Disruptions of Time: Found Manuscripts, Hogg’s Influence, and Queer Time in Helen McClory’s Bitterhall (2021)

Abstract

This paper considers Helen McClory’s 2021 novel Bitterhall as one that self-reflexively engages with Scottish Gothic literary traditions, interrogating its own relationship with James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and expressing authorial concerns around influence and the production of derivative pastiche. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a specifically queer reading of Confessions, and this article finds a parallel with Bitterhall, suggesting Tom’s anxiety about his sexuality is what makes him vulnerable to the power of a mysterious diary. Drawing from Timothy C. Baker’s exploration of the found manuscript, this paper further considers Bitterhall’s relationship with time and temporal disruption as queer, indicating how the novel’s cyclical narrative style and collapsing of past and present disrupt linearity and indicate a history of queer identities. This paper argues for McClory’s inclusion in wider discussions of contemporary Scottish Gothic and indicates the potential for fresh engagements with Scottish literary traditions.

1. Introduction

Helen McClory has published two novels and two short story collections in the past ten years, earning accolades including the Saltire First Book Award for On the Edges of Vision (2015). While McClory has not yet been considered part of a larger literary movement, much of her work sits comfortably in the realm of the Gothic, and Bitterhall (2021) was described as “a neo-gothic yarn” by Gary Kaill in The Skinny (Kaill 2021). This tendency towards the Gothic comes through in a number of ways, including the depiction of uncanny objects and scenes of sacrifice, yet a specificallyScottish Gothic tradition is perhaps best represented in McClory’s interest in found manuscripts and textual material.

While the use of found manuscripts has been central to Gothic texts from beyond Scotland including Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the motif has an extensive history in Scottish writing. Timothy Baker in Contemporary Scottish Gothic traces the trope of amanuscript being discovered to “James Macpherson’s publication of the first Ossian poems in 1761”, which were marketed as being ancient texts found by Macpherson, rather than as recently written by Macpherson himself (Baker 2014, p. 54). The rediscovered manuscript became “embedded in much later Scottish Gothic fiction” and was again employed by James Hogg in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (Davison and Germanà 2017, p. 4). Authors have long since played with the concept of discovered papers as the “idea of a text that is not what it seems, or what it claims to be, haunts the national imagination”, with notable examples including Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), and James Robertson’s The Fanatic (2000) (Baker 2014, p. 54). McClory similarly engages with this concept, and Mayhem & Death (2018) establishes that strange handwritten books are a keen interest in her work. The collection consists of thirty-three short stories and a novella titled ‘Powdered Milk’. In this longer narrative, readers follow Maddie and a team of researchers in an underwater base, when they are unexpectedly disconnected from any contact with the surface, and their food supply drops abruptly. Many details in this novella will be familiar to the collection’s readers. In ‘Souterrain’, the first story of the collection, Frances mourns the loss of her daughter, Madeleine. Frances travels to Skye to grieve and thinks about “the silent base underwater thousands of miles away where her daughter had gone, and in which all the occupants, including her daughter, were now long held to be dead” (McClory 2018, p. 15). Readers learn that these narratives are both about the same person, and from Frances’ story, they know that Maddie and her colleagues will not be rescued from the base. In connecting these narratives, McClory also provides a detail that reshapes how the stories are read as a whole: Frances finds a chapbook of short stories written by Maddie as a child with the title ‘Mayhem & Death’, described as “full of dark and atmospheric tales” (McClory 2018, p. 1). This detail suggests that the contents of McClory’s book can be read as if they were written by Maddie in her youth, playing with perceptions of authorship through the found text.

Baker suggests that while forged manuscripts are no longer intended to trick readers into accepting their legitimacy as the Ossian poems were, “they nevertheless suggest a sustained interest in questions of textual authenticity” (Baker 2014, p. 55). Certainly, the authenticity of Maddie’s chapbook is questionable as Frances considers how the material and style of the works feel inconsistent with Maddie’s age at the supposed time of writing, yet the interests of the book map onto her own in childhood. Neither are the two stories in agreement about events: Maddie’s team can find no sign of life on the coast of Guam and thus suspect a widescale catastrophe, yet Frances shows how life on land has continued normally. The collection refuses any singular interpretation, its conflicts suggesting the difficulty in presenting any objective truth of events in a narrative.

For Baker, what is key about this trope is its frequent use “to highlight the problematic relationship between text, language, and the past”, illustrating the impossibility of a text objectively representing the past (Baker 2014, p. 55). In McClory’s work, handwritten found manuscripts are employed precisely to explore these concerns and ideas around the obscurity of the past, most potently and powerfully in Bitterhall.

