Third ARG: Cultural Dynamics Conference: Transmedialisation
Vienna, 10-11th December, 2015
Encountering Macpherson’s Poetry: a case study in transmedialisation
This paper will examine the transformative effects of transmedialisation on human relationships with objects and texts, and the institutions that facilitate this interaction. As educational institutions such as schools, universities and museums place greater emphasis on public engagement and social outreach activities to extend their audiences and impact, transmedialisation of texts, objects and experiences becomes extremely necessary as a way of drawing in hard to reach audiences. Most obviously, this presents itself as the use of interactive virtual technology in educational contexts; however, there is a case to be made for using more traditional methods of experiencing and expressing cultural interaction to engage audiences with art forms that appear to be remote. Arguably, in an age of desensitisation and habituation relating to computer technology, the use of virtual methods to engage audiences inevitably reduces in impact, often over a short period of time, and have to be continually revised and upgraded. In this context, providing audiences with direct contact with texts and objects, albeit mediated by skilled practitioners who can interpret them and make them relevant using the methods of transmedialisation, is potentially a more effective method of audience engagement. This approach can never replace the benefits of digital technology in education, but should be seen as complimentary and necessary balance to the over use of technology. This paper will present a specific case study exploring this expression of transmedialisation, with reference to a series of workshops for children staged by a collaborative partnership of learning providers in the Highlands of Scotland. The workshops will introduce the children to the life and writings of the eighteenth century Scottish poet James Macpherson, and encourage them to respond to the poetry through their own art and creative writing, ultimately producing a children’s book. The work produced by the children will demonstrate different aspects of transmedialisation such as integration, inflection, adaption and enactment of the original text, and develop their own cultural understanding and investment in the place where they live.
I am delighted to have been invited here by Professor Coelsch-Foisner to join
this conference exploring transmedialisation, but I must confess that as a scholar
of Renaissance literature and culture, transmedialisation is not a term that is
over familiar to me, stemming as it does from the world of media studies,
cultural studies, and narratology, and so this invitation has spurred me to think
deeply about what it might mean in relation to my research, teaching and public
engagement activities at the University of the Highlands and Islands in
Scotland. As is often the case, as soon as I started to think about it,
transmedialisation was everywhere, marking my interactions with literature,
culture and even interactions with colleagues. As a concept describing cultural
exchange and transmission, it is nuanced and lends itself to different emphases,
as it is co-opted by a variety of disciplines, such as art history (ekphrasis) and
more recently by scholarship in the digital arts; but for me ‘transmedialiation’ is
a theoretical concept that can reveal much about the assumptions and aims
underpinning the many public engagement projects where The University of the
Highlands and Islands is a significant partner.1 It also has made me think very
carefully about what a text is, questioning how is it communicated, understood
and experienced. Social inclusion and public engagement are a foundational
part of UHI’s view of its function within the communities of the Highlands. One
of the public engagement projects with which I am currently involved relates to
the eighteenth century Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796),
controversial editor of the Ossian poems.
Transmedialisation and the Reception of Macpherson in the Eightenteenth
Century
Macpherson is a poet who may well be better known to you, than to a Scottish,
let alone a British audience. His status as a poet at the vanguard of
Romanticism, who paved the way for the Romantic movement in art and
literature has been eclipsed by often heated debate about the authenticity of the
Ossian poems. When visiting Moffat in the Scottish borders, by chance
Macpherson was introduced to Scottish playwright John Home by the
philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson.1During their conversation together
Macpherson praised the merits of Gaelic poetry, leading to Home’s request for a
translated example so that he could judge it for himself. After some hesitation
Macpherson obliged, duly leading to the publication of Fragments of Ancient
Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760). Encouraged and
staunchly supported by Professor Hugh Blair who wrote the Preface to it (Blair
was the first professor of the new discipline of Literature at Edinburgh
University) he then went on an expedition around the Highlands to collect
further examples of Gaelic poetry, and announced the discovery of an ancient 1 In addition to the Macpherson project outlined here, other recent UHI public engagement projects include Wilder Being (2014), a collaboration between the Institute for Archaeology and the Art Department at Orkney College, UHI; The Centre for Nordic Studies UHI has worked with Orkney Heritage Society on dialect (2012), and produced a book tying in with a project on small boats in Shetland (2012), and runs a regular newspaper column; The Centre for History UHI has collaborated with Timespan Heritage Centre in Helmsdale on the Kildonan Clearances (2012-13), as well as supporting a current Ph.D research project on the history of golf in Moray.
