ArticlePDF Available

Reading Scotland's Borders through the Environment

July 2022

Authors:

University of Konstanz

The fluidity of the Anglo-Scottish border-which is frequently defined through its surrounding landscape-and its resistance to conventional and rigid understandings of national borders make it an especially viable vantage point to explore borders beyond crisis regions and develop alternative understandings and theorisations of (national) borders. In this article, I will explore the imaginative potential offered by the literary and cultural imaginary of the Scottish Borders from a twenty-first-century perspective and put it in dialogue with critical debates in border studies and ecocriticism. I will illustrate theoretical debates by drawing on works of Scottish literature that negotiate borders through the environment in diverse but interrelated ways.

Content uploaded by Julia Ditter

Content may be subject to copyright.

Reading Scotland’s Borders

through the Environment

By Julia Ditter

The fluidity of the Anglo-Scottish border – which is frequently defined through its

surrounding landscape – and its resistance to conventional and rigid

understandings of national borders make it an especially viable vantage point to

explore borders beyond crisis regions and develop alternative understandings and

theorisations of (national) borders. In this article, I will explore the imaginative

potential offered by the literary and cultural imaginary of the Scottish Borders

from a twenty-first-century perspective and put it in dialogue with critical debates

in border studies and ecocriticism. I will illustrate theoretical debates by drawing

on works of Scottish literature that negotiate borders through the environment in

diverse but interrelated ways. Scotland’s national border may be seen to inform

Scottish literary responses to borders more widely where the figure of the border

is most commonly understood to be dynamic, moving, dispersed across society

and connected to environmental discourses.

Understanding the connections between borders and the environment is not only

a matter of politics but of the imagination. According to Johan Schimanski and

Stephen Wolfe, theories and practices of border crossing ‘are fast revealing

borders as zones of instability in which ethical, political, cultural and national

questions are negotiated’ (2007, 9). Literary texts have the potential to explore

these questions creatively through imaginative border crossings and the creation

of textual zones of instability. Acknowledging the critical value of aesthetic

negotiations of borders, Brambilla argues for an integration between border

theory, which concerns the metaphorical and conceptual meanings of borders,

and border studies, which focuses on localised social experiences. By combining

politics and aesthetics, such integration allows for a more comprehensive

understanding of bordering processes between experience, representation and

theory (2015, 3). Following from the same impetus, Mireille Rosello and Stephen

Wolfe develop a methodology of border aesthetics which posits that ‘aesthetics is

essential whenever we need to recognize and appreciate the criteria that define

borders’ (2017, 4–5). Examining border narratives and their aesthetic

configurations, they argue, ‘will help us recognize new borders and new

narratives’ and acknowledge in what ways ‘border fictions change dominant

conceptualizations of who inhabits and can speak for the border’ (13). An

integration of these approaches with current ecocritical theories may reveal how

border narratives and their conceptualisations of power and ethics may correlate

with the environment, which has the ability to underwrite and reinforce, or

contest and subvert, the representation of the border. Ecocritical approaches take

into account the multiple interdependencies between bordering processes and

environmental concerns, outlining the affordances of literature in the negotiation

of this connection. Examining the correlation between borders and the

environment through literature may provide an alternative pathway to approach

these questions through narratives that prompt a questioning of the basic

premises and paradigms underlying our current understanding of borders and

‘nature’.

What is it that makes Scottish literature a particularly fruitful territory to explore

the concept of borders in relation to the environment? For one, the unique

affordances for alternative imaginations of borders in Scotland demonstrate how

an examination of Scottish literary negotiations of borders may contribute to

wider scholarly debates. Robert Crawford convincingly outlines how the idea of

the border as a dynamic zone rather than an inflexible line, concurrent with

current understandings of the border in critical border studies, not only

originated in Scotland but also serves as a crucial cultural model that can be

transferred to other contexts (1992, 185). The adaptability of Scottish modes of

thinking about borders is similarly discussed by Claire Lamont and Michael

Rossington through the history of the shifting geographical border zone of the

debatable lands between England and Scotland from the thirteenth to the

sixteenth century. As they demonstrate, since the Romantic era the term

‘debatable land’ has increasingly moved away from a geographical and more

literal understanding of the debatable lands as disputed border territory to a

legal, historical and cartographical point of view. In doing so, the term has

acquired metaphorical potential in its literary representations from the eighteenth

century onwards (2007, 1). On this basis, the debatable land and its particular

vision of the national border as porous and dynamic is increasingly transformed

into a broader metaphor that could be applied to other cultural and social

contexts while at the same time retaining its particular geographical significance

(2007, 4). As a result, the cultural imaginary of the Anglo-Scottish border region

allows for an understanding of borders as flexible and fluid constructs that

function in ways beyond the national.