While McClory is ostensibly drawing from a wider literary tradition through the use of this motif, the specific influence of Hogg’s Confessions is apparent, and Bitterhall self-consciously articulates the complexity of its relationship with this influence. In this paper, an interest in the past introduced by the found manuscript is broadened into a wider interest in time in Bitterhall, where Hogg’s influence on narrative structure complicates or ‘queers’ a linear chronology. Considered alongside a queer interpretation of the novel’s events, this paper ultimately identifies how McClory’s work engages with Scottish Gothic literary traditions and Confessions in a specifically queer way.

2. Hogg’s Shadow

This novel centres around an antique diary that Daniel Lightfoot steals from the home of his wealthy friend Mark, as he is drawn to the handwriting and its “quality of welcome dalliance across the page” (McClory 2021, p. 7). It is supposedly written in the early nineteenth century by James Lennoxlove of Bitterhall, yet Bitterhall cannot be found on any map, nor does Lennoxlove’s name appear on any online ancestry pages. The dates of his entries clash and conflict and appear out of order, as “[w]inter appears after summer, autumn is whenever, the leaves constantly drifting in the woods that are never cut down” (McClory 2021, p. 137). Daniel’s new flatmate, the beautiful Tom Mew, is also immediately taken with the book and cannot seem to put it down again. His girlfriend, Órla McCleod, and Daniel become increasingly concerned as Tom gets lost in the mystery of the diary, appearing sallow, distracted, and as though there is “something inhabiting him” (McClory 2021, p. 163). The novel ends with Daniel and Órla rescuing Tom from a cliffside after days of disappearance, and all three holding hands as they contemplate how to “keep going” (McClory 2021, p. 355).

For reviewers, the influence of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is visible. Stuart Kelly for The Scotsman identifies McClory as writing in the same “great Scottish gothic tradition” as Confessions and R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Alistair Braidwood for Snack similarly touches on McClory and Hogg’s shared interest in where “the psychological and the supernatural meet” (Kelly 2021; Braidwood 2021).

Any similarities in terms of plot are not immediately obvious. In Hogg’s narrative, Robert Wringhim provides an account of his experiences beginning with his childhood in Scotland in the late 1600s, where he was educated by his mother’s minister with fundamentalist Calvinist beliefs. He was given this man’s surname rather than his father’s, raising concerns about his paternity, and he found himself unfavourably compared to his popular brother, George Colwan, who took their father’s surname. At eighteen years old, Robert is told he is ‘elect’ and predestined for salvation regardless of his actions, and he soon thereafter meets Gil-Martin, a stranger who can take on the appearance of any man. Gil-Martin engages Robert in the task of “destroying and rooting out” enemies of the Church, including George (Hogg [1824] 2008, p. 92). Their increasingly fraught partnership continues until Robert finds himself with a long lapse in his memory and he is accused of additional crimes he cannot recall. Gil-Martin continues to torment Robert until he takes his own life and leaves behind his manuscript. These ‘memoirs and confessions’ are presented to the reader by an editor who includes his own extensive introduction.

Despite their outward differences, Bitterhall’s connection with Confessions surfaces in multiple details, like the motif of doubling and of a harassed character losing their sense of identity and track of time. Órla, a PhD researcher, mentions being “in George Square, most of the time” recalling the University of Edinburgh’s central campus in a city where Confessions also centres its action (McClory 2021, p. 120). On two occasions, the word “sinner” is used by characters: Daniel’s friend Mark calls him a sinner the morning after a party, and Órla self-describes with the same term when looking through the diary (McClory 2021, pp. 136, 81). Even Lennoxlove’s first name being ‘James’ seems to gesture to Hogg himself.

Most vitally though, McClory’s novel centres around a journal handwritten by a dead man, not dissimilar to the confessions discovered in Hogg’s text. Lennoxlove’s diary is compelling with its “sinuous” entries and the thread of “untruthfulness” that runs through it (McClory 2021, pp. 241, 138). This quality is one shared with Hogg’s novel too. James Robertson, whose own fictions are stuffed with manuscripts, speaks of the compelling ambiguity of Confessions. He notes that its design resists a firm interpretation, and its inconsistencies and contradictions draw “a restless reader back to it again and again” (Robertson 2021). An obsession with Lennoxlove’s diary is in this way paralleled with a national writerly interest in Confessions. As Lennoxlove obsesses Tom, Hogg obsesses McClory.

