Customer Reviews

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford World's Classics)

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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Hogg's novel is about 150 years ahead of its time. Published in 1824, the work has everything readers of post-modern novels could ask for, including clustered narratives, self-reflexive point-of-view, unreliable narrators, unsympathetic-protagonist, etc. Hogg is engaging in a highly playful exercise, yet at the same time the novel can be read as an entirely chilling depiction of what may happen to the human psyche when it is given absolutely free-reign. The story takes place in Scotland in the early 18th century, a time of political and religious foment. It chiefly concerns the religious "progress" of Robert Wingham. Robert's mother is a religious enthusiast who has left the household of her husband, George Colwan, laird of Dalcastle, because he does not meet her stringent standards of pious behavior. Before she leaves, she delivers a son, whom Colwan names after him and names him his sole heir. A year after she has left she delivers another son, Robert, whom the editor-narrator who first tells the story is too polite to say is illegitimate, but it's evident by all appearances and intimations that Robert is the son of Lady Colwan and the Reverend Wringhim, a dour, intolerant, "self-conceited pedagogue," who is the polar opposite of the easy-going laird. Reverend Wingham undertakes the instruction of young Robert and eventually adopts him. Robert, like his father, is a cold fish, who abhors the presence of women and anything else that he thinks will lead him to sin. Young George, on the other hand is naturally open and fun-loving, engaging in the "normal" activities young men of the time preferred. This attitude piques the ire of Robert, who sees any activity that is not directly related to religion as frivolous. He starts showing up uninvited whenever and wherever George and his friends get together. When they try to play tennis, Robert stands in George's way and interferes with the game. The same thing happens when they play a rugby-like game on a field outside Edinburgh. Even after George loses patience and punches Robert , the younger brother keeps on insinuating himself, uninvited, every time George and his friends meet. When the Reverend Wingham learns that his precious boy has been roughed up, he incites his conservative faction to retaliate against the liberals with which George and his friends are in league. A full scale riot ensues, reminiscent of the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Neither the editor nor Wingham ever give full assent to the fantastic elements in the story. Events are depicted in as realistic a light as possible, which lends weight to the storyline and keeps things from drifting off into never-never land.

Everything about this novel "works." The editor's framing narrative subverts Wingham's "confession" narrative at just the right points, so the subversion actually adds to the solidity and texture of the work as a whole and adds to its plausibility. The comic characters are wonderfully depicted (including Hogg himself, who puts in an appearance as an unhelpful clod who's too busy observing sheep at a local fair to assist the editor and his party when they want to dig up Wingham's grave). Wingham's descent into fanaticism and his subsequent psychological disintegration is handled as well as it possibly could be. It is also a perfectly drawn cautionary tale about the pitfalls of antinomian religious beliefs. Hogg describes for the reader a splendid representation of just where the path of predestination can lead a susceptible mind. That's where the comparison's to Crime and Punishment evolve. Wringhim, like Roskolnikov, considers himself above the common rung of humanity. Unlike Rodyan, however, Robert never does discover the full import of his megalomaniacal doctrine until it is entirely too late. Readers might be interested to note that Hogg's novel had a direct influence on Stephenson' s Jekyll and Hyde and on Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Hogg was considered by his contemporaries to be something of a rustic genius, and the poetic successor to Robert Burns. He was known as the Ettrick Shepherd, because he did earn his livelihood from raising sheep and was entirely self taught. He was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He's still highly revered in his home country. If more readers become familiar with this one-of-a-kind book, he will be revered more universally. It really is that brilliant a novel.

Is Robert a schizophrenic to be pitied or a psychopath to be loathed?
Similar to Dostoyevsky's psychodrama, The Double, we find the exhileration of the psyche brought bare before our perusal. James Hogg's two part account of a "sinner" (a predestined and chosen one albeit) is on surface a derisive gothic narrative of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. The taut trance-like animated lustre it creates is exceptionally haunting. The author succeeds in invoking the sublime and supernatural within the fragile make-up of a psyche twisted and enlightened by the religious zeal it professes. If Percy Shelley found the tale as insightful as any upopn the workings of the mind it was primarily because of the tenacity of the precepts which justify the sinner's actions and provoke his behavior. A landscape of horrific charge stages a mind terrifying and a depth where foundations are dug to the root and these dragged with a vengence upon the highest peaks of a reprobates mind. Similar to the Marquis De Sade - studies on sexual allusions between the protagonist and the devil are amusing and should be dabbled into - in its use of reason to legitimize otherwise deplorable executions of conscience; this narrative strikes a balance between two accounts of the same fratricide and ensuing murders, where we are left dizzy and confused and thrown into a state of mind persecuted by truth and the mind's ability to obviate the most simple excesses as they are practiced and divined. At times we question the existence of the double, and on other occasions we are in awe of his personality and presence. The second account is of greater psychological depth and makes one confide with the mind of a murderer propelled by his faith. However we cannot but continue to query our sensibility imputing greed and a rationalizing tendency at play. The author's ambiguity make for rewarding continued readings for this is indeed a psychological analysis of exceptional powers.
Beautiful and unbelievable, wonderful and frightening. A pleasure to read and a wonder to study.
Of related study is Anthony Burgess' Enderby Trilogy, where the novel and Hogg are assimilated; the execution of the novel is very much in tune with the madness of James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