Gaelic manuscript, published in English as Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six
Books (1761), shortly followed by a further Gaelic verse epic, Temora, in 1762.
While the poetry met with enormous popular success and was very profitable
for its author, almost immediately, critics such as Dr Johnson demanded
material evidence that these poems were authentic. Johnson’s companion
Boswell was an admirer of Macpherson’s works, and he records Johnson’s
famously acerbic response to Professor Blair’s probing regarding his opinion of
the poems’ authenticity as ancient texts:
Johnson had all along denied their authenticity; and, what was still more provoking to
their admirers, maintained they had no merit... Dr. Blair asked Dr. Johnson whether he
thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems? Johnson replied,
‘Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children’.2
Macpherson was unable to provide evidence as to the authenticity of the poems
in the form of ancient manuscripts, and for a very good reason: because they
were based on his own translation of Gaelic poems remembered from
childhood, and collected in oral and fragmentary form during his poetic quest
through the Highlands of Scotland. Many scholars now agree that Macpherson
was communicating an oral Gaelic tradition of poetry and myth, and therefore
was never going to be able to produce historical poetic manuscripts, although
this was not appreciated by the likes of Dr Johnson.2 Indeed, even now, current
academics are arguing the case for and against Macpherson with gusto, with a
2 James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 1207.
Cambridge University Press monograph by American scholar Thomas Curley,
published as recently as 2009, referring to the ‘the Ossian Fraud’, and to
Macpherson himself as ‘the literary liar’.3 The situation is made even murkier
by the suggestion that although Macpherson’s first poetic offerings were based
on an historically accurate Gaelic tradition of oral poetry, his later poetic
outputs, sprang more independently from his own imagination as he bowed to
popular and academic pressure for more work in the same vein.3
So, Macpherson was a hugely successful poet in his own lifetime, and
together with his other political and literary activities, his poetry generated great
wealth for him. The heady upward trajectory of his career took him from
humble beginnings in Badenoch, to Aberdeen University, Edinburgh, America,
the Caribbean, and London. His wealth was matched by his political influence
and he was able to obtain preferment in the army and government for the many
Macphersons left behind in Badenoch, facilitating a flow of income and
investment into the area at a time of economic hardship.4 Towards the end of his
life he returned to the land of his birth and built an impressive country estate
and house, Belleville/Balavil – which still stands and can be seen clearly from
3 ‘The context in fact overwhelmed the poetry. Temora was more fictional than earlier works, so Macpherson verified it historically’: Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 90.4 Dr David Taylor’s talk at the Macpherson’s Ossianic Legacy conference in Kingussie (April 2014), ‘The Boy Done Good: Macpherson and his Native Badenoch’ together with Dr Matthew Dziennik’s, ‘The Rights of Britain and American Independence’, were both very revealing about Macpherson’s rise from relative poverty to wealth, his sponsorship and patronage of other Macphersons, and the ways in which Macphersons on military service abroad bolstered the local economy in the Highlands through sending money home.
the A9, the main road running through the Highlands, as well as a further
tangible remnant: a white marble obelisk in memory of his mother.