McClory is not alone in this preoccupation. Gillian Hughes notes the widespread influence of Confessions which is most potently felt in Scottish fiction: a 2010 advertisement in The London Review of Books noted that Ian Rankin “along with almost every other Scottish writer of any note” names the novel as a major influence (quoted in Hughes 2012, p. 142). It is a text which is “much read, greatly respected, and profoundly influential”, and in engaging with Hogg’s work as a landmark text, McClory is in turn engaging with a legacy of national influence (Hughes 2012, p. 146). Angela Wright indicates that a distinctive quality of the Scottish Gothic is “its minutely detailed attention to the artefacts which give rise to narratives” through which it debates processes of uncovering and interrogating history (Wright 2007, p. 76). In Bitterhall’s engagements with Hogg’s literary influence, McClory is less concerned with a broadly national history, but explicitly engaging with Scottish literary history.

McClory self-consciously interrogates her novel’s engagements with Hogg’s ideas of duplication and the double, deploying these concerns in a new guise through Daniel’s work. Daniel works in the basement of the university library with “the specialist 3D scanner and printer” that he uses to create copies of important and rare objects, including nine-hundred-year-old bibles (McClory 2021, p. 35). Its abilities to duplicate are, however, limited. When Tom receives a stuffed toy “horse-mermaid”, or kelpie, from his work in marketing a vodka company, he believes that it contains a Wi-Fi enabled listening device. Daniel places this toy within the machine, but rather than recreating the intricate mechanisms inside it, the copier simply replicates a similar weight. The aesthetics of the original can be borrowed, but crafting something with its nuance and intention is not quite possible. As a book heavily influenced by Hogg’s Confessions, Bitterhall plays with the notion that a simple replication of aesthetics may make for a poorer copy. Baker suggests that the use of the found manuscript is often pastiche, expressing nothing more than “a desire to mimic earlier texts” (McClory 2021, p. 56). Bitterhall, with its own take on the heirloom trope of the found manuscript, articulates these authorial anxieties around influence, and the hollow replication of a kelpie becomes an allegory for poor or shallow mimics of Hogg. The specific choice of a creature from Scottish folktale tradition creates a firmer connection with Hogg, given the prevalence of folk tradition in his work. In scenes of modern replication, McClory offers a nuanced engagement with recurrent national literary influences, aware of its pitfalls.

If the kelpie toy comes to represent this novel as an echo of Hogg’s, it is literally buried on final page and thus ends itself, though it will tellingly “never rot” (McClory 2021, p. 355). Though concluded for this novel, an interest in replicating these Scottish Gothic influences still lingers, and the existence of Confessions indicates that a grave may be disinterred.

3. ‘My Life Was Circles’: Queer Narratives

Unlike Robert’s confessions in Hogg’s novel, Lennoxlove’s diary itself is not offered in its entirety to readers. Rather than presenting “two distinct narratives of almost the same events” from the editor and the found manuscript, McClory provides three voices recalling the same events (Sedgwick [1985] 2016, p. 98). Daniel, Órla and Tom share the narration of Bitterhall, delivering their version of events in turn. Each section is introduced with the full name of its author, and many individually named chapters are offered within each section. There are three large narrative sections, before narration changes hands more frequently in the final sections. Only the last pages are attributed to “Us” where no one voice takes precedence (McClory 2021, p. 353).

The text of Bitterhall is posited as if it has been written by the trio to process and articulate their recent past. Órla suggests she and Daniel are actively writing it together, though “doing it separately so that [the] stories that emerge are individual readings, not conjoined” (McClory 2021, p. 96). Their distinct perspectives are intentionally offered to provide multiple viewpoints to unexplainable events, both corroborating and challenging each other’s stories. Órla states this approach is in “deference to an idea of reality”, where a singular authoritative narrative is not wholly possible (McClory 2021, p. 96).

Their awareness around the artificiality of the project is pronounced. All three narrators are writing retrospectively, and in his first chapter, Daniel muses on the difficulty of selecting a tense to write in:

When exactly is this happening, and to whom is it happening, and who is making it happen? We begin to become tricky, don’t we, when I write in the first person. What tense do my intrusive thoughts manifest in?

