George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community 9780748640935

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George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community

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George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community

Timothy C. Baker

Edinburgh University Press

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© Timothy C. Baker, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon and Futura by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3812 3 (hardback) The right of Timothy C. Baker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vi vii

Introduction: Problems of Community in the Scottish Novel 1: The Fictive Community: Greenvoe 2: Sainthood-towards-Death: Magnus 3: The Individual Community and the Community of Individuals 4: Community and the Self Conclusion: Scotland, Utopia and the Future of Community

1 28 58 94 125 148

Works Cited Index

168 178

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Acknowledgements

This book stems from research I undertook as a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh; I am indebted to Alex Thomson, Claire Colebrook, Penny Fielding and Berthold Schoene for their encouragement and advice. I benefited from the warm collegial atmosphere of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, where portions of this book were written during a postdoctoral fellowship: many thanks to Susan Manning and Anthea Taylor. Ruth McAdams and Janet McAllister painstakingly read through early drafts. I am especially grateful to Morag McGill and Archie Bevan for permission to quote from Brown’s writing. This book would have never come about without the support of my family, especially David, Eileen, Timothy and Susan Baker, and most of all my mother, Marie, to whose memory it is dedicated. An early version of the first chapter was published as ‘George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe as Impossible Community’, in Scottish Studies Review 8.1 (2007). Many thanks to Margery Palmer McCulloch and the Association of Scottish Literary Studies for permission to reprint portions.

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Abbreviations

BOT CP FI G GB M OT TP

TRC V

Beside the Ocean of Time (London: John Murray, 1994). The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, ed. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray (London: John Murray, 2005). For the Islands I Sing: An Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1997). Greenvoe (London: The Hogarth Press, 1972). The Golden Bird: Two Orkney Stories (London: John Murray, 1987). Magnus (London: The Hogarth Press, 1973). An Orkney Tapestry (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969). Three Plays: The Loom of Light, The Well and The Voyage of Saint Brandon (London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1984). Time in a Red Coat (London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1984). Vinland (London: John Murray, 1992).

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Introduction: Problems of Community in the Scottish Novel

‘Prologue’, the opening poem in George Mackay Brown’s first collection, establishes the tone for all of his work to come. One of his most anthologised and analysed works, it places his writing in a context of a wilful nostalgia and parochialism: For the islands I sing Foand for a few friends; not to foster means Foor be a midwife to ends. Not for old Marx Foand his moon-cold logic – anthill dialectics, Foneither gay nor tragic. Not that extravagance FoLawrence understood – golden phoenix Foflowering from blood. (CP 1)

As the poem continues, Brown details those for whom he does ‘sing’: workers, tinkers and saints. In naming Karl Marx and D. H. Lawrence as representatives of that writing to which he is opposed, Brown situates himself outside of both modern politics and literature: his writing is not end- or theory-driven, but observational, a writing of and for the land and people he knows most intimately. He is concerned with what JeanLuc Nancy calls ‘the spacing of a bountiful community, whose history does not consist in accomplishing an end, but in letting new names, and new songs, arise unendingly’.1 Community and poetry in Brown’s work are united in that they are not teleologically determined, but instead give birth to an untimely ‘song’ in its purest form.2 This song does not have a political or historical end, but instead exists only, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s terminology, to serve life.3

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In this sense Brown can be contrasted with a poet like Hugh MacDiarmid, who in his ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ questions the validity of a Scottish poetry that fails to capture a people or their history: Are my poems spoken in the factories and fields, Are In the streets o’ the toon? Gin they’re no’, then I’m failin’ to dae Are What I ocht to ha’ dune.4

MacDiarmid’s poem proposes a new literary tradition that exists in necessary relation to the people it depicts and their history: his poetry works towards political and aesthetic ends in order to engage and enrage the contemporary reader. While MacDiarmid, perhaps the dominant poetic voice of twentieth-century Scotland, engages the reader with questions of historical and political identity, Brown uses themes of myth and history to establish a resonant depiction of a community that lies outside of time. In his poem ‘Themes’, Brown articulates a vision of Orkney that is essentially mythic and timeless: Tinker themes cry through The closes of my breath – Straw and tapestry shaken With keenings of love and birth; Odyssean corn returning Across furrows of death; Women scanning the sea; Ploughmen wounding the earth. (CP 21)

His images in this poem are localised and drawn largely from nature, while the people about whom he writes are not distinguished as individuals, but are presented as generic types who are best understood in relation to the land. Brown’s use of non-specific agricultural themes, and apparent lack of concern with contemporary life, invite a reading of his work in which he is seen as resolutely anti-modern and even primitive. Indeed, the image of Brown that emerges from a study of his poetry seems most closely related not to other twentieth-century poets, but to Walter Scott’s portrayal of Orcadian and Shetlandic poets.5 In The Pirate, Scott writes of ‘legends [that] are, indeed, everywhere current amongst the vulgar; but the imagination is far more powerfully affected by them on the deep and dangerous seas of the north’.6 This gullible, superstitious imagination is given a full illustration in Scott’s depiction of the mediocre poet Halcro. Scott writes of a party where Halcro, now completely in his element, had assembled around him an audience, to whom he was declaiming his poetry with all the enthusiasm of glorious John himself, and receiving in return the usual degree of applause

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allowed to minstrels who recite their own rhymes – so long as the author is within hearing of the criticism. Halcro’s poetry might indeed have interested the antiquary as well as the admirer of the Muses, for several of his pieces were translations or imitations from the Scaldic sagas, which continued to be sung by the fishermen of these islands even until a very late period.7

Halcro is a poet whose primary value is his appeal to his neighbours, whose work is constructed from the familiar, and who echoes the Scandinavian sagas known to the whole community. His poetry resists politics and style in favour of a fidelity to older myths and stories; it is purely parochial, and while Scott intimates that such writing would not be suitable for his urban readers, any value it has is located in its reflection of, and appeal to, the place and community from which it comes. The combination of mockery and nostalgic respect for such a poet is echoed in both Brown’s writings on his own work and those of his critics. Forty years after ‘Prologue’, Brown’s poetry continues to place what he called ‘the lesser mysteries of art’ within an anti-historic paradigm: I know this about time, It has set me on a distant shore. It haIt has given us history, Not the circles of ceremony all men ought to rejoice in. (CP 316)

There are injunctions to poets throughout his work: the poet must ‘Carve the runes / Then be content with silence’ (CP 378), the call of the poet is: ‘“Harp of whalebone, shake / Golden words from my mouth”’ (CP 224). Brown repeatedly represents himself as an unschooled observer, a poet who recounts the natural world and the communal legends around him for the benefit of those who know these things as well as he, but who is uninvolved in larger philosophical or cultural inquiry. This quasi-mythic perspective, centred on first-hand experience of a particular place, has been taken up by the majority of Brown’s critics. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray hail Brown’s ‘island agenda’ (CP xii), while Francis Russell Hart summarises Brown’s themes as the belief that ‘time will outlast history’,8 and Cairns Craig places Brown within the context of ‘historylessness’.9 Brown’s work is seen as representing a peripheral vision in which the larger concerns of world history, and the complexities of lived experience, are elided in favour of an atemporal, myth-centred perspective. In a brief analysis of Greenvoe, Craig condemns Brown’s use of ‘mythic content [that] emphasises the cyclic return that denies the forward trajectory of history’.10 Berthold Schoene argues more sympathetically that Brown’s aim is ‘to bring forth a narrative that would be at one with his vision of Orkney as a unique place and community with a singular, self-constant identity. He is striving for

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the creation of a historical myth.’11 In all of these studies, and in many more,12 critics foreground Brown’s continual focus on local community and traditional forms of human relation in order to illustrate that he is, in accordance with his own statements, fundamentally concerned not with the modern world, but with the formation and continuance of a mythic perspective on Orcadian life.13 The lasting value of Brown’s writing, however, is almost completely opposed to this reading. Throughout his work, especially in his novels, Brown engages with the questions of community and tradition not to celebrate them blindly, but to problematise them. Brown’s engagement with the problems of community is best seen in his prose works, especially his novels. Although his poetry remains his best-known writing, it is in his novels that Brown engages most closely with lived experience; the longer prose form allows him not only to state an artistic or philosophical position, but to question it as well. A close reading of his novels reveals that he continually undermines his own professed positions and emphasises the relation between community, history, and myth in order to question what use these ideas may still have for the modern world. In this respect, his work is best understood with reference to contemporary thinkers of community such as Nancy, whose work will be introduced in greater depth in the first chapter, and Maurice Blanchot, as well as to philosophers as diverse as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno. While many, if not all, of these thinkers were unknown to Brown, an examination of their work in relation to Brown is crucial because they all respond to the same problems. Brown’s fundamental purpose within his writings is to examine the foundationless world of modernity, and to see, in the wake of the loss of faith-based metaphysics, what organising principles remain available. Brown’s Catholicism is central to his work, and he frequently extols a familiar Judeo-Christian foundational paradigm, what he calls – paraphrasing Hamlet – ‘a shaping divinity [that] takes over from our rough-hewings’ (FI 186). It is simultaneously clear, however, that within his work this faith-based foundation is more desired than successfully implemented. Brown’s novels present fully integrated communities united by common work and faith, but also recognise that such communities may no longer be – and may never have been – possible. The tension between the world as it is desired and the world as it is forms the core of his works, and in that light Brown must be seen as engaging with both the themes and aesthetic possibilities of contemporary fiction in order to document the failings and difficulties of the modern world. While community is easily recognised as a primary theme in his work,14 it is only recently that critics have come to understand that

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within Brown’s writings it is ‘the destruction of a community . . . that is required for life to continue’.15 It is not only, as Bevan and Murray write, that Brown ‘had a deep and abiding sense of community’ (CP xvi), but also that he continually questions this sense of what a community is, how it is established, what it demands and how it can be said to be meaningful in contemporary life. As such, the question of community is a central point for any reading of Brown that wishes to overturn Brown’s reception as nothing more (or less) than a parochial writer of myth and fable. Brown’s theme throughout his work is not only how a community is built, but also how it is destroyed and what life may remain when the community, central to the individual’s thinking of life itself, has been made obsolete. The community is, then, Brown’s symbol of the foundation of being, and it is important to recognise that he refuses to take it for granted, but instead continually problematises it. Brown’s writings of Orkney should not be read as anthro- or mythohistoric observation, but must be understood as attempts to understand the central problems of modernity. In order to situate Brown’s work in an appropriate literary and philosophical context, this Introduction will highlight some of the dominant trends in recent discussions of community in Scottish literary criticism and fiction, as well as in AngloAmerican and continental philosophy.

I. Community and Literary Criticism Community is frequently viewed as a central theme in Scottish literature, and recognition of its position as such is a necessary prerequisite for any conceptualisation of Scottish literature as an identifiable whole.16 In this predominant critical reading, Scottish fiction is regarded both as depicting real or imagined communities and as constituting community itself, in the sense of contributing to a national literary tradition. The term is seldom defined, however, and the four distinct senses of community with which this book is concerned are rarely differentiated. Community is frequently presented as a pre-existent framework that includes both interpersonal relation and political or cultural sentiment, but the larger question of what community is, and how it comes to be, is rarely raised. ‘Community’ itself can be understood to have four predominant meanings: it signifies a local, geographically constituted region; a conception of shared national or political aims; a shared approach to ethics and morality; and, finally, the context for interpersonal relations and the emergence of the individual self. The first two senses of community appear in virtually all writings on Scottish literature, while the third is

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largely developed in works from the 1980s, especially those informed by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. The final sense can be clarified with reference to both Anglo-American thinkers such as John Macmurray and Charles Taylor and, more significantly for this project, to postHeideggerian continental philosophy. In order to show the necessity of approaching the idea of community from these multiple perspectives, it is first necessary to examine the ways community has been portrayed in both Scottish literature and criticism. Kurt Wittig begins his highly influential 1958 survey of Scottish literature with the claim that ‘literature is not written in a vacuum, but grows out of the life of the community, and must therefore be studied as a product of that particular community in which it originated’.17 The community, for Wittig, exists at the level of both national imagination and localised interpersonal interaction. Its primary importance, however, is not in lived experience, but as a necessary background to literature: community is what allows national literature. The community is, indeed, ‘God’s universe’;18 it exists before any consideration of individuals or nations, and is instead the basis of life itself. Literature arises from community because community is the basic context in which humans lead and understand their lives. Community is so basic that it defies definition, but is instead approached as a fundamental and eternal framework. For John Speirs, writing around the same time as Wittig, community is a central component of Scottish literature, but can only be approached as something now lost. The ‘old Scottish community implied in the poetry of Fergusson and Burns’ was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, and for that reason, ‘there has been no Scottish literature . . . since the eighteenth century’.19 The local or organic community, for Speirs, is founded on ‘fruitful co-operation’ and sympathy, yet in his work there is no discussion of how these attributes come to be realised; they merely belong to a nostalgic past. While both critics see community as a basic, pre-existing form or relation from which all literature, and all understanding of life in general, stems, for Speirs the community is also bound to particular historical moments. Literature, and to a certain extent national or cultural consciousness, could only exist in a certain time or place, and is no longer possible. Speirs conflates national and local communities in order to argue that with the demise of the organic regional community, any sense of national community is now impossible. In more recent surveys of the Scottish literary tradition, critics have presented a view of community that is largely based not on an originary system of relations, but on intent. Such perspectives frequently rely on Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined commu-

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nity predicated on the growth of a self-proclaimed national literature. For Anderson, national imagination is not predicated on regional localisation so much as shared reading matter; rather than focusing on the emergence of national literatures, however, he directs his argument towards the emergence of the nation as a political idea. Reflecting on the universalisation of nationalism, he argues that ‘the very idea of “nation” is now nestled firmly in virtually all print-languages; and nation-ness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness’.20 As Craig explains Anderson in relation to Scottish literature, the national imagination is the means by which individuals relate the personal shape of their lives, both retrospective and prospective, to the larger trajectory of the life of the community from which they draw their significance.21

The nation is thus simultaneously perceived as community and through community: individuals draw on their own experience of localised communities to participate in, and understand themselves in relation to, a national community. Community is simultaneously presented as existing at a particular historical moment and as a continuous framework that continues into the present: it is both something real and a way of understanding. Like earlier critics, however, Craig focuses on the national community to the occasional exclusion of the local or regional community; while the latter may provide the specific context of a given work of fiction, it is always in service to a broader idea of nation. Recent studies in both literary criticism and social anthropology have drawn attention to the relationship between the local community – defined in terms of place – and the nation. The regionally grounded community can be seen as both a metonym for the larger nation and as what Roberto M. Dainotto calls a ‘“better frame” than nationalism’ to understand literature.22 Yet for Dainotto, both nation and region are literary ideas far more than facts; they are ‘simply inventions, poetic acts, metaphors’.23 The local community is both an intent and a real place: it can at once be seen as an idea and as a geographically-bounded physical reality. The tension between local and national communities is explored further below; what is notable at this juncture, however, is a continued focus on community itself as the fundamental social structure. For Dainotto, a critical focus on community is especially significant in the present intellectual climate, for it provides a common understanding of literature, ‘an idea, that is, of “literature as common place”’.24 A study of community in literature thus provides an avenue for a new common approach to literature, one that incorporates current theoretical and historical trends, but also allows for a more unified theory.

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Dainotto’s far-reaching claim in many ways explains the current interest among literary scholars in fields such as social anthropology. As Nigel Rapport summarises traditional anthropological perspectives, community is most often presented as the locus of society and culture: it is societies or communities which are the real political actors in the world, which act as repositories of power and knowledge, and . . . it is cultures which mediate the lives, insights, and rights of their members, which grant whatever notions of individuation may exist.25

While Rapport ultimately advocates a view of action predicated on the individual, like many of the continental philosophers discussed below, this perspective of community as a primary system of both self-knowledge and political action underlies many literary, as well as anthropological, discussions of community. Within discussions of Scottish literature, community serves as a way of unifying the political and the ethical, the individual and the national. Even as they rely on a broad conceptualisation of community, however, more recent critics of Scottish literature continue to portray community as necessarily historic: rather than describing an unchanging system of human relations, community is perpetually located in the past. For Robert Crawford, this relationship between community as a literary invention and as a tangible reality is itself a primarily Scottish notion, drawn specifically from Scott, who, he argues, was the first novelist ‘to write a substantial series of fictions which scripted and gave a heightened imaginative identity to a geographical area’.26 For Scott, more importantly, this relationship is essentially historic: Scott, like other nineteenth-century Scottish authors ranging from John Galt to J. M. Barrie, looks to the community of the past to articulate a way of (historical or actual) being as well as an idea of Scottish society as a whole, whatever that might be.27 For Scott, the present moment can best be understood with reference to particular historical moments or events. Only by first understanding history can the reader account for contemporary concerns. In Craig’s reading of Scott, however, Scott’s emphasis on historical events has the effect of ‘dehistoricising the present’:28 by concentrating on the historical moment, Scott makes it an Other, disconnected from the present. ‘History’, for Craig, is an external dynamism, a sequence of events that intrudes upon Scotland. Highland and Lowland culture are both ‘pre-historic’ and ‘historyless’, and can be narrated only when an external history is introduced. For Craig, Scottish fiction’s preoccupation with historical community becomes a way to address ‘the confrontation between what is outside history and unamenable to it, and what believes itself to be inside history’.29

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Although this confrontation is made especially explicit in the twentiethcentury novels discussed below, it may also be seen in the kailyard tradition inaugurated by Barrie. As Craig characterises Barrie’s 1889 novel A Window in Thrums: the narrator, as superior, educated, worldly commentator, submits the community to our scrutiny as an object of mockery for its narrow-minded parochialism, for its strange rituals and its unrelieved backwardness; at the same time, however, in reaction against the harshness of the immediate environment – more spiritual now than economic . . . – the narrator becomes the voice of a lingering nostalgia for a lost sense of community based on religious commitments that have ceased to have any validity to Barrie’s audience.30

Thus, at least as far back as Barrie and Scott, the community is used in Scottish fiction to illustrate both a periphery that exists outside the course of historical events and a particular system of relations that was bound to an historical moment. Any depiction of community thus, in Craig’s view, automatically engages with problems of the representation of history. The community comes to symbolise the element in Scottish history that constrains individual possibility, even when, as in Barrie’s work, the writer also celebrates that very constraint. Community is both an idea located in particular history and the replacement of that history. For Hart, the centrality of community in Scottish fiction emerged as a way of representing the ‘dominant myth’ of ‘the wholeness of Scotland’.31 Faced with a very real possibility of exodus in the Clearances, the ‘remnant that stays home, feeling inferior and defensive, makes compensatory myths’.32 The myth of a thriving and ideologically united community is necessitated by the very impossibility of such a community in a time of emigration and cultural change. In order to understand the place of Scots and Scottishness within history, it is necessary to create a new myth of history, one that provides a foundation for all that follows. In terminology borrowed from Alan Riach, the community is one of ‘Scotland’s masks’,33 a possibility for self-representation that allows a grounded whole where one might not in fact be possible. The community is thus constitutive of the popular iconography of Scotland, an iconography that remains stable across social and economic changes. For Riach, the iconography of Scotland is not only externally imposed by the international media, but also constructed internally: it allows Scots to imagine themselves as part of an unchanging whole. The oftderided ‘tartanalia’, which lays claim to much of Scotland’s place in the international imagination, is thus seen by Riach not to be a symbol of external imagination, but a dominant myth within the culture that allows a grounded self-representation. As in Craig’s analyses, community is used within Scottish culture, specifically in the arts, in order to

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create a foundational myth that resists the actual demands of history and modernity. The community can thus be perceived within Scottish culture as a repository of, and a symbol for, the ahistoric: it is that which resists change and provides a foundation for all thought.

II. Community in Scottish Fiction Within Scots-generated fiction, the twentieth century brought about a more critical view of community which, while challenging the nostalgic view found in the work of Barrie and Scott, still kept the community at the centre of Scottish life. George Douglas Brown,34 whose The House with the Green Shutters Mackay Brown hailed as: ‘The best Scottish novel of the twentieth century’ (FI 20), began to question the value of community over sixty years before Greenvoe placed the idea of community as the focal point of his fiction. Douglas Brown’s vision of community is just as foundational as that of Scott or Barrie, but far more vitriolic; his aim in The House with the Green Shutters is to illustrate the ways community functions as a hindrance to individual thought and expression. The gossip and public interference that lead to the downfall and death of the novel’s protagonists are often no more than a way to pass the time; community is grounded neither in history nor myth, but solely in boredom. The influence of the townspeople in the lives of these individuals is a central concern, but not truly explained. Gossip and interference happen because the community allows them. Indeed, gossip and interference are themselves constitutive of the community. Mixed with an early description of the town is an account of the centrality of gossip within the community: In every little Scotch community there is a distinct type known as ‘the bodie’. ‘What does he do, that man?’ you may ask, and the answer will be, ‘Really, I could hardly tell ye what he does – he’s juist a bodie!’. . . . The chief occupation of his idle hours (and his hours are chiefly idle) is the discussion of his neighbour’s affairs. . . . It is in a small place like Barbie that such malignity is most virulent, because in a small place like Barbie every man knows everything to his neighbour’s detriment.35

A ‘small place like Barbie’ breeds a petty and malignant community; the community does not function as a unified whole, but as a grouping of individuals whose primary aim is the undercutting of other individuals. Whatever beneficial wholeness is sought in the vision of the community is lost; the uniformity of public opinion is presented as a damaging force beyond the control of those whom it involves. The spirit of community is central to the novel, not in a spirit of either praise or nostalgia, but

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of despair. For Douglas Brown, the idea of a community that forms the basis of small-town life is detrimental to all the individuals who dwell within the town. In Craig’s analysis, the community within the novel is predicated on fear: fear is the essence of communal morality. The primacy of fear and competition is indeed foregrounded throughout the novel; what is less explored, both in Craig’s analysis and in the novel itself, is how this situation came to be realised. Craig argues that Douglas Brown’s depiction of the Scottish community is essentially external: The community presented in Barbie is irredeemable, but the values by which it is judged so are values which have – and can have – no existence in the community itself: they have to be continually brought in from outside.36

The authorial voice in the novel certainly bears out this reading: It was strange that a thing so impalpable as gossip should influence so strong a man as John Gourlay to his ruin. But it did. The bodies of Barbie became not only the chorus to Gourlay’s tragedy, buzzing it abroad and discussing his downfall; they became also, merely by their maddening tattle, a villain of the piece and an active cause of the catastrophe.37

The community is here viewed from the outside; its mechanisms are strange and even unthinkable, and can only be recounted. Yet one of the most striking aspects of Douglas Brown’s depiction of community remains unaccounted for in Craig’s reading: the parochial community of Barbie is mirrored by the academic community of Edinburgh in order to demonstrate that such a community is not limited to a particular place, but that community itself is, by its very nature, a force that harms the individual. John Gourlay finds a makeshift community in the public houses of Edinburgh; as his alcoholism develops, so does his need for community: Young Gourlay spent that winter in Edinburgh pretty much as he had spent the last. Last winter, however, it was simply a weak need for companionship that drew him to the Howff. This winter it was more, it was the need of a formed habit that must have its wonted satisfaction. He had a further impulse to conviviality now. It had become a habit that compelled him.38

Community, whether rural or urban, is thus presented as a habit and a need. Of all the characters in the novel, John Gourlay is the most likely, through his outside education, to perceive the damaging power of the community, but he too falls into the trap of such a community. His downfall, which leads to his father’s death, comes from his need to answer to the community at large. In Douglas Brown’s vision, then, the community is something inescapable. It is not limited to the ‘little Scotch community’, but is instead an inherent part of life itself. Craig

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writes that ‘The narrative voice continually establishes patterns of comparison which will assure us that this is not the world’,39 but the Edinburgh scenes serve to point out quite the contrary: this is the world. Community, even when despised as strongly as in The House with the Green Shutters, is inescapable, as it is the primary means of human relation. As much as Douglas Brown despairs of community and uses it as a focal point for his anger, it is no less foundational to his writing than it is to earlier, more idyllic or nostalgic works. The community is ultimately that which denies an external perspective, because it is the grounding of human interaction itself. As much as one can rail against its damaging power, it is impossible to conceive of a world that does not put community in a central position. Douglas Brown’s greatest contribution to Scottish literature is a redefinition of community that allows it to be used as a foundational term. The community is not necessarily specific to a given location, although the idea of a place is usually central. While critics speaking of ‘community’ in Scottish fiction tend to use the term to refer to any literature that examines the life of a town as a whole, Douglas Brown, in his depiction of multiple communities in various places, opens it up. The community is also not entirely ephemeral in its reference to collective thought or gossip, although that too is a dominant aspect. Rather, community is the way in which a group of people, selected by place or culture, come to think of themselves. The gossip of Barbie is the way its inhabitants come to know themselves both as individuals and as members of a community; community is central to the novel because it forms the basis of both physical and ideological gathering. Community is thus, in Heideggerian terms, both logos – ‘the originally gathering gatheredness that constantly holds sway in itself’40 – and Mitsein, or ‘being-with’. Community, after Douglas Brown, becomes a term that applies to the individual’s understanding of himself in relation to the world around him: it is the foundation that one opposes or embraces, but is always there. A similarly foundational view of community is found at the centre of another key text of twentieth-century Scottish fiction, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. Gibbon’s trilogy routinely tops ‘Best Scottish Novel’ popular contests and is given a central position in most critical surveys of Scottish fiction; its views of community and Scottish life are difficult to ignore. The trilogy depicts the life of Chris Guthrie in three successive communities: the rural (Kinraddie, Sunset Song), the town (Segget, Cloud Howe) and the city (Duncairn, Grey Granite). This shift of physical communities is paralleled by a simultaneous shift in ideological communities. Kinraddie is a version of the nostalgic, unified yet individualistic community of Scottish writing past:

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So that was Kinraddie that bleak winter of nineteen eleven and the new minister, him they chose early next year, he was to say it was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny brier bush in the lee of a house with green shutters.41

The allusions to John Watson (whose 1896 Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush is often used as an exemplar of kailyard fiction) and Douglas Brown here foreground the way in which Gibbon is using Scottish literary tradition to inform a view of community in which place, especially uncultivated land, is of primary value: Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learnéd, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurted you.42

When Guthrie moves to Segget, she is forced to interact with a more humanly constituted community, one not dissimilar to that of Douglas Brown. The townsfolk of Segget are closely related to those of Barbie – bored, quarrelsome and interfering: ‘The folk of the Mills would hang round the room where their dole was paid by a little clerk, they’d laze there and snicker at the women that passed, and yawn, with weariness stamped on each face; and smoke, and whistle, and yawn some more.’43 The sense of a judgemental community is aided by Gibbon’s occasional use of the second person (a trope that appears throughout his writing): Segget crowded the kirk the first Sunday in May after the General Strike collapsed, to hear what that cocky billy Colquohoun would say of his tink-like socialists now. But he never mentioned the creatures at all, he preached a sermon that maddened you, just, he said there was nothing new under the sun: and that showed you the kind of twister he was.44

If Kinraddie is the Scottish past and Segget is the present, then the ideological community that forms among the communists in Duncairn is the future. Although the town-centred community is just as harsh as in Segget, Ewan finds a possibility of a greater community in political thought: he lay still with a strange mist boiling, blinding his eyes, not Ewan Tavendale at all any more but lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies all over the world, in Scotland, in England, in the torture-dens of the Nazis in Germany, in the torment-pits of the Polish Ukraine, a livid, twisted thing in the prisons where they tortured the Nanking Communists, a Negro boy in an Alabama cell while they thrust the razors into his flesh, castrating with a lingering cruelty and care. He was one with them all. . . . And a kind of stinging bliss came upon him, knowledge that he was that army itself.45

While Ewan eventually loses his political passion, the ideological community that exists both through and in counterpart to the physical

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community of Duncairn is perhaps Gibbon’s presentation of a community that does not reject its physical and social foundation, but rises above it. What unites these three disparate communities, besides the ability of the individual to thrive in and despite them all, is the community’s ability to comment on itself. As Craig argues: the author’s alienation is not the basis for a disenchanted and literary framing of the community’s life, but for a narrative structure in which the community, through its gossip and its reminiscence, becomes the organiser of the narration, inserting into the body of Grassic Gibbon’s fiction the fictions with which it embroiders its own life and through which it expresses its own imaginative vitality.46

The blend of narrative voices, including the second person addressed above, produces an idea of the community as that which recognises itself. Community is thus foundational, not because of historic or social factors, although these cannot be discounted, but because existence in community is the way in which the community comes to know and understand itself. Community is not a term that labels something that already exists; instead, it is through thinking of itself as a community that community comes into being. Community, as a concept and as a reality, is central to both the novel and to the lives it depicts because it allows for a degree of self-representation that cannot be achieved in any other way. Thus Chris Guthrie’s struggle for individual determination is not counter to the will of the community (as such struggles are in Douglas Brown), but is a part of the community itself. The community is the vehicle through which both individuals and the community emerge as themselves. The voice of the community, at once unified and diffuse, is thus the central aspect of the trilogy. Craig’s earlier reservations about Gibbon’s work – his claims that it illustrates the ‘terrible and destructive’47 power of an engagement with history – are less central to a reading of the novels than a focus on the way Gibbon illustrates the constructive power of community. For Craig, Ewan sees history as the remembrance of violence and death, whereas for Chris the world is ‘amnesia, cyclic and without progression; a world where history has no meaning’.48 Such claims ignore that these confrontations with history and life take place within, and against, the foundation of community itself, and that for Gibbon the individual’s ability to confront history at all is only made possible by her engagement with the surrounding community. The community may be ahistorical, as in Sunset Song, but it remains that which allows an engagement with history. The development of a communal voice is best illustrated in Gibbon’s late, unfinished novel, The Speak

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of the Mearns. The novel’s early narration alternates between thirdperson observation and a first- and second-person voice tied to Keith, the youngest son of the central family. As a young child, Keith uses the first person: It was late in the jog of an April day when our flitting of Montrose came through the Howe, over the hill of Auchindreich and into the crinkly cup of the village. . . . I couldn’t see it [a rainbow] though Alick held me up and pointed it out from the back box-cart.49

As the child becomes aware of his place in the world and begins to describe not only his own observations but the life of the people around him, he starts employs a second-person narration: ‘Mother said couldn’t he come home for it, like a decent man, he’d be tired enough, her eyes upon him in that way that she sometimes had, it made you ashamed that anybody should look at father, like that.’50 Finally, when Keith grows too ill to narrate, the voice of the novel shifts to a third-person ‘folk’, who narrate sundry events collectively: As the new year came blustering into the Howe, folk took the news of the parish through hand, standing up douce and snug in the bar and watching the whirl and break of the flakes that the wind drove down from the hills to the sea like an old wife shake the chaff from a bed. Ay, God, there hadn’t been a winter like this, said Gunn of Lamahip, since ‘yt, he minded it well, he was fee’d at that time up in place in Aberdeen, called Monymusk, one morning he woke and looked out of the bothy window, b’god, the farm place had vanished entire, nothing about but the shroud of snow.51

The voicing in this passage shifts, at times unnoticed and unsignified, from person to person; even as individuals contribute their own stories, what emerges is a communal narration. Here, as J. Hillis Miller finds in Thomas Hardy, the community itself is given voice and ‘speaks for its collective memory and collective interpretation of the world’.52 Gibbon reveals in this progression of voices the way in which the community itself becomes the dominant theme of the novel and also permits a self-reflexivity from the characters. The communal voice is the way the community knows itself to be what it is. The community thus formed is not only, as in Craig’s analysis, a response to, or more often against, history, but it is the way in which the past itself can be perceived. Even those individuals who live in defiance of the community, like Chris Guthrie herself, are only able to do so by using the foundational characteristics of the community as something against which to define oneself. Rather than questioning the validity of the community, as Douglas Brown attempts to do, Gibbon finally cements its foundational character: the community is ultimately that through which all life must be considered.

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The influence of Douglas Brown and Gibbon has been unsurpassed in twentieth-century Scottish literature. Novels as diverse as William McIlvanney’s Docherty and Robin Jenkins’s Fergus Lamont chart the individual’s attempt to overcome the constraints of community in a manner often reminiscent of Douglas Brown, while novels from Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting have followed Gibbon’s portrayal of a community that is constitutive of the very idea of self, even when that self is engaged in trying to escape the community. Yet relatively few novels have clearly engaged with the fundamental question of how it is that community has been instituted as the foundation of Scottish thought; while the role of the community has continually been placed under examination, its very existence has often been taken for granted. The novels of George Mackay Brown fill that very necessary role: by placing not only actual communities, but the idea of community itself, at their centre, they allow a wide-ranging critique of the value of community and the possibility of foundational thinking. Brown is, of course, not alone in this mission; his novels are closely paralleled by those of Iain Crichton Smith, whose work similarly engages with the construction and ideology of the community. Smith himself claims that his first novel, Consider the Lilies, is not concerned with a particular historical moment, but is instead ‘a fictional study of one person. . . . It is only the story of one old woman confronted by eviction’.53 Contemporary with Greenvoe, Smith’s novel engages in a similar exploration of the ways in which the individual not only defines herself according to the surrounding community, but also attempts to understand why that community should itself form a foundation for her way of life. Mrs Scott considers herself to be a member of two communities, that of the church and that of the familial dead: She remembered her own father dying, with his long white beard. He was a good age when he died, yet was as frightened as a child in the silent house. Her father and mother remained as presences in the house. So did her husband, even though he had died in another country. She remembered his small alert moustached face emerging dripping out of the basin of water.54

When these two communities fall into discord – that is, when Mrs Scott is required by the church to leave her home – she is forced to reconsider her role as an individual. She turns for help to Donald MacLeod, a staunch individualist and atheist, presented in the first part of the novel as her ideological opposite. MacLeod is opposed to the founding institutions of the community, but yet becomes the defender of the community itself: ‘You know, Mrs Scott, living in a small village can be difficult. And yet whenever I go to Edinburgh I want back to this village. You wouldn’t think

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that, would you? For people talk. They talk all the time. You’d think that was all they had to do. What was it like, those years when you looked after your mother?’55

Thus while MacLeod is as suspicious of his neighbour’s gossip as Gourlay in The House with the Green Shutters, he is also able to use the ‘talk’ of the community to engage fully with another person. Even this is insufficient; MacLeod is shortly thereafter shown looking for the word ‘which would bring him closer to her’: Obscurely he felt that it was important to him to find the word and to be able to say it, so that he would be united with her and what she was. Perhaps only the poets would be able to find that word. Or perhaps it didn’t exist. But it must exist. Somewhere it lay concealed under lies and differences, like the soot in a black house which could be used to fertilise the land. Somewhere, if he could tear the beams apart, the dry old beams, he would find it and build a new kind of house.56

Smith here documents the need for a community of individual engagement that continues to appear even when the traditional forms and institutions of community have failed.57 Smith thus focuses his novel not on the community as it appears in history, but on the need for community as that which allows one individual to engage with another. Community becomes foundational not only because it allows self-referentiality, but again because it forms the ground for basic human interaction. This intertwined theme of the impossibility of communal continuance, of the necessary failure of all that constitutes community, and the continuing need for communal foundations, drives and grounds the work of both Brown and Smith. In a late essay, ‘Real People in a Real Place’, Smith explicitly argues for the centrality of community in the work of the Scottish island writer. The community, although not idealised, is itself the symbol of how the rural or island life differs from the life of the exile or the city: It is this sense of a community that one thinks of most when one compares the island with the city. It was because of the community that the fact of exile became so desolating and frightening. . . . The positive side [of the community] is the sense of warmth, settledness, that it gives, the feeling that one has a place, a name, that one will not be consigned to the chilly air of pure individuality. It is the sense that what one belongs to is a sustaining force . . . [although] it is nearly always conservative and hostile to change.58

The community thus represents a reality in which the individual is grounded: it is a reality that is now fleeting and oft-abandoned, but nevertheless central to the depiction of a certain manner of being. As Smith writes: ‘This is a real society in a real world and it will therefore be characterised by the particular reality to which it belongs.’59 Smith

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thus follows the writers mentioned above in his depiction of a community that is not pre-historic but rather is based in individual experience: to write about the community is to depict the lives of people as they are actually lived. The community in his work thus refers both to a basic way of being and to a particular lifestyle distinct to the Scottish islands. Community is at once universal and particular, grounded in an historical moment and eternal; it is the foundation on which all understanding of the way people live is based. The interrelation of these senses of community drives much of Smith’s work as well as that of Brown himself.

