Introduction

By Manu Samriti Chander
Rutgers University-Newark

1. Scriptology as Talisman
“Should these stories meet with sufficient encouragement, it is the author’s intention to publish more Scriptology…”Without Egbert Martin, there would be no such thing as “scriptology.” Martin (writing under his penname “Leo”) seems to have coined the term to describe the four stories published in 1885, between his two poetry collections, Leo’s Poetical Works (1883)

and Leo’s Local Lyrics (1886). Like those other works, Scriptology announces its genre or rather it suggests – in the absence of a ready definition – a genre, the conventions of which are left for us, his readers, to determine.
Some sense of the author’s history provides a point of departure. Though we know little about Martin’s life, it is believed his ancestry was at least partly German and African or Afro-Caribbean. From his remarks on Scriptology it is certain that he identified as Creole, a descendant of colonial settlers, which places him within a group experiencing a new kind of self-awareness in the nineteenth century. By the time of Martin’s death in 1890, the population of Guyana had grown drastically, mostly due to heavy immigration from Portugal, India, Africa and China. Consequently, the native Creole population found itself working to establish an identity that would distinguish it from the newly arrived communities.
Martin speaks to the important function of literature in Creole identity-formation in his preface to Scriptology:
I lay these efforts before their view, expecting…support from all in general, but from creoles in particular…. Why, the very fact of anything literary…being published in Demerara by a Demerarian, ought to be a kind of talismanic pass-word to other creoles for recognition and support.
The “talismanic” aspect of Martin’s collection is worth consideration. The Greek root of the word telesma, describes a religious offering, a religious tribute with specific end (telos). Generally speaking, the purpose of a talisman is to ward off danger, although in the seventeenth century the word took on a particular nuance. “A Statue,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “set up…to preserve the community, house, etc. from danger,” a talisman performed an important public function. It reflected the boundaries of a community – distinguishing those whom the object would protect – while promising to keep that community whole.
As a talisman, Scriptology organises Creole audiences into a cohesive unit. For, while the collection is meant to appeal to readers “in general,” it is the Creole reader who will see his or her own story reflected in Martin’s collection. It is the Creole reader who will identify with the situations of the characters, Harry Seymour’s “colonial fever” in ‘The Hole in the Pan’, for example, or Mr. Price’s alienation from the small and ever-scrutinizing community of gossips in ‘The Two Harvest-Thanksgivings’. It is the Creole reader who will recognize the “Court-house, the Hospital and the Bridge” that Basil Emery visits in the town of “B –“as the familiar sights of any modernising colonial settlement. It is the Creole reader who will know the heavy perfume of “the great spotless Victoria Regia” that the unnamed narrator imagines in ‘Asphyxia’.
Martin’s characters form a discrete class of people, held together by something stronger than geography (in fact, specific geographical references are carefully excluded from Scriptology). They share a language – English – with its own peculiarities (the homophonic “Ware” and “where” that enchants Bob in ‘The Hole in the Pan’). They share an unspoken vocabulary as well, a system of social codes, assumptions and expectations (the ideal of companionate marriage that Harry Seymour pursues without success, that Mr. Price finds and loses, and that Basil Emery is too dense to comprehend). Scriptology gives voice to these ideas, sometimes to affirm them, often to satirize them, always to make them visible to an audience familiar with Victorian colonial mores.

2. Scriptology as Historiography
“I lose myself in thought of the many knots and notches on the everyday life of the world, each with its unspoken, but not unspeakable, history.”
If, as I have suggested, scriptology functions as a cultural talisman, it also represents a kind of historiography. It documents the “knots and notches” that comprise colonial life, offering a record of the quotidian that is at once fictional and real. Not non-fiction, but not non-fiction. Martin’s preface puts it this way:
With the idea…of affording a few moments mental recreation to our local Carlyles and Beaconfields, and colonial thinkers generally, I have written the matter of this volume, which, it is almost useless to say, is all imaginative, for that will be seen at a glance. Perhaps, however, there is, thrown in, here and there, a fact the offspring of observation.
I take this last sentence as a moment of meiosis: the understatement is rather humorous when we consider how prominently observation figures in Scriptology. Particular details such as local flora and common attitudes as well as the author’s own philosophical reflections on the nature of colonial society – its problems and its promises – abound in the collection, from the first story to the last. “I need not assure those who have had a touch of colonial fever, what a sweet thing convalescence is,” claims Harry Seymour in the collection’s opening line; “any depression in life is better than a weird ecstasy in dreams,” reflects the narrator after coming out of an opium daze in the final sentence of the final story. Martin’s health – he died of tuberculosis – likely would have given him direct experience on which to base these observations on convalescence and laudanum, the mixture of opium and alcohol used to treat a range of ailments during the period. His experience of colonial society certainly would have given plenty of inspiration for his frequent remarks on the world his characters inhabit.
As imaginative historiography, Martin’s scriptology details the ordinary thoughts of ordinary people. It is, however, a necessarily incomplete history that Scriptology describes. Not a whole history but, as Harry Seymour puns to his interlocutor Bob, “a hole history – a history of a hole.” For one of the key themes of martin’s stories is language’s inevitable limitations, its gaps and fissures, the holes that at once inhibit communication and compel us to communicate. Thus ‘Asphyxia’ begins, “I am at a loss to relate what I am about to relate.” Of course, to relate one’s story is to forge a relationship with one’s audience and to allow the audience to relate reciprocally with the speaker: “How must I get myself in train with the reader’s thoughts?” the narrator continues. In fact, each story in the collection confronts the problems of misspeaking and misreading, exposing the liabilities of miscommunication. Emma Ware’s attitude to Harry Seymour, Alicia Denier’s letters to basil Emery, Price’s forlorn visage, which the community mistakes for coldness, and the narrative of ‘Asphyxia’ itself – each of these texts is subject to misinterpretation, relying on fallible readers to make meaning in the absence of certainty.
It is not just writing, then, but the logic, the logos, of writing, the inner workings of narrative language that concerns Martin’s stories. “Scriptology” is writing about writing, history about history, storytelling about storytelling. It is a study of its own procedure.