(McClory 2021, p. 4)

The complexity of time for characters is evident, as they are aware of how the process of writing remakes or alters meaning, and influences a sense of time too. This self-awareness is a quality shared with Hogg’s novel, as Penny Fielding notes that “Confessions’ remarkable attention to its own status as a text has attracted a variety of readings attentive to the ways in which a book is both literally and figuratively bound up with its own processes of writing and publication” (Fielding 2012, p. 135). Hogg’s Confessions grapples with publication practices through the narrative of the editor and the fictionalised story of the novel’s creation. It is a novel “intimately concerned with the preservation and correct transmission of a manuscript”, playing with its own existence as a text (Wright 2007, p. 76). McClory retains this self-awareness and playfulness, yet centres attention on relationships between authors and their readers. For instance, Daniel notes the potential for authors to manipulate time in their fiction to affect the reader when he begins his narrative with him sitting on a garden swing in late August. He acknowledges that the choice was intentionally made to positively sway a reader’s opinions of him: “I want you to love me”, he explains (McClory 2021, p. 4, emphasis in original). The characters’ clear interests in writing metafictionally and speaking directly to their readers highlight McClory’s own authorial interests in metafiction.

An engagement with author and reader relationships is established before Daniel’s narrative even begins as Bitterhall takes its epigraph from Hélène Cixous’ ‘The Hiss of the Axe’ in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998). It begins: “And to think that there will be readers of our book. They will open it. And they’ll make fun of the murkiness of our night” (McClory 2021, n.p.). The choice of epigraph establishes a firm interest in Bitterhall’s relationship with its readership, and blurs the roles of authors, readers, and characters. Cixous’ interests in intertextuality and revenants are recalled with her inclusion, assisting in foregrounding the novel’s key themes, but a concern with pursuing truth is most prevalent. Using works by Alexander Pushkin and Honoré de Balzac to explore processes of reading and writing and the ephemeralness of truth, Cixous proposes that when truth “bursts forth, it will vanish on the spot” (Cixous [1998] 2005, p. 44). The elusiveness of a singular truth is central to Confessions and Bitterhall, and so ‘murkiness’ becomes Bitterhall’s primary literary strategy. McClory’s characters repeat scenes already relayed by others, retracing the same material from new angles, and conveying the difficulty of obtaining an objective truth as they differ in their perspectives. Their overlap and repetition deny a linear reading of events and instead invite readers to revisit and reinterpret them anew each time.

With this approach, the novel frequently stresses the importance of revisiting the past and resists standard chronology, which is reflected in chapter titles like “Repeat”, “Recycle”, and “Circling” (McClory 2021, pp. 115, 238, 292). Another way that a sense of repetition is visible is in how Tom thinks of his life in ‘circles’. He has a daily routine cycle, a sex cycle that involves finding and discarding new sexual partners, and a “fantasy life cycle” which as a child involved imagining his parents were not dead and his life was different (McClory 2021, p. 209). Time in the Gothic is often understood in terms of repetitions, as Robert Miles notes that the world of ghosts in the genre is “timeless, circular, repetitious”, yet Tom’s rejection of normative time may also be read as specifically queer (Miles 2020, p. 445). Jack Halberstam indicates how “the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” inform a normative understanding of a lifetime that priorities linear progression and reproductivity (Halberstam 2005, p. 2). Yet, Halberstam also illustrates how queer subcultures can create alternative temporalities by permitting people to follow “logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Halberstam 2005, p. 2). This is an approach to time visible early in Bitterhall, when Tom joins Daniel’s “eternal non-home” of a rental house at the start of the novel, rather than pursuing traditional milestones of heterosexual life experiences, including marriage and home ownership (McClory 2021, p. 8). In a contemporary setting where more traditional milestones are increasingly delayed, Tom taking a room in a flat share may not read as a deviance from normativity but simply as a financial reality. Yet, Tom comments on how the inheritance of his “grandmother’s money softened” the cost of necessities, and Órla notes that Tom purposely does not pursue living with her, which takes “the pressure off” their relationship (McClory 2021, pp. 99, 217). What appeals to him about Órla is that she is “a girl who seemed like she wasn’t easily hurt and would be a good friend once it was all inevitably over”, where the relationship’s breakdown is unavoidable to him due to his repeated avoidance of progression (McClory 2021, p. 217). Tom cannot see a way ‘forward’ in this relationship and remains committed to his circular lifestyle with plans to “move on at the next opportunity” (McClory 2021, p. 213).

Rather than pursuing linear progress, Bitterhall establishes a queer relationship with time through its looping narrative and Tom’s avoidance of normative temporal progression. However, when Tom meets Daniel, he understands that his new flatmate will disrupt his cycles: “This is not a circle this is an end, a gap, a plummeting point” (McClory 2021, p. 215). A queer interpretation Bitterhall further illuminates how queerness shapes the novel and its relationships with time.