III. Community and the Crisis of Foundationalism Most of the critics cited above situate their discussion of Scottish literature in a predominantly political and historical, rather than philosophical or sociological, context. Both Craig and Crawford also draw upon the work of the mid-twentieth-century Scottish philosopher and theologian John Macmurray, however, whose concept of ‘heterocentricity’ Craig views as ‘a concept with a specifically Scottish provenance’.60 Crawford similarly argues that ‘Macmurray’s stress on the need for an identity bound up with engagement with the Other sits easily beside recent readings of Scottish cultural identity’.61 In Persons in Relation, the second volume of his Gifford lectures, Macmurray advances the argument that no self can be understood as an entity unto itself, but can only be understood in relation to an Other. This relationship exists in community, specifically the ‘community of the “You and I”’.62 Community cannot be understood as a holistic given, for it is based on the relationship between a Self and an Other. Macmurray thus provides an early example of the philosophical shift from thinking of community as a pre-existing collective identity to an understanding of community as based on individual interaction. Furthermore, for Macmurray any community must be understood as both factual and intentional. The community is a universal pattern of relation, modelled on the family, which can be applied to all interpersonal relations. At the same time, however, the community is explicitly not a natural phenomenon, but is maintained solely by the will of its members. Although the concept of community can be extended to any human society, the community is always constituted on the basis of an intentional one-to-one relationship between two selves: the community is located in and for the individual. For Macmurray, this relationship is inherently moral: it is in seeking ‘to act rightly’ that the self comes into relationship with the personal Other. This Other, as Macmurray writes, ‘always remains fully personal; consequently its objective must

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be the maintaining of positive personal relations between all agents as the bond of community’.63 In grounding the idea of community in individual intentionality rather than in collective imagination, Macmurray’s work provides an account of community that allows for a discussion of individual will and morality. Macmurray’s project has been taken up in very different ways by two other notable thinkers of community, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. MacIntyre implicitly follows Macmurray’s conceptualisation of human society, but argues that this idea of intentional interpersonal relation is in danger of being lost. For MacIntyre, community – in particular political community – has lost its original grounding in common aims and friendship. Instead, post-Enlightenment concepts of the ‘democratized self’ have promoted a vision of individual identity that is inherently decentred.64 For MacIntyre, the rise of the individual is strictly tied to both the loss of tradition and, more importantly, to the loss of common morality. In order to return to a moral state, then, it is necessary to construct ‘local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us’.65 Both thinkers propose a model of community that is based solely on intent: the difference is that for Macmurray this is merely descriptive, while for MacIntyre this intent must be instigated and defended. Like MacIntyre, Charles Taylor begins his account of the relationship between the individual and the community in moral terms: he presents morality as our mode of access to the ontological world. More importantly, perhaps, morality – and indeed all knowledge – depends on the existence of explanatory frameworks, such as community; without these frameworks, it is impossible for the individual to make sense of her life. Even if the community is understood not as an historic reality, but as an ethical or intellectual grouping, it remains one of the ‘webs of interlocution’ on which the self depends.66 Moreover, Taylor locates concepts of the self and of community as cultural constructs whose emergence is closely linked: the idea of community is first questioned in seventeenth-century contract theory, which is itself necessitated by claims of atomistic or sovereign individuality.67 Any account of modern individuality thus presupposes an account of community, and vice versa: the self can never be understood without reference to the community as a framework. Community, as the ‘way we are set in nature and among others’, is itself the ‘human predicament’.68 Both MacIntyre and Taylor present community as the locus of all ethical action and as the framework for self-actualisation. Both thinkers also follow Max Weber’s insistence on a religious and ethical grounding for any classification of a human community.69 Even if the governing idea of a community founded on local experience has been abandoned,

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community is itself irreplaceable, insofar as it is inseparable from religious experience. Where MacIntyre and Taylor differ is in their approach to intent: while for MacIntyre community must be consciously sought out and reinstituted, for Taylor it is always already present.70 Yet both thinkers, like Macmurray before them, provide a way of thinking of community that is not based in region or nation, in history or geography, but in the basic nature of human relations. This fundamental relationship between the concept of community and the nature of human interaction has also been widely addressed in continental philosophical traditions where, especially since Heidegger, community is used to explore the nature of being. The interrelation of community and being, and community and meaning, is one of the dominant themes of contemporary thought; indeed, careful thinking of community often concludes that it provides or determines a system of relations that is necessary to the very concept of being itself. As Howard Caygill has argued, the relationship between community and philosophy is inescapable, since the ‘“making and unmaking” of philosophy [in the twentieth century] increasingly entailed the deconstruction of the writing of community’.71 Nancy, for instance, argues that: ‘There is no meaning if meaning is not shared [partagé] . . . because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.’72 Only through an understanding of community as the locus of meaning, through sharing, can Being be understood. Nancy’s writings on community are central to the following interpretation of Brown, but it is first necessary to place these ideas within a larger reference of post-Enlightenment metaphysical thought. In the wake of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, a foundational metaphysics grounded in God or first principles has been made impossible, but the place of metaphysics in philosophy has remained central. As Kant writes: ‘What has hitherto been called metaphysics cannot satisfy any critical mind, but to forego it entirely is impossible’.73 While Kant has been criticised by some anti-foundationalist philosophers for continuing to privilege the idea of God – and his metaphysics indeed is structured to make room for God – sympathetic critics such as Henry Allison make it clear that this is not arbitrary: ‘Kant is not attempting to provide an exhaustive inventory of all metaphysical positions, actual or possible. His concern is rather with a certain kind of metaphysical reasoning, namely, one that leads to the positing of transcendent entities.’74 The fundamental metaphysical shift found in Kant is thus not one of result, but of grounding; Kant shows that the error of previous metaphysics is a reliance on external foundations, and that any future metaphysics must be founded on (human) knowledge itself. Kant thus recasts metaphysics as a system based not on faith, but on reason. For

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the purposes of this Introduction, this point cannot be over-elaborated, but what is necessarily retained from Kant is the transition from external foundations to a metaphysics based on reason: I am very far from holding these concepts [of the community of things] to be derived merely from experience, and the necessity represented in them to be fictitious and a mere illusion produced in us by long habit. On the contrary, I have amply shown that they and the principles derived from them are firmly established a priori before all experience and have their undoubted objective rightness, though only with regard to experience.75

Kant rejects the traditional foundations of metaphysics in order to replace them with new ones; yet his questioning of foundations influences all future metaphysical thinking. For Martin Heidegger, it is this very question of foundationalism that defines metaphysics: ‘Ground-laying is now elucidation of the essence of a comporting towards beings in which this essence shows itself in itself so that all assertions about it become provable on the basis of it.’76 After Kant, metaphysics is the question of its foundation. In Heidegger’s reading of Kant, metaphysics is grounded on finite human knowledge (and later on imagination); at the same time, however, Heidegger expands upon Kant to demonstrate that metaphysics takes in part a communal view of Being. That is, its focus must always remain on beings in the form of being-together. Even as ‘the true is always only what the individual human being thinks’77 – that is, the communal sense of being does not directly correlate with truth itself – the interplay between Being and beings remains at the centre of metaphysical inquiry. The roots of modern analyses of community from Blanchot onward are revealed in Heidegger’s comment on Kant: For a finite creature, beings are accessible only on the grounds of a preliminary letting-stand-against which turns-our-attention-toward. In advance, this takes the beings which can possibly be encountered into the unified horizon of a possible belonging-together. In the face of what is encountered, this a priori unifying unity must grasp in advance.78

Heidegger locates this advance (foundational) grasping in time and intuition. More importantly for this project, however, he reveals that any understanding of the foundations of metaphysics also necessitates an understanding of the way community can itself function as foundation. Being can only be understood, just as beings are only accessible, through community: community provides a way to think not of beings themselves, but of the relation between beings and meaning. At the same time, the question of foundations always opens itself to the opposite; it becomes difficult to tell if the foundation of one’s

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philosophy is a true foundation or an illusion. Thus for Heidegger, and indeed for virtually all post-Kantian thinkers, the problem of foundations is that, once having been questioned, the way they continue to function must be questioned. For Heidegger, the solution is to move from ‘asking about beings as such (metaphysics)’ to ‘asking about Being as such’.79 How Heidegger approaches this shift from beings to Being, and the way in which such a shift influences his thinking on beingtogether, will be addressed at greater length below. The thinker who has most clearly addressed the relation between Being and beings in relation to community, however, is Georges Bataille. For Bataille, as he details in a commentary on Heidegger, community is a necessary ground for both knowledge and the self: ‘there cannot be knowledge without a community of seekers, nor inner experience without a community of those who live it.’80 This community, however, does not represent order or stability. Indeed, as Blanchot and Nancy detail, for Bataille community is revealed in its absence.81 Rather than appealing to an instantiated or ethical community, Bataille depicts the self as ‘a particle inserted in unstable and tangled groups’, the instability of which ‘permits the illusion of a being which is isolated, folded back on itself and which possesses the power to exist without some sort of exchange’.82 Community, as a system of relation or exchange, is an absolutely essential framework: it remains the way the individual accesses the universal. Rather than advocating an intentional recognition of such a community, however, like MacIntyre and Taylor, Bataille focuses on the necessity of a community that is defined by its very lack of production. The national or ethical consciousness that the above writers see as central to any definition of community is here discarded in favour of a model defined solely by individual relation. Bataille’s work suggests a community that is not reliant on a nostalgic or historic ideal, nor on common aims, but on a continuous cycle of imminence and withdrawal, that is, on individual interaction and death. In many respects, Bataille’s views are similar to Macmurray’s: the individual is defined solely in relation to other individuals, and this relationship – in Bataille, an incomplete and tenuous one – becomes constitutive of community. For all of these thinkers, community cannot be approached as a preexistent, foundational unity. Instead, it must be understood in the context of individual relation. From this perspective, the question of community becomes one of the dominant philosophical problems: only through an understanding of community can one approach Being, meaning and economy. Brown’s singular importance lies in his ability to unite divergent perspectives on community: community is at once foundational and a way to question those foundations.

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IV. Brown, Community and Foundations Brown’s fiction incorporates elements of the ideas of each of the thinkers discussed above: his work advances an understanding of community predicated on intentionality but also incorporates anti-foundationalist perspectives. The community in Brown’s novels is both a unified whole and a space of individual relation. As such, a discussion of Brown’s works clarifies the relationship between national or regional consciousness and individual identity. A close reading of his novels not only reveals the complexity of his views, but also allows for a discussion of community in Scottish fiction that is not only focused on national and regional models, but also incorporates a broader understanding of the relation between the individual and the community. Previous readings of Brown have concentrated overwhelmingly on his use of mythic and holistic perspectives. Such criticism often repeats the interpretive paradigm that Fredric Jameson finds in Northrop Frye. Jameson cautions against a social hermeneutic that focuses on the community. This positive hermeneutic identifies mythic patterns in modern texts aim[ed] at reinforcing our sense of the affinity between the cultural present of capitalism and the distant mythical past of tribal societies, and at awakening a sense of the continuity between our psychic life and that of primitive peoples.83

Brown’s work has often been read as advancing mythic patterns in order to establish a sense of continuity between the past and the present. Especially in his poems and stories, Brown often explicitly relates the past to the present, and implies that any conception of community relies on an understanding of historical systems of relation. At the same time, however, Brown continually questions the utility of such a conceptual framework; his work depicts historical models of community, but also presents them as inherently problematic. For those who have read Brown’s interviews and essays, this may be a surprising leap. Brown frequently argues for a pre-Kantian understanding of the world, focusing on the primacy of God and the unified, instantiated community. Brown’s own work is far more complex than he himself admitted, however, and far more engaged with the problems of modernity and foundationalism than has yet been acknowledged. In his novels he can be seen as fulfilling Louis MacNeice’s description of the role of the modern writer, who ‘should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community (for then he will only tell it what it knows already) as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct’.84 Brown’s work is at once critical and generous, and gives equal weight to the promise

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and difficulty of communal life. In order to address his work completely, a wide variety of thinkers from all sides of the foundational spectrum will be examined; while Heidegger and Nancy are the most constant referents throughout this book, a range of viewpoints will be addressed in order to explore the complexity of Brown’s thought. The five chapters of this book are organised chronologically around his novels, but will also incorporate a thematic approach. The first chapter focuses on Greenvoe, Brown’s first and most famous novel. While the novel is often read as a redemptive parable, a discussion of the novel in conjunction with Nancy’s concept of the inoperative community and Blanchot’s idea of the unavowable community reveals that it is far more complex than has been recognised, and can be read as the first stage of Brown’s discussion of community in relation to the disaster. The second examines Magnus, perhaps Brown’s central work, and highlights the way in which Brown posits sacrifice as the centre of communal life. The third chapter examines the relationship between history, community and storytelling as it is presented in Brown’s later novels: Vinland, Time in a Red Coat, The Golden Bird and Beside the Ocean of Time. In each of these novels, Brown continually points to the unified community as central to the establishment of the individual self, but also highly problematic and indeed impossible. The fourth chapter turns to Brown’s nonfiction prose and examines how his own analyses of his fiction and life both differ from and confirm the previous findings. Brown’s short stories, perhaps the form in which he excelled, will be addressed throughout these four chapters. A final chapter examines the ways community is presented in contemporary political philosophy and literary criticism, and argues that a community-based discussion of literature, incorporating ideas from regional and nationalist discourses but not limited to them, is an important step for any consideration of the literary depictions of identity. The range of Brown’s work examined and the variance of philosophical viewpoints to which these works are compared demonstrates that Brown was, far more than has been realised, a major thinker of community.

Notes 1. Nancy, Birth to Presence, p. 57. Italics in original. See also Jacques Rancière, Flesh of Words, p. 111, where ‘Literature is then identified with the poem of the community’. 2. See Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘untimely’, in which each song is a reorigination, as well as his analysis of a ‘misemployed and appropriated culture’: Untimely Meditations, pp. 161ff. 3. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 59. For Nietzsche the historical and

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

25

the ahistoric are equally mixed in relation to both the individual and the community; history cannot be seen as a purely external force to be studied independently. MacDiarmid, Selected Poetry, p. 134. As Maggie Fergusson repeatedly mentions, Brown found The Pirate unreadable (Fergusson, George Mackay Brown, pp. 32, 92). As such it may be seen not as a direct inspiration for Brown, but as a depiction of a certain way of forming art in which Brown also engages. Scott, Pirate, p. 25. Ibid., pp. 162–3. Hart, Scottish Novel, p. 397. Craig, Out of History, p. 36. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 161. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, pp. 100–1. Alan Bold’s early study George Mackay Brown is perhaps the key work in this tradition. Indeed, much of Brown’s own autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, can be read as a specific rebuttal to Bold’s account of his work, notably in the discussion of Magnus, a novel Brown attempts to redeem against Bold’s criticisms. Please also see Schoene’s Making of Orcadia and Hilda Spear’s George Mackay Brown for detailed accounts of other important secondary sources. A mythic perspective is often seen to be inherent in Orcadian literature. Kurt Wittig, for instance, writes of Orkney as a place ‘where the lives of living men are transformed into legends’ and where life ‘is thirled to the racial past by means of all sorts of links – mysterious, mythological, irrational, scientific and psychological’. Wittig, Scottish Tradition in Literature, pp. 299, 327. Support for this claim is easily found throughout Brown’s work. In the introduction to his children’s collection The Two Fiddlers, for instance, Brown claims that ‘in a small community, enclosed by sea and sky and fields, it is possible to see a man’s life as a whole’, p. 9. Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, p. 123. See Crawford, for instance, who lists ‘Scotland itself, kingliness, community and vigorously asserted independence’ as the ‘great themes’ of Scottish literature: Scotland’s Books, p. 61. Wittig, Scottish Tradition in Literature, p. 3. Ibid., p. 273. Speirs, Scots Literary Tradition, pp. 15, 154. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 135. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 10. Craig provides a much fuller and more complex reading of Anderson than space allows here. See also Anthony D. Smith’s critique, where he claims that Anderson’s focus on common language and narratives elides ‘symbols, myths, values and memories, attachments, customs and traditions, laws, institutions, routines and habits’: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 138. One of Brown’s greatest achievements is to reintegrate many of these secondary characteristics into a complex model of community. Dainotto, Place in Literature, p. 8. Ibid., p. 162.

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24. Ibid., p. 12. This political necessity of foregrounding community has been advocated in a variety of recent contexts: see, for example, Judith Butler’s argument for a reimagining of community ‘on the basis of vulnerability and loss’: Precarious Life, p. 20. Also noteworthy is Nancy Fraser’s account of the importance of distinguishing collective and social identities for feminist discourse: Justice Interruptus, pp. 152ff. 25. Rapport, Transcendent Individual, p. 189. 26. Crawford, Scotland’s Books, p. 406. 27. This relationship is developed in Wittig, who argues that ‘Man, to Scott, is no chance being, but a part of the organic life of the community, and he makes us see how the actions and fates of men are moulded by their society and its history’: Scottish Tradition in Literature, p. 223. 28. Craig, Out of History, p. 38. 29. Ibid., p. 46. 30. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 59. 31. Hart, Scottish Novel, pp. 201–2. 32. Ibid., p. 205. 33. Riach, Representing Scotland, p. 4. 34. Hereafter referred to within the text as ‘Douglas Brown’ in order to avoid confusion. 35. Brown, House with the Green Shutters, pp. 26, 33. 36. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, pp. 62–3. 37. Brown, House with the Green Shutters, pp. 80–1. 38. Ibid., p. 183. 39. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 63. 40. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 135. 41. Gibbon, Sunset Song, p. 24. 42. Ibid., p. 119. 43. Gibbon, Cloud Howe, p. 139. 44. Ibid., pp. 159–60. 45. Gibbon, Grey Granite, p. 137. 46. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 65. 47. Craig, Out of History, p. 48. 48. Ibid., p. 49. 49. Gibbon, ‘Speak of the Mearns’, p. 841. 50. Ibid., p. 852. 51. Ibid., p. 871. 52. Miller, Thomas Hardy, p. 106. 53. Quoted in Hart, Scottish Novel, p. 328. 54. Smith, Consider the Lilies, p. 8. 55. Ibid., p. 101. 56. Ibid., pp. 103–4. 57. Smith’s later novels, especially An End to Autumn and A Field Full of Folk, continue this discussion in productive and disparate ways. 58. Smith, Towards the Human, pp. 23–4, 26. 59. Ibid., p. 46. 60. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 89. Brown himself attended at least one lecture by Macmurray, in the early 1950s. Fergusson, George Mackay Brown, p. 108.

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Introduction 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

27

Crawford, Scotland’s Books, p. 624. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 27. Ibid., p. 122. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 32. Italics in original. Ibid., p. 263. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 39. Ibid., pp. 192-5. Ibid., p. 513. See Weber, Sociology of Religion, pp. 207–45. In The Ethics of Authenticity, a series of radio addresses where he examines practical and political philosophy, Taylor appears much closer to MacIntyre, and indeed Allan Bloom, in prescribing an intentional return to communal values. Caygill, ‘The Shared World’, p. 21. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 2. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, p. 107. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, p. 321. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, pp. 53–4. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 7. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 54. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 20. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 24. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, pp. 3–4, and Nancy, Inoperative Community, pp. 16ff. The idea of a ‘community without community’ is central to this book’s critique of Brown, and will be explained further in the first chapter. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 84. Jameson, Political Unconscious, p. 117. MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p. iii.

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Chapter 1

The Fictive Community: Greenvoe

In A Calendar of Love and Other Stories, George Mackay Brown’s first collection, Brown writes of Orkney as ‘a small green world in itself’.1 Orkney is depicted in these stories as a world and a community that is united by both location and shared religious practice. In ‘Witch’, Brown presents a vision of the ideal community: in a community ‘under God . . . society appears as an organism, a harmony, with each man performing his pre-ordained task to the glory of God and the health of the whole community’.2 In these early stories, Brown adheres closely to the model of community suggested by D. H. Lawrence, where: ‘Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. . . . Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.’3 Community for both Brown and Lawrence is a space where individual freedom is made possible by belonging to, and working in, a unified geographical and religious framework. To understand the individual, one must first understand the community in which he dwells, and to understand that community, one must understand its religious and social foundations. While all of Brown’s fiction addresses this fundamental idea, in his first novel, Greenvoe, Brown most clearly delineates the structure of community as such. Here he presents community as immediate and immanent: communal life is the basis of individual identity. An understanding of community as the locus of individual identity underpins many contemporary political and social theories of community. The anthropologist Susan Love Brown, for instance, has argued that communities, understood as microcosmic societies in themselves, constitute ‘a powerful means of integrating the individual and society’.4 This notion of a unified local community as a place of integration is presented and problematised in the work of the Catholic thinkers Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, who particularly focus on the religious and moral dimensions of community. For MacIntyre, whose

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After Virtue is seen by Cairns Craig to be ‘among the most important interventions in our sense of Scottish culture in the last quarter of the century’,5 one of the key features of modernity is the entwined rise of the individual and loss of community. This loss of communal contextualisation and social identity manifests itself in a loss of moral referents. As MacIntyre writes: ‘This democratized self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing.’6 It is only in the context of a communal identity that moral judgments can be made or assessed: the individual without a community has no basis for moral action. In his argument for an Aristotelian moral scheme, MacIntyre advocates a return, insofar as possible, to a notion of community as necessary for any individual moral decision-making. The moral individual can only be understood within the framework of the moral community; without community, the individual cannot fully be defined. Tradition and community, in the form of ‘my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations’ in themselves constitute ‘my moral starting point’.7 In MacIntyre’s potentially utopian vision, he advocates the ‘construction of local forms of community’ that will sustain both moral life and individual freedom.8 Yet as Taylor has pointed out, once the individual is given the freedom to choose identification with a political or religious community, any idea of assumed unity between the individual and the community is already undermined. Even as Taylor echoes MacIntyre in his claims that society, understood as community, is an ‘utterly solid and indispensable reality’ and that further, such an understanding of society argues for God, he also questions the possible existence of such a community in relation to a modern understanding of the individual.9 For Taylor, self-understanding originates in society and community, and only then manifests itself as a self-conceived individuality. The individual and the community are not opposed methods of understanding the world, but can be mutually understood in the context of a ‘society of mutual benefit, whose functional differentiations are ultimately contingent, and whose members are fundamentally equal’.10 According to classic sociological models, in early and especially tribal religions, humans relate to God not as individuals, but as a societal whole. This idea of a unified religion and society has its origin in the works of Émile Durkheim. In our own time however, as Taylor argues, what is now available is a horizontal, decentred vision of society, at once more individualistic and more egalitarian. Taylor focuses on the Protestant Reformation as perhaps the defining moment in this

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transition, although Friedrich Nietzsche’s dismissal of community itself as nothing more than a ‘morality of custom’ is also a key intervention.11 For Taylor, a return to an understanding of religion and morality from the perspective of a unified society is no longer possible. Nor should this be understood as a loss; as he argues, citing David Martin, ‘We can’t just identify “religion” and twelfth-century Catholicism, and then count every move away from this as decline’.12 Instead, contemporary religion – explicitly for Taylor, Christianity – must be understood in the context of ‘a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life’.13 This shift should not be lamented, as MacIntyre occasionally appears close to doing, but should instead be considered as a new way of viewing society itself. The writings of MacIntyre and Taylor represent entwined but distinct visions of the relation between the community and the individual in modernity. Community can be understood both as a unified whole and as the origin of individuality: in the following discussion, this two-fold tradition of regarding the community will be further explored. The Orkney community about which Brown writes is for many of his critics best understood as an attempt to present a clearly identified whole: his Orkney is a place of shared geographical and social experience. In his depiction of particular islands, he echoes Hugh MacDiarmid’s claim that island life gives birth to a ‘literature of men conscious of their own reality as well as that of outer reality, because fully conscious of the society which makes them what they are’.14 As William Corlett argues, the most commonly accepted definition of community within political theory is that ‘community names a geographical location’.15 Brown’s focus on a geographically determined local community in Greenvoe allows him to offer a penetrating analysis of the meaning of community. Yet Brown is equally interested in the role of the individual and in the failure, or fragmentation, of community. Indeed, the lines quoted from ‘Witch’ above are uttered by the story’s villain, a religious zealot who murders the innocent. Throughout his fiction, Brown documents neither a singular, unified community nor a world made solely of individuals, but instead focuses on the tension between the two, and on the possibilities that remain for community when community – in its strongest, Durkheimian sense – is no longer thought to be possible. In Greenvoe, Brown depicts a community that does not cohere: in the story of the destruction of Hellya he details a community that is nothing more than a group of individuals who are concerned not with their relation to others, but with the construction of their own individual narratives. Against this framework, Brown presents in the coda of each chapter a model of a community unified through ritual. The tension

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between these two views of community informs the entire novel. Unlike his later novels, where Brown focuses more explicitly on individual protagonists and on the construction of community through shared history and myth, Greenvoe is primarily concerned with the community of individuals. The novel has no single protagonist, nor does it include the communal narration of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s late work, but instead juxtaposes multiple individual voices. What is most striking about the novel is not the way its various narratives coalesce, but on the contrary the way they finally fail to form a whole. In sharp contrast to Magnus, where Brown uses a variety of registers and voicings to create a unified picture of both a given individual and the community that surrounds him, or Beside the Ocean of Time, where a dying community is given renewed life through recourse to its past, Greenvoe is perhaps the least redemptive of Brown’s novels. It is a story of the ways in which it is neither the arrival of technology nor the loss of religion that damns a community, but its inhabitants themselves. Black Star, a Cold War operation as vague in purpose as the occupying power that comes to Norday at the end of Beside the Ocean of Time, is the ready-made villain of the novel, and its eviction of the residents provides the basis for Francis Russell Hart’s claim that Greenvoe is ‘the serious novel of latter-day Clearances’.16 As much as the novel shares key features with Clearance novels such as Neil M. Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom, however, Brown also presents the very idea of community as problematic. Despite Brown’s avowed yearnings for community, in Greenvoe he suggests that community might be essentially impossible, an idea made explicit in Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that ‘it is precisely the immanence of man to man . . . that constitutes the stumbling block to a thinking of community’.17

I. The Writing of the Disaster The tension between the desire for an ideal community and the difficulty of approaching any group of individuals as a collective whole is presented from Greenvoe’s first page. The first five chapters of the novel are formally arranged around the course of a day, beginning at dawn and ending after dark. The natural world – signified not according to seasons, as in so much of Brown’s work, but in values of light and dark – is presented as a unifying force that is alternately embraced and disrupted by the people it contains, but that is not in any way transcendent. In his first three sentences, Brown depicts first the natural world, then the village, and finally the individual inhabitants, a sequence that

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initially appears to prescribe a natural order of understanding: ‘Slowly the night shadow passed from the island and the Sound. In the village of Greenvoe lights burned in the windows of three fishermen’s cottages above the pier. A small dark knotted man came out of one of the doors’ (G 9). This pattern is familiar from stories such as ‘A Calendar of Love’, in which Brown presents the life of the individual as best understood with regards to the natural world, to the seasons and weather and landscape. The first chapter, largely concerned with introducing the townsfolk and their landscape, is indeed closely tied to much of the prose Brown had published thus far.18 The small town is presented as a ‘dream’ (G 15) of pastoral calm: Afternoon was always the quietest time in the village. The fishermen were still at sea. The crofters had not yet unyoked. There was little sound in Greenvoe on a summer afternoon but the murmur of multiplication tables through the tall school window, and the drone of bluebottles among Mr Joseph Evie’s confectionery, and the lapping of water against the pier. (G 17)

Idyllic passages such as this one are interspersed with the essentially comic conversations and gossip found at the general store. The community of Greenvoe exists in the juxtaposition of the natural and the manmade, and in the tension between individuals’ interactions with the land and with other people. Each of the novel’s characters is introduced in the course of his or her daily routine; the reader is presented with a wide array of fishermen, shopkeepers and children, all of whom gossip about the others. The sole exception to this dream of unified community is The Skarf, the self-appointed town historian, who speaks in an uncommonly poetic register that initially appears to mark him out as an individual who does not fully engage with the rest of the community. He is, all the same, a type familiar from Brown’s other works. As a chronicler of the community, he necessarily exists at a remove, but he is also integral to the community’s self-recognition. The final passage in this chapter, however, hints at what will become Brown’s dominant theme in the remainder of the novel: the desire of the characters to see themselves in a larger, perhaps fictional, drama than that of their immanent community. Six men and a boy gather in a farm for the ‘first of six initiation rites into the Ancient Mystery of The Horsemen’ (G 33). Solemnity and sobriety are encouraged, and the rite itself concerns the novice’s desire to return to a kingdom from which he has been outcast. As Isobel Murray and Bob Tait point out, the ritual enacted here is a combination of an ancient Scottish cult, the Horseman’s Word, and the Catholic Stations of the Cross.19 The

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characters consciously reach out across traditions to be a part of something larger. Crucially, the ritual takes place at Mansie Anderson’s farm, The Bu, which rarely appears elsewhere in the novel: it occupies a separate time and space from the rest of the novel’s events.20 While this coda does not depart from the realism of the rest of the chapter, it hints towards a tension between lived experience and tradition that permeates the remainder of the novel. Brown’s focus on the tension between received, communal tradition and religion, represented in the passages concerning the Horsemen, and the phenomenal experience of daily life, which occupies the bulk of the novel, highlights the problematic nature of community. If anything, the characters fall prey to a desire to see themselves nostalgically as part of a unified community that can no longer exist. The individual’s desire to understand himself primarily as part of a unified – and often intangible – community comes at the expense of his engagement in the present physical community around him. It is the desire for something greater than lived experience that dooms the community, and it is each individual’s attempt to place himself within grand narratives that isolates him. Ian Duncan has persuasively argued for a joint conceptualisation of community and fiction in Scottish writing. He finds in the work of Adam Smith and David Hume an insistence on such a relation; for them, the ‘imaginary production of reality is customary – habitual and social – rather than solipsistic; its great work of fiction, common life, is an ongoing, collective project, consensually shared and reproduced’.21 The Ancient Mystery of the Horsemen is such a fiction, an artificial manifestation and production of community by the community itself. Throughout the novel, the ritual of the Horsemen is never integrated into the rest of the community, nor is it even commented upon. Instead, it is a fiction of community that exists outside the community at the same time that it sustains it. This recourse to the fiction of community, however, can also be seen in the importance of textual fictions within the novel. More than in any other of Brown’s works, the characters in Greenvoe learn who they are through books. Inga Fortin-Bell, the laird’s granddaughter, is introduced with a copy of Women in Love in her hands; Ivan Westray comforts and torments himself with the Orkneyinga Saga and a book of sermons, On Love Carnal and Divine; the Whaness family reads nightly from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Grace Abiding, Meditations Among the Tombs and The Pilgrim’s Progress; Timmy Folster, the impoverished meth addict, is fond of quoting Burns and cheap romances; Johnny, the Sikh peddler, enjoys Hopkins’s dark sonnets: the entire community is peopled with readers. In a work that begins as something of a pastoral

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romance, this is initially somewhat surprising; the repeated mentions of books point to a rare inwardness among the characters. Throughout the novel, Brown demonstrates that virtually all of the characters measure their lives not by what is around them, but according to what they have read. As Duncan finds in the work of James Hogg, the emergence of textuality ‘marks a lethal alienation from common life in its original condition of a traditional community . . . there is no access to that lost world except as another text’.22 It is only through texts, through the act of individual reading, that the members of the community attempt to understand their relation to the world. The problems raised by this reliance on fiction are most clearly seen in the stilted romance between Inga Fortin-Bell, the laird’s granddaughter, and the boatman Ivan Westray. Inga’s interest is born of her desire to be a character out of Lawrence: Inga turned over on her belly on the warm rock and cradled her head on her forearms. She would like to be utterly naked under the sun. She remembered the story by D. H. Lawrence called Sun. A super story, that. The mindless peasant watching the golden-skinned woman. That was the way Inga would like it to be. . . . But why had Ivan Westray not kissed her last night at the crossroads, when he must have known her whole body was crying out for it? He did not behave like a D. H. Lawrence peasant at all. (G 125, 127)

Inga finds fault in her life for its failure to live up to the expectations created by her reading, or rather her misreading. ‘Sun’ is, after all, about the ‘fatal chain of continuity’;23 the heroine may desire a peasant, but she is finally forced to settle for her grey-faced New Yorker husband. The story’s opening fairy-tale tone slowly erodes into language as dull as the central marriage: it is altogether a strange story on which to base one’s romantic longing. When Inga is raped by Ivan towards the novel’s end, it is quite literally underneath his falling copies of the Orkneyinga Saga and On Love Carnal and Divine. She is punished for her reading: Ivan’s excuse for his actions is that she is ‘“too full of bullshit out of books”’ (G 231) and needs to be taught a lesson about the workings of the world. Her desire to live a life suitable for a fictional heroine is ultimately selfdestructive. Inga is finally a sort of upper-class Leonard Bast, punished for her desire to enter into a culture from which she does not originate, but only knows through the written word. Murray and Tait dismiss the implications of this passage, arguing that ‘the relish of the scene is in the ironic interplay of the three voices, seventeenth-century, twentiethcentury and saga’,24 but this is an insufficient excuse for one of the cruellest moments in Brown’s fiction. For Brown’s aim does not appear to be, as in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, to highlight insurmountable

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social hierarchies, but to reprimand a character for an inward turn that is present in almost every character in the novel. The text itself is mocking. The final passage of the scene is a recapitulation of all that has happened in saga-style: The granddaughter of the chief man in Hellya asked a certain boatman to take her to the sea tower. There was much fog on the way back. The boatman whose name was Ivan forced Inga to lie with him in the cabin of the boat called Skua. Inga said he had done her a great wrong that day and that he would suffer for it. Ivan laughed. He said they would see about that. (G 231–2)

What makes this passage so disturbing is that, in the emergence of a new style, Inga has had her wish fulfilled: she is now a character in a story. The significance of the rape is revealed in the following scene, where the men of the town gather at the hotel, just as they have at the close of each preceding chapter. They are concerned with the death of Ben Budge – earlier in the novel, Ivan has recommended Budge for ‘“good stuff to put in [a] book”’ (G 158) – and the rescue of Samuel Whaness by Bert Kerston, for which he has been paid a five pound note from ‘“that book in the window. It smelt sort of damp, mildewy”’ (G 233). At this final congress, The Skarf refuses to read aloud from the history of Orkney he has been writing, because ‘“What’s coming to this island is beyond prose”’ (G 234). While The Skarf’s argument is that the future of the island can only be captured in poetry – a sentiment that will be echoed and embellished at the close of Beside the Ocean of Time – Brown’s denial of poetry elsewhere in the novel indicates that perhaps The Skarf’s words may be taken at face value: prose is inadequately equipped to explain either the present or the future of the island. Inga’s attempt to understand her life according to what she has read is thus ultimately futile, because prose does not, in this view, allow for the actual future. The fictions of common life and individual happiness are ultimately static and irrelevant. Brown here includes a scene of the unnamed government official from Black Star – already introduced signing his name with ‘a strange involuted squiggle, a sign or a hieroglyph out of the remote past or the remote future’ (G 50) – whose role is to write files on all of the other characters. As William Scorradale the landlord claims: ‘“He’s a writer. . . . Nothing else”’ (G 158). The visitor never speaks, but only writes, and in his acts of de-scription he writes each of the village’s inhabitants out of existence. These writings exist outside of both community and prose; the man visits each house and then makes a mark in his notebook, and, like Pontius Pilate, ‘what he had written, he had written’ (G 237). The death of prose is most effectively shown at The Skarf’s house:

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The guest stood at The Skarf’s window. Pale sheets of paper scattered on the table inside, every sheet a scarred and clotted battlefield; and the cocoa-lid beside the ball-point pen overflowing with cigarette ends; and six warping creels in the rafters. Books in tea-boxes all over the room, hundreds of them, a few lying open and marked beside the manuscript where The Children of the Sun with many a glorious wound on them held a hard-worn ridge of history against trolls and priests and lairds; until the day come. A war on paper. The guest made a sign of cancellation with his pen. (G 235–6)

The Skarf’s writings encapsulate all the violence of the past, but cannot stand against the violence of modernity itself; what is written can be destroyed. In Greenvoe the forces of modernity unwrite all that has been written, and in doing so prove the inefficacy of the written word. By the end of the novel, each character has been undermined by what has been written about him or her, whether in the form of the official’s notes or, in the case of Inga, in the form of an attachment to an outside text. The characters’ attachment to books is both what individualises them and makes them vulnerable; their desire to see themselves as literary characters or types lets them be unwritten by outside forces. These passages initially point to a simple condemnation of reading and writing similar to that seen in ‘The Eye of the Hurricane’ from A Time to Keep. In that story, a novelist, Barclay, comes to Hamnavoe to write on Earl Rognvald25 and surrounds himself with the works of high culture: Ionescu, Chaucer, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Proust, Alain-Fournier and the like. The novelist sees himself as something apart from the community: ‘I had come to live, then, among simple uncomplicated people. I worked to the easy regular rhythm of fishermen and crofters. My imagination nourished itself at primitive wholesome sources, the sea and the land.’26 His actions, and his obliviousness to what actually surrounds him in favour of the works of dead authors, however, contribute to the death of his landlord and his rejection by the woman for whom he yearns; the ‘simple uncomplicated people’ are ultimately far more complicated than he allows himself to recognise, and his desire to use a living community as the backdrop for the creation of a solitary art ends with his necessary abandonment of the town. Brown’s clear moral in this story is that in order to live in a community, one must enter it fully in a way that reading and writing by themselves do not allow. This would initially seem to be the moral of Greenvoe as well: the characters’ desire to model their lives on their reading ultimately makes the community unable to function. As suggested above, however, an adherence to fiction works at the level of the individual and the community; both are presented in the novel as inherently artificial. As Ali Smith argues in her recent introduc-

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tion to the novel, what Brown ‘seems to want is for his readers to be aware of the workings of artifice. . . . He wants his readers to wonder about how things go together, and how they unravel, too.’27 By confounding the reader’s expectations for a novel that would either use community as a backdrop for the story of an individual or detail the life of the community as a comprehensive whole, Brown reveals that his project is something different and new. In Greenvoe, Brown depicts a community that is based on the individual rather than the whole, and demonstrates that such a community will ultimately lack cohesion. In his autobiography, Brown repeatedly refers to the characters in Greenvoe as ‘flat’ (FI 172–4). He here follows Forster’s definition of flat characters as those defined by a single idea or quality.28 Each character in Greenvoe closely conforms to a particular literary stereotype: the religious zealot, the loose woman, the parsimonious shopkeeper, and so on.29 Yet Greenvoe’s characters are also flat in terms of their inability to interact, to engage in each other’s narratives, or to create a whole, complex, communal narrative. The collapse of community is brought about not only by outside forces such as Black Star, or by internal difficulties arising from literacy (and other artefacts of modernity), but is an outgrowth of the intrinsic nature of communities in the modern age. In Brown’s view, the modern community is unsustainable: in Greenvoe he is not advocating a return to a purer communal past, but instead pointing to the impossibility of such a return. The clearest indication of Brown’s perspective can be found in an essay on Edwin Muir written concurrently with Greenvoe, ‘The Broken Heraldry’. The essay is as strongly opposed to progress and modernity as any of the more strident passages in Brown’s early volume An Orkney Tapestry, but instead of blaming the arrival of tractors and automobiles, Brown here examines the dissolving community as a greater cultural reality: Formerly a people of strongly-marked individuality, the Orcadians are gradually losing their identity – or rather they have willingly merged their identity with the rest of the western world. Many things contribute to this loss: wireless and television, compulsory education, newspapers, the insidious notion that urban ways of life are necessarily superior to rural ways. . . . One senses a growing coldness – the coldness of people who have received the fatal blessing of prosperity.30

While Brown’s examples point to particularly twentieth-century sources of change, he goes on, like Taylor, to argue that it was in fact the Reformation that brought about the ‘break-up’ of community: ‘It was then that the old heraldry began to crack, that the idea of “progress” took root in men’s minds. What was broken, irremediably, in the

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16th century was the fullness of life of a community, its single interwoven identity.’31 It is not that newspapers and novels have corrupted the individual members of the community and made it impossible to engage in traditional forms of communal life, but that the entire notion of modern community is an impossibility. The community has been rendered unsustainable for so long that one cannot return to it, for it is already a distant myth. Berthold Schoene sees this focus on identity as a way for Brown to highlight the worth of the individual: ‘Only rarely does Brown speak of the people of Hellya in collective terms, probably because such a presentation would reduce our awareness of each community member’s unique identity.’32 This view is supported by a passage in ‘The Broken Heraldry’ following those quoted above: A town like Stromness, even 30 years ago, used to be alive with ‘characters’, the kind of delightfully surrealistic folk you read about in Russian novels. There are less and less of them now. It is as if people were ashamed to be different from one another.33

And yet the very language in which Brown couches this discussion reveals him to be making a quite contrary point. Given his previously mentioned distrust of prose as a method of revealing truth, his argument that the community has been impossible for centuries, the notion of characters who are ‘surrealistic’, even if delightfully so, whose precedents come not from their ancestors but from foreign novels, signifies that such individuals are already existing at a remove from any ideal communal way of life. Our ‘awareness of each community member’s unique identity’ is not, in fact, an admirable thing, as Schoene supposes. It is instead a reflection of the impossibility of presenting a whole, functional community in the modern age. To hold the Reformation responsible for all that has gone wrong with rural communities in the past four hundred years (as well as ‘the striking incidence of mental trouble in the islands’)34 initially seems to be an over-localised response to the problem of community in modernity. However, Brown’s thesis can be expanded to reflect the absence of a fundamental metanarrative, which has become one of the dominant themes of the modern age. As Michael Strysick writes: Our condition now involves a sifting through the debris of community after the failures of modernity’s metanarratives and community’s attempt to satisfy all desires and affinities. Rather than resurrect past metanarratives or attempt to assemble any new unifying voice or panopticon, another possibility arises: act on the assumption that narrative will still exist, but with the understanding that narratives are irreducible to each other.35

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This ‘sifting through the debris’ is ultimately Brown’s project in Greenvoe. As even the sympathetic Welfare Officer admits, ‘It was obvious, of course . . . that the village was moribund in any case, a place given over almost wholly to the elderly, the fatuous, the physically inept’ (G 244). Greenvoe is a community that is not a whole in itself, but only a holding place for those who have nowhere else to go. If this is Brown’s final view of community in the novel, then his project grows far more complex: rather than document the ways a community operates, as he initially appears to do, he instead writes about the desire for unified or Durkheimian community at a time when such a community is no longer possible. This explains the tendency towards reading and inwardness exhibited in the characters and their willingness to appear as types: all of the inhabitants of Greenvoe are trying to create an imagined community, based largely on received notions from outwith the island, in the absence of a real one. This also, as in other works, reflects Brown’s role (whether self-willed or outwardly imposed) of cultural ambassador: the novel is not ultimately intended for those who live in the real-life models for Greenvoe and Hellya, but for a global readership that looks to the novel as a model of a community that they themselves do not possess. Brown illustrates the failures of community on a grand scale; it is not only the readers in the outside world who are displaced, but those within the works they read. The act of displacement from the community that these behaviours create is a necessary one, then, because there is finally no possibility in modern life of non-displacement. Greenvoe begins to make sense as a novel of displacement, rather than one of community, when it is read alongside Maurice Blanchot’s conceptualisation of the disaster. For Blanchot the disaster is everpresent, unknowable, final, intangible and irreducible to anything else. He is not here concerned with a specific, locatable disaster, but with a more general imminence. This somewhat abstracted notion of the disaster is representative of all that Brown sees as the difficulties of modernity and of human coexistence at large. Whether the disaster in Greenvoe is read as literacy, Black Star, petty individuality or any of the other markers of a collapsing society Brown mentions in the novel is ultimately irrelevant. For Brown, the idea of community, the ideal community, is no longer possible; the panoply of voices in the novel is merely a way to give the reader different approaches to a constant disaster. As Blanchot writes: There is no reaching the disaster. . . . We are on the edge of the disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future – that which is yet to come – if the disaster were not that

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which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. . . . The disaster is its imminence.36

The disaster that is Black Star – the official death of the community insofar as it brings about the razing of crofts and the evacuation of the island’s inhabitants – is a disaster that has in some sense already happened before the novel begins, and is also, even after its historical occurrence, still always imminent. It is for this reason that the end of the novel is present throughout, even when the threat of physical destruction is barely apparent, and for this reason, also, that the specific nature of Black Star remains in doubt (critics have been firmly split on whether it is a North Sea oil concern, a nuclear weapons-holding facility or merely a vague apocalyptic premonition); the arrival of Black Star is nothing more than the arrival of a threat that has always been present, and that will exist no less after its arrival. For what is a ‘Black Star’ if not, like Blanchot’s conceptualisation of disaster, ‘the night lacking darkness, but brightened by no light’?37 Black Star is at once ‘a piece of magic’ and ‘nothing mysterious’ (G 242), it ‘explode[s]’ with ‘mystery and passion’ (G 268), and yet is capable of freezing (G 275). It is, in short, far more a symbol than a construction operation. It is a disaster that always looms and that can never be permanently installed. Indeed, the novel’s end is clearly prefigured early in the book, where the learning-disabled child Gino Manson is mocked and abused by his classmates. The black star is both a mark of hatred and the everyday: They kicked mud at him. A black star filthied his cheek. Gino felt their hatred then; and he cried out, a single sweet gentle plaint. As if they were waiting for just that acknowledgement of their power they scattered and fled in all directions. . . . They were children again. (G 56)

The arrival of Black Star cannot be seen either as the emergence of a new external threat, or as a particular endpoint; it is instead a potentiality that is already present in the community. It is, as David S. Robb has argued, ‘simply a new guise for an ancient – indeed, timeless – feature of island life’,38 as much a part of the community as anything depicted in the preceding chapters. Blanchot’s conceptualisation of the disaster also goes far towards explaining Brown’s distrust of the written word in Greenvoe, which initially strikes the reader as necessarily paradoxical. For Blanchot, the disaster is revealed in its inability to be written: The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as a force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual.39

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Brown’s disaster is the very de-scribing mentioned above. The writing of the disaster, in Blanchot’s conceptualisation is insufficient, in that the disaster by its nature cannot be written, yet Brown perhaps takes the idea further to argue that all writing is the writing of the disaster. If the disaster is ever-present, and if it is shown, as in Greenvoe, to be something that exists in writing – here in the form of the government official’s de-scribing each house and each inhabitant before they are destroyed – then the writing of the disaster must be just as ever-present. In condemning the shaping of society for the past few centuries, Brown is also in part condemning the written word, not for being misleading so much as for having been worn out, for having exhausted itself without coming to a point where it could influence humanity for the better. All of the books the characters read have not improved their lives, because the life of a community cannot be captured in prose. In his fragmentary narratives, his accounts of lives that are not in themselves whole, Brown illustrates the ways in which all writing becomes disaster writing; the novel as a form can do no more than point towards the imminent disaster. Brown’s focus on the disaster in his writing of community can be understood in relation to Nancy’s concept of the ‘singular voice of interruption’, which consists in allowing to be said something that no one – no individual, no representative – could ever say: a voice that could never be the voice of any subject, a speech that could never be the conviction of any understanding and that is merely the voice and the thought of community in the interruption of myth.40

Brown’s voice in the novel is such a voice of interruption: it is the voice of the community examining its own foundational myths. The very structure of the novel – a series of interrupting individual narratives that point to a community that cannot ever be reached, described or made whole – indicates the impossibility of constructing a communal metanarrative. Brown cannot write a novel of community in which the whole community is written into one rubric, but can only document the interplay of individual voices in a situation, inherent in modernity, in which the ideal community can be desired but neither defined nor fulfilled. If literature is to a certain extent made redundant, if it is even viewed, as in Greenvoe, as harmful to the lives of individual readers, it still can function, in the words of Kate Jenckes, to represent ‘an ongoing questioning of the possibility of such a collectivity: a questioning that at the same time implies its impossibility and its necessity’.41 Greenvoe is thus fundamentally not a novel of community, but a novel that questions community: it seeks in the documentation of individual voices to

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explore the possibility of community, even as it recognises that community is impossible. Brown foregrounds the way in which the myth of community continues to exert itself even when the space of community has become nothing more than the emergence of disaster.

