The Allure of the Improbable:Fingal,Evidence, and the Testimony of the “Echoing Heath”

Abstract

While James Macpherson's epic translation Fingal has usually been marshaled as evidence or impugned for its lack thereof, it actually bears a reflexive and critical relation to the issue of evidence in eighteenth-century British culture. On the one hand, the text elicits the ubiquitous logic of probability that was coming to shape the epistemology of legal evidence as well as parallel formations in commercial society and even in theories of the novel; on the other hand, however, the text counteracts this logic by highlighting its own affiliation with the improbability of witness testimony. Such testimony—improbable because widely differentiated from the deliberations of jurors, for example—increasingly came to reflect the relation of literature to the legal, scientific, and philosophical discourses of knowledge. Fingal shows how the improbability of the Scottish Highlands began symbolically to enable configurations of literary form as a vehicle of social critique.