4. Suppressed Sexualities

As a key text in academic enquiry into the Scottish Gothic since André Gide revitalised interest in it in the 1940s, there have been a range of approaches to Confessions. Penny Fielding indicates that the novel is “one on which critics have plotted ideas about internal psychic life, social organisation, political ideology and language”, and notes the queer interpretation proposed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Fielding 2012, p. 139). Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) analyses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels in English and argues that social relations in these texts were often built around a triangle between two men and one woman where “two males are rivals for a female” (Sedgwick [1985] 2016, p. 48). For Sedgwick, the bonding between men through women takes precedence, and the woman in this triangle is displaced and isolated. Hogg’s Confessions struggles with this dynamic, however. Sedgwick’s reading of the novel identifies Robert Wringhim’s devaluation of women, where he explicitly has brought himself “to despise, if not to abhor, the beauty of women” (Hogg [1824] 2008, p. 127). Consequently, Robert is unable to use women to mediate male bonding with other men as his brother George does, by visiting brothels with friends and being accompanied by male friends on a trip to meet a sweetheart. Sedgwick argues that “Robert cannot desire women enough to be able to desire men through them” (Sedgwick [1985] 2016, p. 102). Robert’s failure to manage his desire results in him becoming socially feminised and abjected, and open to exploitation by Gil-Martin later in the narrative, where “a genuinely erotic language of romantic infatuation between men is introduced” (Sedgwick [1985] 2016, p. 103).

McClory’s novel picks up this queer strand in Hogg’s work, exploring these ideas more overtly. The reasons for Tom’s obsession with Lennoxlove’s diary are not immediately apparent to Daniel and Órla, who consider whether it is the historical detail or scenic depictions that make it compelling. Órla states that “Tom probably saw other things in it that he liked”, though she cannot say what precisely (McClory 2021, p. 138). Baker asserts that a text is static, and “any meaning it might have is generated only in relation to its reader”, and Daniel and Tom create similar meanings in their reading of the diary (Baker 2014, p. 75). It tells of a “new person” in Lennoxlove’s life, and while Órla does see that Lennoxlove “seems to go a long way to avoid saying the gender”, she does not dwell further on this detail (McClory 2021, p. 135). When Daniel first discovered this evasiveness, his “eyes widened”, the lack of specificity opening the diary to a queer interpretation of interest to him (McClory 2021, p. 57). Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà suggest that multiple recent Scottish fictions with palimpsestic structures are engaged with ‘[c]hallenging the definition—and existence—of a singular truth”, like Bitterhall is, where “the coexistence of multiple voices and, frequently, multiple texts, erodes the foundations of hegemonic authority, allowing a plethora of ‘other’ voices to emerge” (Davison and Germanà 2017, p. 5). Bitterhall certainly continues in this interest, with its three narrators and engagement with Lennoxlove’s text. The ‘other’ voice that emerges here is one of a queer ancestor.

Daniel is almost swept into the diary when first encountering this; his vision narrows, the “world was closed down” and he smells the woodsmoke of Lennoxlove’s time; yet he gets up, spends time with his flatmate Badr, and “normal life” resumes (McClory 2021, p. 57). It is a perfume “of woodsmoke, cut across with sex heat semen” that Tom later encounters, establishing the smell as a marker of immersion in the diary (McClory 2021, pp. 293–94). What appeals to Daniel in the diary also appeals to Tom, but Daniel’s comparative comfort in his sexuality and reality prevent him from the same obsessiveness that Tom falls victim to. Tom, importantly, is not comfortable in exploring his sexuality, and in Lennoxlove’s hinted queerness he identifies a kind of historical parallel with himself, someone also experiencing a suppressed and hidden queer attraction.