II. The Redemptive Myth For Nancy, this literary communitarianism is closely linked to the role of myth. Myth, in this reading, is absolute community: ‘myth represents multiple existences as immanent to its own unique fiction, which gathers them together and gives them their common figure in its speech and as this speech’.42 Myth is collective speech: it is the combination of individual voices into a whole. Myth is the way in which a community defines itself by allowing the lives of disparate individuals to be voiced as a collective whole. From this standpoint, Greenvoe is a conscious attempt at myth-formation. Brown most clearly highlights the role of myth in the establishment of community when he writes of myth qua myth in his depiction of the Ancient Mystery of the Horsemen. Those who enact this ritual are consciously placing themselves in a defining myth: they are enacting something mythic so that it can provide a comprehensive structure for their individual lives. The scenes of ancient ritual chart the village’s recognition of its own imminent disaster and also the possibility of continual renewal. Myth and horses are closely entwined in Brown’s writing, both throughout the poetry and especially in stories such as ‘Seven Poets’ from The Sun’s Net and ‘The Corn and the Tares’ from The Masked Fisherman, the latter of which explicitly concerns the construction of Edwin Muir’s poem ‘One Foot in Eden’, a significant influence on Greenvoe, as several critics have observed. Muir’s poetry is more explicitly concerned with apocalypse than Greenvoe is. The disaster at hand in many of Muir’s most famous poems is not only imminent but also present. Muir has more confidence in the possibility of renewal than Brown, however. In Muir’s poem ‘The Horses’ the apocalypse has arrived in the form of a ‘seven days’ war that put the world to sleep’, yet the survivors are visited by wild horses which bring new life: ‘Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.’43 Muir’s poem is focused on the redemptive power of myth and community – entwined here with concepts of sacrifice and an appeal to nature – a redemption most critics have seen echoed at the end of Greenvoe when the ritual of the horsemen, which has ended with symbolic death in the fifth chapter, is reinstated by new participants. For Muir, this redemption is inherent in the natural world: only something

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outside the human community (understood both narrowly and broadly) can save it. This is a level of redemption that Brown does not believe to be possible; in Greenvoe such a redemption is desired, but ultimately is revealed to be a unity that the world cannot sustain. In the novel, the theme of redemption appears almost as an epilogue. Ten years after the island has been deserted, Mansie Anderson, the Lord of the Harvest in the ritual, whose own family motto is ‘WE FALL TO RISE’ (G 273), returns to Hellya with six young men. The passage begins as a description of a landscape, filled with anonymous figures: The seven men on board [a rowing-boat] seemed anxious to make as little noise as possible; they whispered to one another; the oarsman dipped his blades with a slow lingering plangency. The sun has set but still the northern sky was a glow of crimson and saffron and jet, and the Atlantic caught the luminous riot with still greater brilliance. The boat smashed soundlessly through the stained glass of the sea. (G 275)

This is a conscious attempt at poetic myth-making on Brown’s part. The language is filled with consonance and alliteration; the description of the landscape is at once highly specific to a given evening sunset and yet remains general. The figures in the landscape are referred to as ‘the oarsman’, ‘a young man’, ‘another man’, ‘the old man’, and so forth: the men are demarcated as individuals, separate from each other, but they could be any men, coming to the island of Hellya for any purpose. There is a brief nod to suspense here: the men could be government surveyors returning to the island to carry out more studies, or, as in Beside the Ocean of Time, hippies hoping for a new life: the reader is not initially meant to know who or what they are. When the names of the characters are finally revealed, it becomes apparent that, with the exception of Mansie Anderson, they have all previously been present in the novel only as minor characters, the children of the protagonists. They are named only in one paragraph, however, before Brown refers to them by their roles within the ritual: ‘the Harvester’, ‘the Lord of the Harvest’, ‘the Master Horseman’. Within this five-page epilogue, Brown examines the lives of the (now former) inhabitants of Greenvoe in three ways: as anonymous figures in a landscape, in which far greater attention is paid to the land than to the figures; as named characters, demarcated as individuals in the way the reader expects from realist fiction; and as participants in ancient ritual, in which the role is paramount and the identity of the individual fulfilling the role is completely subsumed within it. The ordering of these perspectives fits into Brown’s oft-remarked belief in the primacy of ritual and myth. In ‘The Broken Heraldry’, he argues that pre-Reformation life was superior to modernity because ‘the

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temporal and the eternal, the story and the fable, were not divorced, as they came to be after Knox: they used the same language and imagery, so that the whole of life was illuminated’.44 At the end of Greenvoe, Brown marks a return of sorts to this unity of myth and reality: not only do the characters exist on multiple planes, but their very language is used to both realist and mythic purposes. Within the ritual, the figure of the Harvester is killed, and as he assumes a symbolic death, he speaks four words: ‘Rain. Share. Yoke. Sun’ (G 278). The other participants ascribe this speech to ‘the wind that moves in the dust’. Brown thus supplies, within the ritual, an echo of the first two planes of interpretation: the Harvester’s actual words belong to the reality of daily island life, to named individuals and their labour, while the surrounding men see the speech as part of the landscape, as an anonymous, unembodied voice. However, one of the Master Horsemen then offers a mythic reinterpretation: ‘“You will call it foolishness. Yet I will say what I heard. The dust seemed to utter this word, Resurrection”’ (G 278). This final plane of interpretation, combining the Christian and the preChristian, is the correct answer, the appropriate way to interpret the scene. The novel ends: The Lord of the Harvest raised his hands. ‘We have brought light and blessing to the kingdom of winter,’ he said, ‘however long it endures, that kingdom, a night or a season or a thousand ages. The word has been found. Now we will eat and drink together and be glad.’ The sun rose. The stones were warm. They broke the bread. (G 279)

This is undoubtedly the first appearance in the novel of a successful community; the men speak with a unified voice, and are united under this one mythic rubric. The passage marks the emergence of community. As Schoene argues: ‘It is only in the aftermath of the disaster of Black Star that ritual and narrative, eternal truths and everyday reality . . . come back together to instigate a resurrection of the island and a revival of its identity.’45 And yet this is an insufficient explanation of what occurs at the end of the novel. The ever-presentness of disaster remains; the length of this new community’s endurance may very well be one night. This passage, although it is set in a specific time and place – ‘ten years after Hellya had been finally evacuated’ (G 275) – is also set outside time; it is not a response to the disaster of Black Star, but the interruption of a timeless myth into a world that cannot sustain it. If Brown, at the end of the novel, is establishing a myth of community, it is a community that comes at the expense of its individual constituent members. Myth is here represented as wholly communal; as Nancy writes, paraphrasing Wagner and Lévi-Strauss: ‘Myth arises only from a community and for it: they engen-

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der one another, infinitely and immediately.’46 And yet, if Greenvoe is a novel of the impossibility of community, then it must necessarily also be a novel of the impossibility of a naive return to myth. While the novel ends with a return to myth and the promise of the renewal of community that such a return promises, it is ultimately a hollow return, a temporary staving-off of disaster, or refusal to accept disaster, that changes nothing. The men who enact the ritual of the Horsemen do so in a spirit not only of renewal, but of nostalgia. The myth neither arises from nor embodies a living community, but is instead enacted to preserve the memory of a community that no longer exists. The passages throughout the novel depicting the ritual are set apart; they use an elevated language and are written not as prose but as drama. Most importantly, as the ending point of each chapter, they are followed not with a return to the depiction of a living community, but with blank space. The ritual continues as a coda to the life of community, rather than as an active or representative aspect of it. The ritual is one of death, for in every instance a figure is made to die symbolically, but until the final passage quoted above, renewal is not even mentioned; the ritual is weighted to be a series of continual endings. The death of the community is represented by this one myth which has sprung from it, a systematic rendering of individual death. Nancy argues that the West ‘has made of community an absolute End, the End’.47 Community in Brown’s work, as represented here by communitarian ritual, is not only a teleological end, but the end of history and narrative. Community is both a desired goal and the point from which nothing follows. For Nancy, modern humanity is kept separate from myth, even as the myths of community are continually strived for and re-enacted. What remains of myth and of community is not experience, but desire and will. This is the phenomenon Brown documents in his depiction of the ritual of the horsemen; the mythic ritual is fulfilled, but not as a part of the community, only as a remainder and reminder of the idea of community. This recognition of the fallacy of myth must retroactively colour the rest of the novel, for in a certain manner all of Greenvoe is a conscious myth-making. This is indicated primarily through language, as can be seen in the opening lines of the second chapter: In the endless bestiary of the weather the unicorns of cloud are littered far west in the Atlantic; the sun their sire, the sea their dame. Swiftly they hatch and flourish. They travel eastwards, a grey silent stamping herd. Their shining hooves beat over the Orkneys and on out into the North Sea. Sometimes it takes days for that migration to pass. But many are torn on the crags and hills, and spill their precious ichor on the farm-lands. Crofters wake to cornfields and pastures extravagantly jewelled. (G 37)

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A passage such as this is not commonplace in a supposedly realist work, even one by an author better known for his poetry than his prose. Indeed, it repeats almost verbatim the lines from Brown’s 1965 poem ‘Weather Bestiary’, which begins: ‘RAIN / The unicorn melts through his prism’ (CP 50). Such a passage is not present in order to add a poetic tint to the novel, but to signify something substantially different: all of what appears to be a work of realist fiction is as hyper-poetic, as steeped in the imagination, as a more recognisably elevated passage such as this. Brown here indicates a way to read the novel as conscious myth-making, as something removed from reality by virtue of its being written. The novel is not then a realist fiction with echoes of myth, but a novel of myth grounded in reality; such is the impossibility of community that it can only be explored through this sort of myth-making.

III. The Individual Community Brown’s most interesting depiction of myth-making comes in the story of Elizabeth McKee, whom Brown himself terms the one emergent, assertive character in the novel (FI 174). Mrs McKee’s story is the one most easily read as a separate narrative, in part because she herself imagines her life as a readable narrative, one that acquires meaning only as it is judged from the outside. In seven passages, cumulatively making up almost one third of the novel, a board of imaginary inquisitors retells Mrs McKee’s life story and forces her to answer to a series of charges ranging from unwitting infidelity to unwitting murder. Mrs McKee is an outsider, judged by a court of outsiders, befriended in the novel only by an outsider (Johnny Singh, previously introduced in ‘The Seller of Silk Shirts’ in A Calendar of Love), and is largely unconcerned with the events of the village around her. At the same time, as many critics have noted, she is also the closest the novel comes to a central protagonist, and her story is an important depiction of the relation of the individual to the community. In his depiction of Mrs McKee, Brown reveals the ways in which individuals form their own communities according to their own concerns, and the dangers inherent in that action. Mrs McKee lives a life centred on memory and ritual. The assize that visits her four times a year to judge her past sins is as much a ritual as that of the Horsemen, with its own particular and secret rules of conduct. She dwells explicitly in a community based in individual memory, insofar as every meeting consists of a ‘resurrection’ of Mrs McKee’s own past. Mrs McKee’s perspective is similar to that of The Skarf; she initially takes pleasure in the revival of these memories and

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recognises the members of the assize as individuals who have adopted a communal body without diminishing their own distinctive voices. In the absence of an engagement with the physical community around her, Mrs McKee has formulated a non-physical one of her own, a community that is made up of individuals but acts as one. What is in common in the assize is common only because the memories spring from the mind of one person. The assize is, along with the ritual of the Horsemen, a true depiction of community; that it is both imaginary and destructive reveals how Brown is using the novel to argue the impossibility of community in the present. Mrs McKee’s memory is not accidentally located in the form of a court. For Nancy, the approach of the individual to death is imbued with legal echoes; what humans do, according to Nancy, is to ‘compear before the “world court”’.48 Compearance is a technical term, derived from Scottish law, for the way two or more individuals may answer to the same charge; in Greenvoe, Mrs McKee appears alone, but also compears insofar as her selves, spread out across time, must answer together.49 This compearance allows the life of an individual to be understood as a series of actions that must be accounted for, or as accusations that must be answered. As Robb demonstrates, accusation ‘is one of the leitmotifs of the novel’.50 Mrs McKee, unlike the other characters, perhaps by dint of her outsider status, accuses only herself. The adoption of legalistic ritual becomes a form of self-accusation. Ritual is also presented as a form of deliverance, however, in Johnny’s visit to Mrs McKee: ‘What is required in this room is exorcism. What is needed is some pure blessed deliberate ritual to rid this old woman of her ghosts’ (G 94). And yet what Johnny offers her is not a ritual, but an acknowledgement of the outside, natural world, conversation about ‘the wild lupins in the island of Quoylay’ and proof that ‘the present world is full of such beautiful things’ (G 94–5). Just as at the beginning of the novel, Brown here argues for a primacy of the natural order over the rituals that humans can impose on it. Mrs McKee is tormented by a community of memories to such an extent that she cannot engage in the physical world around her, where she might find a more approving community. Self-accusation and isolation, for Brown, are central elements of individual life in the modern world. Mrs McKee is a central character, perhaps the central character, of the novel because she represents the impossibility of individual engagement in community; she turns away from the community that could be found on her doorstep in order to devise a community of her own imagining. And yet the external community is filled with individuals who, to a lesser extent, create their own adjudicators as well. When he is close to drowning, the fisherman

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Samuel Whaness embarks on a pilgrim’s progress (no doubt inspired by his previously mentioned reading), a passage that is both a pastiche of Bunyan and a condemnation of Protestant spirituality. He is surrounded not by judges but by shawled women and angel porters. Like Mrs McKee, Whaness’s self-devised torments as he approaches death – like that of Mrs McKee, a death he is ultimately spared – isolate him from the actual community around him. Whaness and Mrs McKee both exist almost solely in their own imagined worlds, communities that are far richer and certainly more familiar to them than Greenvoe itself, but that also separate them from the rest of the community. These passages are an implicit condemnation of the inward turn that Brown sees as central to the modern world: a turn that not only deprives the community of its members, but also brings the individuals closer to their own deaths. If community, as represented in the final ritual of the Horsemen, symbolises life, then individuality comes to signify death. From these passages, it is easy to see how critics, including Craig, develop the notion that Greenvoe is ‘directed not on the drive towards the modern world, but on the transcendence of it . . . [incorporating a] denial of chronology and progress’.51 And yet this interpretation is almost completely contrary to Brown’s treatment of Whaness and Mrs McKee: it is in transcending the world (whether ancient or modern), and in letting themselves live in a world made of memory, faith, ritual and imagination that they drive themselves to death. Their need to explain themselves to a ‘world court’ of their own devising separates them from the real workings of the community. Brown’s framing of this idea in legal scenes can be understood with reference to the work of Søren Kierkegaard. As Elsebet Jegstrup argues, for Kierkegaard progress perverts the ‘relation between the individual and community [which] is grounded externally in constructed justice’.52 Progress brings disorder to justice, which destroys the relationship between the individual and community. Brown suggests this idea in his portrayal of Mrs McKee as a slave to the assize. Her life is viewed in a legal setting that is necessarily perverse, as it is of the individual’s making: it offers neither punishment nor forgiveness, it cannot distinguish between levels of sin, nor does it allow Mrs McKee to reintegrate herself within the community. Mrs McKee’s life is validated according to a court of her own making, and crucially, it is not a just court: the assize is a place of accusation, but not justice. Progress here has destroyed not only community, but also a communal notion of justice. Contrary to Craig’s interpretation, Brown does not advocate, or consider possible, a transcendence of progress or its effects. He instead documents these effects in order to demonstrate that it is now impossible for an

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individual to transcend such matters. Transcendence could have only come through the work of the whole community, a community – or an idea of community – that has been disrupted for centuries. Greenvoe is far from a denial of progress or an invitation to transcend it; it is instead a condemnation of progress and a calling to attention of the impossibility of the desired community. Mrs McKee’s eventual delirium is relieved not in Greenvoe, but in Edinburgh, when she is returned to ‘her own city’ (G 254). In Greenvoe she is subjected to ‘the dust and the raped skyline’ and ‘the engines of destruction’, and rejects the attentions of her surrounding neighbours (G 249). It is surprisingly in urban life that ‘Time built itself up again, not as an ancient storied house, but as a drift of butterflies. A delicate light lay upon her branching quickened veins; she was young again’ (G 255). The engagement with time in a world ruled by progress is fundamentally different from that in a rural community. In her return to Edinburgh, Mrs McKee moves past narrative into a world where all events become simultaneous. Edinburgh, in works such as Beside the Ocean of Time, is depicted as something of an industrial hell, or at the very least a place that destroys both the individual and the possibility of community. Here, however, Edinburgh stands in for spring, rebirth and forgiveness. Only when the outsider is returned to what is necessarily outside can she make peace with herself and those around her. Edinburgh can do this work because it is there that the community of individuals can exist as such; it is necessarily a broken community, but nevertheless in some ways a far more functional one than that of Greenvoe. This acceptance of metropolitan communal identity has emerged over the past century as urban life becomes more dominant. The rural, agricultural community that Brown often idealises has been gradually replaced with a conception of community founded in the city. It is the city that is located as the basis of both community and philosophy in Nancy’s conceptualisation: ‘the city . . . is the subject of philosophy, where philosophy is the production of their common logos’.53 Mrs McKee, at least, finds peace when she accepts progress and urbanity; for Brown, the modern individual is perhaps happiest when the will to an ancient, ideally unified community is replaced with the acceptance of the plural community modernity demands. This passage reflects a peace-making with modernity not present anywhere else in Brown’s fiction, but it is no less significant for that. In Greenvoe, the idea of the perfect community has been so corrupted that it can only appear in new forms. Mrs McKee is almost destroyed by her constructed narrative, by her engagement with a form of memory that is not communal but too individual, and by her determination to examine the past as a series

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of accusations. Her story parallels that of The Skarf, who is also concerned with constructing an answerable history, in this case not of himself but of the whole community. As discussed above, The Skarf abandons his project when Black Star enters the novel. This abandonment constitutes an acceptance that the modern world will not support linear narratives of origin. Both The Skarf and Mrs McKee are depicted in the construction of explanatory metanarratives that are unsustainable in Brown’s vision of modernity. For The Skarf, the purpose of this project is explicitly political: his vision of community reflects a greater Marxist paradigm. The Skarf’s project is centred on the anonymous and universal; while written by an individual, it is presented for the approval of the community at large. At the start of the novel, then, The Skarf’s project is antithetical to Mrs McKee’s: it is a communal narrative written for the benefit of the community, rather than an individual narrative constructed only for the benefit (or detriment) of the individual constructor. As the novel progresses, however, The Skarf’s narrative becomes more specific. In his account of Thorvald Gormson (Harvest-Happy), The Skarf realises that ‘“We have passed beyond the age of anonymity now. Here at last is a man with a name”’ (G 59). The narrative grows in particulars; at the appearance of Robert Stewart, the account grows more concerned with named people than with the community, and in the final passage in The Skarf’s narrative just one man, Mansie Hellyaman, matters, and only because he is a capitalist. It is progress itself that disallows The Skarf’s communal narrative. The events that shape the island can only be told, after a certain point in history, as individual narratives, since for The Skarf traditional narratives of common life have been irrevocably disrupted by capitalism and the rise of the individual.54 It is at this point, in a sense, that Brown takes over from The Skarf; it is worth noting that much of The Skarf’s narrative closely echoes, in tone and content, An Orkney Tapestry. The modern world can only be told in a series of individual narratives; the communal identity originally invoked can no longer be sustained. Hellyaman is an opportunist and a man of violence. When he leaves the soldiering life, he is caught up in the great dream of agriculture. New methods of farming were being tried out everywhere: enclosures, root crops, the renewal and sweetening of the land with clover. . . . And every year the banker sent him a statement that assured him he had more money than the year before. (G 162)

Hellyaman’s name is not accidental: the representative man of Hellya is now an individual who is concerned not with farming but with

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agriculture, not with the community but with personal gain. The community, captured in the voice of The Skarf, has long been disintegrated, not by the arrival of Black Star, but by the preceding centuries of individual dominance. The Skarf’s history cannot explain the community, for there is no community left to explain, only an assemblage of individuals who form their own narratives, as borne out most explicitly by Mrs McKee, but to a lesser extent by all of the inhabitants of the island. The historian has been made redundant. The Skarf’s dream of ‘the Song of the Children of the Sun’ (G 234) that will replace his history in the island’s future remains a dream. For Brown, what is actually on the island in the present is nothing more than an assemblage of individuals who cannot be written into an overarching story. Greenvoe is finally set up to dispute the possibility of the very sort of community towards which it points (and which hopeful critics have often found within), a community of ‘a single interwoven identity’.55 Greenvoe is a place of inwardness and accusations, of individual fantasies and collective disputes. The novel begins with a depiction of what appears to be a vibrant, interwoven community, only to reveal it as inwardly corrupt, hoping for redemption but not assured of it. For Brown, what a community should be can only be revealed by what it has failed to be. In his story ‘The Cinquefoil’, published not long after Greenvoe, Brown explicitly outlines the ideal community: A community maintains itself, ensures a continuance and an identity, through such things as the shop, the kirk, the stories told in smithy and tailor-shop, the ploughing match, agricultural show, harvest home, the graveyard where all its dead are gathered. (It is the same with all communities – city or island – but the working-out of the ethos of a community is best seen in microcosm, as in the island of Selskay.) Most of all the community ensures its continuance by the coming together of man and woman. . . . The place where the community lives is important, of course, in perpetuating its identity.56

This prescriptive passage is in keeping with the remnants of community displayed in Greenvoe, most especially in the first chapter. The community comes together in the combination of land and commerce, in conversation and silence. It is a combination of the man-made (the shop), the divine (the kirk) and the landscape. In their long-standing ties to each other and to the land, the inhabitants of Hellya have the outward appearance of community; what they lack is what Brown terms ‘Love’: all loves and affections become meaningful only in relation to Love itself. The love of a young man and girl in a small island is cluttered always with jealousy, lewdness, gossipings in the village store. But the mystics insist that Love itself ‘moves the stars’. They say that, in spite of the terror and pain

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inseparable from it, ‘all shall be well’ – in the isolate soul, and in the island, and in the universe. The meanest one in the community feels this occasionally; he could not suffer the awful weight of time and chance and mortality if he didn’t; a sweetness and a longing are infused into him, a caring for something or someone outside his shuttered self.57

In his appropriation of a Catholic mystical tradition to explain the secular community, most especially in this passage the works of Julian of Norwich, Brown reveals that the ultimate failing in Greenvoe, which dooms the islanders, is a lack not only of love, but of faith. While Brown writes elsewhere repeatedly of the necessity of a religious understanding of community, Greenvoe is remarkable for the lack of attention paid to religious practice. The Whaness family is certainly devout, and Mrs McKee’s narrative is in part concerned with the theological training of her son Simon, the island’s minister, but with the exception of Ivan Westray’s oft-mentioned book of sermons On Love Carnal and Divine and the volumes of Foxe and Bunyan, the island appears to exist on a largely secular plane: the faith of individuals never leads towards a community of faith. The closest Brown comes to a statement of the centrality of religious faith to community is in the final ritual of the Horsemen, where the ‘resurrection’ at hand is explicitly Eucharistic. As Schoene argues: ‘In startling imitation of the Incarnation of Christ, the Fable of Orkney enters the narrative of the Story here, revealing the entwinement of the ordinary with the eternal and divine.’58 But Schoene’s interpretation is here somewhat misleading, for while the ritual is ever-present in the novel, it is never ‘ordinary’, especially at the novel’s end, where all that is ordinary in the community has departed. The ritual exists to fill the vacuum created by the departure of the community as such. Even as Brown depicts the potential return of the ‘eternal and divine’ to the island, he ensures that such a return can only occur in the absence of the ordinary community. God is the central aporia of the text, the absent metanarrative that in its absence ensures the failure of all other explanatory narratives. In Greenvoe, Brown depicts what happens to a community where God has been abandoned. In his essay on Rackwick in An Orkney Tapestry, Brown writes of how, through the observance of Catholic ritual, ‘into the crofter’s sackcloth the life of Christ wove richness and beauty’ (OT 36). Calvinism, conversely, is associated with a secular belief in fate (OT 48). In giving themselves up to fate, the islanders abandon the (Catholic) metanarrative that could have sustained their community. If, as has been argued above, Greenvoe can be read as essentially a novel of despair, it is the despair of the possibility of community after

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the death of God. There is, all the same, a fictive, or impossible, community depicted in the novel, and it is the very same community that Nancy sees as arising in the absence of God, a community structured around common plurality. Greenvoe is an example of what Nancy terms a ‘divine [place] without gods’.59 For Nancy, the community is centred on the plurality of Being, and is grounded in a specifically non-Christian practice of ‘love’: this love is not some possible mode of relation; it designates relation itself at the heart of Being – in lieu of and in the place of Being – and designates this relation, of one to another, as the infinite relation of the same to the same as originally other than itself. . . . It is a matter of wondering about the ‘meaning’ (or ‘desire’) of a thinking or culture that gives itself a foundation the very expression of which denotes impossibility, and of wondering how and to what extent the ‘madness’ of this love could expose the incommensurability of the very constitution of the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ of the ‘self’ in the ‘other’.60

This is a remarkable paragraph, for Nancy insists that this love, when removed from its conceptualised Judeo-Christian history, is the way the relation of the self to Being, and the relation of the self to the other, are best understood. He simultaneously insists that the concept of love is so entwined with Judeo-Christian notions that it can only denote an impossibility of relation. The contradiction here is the same one that Brown presents in Greenvoe, although to opposite ends: through JudeoChristian history and practice, humanity has been given a guideline of what a community should be and of how a self relates to others, to the Other and to otherness itself, and yet that system of relations is necessarily impossible. It is not enough, as Nancy implicitly admits, merely to state that these concepts can be utilised free of their previous significations, and yet there is no other language with which to discuss the nature of relation. Given the absence of God (or even, in terms more permissible to Brown, the impossibility of recreating the original relationship between humanity and the divine, severed at the Reformation), those aspects of human life previously unified through faith in God, including self, others, community and love, are now understood only as individual fragments. And yet it is still impossible to speak of these things without implicitly referring back to an earlier, unified, way of looking at the world and at the divine. This is a key concern of Greenvoe: the ritual at the end of the novel can only refer directly to the divine because it has been taken out of the world. Brown’s community yearns to transcend its own fragmentary nature and cannot, until such a time as all of the fragments themselves have been further fragmented to the level of the individual without others.

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Nancy explicitly frames his account of a fragmentary nature revealed in, or constitutive of, community, in reference to the work of Heidegger: fragmentation is the way in which Being can be best understood not as Dasein but as Mitsein, or Being-with. In Nancy’s interpretation of Heidegger, Mitsein is absolutely central to any understanding of Being: Being is revealed as meaning, and that meaning is in turn revealed as the sharing of Being.61 At the level of the human, Being consists in being-in-common, that is, in the formation of community. Community cannot be understood as a single entity, as the interwoven whole of Brown’s idealised pre-Reformation community would entail, but as linked singulars. The fragmentation at the heart of any understanding of community is thus a necessary way of understanding Being for Nancy. This community is not a rude collection of egos, but a coexistence of singulars. Nancy uses this idea of ‘singular plurality’ to advance a new understanding of community: not being able to say ‘we’ is what plunges every ‘I,’ whether individual or collective, into the insanity where he cannot say ‘I’ either. To want to say ‘we’ is not at all sentimental, not at all familial or ‘communitarian.’ It is existence reclaiming its due or its condition: coexistence.62

This ‘we’-ness is an essential condition of human existence that is fulfilled by community, even when community has been rendered impossible. And it is this notion of an essential coexistential element of human life that finally unites Brown and Nancy. Both posit that although community is impossible, it is only in co-existence that difference can be fully revealed. This begins to explain the bare types who populate Greenvoe: they can only be revealed as such because they co-exist within a cobbled-together community, one that does not reflect the unified whole to which Brown would perhaps advocate a return and that Nancy would castigate as sentimental, but that nevertheless represents a cohesive approach to the question of being within a community. A further unification of perspective can be seen in Nancy’s work with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the literary fragment. The fragment, in the early German Romanticism to which they refer, is necessarily and intentionally incomplete, and ‘functions simultaneously as a remainder of individuality and as individuality’.63 The fragment does not exclude or annul the whole, but instead expands and surpasses it. The fragment in literature is a way to explore the whole while remaining at the level of the individual. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s focus here is on fragments clearly identified as such, but it is possible to interpret Greenvoe as a fragmentary novel. Rather than reading the novel as a collection of short stories that have been combined to create a novelistic effect, as

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some critics have, it is possible to read it as a collection of fragments. The novel consists of a series of passages that focus on separate individuals and are to a certain extent necessarily incomplete in themselves. Through their juxtaposition, however, they point towards a whole. Within Greenvoe, it is in the spaces between the distinct fragments that the community appears, in the shifts between forms and narrators. The whole cannot be documented as the whole, but in the documentation of fragments something of the whole can perhaps be salvaged. Greenvoe thus points to a radical new understanding of community. If it fails as a depiction of a unified community, this failure is itself anticipated by Brown in his emphasis on lives ruined by the unified worlds presented within fiction. The novel as a form can no longer be used to depict a community, or even a whole and independent individual, but can only portray what has been lost within modernity and what remains. There is a tremendous tension in Greenvoe: the fragments that constitute it point both to disaster and to a new understanding of community, seemingly entirely disparate notions of the future. In his later writings, Brown attempts to find ways to resolve this tension: myth, sacrifice and poetry all serve to point beyond a disrupted community and towards an eternal unity that, even if it cannot be captured or acted upon, nevertheless exists as promise. Here, however, the community is left as impossible: the disaster is forever imminent and always present. Greenvoe is best understood not as a novel specifically focusing on Orkney at all, but as an expression of modern despair, a despair that in his age Brown would attempt to mollify, but here presents only as crisis. Greenvoe represents the novel as fragment, as everything and nothing, and as such it also becomes the novel of modern community, impossible and ever-present.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Brown, Calendar of Love, p. 7. Ibid., p. 116. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 12. Italics in original. Brown, ‘Community as Cultural Critique’, p. 153. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 22. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 32. Italics in original. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 263. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 43. Ibid., p. 168. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 10. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 427.

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56 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community Ibid., p. 437. MacDiarmid, Islands of Scotland, p. 27. Corlett, Community Without Unity, p. 17. Hart, Scottish Novel, p. 384. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 3. Isobel Murray and Bob Tait’s discussion of the novel in Ten Modern Scottish Novels focuses largely on this section; their piece was one of the first significant critical discussions of Greenvoe outside of its original reviews, and has contributed greatly to the novel’s recent rise in stature and popularity. The reviews, too, focus largely on this opening chapter, which Derek Stanford sees as an homage to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (Stanford, ‘One Summer Week’, p. 3). The novel has been traditionally read as one of avowed community, in which the ideas of human interaction established in the opening chapter are sustained throughout. Tom Scott, for instance, reads Greenvoe as a novel in which ‘the community is the hero’ (Scott, ‘Orkney as Pairt O an Eternal Mood’, p. 33). Murray and Tait, ‘George Mackay Brown: Greenvoe’, pp. 150–1. The Bu is also the name of the farm where Edwin Muir grew up. Brown devotes the largest section of his selection of Muir’s prose to Muir’s childhood reminiscences; there, Muir writes of Orkney and the Bu as a place with ‘no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous’. Muir, Selected Prose, 80. In setting the ritual of the horsemen at The Bu, Brown explicitly echoes Muir’s conception of Orkney as a place set aside from the rest of the world. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p. 120. Ibid., p. 286. Lawrence, The Complete Short Stories, v. 2, p. 545. Murray and Tait, ‘George Mackay Brown: Greenvoe’, p. 166. As Alan Bold points out, both the daily routine of Barclay and his preoccupations (Catholicism, Norse history) mirror Brown’s to such an extent that the story may be seen as semi-autobiographical. Bold, George Mackay Brown, p. 64. Brown, A Time to Keep, p. 159. Smith, Introduction, p. vii. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, p. 75. See also Muir’s defence of flat characters in The Structure of the Novel, pp. 135–46. The characters conform not only to general literary types, but also to particular Scottish Island models. Many of the characters, especially Alice Voar, appear modelled on the descriptions of Hebridean life in Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch (see pp. 9–13 especially). Brown, ‘The Broken Heraldry’, p. 144. Ibid., p. 145. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 172. Brown, ‘The Broken Heraldry’, p. 144. Ibid., p. 146. Strysick ‘End of Community’, p. 203. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Robb, ‘Greenvoe: A Poet’s Novel’, p. 50.

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The Fictive Community 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

57

Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, p. 7. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 80. Italics in original. Jenckes, ‘The Work of Literature’, p. 69. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 57. Muir, Collected Poems, pp. 246–7. Brown, ‘The Broken Heraldry’, p. 145. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 185. This is perhaps the most remarked on passage in the novel; for Bold, it ‘brings before the reader a world where renewal is always a possibility’ (94); for Brian Murray and Rowena Murray, it is ‘the settlement and restoration of their faith’ (138); for Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, it is ‘an affirmation of man and his relationship to nature’ (151). Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 50. Nancy, ‘La Comparution’, p. 374. Ibid., p. 372. The assize is indeed tied to Simon McKee’s episodes of drunkenness (G 18), but as the fantasy is solely Mrs McKee’s, it is only her self which must answer to the court. Robb, ‘Greenvoe: A Poet’s Novel’, p. 51. Craig, Out of History, pp. 58–9. Jegstrup, ‘A Questioning of Justice’, p. 434. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 22. Elizabeth Huberman takes the opposite approach in an early article on the novel, claiming that: ‘although The Skarf does not make the point, these cycles of sowing, harvesting, and baking, of living, dying, and giving birth, have been going on too long to be more than temporarily interrupted by a project conjured up by a fleshless, soulless Number. The community, as the movement and structure of the novel, as well as The Skarf’s history, have testified, is too solidly a whole to be disintegrated beyond recall, too timeless to be brought to an end.’ Huberman, ‘Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe’, p. 41. Huberman’s interpretation of the novel is especially worth examining for its determination to take the works of Brown purely at face value. Brown, ‘Broken Heraldry’, p. 145. Brown, Hawkfall, p. 105. Ibid., p. 107. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 185. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 150. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, pp. 79–80. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 42. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, pp. 42–3.