James Hogg's "Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a claustrophobic, terrifying spectacle of a novel. First published anonymously in 1824, the novel centers around the manuscript of an obscure Scottish Laird who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Robert Wringhim is a well-educated, but illegitimate child of the Laird of Dalcastle. He leaves the estate to live with his mother, also estranged from the estate. Raised by his adopted father, a zealous Calvinist preacher, Robert grows to despise his biological family. When, on his 18th birthday, God reveals through the preacher, that Robert is one of the elect, the true action of the novel begins.

The novel has an unusual and provocative structure: an editorial recounting of the story envelops the text of Robert Wringhim's actual 'memoirs and confessions'. The novel's temporal structure hinges on the 1707 Act of Union which annexed Scotland to England, forming Great Britain. With the editorial apparatus (and its debt to an oral tradition), and Robert's first person manuscript, Hogg seems to question the methods by which history is written and passed down. Several versions of Robert's story, from himself, his contemporaries, and the 'editor' who lives over 100 years after the events gives a startling, disturbingly incoherent vision of history.

This novel is great for its wranglings with the problems of reconciling money with morality, and religion with the law. Hogg's primary concern is with the religious issue of antinomianism - the notion that God's elect are free from the dictates of human law. Robert's election and subsequent relationship with the wildly mysterious, fantastically rendered Gil-Martin put antinomianism to the harshest test.

"The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a rather short novel which I recommend highly. It is an entertaining historical, religious, psychological rollercoaster. Its blend of sublimely dark humor and social comment is a high achievement in any century.

Another faustian tale from the turn of the nineteenth century, Confessions forms an interesting contrast with other works in the same vein, like The Monk of Matthew Lewis. The dualities of this novel go to extremes, with shadows of the shadows, but is richer in psychological insight than it is in critical morality.

The first part of the novel sets the stage with an account of the tale from an objective and social view. Minor characters give their own perspective of the action, without dominating it into subjectivity. "Here's what happened, or at least how it seemed to the good folk who saw it happening."

The second part, the actual confessions, is where the story becomes interesting - a first person account of a psychotic murderer, justifying his actions every step of the way. He walks us through the crimes with clear rationality, keenly sensible if we accept his misguided premises. The key to the illness reading, for me, came from his bafflement at the crimes committed where he was completely unconscious of what he was doing. This is no Faust, trading his soul for power. This is a man who has simply lost control of his reason. Reading the novel as a morality play reduces the impact - damn, that devil sure is a bad fellow. Reading it as a case study, a peek into the thoughts of a man who has genuinely lost his mind and personified his illness into an evil, immoral, silver-tongued changeling, makes Confessions a fascinating piece of work.

My only complaint was the phonetic brogue which makes some small portions of the prose almost unreadable.

In 1824, James Hogg published one of the first great psychological novels. The "Justified Sinner" is a Scots Calvinist who comes to believe that no action of the elect is a sin. To put it another way, his theology drives him mad.
Or does it? He insists that a young gentleman led him into some of the evil he does and that the worst of the actions attributed to him are not performed by him at all. Is the "Justified Sinner" mad or has the Devil lured him into sin and even taken on his shape at times? This novel is a forerunner of works like Stevenson, THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE and of James, THE TURN OF THE SCREW.

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified sinner is the story of the illigitamate son of a Scottish laird who is convinced by the devil to act on his own spite and rage and commit murder -- but Hogg adds a clever twist (I don't want to spoil anything by saying what it is) that leaves the reader wondering...