The norms of Robert Wringhim’s period that concealed and denied queerness are different for Tom in the contemporary moment. Queer identities are far more culturally visible and socially accepted and Daniel’s existence attests to the possibility of living as a queer man, yet Tom struggles with any revision of his identity built around an “established sexuality” of heterosexuality (McClory 2021, p. 256). Tom reassures himself that it would not be an issue if he were gay (saying “[n]ot that it mattered if I were gay”), yet he struggles with his own attraction to Daniel (McClory 2021, p. 241). While in Daniel’s workplace with him after hours, Tom worries about losing control and kissing his flatmate, and states that the thought did not come from him but from his surroundings, “it’s the room itself!” (McClory 2021, p. 240). Tom conceives of his attraction to Daniel as an external influence, manipulated by the environment or the diary, rather than an internal part of the self, and he is consistently uneasy when approaching the potential for his own queerness. He insists “sexuality didn’t come into it” when speaking about his experiences, yet upon first meeting Daniel—before ever reading the diary—he “was afraid of an unknown pressure of wanting” (McClory 2021, pp. 215, 217). Cixous’ epigraph suggests the proximity, if not the inseparability, of fear and desire felt in the approach to truth (“desire, that is, fear, that is, desire”), and this is precisely the case for Tom as he confronts the reality of his response to Daniel (McClory 2021, n.p.). As Tom is increasingly impacted by the diary, Daniel and Tom’s mysterious live-in landlord Dr Minto muses over whether his actions are a “habitual oddness or sudden onset queerness”, his specific choice of terms hinting that Tom’s strange behaviour may be read as a recent struggle with sexuality (McClory 2021, p. 157).

Tom is drawn in by the representation of a history that is not straightforwardly heterosexual, and by the identification he might find there. Carolyn Dinshaw suggests that a “queer desire for history” is “a desire for a different kind of past, for a history that is not straight”, with a generous use of history as a term that touches on past time but is not strictly about narrative or causal sequences of events (Dinshaw et al. 2007, p. 185). Dinshaw suggests the potential to form communities across time by “collapsing time through affective contact between marginalized people now and then”, and the diary’s intimate expression offers this (Dinshaw et al. 2007, p. 178). The sensitivity and beauty with which scenes are rendered make Daniel cry upon first reading it, in “[r]elief”, and because he is wondering if he “could ever be loved like Lennoxlove loved the world” (McClory 2021, p. 8). For Tom, this manuscript legitimises his experiences and identity by providing historical representation of another like him and providing a sense of connection.

Yet, it is not simply a sense of connection or community that Tom gains. Fred Botting argues that from the nineteenth century “[d]oubles, alter egos, mirrors and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices” of Gothic fiction (Botting [1996] 1999, pp. 7–8, emphasis in original). What is disturbing to Tom within his own identity here is his sexuality, and his resistance to acknowledge any queer attraction is made more distressing by the sense of shame he feels for it. After a party at Mark’s where he kisses Daniel and Órla joins them, his narrative reports: “I am fucking ashamed, of course I am, don’t even ask” (McClory 2021, p. 313). He reiterates he is “ashamed” again though he does not know why anymore and speaks about how his fantasy of “union with another” was “[f]ucking shameful” (McClory 2021, pp. 318, 210). Lennoxlove’s hinted queerness in a period of repression echoes Tom’s own experience, and so he becomes a spectral double for Tom, appearing to him in “absurd apertures” and “reflections”, before manifesting in more extreme ways (McClory 2021, p. 260). Lennoxlove appears as an intangible manifestation of Tom’s anxiety around his sexuality.

Another sense of doubling surfaces in the similarities between Daniel and Órla. Daniel describes Órla as exactly his height with eyes “of the same long shape and heavy lashes, and brown hair” only a shade lighter than his (McClory 2021, p. 18). Quickly becoming friends, the two find parallels in each other, and Daniel even refers to her as a “twin” (McClory 2021, p. 23). Their likeness and Tom’s closeness with both seems to facilitate the transference, or sharing, of his desire between them, and by extension between other men and women.

A discovery made later in the novel strengthens this queer interpretation of Lennoxlove. Within the found diary, Daniel finds a further “confession” secreted in the lining of the book dated to 1820, the same decade as Confessions’ publication (McClory 2021, p. 307). This additional material reveals that the aristocratic James Lennoxlove is not the author of the diary, but rather James O’Riorden, a servant and “no one of importance” (McClory 2021, p. 306). James ‘Lennoxlove’ has never existed but is simply “based on a man of a different name in a similar social position”: O’Riorden’s master who is also tellingly named James (McClory 2021, p. 306). Their sameness in name reduces their difference further. Tom’s experiences of O’Riorden’s memories reveal that he was in love with his master, who was aware “how deep [O’Riorden’s] affection [had] been for him since […] childhood”, though it is an affection that is not openly returned (McClory 2021, p. 309). The two Jameses, master and groom, are combined in this third James Lennoxlove, blending their perspectives, fantasies, and memories in this artificial creation. Tom experiences their relationship seemingly from both sides: feeling as though he has “been working in the stables all day and loving my master” and also being called “sir” by the groom as if he has become the master (McClory 2021, pp. 297, 350). Through Lennoxlove, he experiences both.