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Chapter 2

Sainthood-towards-Death: Magnus

The story of Magnus Erlendson,1 twelfth-century Earl of Orkney and martyred saint, is perhaps the best known to emerge from the islands, the ‘most famous episode in Orkney’s history’.2 In John Mooney’s modern hagiography, a major source for twentieth-century writing on Magnus, the earl is held to be ‘the outstanding personality of the Orkneys in olden days as well as in our own times’.3 This claim still stands seventy years after Mooney’s biography, thanks not only to the continued popularity of the Orkneyinga Saga and related Icelandic tellings, but also to George Mackay Brown’s repeated reworking of the story, especially in the largely non-fiction collection An Orkney Tapestry, the play The Loom of Light and the novel Magnus. Brown calls Magnus’s martyrdom ‘The great drama at the heart of the Orkney story’ (CP 291), and later begins and ends his autobiography with references to Magnus: ‘These historical events form the backdrop to much of the narrative and verse that I have written. Without the violent beauty of those happenings eight and a half centuries ago, my writing would have been quite different’ (FI 9). While he attests to the stylistic influence of the sagas in his work and to the ways they impart ‘the importance of pure shape’ (FI 65), Brown also approaches the story from a religious perspective. The last line of his autobiography reads: ‘I say, once a day at least, “Saint Magnus, pray for us . . .”’ (FI 187). For Brown, the religious and politico-historical elements of the Magnus story are necessarily entwined; historical veracity is no more central to his reading of the sagas than their function as devotional texts. In his various versions of this story, most particularly in the three texts named above but also in many of his short stories and poems, Brown continually rebalances the tension between historical and spiritual signification. He also uses the framework of Magnus’s life further to explore the relationship between individuals and the community, the value of sacrifice and the meaning of death. While in Greenvoe Brown depicts the community as an assemblage of separate individuals

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who yearn for a unified whole, in his versions of the Magnus story he demonstrates the ways in which an individual can unify and define the community through sacrifice. Saint Magnus is the central figure in Brown’s writing, and in his reworkings of this narrative his philosophical and religious methods and beliefs become most clear.

I. Medieval and Modern Variants of the Magnus Story There are three primary narratives of the life and death of Magnus Erlendson, all drawn from the same Latin biography, written in the early twelfth century by a priest known as Master Robert.4 The oldest and most widely disseminated of these accounts is found in the Orkneyinga Saga, which situates Magnus’s martyrdom within the context of the history of the earls of Orkney until the early thirteenth century. Two later sagas, quite closely related, are devoted entirely to Magnus, the Longer Magnus Saga and Shorter Magnus Saga (hereafter LMS and SMS respectively). The SMS is most often read as an abridgement of the account given in the Saga and is primarily focused on the moment of Magnus’s death. Its account of Magnus’s life is divided between the battle of the Menai Strait – an episode that appears in every variant, in which Magnus, serving under the Norwegian king Magnus Barelegs, refuses to fight against the Welsh and instead recites the psalter from the deck of the ship – and the miracles performed by Magnus after his death. Its importance lies in separating out the story of Magnus from that of other earls; the reader is forced to consider the text not just as an historical narrative, but as having greater cultural and religious significance. The SMS and the Saga initially present Magnus’s life in the context of political history. A brief interlude in the latter, however, suggests the primary concerns of later texts. Magnus’s cousin, rival earl and ultimately murderer Hakon Paulson receives his fortune from a Swedish wise man, who tells him: ‘“During your life you’ll be the cause of a crime for which you’ll barely be able to atone – perhaps never – to that god you believe in”’.5 In this prophecy it becomes clear that the life of Magnus gains its import from his martyrdom and sainthood, rather than from his living accomplishments. The prophecy also suggests the ways in which Magnus’s martyrdom is used to represent the shift from Scandinavian religions to Christianity. The Saga includes two fervent interludes of devotional writing in its account of Magnus’s life and miracles, and ends with a prayer: [we] close this particular account with the prayer that he who wrote this record, he who has told it, and all who listen to it may enjoy from that holy

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knight of God, Earl Magnus, blessings and the answer to their prayers for the remission of their sins and for everlasting joy.6

Nowhere else in the Saga does the author appear, and nowhere else is Christianity invoked, except as a political expedient. If Magnus’s battles are presented in the same terms as those of other earls, his miracles are separated out from the rest of the history. There is no pretence towards objectivity here: these miracles are nothing like the series of political assassinations, battles and successions that fill the rest of the Saga. For these reasons, as well as stylistic differences, it is frequently assumed that the episode is of a different authorship from the rest of the Saga.7 Even if this episode stands out as ‘a clunking interpolation of Christian propaganda into the saga as a whole’,8 as Robin Waugh argues, it is remarkable in light of later explicitly Christian interpretations of Magnus’s martyrdom that none of the variants presumes that Magnus is killed for religious reasons. Magnus never openly declares his Christianity, for instance, nor does Hakon – occasionally seen in more recent texts as representative of Scandinavian religious practices – use religious difference as a rationale for the killing. Instead, the role of Christianity is limited to the discussion of miracles and the interpolations of the narrator, elements that are further emphasised in later variants. In the final medieval version of the story, the LMS, the religious element of the story is strongly foregrounded, and Magnus is presented as one of ‘the most saintly forerunners of holy Christianity, from whose holiness the whole North shines and beams near and far’.9 The LMS purports to be the work of Master Robert himself, and is interspersed with sermons on the significance of Magnus’s martyrdom from the priest. The narrative’s style is claimed to be in accordance with God’s will: ‘for the Lord made short discourses, so we make this story plain with clear words and pure telling, as God hath granted us to discern’.10 The interest of the author is not in recording history for its own sake, or for that of genealogies or political means, but in recording a version of history that glorifies God. Unlike the two earlier versions of the story, the author of the LMS spends considerable time on Magnus’s childhood and repeatedly assures the reader that Magnus has lived a holy, unblemished life befitting his martyrdom. The author carefully places the brutalities of life as a medieval earl within the context of this seemingly predetermined saintliness: many turn their customs after those with whom they live, and whosoever toucheth tar is defiled of it; so when Magnus had come to be about fullgrown of age, placed among grim and wicked men who were ill-willed against good habits, unstable in the faith, opposed to right laws, stiff-necked in learning, yielding to evil habits, gainsayers and disobedient to God’s commandments;

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he seemed for some winters like wicked men, and as a Viking with robbers and warriors he lived by robbery and plunder, and stood by at manslaughters along with others. But it is to be believed that he did this more from the wickedness and egging on of bad men than from his own badness.11

Magnus can, indeed, do no wrong. Although this version of the story dates only ten or twenty years after the Orkneyinga Saga12 (and purports to be much earlier in origin), the saintliness of Magnus has by this point become almost the whole story. Magnus has become, in this telling, fully Christ-like: And this his deed was needed for the highest proof, that on that spot he should become the sacrifice of God, as the helpful sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s body and blood was offered up for the good of the whole world.13

In order to clarify this symbolic martyrdom, in the LMS Magnus is not killed after a political discussion that he comes to of his own will, as in the other variants, but is forcibly dragged out of Mass by Hakon’s men, ‘the most harmful wolves’.14 Every moment of Magnus’s life exemplifies his saintliness and earns him comparisons to Christ. While the LMS changes little in the general outline of Magnus’s life, it refocuses the reader’s attention on the way he exemplifies every Christian life. In a sermon following an account of the first miracle, the reader is asked to ‘follow the footsteps and life of the glorious martyr’, though ‘his life and holy virtue is rather more praiseworthy and wonderful than possible to be imitated by our weakness’.15 Within a matter of years, in three texts built from the same source material, it is possible to see Magnus transformed from Earl to Saint. The saintly aspect of Magnus’s life is the one that most interests John Mooney. Mooney’s biography was published in 1935, only three years before Alexander Taylor’s definitive edition of the Saga, where aspects of the Magnus story are dismissed as ‘monotonous and puerile’,16 but is completely opposed to Taylor’s scholarly methodology. Although both Mooney and Taylor present Magnus’s miracles as events that must be understood within their historical context, Mooney argues that ‘The story of his life is a demonstration of the heights which may be reached by the man in whose spirit the heart of Christ abides’.17 For Mooney, the Magnus story represents ‘the triumph of Good over Evil’.18 In this manner, Mooney most closely follows the text of the LMS, viewing Magnus as an exemplar of Christian behaviour and reinterpreting all the events of his life with that ideal in mind. This polarisation of the religious and the historical has informed the dominant reading of the Magnus story; what began as an historical event is now read as a clearcut story of the triumph of good over evil.

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Mooney’s text is important to the study of Brown’s own reworkings of the tales not only because, by virtue of its popularity and influence, it is likely that Brown drew upon it for his own work (OT 23–4),19 but also because Mooney labours to introduce ways in which the Magnus story can be made relevant to modern life. He argues, for instance, that the First World War is illustrative of Magnus’s own Christian goals, and that Magnus was in advance of his time. . . . In that far-off, dark Past, did he have a vision of the futility of war? . . . Ten million lives were sacrificed in the Great War, in the hope that there would be no more wars, yet in less than twenty years there are fears of a worse conflict. Peace and goodwill can prevail only when men realise that ‘all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’.20

This passage is remarkably prescient of Brown’s own final version of the story in Magnus, in which the events of the Second World War closely parallel Magnus’s death on Egilsay. Mooney’s biography is predicated on turning the image of Magnus as a warring earl into that of a modern pacifist: ‘to him the Gospel was more powerful than the sword; and his witness for Christ and His teaching had a message for his own times and ours.’21 Mooney focuses not on Magnus as an historical figure but as a particularly modern one, not as an earl but as a Christian. For Mooney, as for the authors of religious and tourist pamphlets in the ensuing decades such as D. P. Thomson, the death of Magnus ‘proved the turning point in the religious history of Orkney’.22 Until Brown became the dominant popular interpreter of the Magnus story, the religious elements of the narrative became almost wholly dominant over the political, despite, as mentioned above, it being virtually impossible to interpret his death as determined, or even influenced, by his Christianity. In works such as those by Mooney and Thomson, Magnus becomes a far more familiar type of saint, one who has led a godly life and can be used as an example for the reader to follow. Like the author of the LMS, Mooney never explicitly denies the more violent aspects of Magnus’s life, but rather insists that they were out of character and that the saint Magnus became in (and after) death was the same man in his life. Magnus becomes a tool for religious and cultural exploration, a man whose life was formed retroactively in relation to his death.

II. The Seamless Garment: An Orkney Tapestry and The Loom of Light Brown immediately foregrounds the dangers of hagiography in his first major attempt at the Magnus narrative, the ‘Martyr’ section at the

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centre of An Orkney Tapestry. He laments that: ‘we cannot get a clear picture of the man because his monkish biographer has smudged the outline with conventional pious platitudes’ (OT 72). The chapter consists of quotations from Taylor’s translation of the Saga, which Brown has adapted to a slightly more modern tongue – in order to ‘round out a meaning’ (OT 12) – interspersed with Brown’s reflections on the significance of the tale. For Brown, the focus on a predestined saintliness found in the earlier accounts forms a ‘pietistic fog’. At the same time, however, ‘The events that gather about him are so extraordinary, and were witnessed by so many people, and were enacted in such a hard light, that there is no faking of the record’ (OT 73). Brown repeatedly argues that the events of Magnus’s life are so unusual that they could not have been invented, only witnessed: ‘no one could have invented the psalter in the Welsh battle, or the tears of Lifolf the cook-executioner, or the conversation between Hakon and Magnus’s mother’ (OT 83). Brown’s claim that those elements that are most strange are necessarily true initially jars grossly with his assertion in the same book that: ‘If the Viking myth is true, it is true with so many reservations and qualifications as to be almost meaningless’ (OT 28). Brown himself later admitted that in this account he ‘wrenched history too far out of its frame’ (FI 170). In An Orkney Tapestry Brown is not wholly successful at creating a synthesis between history and myth: if Viking myths are ‘almost meaningless’, Christian ones remain ‘not possible . . . to fake’ (OT 84). Yet Brown’s focus in these passages on the importance of the Magnus story to an understanding of community, God and political unity provides a framework for many of his later writings. Brown represents these various elements through the unified symbol of the ‘Seamless Garment’, which is first shown to represent community: it is the ‘warmth and comfort and well-being of the people . . . their identity and their ethos’ (OT 77). This is ‘the coat of diurnal hand-to-mouth existence’ (OT 77) that concerns everyone within the community, and on which Brown focuses in his first telling of the Magnus story. Magnus’s death forms ‘another section of the Seamless Garment’ (OT 70) because it is central not only to the life and succession of the ruling families, but to all members of the community: the death of an individual concerns the whole community. Brown also extends the symbol to include the ceremonial coat worn by the ruling earl. Magnus’s death allows the coat to remain whole, because it is worn by one man within the context of a unified rule under Hakon Paulson. Finally, Brown writes of the coat as a symbol of Christianity; it is ‘the long white weave of innocence’. In Magnus, this final aspect forms the dominant use of the metaphor. A long section, echoing Master Robert’s

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sermons in the LMS in both placement and style, is devoted to Bishop William’s homily, ‘Concerning the Two Coats, of Caesar and of God, that cover Adam’s Shame’, in which the coat of community and the coat of earldom become one; the ceremonial garment does not only cover the earl, but ‘in a mystical way it enwraps the whole community’ (M 111). Bishop William is unable to write of the heavenly cloak of Christianity; it is instead presented to Magnus in dreams and visions, ultimately carried by an angel or man only Magnus can see as he says his final Mass (M 141–7). This recurring imagery, in both An Orkney Tapestry and the works that follow, unites religious and secular themes. Brown alludes to the parable of the wedding feast (Matthew 22: 2–14) in which a man is thrown out for not being properly attired: the symbol of the perfect garment stands for Magnus’s acceptance by God. The symbol works in the opposite direction as well, however, for clothing is traditionally used in the sagas to represent the beneficence of a king or earl: it is the mark he gives to a retainer or loyal subject.23 The gift of clothing in traditional sagas represents both acceptance and generosity. While the symbol is perhaps overworked over the course of Brown’s writing, especially in The Loom of Light, he employs it in order to find a new approach to the idea of a saint, who cannot be valued for his actions and death alone, but must be seen in the context of the wider community. As George M. Brunsden argues, in many instances in Western Christendom ‘veneration of the saint becomes an expression of communalism’.24 In his symbol of the seamless garment, Brown attempts to show why this might be so, and how the death of one man, and miracles performed on a scant few more (seventeen in the case of Magnus), can alter an entire community. For Brown, the ‘truest sign of martyrdom’ is not contained in the death or the miracles, but in ‘the abundant horn of peace that tiled over the islands’ after Magnus’s death (OT 85). What truly sanctifies a martyr is the effect that his death has on the community at large. It is for this reason that Brown ends each version of the story with two tinkers, Jock and Mary, witnesses to the first miracle, in a scene that changes very little. ‘No saga-man would have written about folk like Jock and Mary’, Brown contends, ‘two vagrants who wander about the shores and burns, as secret and dangerous as otters’ (OT 86), but they are loosely tied to some of the Orkney and Shetland islanders who experienced miracles. Rowena Murray explicitly links them to Sigurd and Thorbjorn in the Orkneyinga Saga,25 who are cured of their crippledness, alongside a ferryman called Bergfinn Skatason who is cured of blindness, when they keep vigil at Magnus’s grave.26 Jock and Mary are also archetypes of the lowest peasants, however, wholly dependent

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on the society above them. Jock is a believer, the first islander to pray for the intercession of Saint Magnus, while Mary, who is cured of her blindness by a spray of seawater, believes in miracles no more strongly after receiving one. The heart of the scene is Jock’s prayer to Magnus, in which he pleads, attempts to make many deals, professes his love for Mary and apologises for her lack of faith, even as he is constantly met with silence and the Bishop’s declaration that: ‘“There’s no Saint Magnus . . . only the tomb of the earl who was murdered in Egilsay”’ (OT 93). At the moment of the miracle, there is almost no dialogue, only lengthy, unperformable stage directions, in which Brown discusses the nature of the human soul. Magnus is depicted as being ‘now in two places at once. He is lying with a terrible wound in his face, in the church near where the two tinkers are girding themselves for the road. . . . Also he is pure essence in another intensity, a hoarder of the treasures of charity and prayer, a guardian’ (OT 96). This is neither successful playwriting nor especially convincing prose; it is at these moments, when he is attempting to be most sincere, that Brown’s style falters most and he adopts a lexicon and rhythm that do not befit his story. His interpretation of sainthood is made clearer because of it, however. For Brown, saints do not exist at a remove from their community, but act as the guardians of that community. Mary is the recipient of the first miracle not because she is grateful or deserving, but because Jock intercedes on her behalf. True religion lies in the actions of the community, its lowest members above all. In his autobiography, Brown writes that long before his conversion to Catholicism in 1961, he was disappointed by the Mass itself, but found that: ‘The devotion of the working-class women did move me: here they found beauty and peace in the midst of drab lives’ (FI 53). Brown’s religious focus throughout his work is on the effects of belief on an entire community. It is to this end that the miracles depicted by Brown are, as in the Saga, small and quiet; by making unbelievers their beneficiaries, he further cements the notion of Magnus’s death as forming the salvation of the community at large. The one-act play concerning Jock and Mary in An Orkney Tapestry is introduced with the lines: ‘The story of Magnus and Hakon unfolds like a drama. Some day a play will be written about it; I have not the ability myself; but I end this chapter with a scene in dramatic form . . . as a suggestion of what might be possible’ (OT 85–6). Clearly Brown overcame his self-doubt, for his play on the same subject, The Loom of Light, was produced in Kirkwall in 1972. The outline of the story is much the same as in the Saga and in the ‘Martyr’ chapter, although Brown admitted in an unpublished interview at the time that: ‘I haven’t

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scrupled to use my imagination when I thought it might illumine some dark places.’27 In this case, the ‘dark places’ Brown seeks to illumine are the lives of the surrounding community inhabitants. A chorus is instituted both to set the scene and to convey verbally the themes Brown expressed through stage directions in the earlier version. The chorus integrates the world of the play with that of its audience; especially in its repetition of seasonal observations, the chorus demonstrates that the events in this story are not as extraordinary as they might initially appear, but are grounded in the world as it is. The play’s expanded version of the narrative includes all that the Saga leaves unmentioned: the croftswomen, monks, fishermen and peasants. The play is divided into seven sections that correspond almost exactly to those in Magnus.28 The first scene, ‘Seedtime’, opens with the peasants Hild and Mans – as Berthold Schoene points out, a diminutive form of ‘Magnus’29 – ploughing the field. Hild herself is yoked to the plough, as their ox is lame. The peasants are far more concerned with the demands of agriculture than with religious and political institutions: Mans’s dislike for the factor, the earls, the Bishop and the king is echoed later by the tinker Mary’s disdain for the mechanisms of the church. The atmosphere of this scene is not one of violence, as it will be in Magnus, but of distrust; the requirements of self-preservation are so great that all the world is an enemy to the peasants. Brown also introduces here, in the chorus’s Bridal Song, the theme of the garment: Listen: somewhere a loom is set Beyond moth and rust. Fall, tissue of peace, from the loom, A single fold of light, That the just man May walk at last in a white coat among his people. (TP 9)

By beginning the play in the absence of Magnus and his family – his parents Erlend and Thora, whose wedding is being celebrated, are never named – Brown foregrounds not the act of martyrdom itself, but the people Magnus’s death saves. He returns to Hild and Mans in the final scene, ‘The Harvest’. Little has changed: the peasants are still labouring and distrustful. There is a new air of compassion here, however; in giving the tinkers Jock and Mary a bannock, Hild says: ‘We were as poor as them last winter. And poorer the winter before that. The war’s over. We can all eat in peace. We have Hakon, our good earl, to thank for that. We’re only as rich as the poorest folk among us.’ (TP 47)

Hakon’s rule, predicated on Magnus’s death, has not only granted increased prosperity to the peasants, but also given them a broader,

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more humane world-view. Magnus’s death benefits the entire community, even as it remains little noticed. Four of the remaining five scenes illustrate the life of Magnus. In the first biographical scene Magnus and Hakon, along with those boys who will later become their advisors, begin their education at the cathedral on Birsay. While the episode itself is mentioned in none of the older accounts, it coincides with the LMS description of Magnus’s childhood, where Magnus is depicted as ‘of seemly conduct’ and holding himself apart from his peers. In Brown’s version, the child ignores those around him – who, by birth or religious authority, represent all of the power on the island – in order to minister to a wounded seal. Brown here literalises the Bishop’s claim from earlier in the scene that Magnus and Hakon are ‘bringing that old wound [the vying earldoms] to the brothers for a year or so’ (TP 11). The injured seal is used to represent not only a rent between humans and nature, but the violence within human society itself. Not only is the seal hurt, however, but ‘his coat’s all blood’ (TP 14). Brown here reiterates his metaphor of ‘The coat-of-state riven . . . so [that] Orkney, poor Orkney, bleeds from generation to generation’ (TP 11), voiced by the Bishop moments earlier. Magnus’s purpose with both the seal and Orkney, then, is to staunch the blood. In a poem repeated verbatim in Magnus, Magnus sings to the seal: Come from the rock now, cold one. See, I have a fish for you in my hand. My name is Magnus. I have told the hunters to leave this shore. There is a wound in your head. If you do not come to me soon you will die. Your blood will grow cold as shells. Rats and crabs will cover your beautiful coat. (TP 15; M 48)

Magnus sees himself as prohibiting violence in order to protect the beautiful coat, not only of the seal, but also of community, earldom and God. The image of the coat continues to appear throughout the play. In this short form, Brown resists developing the metaphor, instead letting repeated uses of the imagery surface in so many contexts that the reader cannot help but make connections. Indeed, the image of the coat appears to stand for absolutely everything. In ‘The Song of Battle’, depicting the battle of the Menai Strait, Magnus is shown reading from the psalter, in accordance with all early versions, but Brown includes the passages he reads: ‘Why take ye thought for raiment?’ (Matthew 6: 28); ‘Who is . . . this beautiful one in his robe?’ (Isaiah 63: 1); ‘The king’s daughter[’s] . . . clothing is of wrought gold’ (Psalm 45: 13); as well as

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a retelling of the story of Joseph’s robe from Genesis and a recitation of the 23rd Psalm. These passages – with the exception of the psalm – are important not so much for their religious significance as for their repeated mentions of clothing. The chorus, too, notes the colour of the monks’ clothing at the beginning of every scene: it changes from ‘long bright coats’ (first four scenes) to ‘long black coats’ for the two scenes depicting Magnus’s martyrdom, to ‘long bright coats’ again at the close of the play. At the moment of his death, Magnus gives his coat to the executioner Lifolf, even as he speaks of a heavenly garment: ‘maybe it’s not for me, that coat. There’s too much blood and ashes on my hands. That coat is woven of prayers, charities, vows, penances, fastings’ (TP 41). Magnus presents the literal coat of state to Hakon, for ‘The strong man who relishes government, only he can suffer it on his shoulders’ (TP 42). Curiously, Brown does not make explicit the obvious parallel with Christ, whose coat is allocated in a lottery after his death so that it might not be torn (John 19: 23–4). Although the play rarely transcends the repetitiveness of this imagery, Brown’s use of one image to present various aspects of the story is notable: for Magnus to be relevant to the contemporary reader, his death must be significant not only from a religious or even political standpoint, but also in the way it affects the entire surrounding community. In Magnus’s wearing and subsequent rejection of this coat, Brown depicts him as both a member of the community and its saviour, even when his actions are the very thing from which the community must be saved. This emphasis on the way one life (or rather, one death) can alter the entire world around it forms the centre of his fullest imaging of the story, his novel Magnus.

III. Magnus and the Nature of Sacrifice Magnus can be read as an expansion of The Loom of Light. Brown notes that it is written ‘on the stark framework of the play’ (TP ix), while also contending that in this final version lies ‘the best writing I have done’ (FI 171). He cites his attempt to make ‘as full use as possible of the more varied techniques at the novelist’s disposal’ (TP x), and much of the novel’s success, as compared with the play, can be attributed to the formal variation the novel allows. While Brown’s earlier versions of the story represent the varied viewpoints of the larger community through action and setting, in the novel he introduces a wide range of stylistic and lexical devices; in many ways, Magnus, for all its dependence on medieval sources, is the most contemporary of all Brown’s fictional works.

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In an essay praising the Orkneyinga Saga, published a month before the release of Magnus, Brown argues that: ‘In these present days of ghastly narrative styles, here was prose simple, direct, and dramatic.’30 His work in Orkney Tapestry and Loom of Light can be seen as an attempt to emulate that style. Especially in ‘Martyr’, the writing adheres closely to the Saga. In Magnus, however, Brown embraces the very ‘ghastly narrative styles’ that he elsewhere derides; the story is told in a blend of drama, verse and prose. He employs language that mimics both the sagas and present-day news bulletins. Although the full measure of stylistic diversity is most easily seen in the climactic chapter, ‘The Killing’, the remainder of the novel is also a blend of contemporary and medieval styles and, in those styles, ways of looking at the figure of Magnus. Brown’s emphasis in the novel is on a reinvention of Magnus for contemporary readers; he attempts to remove the ‘pietistic fog’ of early accounts and present a timeless figure who is nevertheless still grounded in a specific era. The most notable reworking is seen in the final chapter, ‘Harvest’, much of which is repeated from the earlier two imaginings. Brown significantly reduces the import of the miracle in comparison to ‘Martyr’ and The Loom of Light, so that in its final version it is almost unnoticeable. In ‘Martyr’, Magnus is, in parenthetical asides, virtually present at the moment of Mary’s restored sight: ‘Saint Magnus the Martyr accepts the flame [of Jock’s candle]. He touches it to immortality, a hard diamond. The radiance he reserves, to give back again where it is needed’ (OT 96–7). Jock makes a direct connection between his lighting of a candle and the restoration of Mary’s sight: ‘Who would think a ha’penny candle would light up the world?’ (OT 98). When Brown revisits the scene in The Loom of Light, however, he slightly subdues the religious revelation. While Jock makes the same statement about his ha’penny candle, the lines about Magnus have been deleted. The monks’ litany, chanted throughout in all versions, is changed at the moment of Mary’s cure from ‘St Tredwell, virgin’ to ‘St Tredwell, keeper of eyes’, so that the possibility is raised that Magnus is not responsible for the miracle, but that it is the intercession of the whole body of saints that cures her. At the close of Magnus, little initially appears to have changed in Brown’s imagining: indeed, perhaps the only change in the depiction of Magnus from ‘Martyr’ is one of tense, and in most other respects the passage is identical. However, the response of Jock and Mary changes subtly. While Mary remains ungrateful, Jock loses the religious fervour he presents in the earlier passages. After he shouts the final line (again present in all three versions) – ‘“Saint Magnus the Martyr, pray for us.

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. . . Jock the tinker said it before any of you”’ – he is shown to have ‘put the empty sack over his shoulder and turned and moved off after the sea-washed feet of Mary’ (M 206). What has changed is that Jock and Mary are restored in the community of the islands: ‘The great red vatand-lamp-and-loom was high in the east now. Under the sun the crofters of Orkney brought out their peaceful scythes for the second morning of the harvest. There were glitters and flashes all over Birsay’ (M 206). The gratitude and wonder of the earlier versions has changed into a simple acceptance. The central miracle is not one of restored sight, but one of maintained peace. In this slight shift of perspective, Brown is using his final version of the story to turn his focus not to the saint or his actions, but to the community at large. The one scene wholly new to the novel falls in the chapter ‘The Temptations’, which begins as a pastiche of ancient texts, sounding somewhat biblical and somewhat indebted to the sagas, but also more distanced and reserved than either: It was said, concerning the holy martyr Magnus, that to gain his soul’s kingdom he had to suffer five grievous temptations, and but that he was upheld then and ever and near the hour of his blessed martyrdom by a certain comforter that was sent to him, his soul might have been overborne by the evil one and brought down into the fires of hell. (M 67)

Here, more than anywhere else in the novel, Magnus’s death is prefigured by his life. The chapter contains a reading of Magnus’s actions that presupposes a certain end, and echoes the three temptations of Christ, in which he rejects hunger, power over self and power over the world (Matthew 4: 1–11). What is surprising is how Brown configures the four temptations shown. The first is the battle of Menai Strait, when Magnus chooses a psalter over an axe; the second Magnus’s marriage, when he chooses to remain a virgin; the third the death of his father Erlend, when he takes up the earldom, but ignores the advice of the chancellor Aristius. The first two are found in all other accounts; the third, while original, is no great departure from the sagas. Throughout, Brown includes his familiar images of cloths and looms and writes in a style as deliberately hagiographic as Mooney or the LMS. In the fourth temptation, however, Brown’s focus dramatically shifts. The tempter – and only here is the tempter clearly identified as such – comes in the form of a monk, asking Magnus to renounce the earldom, to retire to a monastery and spend the rest of his life in peace. Departing from tradition, it is in this case the tempter who gains the reader’s sympathies. If the text is read as preconfigured and the eventual outcome is known, then it is clear that the tempter’s plan

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is, in fact, better than Magnus’s, for his forecast is entirely accurate: ‘There may be worse to come – civil war, mercenaries riding through the cornfields. Murder. Burning. Rape’ (M 78). Given that all of these events do come to pass, Magnus’s response, ‘God has made me an earl in this place. . . . My work is a work of peace, to bind up the wounds in the music’ (M 79), falls somewhere between arrogance and delusion. It is, after all, not anything Magnus does in life that guarantees peace for the island, but his death. Even the Keeper of the Loom, Magnus’s self-appointed guardian, argues on the tempter’s side – ‘Go out on the roads with that sword, Magnus, and you’ll lose everything’ (M 79) – before accepting that ‘there is no other way’ (M 80) than that which Magnus eventually chooses. Brown raises a number of complications for conventional interpretations of the story. In depicting Magnus as a man who chooses war, Brown denies the panacea that Mooney and others offer in their insistence that anything Magnus may have done in life that did not befit a saint was only due to the coercion of his friends. The chapter following ‘The Temptations’ is ‘Scarecrow’, a telling of the war through the eyes of the peasants and tinkers, expanded from ‘The Fields in Summer’ in The Loom of Light. In the earlier play, the soldiers on both sides are bitter and destructive, but it is made clear that the damages inflicted by Magnus’s soldiers are against his orders (TP 25). In the novel, however, the earls are made far more culpable: the soldiers not only despoil the fields, but murder innocents. ‘These mercenaries were evil, whatever side they supported’ (M 85), writes Brown, but the earls are equally blamed: Mans rages against them both, and, by their equal destruction of his fields, he is shown to be justified (M 96). In his positioning of these two chapters, Brown demonstrates that the perceived path to Magnus’s martyrdom is also the path towards political discord and war. This raises the necessary issue of value and responsibility: how many men must Magnus’s soldiers have killed, Brown seems to be asking, for his death still to be worth the loss of so many lives? Brown situates the entire story within a culture of violence and death. The opening of the novel, in its depictions of the daily life of peasants, could read as a pastoral idyll were it not for the repeated mention of ‘scars’, ‘corpses’ and ‘blood’. The third of the bridal songs that end the chapter also forecasts not redemption but death:

What is the lost cry in the heart of the earth? I am wounded. I have taken a wound in my flesh. The lips of it will never come together. Fire has been thrust deep in the wound. My flesh is branded.

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IT IS THE SUN. IT IS THE PLOUGH AND THE SOWER. (M 28)

Magnus’s path is far from glorious. Rather, it is filled with blood and death, with the sacrifice not only of the saint’s life but that of others. While numerous critics have made note of the ‘contemporary’ setting and style of large portions of ‘The Killing’, few have examined how the whole novel is made resonant for contemporary readers through its refusal to accept simple, unblemished martyrdom. Even as Magnus, Christ-like, resists temptation, his choices lead to the deaths of others as well as to widespread peace. The question of sacrifice and responsibility raises ethical paradoxes distinctly similar to those found in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, examines the paradox in which the particular is made higher than the universal through faith. In his willingness to sacrifice his son, Abraham is not a tragic hero, but ‘either a murderer or a believer’.31 The individual act must be seen as a paradoxical suspension of universal ethics in which the act that could possibly fulfil a higher ethical code is also one that defies pre-existing ethics. Kierkegaard considers how one can admire a man who has forsaken universal ethics in favour of the absolute: By his act he overstepped the ethical entirely and possessed a higher telos outside of it, in relation to which he suspended the former. For I should very much like to know how one would bring Abraham’s act into relation with the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any connection whatever between what Abraham did and the universal . . . except the fact that he transgressed it.32

The question then becomes: is an act of faith that goes against common or universal ethics still a worthy act? For Kierkegaard this remains an unthinkable paradox. Abraham, in his sacrifice of Isaac, becomes, as an individual, higher than the universal through an act of faith. The sacrificing of ethics creates the individual. For Kierkegaard, the singular individual is he who can make a decision that sacrifices universal ethics. As Hent de Vries points out, the ‘sole incarnation of this single individual is the martyr’.33 The martyr, through sacrifice – both the physical sacrifice of the self and the sacrifice of universal ethics – becomes wholly singular. Jacques Derrida shows how this sacrifice is made not only according to the strictures of faith but also out of duty: ‘It calls for a betrayal of everything that manifests itself within the order of universal generality. . . . In a word, ethics must be sacrificed in the name of duty.’34 For both Kierkegaard and Derrida, Abraham’s sacrifice is not only the averted one of Isaac,

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but also one of ethics itself. Abraham is ethically dutiful in his unethical actions; because the absolute other (in this case, God) demands the sacrifice of universal ethics, Abraham is able as an individual – and moreover as an individual martyr in Kierkegaard’s formulation – to transcend ethics. This is the paradox through which Brown is working in Magnus. Magnus chooses a path to sainthood and martyrdom that includes the rape and murder of the people for whom his sacrifice is theoretically made. As is shown in ‘The Temptations’, Magnus wills the destruction of the community in order to save it, thereby transgressing universal ethics in favour of individual duty. Yet for Brown, the sacrificed individual also works on behalf of the community, insofar as the sacrifice benefits not community in general, but a very particular and individual community. Magnus’s death is not for the good of mankind, but for a very real and localised community. In both Brown’s work and in philosophical and anthropological traditions, the notion of sacrifice is deeply entwined with that of the community, because only in a suspension of universal ethics can an individual sacrifice serve the good of the individual community. For Brown, universal ethics only allow ‘peacemaking’ of the sort Hakon and Magnus’s friends propose: a series of deals and temporary solutions. Universal ethics and political solutions are both only partial cures: in times of real discord, what is needed is a sacrifice. As Derek Hughes notes in a discussion of Virgil, modern, secular sacrifice is itself a form of economy: ‘Human progress is here not a movement beyond human sacrifice, but towards the right kind of sacrifice: that of the individual for the state.’35 For Brown, the right kind of sacrifice is indeed that of the individual for the state, but it also represents an economy in which a secular, political peace is exchanged for a higher, Christian peace. The need for this new form of peace in the community is expressed by the Bishop: ‘“Peace-making . . . is at best the patching of an old coat. To make true peace, the pax Christi, is to weave the seamless garment”’ (M 119). Or as he introduces the same lines in The Loom of Light: ‘The business of a community is peace’ (TP 29. Italics in original). The peace of Christ is the peace that comes through sacrifice, the sacrifice that, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes, is simultaneously ‘unique . . . [and] consummated for all’.36 In his repeated mentions of the seamless garment, Brown finds a solution to the paradox of individual responsibility in opposition to universal ethics. In Bishop William’s homily, ‘Concerning the Two Coats, of Caesar and of God, that cover Adam’s Shame’, the first coat, that of Caesar, is the coat of earldom, of power and of community itself; of the second coat he says nothing, except that it is ‘woven

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upon no earthly looms’ (M 113). For Magnus’s sacrifice to be full and sufficient, it is necessary that he wears both coats; his martyrdom can only serve its purpose if he is the embodiment of the community itself; his individual responsibility gains meaning only after he takes on the earldom, and thus becomes responsible for the entire community. Brown’s approach to this paradox of responsibility initially seems like a simplification of Kierkegaard’s approach, for surely if Magnus is predestined to do such a thing on behalf of his community, then the choice is simplified if not completely eliminated. Magnus cannot do other than become a martyr. Brown, however, is engaged in a redefinition of the individual. For Kierkegaard, in this paradox of Abraham: ‘the individual as the individual is higher than the universal and as the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute/or else faith never existed, because it has always existed’.37 For Brown, however, the individual is the way the universal stands in relation to the absolute: only in the form of the individual who takes on the problems and desires of the community can anyone approach the absolute. The relation of the self to God and the community can only be on the level of the individual. The individual’s faith is an individual matter and must constantly be redefined. If Magnus were never to waver, then the matter of faith would, as Kierkegaard insists, become irrelevant. But in depicting the temptations of Magnus as temptations, by demonstrating that Magnus has available to him all of the benefits of being an individual human and yet chooses this sacrifice, Brown demonstrates that it is through Magnus that the community as a whole comes to a knowledge of the absolute and to faith. Magnus’s death must be understood as both martyrdom and sacrifice, then, where the first is an act outside of the particular community and the latter is intrinsically connected to the community. As René Girard has shown, the sacrifice of an individual, as a surrogate victim or a scapegoat, serves to remove violence from a community. The sacrificed individual must be someone kept at a remove from the given community but intimately known to it, either a slave, such as the Greek pharmakos, or a king. The act of violence against one individual, in the form of sacrifice, transforms the ‘violence of all against all [that] would finally annihilate the community . . . into a war of all against one, thanks to which the unity of the community is re-established’.38 Sacrifice is thus a unique and individual act and yet one that also unifies the surrounding community. It is a suspension of universal ethics that creates, if not the universal community, at least the community as a unified whole. As Girard writes: ‘The surrogate victim dies so that the entire community, threatened by the same fate [of generalised violence], can be reborn.’39

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Brown introduces the way in which sacrifice works on behalf of the community in an early play, A Spell for Green Corn. The death of the girl Sigrid, burned as a witch, leads to the resurrection of the community. Sacrifice both unites the community and guarantees good crops; as a blind fiddler says: ‘One cold act of beauty . . . might yet flush the hill with ripeness.’40 Here the sacrifice is presented in a manner much closer to that described in Girard and James George Frazer than Magnus’s death: it is only an innocent, drawn from the community, who can guarantee the community’s survival. Sacrifice is explicitly tied to both human and agricultural fertility – a trope repeated in Magnus, where the consummation of Thora and Erlend’s marriage is described as a sacrifice and ‘joyous holocaust’ (M 26) – and to the regeneration of community. The fiddler’s song progresses from ‘sickness’, through ‘sacrifice’, to ‘sustenance’ and, finally, ‘silence’.41 Yet here, too, the sacrifice is fundamentally Christological. In the play’s appendices, Storm Kolson’s notebook reads: ‘A few must vanish in terror to keep the nets full. When the wounds of Christ are forgotten, a new saint must offer hands and feet and side.’42 As in Magnus, individual sacrifice works toward the good of the community not only in the suspension of ethics – for throughout the play, the burning of Sigrid as a witch is condemned as cruel and misguided – but also as a (here unwitting) echo of the life of Christ. Every sacrifice is simultaneously agricultural and Christian, communal and individual. In Magnus, Brown again demonstrates that the community is predicated on this individual act. As Nancy writes in his discussion of ‘early’ sacrifice – in this case of Jesus and Socrates – the sacrifice of the individual ‘is not simply unique, therefore, but, by virtue of its uniqueness, elevated to the principle or essence of sacrifice’.43 Magnus’s death is both an individual sacrifice in an individual community and a manifestation of the essence of sacrifice, as will be shown below in a discussion of his apparent transformation into Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What is clear here is that this death works in at least four ways. Following the saga accounts, Magnus’s death is an instance of classic martyrdom, an act that displays the glory of God through the death of the individual believer. It is also the defining act of the individual, outside or against universal ethics, insofar as it is a self-sacrifice, willed not by the executioner but by the individual about to die. At the same time, it is an act that unifies the surrounding community: it is only through Magnus’s death that peace comes to Orkney. Finally, Magnus’s death is an example of pure sacrifice, both unique and universal. What remains consistent across all of these interpretations is that the death of Magnus is Brown’s primary example of how the individual stands in relation to the community.

