In a previous issue of Scottish Affairs, in the course of engaging with David McCrone's Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (1992), I identified a peculiar feature of those acts of discourse production (novels, plays, films, television programmes, paintings, history books and so on) which set out to tell stories about Scotland (whether the teller of any given such story is themselves Scots or not is irrelevant). I called this feature ‘the Scottish Discursive Unconscious’ and suggested that it operated in a way akin to automatic piloting. That is, when telling stories about Scotland narrators tend not so much to invent those narratives (or, in the case of non-fiction, lay out the facts of them) as to succumb to powerful and historically deep-seated, pre-existing narratives which shape the tone and substance of their work. The example I dealt with in depth was the discourse dealing with the Gàidhealtachd of the past and the former's tendency to fall into the elegiac mode, as exemplified most recently by Scottish press accounts of the January 1992 tercentenary commemorations of the Massacre of Glencoe.

In passing, I indicated that the same elegiac mode is characteristic of accounts of the 1745–46 Jacobite Rebellion and, in particular, of the Battle of Culloden (1746). What I might have added was that we are likely to be in for a deluge of tearful, breast-beating, elegiac paroxysms from the commemorations of these events on their 250th anniversary in 1995–96. This essay is, as its title suggests, in the way of a pre-emptive strike – an attempt to counter the tsunami of tearful remembrance around the event. The strategy is to re-historicise both the ‘45 and Culloden and to reinscribe these key historical events, important personnel within them, and the memorialisation of both into discourses other than the dominant elegiac one. Sometimes these alternative discourses are historically challenging, and sometimes they are flamboyantly absurd (and even offensive). Always, however, they assert the inescapable fact that there is no ‘natural’, essentialist way of describing the events and people of 1745–46; there are only diverse ‘fictions’ which might be constructed around them.