Macpherson’s staggering success is probably responsible for the suspicion and
scrutiny that both he and his works received, and this partly explains why he has
been forgotten in terms of popular literary culture, although his significance
continues to be proclaimed by scholars of eighteenth century literature and
culture.5 It is human nature to suspect the motives of artists who create a great
deal of wealth for themselves from their work, as it was then with James
Macpherson, and as it is now with artists such as Damien Hirst. Thomas Curley
states scathingly that Macpherson ‘bought’ his burial spot in Poet’s Corner in
Westminster Abbey, whereas Samuel Johnson ‘earned’ his.6 It is inevitable,
although perhaps naïve, that we question the motivation behind artistic
endeavours resulting in great financial gain.
5See Howard Gaskill, The Reception of Ossian in Europe, (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004); Gaskill, ed., Versions of Ossian: Receptions, Responses and Translations, Translations and Literature, 22.3, (2013); Fiona Stafford, ''The Landscape of Ossian', in Gayle Chong Kwan, The Obsidian Isle,(Aberdeen: Peacock Visual Arts, 2011).'Romantic Macpherson', M. Pittock, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Dafyd Moore, ' "Caledonian Plagiary": The Role and Meaning of Ireland in the Poems of Ossian', Ben Dew and Fiona Price, eds., Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830: Visions of History, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 92-108; Moore, ‘Fingal in the West Country: The Poems of Ossian and Cultural Myth-Making in the South West of England, 1770-1800’, in Marion Gibson, Shelley Trower and Garry Tregida, eds., Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity, (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 99-116. Also the forthcoming edition of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Journal for Eighteenth Studies edition on Ossian, edited by Sebastian Mitchell. Justin Tonra and Rebecca Barr have taken Ossian into the digital age with Ossian Online project, an online resource of different editions of the Ossian poems.
6 Thomas Curley, ‘The Great Samuel Johnson and his Opposition to Literary Liars’, Bridgewater Review, 28:2, December, (2009), article 6,< http://www.vc.bridgew.edu > [27.11.15].
So, where is transmedialisation in this potted history of Macpherson’s
literary reputation? Well, it seems to me that transmedialisation is a way of
thinking about cultural transactions that is extremely relevant to the
rehabilitation of Macpherson and his poetry for a wider audience. As the most
renowned of Macpherson’s early critics, Samuel Johnson demonstrated the
Enlightenment’s prioritisation of the written text, glorifying its ability to capture
through language the truth of experience, most powerfully demonstrated by the
publication of his acclaimed Dictionary (1775). It is argued by Curley that
Johnson’s extreme antipathy to Macpherson was based on his rigorous
adherence to the principle of truth. In his prioritisation of linguistic truth
Johnson reduplicates a centuries old suspicion of literature’s ability to present
experiences to the imagination that may not strictly mirror material existence:
yet this is the very creative facility of literature that was championed by Philip
Sidney two hundred years before in the late sixteenth century, in his Defense of
Poesy (published 1595). Here he made the ringing declaration that, ‘Nature
never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done’, and
defended the right of the poet to create from his own invention.7 By contrast,
Johnson’s Enlightenment rationalism meant that language should always
empirically reflect the truth of material experience rather than the riches of
invention; for him, the abandonment of linguistic truth risked social dissolution
of the kind envisaged by Hobbes. As Johnson wrote:7 John C. Hunter, ed., Defense of Poesy, Renaissance Literature. An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, 2nd edition, (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), p. 514.
There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that
men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is
employed as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from
others, inhabit his own cave, and seek prey only for himself.8
He viewed written texts as the preeminent medium for recording thought, and
for understanding lived experience. In this model of literature the text is
essentially separate from experience, albeit a sophisticated means of capturing
it. The Enlightenment view of the text posits a diachronic view of the
relationship between the literary text and life – life comes first and then the text:
the text is the mirror held up to our understanding. This is why the genre of
history writing was so highly regarded in the period, as the recording of past
times for the edification of the present.9
It is immediately apparent that this model of the text simply does not fit with
oral poetic traditions, and so it is hardly surprising that Johnson, was not only
dismissive of Macpherson’s translations of Gaelic verse, but of Highland
culture in general, as can be seen from his many disparaging comments in
Journey to the Western Isles, the record of his journey in the Highlands; an
8 Peter Martin, ed., Johnson, Selected Writings, (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 224. Hobbes acknowledges the culturally constructed nature of truth when he writes, ‘For True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things. And where Speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood’: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 105.9 For a summary of the Enlightenment’s prioritisation of historiography over literature see William Godwin’s essay, ‘Of History and Romance’, Mark Philp, ed., Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 5 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1993), vol. 5, pp. 290-301.