One of the great things about this book is that its serious subject matter is balanced by a dose of humor -- I was surprised to find myself giggling through the first fifty pages which tell of the laird's marriage to a reluctantly religious woman.

This is a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century fantasy, but its detailing of the making of a fanatic is still hauntingly relevent today...

Praised as a masterpiece, Hogg's novel does indeed have that strange, brilliant quality of uniqueness, that, defying all cookie-cutter fictive forms, creates its own world. The world in question is Puritanism, specifically Scottish Calvinism in its most virulent form. The Calvinists in the novel, Robert Wringhim and his son of the same name, are scabrous parasites, full of religious cant and envy, who plot to takeover the inheritance of the Colwan household through murder, an act they rationalize because they are, they believe, already predestined to be saved so no sin can bring them damnation and secondly because the murder victim is an evil sinner who, in their mind, deserves to be killed. Thus we have the profile of those who commit evil even while convinced of their own piety, a very relevant theme in today's world of quasi-spiritual leaders who foment violence in the name of their faith.

The novel is divided in three parts, ninety pages of The Editor's Narrative, a third-person account of the rivalry and murder; the 130-page first-person Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner; and, thirdly, the 10-page epilogue, told again from the Editor.

This is a very disturbing, funny, frightening novel, especially since its murderous characters are so believable. However, I can only give the novel four stars, not five, because the Confessions section, at 130 pages, is too long. It's unbearable and repetitive to observe Wringham's rhetorical excesses and lame justification and skewed point of view for so long. His evil is clearly and convincingly established and to hear him bloviate about how good he is and how evil everyone else is for over a hundred pages becomes tiresome. However, I don't wish to sway anyone from reading one of the best novels I've ever read about the role piety and self-rectitude play in enabling people to wreak evil and havoc on the world.

This book was published in 1824 and harks back to the novels of the 18th Century (no prudery, but primitive sociopolitical views), without any major trappings of incipient Victorianism. It reads surprisingly well in modern English, but that is partly because this is quintessentially a 'Scotch' book -- a commentator says no Englishman could possibly have written this novel.

The novel is not a mystery, but it IS a murder story, and is just as upsetting as PSYCHO or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. It goes right into the depths of psychological realism, even though that wasn't systematized back then -- a story of religious fanatacism that you can fit to modern avatars like Jones or Manson. And the underpinning is the horrible travesty of Christianity the Scots grafted onto Calvinist Protestantism that caused so much woe back in the days of Cavaliers vs. Covenanters -- i.e., that certain people are predestined by God to be saved (because He set up everything in advance, before time even began), so it doesn't really matter WHAT they do in life, which led to a kind of Caledonian Khomeini-ism.

There are the usual bits of Scottish dialog rendered in pseudo-phonetics, but not as egregious as in other novels of the sort. In spite of being set in the early 1700s, it generally comes across as a description of a Scotland that hasn't changed much in modern times, with parallels to football hooligans and drunks and debauchees, plus an innate puritanism and political extremism -- the more things change, the more they say the same.

Structure of the plot is clever: a 90-page summary by the "Editor" based supposedly on publicly available details, that lays out the bare bones of the story in a very journalistic (I mean news-in-depth) manner, followed by the revealed Memoirs, where of course the narrator is naive enough to display all of his faults as supposed virtues -- although he finally catches on at the end. Hoary plot device, but it works very well. This presages JEKYLL AND HYDE, which, knowing now of this book, I can see was influenced by it (well, Stevenson was a Scot too, and would have known Hogg, whereas the rest of the Eng-Lit world only paid attention to Sir Walter and Burns in his whimsical vein in those days). Basically, it is a story of a man who murders his older brother to inherit his lairdship and lands, although he is of a type who would never admit to such a base motive. He goes on to do even more horrible deeds (maybe!). The protagonist is a snotty, ugly little twerp, even as he portrays himself and as he is portrayed by others. This paradoxically adds a bit of fun to this dour book -- the author was one of the radical-poet circle of his times, so he could indulge in an unusual level of cynicism for the period. There is a lot of irony and satire in this, conveyed in a wry way that is almost uniquely Scottish (closest to it is Yiddish).

The familial situation is rather odd, consisting of an old-fashioned huntin' drinkin' laird, his mistress/housekeeper, his older Tom Jones-ish son, the Blifil-ish Sinner, the laird's pious and prudish wife (whom he rapes on their wedding night rather than kneeling down for some wholesome prayer), and her spiritual adviser Wringhim, who 'adopts' the younger son in time (or is perhaps his father, but not likely, this being a novel of people looking like their role models, like dogs are supposed to resemble their masters). Wringhim, while not a 'sinner', is a perfect ass, and is responsible for educating his snot-nosed ward into his perception of personal infalibility.

