Some time ago, I wrote a post about the (in)famous sort-of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, author of bestsellers like The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan. Castaneda was, to put not too fine a point on it, a charlatan, who invented a pastiche of supposed Indigenous Mexican beliefs involving a "separate reality" that could be accessed by using hallucinogenic plants. He got filthy rich from it, amassing a cultlike following of people who wanted to tap into this alleged source of esoteric wisdom.
He was also a fine storyteller. In fact, in my high school and college days, I was taken in for a time. There was something compelling about the tales he told. And in my post, I concluded that it was a pity he didn't just admit up front they were fiction. They'd have lost nothing in their vividness and impact -- and we wouldn't be in the horrid situation where there are still college anthropology courses where Castaneda's work is taught as legitimate scholarly work in ethnology and indigenous religious studies.
Put simply, truth matters. It might seem sad that the universe isn't set up so as to include glowing coyotes who visit you and have conversations wherein you learn eternal wisdom, but I'm much more inclined to agree with my grandma, who observed, "Wishin' don't make it so."
What I didn't know when I wrote the Castaneda piece, however, is that this is far from the first time this sort of literary bait-and-switch has happened, and taken in large numbers of people who you'd think would have known better. And this brings us to the Scottish poet James Macpherson.
Macpherson was born in Ruthven in 1736. His youth was a turbulent time in his home country. The disastrous Battle of Culloden happened when he was ten years old. This was followed by the horrifying "Highland Clearances," during which the victorious British leaders did their damndest to break the Scottish clan system, forcing the immigration of tens of thousands of Highlanders to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This undoubtedly ignited nationalistic fervor and cultural pride in the young Macpherson; after spending a good ten years in hiding, he attended the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh, where he became obsessed with Scottish folklore, history, mythology, and poetry.
In 1760 and 1761, he published two works -- Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and the more famous epic poem Fingal. Neither of these, he said, was his own original work; they were translations, the latter from a poem authored (and then passed down orally) by the ancient Scottish poet Oisín (anglicized as Ossian).
Oisín was a bard, Macpherson said, son of another famous poet and musician -- Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicised to Finn McCool), who was the great-grandson of a druid named Nuadat who was in the service of Cathair Mór, high king of Ireland during the early second century C.E. So this would have put Oisín (at a guess) some time in the middle of the second century.
And, Macpherson pointed out, there are historical markers in Fingal and his other alleged Oisín-authored poem, Temora, that support this; they mention a Roman emperor named "Caracul" and a commander named "Caros," which Macpherson said line up with the (real) figures of Caracalla (188-217) and Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius (ca. 250-293).
So if these really did represent an oral tradition, it was pretty astonishing; it had lasted, preserving significant details, for fifteen hundred years.
When Macpherson published his books, they had an incredible impact. Napoleon, Diderot, and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans; the last-mentioned said that "Ossian was the greatest poet that has ever existed," and that he planned to learn Gaelic so he could read them in the original language. Thoreau wrote, "The genuine remains of Ossian... are in many respects of the same stamp as the Iliad." Felix Mendelssohn's symphonic work Fingal's Cave and Niels Gade's tone poem Echoes of Ossian were directly inspired by Macpherson's supposed translations.
The Oisín cycle was also a major influence on the rise of Celticism -- the renewal of interest in all things Celtic, often coupled with dramatic romanticization of the culture of the Celts (something that still hangs around today; consider how many New Age spiritual books claim to have their basis in the teachings of the druids, when in fact we know next to nothing about what the druids and their followers actually believed).
It also was the basis of dozens, possibly hundreds, of works of art:
Not everyone was impressed, however. English author and polymath Samuel Johnson said the pieces were "forgeries... the grossest imposition as ever the world was troubled with" and called Macpherson "a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud." When asked, "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?" he replied, "Yes. Many men. Many women. And many children."
This, of course, caused an immediate firestorm in Scotland. No Englishman could dare utter such words against someone who had become something of a national hero. The controversy raged for decades, with most of it devolving into "he is too" and "he is not" shouted back and forth across the River Tweed. It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that blood had cooled sufficiently for someone finally to ask, "Well, what evidence do we have?" and started cross-checking it against other collections that had been made of Scottish oral history, tradition, and folklore.
The upshot: some scraps of the Oisín legends were actually part of the oral tradition in the Scottish Highlands. (No one doubts, for example, that Fionn mac Cumhaill was a real figure of legend.) But Fingal, and especially Temora, were mostly an invention by Macpherson himself.
That's not to say they aren't beautiful in their own right. William Paton Ker, the Scottish-born professor of literary history at Oxford University, said, "all Macpherson's craft as a philological impostor would have been nothing without his literary skill."
But you have to wonder why Macpherson wasn't content to publish them under his own name. Instead, he stretched the truth to the snapping point; his detractors say outright that he lied. Did he believe that his work would never receive the publicity it deserved without his attributing it to a legendary authorship? Or did he want to lend credence to a vision of a quasi-historical time in Scotland when it was powerful, stable, and producing works of timeless beauty?
It's impossible to parse the motivations of someone who's been dead for over two hundred years, but it does strike me as a shame -- just as with Castaneda, what could have been a dramatic and inspiring work of fiction has forever been tarnished because its author falsely claimed it to be true. (Well, in Macpherson's case, that it was an authentic piece of folklore.)
The truth matters, or it should. It's easy to condemn those who lie to cover up ugly behavior; what about liars who create wonders? Even Castaneda, although late in life he succumbed to the desire for power, sex, and money, started out simply creating a fascinating and gripping fictional tale that, shockingly, millions of people ended up believing.
I can't help but find the whole thing sad. The world is a hard, cold place sometimes, and we need beautiful stories to buoy us up in the all-too-common troubled times. When the creators of those stories turn out to have engaged in nothing more than literary sleight-of-hand, it feels like a betrayal.
However inventive they are, it's a lie I find very hard to excuse.
No comments:
Post a Comment