experience which confirmed his scepticism about Gaelic poetry.10 Johnson did
not find convincing evidence of Gaelic literary culture as he was looking in the
wrong places; indeed, he should have been listening out for it rather than
looking for it. A telling anecdote from Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides relates how on a rough boat trip around the coast, the sturdy rowers
broke into Gaelic song (‘Erse’), to which Johnson’s response was to orate
loudly lines from Horace. This episode is open to interpretation of course: was
Johnson countering this exhibition of nationalist culture with an assertion of the
pre-eminence of classical learning? Or was he acknowledging the cultural
significance of the song, and complimenting it in the best way he knew how?
Given the history of the ensuing grudge between Johnson and Macpherson, I
tend to think the former is most likely the case.
The third possibility is, of course, that Johnson simply did not recognise the
rowers’ song as evidence of a Gaelic poetic tradition, because it did not equate
with his ideas about how literature and culture in general worked. This
misperception was perhaps compounded by the fact that Professor Blair’s
Preface to Fragments insisted that the poems were not songs, and he confidently
10 Johnson’s suspicion of all the information he gathered on his Scottish trip is neatly summarised with his following assertion: "He that travels in the Highlands may easily saturate his soul with intelligence, if he will acquiesce in the first account. The highlander gives to every question an answer so prompt and peremptory, that skepticism itself is dared into silence, and the mind sinks before the bold reporter in unresisting credulity; but, if a second question be ventured, it breaks the enchantment; for it is immediately discovered, that what was told so confidently was told at hazard, and that such fearlessness of assertion was either the sport of negligence, or the refuge of ignorance’, Ronald Black, ed., To the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed., (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012), p. 267.
asserted: ‘They are not set to music, nor sung. The verification in the original is
simple; and to such as understand the language, very smooth and beautiful;
Rhyme is seldom used: but the cadence, and the length of the line varied, so as
to suit the sense’.11 Ernst Gombrich’s famous opening line in his book The Story
of Art brings us closer to understanding the operation of Gaelic poetry when he
writes, ‘There is really no such thing as art. There are only artists’.12 This insight
into the nature of visual art may be extrapolated to suggest that there is no
division between art and life, that art and life interpenetrate each other;
Boswell’s account shows us that poetry was intertwined in the rowers’ life, its
rhythms marking out the progress of their labour. This dynamic relationship
between life and art or poetry has a different chronology to that of the
Enlightenment relationship between life and text, in that it is synchronic rather
than diachronic; it constantly changes and therefore does not lend itself to
Johnson’s model of the text. It is for this reason that Gaelic poetry often seems
fragmentary, dreamlike, repetitive, and various. One of the nuances of
transmedialiation is the idea of integration: that ‘there can be no artificial
boundaries between art and life. If there can't be a boundary between art and
life, there certainly cannot be boundaries between art form and art form’ (Dick
Higgins, quoted by Friedman, 1989). This insight springing from the theoretical
workings of transmedialisation goes a long way in accounting for the ‘stream of
11 Allan Burnett and Linda Anderson Burnett, eds., Blind Ossian’s Fingal: Fragments and Controversy, (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2011), p.67.12 Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art, (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), p. 4.
consciousness’ effect of much Gaelic poetry, particularly well represented in
Macpherson’s collection, Fragments, where dream like images of the
countryside overlap, the character of the hunter and the deer, are continually
evoked, in a highly charged, emotional and elemental dreamscape that
simultaneously encapsulates, art, memory, and collective history:
My love is a son of the hill.