Despite its fluidity, the figure of the border remains an ongoing presence in the

Scottish literary imagination, and, especially due to the absence of immediate

conflict, may provide us with alternative ways of thinking about borders today.

The interest in border studies most often lies in examinations of borderscapes

characterised by violence and conflict. Scotland’s borders do not fall into this

categorisation today: their material effects are more abstract, dispersed and

elusive, and even though they display similar histories of violence and

destruction, these histories do not hold the same urgency today as borders in

which precarious lives are immediately endangered. As Lamont and Rossington

point out, Anglo-American theorisations of borders have been focused on conflict

areas in Britain, imperial borders, and the border experiences of the United

States (2007, 5).Complementing the focus of border studies by European views

more generally, Carla Sassi explains how the focus of European theorisations has

similarly been on the most divisive borders and suggests how a reading of borders

beyond such crisis regions might offer a more thorough understanding of

bordering processes (2009, 146). If European thought has been incapable of

theorising a liminal aesthetics to foster political transformations akin to what

American/Chicanx thought has achieved (2009, 145), Scottish literature from the

nineteenth century onwards offers a vantage point for such alternative

theorisations. This may serve as a framework to understand and rethink the

present crises from a new perspective.

At the same time, landscape and the natural environment, similar to concerns

about borders and a particular view on bordering processes, have long been seen

as entrenched in Scottish identity, culture, and literature. Tracing the origins of

environmental discourses in Scottish literature, Louisa Gairn outlines a decidedly

Scottish ecological tradition. In her analysis of Scottish national identity, Sassi

further argues that landscape has always been a ‘core component’ of Scottish

identity that structures a post-national sense of space which is not linked so much

to geopolitical borders as anchored in geology and landscape (2005, 178). Despite

the optimism of Sassi’s statement, the connection between landscape and identity

is not unproblematic, especially regarding such issues as access, land ownership,

and debates around conservation and land use. Such concerns turn many rural

areas, especially in the Highlands, into contested territory structured by

multiscalar bordering processes. A conflation of the national and natural

furthermore not only risks depicting the Scots as naturally and historically ‘closer

to nature’ but, as Camille Manfredi argues, may generate exclusionary and

essentialist forms of ethnoregionalism (2019, 6).

Taking these risks into consideration is crucial in the development of a more

inclusive (post-national) sense of place in which territory-bound identities are

continually reinvented and adapted (2019, 208). An inclusive environmental

imagination nevertheless poses for Manfredi, as it does for Sassi, an alternative to

nationalist readings of a bounded environment, or what border studies scholar

Chiara Brambilla terms the ‘modern geopolitical, territorialist imaginary’ (2015,

19). Manfredi finds examples of such an alternative mode of thinking in the works

of twenty-first-century Scottish artists and writers who, through acts of rethinking

and reclaiming the land imaginatively, question ‘the origin, destination and

therefore propriety of that territory—our land, their land, everybody’s or nobody’s

land’ (2019, 7). Opening up a forum for debate which situates Scotland in relation

to larger issues of planetary import, they establish understandings of

environment, territory and history as ongoing processes of ‘de- and re-

aestheticisation, disinvention and reinvention’ (9). For Susan Oliver, similar

processes can be discerned in nineteenth-century Scottish literature. Here, the

historical controversies around Scotland’s borders afford the fostering of an

environmental understanding of ‘country’ in which humans are part of an

integrative material environment and which presents Scotland as ‘a complex but

connected nation, where cultural diversity can be mapped bioregionally as well as

according to more conventional political, linguistic and cultural borders’ (2014,

2). These alternative modes of thought, afforded by the anomalous border

situation of Scotland, are grounded in the country’s own environmental tradition.

Though said to have its origins in the Enlightenment, this tradition has been

eclipsed in ecocriticism, the foundation-myth of which has been rooted in the

English Romantic project.