These multiple viewpoints are offered, but the diary carefully omits many details, and the specifics of the relationship are never clear. Baker indicates the “difficulty of using language to access the past”, and this diary cannot and will not provide the full story (Baker 2014, p. 56). In the diary, ‘Lennoxlove’ notes that he witnesses the murder of a maid by a groomsman at a ball, though inconsistencies in his reflections raise questions about the nature of his involvement. Lennoxlove mentions “seeing the glint on the knife and feeling the heat rising from the wound” which Tom suspects he could not have done without being closer to the killing than initially suggested (McClory 2021, p. 228). In O’Riorden’s confession, more details are offered around the events of that night, and suggest the murder was committed by his master, and O’Riorden was involved in covering up the crime.

Another key detail is that the gender of the murder victim changes. O’Riorden’s master has ridden back to the stable after the ball with a frightened young man in common clothing, but O’Riorden purports to “have no idea to what end James brought the man to the stable” (McClory 2021, p. 309). The scene suggests a violent, sexually motivated encounter, where this stranger was killed by James in part for refusing to stop shouting which drew attention to them. Recast as a maid in the diary’s version, the queer subtext of the murder is disguised as well as the perpetrator’s identity, repressing deeper the truth of the event and the presence of queer desire. In Tom’s experiences of the past, he hears master-James ask this common man, “you don’t want something true at last?” positioning queer sex as a truthful expression of the self after a long period of suppression. Of course, events are complicated further, as Órla reports that Tom talks in his sleep about a knife and says, “get it in her” (McClory 2021, p. 131, emphasis mine). It is after all, a “strange, unfathomable death”, undoubtedly at the centre of the diary’s concerns and demanding recurrent investigation (McClory 2021, p. 217).

O’Riorden’s confession states that the reason that he did not tell anyone about the murder was not due to his loyalty to his master, but due to “shame” (McClory 2021, p. 309). He feels shame for his involvement, and about how the master seeks to manipulate his love for him by entering them into a blood oath. Rachel M. Friars indicates that “Gothic articulations of queer sexuality have been linked to representations of monster figures, especially in the nineteenth century” when the diary is supposedly written, and the diary’s Jameses certainly become monstrous figures for Tom (Friars 2023, p. 464). It is not simply the existence of queer sexuality which makes the Jameses monstrous, but the repression of that queerness which seems to corrupt their desire into something darker. For instance, Tom hits Daniel when the moment passes after he, Daniel and Órla kiss at Mark’s party, suddenly self-aware. He lashes out in this way before vanishing for days and becoming increasingly vulnerable to the diary’s power. Seemingly, the repressed will come roaring back out in unpredictable, dangerous ways.

5. Out of Time

This monstrosity is possible because the diary functions as gateway for ‘Lennoxlove’, as Tom writes: “The universe had been opened […] and through that fissure something hissed completely silently and completely unreal, but only for now” (McClory 2021, p. 234). Baker explains the complexity of time for a found manuscript, as an object which “purports to be a marker of an historical moment, the moment of writing, but signifies exclusively in the present” (Baker 2014, p. 70). Operating in these two times, rather than continuously, Lennoxlove’s diary collapses the time of its writing and the time of Tom’s reading. In bringing those temporalities together, it can function as a conduit and portal between them.

Firstly, Tom is pulled into the past. Minto suggests Tom is suffering from a “[d]isruption of time” and is “lost in another century entirely”, and Tom also believes he has been transported into the past: “I went into the place in the diary” (McClory 2021, pp. 158, 298). At a psychological level, such a comment might suggest that the lyricism of the diary has transported Tom as a reader to its setting, the use of the word ‘into’ indicating an absorption. With a supernatural perspective, the diary literally moves him back through time.