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In order to understand fully this sacrifice, it is necessary to explore the ways in which Brown treats the moment of death. ‘The Killing’ is by far the longest chapter in Magnus, the most challenging in style and narrative, and also the most elusive, slipping from reportage to anthropological discourse to hagiography without, ultimately, even documenting the moment of Magnus’s death. As this is in many respects the most controversial passage in all of Brown’s fiction, it demands examination from a variety of angles: from that of style, from that of the meaning of sacrifice as discussed above and, finally, from that of the nature of ‘Being-towards-death’ in the life of a saint. The chapter, which fills more than a quarter of the novel, is split into ten sections of unequal length. Each section is written in a different register, from apparently wholly separate perspectives. Brown condenses the stylistic diversity of his portmanteau works such as Orkney Tapestry into one historical moment. Even if the reader accepts the abstraction of previous chapters, which are far more concerned with the depiction of a given period in Magnus’s life (or the life of the community around him) than in narrative causality, the fragmentation in ‘The Killing’ is still surprising and unusual, far closer stylistically to the Circe episode in Ulysses than to anything in the Sagas. The chapter is wilfully alienating, at least compared to the rest of Brown’s work, but not to the end of confusing the readers or causing them to focus unduly on one aspect of the novel. Rather, by interweaving a variety of styles and perspectives, Brown demonstrates the apparent timelessness of the story by using both archaic and contemporary narrative styles. The mixture of styles in ‘The Killing’ is Brown’s attempt to open the novel up to include far more of the world than might originally be seen in an historic tale. The chapter begins with a short passage written in a pseudo-medieval saga style, one that does not echo any of the known translations of the Saga but instead comes closest to Anglo-Saxon pieces of the period: ‘When that holy season of pasch was overpast, the jarls busked them both for the tryst’ (M 123). Like James Joyce, Brown draws the reader’s attention to the artificial nature of the novel. To that end, Brown introduces a first-person narrator, echoing the ‘saga-men’, who is understood to be ordering the narrative: ‘I must tell now concerning the jarl Hakon Paul’s son, how he summoned about him an host, and set them in eight war-hungry ships’ (M 123). Earlier in the novel Brown has stipulated that ‘to celebrate the mystery properly the story-teller must give way to a ritual voice’ (M 25). In his return to a saga style, he clarifies that the story cannot be read as pure historical narrative, but is created towards

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a specific end. The story of Magnus’s death is important because of the way it is interpreted by later generations; Hakon asks himself: ‘what would the saga-man say about a furtive cold callous murder (that was how it would be seen, no matter from what root of necessity and realism the act had sprung)?’ (M 161). In these asides, Brown constantly reminds the reader of the multiple levels of interpretation such emblematic narratives invite. The novel Magnus is itself such an interpretation, as the introduction of the first-person narrator demonstrates; Brown does not presume, as Mooney does, to be telling a wholly honest account of Magnus’s life and death, but instead one that is filtered through time and memory. The chapter then moves to a style not dissimilar to that employed in the rest of the novel, a looping, hyper-poetic but nonetheless fairly realistic prose: ‘Oars rose and fell in the firth. The blades shattered the glass with regular plangencies. Circular dark wounds marked the path of the ship Flame through the firth, but the sea soon healed itself again’ (M 123). Brown focuses in this segment on the differentiation between dream and reality and on the frailty of human observation. The sea is apparently calm, but is also filled with a threat that finally emerges in the form of a great single wave, a portent taken from the Saga. The wave is preceded by a detailed account of Magnus’s dream of a nuptial wedding, to which he arrives wearing a coat stained with sea-slime, grease and urine, only to remember that a better coat is waiting for him. This dream is interrupted by the coming of the wave. In the Saga, Magnus’s response is calm: ‘“It’s not surprising that you should be worried by this,” said the Earl, “for I think it forebodes of my death.”’44 Brown’s earl, however, while he interprets the wave as a warning, tells his men to row on so that he can attend the wedding feast of which he has just dreamed. The border between nature and fate, between dream and reality, has blurred, and Brown again highlights the difficulties of interpretation and the flexibility of historical fact. The portent that comes through natural signs is, too, a commonplace figuration of death over time, as Philippe Ariès shows.45 The wave’s signification of death would have been clear to both the sailors and contemporary readers of the earliest accounts, making Magnus’s simultaneous acceptance of its meaning and refusal to heed it all the stranger. Finn Thorkelson, one of the sailors, thinks: ‘“God help the people of Orkney who have an incompetent like this in charge of their affairs. . . . A wedding – a coat for a wedding – for God’s sweet sake!”’ (M 130). This is one of Brown’s less subtle ironies, for in his telling of the story Magnus’s martyrdom is, in fact, ‘for God’s sweet sake’. Brown gives voice to characters who are ignorant of the greater situation in order to stress that miracles cannot always be understood,

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even by their eyewitnesses. The reader’s sympathies are easily split at this point in the chapter: Magnus must now be seen as either a madman, willing his own death in service to a strange dream, or a saint, sacrificing all to fulfil a duty that cannot be understood by those around him. Brown presents these two options as fairly as possible; the reader is welcome either to follow Brown’s interpretation of events or to believe in Magnus’s sanctity. To accentuate the ambiguity of the events further, Brown turns to a contemporary newscast style to depict the reactions of the local inhabitants to the events on Egilsay. In this segment, the focus is on a ‘black-out of news’ (M 130); the inhabitants of Egilsay are notable not for their reactions to the events, but for the way in which they continue their day-to-day activities while these great events take place. Even as Magnus walks the island apologising for his misdeeds, it is only the outside observer, in this case an unidentified news crew, that makes the events noteworthy. Again, in this range of discourses and narrative structures, Brown foregrounds his own role in constructing the story, in highlighting certain elements and not others. As Michael Strysick argues, the foregrounding of narrativity itself is a fundamental postmodern approach to thinking about the way human relations and communities are established.46 In various sections of the prelude, including the anthropological discussions of the nature of sacrifice, the lengthy treaty-making between Hakon and Magnus and, finally, the transition for the titular killing to a German concentration camp, as well as the Mass, Brown illustrates how communities are formed across time, and how patterns emerge that cannot be seen by anyone involved in these events, but only by an outside observer, such as the reader. This multiplicity of styles and perspectives allows Brown to shift easily between the individual act and its public or communal representation. In order to show that sacrifice is a unique act that works towards communal unification, Brown must depict both the sacrifice in its individuality and the public in its everydayness. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the ‘Self of everydayness is the “they” [that] is constituted by the way things have been publicly interpreted.’47 The Heideggerian public ‘they’, through ‘information services such as the newspaper’, can be understood not as a grouping of separate individuals, but as its own entity. The ‘they’ of ‘publicness’ [die Offentlichkeit] is created through what Heidegger terms: ‘distantiality, averageness, and levelling down . . . it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness and thus never gets to the “heart of the matter” [“auf die Sachen”].’48 The ‘they’ is the way in which Being is perceived in the world, by the world.

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Brown illustrates this ‘they’ in the first three sections of ‘The Killing’: a public Being into which the individual is subsumed. In the news portion, for instance, Jock and Mary are among the interviewees, but while the reader is more familiar with, and sympathetic to, them than any of the other interviewees, they are ‘levelled’ with the others. Individual perspectives are immaterial compared to the common medium of news. The reader is implicated in this ‘they’, as is Brown himself, for these events can only be approached through this series of impersonal varied interpretations and perspectives. The stylistic and structural diversity in ‘The Killing’ demonstrates the inability of the public Being to reach ‘the heart of the matter’: the reader, the writer, the peasants and the saga-men are always necessarily kept at a distance. Martyrdom necessarily remains a mystery, and Brown does not attempt to explain it or to enter fully into the mystery that is the Self at the moment of death. Brown’s most serious exploration of this mystery comes not in his depiction of Magnus’s actual death, in which the saint is replaced by another and the moment of death is unseen by the reader and forgotten even by its witnesses, but in his depiction of Magnus’s last Mass. This passage is the purest statement of religious faith in Brown’s writing, and also one of the passages where he is most willing to engage with ambiguity and to abandon the conceptions of Good and Evil that underpin other tellings of the story. Brown turns first to eternity: even as Magnus trembles at his approaching death, with ashen mouth, he is reminded through his meditation that ‘the generations, and even the hills and seas, come and go, and only the Word stands, which was there – all wisdom, beauty, truth, love – before the fires of creation, and will still be there inviolate among the ashes of the world’s end’ (M 138). These considerations of the end of the world lead Magnus to its beginning, for All time was gathered up into that ritual half-hour, the entire history of mankind, as well the events that have not yet happened as the things recorded in chronicles and sagas. That is to say, history both repeats itself and does not repeat itself. (M 139)

This is perhaps Brown’s clearest statement of purpose in the novel: the novel, like the Mass, exists in order to encapsulate the ‘unimaginably complex events of time into the ritual words and movements of a halfhour’ (M 139). For a novel like Magnus to be meaningful to a contemporary audience, in Brown’s understanding, the focus must be not on the specificity of given events, but on observable constants in ‘the human situation’. History is thus best understood as a symbolic process, both abstract and ‘a jewel enduring and flaming’ (M 140). The incorporation of daily life into history comes through Christianity, which ‘invests the

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creatures who move among these elements with an incalculable worth and dignity’ (M 140). Brown’s focus on the community in his telling of the story, on the peasants as well as the earls, is not only an attempt to portray a wider context for these events, but also to imbue them with sacrament. Like the Mass, the novel for Brown is a mixture of the symbolic and the sensual, and invites a new approach to time and history. Brown’s work balances the experience of momentary lives with ‘the eye of an angel’ who would see ‘the whole history of men’ with ‘the brevity and beauty of this dance at the altar’ (M 129), a project is taken up more literally in Beside the Ocean of Time. The novel, like the Mass, incorporates all things in anticipation of a full revelation to come. In this Brown echoes Walter Benjamin, who argues that A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour – and that day is Judgement Day.49

For Brown, history becomes a testament, and the value of events that can only be hinted at in the present will become known only later; the ‘actions of Everyman . . . [reverberate] through the whole web of time’ (M 141). For Brown, like Benjamin, mankind is not yet redeemed. The past cannot be experienced in its fullness, but for Brown the brief moment of the Mass offers a hint of what that fullness might hold, all events major and minor, all times, experienced at once in the fullness of ritual. The Mass exists in the present, but incorporates all time, so that ‘the pain of all history might be touched with healing by a right action in the present’ (M 141). While this is the closest Brown ever comes to stating his goals in writing Magnus, the section ends almost in repudiation of this philosophical thesis. Magnus rejects the consolations of Mass and art alike as he is beset with terror at the prospect of his death: ‘His spirit was too cold to be warmed any more by that subtle weave of imagery. The Mass today was simply the movements of an old man and a boy’ (M 141). Magnus is seized by what Derrida terms the mysterium tremendum, the ‘terrifying mystery, the dread, fear and trembling of the Christian in the experience of the sacrificial gift’.50 For Derrida, writing on Jan Patocˇka, this moment comes when one is in the moment of becoming a person, ‘and a person can become what it is only in being paralyzed [transie], in its very singularity, by the gaze of God’.51 For Magnus, this mysterium tremendum is revealed both as the sensuous feeling of tremendous cold

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and as the symbolic atonement for sins. Magnus, renouncing his pride, acknowledges his failings as both a man and an earl: ‘He offered all that he had left: the peace and the pain’ (M 145). Magnus becomes most wholly himself even as he becomes ‘the chosen man [who] might have to mingle himself with the dust’ (M 141). As Benjamin points out, the emphasis on the physical body of the suffering hero at the point of death originates in Greek tragedy. It is a way for him to be made separate from the community and from language: it is only by internalising his actions that he can approach death as an individual.52 At the same time, however, as Hegel notes, martyrdom always transcends physical suffering: The real topic to be felt and present is the history of the spirit, the soul in its sufferings of love. . . . The steadfastness of the martyrs in their physical horrors is a steadfastness which does endure purely physical suffering, but in the spiritual ideal the soul has to do with itself, its pain, the wounding of its love, with inner repentance, sorrow, regret, and remorse.53

At the moment of the mysterium tremendum, Magnus reconciles physical and spiritual suffering: it is the moment when all outward pain is turned inwards, and the individual becomes most truly himself. This moment of reconciliation and fear is found to some extent in the previous accounts of Magnus’s life. In the Saga, Magnus is shown before his death ‘covering his face with his hands and shedding many tears in the sight of God’ before praying ‘not only for himself and his friends but for his enemies and murderers’.54 All that is said about the Mass, however, is that ‘Some people say that Mass was sung for him and he received the sacrament’.55 Brown moves Magnus’s prayers and tears to the scene of the Mass in order to demonstrate the intentionality of Magnus’s sacrifice; this is a meaningful sacrifice because it is fully willed. Magnus’s death gains significance when it is placed in this religious and intentional context. It is willed, and thus is changed; it is no longer merely a political expedient or even a religious symbol, but something greater. Brown abruptly shifts at this point to a long and formulaic section detailing the bargaining for Magnus’s life. Virtually every paragraph begins the same way: ‘Finn Thorkelson/Hold Ragnarson/Sighvat Sokk/ et al. said . . .’. The section reads both as a homage to the style of the sagas and as something of a court transcript: it is a series of testimonies about Magnus’s value in the community, in which Magnus himself plays no part. This section also marks perhaps the most significant change in the story from both the original saga versions and An Orkney Tapestry. In these earlier versions, Magnus himself offers Hakon three alternatives

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to his own death (pilgrimage to Rome, exile in Scotland, mutilation in prison); in both Loom of Light and Magnus, Magnus is notably absent. The passage reinforces the innocence of Hakon, who is willing to compromise but finally turned towards death by the persuasion of his councillors. In its strange emphasis on Hakon’s golden armband, too, the passage reaches for the symbolic, as, at the moment of decision, ‘the arm of the man . . . was an intolerable blaze now in the noon sun’ (M 163), an echo of the flaming jewel of symbolism mentioned in the previous section. Magnus’s absence is itself symbolic. Throughout the novel he appears surprisingly infrequently: although he is often discussed, he is depicted in less than a quarter of the novel. Every scene that includes him is one of refutation: he refuses his name, sex, battle and power. Here, at the moment where he has become most himself, he is also most absent: in preparing himself for sacrifice he has already left the world of politics, and indeed of human interaction. At the close of the novel, he is nothing but a nameless, speechless ‘old man’, made individual by being stripped of every distinguishing characteristic. Before turning to the actual moment of death, Brown includes a number of discussions of the anthro-historical nature and significance of sacrifice. For Brown, all sacrifice, in all cultures, works towards the same purpose. Sacrifice is as essential to a community as agriculture: it represents the tearing ‘of long wounds in the earth . . . [that is] one of the great discoveries’ (M 168). At the same time that it is completely physical, sacrifice is also completely symbolic. Animal sacrifice, for instance, prefigures the Christian Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation: a man eats a dripping sliver of ox imbued with divinity and thereby he (the wayward one) takes into himself both the sweetness and wisdom of the god (in so far as his being can bear such intensities) and also a draught of the dark primitive power of the earth. (M 166)

Brown here emphasises the gift inherent in sacrifice: the redemption or unification brought by sacrifice is not deserved by humanity, ‘the wayward unstable partner’ (M 165), but is instead a gift that allows humans to achieve a closer relationship with God through the intervention or intercession of the other, what Girard calls the surrogate victim. Brown’s account of the history of sacrifice is teleologically centred on Christ and the Eucharist: That was the only central sacrifice of history. I am the bread of life. All previous rituals had been a foreshadowing of this; all subsequent rituals a re-enactment. The fires at the centre of the earth, the sun above, all divine essences and ecstasies, come to this silence at last – a circle of bread and a cup of wine on an altar. (M 169. Italics in original.)

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Brown writes of how the Eucharist was prefigured by Melchisedec, who brings forth bread and wine when he blesses Abraham (Genesis 14: 18). There is nothing in the biblical account that relates directly to Brown’s claim that at this moment ‘Men uttered new words to one another – “pity”, “mercy”, “love”, “patience”, “peace” – as if this new food in some sense quickened their minds and hearts’ (M 168). Brown’s interpretation is quite clearly manipulated to indicate the Christian Eucharist, and draws on the Pauline notion that Melchisedec allows for Christ, insofar as the latter is a perfected, consecrated high priest (Hebrews 7: 26–8). These four short passages on the nature of sacrifice are absolutely central to the novel, for they demonstrate that Brown is not interested in writing a conventional novel that would follow traditional narrative structures or tap familiar emotional resonances. Brown inserts them not to further the story, but to make sure that the reader is fully aware of the nature of sacrifice before the sacrifice takes place. Inasmuch as it is the narrative of an individual life, Magnus is also a treatise on the nature and value of sacrifice itself and an account of why it is that ‘At certain times and in certain circumstances men still crave spectacular sacrifice’ (M 170). For Brown, sacrifice is central both to this particular narrative and to all narratives because of its simultaneous uniqueness and universality. It is the only possible act that can fully illustrate the interaction between the individual and the community, because it is simultaneously always individual and always communal.56 These passages also form a rationale for Brown’s remarkable transition from the twelfth century to the twentieth in the final scene in the chapter, a transition that only works if the reader is fully convinced by Brown’s argument that every example of sacrifice refers back (or forwards) to Christ. This claim is central to the novel: Magnus, like Bonhoeffer, is sacrificed because at times ‘bread and wine seem to certain men to be too mild a sacrifice’ (M 170). Brown’s insistence on the value of sacrifice is remarkably similar to that of Georges Bataille. For Bataille an individual society or community is defined in terms of real works, including agrarian production, ‘that integrate sacrifice into the world of things’.57 Sacrifice is the act that unites the worlds of the sacred and profane, of gods and objects, through a destruction of the individual body. Like death itself, for Bataille sacrifice cannot be understood merely as killing, but as a gift. By destroying what has been withdrawn from the world even as it is made into a thing, the sacrifice makes possible a lost intimacy with the sacred. Sacrifice is a way to confront the fear of death, where death is understood as a disturbance of the order of things; it makes the physical body, through the ‘trembling of the individual’, into something ‘holy,

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sacred, and suffused with anguish’.58 It is only through the sacrifice that humans, who dwell in an order of physical things, can partake in an order of the divine. For Brown, Magnus’s sacrifice must be understood in Christian terms, but also in more basic human ones; it is both an emulation of Christ and the way the community understands its place in the world. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Magnus’s death serves as a way to understand all human death. As Hughes argues, the ritualistic nature of sacrifice allows it to fit into a system of circulation; sacrifice is the way the community makes sense of death, even when it is ‘the end of the road for the dead individual’.59 The question of how Magnus’s martyrdom can be understood as death as such can be more fully addressed through an exploration of Heidegger’s conception of Being-towards-death. In developing this idea, Heidegger draws upon Meister Eckhart’s notion of the centrality of Being as revealed through death: ‘The martyrs are dead and have lost their life but have received being’.60 For Eckhart – in some respects like Kierkegaard after him – martyrdom is the quintessential death because it reveals the way death gives being. Heidegger follows and expands this notion in his explication of Being-towards-death, which is the way Dasein comes to understand itself in terms of potentiality. Death limits individual possibility – it imposes a finite number of possibilities for the individual life – but at the same time, the recognition of the possibility of death itself gives the individual an understanding of her own specific potentiality. Death is the way in which Dasein is separated from its everydayness, from the ‘they’ discussed above. The potentiality-of-Being revealed in death is the foundation of Dasein’s coming to an end, and thus the root of the wholeness of Dasein: ‘Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time.’61 Death is both the fulfilment of an individual life and also the way the individual life is made known as itself. The two-fold aspect of dying, wherein it is both necessarily one’s own and where in its opening up of possibility it is marked as separate from merely perishing, make it constitutive of Dasein. Death is then a fulfilment of Being, but not, crucially, in a linear sense. It is not the case that, in Being-towards-death, there is Being that reaches fulfilment at the moment of its ending. Rather, there is in the possibility of death an essential ‘not-yet’ that Dasein already is, which is necessarily incorporated in Being. Death, and the ever-present possibility of death, gives being. Death reveals that towards which life has always been moving: The ‘ending’ which we have in view when we speak of death, does not signify Dasein’s Being-at-an-end [Zu-Ende-sein], but a Being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende] of this entity. Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is.62

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Thus life is not a process towards a wholeness that can only be achieved at the moment of death; instead, death creates this wholeness in such a way that life is based upon its possibility. Death is not only anticipated in life, but also drawn upon and fulfilled in life itself.63 When death is understood as possibility and as that which necessarily transcends time, it becomes apparent why Brown chooses to avoid showing the moment of Magnus’s death, and instead fixes the conception of death to a point when Magnus is in preparation, in the mysterium tremendum. Magnus’s death is present throughout his life. This is not the teleological understanding of martyrdom that appears in the sagas or in Mooney, where the events of Magnus’s life are given credence by the knowledge those authors had of his death. Instead, for Brown the possibility of Magnus’s martyrdom, as well as its actuality, is what makes Magnus’s life whole. Brown does not show the reader Magnus’s actual death because his death has been coexistent with his life. Brown echoes Heidegger in the notion that death is that aspect of one’s being that provides wholeness, not at the moment of death, but in life itself. The final scene in the novel when Magnus is still alive comes as a coda to the passages on sacrifice. Brown writes that men still desire ‘spectacular sacrifice’: They root everywhere for a victim and a scapegoat to stand between the tribe and the anger of inexorable Fate. So Magnus Erlendson, when he came up from the shore that Easter Monday, towards noon, to the stone in the centre of the island, saw against the sun eleven men and a boy and a man with an axe in his hand who was weeping. (M 170)

Magnus combines Girard’s concept of the sacrificial scapegoat as the unifier of the community and Heidegger’s notion of death as that which reveals individual potentiality. At the same time, however, the above passage marks a surprising exit for the titular protagonist of a biographical novel. This is the last moment Magnus is shown in the novel, and he is here voiceless, wholly body and wholly symbol. Indeed, it is this disappearance that marks the novel as distinctly philosophical. For Brown, Magnus’s death does not need to be shown to the reader, for it already has been shown: every scene in the novel has already made his death apparent. It is not that Magnus could not live other than he did because he was fated to be a martyr, as the sagas would have it, but that the value of Magnus’s martyrdom is not limited to his death, but is instead present throughout his life. It is not the manner of his death that is significant, but the possibility of his death throughout the course of his life. Magnus’s martyrdom,

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then, is revealed in his Being-towards-death far more than in his actual murder on Easter Monday on Egilsay. And yet Brown does show a death, or at least offers the prelude to another death. Isobel Murray, in her recent introduction to the novel, argues that the concentration camp scene has, in the past, ‘obscured almost any other questions, but it is a very short passage, easy to magnify out of context’.64 Indeed, many critics have argued that this passage is at the centre of the novel, the stylistic and narrative climax, which it is emphatically not. For Brown, the climax is one of ideas, not events, and is interspersed throughout the course of the novel. The passage is, however, exceedingly different from anything else in Brown’s fiction, and for that reason alone deserves careful consideration. It is, to begin with, one of a small handful of first-person narratives. This tonal shift jars the reader and forces her to take note of the passage as something distinct and removed from the analytical discussions of the nature of sacrifice that have preceded it. This passage is the most confrontational in the novel, for its success is dependent on the reader’s acceptance of Brown’s claims about the nature of death and time; the shift from Magnus to Bonhoeffer only makes sense if sacrifice is seen as simultaneously unique and universal. Thus, in both stylistic device and narrative placement, Brown highlights the importance of this passage. He repeats this sentiment in his autobiography, where he provides the longest textual criticism of any of his work: such incidents are not isolated casual happenings in time, but are repetitions of some archetypal pattern; an image or an event stamped on the spirit of a man at the very beginning of man’s time on earth, that will go on repeating itself over and over in every life without exception until history at last yields a meaning. The life and death of Magnus must therefore be shown to be contemporary, and to have a resonance in the twentieth century. I did not have far to go to find a parallel: a concentration camp in central Europe in the spring of 1944. (FI 178–9)

If one accepts Brown’s conceptualisation of the novel, then, the Bonhoeffer passage is not merely inserted in order to enliven the novel or to provide another sort of voicing, but for the same philosophical and theological purposes that are found behind the structuring of the rest of ‘The Killing’. The passage does not add to the novel as a biographical or historical narrative, but is instead focused on the emotional and symbolic resonance of sacrifice itself. As much as Brown derided film, this move is far closer to the work of Sergei Eisenstein, or even the Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times, than to the work of those rural writers with whom he is most often compared. Alan Bold, one of Brown’s staunchest defenders, compares his technique in ‘The Killing’ to Brechtian

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Verfremdungseffekte, a technique of ‘distancing the reader from the cathartic flow of fictional narrative’.65 Whether regarded as a modernist or even postmodernist gesture, Brown is clearly labouring to present the death of Magnus as an event that must be considered both as a singular event and an archetypal one. The moment of sacrifice is always unique and irreducible, yet in its essence and its communal purpose it can be shown to be always present in human life. The choice of setting, however, is far from the obvious parallel that Brown claims it to be in his autobiography. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, was the subject of several biographies written around the time of Magnus,66 and the bare outlines of his death are much as Brown portrays them. Until the final years of his life, however, Bonhoeffer’s life was closer to a saint such as Columba, if a Catholic parallel must be made: a relatively quiet life given to religious contemplation.67 Killed for his resistance to the Nazi scheme, his death could not be said to have brought peace or miracles any more than that of thousands of other resisters. Indeed, by maintaining the structure of the Magnus story and making the narrator of this segment Lifolf the chef, who insists that the events of the concentration camp at which he works ‘had nothing to do with me’ (M 171), Brown depoliticises the action. The German major in Magnus proposes that the prisoner must be killed because ‘For years he has spoken about such things as “the brotherhood of man”, “the spirit of peace that ought to brood upon all the peoples of the world”, “the universal kingdom of love”. . . . We wish to show this pure spirit, by means of the butcher’s hook, that he is, after all, when all is said and done, an animal like other men.’ (M 176)

The reader is naturally expected to oppose this killing and to side with the apparent martyr. And yet Brown comes close to undermining this sentiment, for in keeping his protagonist anonymous and inserting this story inside that of Magnus, the Bonhoeffer figure becomes merely symbolic. In his desire to show the world as a system of repetitions, Brown robs the events he portrays of much of their individual import. It is tempting to read this passage of the novel as implying that, in their echoing of Christ’s death, the deaths of Magnus and Bonhoeffer have themselves lost their particular import and singularity. The final segment of ‘The Killing’, in its emphasis on the patterns and repetitions of human life and dismissal of individual particulars, refutes the arguments of both Brown and the man he is apparently using as his protagonist. By stripping these sacrifices of their individual worth, their political and emotional resonances, Brown does them a great, if unconscious, disservice.

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The failure of this passage to represent sufficiently the sacrifice as both unique and archetypal does not undermine the entire novel, however, for Brown early on sets up the fallibility of a work of fiction. In the Bishop’s first letter, written just as Magnus makes his first appearance in the novel, he writes: But in the end nothing matters. The chronicler writes his history in the royal palace, but the saga was conceived and ‘finis’ put to it before the beginning of time; and soon enough there will be no one to relish the dark struttings and puppetry of men, for even the gods, the only creators and begetters, are doomed to perish. (M 39)

This passage is not mere apocalyptic despair, but a comment on the way in which the chronicler, or novelist, cannot tell the totality of human life, immersed in it as he is, but only a small, inaccurate part of it. In his portrayal of Magnus’s life as Being-towards-death, Brown attempts to demarcate not the life of one man, but of humanity in general. This is the end served by the continual mentions of death, violence and apocalypse throughout the novel. Not only the individual, but the entire community is predicated on its death; the ‘finis’ is already present in the lives of both the whole and its constituent parts. This is, finally, why Brown repeatedly approaches Magnus’s life through the community that surrounds him; the individual ultimately stands in for both the specific community and the larger community of a humanity fast approaching its own end. This implied communal Dasein is the bravest aspect of the novel, and perhaps the aspect that elevates it to more than a theological treatise: Brown is not only using the life of Magnus to stand in for the death of the individual, as it would appear, but for the death of the community itself. As Maurice Blanchot argues in a text devoted to Bataille, the sacrifice that founds the community at the same time undoes it. Sacrifice is a gift and abandonment, and thus is ‘the ordeal that exposes [the community] to its necessary disappearance’.68 Or, as Nancy reads Girard: if the whole of Western culture is determined by sacrifice, then sacrifice must also come to represent ‘the closure of the West’ and the failure of community.69 Brown places sacrifice at the heart of the community to examine how a community becomes unified; it is worth suggesting that his mirroring of Magnus’s death with that of Bonhoeffer, a death that in no way creates a community or puts an end to communal violence, illustrates the impossibility of community in the modern era. Even if one does not take this step, what remains clear is that Brown uses the story of Magnus to illustrate the centrality of the individual life, and thus the individual death, to the workings of community. The individual

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sacrifice stands against the universal even as it unifies the community; it is a death that is present throughout the life of the individual; and it is ultimately both unique and archetypal. Brown strongly emphasises the significance of the sacrifice, and uses it to unite both disparate works and disparate sequences within each of those works. This emphasis, however, demonstrates that for Brown sacrifice itself is constitutive of, and reveals, community. The community is finally predicated on the individual: the story of Magnus does not illustrate a unique moment in religious history, but is a way to understand the workings of community itself. Brown returned to the story of Magnus many times over the rest of his career in poetry, drama and prose, although never with the complexity of Magnus. His most significant late treatment of Magnus is found in the short story ‘The Feast at Paplay’. Based on Chapter 52 of the Saga, the story takes place immediately after Magnus’s death, when Hakon attends a feast with Magnus’s wife and mother, and feels ‘the burden of his crime’.70 As in Magnus, Brown focuses on agrarian and communal life. The bulk of the story is concerned with the preparation for the feast, beginning with the slaughter of a pig, which dies ‘in floods of gore’, echoing the simultaneous, but unknown, death of Magnus.71 As in Magnus, violence is understood to be a necessary, daily aspect of community life. Little is made of Magnus’s death, recognised by his wife Ingerth long before Thora, who says: ‘“Men die. Never a day but a man dies in this island or that. So long as this dead man in Egilsay was shriven and given heavenly bread for his journey, then he’s happy enough, I’m sure.”’72 Although Thora does not know that it is her son of whom she is speaking, she is still forgiving Hakon, for she accepts Magnus’s death as part of a larger pattern. The majority of the story is concerned with her distress at Ingerth’s refusal to celebrate Easter fully: ‘The Lord is risen . . . Does that mean nothing to you? Of course it means nothing, if one does not see all the actions of Christ’s life in the events of every day. Today in the island of Egilsay your husband and his cousin – the two earls – who have been on bad terms for years, they are holding a meeting. . . . Orkney that has been bleeding to death for many winters, that is dead in fact and laid in a hollow rock; Orkney is to be resurrected again this very day. Does that mean nothing to you?’73

Thus Brown makes explicit the link between Magnus and the community at large; his death both symbolises the death of the community and will result in its resurrection, and in the return of peaceful life. The death of Magnus proves ‘that it is Christ who rules the universe, not Fate’.74 Like Magnus, the story is impossible to understand if Magnus’s death

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is not understood as a Christological sacrifice, and if the individual is not seen as representative of the community. If these precepts were not taken into account, ‘The Feast at Paplay’ would merely be a rather strange story about a mother who is not concerned with grieving for her son. Instead, by assuming the symbolic account of Magnus’s death, Brown explores further how sacrifice alters the entire community, even allowing for peace between his mother and his murderer. For Brown, this is the first of Magnus’s miracles: while Ingerth is filled with nothing but hate, Thora calls Hakon ‘son’. After Magnus’s death, all of Orkney is filled with peace. Brown ends the story with a return to the symbol of cloth: ‘On the half-finished cloth in the loom could be seen now, in the torchlight, a sun, a cornstalk, a cup.’75 These are, of course, images of both daily life and of the Christian Eucharist. If this story is to be read as a coda to Magnus, then it becomes clear that this loom contains the wedding garment for which Magnus searches until his death. It is a priestly garment, woven with the images of a Eucharistic robe. Although Magnus is mentioned in many of the poems and stories Brown wrote after ‘The Feast at Paplay’, he gradually became interested primarily in the story’s most purely symbolic elements. A poem like ‘St Magnus’, written shortly before Brown’s death, tells the entirety of the novel in twenty-eight lines; the change from a white coat to ‘a red martyr coat’ becomes the central drama of the narrative, rather than any of the story’s events.76 The repetitive imagery of coats and sacrifice in these later poems gets somewhat muddled. The events described have perhaps grown so familiar to Brown that they are no longer worth explaining, and he instead rewrites the story focusing only on its symbolic elements. It is only in Magnus that Brown is able to illustrate through Magnus’s death how the individual serves on behalf of, and as representative of, the community and how the life of the community becomes a single entity in the life of one member. It is finally worth mentioning the primary medium through which Magnus has become known to a wider audience: Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera The Martyrdom of Saint Magnus. In his libretto, Davies sticks quite closely to the novel, often, in scenes such as ‘The Reporters’, providing a word-for-word setting of the material. The only notable change is in the character of Blind Mary, who seeks, and accepts, her own restoration of sight. The finale of the opera consists of a declaration on the nature of sacrifice repeated from Brown’s chapter ‘The Killing’, followed by an explicit inclusion of the audience, who are told, upon leaving, to ‘Go now and carry the peace of Christ into the world’.77 Davies makes explicit what Brown

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leaves implicit, and the story perhaps becomes slightly less dramatic for losing the ambiguity Brown has worked into it. The libretto does though illustrate how, for all of his sometimes unwieldy symbolism and the repetition of a few elements to the point where they almost become meaningless, Brown was largely able to create an ambitious account of the death of an individual and the way that death changes the surrounding community, a theme he often explored, but never again with the success of Magnus.

Notes 1. For purposes of clarity, except in the cases of direct quotations from alternative sources, all names will correspond to the spellings in Brown’s novel Magnus. 2. D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds, p. 262. 3. Mooney, St. Magnus, p. 3. 4. Ibid., p. 11. 5. Orkneyinga Saga, p. 81. 6. Ibid., p. 108. This passage is also used as part of the Pálsson and Edwards translation’s dedication to George Mackay Brown. 7. Taylor, Introduction, p. 72. 8. Waugh, ‘Saint Magnús’s Fame’, p. 166. 9. ‘Magnus’ Saga the Longer’, p. 239. 10. Ibid., p. 240. 11. Ibid., pp. 241, 247. 12. Magnus’ Saga, p. 45. 13. ‘Magnus’ Saga the Longer’, p. 264. 14. Ibid., p. 265. 15. Ibid., pp. 269–70. 16. Taylor, Introduction, p. 95. 17. Mooney, St. Magnus, p. 9. 18. Ibid., p. 19. 19. See also D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds, p. 267. 20. Mooney, St. Magnus, p. 211. 21. Ibid., 265. 22. Thomson, Orkney Through the Centuries, p. 7. 23. Waugh, ‘Saint Magnús’s Fame’, p. 177. 24. Brunsden, ‘Earls and Saints’, p. 80. 25. Murray, ‘The Influence of Norse Literature’, p. 550. 26. Orkneyinga Saga, p. 103. 27. Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, p. 231. 28. In the novel, ‘Seedtime’ is known as ‘The Plough’, ‘The Fields in Summer’ as ‘Scarecrow’, and the chapter ‘The Temptations’ is new. 29. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 221. 30. Brown, Letters from Hamnavoe, p. 86. 31. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 67.

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92 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community Ibid., pp. 69–70. de Vries, Religion and Violence, p. 163. Derrida, The Gift of Death, pp. 66–7. Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice, p. 44. Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, p. 57. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 91. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, p. 24. Italics in original. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 269. Brown, Spell for Green Corn, p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 84. Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, p. 58. Orkneyinga Saga, p. 92. Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, p. 4. Strysick, ‘The End of Community’, p. 196. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 296. Ibid., p. 165. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 246. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 108. Hegel, Aesthetics, v. 2, p. 830. Italics in original. Orkneyinga Saga, pp. 94–5. Ibid., p. 95. Indeed, as Miguel de Beistegui argues, the ‘properly Western sacrifice is self-sacrifice’ precisely because it is through the sacrifice of the individual that the community can experience ‘what cannot be constituted in community’, which is the ‘sacrifice of community’. de Beistegui, ‘Sacrifice Revisited’, pp. 159, 165. Bataille, Theory of Religion, p. 57. Ibid., p. 52. Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice, p. 12. Eckhart, Selected Writings, p. 165. Italics in original. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 284. Ibid., p. 289. ‘Life’ here is used more conventionally than in Heidegger, who nonetheless does argue that ‘Even Dasein may be considered purely as life.’ Ibid., p. 290. Murray, Introduction, p. x. Bold, George Mackay Brown, p. 106. The most arresting element of Mary Bosanquet’s 1968 biography of Bonhoeffer is that, like the Bonhoeffer episode in Magnus, it begins and ends in aporia, at the moment of expectation and mysterium tremendum, rather than ever discussing the death itself. This is, at least, the conventional view, of which Brown is likely to have been aware. The American writer Marilynne Robinson has in recent years offered a convincing reading of Bonhoeffer’s life as continual confrontation with authority. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, p. 15.

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Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, p. 54. Orkneyinga Saga, p. 96. Brown, Andrina, p. 106. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., pp. 108–9. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid. p., 124. Brown, Northern Lights, pp. 28–9. Davies, Martyrdom of St. Magnus, p. 20.

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Chapter 3

The Individual Community and the Community of Individuals

While in Greenvoe Brown depicts the life of an entire community, and in Magnus he focuses on the way the death of an individual can create community, in his later novels he concentrates on the individual search for community. In the largely symbolic fairy tale Time in a Red Coat, the seafaring adventure story Vinland and the elegiac Beside the Ocean of Time, Brown examines the idea of community as myth, as historical reality and as fiction itself. All three of these works can be read as examples of Denis Hollier’s definition of the novel as ‘the story of an individual who is not integrated into collective experience’.1 The protagonists of these novels journey to an imagined community from which they are kept separate. The community is a place of origin and a telos, but is always alien to individual experience; it is a phenomenon revealed by its absence. The community cannot be directly experienced, but it remains the defining idea of human life. The tension between the individual and the community suggested by Hollier is central to the work of many mid-century thinkers. The constant desire for community Brown explores in his late novels is summarised aptly by Simone Weil, who writes that to be rooted in a community is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.2

For Weil, writing immediately after the Second World War, a return to a common, ‘rooted’ humanity is an ethical imperative; rootedness is an essential aspect of human experience that has too often been forgotten.3 Only through community can the individual discover truth, which for Weil is the individual’s greatest need. Weil outlines three essential components of community that reveal it as ‘food for a certain number

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of human souls’.4 The community is unique: one community cannot be replaced by another, and the individual who has left her community, or whose community has been destroyed, cannot become part of a new community. The community looks to the future: it provides continuity and a forward momentum into which its members enter. Finally, a community has its roots in the past, and is the only way the spiritual knowledge of the dead can be transmitted to the living. Community, not as a vague notion but as a particular, localised reality, is thus necessary for the individual to define him- or herself, to move into the future and to benefit from the knowledge of the past. Published nine years later, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition initially appears to echo Weil’s ethical and political claims for the necessity of community: ‘No human life’, Arendt writes, ‘is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.’5 Yet unlike Weil, she does not believe that a return to a purely communitarian life is possible. Looking back to Rousseau, she argues that the modern individual is defined by ‘his inability to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether’.6 The individual can only be known in relation to community, but is simultaneously also alienated from it; the world both relates and separates individuals. For Arendt, the most common way this tension can be resolved is in storytelling, which allows inner experience to be made known to the public. Stories are the bridge between individual experience, which is always particular, and the common experience of the public sphere. Only in the pre-existing ‘web of human relationships’ can the ‘unique life story’ of each individual be made known.7 While Arendt draws important distinctions between real and fictional stories, her conception of the polis as the space of appearances in which each individual life story can be made known and where ‘I appear to others as others appear to me’8 nevertheless suggests a way that human community can be understood as an assemblage of individual stories. Working more explicitly on literary narratives, Ernst Bloch also finds the possibility of a return to community in storytelling: stories not only recount individual experiences, they add something to them, namely a receptive ‘we’.9 His book Traces consists of an assemblage of small stories that reveal their philosophical importance by the traces they leave. Even as the self becomes ‘more individual, searching, homeless’,10 it is in and through storytelling that the possibility for a – for Bloch, specifically utopian – community emerges. Both Bloch and Arendt, in disparate ways, present storytelling as a paradigm that can potentially permit a reintegration of the individual and the community. More recently, Wayne C. Booth has also identified the polis as the place of

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storytelling: the storyteller’s task is to find a receptive community. The value of stories cannot be known to the isolated individual, but only to the self in community.11 In each of his late novels, Brown presents a series of diverse stories that themselves, in their assemblage, open the space of common appearances where the individual and community can be known. In these works he does not emphasise the local Orcadian community, but instead depicts the need for community as central to the life of individual, and suggests the possibility of achieving community through stories.

I. Time in a Red Coat Written mid-way through his career, Time in a Red Coat is at once Brown’s most unusual novel and a commentary on all of his other writing. The Orcadian community he writes about elsewhere appears only at the novel’s end, while the central narrative concerns the journey of a young girl through Asia and Europe, over the course of 1,500 years, on a quest to ‘slay the dragon of war, or at least to reconcile the dragon with the peaceable creatures of the earth’ (TRC 197). The novel is most frequently read as an allegory or a fairy tale: it appears to be a collection of universal truths about the nature of human life presented through diverse myths and stories. A foregrounded narrative voice frequently interjects with explanations of the value of such a reading. Early in the novel, as the unnamed heroine begins her journey, Brown writes: In a sense – in the poetical way of looking at things, which packs a whole world into a symbol, in order to make simple and joyous and comprehensible the manifold confusions of life – in a sense the young girl in the boat crossing the river is not only all the young women who will cross it in time past and who will cross it in time to come. . . . She is more, she is all women, all the girl children and the old ones who have added their salt drops to the sweet on-flowing river of life, and who hate war and war-makers with a bitter hatred. (TRC 33)

The novel is explicitly a poetic representation of the human hatred of war and search for a peaceful community, such as the girl finds at the novel’s end in Orkney. The heroine is repeatedly torn between poles of myth, peace and art, which constitute community, and violence and oppression, which make up individual experience. Yet more than that, Brown uses the novel to question the value of storytelling, especially in regards to his own work. Elements of all of his novels appear in Time in a Red Coat. Brown alludes to the black star of Greenvoe (TRC 146) and to the seamless garment of Magnus

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(TRC 173), while the central concerns of his later works, Tir-nan-og from Vinland and the images of time as a river and ocean from Beside the Ocean of Time, are also present. Entire scenes are replicated from his earlier works: the grumbling of the peasants during a royal birth in ‘The Masque’ echoes the opening of Magnus, while the Orkney village of Ottervoe, at once ‘a good place’ and ‘just a village’ (TRC 182), is strongly reminiscent of Greenvoe itself. Ottervoe, like so many of Brown’s Orkney settings, contains a ‘strict and mild factor’ (TRC 230) and children who play ‘bright-limbed and shrill-tongued, among the rock-pools and the dunes and the seabirds’ (TRC 232), while in the village as a whole there is ‘a great intimacy between sea and fishermen’ (TRC 236). This small island community has resisted the ever-present violence seen in the rest of the novel. The return of Simon Thorfinnson, a minor figure in the Napoleonic battle that occupies much of the novel’s second half, to his home community is presented as a small triumph: in a novel about the impossibility of continuity in a violent world, here is a man who manages to fulfil his desire for community, albeit only after his death. The Orkney community on which Brown focuses throughout his career is presented as a world set apart; it is the place from which the individual comes, and to which he will ultimately return. It is ‘a pastoral, a country blessing, a song of peace without end’ (TRC 244). This redemptive vision of community is more complicated than it initially appears to be, however. While Thorfinnson’s return to his home community is an event to be celebrated, the presence of an outsider in the community cannot be as easily accepted. The heroine comes to live in Ottervoe as well, but is less welcome there. In the novel’s final chapters the heroine, now an old woman – and possibly a witch – named Maurya, tells her story to herself, and concludes: ‘“It’s a lie, like all stories. For even the sea was burnt at last. All broken, the harps and the mirrors. An island strewn with skulls. I am a stone mouth that speaks. There’s no need for you or anyone to listen any more’” (TRC 249). The return to community is a story like any other, and stories here are not ways to access universal truths, but merely lies. As her presence in a defined community at last provides her with a name, the heroine is made purely individual: her stories do not speak to universal experience, but only detail the life of one person. The community here is a force of isolation and individuation. Critics including Berthold Schoene have pointed to the last line of the novel, where a child enters the croft and says: ‘“Yes, we got history again, of course. The kettle’ll soon be singing’” (TRC 249), as a refutation of the heroine’s claims and a positive inversion of perspective.12 Brown himself makes a similar claim in an essay written for the Independent, where he writes that the role of

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children in the novel is to make ‘a pure sweet promise that indeed all shall be well’.13 As earlier drafts reveal, however, this addition to the novel came at a very late date. The first ten versions of the scene are presented as monologues, where Maurya is simply an unhappy old Orkney woman who fears that her fantasies of wild adventures will result in her confinement in an asylum. The novel originally ended not on a positive note, but on one of complete despair and confusion: ‘Why shouldn’t I be a princess now and then? Once upon a time. Does it do any harm to anybody? An old thing at the door of death, she can imagine anything and she can say anything she likes so long as she is not hurting anybody. . . . We were all princesses. We gave gold and we were silent with sorrow. The dragon drank the blood of men and he roared and he belched out terrible fires from his mouth.’14

Stories are here presented as a means of escape from the promise of death, but they too harbour the potential for destruction in the form of dragons. This pessimistic tone remains in the final version of the novel: the child who appears at the very end speaks out of ignorance, and this brief positive note cannot change all that has come before. The novel ends with an image of stories as useless commodities in a time of war; the modern world remains ‘too hideous and horrible for words’ (TRC 227). A story that resolves the tensions of the world can only be a lie. The entire novel is concerned with the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of stories. Each chapter begins with a discussion of a universal image, an inn or a river or a mountain village, that can be seen as both a particular place and a metaphor for all of human life. As Rowena Murray and Brian Murray note, Brown ‘risked destroying everything he had built up in his writing up to this point’ by explicitly commenting on the ‘“tedious familiarity” of each of these metaphorical tropes’.15 Brown discusses the ‘worn metaphor’ of a river as a figure for ‘the life of the whole tribe, the whole nation, the totality of the human race, and indeed of creation itself’ (TRC 31), a metaphor he nevertheless extends and embellishes over two pages. Later, in the chapter ‘The Inn’, he writes that: ‘It is a worn metaphor, too, that sees life as an inn, a hostelry where we stay for a few nights, warming us at the fire with mulled wine, sitting at the broad table with strangers that one will never see again’ (TRC 42). Even as he develops these metaphors at great length, the reader is always made wary; such images are arbitrary and cannot be made new. Brown demonstrates the potential utility of such images in his shift to particulars, however. In ‘The Inn’ he moves from a discussion of a universal inn-keeper to ‘the present inn-keeper’ who, while a minor

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character in the novel, is nevertheless given a detailed personal history, focusing on his former wife. Brown then switches tone again to present a mystical view of the situation in which, as in Magnus, present circumstances are seen in relation to the life of Christ: ‘in such a place as this had the new time begun, the Light and the Way and the Word’ (TRC 48). This Christological passage begins as part of the inn-keeper’s imaginings, but quickly reverts to the external narrative voice: ‘It did not occur to the old man, whose hands were blue with cold, what an equivocal part in the story that other inn-keeper had played’ (TRC 48). In six pages, Brown takes the reader through three possible interpretations of the scene: the inn is a poetic metaphor; it is a particular inn situated in an actual history and geography; and it echoes the life of Christ. The remainder of the chapter places the heroine in a similar range of possible interpretations: she is Mitzi, the inn-keeper’s dead wife; she is the snow princess of a child’s fairy tale; she is a ghost; she is an external observer of events. Throughout the chapter Brown balances the vague with the specific and the metaphorical with the realistic, all the while foregrounding the unsuitability of any one of these readings. Both Brown and many of his critics use this indeterminacy to argue that the novel can be read as myth, fairy tale or allegory: Brown indeed uses all three terms to describe his project. David Profumo argues, for instance, that the novel ‘is filled with recurrent figures and shapes (spiritual symbols, elemental motifs) which remove the need for extensive historical realism’.16 Schoene likewise argues that the novel is ‘based on the allegorical poem with which it concludes’.17 In this final poem, the various repeated images of the novel are shown to be representative of the natural elements: the dragon, for instance, stands not only for war but also for fire. If the novel were to be read backwards from this poem, it would appear that a balance between these elements, between war and peace, modern progress and pastoral life, is what makes the world whole. The poem depicts a garden with four elemental creatures – a dove, a horse, a fish and a dragon – ‘dwelling together’ in harmony. While mankind and industry have destroyed this original harmony and made the dragon king, the restoration of an original harmony can still be accomplished: Come back, follow the song. Here is the door of the lost garden. Come, fish. The dragon is sick of his lonely flames. Come fish, speak to the dragon. Come fish, first. The horse and the bird will follow. (TRC 248–9)

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From a village on the sea, then, can come the birth of a new world. It is only when the girl abandons her war against war, itself a necessary part of human life, that the hope for redemption can be born. To read this novel solely as an allegory of elemental harmony, however, is to reduce it too crudely. The novel employs allegorical images as a means of representing the world as it really is: these images do not require interpretation, but are whole in themselves. Brown, like the German baroque dramatists on whom Walter Benjamin writes, uses allegory not as ‘a playful literary technique, but as a form of expression’.18 As Benjamin writes: ‘each idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world.’19 As an allegory in this manner, Time in a Red Coat contains various images, each of which is a full and complete image of the world. The multiple interpretations Brown gives each image show how stories and poetry illuminate and contain the world. Literature shows the wonders of the world: an allegorical tale does not point to another, external truth, but in itself reveals the complexity of the image. As Andrew Bowie argues, for Benjamin the ‘point of modern allegory’ is that ‘Meaning is only ever connected to that which passes away, which changes the very status of language, because there is nothing which now remains fundamentally stable’.20 This instability of language and the world can never be forgotten in a reading of Time in a Red Coat. Brown abandons traditional linear causality: there is little unity of time and place in the novel, but instead a consideration of the novel as a series of allegorical or metaphorical images that are themselves both complete and always changing. The novel can only be read as a novel; the stories – as Maurya makes clear in the final chapter – are always just stories, not solutions to the problems of the world. Paul de Man traces these ideas to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where metaphors and dreams do not reveal a ‘deeper’ truth, but are ‘a mere surface, a mere play of forms and associations’. The Apollonian dream is always aware ‘of its illusory, fictional character, and it delights in this illusion’.21 This illusory character of the novel, which does not claim a deeper reality but is always manifest as surface, is the key to understanding Time in a Red Coat, and by extension all of Brown’s fiction. This play of worn metaphors is all that the novel is, or can be. At the same time, however, as in Magnus the repeated images in Time in a Red Coat are placed in an explicitly Catholic paradigm. If there is a deeper meaning that the metaphors and allegorical images reveal, it can only be found in the Mass. Just as the inn-keeper is presented in relation to the birth of Christ, the Mass is seen as a central element in

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the lives of all the various characters. Early in the novel – where the setting is ostensibly Asia many hundred years ago – the peasants find beauty only in the icons in the church, and the chanting and the incense. But that Sunday experience was something far beyond a word like beauty to comprehend. There the peasant women gathered in a mysterious omnipotent peace, that gave a kind of rough meaning to their lives, and pierced them to the heart with the mysteries of love and suffering and death. (TRC 36)

And again, later, the Mass is celebrated not only as a ceremony ‘so perdurable that the world-girdling fire or flood was nothing in comparison’, but also as the only possibility to retrieve ‘the anguish and joy of the community’ (TRC 178). The Mass is the central image to which all other images refer. To read Time in a Red Coat purely as a Christian allegory would be equally reductive, however. Although these passages explicitly link the novel to Brown’s other writings, they are only brief elements in a complicated narrative. Instead, the novel is best approached as an account of the way in which the individual protagonist can be understood, through stories, in relation to a larger community. Throughout the novel, the heroine is presented both as an individual in the world and as a story herself, only partly known both to other characters and to the readers. The soldiers of the novel’s central battle know only ‘a story [about] a very beautiful girl’ (TRC 148): she exists at the periphery of the novel’s events, half-glimpsed and always on the verge of disappearance. She herself makes no claims to her reality when it is questioned by various other characters, and indeed barely speaks throughout the novel. She is not a protagonist so much as an observer, a figure around whom the action is united but who takes little part in it. For the reader, too, the girl is ‘the shadow . . . who has followed us all through this tale. (Or perhaps it is we who have been following her)’ (TRC 134). Brown continually stresses the ‘we’ of the novel’s readers. Earlier in the novel, in a discussion of language, the reader is instructed: ‘We must understand this at once, in reading this chapter’ (TRC 103). And again, at the close of ‘The Battle’ Brown writes: ‘We will leave the fire at this point. . . . There is nothing much to say about a burning village’ (TRC 156–7). These references to the text as text serve a distinctly different purpose from similar metanarratival passages in the work of postmodern writers such as John Fowles and Italo Calvino. Even as Brown highlights the novel’s fictionality, he also reinforces what that fictionality allows, which is the birth of a community. If the community of Ottervoe is ultimately not the place of respite promised, the

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community of readers formed by the novel becomes its most enduring aspect: a new community is formed through the shared reading of these stories. Brown presents history not as a set of facts or events, but as a collection of stories that point towards a receptive community. A variety of theorists, including Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White and Mieke Bal, have commented on the problematic relationship between history and fictional narratives.22 David Carr has used their work to demonstrate that narrative does not only present historical events, but is also constitutive of ‘social time’. All social narratives, for Carr, require an individual storyteller who is able to organise particular stories into a larger explanatory narrative. This storyteller achieves full potential in his interaction with both audience and protagonist, and this interaction between storyteller, protagonist and audience in itself becomes constitutive of community.23 Although Carr’s assumption that narrative, history and community can be approached as pre-existent reference points is itself problematic, his focus on the role of the storyteller in narrative creation offers significant insights into Time in a Red Coat. Brown foregrounds the authorial structuring of events, and the possibility for a receptive community this creates, in his mixture of traditional narrative and allegory. In ‘The Inn’, for instance, he suggests the almost infinite ways a story can be told, and highlights how a particular perspective changes the nature of the story itself. The girl can also be seen as a storytelling figure who exerts an authorial influence on the narratives of the people who surround her. As in Carr’s reading of narrative social history, a community is formed by the commonality of being in the story. The function of the storyteller – in this case both the narrative voice of the novel and the heroine – is to unite disparate images and characters into a common narrative frame. Brown’s use of disparate metaphors and images, and his broad historical and geographical range, are used to create a common identity and shared narrative. Stories allow historical events to be united and historical individuals to be understood in relation to each other. It is only through narrative as such that the truth of any individual situation can be recognised. Brown most fully explores this notion in the novel’s centrepiece, ‘The Magus’, which introduces first-person narration into the novel. Although this chapter is the most grounded in a specific time – the 1870s – of any in the novel, its primary characters all live outside of time, and watch the way the world continually returns to war. The Magus is an ageless man, a war archivist and literary scholar, who keeps a museum of military artefacts that goes far into the future as well as the past. He presents the story of human life as a collection of physical objects: through the examination of muskets and cannonballs, manuscripts and

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daguerreotypes, one can understand both the past and the future. He is a clear counterpart to the heroine: while both characters abhor violence, the Magus also aestheticises it and seeks to preserve its relics. For the Magus, the world of history and artefacts is indistinguishable from the world of literature, for all knowledge resides in symbols. Referring to poets from Sophocles to Dryden, he defines the heroine’s journey as a purely symbolic one. He dismisses the reality of her story, and instead tells her that: ‘you see yourself as a symbol for all the world’s women, particularly those that have had to stand by and witness the innumerable horrors of war like a Greek chorus. . . . You will kill this dragon, you say in your letter – this is to say, if I understand you well, generation on generation of women, sickened by the diplomacy of statesmen that has always its ultimate flowering in war, will in the end take the reins of power into their own hands, and make an end of the dragon and his breed’. (TRC 207)

The Magus here stands in for the reader, both in his knowledge of twentieth-century events and in his determination to see the girl’s story as an allegory with a definable political purpose. The Magus provides a way to see the novel as something interpretable, an allegory with realworld consequences. His views, however, are only an intermediary layer; the chapter is shaped by the first-person narration of Erasmus, his servant. Erasmus is ‘weary’ of the war museum, ‘“though I know that such things must be, and that I may even live . . . to suffer them in my own flesh and spirit”’ (TRC 213). Even as he accepts the enduring power of the Magus’s symbols and artefacts, he does not see them as part of a grand narrative, but is instead interested only in the ways they refer to individual lives. Brown sets up in this chapter a three-fold vision of literature and history: Erasmus, whose ‘I’ shapes the chapter, views history as a series of unconnected events localised around the individual; the Magus sees each element in the museum as having a symbolic function that exceeds its material reality; the heroine is interested only in the abstract and elemental. These are, to a certain extent, irreconcilable points of view, and no character ever fully understands the others. At the same time, however, this chapter, rather than the final chapters set in Ottervoe, contains the novel’s truest portrait of community. Each of these three characters is defined in relation to the others. While the heroine, as Maurya, ends the novel in virtual isolation despite her presence in a tangible community, here she exists in a community of ideas and can emerge as a self. To use terminology borrowed from John Macmurray, elsewhere in the novel the heroine has been an example of the self as agent: she is known only through isolated action. Here,

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however, Brown portrays a situation in which ‘the self is constituted by its relation to the Other’ and has its personal being in this relationship.24 In the opening of the novel the heroine is known only through her determination to fight the dragon, an individual will that is itself ‘the conception of the self as agent’.25 In ‘The Magus’, however, she exists in full relation to other characters. This emergent community is entirely unlike the one in Ottervoe; all three characters exist outside of time and human consequences, and all approach the world through books and symbols. Yet this community of outsiders is the truest form of community in the novel, for they exist in full relation to each other by means of their consciousness of their own presence in a story. At the chapter’s end the three characters stand at a door to a gallery whose contents are unknown, yet which fill Erasmus with ‘a pang of dread and pity’ and that the Magus compares to ‘the flames of hell’ (TRC 226–7). They appear as distinct individuals, marked by fear and love. As the girl walks through, Erasmus listens at the door: What I heard after – it may be – an hour, after a bird and flower and bee pause, was the sound of the laughter of many children . . . And then I found I had fallen into a drowse, on my knees, stooped there outside the door, and the thread of a pleasant pastoral dream had past through me. (TRC 228)

Both in style and sense, this passage is distinct from anything Erasmus has written before, and the reader cannot tell if the future is indeed a pastoral utopia, or if the idea of utopia itself is only a dream that shields one from unknown horrors. The passage implies that, having somehow reunited the elements, the girl is rewarded with an old age in Orkney, where she is reunited with a man she once loved (now long dead). Yet Brown focuses at such length on the horrors of the twentieth-century warfare still to come that the reader knows this cannot be the case, and the Orkney where the heroine finishes her journey is no pure idyll, but a place with its own difficulties. Instead, this chapter can be read as an account of the way community itself, as the relationship between the self and others, is constructed through storytelling. Throughout the rest of the novel, the heroine tells her own story. Here it is interpreted first by the Magus, and their relation is itself recounted by Erasmus. The library setting and the frequent literary allusions bear out this idea; it is only by looking at lives as stories that interpersonal relation is made possible. Here, as in the work of Arendt, the reader is shown a definable web of human relationships in which the individual life story can be made known. If the final chapters in Ottervoe are an intentional allusion to the rest of Brown’s work, this idea becomes more powerful: it is not Orkney itself

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that permits or represents community, but the stories written about it. Community is presented as a literary construct, an ideal that is realised only through narrative. Maurya’s instantiation in Ottervoe cannot be seen as a pure triumph, nor her possible madness as a defeat; instead, these are elements of the knowledge of self and community that can only be accessed through literature. It is the community of readers and writers that offers the strongest possibility for the survival of community in the present age.

II. The Golden Bird and Vinland Time in a Red Coat’s difficult penultimate line – ‘“Yes, we got history again, of course’” (TRC 249) – introduces the central concern of Brown’s next two major works, the novella The Golden Bird and the novel Vinland. ‘History’ in these texts is at once a subject to be studied in school, where it is presented as a series of facts divorced from everyday concerns, and at the same time a way of understanding community itself. As the former, as shown in The Golden Bird, it can destroy both the individual and the community, while as the latter it can unite the stories of individuals into a shared narrative. This idea is aptly expressed by Jean-Luc Nancy, who argues that ‘community itself is something historical’; it is not a being in itself, but an event or a ‘happening’.26 History in this sense is the spacing of time and community: it is the way community is exposed to itself as a ‘we’. History cannot be thought of as a compilation of individual stories, nor should it be thought of a constant subject over time, but is instead the happening, or existence, of a ‘we’ across time. In Time in a Red Coat Brown reveals history as the shared narrative that creates community, while both Vinland and Beside the Ocean of Time can be read as the stories of one man’s struggle to unite disparate stories into a common existence. Before addressing this final, potentially utopian view of history and narrative, however, Brown wrote what may be his most damning and pessimistic book. The Golden Bird is the story of the collapse of a community, not through external pressure as in Greenvoe, but as both a natural process and the failure of individual will. The novella contains two parallel stories, of a feud between the crofts of Gorse and Feaquoy and the education of John Fiord, that illustrate how technological progress and individual pride can destroy all human relations. At the novella’s opening this island community, like ‘nearly every small community everywhere on earth’, lives according to ‘a kind of willed harmony’, which can be seen between the community’s individual

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members and in the human relationship with the natural world (GB 9). This harmony is quickly destroyed, both through the mutual animosity of the women in the two crofts and Fiord’s departure from, and failed return to, the island. As an infant, Fiord exists in an almost mythic sphere: he earns the name ‘Eagle John’ after he is captured by an eagle. He bears the scars for the rest of his life. From this point he is distinguished and isolated from the other islanders: he serves as a peacekeeper between the feuding crofts, and is also one of the few characters to develop an inner intellectual life. He picks up ‘all the offered branches of knowledge with effortless ease’ (GB 48), and seeks a connection with the islanders not in person, but through reading the Orkneyinga Saga. Through this reading he comes to believe that Orkney is not ‘a backwater in the great ebb and flow of world history’, but that ‘the magnificence of history’ can be manifested in the present through education and will (GB 51). Through reading the stories of the past, an individual can reform the present. Fiord begins to see himself as a figure of intellectual enlightenment and progress, one who can single-handedly bring Orkney from its primitive present into the cosmopolitan world, and after university in Aberdeen, he returns to the island as its new schoolteacher. As a teacher, however, he becomes ever more isolated from the community: ‘he was a part of the valley, and yet he was apart from it; even though he had been born and bred among these people’ (GB 116). He instructs his students that ‘“the wonders and delights of Western Civilization”’ will be made available to them only through ‘the rudiments of history and geography. It is true that you live in a beautiful island, but you will never realize it – no, you will go to your graves dull and ignorant – until you acquire the facility of making voyages of the mind.’ (GB 96)

Like the unnamed Orkney teacher in Time in a Red Coat and Mr Simon in Beside the Ocean of Time, John Fiord attempts to raise the local children ‘out of the dung and mud and fish-slime that had been their immemorial lot [and] bring to them the gifts of reading, writing, ciphering’ (TRC 168). In all three texts, this educational mission fails; the children are unreceptive, and the teacher is further isolated. The educated self cannot enter into common life. Fiord is a self-made man, even to the extent of denying his childhood encounter with the eagle – now only the ‘kind of superstition that keeps us sunk in our brutishness and ignorance’ (GB 103) – and as such becomes entirely cut off from the community. He can find neither respect nor love, and at the novella’s close is entirely abandoned. Here, as in Jürgen Habermas’s

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paraphrase of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘reason itself destroys the humanity which had made it possible in the first place’.27 The enlightened and isolated individual is destroyed by his own commitment to reason. Unlike the communities in more hopeful texts such as Beside the Ocean of Time, however, the island community Fiord attempts to elevate is itself already in the process of self-destruction. Brown scatters images of death throughout the novel, almost always couched in natural imagery. Death and life are simple commonplaces, as basic as the way ‘the grass in hayfield and kirkyard rose and flourished and fell before the scythes’ (GB 22). A man and a cornstalk are similarly bound in time: ‘For each, equally, a reaper waits with a scythe’ (GB 61). The community is dying without the promise of renewal; deaths are more common than births, and the entire community sinks into decay. It is not technological progress or intellectual individualism that dooms the island, although they have their part. Instead, the death of community is inevitable, a return to nature that is never romanticised or hopeful, but merely is: And sometimes, if it chanced to be [the death of] the last old man or old woman in a croft, the door was closed for ever. The hearth fire that had never gone out for maybe a hundred years was gray peat-ash. Kettle and pot rusted. Rain dripped from the thatch. The curtain across the bed rotted. The wood of rafter and table began to warp slowly. A roofing stone might fall and smash in the narrow alley between house and byre. (GB 58–9)

Death is simply something that happens to communities, just as to individuals. Brown here repeats a sentiment from one of his best stories, ‘Tithonus’ in the collection Hawkfall, where the laird reflects that Life in a flourishing island is a kind of fruitful interweaving music of birth and marriage and death: a trio. The old pass mildly into the darkness to make way for their bright grandchildren. There is only one dancer in the island now and he carries the hourglass and the spade and the scythe.28

In both of these accounts community is shown to have its own unique life, and it cannot be artificially sustained. Neither recourse to the past nor intellectual endeavours can make the community other than it is; whether the individual tries to elevate himself above his origins, like Fiord, or is content to live as her ancestors have, like the croftswomen, death comes to all, not only individuals but communities. There is no transcendent vision in the novel, no hope for communities made possible by stories or a return to history, but only, and always, death and isolation. While many individuals die, their deaths never constitute the sacrifices deemed necessary for community in Magnus and A Spell for

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Green Corn: in the modern world, the individual and community are always separate and irreconcilable. The Golden Bird is one of Brown’s strongest, and least commented upon, works, and one of his few texts that offers no possible redemption. Like many of Brown’s short stories, notably ‘The Scholar’ from The Masked Fisherman and ‘The Eye of the Hurricane’ from A Time to Keep, it can be read as an anti-intellectual argument: both stories concern the failure of a writer and thinker to live within community. In these stories Brown repeats a trope common to Scottish writers of his generation: in novels such as Iain Crichton Smith’s In the Middle of the Wood and Robin Jenkins’s The Changeling, writers and teachers are portrayed as figures necessarily cut off from the community around them, even as they actively attempt to integrate themselves. Brown’s texts on this theme do much to counteract the critical perspective that his work is built on a unified ‘anthropomorphic or legendary continuum’.29 Instead, he here presents the modern individual as someone intrinsically removed from community; community is a necessary aspect of human life, and the individual can only be known in relation to others, but at the same time once the individual has been made separate from the community, there is no way in which he can return to it. The relationship between community and individuals set out in The Golden Bird suggests Ferdinand Tönnies’s classic division between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft). The community is an organic whole, modelled on the family, where individual identity is constructed in relation to the larger community. As in The Golden Bird, community in this sense can be seen as an act of will: ‘Wherever human beings are bound together in an organic fashion by their inclination and common consent, Community of one kind or another exists.’30 Society, on the other hand, is grounded in and supports the development of individual consciousness. In community, individuals stay together in spite of everything that divides them, while in society, individuals remain divided in spite of everything that might unite them. Brown’s focus in The Golden Bird on internal divisions within the community – enmity between and within crafting families, and differences in education – suggests an inevitable turn away from the community. As Tönnies writes, ‘tragic conflict’, such as Brown portrays in the feuding crofts, ‘will unfold itself as inevitable in the evolution of Community into Society’.31 For both authors, community cannot be regained, but will always be replaced by society. The Golden Bird is paired with a less interesting long story, ‘The Life and Death of John Voe’, which is focused entirely on the life of one individual, who voyages around the world and finally returns to

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die in Orkney. This focus on the life of the individual is developed more fully in Vinland, itself based on a poem of the same name (CP 212–13). Brown intended the novel to be read as ‘a boys’ story’,32 and it may be his most linear and least experimental work of fiction. Yet the scope of its protagonist’s life is itself surprising. Ranald Sigmundson witnesses not only the shift from Viking to Christian culture in Orkney, but seemingly every important event in the medieval north, meeting everyone from Leif Ericson to Macbeth. While a number of important twentiethcentury Scottish novels focus on Viking Orkney and Scotland, including Eric Linklater’s The Men of Ness, Neil M. Gunn’s Sun Circle and Naomi Mitchison’s The Land the Ravens Found, Brown’s Vinland employs a much larger historical and geographical scope, and experiments with the literary representation of time and event. The most important community in the novel is not Orkney, where much of the action is set, but the Native American community of Vinland, which Ranald visits as a child. As Julian D’Arcy points out, it is surprising in retrospect that the sequence detailing Leif Ericson’s settling of America only occupies eleven pages, considering the emphasis placed on it throughout the rest of the novel.33 Vinland is both a real place and an instantiation of myth – it is explicitly connected to Tir-nan-og later in the novel – and is portrayed as a lost Eden. Leif Ericson points towards the Native Americans’ (‘skraelings’) ecologically sound lifestyle, and forecasts that this way of life will prove to be unsustainable: ‘But I think it will come to this in the end’, said Leif later, ‘that men will devise weapons to kill even the greatest whale. The skraelings, that we thought so savage and ignorant, were wiser than us in this respect. . . . Did you not see what reverence the Vinlanders had for the animals and the trees and for all living things? It seemed to me that the Vinlanders had entered into a kind of sacred bond with all the creatures, and there was a fruitful exchange between them, both in matters of life and death.’ (V 24)

This is not a statement that could have been made by the historical Ericson, but instead relies upon the reader’s knowledge of contemporary events. Brown portrays the American community as geographically and historically isolated; as much as it is a real place, it is also a symbol of an originary unity between humans and the natural world that has now been lost. The anachronistic statements on the nature of the world that are scattered through the novel provide a way for Brown to make the world of Vinland simultaneously available to the reader as both actual place and symbol. By portraying sentiments that would be unknown to the characters, but are familiar to the readers, Brown demonstrates the way historical events are always structured by interpretation. This technique

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is commonplace in the historical novel. In Ivanhoe, for instance, Walter Scott calls for the historical subject to be ‘translated into the manners, as well as the language, of the age we live in’.34 Georg Lukács, writing on Scott, sees this move as a complete rejection of objectivity: ‘if this world is to evoke a totality . . . then some form of artistic concentration is again necessary and any straightforward copying of reality must be resolutely abandoned’.35 Brown goes further, however, in his implicit contention that reality is not merely abandoned within the context of the historical novel, but was never possible at all: all that we know about history we know through stories. As Paul Ricoeur writes: ‘Only the confrontation between the world of the text and the life-world of the reader will make the problematic of narrative configuration tip over into that of the refiguration of time by narrative.’36 Brown places the idyllic world of Vinland in sharp contrast with the reader’s knowledge of the death of agrarian societies and the claims made upon the Americas by European settlers, and in so doing locates narrative as the way time and history are configured and presented. Neither the reminiscences of the Norsemen nor the modern political knowledge of the reader can accurately convey historical experience: instead, it is only through narrative that history, like community, is at all possible. For the remainder of the novel, once Ranald returns to Europe, Vinland is primarily important as symbol and story. Even as the Norsemen leave America, the bard Ard recasts their experience in poetry. Vinland is continually evoked only as and through poetry; Ranald’s experiences there do not constitute part of his own life story, but become an informing myth. In the chapter ‘Ireland’, Ranald joins a battle fought between Sigtrygg, King of Dublin, and the ultimately victorious Brian Boru, King of Ireland. In this setting, far removed from Viking voyages, Ranald reflects that The skraelings in Vinland had seemed, of all men, to be a part of that most intricate delicate web that ‘the great spirit’ had made, in the beginning, for the delight of all his creatures. ‘And yet,’ thought Ranald, ‘it is possible to be made one with nature now, in the time of youth, on an Irish hillside, with battle horns blorting around, and the clash of swords and the shouts of victory and the groans of dying men . . .’ Again it came to him, the image of the plough and the cornstalk at Breckness in Orkney, and a girl sewing a patch on a homespun coat. (V 96)

Vinland becomes knowable as a representation of an ideal life that can be in turn replicated in another place, at another time. His mother Thora later declares that in Ireland it was possible to find ‘“a new beauty and harmony in the dealings of men with men”’ and ‘“the white seamless

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garment”’ (V 112). As the references to the seamless garment make clear, Vinland has become by this point in the novel part of the larger symbolic structure that underlies all of Brown’s work. Vinland ceases to interest Ranald as part of his personal lived experience, and instead becomes an underlying symbol that can be applied to all experience. Like Hegel, for whom art ‘only fulfils its supreme task when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine’,37 for Brown art – in this case poetry – does not reflect the actual, but expresses the ideal. As in the passages on the Mass in Time in a Red Coat, poetry allows the underlying religious significance of lived experience to be made known. For Brown, poetry’s importance lies in its ability to abstract particular events. In Orkney, Ranald hears a poet’s rendition of the Irish battle in which he fought. As he offers to evaluate the poem’s historical validity, the poet interjects: ‘I know that you were at Clontarf. . . . But for all you knew about it, about the true essential meaning of the event, you might as well have been at the horsefair in Dounby. . . . What concerns me . . . is not only this battle in Ireland that was fought between the river and the headland. It is about every battle that was ever fought or that ever will be fought.’ (V 114)

This statement unites the otherwise divergent worlds of Time in a Red Coat and Vinland: a poetic perspective is more closely aligned with the truth than individual experience ever can be. The truth of an event cannot be known to the individual, but can only be seen in its artistic representation. Each battle is every battle, for what a battle really is can only be revealed through stories and poems. The poem recited about Clontarf is both visceral and mythic: the poet contrasts ‘The guts hot with gore’ with a vision of ‘the death sisters, / War maidens, at their weaving / Of the war-web’ (V 115, 114).38 The language Brown uses in this poem, with its heavy reliance on compounds and alliteration, is in keeping with the poetry of the period, but also has a more contemporary effect: again, the poem makes the particular universal. This is especially clear when the poet sings of Tir-nan-og, a ‘land in the western ocean where is no winter or sickness, no hunger or withering, no battle or black whispers’ (V 116). For both Ranald and the reader, this world is instantly recognisable as the Vinland of the novel’s opening, itself a western land where There is no work to be done, for the orchard trees are heavy with fruit always and the fields – innocent of plough or harrows or scarecrow – are forever ripe towards harvest. And then the immortal young in that blessed place

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move along together in small groups, wisdom and beauty come from their lips, a courteous and most live exchange of utterance, so that their language is nearer to song than speech. (V 116)

Following the early twentieth-century theory that ‘Vinland’ was derived from Ireland,39 the connection between Celtic and Viking myths becomes clear. For Brown it is not that Vinland was itself an Eden despoiled by Viking invasion, but that its true significance lies in its symbolic meaning. Vinland as a myth and symbol shapes the rest of Ranald’s life, because myth is stronger than lived experience. Poetry unconceals the truth, and reveals the inner nature of historical events. Even as Ranald learns to appreciate the symbolic truth of his experience in Vinland, however, he becomes cut off from the Orkney community where he actually resides. As a young man he claims that: ‘“what I long for most is to return to that land in the far west”’ (V 56) and this goal remains with him throughout his life. He not only applies the symbolism of Vinland to diverse events in Orkney, but finally centres his life around Vinland to the exclusion of all else. Late in the novel he speaks with Peter the abbot on the theme of fate and free will. As in Magnus, the religious figure is able both to make local experience universal and also to find a single symbol that stands for everything else, whether the seamless garment of Magnus or an enchanted garden. This garden is not a place, but an epiphanic moment that occurs at some point in an individual’s life, and to which the individual will always want to return. In this garden – or at the moment when the individual believes himself not to be subject to fate, but possessed of infinite free will – the individual is ‘“possessed with a joy that he cannot explain or comprehend – . . . the whole of a man’s life is pervaded by sweetnesses that have no physical or mental source, they touch his mind and heart and spirit even in places of stone and thorn”’ (V 186). Ranald’s Vinland is here revealed to be immaterial: it represents not his own past, but joy and sweetness. Vinland is a state of being, and hardly a place at all. Yet the abbot cautions against rejecting the world entirely in favour of a return to this place of mental peace. Monks, he argues, ‘“have a faith and a hope that the garden exists all right, and we think that we can go out among the birdsong and the blossoms more often, perhaps, than other men – though we belong like all others to the House of Life, and are thirled until we die to its laws and its rules”’ (V 188). Ranald completely ignores this tension between material life and metaphysical respite, and indeed condemns all matters of the world as useless stories. As the novel progresses, Brown introduces an increasing number of elements from the Orkneyinga Saga, specifically focusing on Earl Thorfinn and his nephew, Earl Rognvald. While ‘Extraordinary things

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had been happening in Orkney’, however, Ranald refrains from discussing them, and dismisses his son’s reports of exciting and dangerous times as ‘bed-time stories’ appropriate for his grandchildren (V 193). He gradually removes himself not only from the political sphere, in which he has previously been a great leader, but from his family as well, living alone in an isolated hut. As he nears death he speaks of both Vinland and an island that ‘“lies away beyond Vinland”’ and is mapped only in his head (V 230).40 His death and funeral mark the end of the novel, a series of one-sentence paragraphs only a few words long. At the close of the novel, Ranald has neither myth, nor story, nor family, nor history. Vinland is not as pessimistic a tale as The Golden Bird; while Ranald dies alone, half-mad, he is also described as ‘gentle and happy’ (V 230). In both texts, however, community is presented as a place of origin, accessible only through stories, to which the individual is finally unable to return. John Fiord cannot recreate the Orkneyinga Saga in presentday Orkney, nor can Ranald Sigmundson ever return to the Vinland of his youth. The individual who knows himself as such is always cut off from community. Neither protagonist is fully able to enter into the reality of his lived experience. In this Brown echoes Arendt, for whom to be deprived of community is ‘to be deprived of reality’: the reality of the world is ‘guaranteed by the presence of others’, and individual experience that is separated from this community ‘comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality’.41 Like Maurya at the close of Time in a Red Coat, individual stories cannot replicate community; it is only when these stories are shared, as in ‘The Magus’ chapter of that novel or in the common experience of Vinland, that the reality of community can be known. Community, then, exists as story, but its reality is contingent upon that story being shared. This final vision is most apparent in Beside the Ocean of Time, Brown’s final novel, which presents the redemptive vision to which these earlier novels strive: community, in its final sense, exists at the level of two people, recognising each other as other, and sharing their stories.