Creative works from the last decade have not only displayed the vital connection

between borders and the environment but also highlighted the special

affordances offered by the inclusion of a Scottish context for thinking through this

connection. The crossing of the Anglo-Scottish border by the wolves around which

the plot of the story revolves is one of the key moments in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf

Border (2015). Through this crossing the novel achieves, according to Timothy

Baker, the elimination of borders by offering ‘a new form of political thinking

based not on parties and policies, but on a rejection of categorisations’ (Baker

2016, 264). The ability of the wolves to undercut national borders is thus a central

element of The Wolf Border. Multiple borders overlap and merge into each other

in a narrative about the reintroduction of wolves to a Lake District estate: the

protagonist’s movement from the US to the UK in order to oversee the

reintroduction, the walls of the wolf enclosure, the borders around the estate, the

territorial lines drawn by the wolves themselves, the crossing of a national

border, and the embodiment of the border between civilisation and wilderness by

the wolves are just some of the levels at which borders and the environment are

connected and examined throughout the novel.

In depicting the difficulties of a potential reintroduction of bears into a newly

independent Scotland, Mandy Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013) offers a similar

examination of multi-layered bordering effects and stresses the agency of its

human and nonhuman characters. Haggith further draws on the specific political

and social implications of land ownership debates in the Scottish Highlands and

offers an archipelagic reframing of Scotland by focusing on allegiances across the

North Sea border to Norway and to the European continent. Drawing on a similar

interest in Northern geographical connections beyond national borders, Mallachy

Tallack’s Sixty Degrees North (2015) destabilises geopolitical borders by

rethinking geographical and environmental allegiances and weaving together

human and natural histories along the sixtieth parallel.

These concerns are often recognisably at the centre of the plot or theme of

literary works in the twenty-first century and its background of ever-more visible

connections between bordering practices and the environmental crisis. However,

we can also find examples of the connection between borders and the

environment in a specifically Scottish context earlier on. In Carol Ann Duffy’s

‘River’ (1990), the Tweed is represented as a natural border that resists

instrumentalisation through the nationalist paradigm. Duffy’s poem is concerned

with the nature of borders and the possibility of border-crossings using the

imagery of a river whose “[w]ater crosses the border, translates itself, but words

stumble, fall back” (2011, 99). Through the imagery of a river that crosses the

border to another nation where language differs, the poem contrasts the ability of

nature to ‘translate itself’ and permeate the border signalled with the inability of

the speaker to overcome the obstacle of the language barrier. In doing so, a

communication across the border is rendered impossible. The contemplation of

the river’s ability to resist human bordering practices makes the speaker acutely

aware of the arbitrary nature of language and, by extension, of borders.

In Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners (1931), animals appear more fleetingly than in

Hall or Haggith, but hint at a similar perspective on bordering processes from the

viewpoint of the early twentieth century. The environment almost seems to

encroach on the social and cultural focus of Imagined Corners but still the novel

serves to delineate an engagement with national borders through the

environment. At one point, the narrator remarks that the birds gathering on

Scotland’s beaches have to adhere to the restrictive social rhythms of the coastal

towns because they ‘after all, were not ratepayers’ and ‘[i]t is doubtful whether

they even knew that they were domiciled in Scotland’ (1931, 2). Paying attention

even to such seemingly small and insignificant interruptions of the creaturely not

only opens up a range of new reading possibilities for novels which have not been

regarded as central to environmental debates but also reveals how they engage

with broader bordering processes. In highlighting the structuring of space

through nonhuman agents and the ordering of space and place around the

categories of human and animal, such texts illustrate and narrativise the

theoretical engagements offered by animal geography, geocriticism and

archipelagic perspectives for a broader audience.

These examples demonstrate an awareness of the historical geopolitical situation

of Scotland and recognise the role landscape imaginaries as an alternative

framework through which Scottish identity can be understood. However, there is

also a sense that Scotland’s environment itself fosters an unconventional

understanding of bordering processes. This element appears to varying degrees

in the examples mentioned here but is perhaps most striking in the works of Nan

Shepherd. The special quality of light in the northern hemispheres, together with

the local environment, allows characters to rethink their perspectives of the world

around them, including the borders which structure those lives. The wondrous

and magical maps Shepherd creates in which ‘Scotland is bounded on the south

by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice,

and on the west by Eternity’ (1928, 20) are rooted in an intuitive understanding of

bordering processes. By situating Scotland in a larger, planetary framework,

Shepherd asks for a creative and open-minded engagement with borders.

In the late nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson was similarly inspired by

the local environments of Scotland. These became the settings of his travel

essays, novels and short stories and were placed in dialogue with the

environments he encountered on his travels to America, Europe and the Pacific.

Taken together, Stevenson’s works offer an archipelagic understanding of

Scotland in which borders are understood through mobile environmental practice.

As I have argued elsewhere, the Erraid episode in Kidnapped, in which the

protagonist, David Balfour, finds himself stranded on a tidal islet off the coast of

Mull after a shipwreck, is representative of Stevenson’s engagement with national

borders through the natural environment of Scotland (Ditter 2021). As soon

becomes clear, it is not the natural border of the sea but a lack of environmental,

geographical and linguistic knowledge that prevents David from leaving the

island. His final recognition that he could have left the tidal islet at any point

when the tide was low reveals even supposedly natural borders as potentially

contingent and imaginative constructs.

The special affordances of Scottish literature both today and historically

contribute a range of literary modes through which borders and the environment

may be theorised. Arising out of a Scottish context, these modes could be applied

to reframe an understanding of borders more widely and in other contexts.

Scottish literary texts that are invested in exploring the correlation between

borders and the environment from a multiplicity of perspectives, including those

of nonhuman animals, can thus contribute to the counter-discourse to dominant

anthropocentric readings of borders without reinforcing a dualistic separation of

culture and nature. Literature may highlight the agency of animals and the

environment more broadly not only to undermine, subvert, and reinforce human

borders, but also to construct and police borders themselves. Scottish literature

invites a multiperspectival approach towards borders (cp. Rumford 2012) that is

crucially informed by the connections that have been drawn between bordering

processes and the natural environment in Scotland. It allows a move away from

the anthropocentric focus on nation-state sovereignty as the primary locus of the

border and opens the border up to an investigation that takes into account its

multiple effects on human and nonhuman lives. Looking at borders from multiple

perspectives and recognising such borders that may not follow the dominant

parameters through which we understand borders today reveals the diversity and

metaphorical potential of the literary form of the border. This further encourages

reading practices that focus on bordering processes more generally in order to

generate a new understanding of what borders mean in Scottish literature and

beyond.

References & Further Information

Baker, Timothy C. 2016. “Writing Scotland’s Future: Speculative Fiction and the

National Imagination.” Studies in Scottish Literature 42 (2): 248–266.

Brambilla, Chiara. 2015. “Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes

Concept.” Geopolitics 20: 14–34.

Ditter, Julia. 2021. “Wayfaring the Outlands: Exploring the Borders of Mobility

and Nature in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Writing.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts

43 (2): 1–21.

Duffy, Carol Ann. 2011. “River.” In New Selected Poems:

1984–2004 (Basingstoke: Picador).

Gairn, Louisa. 2008. Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.

Hall, Sarah. [2015] 2016. The Wolf Border (London: Faber & Faber).

Lamont, Claire and Michael Rossington. 2007. “Introduction.” In Romanticism’s

Debatable Lands, edited by Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan).

Manfredi, Camille. 2019. Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and

Art (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan).

Muir, Willa [1931] 1987. Imagined Corners (Edinburgh: Canongate).

Oliver, Susan. 2014. “Green Scotland: Literature and the Seeds of Independence.”

In Independent Thinking: Scotland’s Inscription of Separation. Supplement, The

Bottle Imp 1 (March):

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2014/03/green-scotland-literature-and-the-seeds-

of-independence

Rosello, Mireille and Timothy Saunders. 2017. “Ecology”. In Border Aesthetics:

Concepts and Intersections, edited by Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe

(New York: Berghahn).

Rumford, Chris. 2012. “Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders.”

Geopolitics 17 (4): 887–902.

Sandrock, Kirsten. 2020. “Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and

Shakespeare in John Lanchester’s The Wall.” Journal of Modern Literature 43 (3):

163–180.

Sassi, Carla. 2005. Why Scottish Literature Matters. Edinburgh: Saltire Society.

Sassi, Carla. 2009. “The (B)order in Modern Scottish Literature.” In The

Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, edited by Alan

Riach and Ian Brown (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Schimanski, Johan, and Stephen F. Wolfe. 2007. “Entry Points: An Introduction.”

In Border Poetics De-Limited, edited by Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe

(Hannover: Wehrhahn).

Smith, Ali. 2016. Autumn (London: Hamish Hamilton).

Shepherd, Nan. [1928] 1987. The Quarry Wood (Edinburgh: Canongate).

Stevenson, Robert Louis. [1886] 1895. Kidnapped (London: Cassell).

Tallack, Mallachy. 2015. Sixty Degrees North (Edinburgh: Polygon).