More than this, the past seeps into the present, as objects seem capable of phasing into Tom’s possession as if thrown by an unseen figure. Old-fashioned shoes, socks, breeches, a shift, and a tweed jacket appear before a silver knife with a bone hilt materialises at a diner and is corporeal enough for Tom to cut “a divot out of the flesh” on his finger (McClory 2021, p. 264). ‘James’ is capable too of inhabiting the present, appearing in mirrors and reflections. The image is reflected in the novel’s cover art which shows a human figure and a broken reflection in a puddle at their feet that faces away as if independent. Minto is able to perceive James as a spectre, and ultimately James comes to inhabit Tom himself, as Tom becomes “Tom or not-Tom” to Órla as if two people are within the same body, (McClory 2021, p. 198). Kissing Daniel, Tom keenly feels this duality: “Two selves crashing together overlapping two selves imaginary or from long past histories, I didn’t care, I pushed my tongue in” (McClory 2021, p. 302). Hogg’s Robert similarly struggles with the “the singular delusion that [he] was two persons”, yet Tom’s doubling operates differently in time (Hogg [1824] 2008, p. 171). Tom is enmeshed with his historical counterparts, simultaneously himself and another, and thus granted permission to act upon impulse and instinct; his desire for Daniel, who looks so like groom-James. The doubling collapses the men’s differences and illustrates their commonalities, despite the two hundred years that separate them. The presence of queer desire through time is evident.

McClory explores how books as objects tangibly connect the present with the past, demonstrating a clear interest in material book culture. A chapter titled ‘Skin’ centres on the history of a thousand-year-old book of religious devotional poems that Órla seeks to study in her doctoral research on “the human detail in medieval manuscripts”; or, more simply, “meaningful errata and doodles through the ages” (McClory 2021, p. 31). The process of this physical book’s creation is detailed in an extensive passage which traces the origins of a book materials to the living calf whose vellum will be used in its creation. The book becomes a record of the past, logging the scribes’ and illustrators’ work to the marks made by a candle on a bookcase, to the drawings added by a soldier’s child. The diary brings its past into the present to be ‘read’ and interpreted, and it is eventually appreciated by the university as a “great vessel” (McClory 2021, p. 123). Crucially, this understanding of books as ‘vessels’ suggests that they are containers or transporting vehicles that make movement between times possible. Baker acknowledges the strangeness of the found manuscript in this way, as “it must exist simultaneously as an object, as temporal event, and as an opening-up of, or escape from, reification” (Baker 2014, p. 73). McClory’s use of the diary as a found manuscript does exactly this, existing simultaneously as a document recording a queer past, a mechanism for collapsing time, and a vehicle for allowing James to appear as a manifestation of repressed queer desire.

6. Conclusions

McClory’s interest in interrogating Scottish Gothic traditions is echoed in Órla’s eagerness to study a thousand-year-old book. She acknowledges her daring in attempting to approach it, suggesting that “surely everything that could be was known about it” (McClory 2021, p. 123). Yet, she still is determined to “find out the right question to ask of it that it had not been asked before” so she will be permitted to keep touching it (McClory 2021, p. 123). This is Bitterhall’s concern, too: how to approach its Gothic influences in new ways that justify continuing to engage with them.

Baker indicates how texts like Andrew Crumey’s Mr Mee (2001) and A.L. Kennedy’s So I am Glad (1996) use Gothic elements within other genres or modes to bypass the limitations of the trope and allow “for a greater reflection on the relationship between language and experience. Such novels are not reliant on generic tropes as simple metafictional or postmodern devices, but actively engage the reader” (Baker 2014, p. 57). While Bitterhall securely operates in Gothic mode, it still manages to engage the reader by denying a singular authorial narrative, channelling reader attention to textual relationships, and through its characters’ own awareness of the artificiality of writing and their inability to wholly articulate an experience with language. As the lumpen copied kelpie toy cannot maintain the intricacies of its original, Bitterhall contemplates itself as a kind of replica.

In self-consciously playing with Hogg’s continued influence, Bitterhall recontextualises elements of Confessions in the twenty-first century, and does this through a more explicitly queer lens. It teases out what Sedgwick identifies as queer elements of Robert’s character which open him to ‘possession’ by Gil-Martin anew in Tom, where his sexuality becomes key to understanding his haunting experiences. In considering the novel as queer, its non-linearity permits readers to revisit the past and uncover suppressed queer histories. The found manuscript’s collapsing of time works specifically to explore a desire for queer community and considers how the repression of queerness haunts and produces monstrosity.

Bitterhall thus sits firmly in the realm of queer Scottish Gothic with its manipulation of time, the doubling of bodies, and the presence of queer characters and desires. In these ways, it is closely related to other texts in the genre noted by Kay Turner, including Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room (2002), Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (2004), and Zoë Strachan’s Ever Fallen in Love (2011) (Turner 2017). McClory’s novel demonstrates that contemporary Scottish authors are still finding ways to reinterrogate and explore Scotland’s literary Gothic traditions with relation to queerness.