Georg Lukacs, Hungarian Marxist philosopher, enthused in his “The Historical Novel”, and it was to become the standard work on the subject, that Sir Walter Scott managed despite his inordinately reactionary, pro-aristocratic stance to write progressive literature. Lukacs claimed that Scott developed “typical’ characters in his novels, and these characters dramatized major social conflicts, highlighting the flux of transformation – the moment in ‘time’, in history – rather than depicting stasis. Lukacs championed such novels over what was for him the aberrant experimentation of a Franz Kafka or a James Joyce – formal innovation changed nothing, he opined. If he saw how Sir Walter Scott’s heritage is being used by a campaign for formal innovation called ‘independence’ and described in the words of “a day when we can decide our future” uttered by Alex Salmond.
Nigeria
Uniform death
There was a time when battles were fought between groups of men wearing uniforms. While the clothing was in some cases sold to both sides by one and the same company, the uniforms were deliberately different; usually the colors contrasted, so that the soldiers, and as often as not they were mercenaries on the one side could see who it was they needed to kill, on the other side. This form of warfare runs like a red thread through western history from the American War of Independence, through Waterloo, to the Vietnam War. It assumed there was a clear “them” and an even more clear “us”. And things only got complicated if someone put on their outer uniform inside out and thus became a turncoat.