He pursues the flying deer.His grey dogs are panting
around him; his bow-string sounds in
the wind. Whether by the fount of
the rock, or by the stream of the
mountain thou liest; when the rushes are
nodding with the wind, and the mist
is flying over thee, let me approach
my love unperceived, and see him
from the rock. Lovely I saw thee
first by the aged oak; thou wert returning
tall from the chace; the fairest
among thy friends.13
Macpherson’s first poetic offerings enacted a kind of poetic ekphrasis,
whereby he represented in the English language, his personal memories and
remnants of Gaelic myths and beliefs. Ekphrasis is a term applied to the
narrative description of an object as if it were actually present, although it may
13 Burnett and Anderson Burnett, p. 70.
not be, and crucially, ‘through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on
the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its
meaning’.14 The common example used to explain how ekphrasis functions is
Keats’s ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’. In the second stanza of the poem Keats
exclaims:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.15
Unheard melodies that are nevertheless represented visually are ‘sweeter’ as
they lend themselves more readily to the transformative power of the viewer’s
imagination, and may be imagined as desired. Through amplifying and
expanding on an original the poet enters the realm of adaptation. Ekphrasis is an
approach to art and poetry evoking what is absent in order to make it present,
and in doing so the poet will inevitably adapt and amplify. This process is
integral to the transmission of oral poetry, and Macpherson’s Ossian poems are
rooted in this tradition. He does not function as a camera, or as an
Enlightenment mirror, but adds his own understanding and feeling to the works
that he inscribes for posterity.
14< http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/ekphrasis> [28.11.15]15 John Barnard, ed., Selected Poems: Keats, (London: Penguin, 2007) p. 191.
The emphasis on inflection within the theory of transmedialisation usefully
summarises how the oral poet inevitably brings something of his or herself to
the poetry transmitted, ensuring that poetry in this tradition is continually
evolving, inflected by the creative energies and memories of those who transmit
it, although not totally transformed. Inflection has been described as follows,
‘Whenever a poetic text is set into another medium without changes of its
content, the original medium is inflected rather than transformed’.16 Inflection
and adaptation are helpful concepts when trying to understand Macpherson’s
attempts to negotiate the tricky relationship between oral and written texts.
Although the sub title to the Fragments describes the poems as, ‘translated from
the Gaelic or Erse language’, the verses here are certainly not directly translated
as we might understand it, as he brings his poetic sensibilities to shape and
adapt the poetry to make it accessible and appealing to the reading public; yet
neither has he performed a total transformation, as he evokes the language,
imagery and emotion of the Gaelic poetry he knew as a child. It would be wrong
to speak of an original text here, as oral poetry is continually in a state of
transmission or flux, and there is no static original text. Macpherson attempts to
capture the oral poetry of his youth within the scribed text in a way that inflects
the Ossian poems. The medium of the Enlightenment written text is quite
different from the oral text, (albeit literary theory has long since opened up the
possibility of the fluidity of the written text) nevertheless, through the written 16 Karin Wenz, ‘Transmedialisation: An Interart Transfer’, <http://www.netzliteratur.net> [28.11.15]
text Macpherson attempts to convey the spirit or flavour of the oral poetry of his
childhood. This was a perilous experiment, and while a reading public
increasingly sensitive to Romantic ways of seeing and reading leapt on the
Ossian poems and the Fragments with great enthusiasm, Macpherson was
always vulnerable to accusation of fraud, as he was unable to produce an
original, static, scribed Gaelic poetic text, the source of his ‘translations’. This
was not due to his mendacity as a poet, but rather due to the very nature of oral
Gaelic poetry itself.
