the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner

Hogg’s gloomy examination of the paradoxes of Scottish Calvinism will be discussed along with James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), a curious reworking and refashioning of Hogg’s tale in the context of a distinctly contemporary Scotland. The literary text chosen for analysis in the first place is a seminal novel which exercises a lasting influence over Scottish writing: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Admitting that a clash of conflicting opposites is not a uniquely Scottish preoccupation, but insisting that it indeed is a national idiosyncrasy characteristic of the Scot, this paper applies Smith’s abstract concept to specific works of literature. This paper deals with the thematic and formal implications of the Caledonian antisyzygy, a term introduced by George Gregory Smith in his Scottish literature, character and influence (1919) to describe the contradictory quality which he sees as constitutionally inherent in Scottish writing. Hogg’s novel filters this commentary on taste through a pattern of sensuous overdescription, a fractured narrative structure, the conflation of bodies and texts, and a necrophilic Editor with a case of textual indigestion, elements that reviewers fail to read within the discursive context of Hogg’s ongoing engagement with the Blackwood’s circle on questions of taste and class identity. Hogg interrogates the linking of good taste to authenticity, cerebral apprehension, and delicacy, whereas bad taste is linked to inauthenticity, bodily sensations, and excessive affect.

The reviewers, however, fail to recognize how the novel issues a challenge to culturally dominant notions of taste, policed in literary periodicals as a symptom of class anxiety.

Contemporary reviews of Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner attack the author’s taste and decorum, filtering their language through culinary metaphors that conflate aesthetic discrimination with the embodied act of consumption.

The private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner