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Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Dawsonville, GA, USA
In keeping with the 250th
anniversary of Robert Burns’ birthday, we are honored to welcome imminent
Burns scholar Dr. Gerard Carruthers to our pages on the Bard. I met Dr.
Carruthers a few years ago in Columbia, South Carolina while attending a
symposium at the University of South Carolina honoring Dr. Ross Roy on his
80th birthday. Since then I have followed Gerry’s career through
the Scottish press and via several mutual friends both here in the States
and in Scotland. Simply put, Dr. Carruthers is one of the top two or three
Burns scholars in the world.
Gerry Carruthers is Head of
Department in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow where he is
also Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is General Editor
of the new Oxford University Press multi-volume edition of the Works of
Robert Burns and author of Scottish Literature, A Critical
Guide (2009) and Robert Burns (2006). In addition,
Gerry is editor of The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James
Bridie (2007) and Burns: Poems (2007).
He has not limited himself to
Burns alone and has served as Research Fellow at the Centre for Walter Scott
Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He has taught American, English, and
Scottish literatures at the University of Strathclyde as well. During the
summer of 2002, Dr. Carruthers was the W. Ormiston Roy Memorial Research
Fellow at the University of South Carolina. To me, this last achievement is
as impressive as any of his many accomplishments. Robert Crawford, prominent
Scottish poet, author and Burns scholar, refers to our guest in his latest
book, The Bard, Robert Burns, A Biography, as “the
distinguished textual scholar Dr. Gerry Carruthers”. I cannot say it better.
Welcome, Gerry!
What Burns Means to
Me
By
Dr. Gerard Carruthers
There is a perennial debate
about Robert Burns’s status as Scotland’s ‘national poet’, and his
suitability for this role. We might ask, however, ought any writer to be
comfortably appropriated for such status? Surely a creative artist worth his
or her salt will have a countercultural element that does not sit easily
with the imagined officialdom of the nation? Truly, Burns, along with Walter
Scott, is one of the two great inventors of the modern iconography of
Scotland. However, this has an added complication according to some
commentators. For instance, the highlands were re-imagined by both writers
in a way that has sometimes led to accusations that they collaborated in the
British appropriation of the Gaeltachd in the eighty years following 1745.
It does not even matter whether Burns and Scott were consciously engaged in
such a process, so one version of the argument goes; living in an age of
inexorable British ‘progress’ they could not help themselves and were,
according to Edwin Muir, ‘sham bards of a sham nation’.
There is another way of
reading Burns, however, which very precisely disregards Muir’s anxiety over
the lack of authentic political and cultural independence in eighteenth
century Scotland. Rather than being seen as a poet inevitably compromised by
a broken national scene and history, Burns might be seen as a man in full
command of post-1707, and indeed post-revolutionary modernity (something
that would include those huge western mind shocks, the American, French and
Agrarian revolutions). In reading objectively-inclined Enlightenment
historians Burns was prompted to re-read the Covenanters as proto-democrats
looking towards 1789. The poet played his part too in bringing back from the
despised margins, the Jacobites. Burns’s promiscuous sympathy also extended
to the Highlander. Half-jokingly and perhaps wholly seriously, the great
fifteenth century Makar William Dunbar had spoken as a typical lowland poet
when he opined that there was no music in Hell – except for the bagpipes.
Burns’s great satire ‘Address of Beelzebub’ sees Satan’s right hand man
commending the Earl of Breadalbane for exploiting the Gael and suggesting
that things be taken further so that highland child-labour ought to be
instituted and Gaelic women put to use in Drury Lane as prostitutes. Burns
helped bring in from the cold Mary Queen of Scots, Stuart queen previously
supposed to be despotic and devious. For Burns, Mary is bright, sensitive
and unjustly treated. Coming himself from a Presbyterian background, Burns
is remarkable in this act of reappraisal. His own religious background,
which he could lampoon when this was warranted, is another element that
Burns rehabilitates. In ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and elsewhere the poet
did much to counter the sneer of ‘fanaticism’ often heard from metropolitan
(both Scottish and British) ‘centres’ of culture towards the Scottish kirk.
Unsurprisingly, English Protestant dissenters responded with approval to the
poet’s essay in the idea of the dignity in ‘low church’ worship.
We should see Burns, then, as
a writer deeply interested in the past but applying its general lesson to
the present. Taken in the round, what Burns poems and songs show is that he
knew there was no easy or single way of being Scottish. Burns might be said
in this, as in other aspects including his profound interest in the song and
ballad culture of the folk, to be the first great poet of the democratic
age. Approving of American and French revolutions, deeply engaged too with
the Scottish past, Burns is a poet remarkably intelligent in his cultural
radar. The frequent depiction of Burns restive on his plinth is not really
appropriate to a writer actually open to the restlessness of both past and
present. Burns is a poet of plurality and possibility rather than fixed
identity. He is, indeed, a poet of whom modern Scotland can be proud.
(FRS:2.6.09) |
