reading this, or still intending to. This is, after all, a book that's not as well known as Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I'm glad Veil selected this one, because I've owned a copy for a long time but had never got around to reading it. Perhaps the title and the subject matter suggested a heavy-going meditation on theology and sin.

As a matter of fact, the narrative moves at a sprightly pace and is surprisingly modern - both in a frankness about sexual matters that I found surprising in a 19th Century novel (pre-Victorian, admittedly) and with some flashes of what look like post-Freudian insight.

The story is told in three sections, the first editor's narrative sets out the story as if it were a local legend being collected and rationalised by a man of the Enlightenment long after the event, the second and longest section is the confession proper which (to quote the dust-jacket blurb of the Everyman edition) "anticipates Dostoevsky's great dramas of sin, self-accusation and damnation by half a century", and the editor returns in the third and final section. This is in essence a piece of fake journalism (the book was originally published anonymously and Hogg, I believe, "planted" a letter in Blackwood's Magazine the year before publication, and quoted it as genuine.

There is an ambiguity to the story. It's just possible to read it as a non-supernatural tale of a young man whose upbringing in a hothouse atmosphere of sexual repression and arrogant religious superiority drives him to murder and madness. However, if the supernatural reading is accepted then (as Douglas Gifford makes clear in his introduction to the Folio Society edition) the behaviour of Gil-Martin is in accordance with how the Devil tempts mankind, as per the folklore of the Scottish Borders.

>11 frahealee:

That's a shame, I see that I gave it quite a build up (and then nobody else read it, or cared to comment)!