III. Beside the Ocean of Time Like Magnus, Beside the Ocean of Time is the longest version of a story Brown wrote many times throughout his career. In the early story ‘Five Green Waves’, from A Calendar of Love, Willie Sinclair is a truant who, with a woman called Sophie, learns the history of the community through ballads, in which he finds that time is not a series of learnable

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facts, but ‘skulls and butterflies and guitars’.42 This basic structure is expanded in Brown’s children’s collection Pictures in the Cave. Sigurd Bressay escapes school one day to drink in a witch’s cave, where a seal named Shelmark tells him stories of Orkney from its earliest inhabitants to the present day. At the end of the collection, after both the Second World War and the arrival of an external drilling operation similar to Black Star in Greenvoe, Sigurd is an old man – and Shelmark ‘slippers and a couple of handbags’ – who passes these stories to a young girl.43 These stories, including stories about famous kings and unknown fishermen, selkies and crofters, form the core of the island’s culture. While they largely centre on the lives – and more often, the deaths – of individuals, they are worth preserving because they have the power of integrating the individual within society. As in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, stories are the way in which both individuals and societies are understood: ‘It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others.’44 These stories are not the all-encompassing symbolic narratives discussed in Time in a Red Coat and Vinland, but simple tales of individuals. Without these tales, however, no community can exist. As one character says: ‘“When the stories are told no more, the island will be as lost as Atlantis.”’45 Stories are the bridge between individual and communal life. Beside the Ocean of Time closely follows the structure and themes of Pictures in the Cave, even as it complicates them. It can also be read as an artistic credo and a summation of all of Brown’s previous works. The impossibility of community presented in Greenvoe and the isolation of the individual shown in The Golden Bird and Vinland are here replaced by a more positive, even utopian, vision of community as something that can continually be remade in the form of shared stories. Thorfinn Ragnarson, the novel’s protagonist, is, like Sigurd Bressay and Willie Sinclair, a dreamer and a truant who leaves school to learn the stories of the island’s past. The stories themselves are familiar ones, not only from Brown’s previous work, but also from popular collections such as Around the Orkney Peat-Fires, a series of articles from the Orcadian which was reprinted throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the first six chapters Thorfinn learns of the Vikings, Robert the Bruce, selkies and press-gangs, while the chapter ‘A Man’s Life’, about the death of Jacob Olafson, echoes stories such as ‘The Life and Death of John Voe’ in portraying the whole of an individual’s life. The perspective on these stories has changed, however: Thorfinn is not a detached listener, but an active participant in events. Early in the novel the child’s

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family suspects that he is ‘in some hovel listening to old folk telling moth-eaten stories’, but As a matter of fact, Thorfinn at that very moment was on a Swedish ship, the Solan Goose, anchored off a port in the Baltic. The skipper, Rolf Rolfson, was making plans to meet the prince of Rus, with a view to trading with his people and establishing good relations. It should be said that Thorfinn was actually in the barn of Ingle, lying curled in the bow of his father’s fishing yole. (BOT 4)

The juxtaposition of these two paragraphs indicates that while Thorfinn’s journey is one of imagination, it is also in some sense real: the use of the present tense for both and the balance of ‘fact’ and ‘actually’ signifies that the distinction between historical or empirical truth and imagination is less important than the reader might suppose. By hearing these stories, and even creating them, Thorfinn makes them real, to himself and to the reader. The importance of stories as a way of ensuring the continuance of community is highlighted throughout Brown’s work. In An Orkney Tapestry he provides his most explicit defence of myth and stories: ‘It is a word, blossoming as legend, poem, story, secret, that holds a community together and gives a meaning to its life’ (OT 29). At the same time, however, the stories that are told must be placed in the appropriate context. He derides both modern statistical knowledge and sentimental mythologies as ways of creating community: It is impossible to understand in Orkney in any prosaic way, as many people try to do, by reading tables of statistics about egg production or population drift, concerned only with the here and now. Contemporary Orkney, cut off from the story of its past, is meaningless. The majority of Orcadians have a kind of reverence for their history, but it is a romantic reverence, for the witches, the press-gang, the smugglers, the salt-tongued ministers, the Hudson’s Bay men, and above all for the Vikings; a kind of sentimental make-believe history, very different from the terrible and fruitful things that actually happened to our ancestors. (OT 27–8)

This listing of story-types forms a virtual précis not only of Beside the Ocean of Time, but also of Brown’s career as a whole. This is not an early condemnation of Brown’s late writings, however, but a call for stories not to be approached as isolated artefacts, but instead as lived experiences located in community. Approaching stories, and the lives they concern, as separate entities, leads to the failure of community, as can be seen in Greenvoe. Instead, these stories must be approached as part of a common experience. As in the fairy tale ‘The Sea-King’s Daughter’, stories remind us ‘That we belong to one another. That we’re parts of a single web, most subtle and delicate.’46 Stories both reflect and manifest community.

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The framing story of Thorfinn Ragnarson provides a way to unite diverse stories into a larger narrative; only in this way can they illuminate the life of both the individual and the community. This is the view that Brown suggests in the passage from An Orkney Tapestry above: a focus on stories as such, as sentimental diversions, is as useless as trying to understand a culture by measuring its egg production. This idea is also expressed in Time in a Red Coat, where individual stories are made into universal symbols, and Vinland, where one story gains enormous explanatory power. In Beside the Ocean of Time the stories themselves are simpler, but gain their import because they can be relived and understood in relation to each other. At the close of the novel, when the island community has been almost totally destroyed, Thorfinn has become a famous novelist and returns to Norday to chronicle its stories before they are forgotten. The task of the poet or novelist, at this late stage, is ‘To make something of what was left . . . There were enough fragments to see his time out, folk memories, legends, the seal people, the trows that loved music and lived under the green hill’ (BOT 215). The duty of the poet is to combine fragments into a united whole: Thorfinn’s life becomes meaningful not through his individual actions, but through his ability to see individual stories as part of a larger narrative. Earlier in the novel, this poetic purpose is placed in sharp contrast with the teaching of history. History as presented in the classroom is not only ‘as dull as ditchwater’ (BOT 21), but creates a distance between the student and his or her own past by presenting the past only as a series of fragments. History is nothing more than ‘long lists of the kings of Scotland and the battles that had either magnificently won or been gloriously defeated in, together with their dates’ (BOT 21). History in this sense is a force of separation; it is a system of fragmentation that renders individual lives and stories meaningless by reducing them to facts. The poet, for Brown, offers a new approach to history by recombining historical fragments into a new story that transcends time. The novel’s ending supports this reading: united with his childhood love, Sophie – the woman who first identified him as a poet – Thorfinn begins, through a combination of poetry, agriculture and procreation, a new utopian community ‘beside the ocean of the end and the beginning’ (BOT 217). Stories must be shaped by an individual creator, but in that shaping they are removed from the confines of linear history and can be understood in new ways. Brown’s conception of storytelling here owes a great deal to Edwin Muir’s distinction between the story, or ‘cold documentation’ of historical facts, and the fable, ‘ the mythical past’.47 For Muir the function of imaginative fiction is the same as that of religion: fiction can offer a

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‘recognition of a permanence beyond the duration of happenings told in one story’.48 Fiction in this mode presents eternity as the only possible way to see a man’s life as a complete story. The contemporary world is important to us, Muir writes, ‘simply because it is the world in which we live; but it takes on a deeper significance when we see it as rooted in a past whose extent we cannot measure’.49 Only by uniting the story and the fable, as Thorfinn does in his imagined historical travels, can any individual life be understood. The imaginative endeavours of the storyteller allow the world to be understood not as a collection of historical instances, but as a united whole. Like the stories Thorfinn tells, each individual life in Beside the Ocean of Time is presented as part of a larger narrative of community. A croftsman achieves wholeness not through his working of the land, but by being part of a familial line of men who have worked the same land for generations. Individuals are identified not only by name, but by place: Thorfinn’s mother is known not only as Liza Ragnarson, but also as ‘the wife of Ingle’ (BOT 146), her farm. Brown’s view of identity in this late novel suggests that of Jean-François Lyotard’s perspective on postmodernism, where each individual self ‘exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before’.50 For Thorfinn the significance of an individual death, such as that of Jacob Olafson, lies not in itself, but in the fact that ‘this old man was not part of the island anymore’ (BOT 50). It is not only relationships with other individuals, but with unknown ancestors and the land itself that creates community. Individuals can only be understood in relation to the larger community. Each member of the community is identified by his or her occupation, and when these occupations are no longer necessary for the life of the community, the individual either dies or moves away. When the island is appropriated by the military, in scenes that closely parallel Greenvoe, the islanders are stripped of their occupations and are separated not only from the community, but from themselves. In the chapter ‘Aereodrome’, twenty-one islanders are introduced in as many pages – as well as seals, dogs, hens and cattle – and Brown shows sentence by sentence how change in any individual life alters the entire community. Louis Stewart of Westvoe burns his farm and stampedes his cattle into the sea, because no remuneration can equal the value of an eight-hundred-year-old farm: ‘Louis Stewart hadn’t thought about insurance – he nor his father nor his grandfather before him. In fact, he seemed to think that there was something wrong about defending a farm against tempest or fire with money’ (BOT 188. Italics in original.) For a farmer, it is better to destroy what you have made than to sell it: the value of the land is found in the

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communal history of its working. The individuals who suffer most under military occupation are those whose lives are most closely tied to the land. When Ben Hoy loses his land, he is stripped not only of his property, but also of his ancestors: ‘the cry he vented after Ragna had read the [eviction] letter came from otherwhere. Ben Hoy, when he retired from the sea, had restored Lookout with his own hands. But his forebears had lived on the same site for generations’ (BOT 184–5). It is not only the loss of individual work and property that matters, but the loss of connection with the historical community that comes with it. These moments of despair are the last time Hoy and Stewart are mentioned in the novel. They are not shown leaving the island, and unlike many of the other islanders, their stories are not continued, for once they have lost their land and their place in the community, there are no stories left to be told. There are only two people who are able to benefit from the island’s clearance. The first is Jimmo Greenay, a beachcomber and rat-catcher who has always depended on the assistance of others and is content with whatever he is given, regardless of its source. Jimmo also stays on Norday to bury its dead once the island is deserted, and it is in his dilapidated hut that Thorfinn finally resides. Jimmo is able to withstand the changes in the island because he is a man without land or history: because his life is already maintained outside the confines of the community, he has little to lose when the community disperses. The other character capable of living without community is Thorfinn himself, another outsider. While all other characters, even Jimmo, are identified by occupation, Thorfinn is repeatedly described as the ‘laziest and most useless’ boy in the island (BOT 1), and his life is never grounded in land or work: he is instead a ‘stumbler into time’ (BOT 131). As his father questions in an omitted passage: ‘“What would happen here when there was only a dreamer to inherit?”’51 When Thorfinn returns to the island, it is already a dream, paved, deserted and abandoned. Yet in viewing the island community not from the present, but outside of time, Thorfinn is able to tie all of the strands of the novel together. Thorfinn is first seen on his return repairing Jacob Olafson’s boat, ‘The Scallop’, mentioned in the chapter ‘A Man’s Life’, and observing the same ‘fringes of seaweed and rock studded with limpets’ (BOT 193–4) around which children play in ‘The Broch’. Anonymous at this point in the narrative, he sustains himself through inherited skills: The man has worked creels, in a way, a long while ago, but then only as a boy who had come to bail and tie lobster claws; and then little was expected of, or hoped for, a dreamer like him. ‘Ah well,’ says the man to the mournful fog-lost bird, ‘let’s hope the blood of a few generations remembers . . .’ (BOT 194)

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Thorfinn’s dreaming enables him to carry on the life of the island, even in solitude, in a way no single member of the community could have done before. It is not just that a dreamer inherits the land, but that all of his dreams and stories, both real and imagined, allow him to live on the land more fully. A number of critics have read this final chapter as largely autobiographical: Rowena Murray and Brian Murray claim that it constitutes a justification for Brown’s Orkney-centred career.52 Certainly the ‘treadmill existence’ (BOT 214) of the writer in Edinburgh is reminiscent of Brown’s time in the city, and Thorfinn’s greatest success, a novel about ‘the impact on a primitive simple society, close to the elements, of a massive modern technology’ (BOT 214), strongly suggests Greenvoe. In an early draft, the autobiographical elements of the novel are clearer. Thorfinn is shown writing the chapter ‘The Broch’, and indeed the rest of the novel: ‘Later in the novel, the story of the broch will be paralleled by the occupation of the island by the Royal Air Force in 1938–45’.53 In the final version of the novel, however, this self-referentiality is removed, and Thorfinn is instead shown trying to dredge something rich and strange out of the mythical past of the islands – the selkies who shed their coats on the moon-blanched sands and danced; the trows who live under the green knolls and love above all the music of men. . . . And so there is great mystery in this connection between music and death and time and the food that the earth yields. (BOT 209)

The novel must be read not as the account of a particular life – especially not as an autobiographical work – but as an investigation of the universal and communal nature of stories. Brown removes some of the historical specificity from his work in order to focus on what lies outside of time and is accessible only through myth. A key feature of this universalisation can be found in Thorfinn’s lack of individual distinction: he is not an heroic protagonist, but primarily an observer of other people’s stories. Halfway through the novel, Brown questions why the reader should be interested in the life of an ‘idle useless boy’ at all. Our interest is deserved not because of Thorfinn’s own achievements, but more broadly because every man’s life-story is a unique event, a meaningful stand in the immense unfolding web of mankind. I think it must be so, if we could view every person’s life ‘sub specie aeternitatis’, through the eye of the guardian heaven-appointed angel. . . . Every dance, every lifetime, is unique, and that infinity of dances from every race and from every era, is of incalculable value, and comprehends the great ceremonial dance of mankind. But the music will not be known in all its glory until it is rounded with silence. (BOT 129–31)

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Even as Brown immediately pulls back from this view – ‘so I in part believe’ (BOT 131), he writes – this fundamental idea of individual lives as being of significance both in themselves and in relation to the lives of others, indeed all others, underlies the rest of the novel. For Brown, as for Nancy, totality can only be approached through the relations of diverse parts: ‘The unity of a world is nothing other than its diversity.’54 Similarly, Beside the Ocean of Time manifests what Fredric Jameson views as the fundamental structure of utopian fiction, in which ‘we have the ultimate rebuke of the centered subject and the full deployment of the great maxim that “difference relates”’.55 In this claim, Jameson draws upon the work of Adorno, for whom utopia ‘would be a togetherness of diversity’.56 It is only in seeing each individual’s life as both unique and as known in relation that the world can be understood. While this unity is presented as specifically utopian in the work of Jameson and Adorno, for Brown it is realisable in the present. Thorfinn himself becomes the novel’s protagonist not because he is an extraordinary individual, any more than any other, but because he is known only through relation to others. Each and every individual can be known in relation to the world as a whole: the diversity of individual and unique lives makes the world not what it could be, but what it already is. Thorfinn’s identity as a poet is pressed upon him from outside. Sophie, his early love and eventual wife, is the first to refer to him as a poet. As a prisoner in a German camp, he forges a bond with Major Schneider through a shared belief that ‘literature knew no frontiers; it might be the means of binding the nations of the earth together in peace and friendship’ (BOT 206). Schneider provides Thorfinn with the material means and intellectual encouragement to become a writer because poetry is something that transcends individual experience. He presses Thorfinn to become a poet simply because ‘there are not enough poets in the world’ (BOT 202). Poetry is a distinct occupation, but an occupation nonetheless; Thorfinn is able to enter community not through an act of intellectual will, but because his occupation as a poet makes him unique, and as such allows him to relate to the diversity of the world. As Arendt notes, while poetry is itself close to thought, the poet eventually makes the poem into ‘a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves’.57 Poetry is a way of uniting the world of thought with the world of things, and the individual with the communal. Thorfinn does not, and cannot, write in isolation, but writes of and for the community: poetry does not reflect individual experience, but makes manifest the diversity of others.

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While the valediction of the individual poet at the novel’s end suggests a certain romantic perspective, Brown is clear that this poet is not an isolated self, but that poetry emerges as a function of community. Thorfinn can only become a poet through his interaction with Sophie and Major Schneider. Poetry operates in the same manner as all speech does for Macmurray: it is ‘the capacity to enter into reciprocal communication with others’.58 It is only as Thorfinn begins to understand himself not as an isolated individual, but in relation to others, that he can become a poet. Thorfinn is an ordinary man, but by entering into a reciprocal relation with others he is able to recreate community in a way that John Fiord and even Ranald Sigmundson cannot. While Brown elsewhere presents the rise of the individual, the growth of technology, and the impossibility of community as great horrors, here they are seen as ways of opening the world. Community is not conceived of as a pastoral or agricultural ideal, humans working the land in willed harmony, but remains possible so long as there are two people known in relation to each other, and united through shared poetry and stories. At the end of the novel, Brown makes it clear that this unifying function of poetry is inherently spiritual. The projected birth of a poet at the close of Beside the Ocean of Time symbolises this moment: the eternal world of the spirit can be known only through the poet. In Brown’s late writing, art can be seen as the sensuous revelation of thought, as in Arendt, and also of the spiritual, as in the work of Hegel. For Hegel, the essential nature of art is to bring the spiritual into harmony with the material or sensuous. This relationship is also presented as a reflection on the relationship between the individual and the community. The community is ‘the spiritual reflection into itself’ of the sensuous, but only through ‘particularization and individualization’.59 The individual artist creates that which places the spiritual and the community in relation. The work of art, Hegel argues, comes about through a combination of the self-conscious existence of the individual artist and universal content.60 Art relates the spiritual and the communal, but only insofar as it is originally related to an individual mind and material objects. As Adorno makes clear in his writing on Hegel, however, the spiritual in art is not a pre-existing referent, but rather exists ‘in a process of development and formation’.61 The spiritual is not only accessible through, but comes about through, the creation of the work of art. Art does not mimic something – whether it be natural or spiritual – in the world, but creates it. The spiritual is something removed from art – indeed, it ‘works towards art’s dissolution’62 – but also makes the work of art what it is. It is only through art that the spiritual can be made known to the

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community. While Adorno argues that this process is rarely achieved, and more often leads to regressive and childish works of art, nevertheless spiritualisation is a legitimate way to perceive the relation between art and culture, and between the artist and the community. It is noteworthy that in sharp contrast to Greenvoe, Magnus and Time in a Red Coat, in his final novel Brown never relates the experiences of the individual or the community to a particularly Catholic symbolism. While in all of those novels the Mass or Eucharist underlies all other action, in Beside the Ocean of Time Brown looks only to eternity: the spiritual here exists outside the normal realm of human affairs, and can only be accessed through art. The task of the poet is revealed to be, in the words of Bloch, ‘to shape a path from the lonely waking dream of inner self-encounter to the dream that goes out to shape the eternal world’.63 Poetry accomplishes what history cannot: it both uses the past to shape the future, and unites inner experience with the communal. Each of Brown’s late novels examines the individual in time. The heroine of Time in a Red Coat lives through 1,500 years of violence, and Thorfinn’s experiences encompass eight centuries of Orkney life, while Ranald Sigmundson lives through most of the major events of the medieval north. Yet it is crucial to understand them not as tales of individuals in particular historical moments, but as accounts of the constitution of community in the present. As Bloch writes, the work of art must be seen as ‘the journey of its time and the concerns of its time’.64 In each of these novels, Brown shows how community is still possible even when it seems to have been utterly destroyed. If a return to a primitive communal life is not possible, there is still hope for community as long as selves exist in relation. More than that, however, it is stories themselves that constitute and allow these relations. If an overwhelming fixation on fiction and poetry is seen in Greenvoe as an indication of the failure of community, here it is its salvation. As long as stories are still told, the community can be reborn. This is not a naive defence of poetry, as these novels make clear, however. It is not because poetry and stories are a higher form of communication that they make community possible, but because community is itself constituted through stories. What we know about the relationship between the self and others, about the relationship between the individual and the community, is only available in and as stories. Even when, in Pictures in the Cave and Beside the Ocean of Time, the physical community is destroyed, community is still possible because it has never been present in the land itself, but is a function of narrative. Community is, for Brown as much as for Weil, a fundamental human need, but it can be realised only through storytelling.

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Notes 1. Hollier, Absent without Leave, p. 3. 2. Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 43. 3. A similar focus on rootedness can be found in Jan Patocˇka’s lectures on Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, where he argues for ‘anchoring or rooting’ as one of the basic ‘movements of human existence’: ‘We are always already somewhere, we are in the world, integrated in an instinctual affective ground and released by the Earth, singled out as individuals, yet still bound, still determined by the natural ground, retrospectively taken into it’. Patocˇka, Body, Community, p. 156. 4. Weil, Roots, p. 8. 5. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 22. 6. Ibid., p. 39. 7. Ibid., p. 184. 8. Ibid., p. 198. 9. Bloch, Traces, p. 6. 10. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, p. 27. 11. Booth, Company We Keep, pp. 240–68. 12. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, pp. 250–1. 13. Brown, ‘Et in Orcadia Ego’, p. 7. 14. Brown, Time in a Red Coat, Ms. 2841.1.2.4 F.4. 15. Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, p. 197. 16. Profumo, ‘She of the Black Brown Hair’, p. 676. 17. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 255. The poem and novel themselves are markedly similar to Eavan Boland’s 1974 poem ‘The War Horse’, which similarly treats the interrelation of the individual, the community and the threat of violence, and employs the same images of the mint, coins, and earth. Boland, Collected Poems, pp. 28–9. 18. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 162. 19. Ibid., p. 48. 20. Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, p. 225. 21. de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 91. 22. See Schoene, Making of Orcadia, pp. 17–27 and 240–57 for an innovative reading of Ricoeur’s work in relation to Time in a Red Coat. 23. Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World’, pp. 117–31. 24. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 17. 25. Macmurray, Self as Agent, p. 65. 26. Nancy, Birth to Presence, p. 143. 27. Habermas, ‘Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment’, p. 17. 28. Brown, Hawkfall, p. 81. 29. Gifford, ‘Bleeding from All that’s Best’, p. 28. 30. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, p. 28. 31. Ibid., p. 165. 32. Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, p. 238. 33. D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds, p. 277. 34. Scott, Ivanhoe, p. 18. 35. Lukács, Historical Novel, p. 139. 36. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 100.

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37. Hegel, Aesthetics, v. 1, p. 7. 38. The images of ‘war-webs’ in Vinland, as well as the use of cloth imagery to represent Napoleonic battles in Time in a Red Coat, strongly suggest Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, where Napoleon claims that ‘History makes use of me to weave her web’ (p. 330) and the Spirit of the Years, in the final passage, speaks of the ‘web Enorm, / Whose furthest hem and salvage may extend / To where the roars and plashings of the flames / Of earth-invisible suns swell noisily’ (p. 522). J. Hillis Miller usefully links these images to Hardy’s use of the local as representative of the universal: ‘An ant hill, a garden, Wessex, all Europe – each is both small and large at once, small in relation to the infinity which surrounds it, large in that, however small it may be, it expresses the universal laws which govern the universe everywhere at all times’ (Thomas Hardy, pp. 52–3). Brown echoes this combination of the local and the universal throughout his work, but it is especially visible in the battle scenes of these later novels. 39. Nansen, ‘Norsemen in America’, p. 567. 40. Echoing the use of D. H. Lawrence in Greenvoe, Ranald’s gradual move to isolation over the course of the novel strongly suggests Lawrence’s story ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’. 41. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 199. 42. Brown, A Calendar of Love, p. 60. 43. Brown, Pictures in the Cave, p. 134. 44. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 212. 45. Brown, Pictures in the Cave, p. 135. 46. Brown, Sea-King’s Daughter, p. 45. 47. Brown, Introduction, p. 6. 48. Muir, Essays on Literature and Society, p. 148. 49. Ibid., p. 234. 50. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 15. 51. Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time, Ms. 3121. 52. Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, pp. 254–5. 53. Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time, Ms. 3121.8, p. 30. 54. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 185. 55. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 223. 56. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 150. 57. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 170. 58. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 60. 59. Hegel, Aesthetics, v.1, p. 85. 60. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 439. 61. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 91 62. Ibid., p. 92. 63. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, p. 237. 64. Bloch, Utopian Function of Art and Literature, p. 38.

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Chapter 4

Community and the Self

While Brown develops the theme of community at greatest length in his novels, the relationship between individuals and community forms the theoretical core of Brown’s non-fiction as well. In his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, and his essays he presents community as the medium through which individuals relate both to each other and to a larger collective past; it is not only, as he argues in An Orkney Tapestry, that a ‘community like Orkney dare not cut itself off from its roots and sources’ (OT 29), but that community is the very way in which those roots and sources are maintained. A community in its ideal form is the way individuals come to a coherent understanding of themselves through an understanding of their past. ‘Community’, in Brown’s writing, expresses historical rootedness, geographical situation, racial homogeneity and religious unification. Contrary to these holistic notions of community, however, Brown also uses the term to explore the ways community, in both presence and absence, can be used to reveal individual difference. In his writings on community Brown continually questions the divide between the ideal and the actual, and between community as a defining concept and as a lived experience. Brown looks at community from three related perspectives: he examines the geographico-historical or ‘real’ community; he posits community as an abstract ideal that exists in the revelation of difference; and finally he reveals community as the turning, in a Heideggerian sense, or the way that truth is unconcealed. This first sense of community, as geographico-historical rootedness, is the only one that the majority of his critics have recognised. For both Brown’s admirers and detractors, he is best thought of as a writer of a given place. Such criticism suggests the early critiques of Robert Burns and James Hogg: Brown’s status as a poet of place allows readers to see his work as pertaining only to what is local to him. The opening pages of Maggie Fergusson’s recent biography of Brown represent the tone of

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Brown’s critical appraisal. She situates her account of Brown’s childhood and upbringing in the context of Orkney as ‘“a place of vision” which sustained him in his writing for the rest of his life’.1 For many critics, it is important not only that Brown documents a real community, but that to a certain extent he embodies it. Brown is repeatedly described as ‘umbilically attached to Orkney’,2 writing of ‘the timeless simplicity of the islands’3 and possessed of ‘an enhanced sensitivity to the rhythms of [his] environment’.4 Scores of reviews and appreciations repeat this argument: Brown’s identity as a writer is inseparable from his identity as an Orcadian. As a recent review of the Collected Poems notes: ‘One of the most common complaints about Mackay Brown’s work – that it remains circumscribed by his narrow island experience and so is largely irrelevant to the wider modern world – is precisely the reason that many people love it.’5 Whether Brown is viewed as a fabulist who has created a mythic Orkney or a realist who writes only of the island life around him, he is always viewed as an essentially provincial writer whose main, perhaps only, concern is the life of Orkney.6 Brown himself supports this idea of his writing as representing a primitive and rooted perspective: ‘I drew much of my inspiration (if such a thing exists) from the tillers of earth and sea that the whole engine of education had been devised to lift the worthy ones and the hard studiers clear of’ (FI 33). At the same time that he attempts to separate himself from education, he writes elsewhere of the symbolic use of labour: Without the rich imagery that flows from the labour of sailor, farmer, fisherman, I would hardly string two lines together. Those earth-workers and sea-workers stand at the very sources of life, very powerful symbols, and it is there that literature and all the arts have their beginning.7

Brown’s writing, he insists, has its basis in the land and the community as much as the work of a croftsman or fisherman. In interviews, too, he is presented as a man ‘as rooted in the community as any writer could be’.8 Critical accounts of Brown’s writing frequently focus on the way this ‘rootedness’ in the local community is deeply connected with a universal approach. David Annwn, for instance, calls Brown ‘A poet of an island community who, through his work, has been committed to identify himself with that community’.9 In Annwn’s reading, Brown makes use of the real community where he was born as a ‘significant microcosm’ which sheds light on all human behaviour.10 Elizabeth Huberman similarly claims that: Since George Mackay Brown is himself a native of the Orkneys, where he has lived all his life, and since he writes exclusively about the people of these

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remote green islands off the northern coast of Scotland, he is able to present the image of this distant region with consummate authority and skill.11

Even as Huberman argues, like Annwn, that ‘the universal is only too visible in this regional disaster’,12 she continually suggests that Brown’s community is something set apart. Huberman’s criticism focuses on Brown’s relation to Orkney, and his apparent reclusivity, to the extent that she convinces the reader that Brown’s greatest value is as a regional, or Orcadian, author. This argument is pitched closely to that of Alan Bold who, at the end of his influential early monograph, argues that Brown ‘has so completely mapped out his own artistic territory that he competes with no one’.13 While Bold intends this as a high compliment, such an assertion implies that Brown does not need to be taken seriously as a modern world writer, but only as an Orcadian, or even Brownian, one. The language Bold uses is perhaps more revealing than the arguments themselves: ‘Brown’s work . . . is like a vast ocean over which shine starlike images and symbols. He takes us on a timeless voyage on the ocean and makes us aware of the profound depths beneath the glittering surface.’14 Bold discusses Brown in Brown’s own language; for Bold, Brown exists in a world unto himself, and can only be examined individually. While it would be misguided to ignore the importance of Orkney in Brown’s work, criticism that rests solely on his personal regional identity is similarly problematic. Not only does it not allow Brown’s work to be compared, whether stylistically or ideologically, with contemporary or historical works, but it refuses to acknowledge any aspects of Brown’s writing that may not fit into this predefined model of what his writing should be. Whether Brown is considered a Scottish writer, an Orcadian writer or a writer who can only be compared with himself, the end result is clear: Brown’s work cannot be said to engage with the world as a whole or to have anything to offer more than is superficially present. Berthold Schoene’s response to claims of this nature is to praise Brown’s regionalism: ‘One wonders what is the great danger in becoming known as “the Orkney poet”. Why should Brown’s Orkney be less interesting than James Joyce’s Dublin [or] Thomas Hardy’s Wessex?’15 For Schoene, criticism of Brown’s work on the basis that it is too regional is located in ‘Scotland’s cultural inferiority complex’ and must be rethought. In this he echoes Cairns Craig, for whom Brown’s work is best understood in relation to a larger Scottish cultural inability to think past national or geographico-historical borders: ‘be Scottish and your achievement is necessarily local’.16 Both critics support a reading of Brown’s work that recognises its regionalism but also places it in a global context. Yet the lasting value of Brown’s work, according to Schoene,

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remains local: ‘The gradual establishment of Brown as Orkney’s literary spokesman over the past four decades has instigated a revival of the Orcadian tradition in literature and strengthened the islanders’ sense of a distinct identity.’17 Brown’s work thus gains significance as it reveals the identity of those people about whom he writes to themselves. This idea ultimately enforces the understanding of Brown’s value as being finally regional. Certainly there are Dubliners or Mississippians who have come to understand themselves through Joyce or Faulkner, but very few would argue that this is the great achievement of those writers. Instead, what makes these texts remarkable is the way they appeal to the universal, not in Huberman’s vague conception, but as explicit explorations of the nature of human interaction and of the ways communal and individual identities support and disturb each other. Criticism of Brown’s work that focuses only on his Orcadian, or even Scottish, identity inevitably excludes any reading of Brown as not only a chronicler, but a thinker of community. It is to this latter point that Robert Crawford moves in a recent reappraisal. ‘The digging-in of poets can be romanticised, but more usually their relationship to place and community is scratchy,’ he writes.18 The ‘coherence and harmony’ of Brown’s works are ‘the products of art, not life’.19 For Crawford, Brown’s work should not be taken to reflect a real, localised, pre-existing community, but instead creates community through art. Brown occasionally, especially in his early writings, echoes this view: ‘the time and place do not matter’, he writes in a letter.20 Brown’s engagement with community does not exist only at the level of the tangible and local, but is far more philosophically acute than many critics have recognised. His willingness to explore the concept of community as fully as possible marks Brown as a far more self-conscious writer than he is usually understood to be; his attempt to define the limits of community and to examine what remains when the ideal fails is remarkably similar to that of a number of contemporary philosophers. The very engagement with community that has led him to be classed as a regional writer ultimately proves Brown to be a philosophical writer as well. It is through his life-long exploration of community that Brown comes to address not only life as it is lived in contemporary Orkney, but the nature of Being itself.

I. Community as Difference, as Dwelling and as Myth The idea of community has become one of the dominant strands of modern philosophical thought, most notably in those works of Nancy

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and Blanchot which in many ways follow on from a Heideggerian ontology. An understanding of community is central to any understanding of contemporary metaphysics, for community is perhaps best understood in relation to Being. Heidegger places Being, and the relationship between beings and Being, at the centre of all metaphysical enquiry. In his pivotal essay ‘The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics’, he argues first that the difference between beings and Being is the central metaphysical question. That is to say, following from Hegel, Being is itself, as itself, the absolute concept or the essential truth of what it is to which beings pertain. Being is that to which beings belong. Most importantly for later theorists of community, Heidegger locates difference, not relation, as the central area of metaphysical exploration with which he is concerned. ‘In order to think of the difference as such,’ Heidegger writes, ‘we do not make it disappear; rather, we follow it to its essential origin.’21 The relation between Being and beings must be thought of with regard to an originary difference. For Heidegger, this difference can be understood in relation to the individual, but recent years have seen a movement to use Heidegger’s account of difference as a way of thinking about community. For both Brown and recent French theorists from Georges Bataille onwards, community is the way in which this originary difference is revealed. Bataille first places individual experience as the fundamental metaphysical question, for it is ‘the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being’.22 Being is always already divided; it cannot be approached as a singular whole, but can only be known through individual experience. Although this experience is known through the individual, however, it is only permitted through community. Bataille proposes a philosophy ‘whose meaning should be linked to a Dasein determined by inner experience’, which in turn can only be understood in relation to ‘a community of those who live it’.23 As Nancy clarifies, inner experience in Bataille’s sense is ‘in no way “interior” or “subjective”’.24 Instead, community itself furnishes the space of inner experience. Community is not, for Bataille and Nancy, a Durkheimian unity, nor does it possess consciousness; it cannot be understood in relation to intimacy or unity, but to separation and division. Bataille and Nancy both use Heidegger to propose a non-foundational metaphysics rooted in division and difference. While Heidegger sees difference as an explanatory path to identity, rather than to Being as such, within his works he points towards difference and dividedness as constitutive of Being itself. Nancy neatly connects this apparent division at the centre of Being to community. When Being is understood not as absolute immanence, but as relational difference, ‘Being “itself” comes

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to be defined as relational, as non-absoluteness, and, if you will – in any case this is what I am trying to argue – as community.’25 This shift from Being to community is the key move in Nancy’s writing. It is predicated on Heidegger’s use of Mitsein, or being-with, Heidegger’s ‘answer to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein’.26 Being-with is a way for Dasein to understand itself in terms of what is already present (‘ready-to-hand’) within the world. This provokes the question of community: it would initially appear that Mitsein is fulfilled through a literal gathering of others. Yet this is not the case for Heidegger: ‘even if the particular factical Dasein does not turn to Others, and supposes that it has no need of them or manages to get along without them, it is in the way of Being-with.’27 In Being and Time, Being-with is not presented as community, but as an essential statement of what Dasein is: Being-with is not ultimately predicated on the presence of others, but is one of the ways Dasein is revealed. Specifically, Heidegger is here focusing on how Dasein is revealed as everydayness, yet this everydayness is outside of nature and thus not social, nor, perhaps, communitarian. As Michael Haar clarifies, everydayness is founded upon an essential Beingwith-others that does not in fact require any Others to be present.28 This Mitsein, insofar as it reveals Dasein, does not require something to exist in relation to its ‘with’: Being-with requires no object, only the possibility of an object. Heidegger uses Mitsein to explain the individual Dasein, yet as Christopher Fynsk points out, this Being-with is not autonomous. Being-with an Other is not the same as Being-with (or towards) oneself, but they exist in necessary relation: ‘Dasein’s relation to itself and its relation to the Other are not the same relation (or a relation of sameness), but nor can they be kept separate from one another – otherwise there could be no communication of difference.’29 Heidegger invents a new language of community, and the ways community can simultaneously reveal both the self and others – suggesting Bataille’s ‘inner experience’ – but draws short at the last moment in order to focus only on the individual Dasein. As Simon Critchley argues, Nancy’s task is thus to rewrite Being and Time such that Mitsein is the essential originary concept.30 In order to accomplish this, Nancy proposes a reading of Mitsein in which Being-with is revealed as community. Nancy begins his analysis with a questioning of ‘the breakdown in community that supposedly engendered the modern era’.31 This is a theme that Brown consistently invokes, simultaneously looking back to ‘a time, 150 years ago, when life was dangerous and the language rich, and the community was invested with a kind of ceremony’ (FI 166–7) and examining a vision of the present that is predicated on a necessary

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lack of such a community. Nancy sees this sort of reflection on the lost community as a constant in human life, whether the lost community at hand be Greek, Roman or Christian: always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible bonds and in which above all it played back to itself, through its institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy and autonomy.32

As can be seen even in the more avowedly communitarian writings of Taylor and MacIntyre, community is always framed as something located in the past: it is never a present unity, but always a unity to which the modern, isolated self is trying to return. The community, viewed as something already lost, can be understood both as a unified group of people encompassing all elements of their lives, and also the way in which they come to self-realisation. For Brown as much as for Nancy, this form of community is already mythic, and the task of the individual writer is to relate the mythic to the actual: that is, to relate the dream of a lost community to life as it is lived. As Brown writes in ‘An Autobiographical Essay’: it was under these ordinary skies that the hunt, the battle, the voyage, the settlement, the triumph and defeat and reconciliation, take place; and the men and women and children of the islands (and everywhere) are the eternal actors. It is the writer’s task to relate the legend (what Edwin Muir called ‘the fable’) to this age of television, uranium, and planet-flight.33

In this brief essay, ostensibly designed to reveal his origins as a writer, Brown makes explicit what Nancy calls an essentially Christian trope: ideal community once existed, but now can only be remembered. Tracing the history of this trope back through the history of the West, Nancy argues that there has never been an age when humans were not looking back to a more ideal community, rather than celebrating their own. Nancy goes on to argue that ‘the thought of community or the desire of it might well be nothing other than a belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience’, the absence of the divine.34 For many contemporary theorists, these notions of community are necessarily Nietzschean. For Derrida, Nietzsche presents a philosophy in which community itself must be understood as belonging without belonging, and as existing in time while remaining untimely. If one is not to posit ‘community’ as part of a possibly mythic past, then its paradoxical nature must be made explicit. Derrida points to the way that Nietzsche ‘sometimes says “I” and sometimes “we”. The signatory of the precursory discourses addressed to you is sometimes me,

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sometimes us’.35 What interests Derrida in this reading of Nietzsche is how the impossible community refers both to the solitary individual and the collective at the same time; it is always both inclusive and exclusive. Tracing this idea to Nietzsche reveals that the idea of the impossible community is closely tied to modernity and to the death of God, as Nancy also attests. As Fynsk writes, Nancy’s argument is built on both Bataille and Nietzsche, insofar as he argues that: ‘part of the devastation wrought by the technical organization of advanced capitalist societies . . . lies in the isolation of the individual in its very death.’36 The dissolution of community must in part be understood as an effect of modern conceptions of self and society. However, as Nancy adds, we must also be suspicious of this idea of a ‘lost’ community that modernity has eradicated; nostalgia for a past community is a constant throughout Western intellectual history. The impossibility of community must thus be understood as both an effect of modernity and as a constant in all human experience. If the desire for a ‘lost’ community is revealed as a constant in human experience, then any nostalgic idealism is necessarily called into question. For Nancy, community must be understood as something else, something active in the present, specifically as the way in which the individual’s existence outside himself is revealed. ‘Community means . . . that there is no singular being without another singular being.’37 Community is the way the self relates both to others and to itself. This initially appears to be the furthest possible point from Brown’s writings on community, which often present community as a unified whole. In a rather surprising passage in his autobiography, however, Brown introduces community as the way individual difference is revealed: ‘We put on masks when we go out of our houses into the community. Communal life is complex: we have a different mask for everyone we encounter’ (FI 17). This is a very different conceptualisation of community from those passages of Brown cited above: here, Brown argues that community not only reveals individual difference, but also creates it. A singular being, through communication with another singular being, creates itself anew. Community, in this image of Brown’s, is how the self is revealed to itself, but this revelation is not one of inner truth, but instead reveals the self only insofar as the self relates to others. There is a certain circularity at work here, then, for in Brown’s conception community creates or reveals what can only be seen within a community. The ways an individual perceives him- or herself and is perceived by others are both functions of community. Along similar lines to Bataille and Nancy, Brown’s conception of individual being is predicated on its revelation through community. Community thus cannot be thought of

