The poet they probably shouldn’t have sent. I watch anime and am sometimes accused of reading books. I'm writing a long gay giant robot story in verse—probably this millennium's best yuri mecha epic poem, through lack of competition.


'Now praise those names on tombs of steel engraved | And toll this rotting country’s countless bells.'


calliope
@calliope

Welcome to another book in what I'm calling my Gothic Library series! Last time, I read The Old English Baron, and, in between, discussed a story or poem every day of October. I'm jumping a bit forward in history to read The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg. It was published in 1824. You can read it here if you'd like (Gutenberg's seems to be down at time of writing).

So what's the book about, you might ask? It's wild. First, James Hogg heard you liked doppelgangers, so he gave his doppelgangers some doppelgangers. And, in future entries, it gets worse. We've got religious zealotry, murder, psychological horror (sort of), and questionable theology.

Plot Summary - We open on a wedding. No, seriously. No, you didn't click the *Otranto* post by mistake. George Colwan marries Rabina Orde. Colwan is a laird, and, like, just some dude, you know? He likes hunting and drinking, dancing and music.
  • Rabina is a rabid Presbyterian -- and I mean, like, Jesus Christ lady, Jesus partied.

  • On the wedding night, Rabina won't, you know, have the sex. She insists instead they pray. Colwan says he hardly thinks it's the time, and makes a really amazing point: that if you're always doing religious stuff, doesn't that devalue it?

  • This point goes over badly, however. He falls asleep and she wanders off eventually to pray and sleep with her maid of honor.

  • Eventually they separate but in the same house: she annexes the top floor and gets her own entrance built. She begins to invite Robert Wringhim, a well-known Presbyterian minister and firebrand. They debate useless minutiae all day and all night long. She also complains about being stuck with Colwan. Wringhim once goes down to shout at Colwan, who's hanging out with a new lady friend. She leaves because she's embarrassed, but soon after Colwan hires her and she just moves in.

  • Rabina has a baby. HOW, you may have shouted at the screen.

  • She has another one, too.

  • The editor basically won't address this issue, hilariously. Colwan accepts the first child as his heir and names him George. The second, though, he refuses to accept, and eventually sends off to Wringham to raise. Wringham and Rabina name him Robert.

  • Confused yet? We've got George and George, and Robert and Robert. I'll refer to the elder two with their surnames, as I've been doing, and the younger pair with their given names, to avoid confusion (well, hopefully).

  • We get portraits of the way each kid is raised: George turns out to be, well, some guy, you know? He's easy to please, loves sports and enjoying himself, and is easy to get along with. Robert is That Son of a Bitch you had to deal with on twitter. He wins awards for essays about theology and never loses an argument, often because he simply won't stop arguing. This is IMPORTANT later.

  • I've been eliding the editorial comments about the religious warfare, but it enters the plot directly now. The rabid Presbyterians and the "royalists" are at odds once again, and there's a Parliament meeting. Colwan happens to be an MP so he and George go to Edinburgh. Wringhim is much in demand by the zealots for speechifying, so he and Robert also go down.

  • George plays tennis. Robert overhears someone mention his name and becomes EVEN MORE that son of a bitch on twitter. He gets in George's face while he's playing, and argues that he has just as much right to the public field as anyone else. George smacks him with his racket, and only after does he learn that's his brother. He tries to apologize. Robert, you'll be shocked to hear, doesn't accept.

  • He haunts George's steps, nearly getting him killed by a mob at one point. We get some passages about the next few weeks, in which George becomes a shut in because he can't go anywhere without Robert glaring at him. He finally goes out one morning and walks up Arthur's Seat. He sees a ghostly figure in the fog, turns to run, and knocks Robert down, who was right behind him. They have another altercation, Robert is conciliatory and whiny -- until he hears George say he's not going to kill him. At which point, naturally, he becomes an asshole again. He runs off and accuses George of trying to kill him. George is arrested.

  • But, and this is funny, but, at the trial, you know, George tells his side of the story. The judge questions the cop who'd borne witness that they were both up there, and the guy says, yeah, Robert came up after, not before, and he asked explicitly if a person matching George's description had passed that way. Upon hearing yes, he rushed off. They realize Robert has been stalking George, and Robert tries to run away from the courtroom.

  • Everything seems hunky dory and George goes with his friends to a big dinner to celebrate. Surely nothing awful could happen now, right?

  • Hahaaaaaa. They go to a brothel after, and, drunk as fuck, George and a friend get into an argument. The friend leaves, but after intimating he'll "demand satisfaction" so on so forth.

  • People don't really even know what the fight is about. However, a figure knocks on the door, and one of the ladies answers. The figure asks for George, who steps outside.

  • George is found murdered the next day.

  • I was really tempted to stop there, but there's a few pages about the friend, who, the editor implies but never says, didn't kill George. His family hides him away, which fucks him when the case goes to trial (because that could happen without the defendant, you see). He's found guilty, of course, and eventually flees the country and joins the German army.

  • Colwan dies of grief soon after, only providing enough for Mrs. Logan, that lady who he was living in sin with, before dying.

  • As the only heir of Colwan remaining, Robert inherits everything.

That's a lot. This book doesn't have chapters. It just keeps going. It's very good at keeping you wanting to read a little more, and I've read the damned thing once before. I've left out a lot of the interesting details, but, I mean, you should read the book if you're wanting more. It's good!

Doppelgangers

This is going to be a thing in the book. As I pointed out in the summary, the children become doubles of their "fathers," though there's a serious chance that both are Wringhim's kids -- When did Rabina and Colwan ever fuck?