After all this, it turns out to be a Faustian story, because the Devil went on vacation from his other duties just to have fun playing with this particular victim. After all, how could he resist leading to depraved evils a person who believed through his Justified Religion that he was predestined by God to be one of the elect in Heaven no matter what he did on Earth? Satan, in this story, is a marvelous invention in that he takes on the features and character of whatever/whomever he is being seen by at the time -- for the most part, your own image as you perceive yourself to be, or if you're thinking of Jesus, he'll look like Jesus, or of Ringo Starr like Ringo Starr, etc. (At one point, the protagonist thinks, "I had no doubt now that he was Peter of Russia.") Naturally, Satan leads on the Justified Sinner to commit murders and despicable acts that the 'hero' thinks he can't be damned for since he's been predestined for heaven. (An alternative reading is, of course, that Colwan is paranoid/schizo, and this devil is his own delusion.)

Edinburgh setting: there is a fine and scary scene that takes place on Arthur's Seat, which you will appreciate all the more if you know that city. The end of the story is a phantasmagoria, magical events and all. Here, the devil in the new Laird Colwan's guise commits seductions, frauds, and murders of a despicable nature (including matricide: "she had by this time rendered herself exceedingly obnoxious to me"), driving our 'poor hero' into a state of total schizophrenia (he believes or doesn't that he really did these things, and maybe he did). Dirty trick follows dirty trick, to excess -- and maybe that isn't fair, considering how the book went before. For the devil to implement rather than instigate is of dubious orthodoxy, yet there is some doubt as to what really happened. When Colwan finally tells his friend to 'begone', he replies: "Our beings are amalgamated, as it were, and consociated in one, and never shall I depart from this country until I can carry you in triumph with me." (Guess that finally makes the situation clear.) "If this that you tell me be true," said I, "then it is as true that I have two souls, which take possession of my bodily frame by turns, the one being all unconscious of what the other performs; for as sure as I have at this moment a spirit within me, fashioned and destined to eternal felicity, as sure am I utterly ignorant of the crimes you now lay to my charge."

Colwan's adventures, when he goes on the lam, pursued by the obligatory mob (as in the movie versions of the contemporary novel FRANKENSTEIN), will be omitted here -- discover for yourself! (Well, he does get all tangled up in a miller's loom, and ends up in Edinburgh as a typesetter's apprentice -- hence 'justification' for the existence of the Memoirs.)

This is a very fine book, and I'll leave off now (as it is, this summary ended up being a lot longer than I intended).

Hogg's book was one of many 'Gothic' doppelganger novels produced at the time, as editor Cuddon makes clear in his introduction. What sets 'Sinner' apart is the fierce, unforgiving, saturnine, phlegmatic, terse, Biblical, paganistic, ugly beauty of the vocabulary and phraseology (Hogg was a shepherd and a poet), suited to a narrative lashed with hate, murder, bigotry and terror, whose sheer violence connects it with another shocking Gothic one-off, Lautreamont's 'Maldoror'; the way the 'double' theme of the novel is embedded not just in the plot, but in the rich formal patterning, from character groupings to the religiously and politically divided Scotland of its setting; and the wide literary adventurousness as a whole which, in its proliferation of stories, framing devices, and self-reflexivity create a labyrinthine, elusive, very modern text.

James Hogg's masterpiece, this strange and evocative study of the effects of Calvinist doctrine on the Scottish mind, has slowly edged its way into the canon in the last twenty years largely because it is first and foremost a rattling good read. Like all the great Scottish novelists from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson to Muriel Spark, Hogg was haunted by the dual promise of Edinburgh both as the refined cosmopolitan Renaissance home of Boswell as well as the fanatically religious city of John Knox. THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS is a response to that dual inheritance, and the novel is filled with doubles and dual structures: two brothers (born on two floors of the same house) vie for filial recognition; one brother duplicates himself when he is visited by a devil figure, Gil-Martin, in his exact semblance; and the story is told in two parts, and one of those is itself doubled. Although the Scots dialect in sections is a real chore to get through, the book is a marvelous frightening read nonetheless, and NYRB has wrapped it all up in a glorious cover featuring a famous Blake illustration. This isn't an easy ghost read, but it is tremendously repaying.