Scott’s Momentaneousness

Luke Terlaak Poot, “Scott’s Momentaneousness: Bad Timing in The Bride of Lammermoor” (pp. 283–310) This essay takes up the debate at the beginning of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), noting that critics have generally treated one figure in this debate—Dick Tinto, the painter who advises our narrator to use less dialogue and more descriptive language—as a strawman. Critics have mostly overlooked the extent to which Tinto articulates the dynamics of “momentaneousness,” an aesthetic principle drawn from Scott’s contemporary, Henry Fuseli. Fuseli defined a momentaneous painting as one that represents a moment with a clear past and future. For Fuseli, paintings ought to select pregnant moments for representation, moments from which whole narrative sequences can be intuited. Implicit in this notion is the belief that some moments are particularly suited to representation because they are qualitatively different from others—more fully narrative, because more indicative of larger processes of change. Turning to Scott’s novel, I show how this assumption features prominently in The Bride of Lammermoor, where it repeatedly produces unforeseen, calamitous consequences. The moment’s disruptive potential culminates in an aptly novelistic take on momentaneousness: the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger draws the act of reading into a circuit of temporal interruption and delay, reproducing the bad timing endemic to the novel’s plot. When read as an instance of momentaneous representation, The Bride’s climactic cliffhanger can be said to incorporate the reader’s own interpretive activity into the bewildering experience of historical time that the novel depicts. This technique, I argue, helps to account for The Bride’s peculiar place in the Waverley canon—its pessimistic historical vision and fatalistic narrative logic.