That means, as an interesting aside, that the book is saying the environment one is raised in mostly determines what one is like, since they were both kids of the same guy and turned out to be copies of the people who raised them, not their biological parents.

The quintessential doppleganger story in English is probably William Wilson, at least for my money. And it was published in 1839. Confessions was published in 1824.

The for real quintessential doppelganger story is "The Sand-Man" by Hoffman, and it was published in 1816. "Sand-Man" is... fucked up. You should read it! But let's just sort of leave it by the way for now. Suffice it to say that the double is an integral part of gothic literature in the 19th century. We can push it a little further back to the work of Charles Brockden Brown in the US, which is the late 18th century, but I don't want to try to set out a specific lineage or anything. I just want to say that it's both already a bit of a tradition and still fairly fresh, the doppelganger tale, by the time Hogg writes Confessions.

So we have to ask, what are we going to expect from a doppelganger story? What's the most famous one nowadays? Is it still the "Mirror Universe" episode of Star Trek? It can't be, right? Steven Universe subverted it by making the watermelon Stevens nice, but there's still that episode where all the doubles form a band and then break up due to creative differences.

And that's a pointed example, because here in Hogg's novel, we have a double story that hinges on the first set of doubles beginning in the same situation and growing apart over time. The doubling is because they're siblings, and it becomes uncanny because of how different they are and, of course, how simply weird Robert is.

He dogs George's steps, I said; he never gives George peace. He is always there, like an accusing angel, but, and this is the core of this part -- he's accusing George of nothing very much. After all, what did George actually do? He smacked Robert, in the 1700s (the novel is set in a historical period before its composition), when people would fucking kill each other over similar shit. Basically, Robert fucked around and then he found out. But, apart from the big topic below, he can of course never admit fault in himself.

Well, that's the big topic actually, but it's just put differently.

The Antinomian Heresy

So why the hell is Robert like this? Enter John Calvin.

I haven't written the intro yet and this post is over 1400 words so please, my post, it is big, forgive me if my history of Calvinism is extremely anemic. But, in short, Calvin argued in favor of Predestination, a doctrine that says God knows all things, including who's going to Heaven and who's going to Hell. Since he must have known all things at all times, including before the world was made (and he must have, in order to be omniscient; if there was a time he wasn't omniscient, he wouldn't have been God; one doesn't know something and forget it if one is also perfect), then we are predestined: we're going where we're going no matter what, because God set that up eons ago.

This is... problematic. You have to understand that Calvin himself, while an asshole, was not nearly as much of an asshole as his spiritual descendants became. If you hear echoes of US evangelical Christianity's supercilious shittiness in this doctrine... yup! That's right.

As Rabina put it when discoursing with Wringhim, "How delightful to think that a justified person can do no wrong! Who would not envy the liberty wherewith we are made free?" This is already, uhhhh, bullshit. But Robert, over the course of the book, will take this even further, arguing that, since he's obviously one of the Elect, anything he does is correct. And "anything" means evil shit. Like murdering his brother, and, uh, the rest of the book.

What the hell is the "Antinomian heresy" then? It's not strict Calvinism, though it's often conflated nowadays. It means "above" or "against the law," and is, simply, that the Elect are not bound by mortal law, because they are God's chosen.

It's a heresy for a reason -- it's based out of Paul's writings, but Paul was arguing that the new covenant means they're not bound by Jewish law, not that no laws ever can't touch them because they're extra special. But he sure thought that Christians were extra special, so if you squint, you can get Antinomianism from his work easily.

This book is, essentially, lampooning Calvinists by demonstrating the logical conclusion of their ideas: if you think laws don't matter and you're going to Heaven no matter what you actually do, then you can, well, fucking murder people (or, cough cough, harass and bully them, or pass laws restricting human rights, or is hauled off stage by that giant hook).

I should be clear that Calvin didn't fuck with this idea. The intro to my edition, which I'll link below, quotes a writer named Hutton to describe what Calvinism actually says about this: "Anyone receiving the effectual call would either already be morally upright, or would become so soon thereafter. The elect would consider themselves bound by the moral law, not above it" (p. 16). So really it's just traditional determinism, that you're born heading in the direction you're heading, and that the elect are the people who are naturally good. That's... also irritating, at least from the point of view of modernism and the philosophy of free will, but hell, people argued this point of view in the classical world, it obviously has legs under it.

The Uncanny Zealot

So what do these two things, the doppelganger and the religious zealot, do in synthesis? Maybe I'm biting my own conclusion down the road. We'll see. But effectively, the book creates a portrait of religious zealotry and depicts it as uncanny, unheimlich, weird as shit. It's, to use a modern term, like filming a normal movie but making the villain an awful computer generated thing so they're always in the uncanny valley. This is what you look like, assholes, Hogg is saying. How did you get like this? Robert has nothing better to do with his time than bother his brother, who just wants to play tennis, get drunk, and fuck. These are mostly reasonable desires. But they aren't reasonable either from the point of view of the religious zealot or from the condescending "elect" who are just inherently better than everyone else.

That's the last major thing I want to point out: Wringhim and Robert don't even have the excuse of wanting to "save" the sinful. They just holler at them to make them feel bad so they themselves can feel good. Their specific ideology denies them the opportunity to save souls. They can't do that. What is all the obnoxious hair-splitting, sophistry, and vitriol for?

Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Adrian Hunter, ed. Broadview Press. 2003. Print.


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