In terms of transmedialisation, presenting oral poetry in the very different
medium of the written text is an example of enactment. The enactment or
reformulation of the text in this way, profoundly affects both the reader and the
writer’s relationship with it. In the case of oral poetry, as we have seen the poet
is not the author, but rather an agent of transmission, simultaneously acting as a
collaborative producer and consumer of the text in a continual process of poetic
exchange and transmission. In enacting the written text, Macpherson inevitably
altered the nature of the poetry he was attempting to bring to a broad readership,
and in the process, fractured the connection between production and
consumption, pinning down a mobile, multi-layered form so that it obeyed the
rules of the Enlightenment text: written down and reflecting an earlier
experience, no longer a constituent part of that experience. Transmedialisation
provides a theoretical framework that helps us to understand the wildly
divergent responses to the Ossian poems – Johnson’s hostility was generated by
a perception that these poems flouted the rules of literature as he understood
them, and Macpherson’s enthusiastic supporters were passionate about them
precisely because through them they glimpsed another way of seeing and
experiencing the relation between life and poetry that would soon be understood
as Romanticism.
Transmedialisation and Reception of Macpherson in the Twenty-First Century
In April 2015 a conference on James Macpherson and his works took place in
Kingussie in the Highlands of Scotland. Macpherson’s Ossianic Legacy sprang
from an idea generated by the local community in Kingussie, and was jointly
organised by staff from UHI, in particular Dr Kristin Lindfield-Ott, our
Macpherson expert, and by Badenoch Heritage. The conference’s raison d’etre
was to highlight current re-evaluations of the poet, from the worlds of academia
and art, and to highlight to a home audience the significance of one of their
most successful yet overlooked sons. Contributions from academics were
complimented by presentations from practising artists, and drew on local
interest and expertise on Macpherson and Gaelic culture. In keeping with the
conference’s ethos of public engagement, a number of spin off activities and
projects have developed from it: a Macpherson trail, a children’s book, and
potentially a maze with a monument erected by Macpherson to memorialise his
mother moved to its centre (it is currently in the path of a major road widening
scheme). All these projects are designed to introduce new audiences to
Macpherson and to remind others about him. It is true that some established
scholars have expressed alarm about what they see as the trivialisation of
Macpherson and his works, yet this academic protectionism fails to recognise
the vital role that literature and culture plays in creating a sense of ownership
and belonging in local communities. These projects serve to remind the people
of Badenoch that Macpherson is one of their own, that their own history,
cultural memory and geographical experience is relevant to a wider audience
and is represented in these most significant poetical works. Nevertheless, there
is no escaping the fact that most people (i.e. non-academics) are not attracted by
the prospect of reading long eighteenth century narrative poetry! So, the
challenge is how to close the gap between Macpherson and public appreciation
and enjoyment of his works. This should not be an impossible task, after all,
Shakespeare is the poet of England, his plays are performed by many schools
although the language and ideas contained in them are not always immediately
accessible. Shakespeare of course has been embraced in Germany and Austria,
as was Macpherson; both distinctively national poets have transcended
boundaries to have an international significance. Similar difficulties of
understanding and interpretation could be associated with Burns, Scotland’s
national poet, but he has penetrated the national consciousness to such an extent
that readers at home and abroad are passionately committed to his work. The
crucial point is to make an imaginative link between the poet and his potential
audience, to create a climate where readers are prepared to put in the effort
required to appreciate the poetic value in his work.
The idea behind the Macpherson trail is to mark a walk taking in
Macpherson’s humble beginnings at Knappach, in what was a Black House
style cottage, to his splendid country house mansion Balavil. The team’s first
idea was to erect information boards to guide walkers and inform them about
Macpherson’s life and significance to the local area; however, Scottish Natural
Heritage, the body with responsibility for management of the countryside,
expressed concerns that boards of this kind would be intrusive in the landscape.
