Scottish poetry corroborate a “borderland within” all sensitive Scots (36).8 The modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid was quick to take up the banner in celebrating a “Caledonian antisyzygy.”9 More recently, David Parkinson has suggested, “In its fascination with boundaries the younger tradition (i.e. Middle Scots) takes strength and claims independence” (“Henryson’s Scottish Tragedy” 356).
Henryson’s intercultural response to Troilus and Criseyde reflects the ambivalence of internalized borderlands to a remarkable degree, questioning the legitimacy of the work’s supposedly ancient source while diplomatically heralding the achievements of “worthy Chaucer” and his “worthy Troilus.”10 In a bold, even radical invention, Henryson dons the mantle not of legitimate, “aureate” authority, but rather that of the equivocating Scot so often condemned in English characterizations of their northern neighbors.11 A diplomatic reaction, certainly, yet one that is marked by a table-turning prevarication, not unlike John of Fordun’s elaboration of a Scottish descent from the Greek Gaythelos and Egyptian Scota in requiting the British myth of translatio imperii from Troy.12 Fordun dismisses Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of Brutus settling Britain as the invention of a fabulist, but he also paraphrases a good deal of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae, interspersed with the parallel story of a Scottish ethnogenesis. Often, he demurs politely with a noncommittal “such is Geoffrey’s account”; sometimes he contradicts the story less diplomatically.13 Roughly a hundred years later, Henryson does much the same thing to Chaucer, with a similarly tactful skepticism. Whether Henryson gave any credence to this myth of Scottish origins is beyond knowing, but he did invent disastrous adventures for a Trojan exile “amang the Greikis” (98) and a devastating textual Trojan horse.
Homi Bhabha expanded the Bakhtinian concept of hybridization in theorizing the space of “partial culture,” that is, “the contaminated yet connective tissue between cultures—at once the impossibility of culture’s containedness and the boundary between” (Bhabha “Culture’s In-Between” 54). For Bhabha, “the translation of cultures, whether assimilative or agonistic, is a complex act that generates borderline affects and identifications, ‘peculiar types of culture-sympathy and culture-clash,’ ”