3. Scriptology across Borders
“I felt with Tennyson that ‘A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things’.”
That Martin was a student of literary language is clear from the several nods to other authors throughout the collection. At the outset his likens Scriptology to novels of Wilkie Collins and Frederick Marryat, which, according to Martin, provided serious thinkers “a mental safety-valve to the heavier steam-pressure labours of the mind.” Elsewhere he quotes popular authors of his day, such as Tennyson, Poe and Longfellow, as well as those who had already attained canonical status by the end of the nineteenth century, such as Byron and Coleridge. These references do more than demonstrate Martin’s wide breadth of reading. They also attest to his literary aspirations. In his preface to Leo’s Poetical Works, Martin notes that “Success is the ultimate object of every endeavor,” without hope for which one would never bother to publish. He disavows in the same preface the pursuit of fame (which explains why he wrote under the name “leo”), claiming to define success as a fulfillment of the desire for “the words of his mouth…[to] reach the outward ears…of some of his fellow-pilgrims through this ‘valley of tears’.” There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this claim, especially since it speaks directly to the broader theme of communicability his works so strongly feature.
Yet we also know from his prefaces to Leo’s Local Lyrics and Scriptology that Martin took public opinion very seriously, that recognition was an avoidable motivation for literary production. And while he clearly was concerned with reaching readers at home, Martin also creates a dialogue in his stories that is at once inter-textual and international. That is, by calling upon his contemporaries from England and the United States, Martin situates his local stories within a transnational literary field, establishing a kinship between himself and his fellow writers. This is particularly important given Martin’s cultural identity. For the educated, elite Creole of the late nineteenth-century Guyana, cultural capital was tied to the success with which one could assimilate metropolitan trends, ideas and attitudes – this was doubly important for members of the burgeoning black middle-class. Thus I would suggest that when Martin invokes Tennyson Longfellow, et al., he implicitly argues for the equal status of the Guyanese writer with the writer from culturally dominant (through not culturally superior) nations.
One of the ways Martin connects his stories to the wider world of nineteenth-century literature is by fusing different genres – indeed, it is by assembling these other genres into a unit that scriptology takes on its unique generic identity. Among the most prominent of these is the parable. The stories warn against hubris and ignorance; their lessons range from issues of propriety to issues of ethics, criticising equally basil Emery’s pompousness and the hypocrisy of the judgmental Christian community that destroys Margurita Foli.
At the same time, ‘Asphyxia’ mobilises ideas found in science-fiction, bringing together philosophy and otherworldliness by exploring the effects of laudanum on the imagination; ‘The Two harvest-Thanksgivings’ examines Creole superstition (a topic Martin raises in Leo’s Local Lyrics as well), bringing an element of the Gothic into the story, both thematically and, through the epigraphs drawn from Poe, literally. The story to which Martin refers in his concluding note ‘The Effects of Mesmerism,’ which he seems to have completed but not yet discovered, recalls Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Wilkie Collin’s interest in occultism, perhaps suggesting a relationship between scriptology and detective fiction.
Of course, without access to ‘The Effects of Mesmerism’ and the other stories that Martin wrote of planned to write, our understanding of scriptology must be tentative rather than definitive. In the end, we may end up falling back on reading the present collection with Martin’s stated intention in mind: “The short stories composing this little volume are given with the simple idea of amusing the reader.” They are amusing. Martin’s wit and style, his sense of character and his insights on social life – these make for an enjoyable reading experience, just as the picture we are given of colonial society teases the imagination. Yet they are not merely amusing. They also present an occasion to reflect on the moment at which these stories were produced and the mind that produced them. After over a hundred years during which Scriptology lay in relative obscurity, we now have the opportunity to examine an endless fascinating period in Guyanese history through the lens of an endlessly fascinating Guyanese author.

(By Egbert Martin)