So, after a rethink Dr Lindfield-Ott came up with the idea of developing a
Macpherson app, that walkers could download to their phones, linking up with
the Ossianic Legacy website. Those on the Macpherson trail will physically
retrace the poet’s presence in the landscape, and in performing this version of
psycho-geography acquire greater understanding of the poet, his origins and life
journey, as well as a much deeper understanding of the imagery evoked in the
poetry: as they hear excerpts of the poems alluding lyrically to the hills, forests,
animals and weather of the Highlands, walkers will encounter these elemental
forces for themselves. The Macpherson trail will embody the most significant
aspects of transmedialisation, most obviously that of integration, as the poetry is
literally stepped out as the walk is followed, a merging of life and art wholly in
keeping with the tradition of Gaelic oral poetry – a combination of integration
and enactment. There is also an ekphrastic elaboration and adaptation here as
walkers are called on to imagine what life might have been like in eighteenth
century Badenoch – a conjuring into the present of what is now absent and
using the power of the imagination to bridge the gap between Macpherson’s
poetry and contemporary audiences. The concept of inflection is also helpful in
understanding the transmission of the poetry to a contemporary walker/listener.
As the oral poetry was inflected into the written text, it now becomes a digital
text, perceived through the senses as well as through the rational faculties –
arguably this walk offers the most complete experience of Macpherson’s poetry,
experienced through the body, the senses and the mind. Reception of the text in
this way entails inflection of the original into new modes of delivery, but it is
not a transformation or even a translation of an original, but rather a new mode
of transmission that is more accessible to a modern day audience. It is arguable
that the digital text allows for an approximation of the kind of interaction of
production and consumption that marks oral culture, and that is not available
with the static written text, thus taking the walker/listener/user closer to the
holistic nature of traditional oral culture and literature. The maze will operate in
a similar way, yet rather than encompassing a sweeping landscape, it will offer
a journey to the centre of Macpherson’s poetic world, where the imagination is
prioritised over external realities, in an extension of the adaptation and
inflection we have already seen as integral to transmedialisation.
The children’s book will offer a unique opportunity to introduce younger
readers, and the local community, including local businesses, to Macpherson.
The team has planned a series of workshops resulting in a book authored and
illustrated by children, that should appeal to visitors on holiday to the area, and
can be distributed by local businesses. It is hoped that this will raise
Macpherson’s profile with the people living in Badenoch, as well as further
afield. The workshops will be facilitated by art and creative writing tutors, and
the children will be presented with accessible excerpts of the poetry and asked
to paint and write their creative responses to these poetic stimuli. In addition,
the children will visit the Highland Folk Museum, where there is a
reconstructed black house township, to see exactly the kind of humble
surroundings the poet grew up in. It is hoped that this field trip will help to
inspire them to write their own story based on Macpherson’s eventful and
adventurous life. The intended result is a book written by children, for children.
So where is transmedialisation in all this?
In taking account of the significance of Macpherson’s personal history and
adventures, of which the poetry is but a part, this book will manifest the
principle of integration – a key aspect of transmedialisation, where life and
artistic activity are inseparable. Indeed, in an entertaining game of historical
revisionism we might wonder if the Ossian poems would exist at all, if the
playwright John Home had not fortuitously bumped into Macpherson at a
bowling green at Moffat in the Scottish borders. Macpherson showed Home
manuscripts of Gaelic poetry, and apparently also spoke verses which Home
encouraged him to record - the results published as Fragments of Ancient
Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760). The Ossian poems then,
can be seen as the product of serendipidity, rather than the spontaneous
expression of Macpherson’s poetic genius, and prompted by a proto-Romantic
taste for ancient works. Inflection is also present in the way that the children’s
book will not attempt to translate or even transform the original poems, but to
take excerpts from them and produce their own poetic responses. Macpherson’s
original works are adapted and transmitted in a new context, that hopefully
makes them more accessible and will stimulate readers to explore his works in
greater depth. The process of creating their own visual and poetic work
prompted by Macpherson’s verses, also figures the enactment of the original
text, as these young poets experience the distinctive creative process involved
with oral poetry, where they act as both consumers and producers, reinterpreting
an earlier tradition in order to perpetuate it.