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as a past moment, but as something at the very heart of modern life and any modern understanding of self. This notion of ‘masks’ and, above, of ‘actors’ raises a troubling question: in Brown’s conceptualisation of community, how much communal behaviour can be said to be organic or originary, and how much is artificially created? Brown’s Letters from Hamnavoe, a collection of early Orcadian columns centred on community news, is filled with injunctions against transistor radios and ‘The Menace of Cars’; his dominant theme in the column is a lament for all that modernity has stripped from the community and the ways technology has separated community from its own essence. The community Brown reveals is in part predicated on its physical nature; he writes with dismay, for instance, on the replacement of flagstones with concrete, in hopes that ‘the Stromness members of the Heritage Society will keep an eye firmly on the situation’.38 The columns initially appear to support the widespread view of Brown as a somewhat curmudgeonly preserver of past ways of living, a view Brown himself supports in his introduction: There is a great deal of reminiscence [in these columns]; not only shreds of my own childhood, ‘the vision splendid’, but for the simpler and more meaningful community that Orkney used to be. The outer world has intruded successfully into our silences and secrets.39

The conflation of simplicity and meaning here is notable; in these essays Brown treats the modern world as a system of complexity which erodes a primal simplicity that was necessary to allow community. Iain Crichton Smith’s assessment of the columns, that ‘they reveal a real person in a real place’,40 is particularly apt. The columns focus on a placed community, and point towards a harmony of location and community to which Brown advocates a return, or at least approaches with nostalgic longing. Here there is no sign of ‘masks’ and ‘actors’, but only of real people in real places. Brown occasionally reflects, however, on the impossibility of returning to a unified or ideal community: ‘most of us have come so far away from that poor earth-rooted beautiful way of life that to go back would be more painful than to struggle on into the age of the Atom’.41 There is something intentionally disingenuous in such a statement, an insinuation that this ‘beautiful way of life’ has not been accidentally lost, but intentionally left behind. In his reflections on the types who ‘have disappeared from our streets and roads’42 – fiddlers, tinkers, lamplighters, postmen – Brown fluctuates between a purely nostalgic vision of past community and a recognition that the roles filled by the members of that community are no longer needed. Even as he laments the passing

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of the ideal community, Brown recognises that such a community came about, if it ever existed, not to fulfil an ideal but out of the demands of a particular time and place, demands that are themselves now irrelevant. From these passages, it appears that a community is not, and perhaps has never been, a unified whole, but instead serves as a systematic approach towards individuality. In these writings Brown distinguishes between two types of community. He writes both about the actual community of Stromness, geographically and historically specified, which provides a context for his writing – ‘It was a very depressed little community that I was born into’ (FI 15) – and a second, more philosophically-based notion of community based on the confluence of individuals. The former is most often his concern in Letters from Hamnavoe, but he does not write of this community entirely naively, expecting a full return to a glorious past. It is this latter form of community to which Nancy most often refers in his rewriting of Heidegger: ‘The unity of the world is not one: it is made of a diversity, and even disparity and opposition.’43 It is this latter form, too, to which Brown refers when he talks of the masks needed to enter a community. The difficulty in reading Brown’s work as a clear philosophy of community, however, comes about from his conflation of the two senses: he frequently presents the geographico-historical community and the community that exists in the revelation of difference as essentially inseparable and co-existent, tied together by an undefined ‘community spirit’.44 While Brown’s interest in community as difference can be best understood in relation to novels such as Greenvoe, his complementary interest in the geographico-historical basis of community is noteworthy in itself, not least because it is the view of community with which he is most closely associated. This notion of community can be found in many rural texts, and is made explicit in the later works of Heidegger, where he writes: The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. . . . The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.45

The second half of this famous quotation most immediately illuminates Brown’s idea of a community founded in agricultural labour: ‘I came, as the years passed, to see the farmers and fishing-folk, and their work, as the most important in any community’ (FI 33). Throughout Brown’s writings there is a clear sense that the geographical community is predicated on the working of a specific area of land and an opening up of awareness about the relation between land and people. This sense

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mirrors the Heideggerian notion of dwelling; dwelling is not only inhabiting the land, but also entering into a relationship with it. This sense forms the basis for all interpretations of Brown’s work as pastoral; his community is entirely dependent on agriculture, not only for subsistence, but also for identity. In strict opposition to Nancy, for whom ‘community cannot arise from the domain of work’,46 in these writings of Brown and Heidegger it is labour itself that forms the basis for community, specifically as that labour relates to the land where the community exists. Brown’s work can also be illuminated by the first half of this quotation. Heidegger establishes a connected chain of being in order to explicate this notion of dwelling: you are, I am, we humans are. Although he does not make it explicit in his later writings, this is Heidegger’s final notion of being-with, apparently so simple as to require no explanation. Dwelling cannot occur in isolation, but only in the co-presence of individuals understood as a ‘we’. What you are and I am is ultimately ‘we’. Being-with does not only reveal difference, but sameness, or unity, as well; when Being-with becomes co-dwelling, it establishes community. Heidegger writes that, in dwelling, mortals save the earth, not only in terms of snatching it from danger, but as a way of ‘setting something free into its own presencing’.47 Surely it is not only the presencing of the earth to which Heidegger refers here, but the presencing of the community as well, the way the community serves to reveal individuals as what they are through Being-with. It is here that Mitsein implicitly begins to be read as Gemeinschaft; Being-with, in Heidegger’s later writings, cannot be understood solely as the way individuals are, but also becomes the way communities are. Even Heidegger’s focus on the physicality of the community in this essay points towards a changed conception of beingwith, one that is quite literally grounded in both place and others. The idea that the geographical place where a community dwells is at once essential to its life, but not a complete expression of that life, can also be found in Brown’s writings: The spirit of a town is in the people. Beauty and vitality flow through generations, however a town might change from a garden to a maze of sooty stone. Environment must be important, but the ever-renewing spring, brimming over in a community (laughter and lore) is not easily defiled, though factory chimneys rise. (FI 101)

Both Brown and Heidegger use a heightened, wilfully poetic language in these citations in order to signify the very strangeness of their notion of community; this holistic community has become the property of art, and is expressed through art in a way that is not readily apparent through simple observation of a given actual community. Here Brown comes

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dangerously close to what Jerome McGann calls ‘the grand illusion of every Romantic poet’: the idea that poetry – ‘laughter and lore’ – can supersede the actualities of history and culture.48 Brown uses this notion of the revealing power of art, however, in order to show not how art can bypass reality, but how it can show the truth of community. This explains his continual claim that his writing is as physically grounded as farming or fishing. Art only has the revealing power Brown claims for it if it is based on the actual physical presencing of a real community. For Brown and Heidegger, art reveals community to be Being-with, predicated on a being-in of an environment, but more specifically related to the way people co-exist. Both the citations from Brown and Heidegger come from works written relatively late in their careers, at such a point when the impossibility of community presented in Greenvoe, or the use of Being-with only to reveal Dasein in Being and Time, are apparently no longer of great concern. In these later writings dwelling is revealed specifically as care. Dwelling is the combination of, or the relationship between, the actual physical community and a more abstracted human community, both of which are necessary to provide this dual care function. The community of ‘laughter and lore’ is one of care, one that to a certain extent overcomes the essential nihilism that underlies human existence. Within the language Brown and Heidegger use, this latter form of whole community is revealed as continual possibility; for Brown, community is ‘an ever-renewing spring’, while in Heidegger, the problem and solution to communitarian existence lies in the way in which humans ‘must ever learn to dwell’.49 The impossibility of community is thus acknowledged, but nevertheless presented as a solvable problem: humans will learn to dwell; the spring will renew. There is still, however, something dissatisfying in these explanations: in these late works Brown and Heidegger disregard the impossibility of understanding community as unity in favour of an account of a communal unity that is at heart poetic. As Julian Young argues, a Heideggerian notion of dwelling ‘requires an art that has overcome metaphysics’.50 Community, when it is approached through this artistic sensibility, initially appears in these later works as a solution to certain metaphysical problems. In Being and Time, the fundamental nature of life in the world is presented as anxiety: ‘Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.’51 In the early Heidegger, anxiety reveals the world to be what and how it is. If dwelling provides security in the form of caring for and being cared for, then to a certain extent it necessarily overturns metaphysics. This cannot only be a question of art: if metaphysics, as shown above, is the way the relation between Being and beings is understood, and that

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relational difference is the core of community, then a community understood as caring or dwelling is not only distinct from, but entirely opposed to, a community of difference. It would be easy to mark this shift from a community of difference to a community of dwelling, seen in both Brown and Heidegger, as a function of age or of changing notions of metaphysics across time, but this fails to explain the extent to which these two oppositional notions of community co-exist in Brown’s work. The passage of years is insufficient to explain the difference in Brown’s understanding of community in Greenvoe, where individual difference is revealed as central to community at the same time that it undermines it, and Beside the Ocean of Time, where the individual life is able to encapsulate all that was valued in community, and thus provide renewal. In the citations from his autobiography above, it is clear that Brown uses the term ‘community’ to refer, in Heideggerian terms, to both anxiety and care. In Brown’s work community is both impossible and ever-renewing, tied primarily to the land and primarily to the people, revealing of difference and best understood as unity, all at the same time. As Francis Russell Hart notes, Brown writes of the world as a ‘blighted wholeness’52 in which both blight and wholeness are given equal attention and are presented as irreconcilable but simultaneously present. What makes Brown’s work challenging is that his community can never be straightforwardly read as either anxiety or care, neither as nostalgic unity nor modern dysfunction, but must always be read as both simultaneously. Community is not a solution to anxiety, and does not overcome metaphysics, but instead exists concurrently. In this paradoxical understanding of community, Brown creates a paradigm similar to that of Blanchot who, writing in response to Nancy, formulates the idea of a ‘negative community’: if the relation of man with man ceases to be that of the Same with the Same, but rather introduces the Other as irreducible and – given the equality between them – always in a situation of dissymmetry in relation to the one looking at that Other, then a completely different relationship imposes itself and imposes another form of society which one would hardly dare call a ‘community.’ Or else one accepts the idea of naming it thus, while asking oneself what is at stake in the concept of a community and whether the community, no matter if it has existed or not, does not in the end always posit the absence of community.53

Blanchot invites a perpetual dual understanding of community: community is still thought of as the relation of ‘the Same with the Same’, the unified community Brown situates within a verifiable geographicohistorical continuum, but ‘community’ is also the term used to express the questioning of this first form. If this unified community has perhaps

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never existed, if communities have never been formed around unity but only around difference, then ‘community’ becomes a way of exploring the absence of what is already defined as community. Community, in the revealing of Otherness, is what is revealed in the absence of a community that functions through a revealing of sameness. While Brown writes with the belief that this unified community did exist, and may perhaps be recapturable, he also uses the word to refer to the dissolution of that ideal community, and to its revealing in impossibility. His work is thus balanced between a depiction of community as it should be, and as it perhaps may have been, and community as it is now revealed only though its absence. This paradox, as made explicit by Blanchot, begins to explain how Brown’s writing of community functions as both a eulogy for a past way of life and a prescription for the way in which humans should live. Communal life, for Brown, is the way the ‘complex interweavings’ of human relations can be understood, even when the community itself is not complete or unified (FI 17). Individuals always exist both as themselves and in relation to a community, even a mythic one: ‘real Orkney country folk . . . can be encountered any day on a road or a seashore; but they too are a part of the fable, as though they had always been, and always will be’.54 Elsewhere he writes that: ‘the townsfolk are part of [a] web of legend’.55 The ‘fable’ or ‘legend’ in this instance is that of community: even in its absence it is the way in which people are best understood. Community is a fabular metanarrative, no less convincing or necessary for its impossibility. As Schoene demonstrates, Brown brings forth the notion of a ‘community with a singular, self-constant identity’ through the creation of ‘historical myth’: ‘a real-life discovery and a construction of the mind’.56 This focus on community as fable permits Brown to maintain a notion of anxiety or negativity as central to human existence while also proposing a desired unity. As in the writings of Blanchot, humans cannot understand themselves without recourse to this fable of community, for it is only in the otherness revealed by community that understanding can take place. For Brown and Blanchot both, community is what goes beyond bare human existence, and thus even in its absence is absolutely necessary.

II. Death and the Turn The parallels between Brown’s complex views of community and those of Nancy, Bataille and Blanchot also explain Brown’s focus on individual death. In his fiction, this focus is best illustrated in Magnus, in which

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the sacrifice of an individual serves to create and sustain community, but echoes can be seen throughout Brown’s writing, notably in the degree to which his non-fiction is concerned with the remembrance of individual lives. A lengthy section of his uncollected writings, Northern Lights, is dedicated to his obituaries, eulogies, remembrances and other works of mourning. In each, the death of the individual is presented not only as an individual loss, but as it is relevant to the community. Of his father, for instance, Brown writes: A quintessence of dust, he lies in a field above Hoy Sound among all the rich storied dust of Stromness. The postman had left the last door, he had quenched the flame in his lantern. The tailor had folded the finished coat and laid it aside. He was at rest with fishermen, farmers, merchants, sailors and their women-folk – many generations.57

Brown’s father is portrayed, or even explained, both through the communitarian roles he had in life – postman and tailor – and the community he joins in death. In life and death, the individual is defined in terms of his community. In neither case is the community chosen or intentional, but is instead the way in which the individual’s life is understood and valued. Whether in revealing sameness or otherness, the individual’s community shapes his life. More importantly, the death of the individual also defines the community. When a man (in this instance, Ernest Marwick) dies, he leaves remnants of himself within the community: ‘we knew that a great and a good man had gone from this generation of Orcadians; but had left treasures behind still to be estimated, and a most fragrant memory’.58 Implicit in such a statement is the notion that the treasures left behind are not only found in remembrance and nostalgia, but continue to create the community after the individual death. The life and death of the given individual serve to make the community what it is. Another man is said to ‘take his place among the shining dead of local legend’.59 The community’s sense of itself comes from the observation of the death of the individual. Community is predicated on the events of linear time – the birth and death of the individual – but also exists outside of linear time, as the death of the individual is always anticipated and always present. As Nancy writes: ‘Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. . . . The genuine community of mortal beings, or death as community, establishes their impossible community.’60 The individual is revealed to himself through his revelation to others, and this revelation, for both Brown and those theorists following Bataille, comes through the presence of death. Departing from a Heideggerian Being-towards-death, however, the death of the

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individual gains significance and is fully revealed not in terms of Dasein but as a function of community. The death of the individual reveals the community to itself. For Brown, community itself becomes an act of remembrance, a unity that is impossible because it is only revealed as the disparate individuals who constitute it die. As has been shown in his novels, however, Brown is not content to show the way community reveals itself to itself only through the death of the individual, but through the death of the community as a whole. With the exception of Vinland, all of Brown’s novels revolve around imminent disaster, whether it comes in the form of the clearance of the islands or a more general apocalypse. In stories such as ‘The Wireless Set’ (A Time to Keep) or ‘The Paraffin Lamp’ (Winter Tales), technological invention itself is introduced as a force against which individual members must buttress themselves. In this recurrent theme of a man-made force or invention that threatens to destroy the community, Brown echoes Heidegger’s questioning of technology. Heidegger quickly moves from technology as technological artefacts – based on physical science and the machine – to a discussion of technology as a mode of revealing. He specifically focuses on ‘Enframing’ as the essence of technology. ‘Enframing’ is an underlying comportment that, while revealed most clearly through these physical constructions, is in fact an approach to Being itself. Technology, through Enframing, is the way Being is known. At its most dangerous, Enframing reveals that everything in the world is a construct: it presents the world as ordered, known and ultimately technological. It is not only nuclear apocalypse or, in the sort of example favoured by Brown, the wireless, that threatens humanity, but a more widespread cultural mind-set of which these innovations are a manifestation. Enframing is the way humans objectify the world, and yet is not, for instance, a development of the Enlightenment or the modern era, but is both ever-present and always a danger. This idea of Enframing can be seen as the underlying structure behind Brown’s condemnation of the artefacts of technology and his depiction of the coming of a wireless set or a newspaper to Orkney as destructive; it is not the thing itself that presents danger, but the way the conception of technology and Being are intertwined. For Brown, the artefacts of technology are those things that most clearly reveal the danger of Enframing. This use of technology, in a Heideggerian sense as well as a practical one, to represent the end of the community begins to point towards a third conceptualisation of community in Brown’s writing. Community in this third sense cannot be objectified, but can be understood through a recognition of the danger that was always present

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within itself. In Heideggerian terms, Brown’s ideal community is that of the ‘turning’, the way in which a community or an individual comes to question technology in the context of danger. For Heidegger, turning occurs when Enframing is recognised as danger. Enframing and technology initially seem to be the markers of a fall from grace and of the separation from an ideal way of living. For Heidegger, however, when Enframing and technology are known for themselves through the turn, they can themselves bring about an attention to Being: ‘When the danger is [recognised] as the danger, there the saving power is already thriving also.’61 When danger is recognised as itself – which constitutes the turn – it reveals itself already to embody its own saving. Thus the solution to the problems that arise from Enframing already exist within that Enframing: the recognition of the imminent danger in Enframing brings about a new ‘insight into that which is’ and reveals the truth of Being.62 Within the works of both Heidegger and Brown, Enframing can be understood in relation to community. Heidegger defines Enframing after the turn as a ‘gathering together’.63 From this notion of gathering, it would appear that Enframing is, in a sense, the community that exists in order to allow the singular individual to reveal truth. If community is defined as the mode of understanding that reveals individual difference, following Nancy and Blanchot, then Enframing can be seen to create this mode. Yet Enframing remains ambiguous, for it is only in the turn that Enframing and technology shift from being the oblivion of Being to its safekeeping. Similarly, the use of community and its saving are revealed only when community is itself revealed to be impossible and mythic. Only in looking at community as something impossible can it be revealed to show a truth about the nature of Being, specifically Being-together. Brown focuses on community as myth or nostalgia in order to allow a turning; turning, in Brown’s terms, is the discovery that community is fabular or mythic but cannot be renounced. The trajectory of Brown’s career can be understood in the context of this turn. It is not only, as Murray and Murray claim, that Brown moves ‘away from treating character as archetype in his early writings towards more psychological complexity in his later works’.64 His work also moves from a repudiation of technology and a discussion of the impossibility of community in An Orkney Tapestry and Greenvoe, respectively, towards an idea of community as revealing, through storytelling and art, in his late novels. Truth, in these final works, is revealed through the gathering that storytelling commands. In the preface to the late collection Winter Tales, he claims that

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Much of the old story-telling has withered before the basilisk stare of newsprint, radio, television. Maybe, the people reckoned, after 1873, it was better to forget the ancient sorrows and joys. There had been too much hardship. The promised land lay all before them. . . . Every community on earth is being deprived of an ancient necessary nourishment. We cannot live fully without the treasury our ancestors have left to us.65

This passage reveals a basic understanding of the place of community in modernity: community, as a repository of stories, exists not despite modernity, or the technological mind-set, but in direct opposition to it. Even as he sets a firm date after which community is no longer possible, and so invites nostalgia, he also presents community as present in the turn. In community, truth has been revealed before and will be revealed again, but oblivion is also always imminent. In order for the community to exist in opposition to technology, it must occupy a liminal space between life and death, between ‘too much hardship’ and ‘the promised land’, between ‘ancient sorrows and joys’. The community in Brown’s work is always portrayed as being on the brink of disaster because, in this third understanding of community, that is the only place it could possibly exist. It is only when the community as a whole dies that it gains life, and only when the community ends that its renewal is possible. The truth of community rests upon both the imminent death of the individual and the death of the community as a whole, and further on the community’s recognition of this death. It is notable, however, that for Brown community is revealed only through art, specifically through storytelling. History is itself ‘a mask . . .; it is impressive and reassuring, it flatters us to wear it’ (OT 11). Storytelling, however, marks a return to a ‘kind of celebration’.66 For Brown, it is within this celebration, in defiance of history, that truth can be revealed: community is rooted not in its past, but in the continued possibility of art. This celebratory art is the sort that Heidegger would call antimetaphysical. Brown proposes a work of art that can perform the turn of Enframing and reintegrate the festive mode into everyday life. The work of art that creates the turn is one that is both created and received in community. As Young argues, this work of art takes the heritage of community and forms it into ‘the outline “shape” of [the community’s] proper future, its “destiny”’.67 In this transition Brown uses historically-based, but fundamentally symbolic, narratives to create and remember the turned community. This is possible because for Brown art, especially literature, is a communal activity: ‘the poem, song, or painting, is not the work of one man labouring in isolation, but it is a whole community expressing its fears, hopes, joys. The artist is merely the instrument through which the whole tribe speaks.’68

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Narrative art is closely tied to the life of the community, because it is itself an expression of community. Art, in this late Heideggerian sense, is the way truth is revealed; more centrally, the work of art ‘lets the earth be an earth’,69 it lets the world world. That is to say, it is through the work of art, not as an artefact but as an event, that things reveal themselves to be as they are. The artwork is experienced in time, but is essentially timeless. The work of art is a revealing event; it is not in phenomenological experience that the truth of human existence can be revealed, but in the happening of art. This comes about because, as Heidegger points out, the work of art does not depict things as they are or as they could be experienced or manipulated by a subject, but in their general essence. Art exists outside of the sphere of individual experience in order to point towards a truth that cannot be recognised from within that experience. The work of art, for Heidegger, is thus perceived in the same way as community is perceived in Brown: it is at once predicated on the historico-geographical reality of a time and place, but is also essentially outside of time. Community’s existence in this dual sphere is the only way it can approach the truth; it is only because community, as an idea(l), exists outside of time that it can reveal the truth of human life. The impossibility of community in everyday life does not point to oblivion, but rather to the way community can finally be revealed in art. In Brown’s autobiographical writings, he treats ‘legendary and historical sources’ (FI 9) similarly: they are both approaches to an existing community, a way of revealing the truth of the perceived moment through what is outside that moment. In doing so, he self-consciously puts himself in a continuum of modern writing, naming James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann and Anton Chekhov as influences and as writers who revealed that: ‘it is the common man who holds the rarest treasures. There, lost, is the “immortal diamond”’ (FI 27). By citing these authors, Brown attests to the degree to which they map some sort of eternal truth onto the individual grounded in time. The work of art, specifically twentieth-century literary art, allows the individual – and the community – to be revealed. The work of art creates, preserves, originates and reveals the community in a way nothing intrinsic to the everyday life of the community could ever do. Indeed, for Brown it is only from outside, either through art or through death, that the truth of the world can be understood. Reflecting on the burial practices of primitive Orcadians, Brown writes: So it seems they lavished far more care on their ‘houses of the dead’ than on the huts and hovels they passed their days in. The dead had gone, not into nothingness, but “into another intensity” (as T. S. Eliot put it). There

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perhaps, the meaning of their miserable few years on earth was made plain to them. There, perhaps, they existed in a timeless beauty, nobility, heroism.70

This is a remarkable passage for several reasons. First, it is notable that Brown’s language for describing the awareness of life that takes place after death is markedly similar to the language he uses elsewhere to describe the effects of poetry. Writing of more recent inhabitants of Orkney, Brown claims that: ‘The people lived close to the springs of poetry and drama, and were not aware of it’ (FI 167). Poetry and death both serve to reveal what is concealed in everyday life; they are, again, Brown’s representation of a Heideggerian turning. It is in an essay on Edwin Muir, indeed, that Brown most clearly states that ‘Death is not a negation of life but a completion and a celebration’.71 Death itself is tied to the festive mode of life and of poetry, of which Heidegger sees echoes in Hölderlin. The passage is also notable for its expression of Brown’s despair over contemporary life. Brown argues that: ‘There will never be a good society, there are too many flaws in human nature’ (FI 183). The imminent perception of everyday life is a constant barrier to the truth. Those who live within a community, whether local or global, cannot recognise what good there may be in their lives. It is only from the outside, either through death or through art, that revealing begins. Community cannot be accessed in lived experience, but only in stories. Finally, Brown’s citation of Eliot is worth mentioning. Eliot is a surprisingly constant muse in Brown’s work, as is Mann. As much as Brown relies on the Icelandic sagas for inspiration, he also views his work as falling in a modernist tradition; he is not involved in recreating a past community so much as rethinking a present one. Brown’s often paradoxical combination of medieval and modernist influences, and his simultaneous defence and repudiation of myth, have been touched on in Schoene’s criticism. For Schoene: ‘What draws Brown back to modernism is his belief in myth. His quest for identity and meaning is no random search but informed by the notion that the truth of a universally applicable value system exists and can be found.’72 For Brown himself this larger value system is explicitly Christian, a ‘shaping divinity [that] takes over from our rough-hewings’ (FI 186). And yet Brown’s lasting value is not as a Christian apologist, but as a chronicler of the poetry of existence. For Brown, as for Heidegger, poetry shores existence against disaster: Poetry is the act of establishing by the word and in the word. What is established in this manner? The permanent. But can the permanent be established then? Is it not that which has always been present? No! Even the permanent must be fixed so that it will not be carried away, the simple must be wrested from confusion, proportion must be set before what lacks proportion.73

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This is the underlying principle behind all of Brown’s work. His poetry and fiction suggest the possibility of a permanent truth. And yet there is much in Brown of Blanchot’s disaster. There is always within his writing the sense that the permanent may be carried away at any minute and that the simple is entwined with confusion. Disaster is imminent, and poetry can only stave it off insofar as it recognises that imminence. Brown’s great contribution to literature and philosophy is to think of art and community as occupying the middle ground between the fixity of Heidegger and the disaster of Blanchot. By restricting his theme to that of the individual and community, Brown is able to explore how a community is actually lived, how it is revealed and how, perhaps, it has been and should be. Brown’s status as a philosophical writer and as a thinker of community cannot rest solely on the conclusions he draws, but rather on the complexity of his vision. Brown tackles the issue of community and individual life more fully than many of his contemporaries. To read Brown’s writings on community as pertaining only to Orkney is to do him a great disservice: his work is best appreciated not as an account of regional life, but as an investigation into modern life as a necessarily disjointed whole. In his praise of Tolstoy, Brown writes that the artworks created by an individual ‘are not theirs only but have come from the community in which they live’ (FI 39). Brown’s work also occupies this liminal space, at once the artistic creations of an individual and of a community, not only the physical community of Orkney, but the larger intellectual community of those who think through what remains of community. His work is thoroughly of the past, but also thoroughly modern, and cannot be seriously appraised as anything other than a reconsideration of modern life. In his emphasis on community, and his subtle reworkings of that notion across the body of his work, Brown asks the question of how individuals come to live with each other, define each other and be defined by each other. For all its trappings of intellectual and ideological primitivism, Brown’s writing is rare in its commitment to rethinking community life, and as such must be considered alongside of, and as a counterpart to, the major twentieth-century theorists of being and community.

Notes 1. Fergusson, George Mackay Brown, p. 1. 2. Taylor, ‘Traveller from Eden of Orkney’, p. 10. 3. Edmonds, ‘Bathing in Light from a Northern Island Sky’, p. 60.

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4. Hall, ‘Brightly Shines the North Star’, p. 13. 5. Campbell-Johnston, ‘Poetry’, p. 12. 6. Orkney itself is often rarefied in contemporary writing. In a piece on Edwin Muir, Alan Massie questions: ‘just what exactly, for instance, is “an organic community” when the term is used for something larger than an Orkney parish, and how would we recognize one?’ (Alan Massie, Introduction, pp. vi–vii). Such statements imply – as Muir himself often does – that community in Orkney can be considered whole in a way that no other community could. 7. Brown, ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’, pp. 3–4. 8. Fleming, ‘Voice of Orkney’, p. 614. 9. Annwn, ‘The Binding Breath’, p. 305. 10. Ibid., p. 285. 11. Huberman, ‘Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe’, p. 33. 12. Ibid., p. 34. 13. Bold, George Mackay Brown, p. 111. 14. Ibid., p. 113. 15. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 9. 16. Craig, Out of History, p. 11. 17. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 269. 18. Crawford, ‘In Bloody Orkney’, p. 23. 19. Ibid., p. 25. 20. Cited in Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, p. 36. 21. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 65. 22. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 4. Bataille’s ‘being’ should here be understood along the same lines as Heidegger’s ‘Being’. 23. Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 24. 24. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 18. 25. Ibid., p. 6. Italics in original. 26. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 153. 27. Ibid., p. 160. Italics in original. 28. Haar, ‘The Enigma of Everydayness’, p. 26. 29. Fynsk, ‘The Self and Its Witness’, p. 190. 30. Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, p. 240. 31. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 9. 32. Ibid., p. 9. 33. Brown, ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, p. 21. 34. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 10. 35. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 37. 36. Fynsk, Foreword, pp. xv–xvi. 37. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 28. 38. Brown, Letters from Hamnavoe, p. 12. 39. Ibid., p. v. 40. Smith, ‘Books from the Journalism’, p. 17. 41. Brown, Letters from Hamnavoe, p. 61. 42. Ibid., p. 127. 43. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 185. 44. Brown, Northern Lights, p. 4. 45. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 145. Italics in original.

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46. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 31. Lydia Davis notably translated Nancy’s concept of ‘désoeuvrément’, here rendered as ‘inoperative(ity)’ as ‘worklessness’. 47. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 148. 48. McGann, Romantic Ideology, p. 137. 49. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 159. 50. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 134. 51. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 232. 52. Hart, Scottish Novel, p. 395. 53. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, p. 3. 54. Brown, Introduction, p. 6. 55. Brown, ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’, p. 3. 56. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, pp. 100–1. 57. Brown, Northern Lights, p. 150. 58. Ibid., p. 158. 59. Ibid., p. 166. 60. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 15. 61. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, p. 42. 62. Ibid., p. 46. 63. Ibid., p. 24. 64. Murray and Murray, Interrogation of Silence, p. 1. 65. Brown, Winter Tales, pp. vii–viii. 66. Brown, Masked Fisherman, p. x. 67. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 55. 68. Brown, ‘As to the business of writing . . .’. 69. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 45. 70. Brown, Under Brinkie’s Brae, p. 57. 71. Brown, ‘Broken Heraldry’, p. 143. 72. Schoene, Making of Orcadia, p. 270. 73. Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, p. 304.

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Conclusion: Scotland, Utopia and the Future of Community

Alasdair Gray, in a 1983 interview, spoke of his desire for a global audience: ‘I want to be read by an English-speaking tribe which extends to Capetown in the south, Bengal in the east, California in the west, and George Mackay Brown in the north.’1 The Scottish novelist Eric Linklater, who had strong Orcadian ties himself, also presents Brown not only as the chronicler of a particular regional identity, but as an embodiment of that region. Linklater calls Brown ‘a recognised feature of Orkney’s landscape’ and ‘essentially a poet of Orkney’.2 Brown’s work and personal identity are, from these perspectives, fundamentally linked to his regional identity. Brown’s status as a regional writer is also emphasised in his critical reception. K. D. M. Snell, for instance, includes Brown in a brief list of British novelists primarily known for their ‘regional imagination’, ranging from Walter Scott and the Brontës to Alan Sillitoe and Catherine Cookson.3 In Snell’s definition, the regional novel includes detailed descriptions of a particular real place and its people: it attempts verisimilitude in its descriptions of both local geography and ‘the life, social relations, customs, language, dialect, or other aspects of the culture’ of the people who inhabit that area.4 Snell argues that, as a genre, the regional novel has been unfairly dismissed and deserves reconsideration: such fiction is important in part because it sheds light on broad questions of ‘organic community’ and ‘interpretive community’.5 Brown’s work, particularly some of his short stories and poems, closely fits Snell’s model of regional literature. His abiding interest in the history and geography of the islands and their inhabitants is unmistakable, and his writings must be thought of in relation to forms of community. Berthold Schoene, Sabine Schmid and Rowena Murray and Brian Murray have all highlighted the relation between organic and interpretive communities in Brown’s work. His writing at once draws upon a real, placed and organic Orcadian community and evokes interpretive

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communities of readers and other writers. Yet this focus on placed community often leads critics to argue that Brown is detached from larger political and cultural change. Douglas Gifford, for instance, writes that Brown’s ‘magnificent work . . . can stand forever as a memorial to his beloved Orkney’, but that no reader could claim it ‘has much truck with a contemporary Scotland facing political challenge and immense social change’.6 Such claims ignore the frequency with which Brown departs from a localised Orcadian setting in his work, as Douglas Dunn has recently noted.7 Dunn points out that ‘Despite his myth of rootedness and his encyclopaedic experience of his native place, there were islands of which he wrote but never visited’.8 Brown himself, in a late interview, makes this sentiment explicit: ‘I write my best things about experiences that I’ve never had and things that I have never seen.’9 Schmid likewise argues that Brown writes primarily about ‘an Orkney of his own mind’ that is outside of time and space.10 Just as much as Brown’s writing is based in lived experience, it also centres on fictional communities and on fiction as community: Brown both depicts and creates community in his work. Schmid usefully links Brown’s work with Patrick Kavanagh’s distinction between parochial and provincial perspectives. The provincial writer distinguishes the local region or community from the pre-existing cultural framework of the metropolis, while the parochial writer is secure in ‘the social and artistic validity of his parish’.11 For Schmid, Brown’s work can be ‘regarded as truly parochial’ in Kavanagh’s sense, for he uses ‘Orkney and his Orcadian identity as a departure point for a much larger vision’.12 In this reading, Brown’s work is best understood as depicting a real regional community in order to advance a more universal perspective. Brown depicts ‘real people in a real place’, but uses regional verisimilitude as a way to develop themes of politics and religion, of history and utopia, and of community and the individual. As Brown writes at the end of his autobiography, his themes are not restricted to Orkney as such: ‘any small community is a microcosm. It is not necessary to stray very far from your back yard. The whole world gathers about the parish pump. But stories from under the horizon ought always to be welcome’ (FI 180). His writing falls ‘under the horizon’ – outside the purview of a metropolitan or mainstream perspective – and could emerge from any small community. The Orcadian elements of Brown’s work are most valuable not as records of a particular time, place and way of life, but insofar as they illuminate the nature of communal life. The use of a microcosmic regional identity as foundation for philosophical, religious and political questioning is an especially important

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trope in Scottish literature, according to Cairns Craig and Andrew Nash. Both critics trace the origins of regional fiction as a genre to Scott, and Craig goes so far as to argue that ‘regionalism in Scotland is foundational to the regional novel itself’.13 For Nash, the distinction between regional and national fiction becomes especially problematic in the nineteenth century, when any fiction detailing a given place was largely held to be factual.14 Depictions of particular regions in Scotland were taken to represent the country as a whole, regardless of accuracy or fictional licence. The pioneering Scottish literary historian John Hepburn Millar, for instance, describes the village communities depicted in John Galt’s novels as ‘the nation in miniature’.15 As Craig has discussed extensively, this relation between region and nation is central to an understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish fiction. For Craig, Scottish fiction is too often provincial, in Kavanagh’s negative sense, leading at best to a vision of rural Scotland as representing an early stage of human history,16 and at worst to ‘a profound self-hatred’17 and escapist sensibility. In Craig’s view, Scottish fiction, defined through both region and nation, is always placed against the larger spectres of Englishness and modernity: it is always set apart from dominant cosmopolitan conceptions of the world. As he claims, without external impetus ‘Scotland is quite simply a world to which narrative, and therefore history, is alien’.18 Given the impossibility of constructing a ‘coherent narrative of the nation’ as an isolated and unified whole,19 Craig instead proposes an account of Scottish fiction that focuses both on the links between regions within Scotland and between Scotland and the rest of the world. Scottish fiction should be seen as a space of debate and cross-cultural influences: rather than depicting a pre-existing unified whole, it focuses on, and emerges from, notions of hybridity, relation and agency. Even as he develops this bold thesis, however, Craig continually discusses Scottish fiction within an explicitly national and regional paradigm. While Scottish novelists may, he argues, ‘construct their narratives as paradigms of a national consciousness’, they do so first and foremost through a focus on specific regional boundaries.20 Ultimately, however, the questions of Scottish fiction are configured as questions of nation. For Craig the relation between different perspectives that constitutes the Scottish novel – he here specifically cites Macmurray – is used to produce a concept of the nation.21 Like Robert Crawford, who partly bases his survey of Scottish literature on ‘the validity of the Scottish nation’,22 Craig views regional literature, in the specific context of Scotland, as always already pertaining to the nation. Even as Craig problematises the idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, he

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repeatedly asserts the importance of a national conception of both literature and community.23 In many respects, Brown can be viewed as a paradigmatic figure in Craig’s account of regional fiction. His fiction is only rarely concerned with the nation as a whole, but instead presents a dialogue on the nature of region and community that draws on culturally and historically diverse sources, and develops key notions of persons in relation. As Schoene notes, Brown’s work does not present a cohesive national identity, but illuminates the differences between Celtic and Norse cultures.24 The relationship between region and community is far more problematic in Brown’s fiction than Craig allows, however. Craig frequently places these terms in close proximity, and at times suggests that they are synonymous. Brown’s fiction uses ‘community’ as a way to interrogate assumed concepts of region: while regional literature necessarily emphasises local boundaries, a literature of community permits an investigation of how people live within them. Brown’s focus on community, tied to a particular place but not only accessible through that place, exemplifies a larger shift in twentieth-century Scottish fiction from a discussion of the regional to the communal. Brown and many of his contemporaries use the tropes of regional fiction to question not nation, but community.

I. Community and Nationalism In his account of twentieth-century Scottish fiction, Craig charts a fundamental paradox in which The narrative of the novel, as an imitation of history’s forward trajectory, has to be undone by formal structures which defy the progressive force of history and return narrative to the cyclic world of myth, to a world of eternal truths untouchable by history’s passage.25

Craig argues that one of the fundamental tropes of twentieth-century Scottish fiction is a rejection of classic narrative structures, such as the bildungsroman, that depict the life of an individual in the context of a forward-moving history. Instead, Scottish novelists use the novel form for non-linear and mythic ends. Rather than depicting the life of an individual over time, Scottish fiction, according to Craig, presents the life of a community in a timeless fashion. Craig uses Brown’s novels as key examples in this argument. He reads the return to ceremony at the close of Greenvoe, for instance, as the presentation of an alternative to ‘the unidirectional development of history’.26 Such a ritual is necessarily

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separate from any conception of history as a progressive force.27 Greenvoe, according to Craig, depicts a static landscape and people that remain unchanged over time. The validation of a cyclical and eternal perspective, tied closely to the land, is a triumph over the modern disasters depicted in Greenvoe, Beside the Ocean of Time and Time in a Red Coat. For Craig, Brown’s work presents the tension between extreme poles of modernity, a progressive force of destruction, and myth and ritual, which permit a return to the good and the human. Brown’s clearest account of this tension can be found in his play The Well, which depicts a small community across many centuries. Midway through the play the Keeper of the Well speaks of an opposition between cyclical and progressive views of time: Time here, in the island, is a single day, repeated over and over. The same people, dawn to sunset. The same things: birth, love, death. The old die, the children come dancing into time. Water shines on the new-born and the dead. Now other ideas have drifted over, have rooted in the island. Time is no longer a single day rising and falling. Time is stretched out into the past. Time runs on into the future. And the island’s past is seen as ignorance and savagery, dung and clay; the future is a golden road with treasures richer than gold at the end of it. (TP 72)

As in so many of Brown’s novels and stories, in The Well this paradox can only be solved ambiguously: an unnamed group of people return to the island after its destruction, and embrace a symbolic and eternal vision of the world. Community is founded in looking neither to the past nor the future, but in finding symbolic resonance in the present. This is a precise demonstration of Craig’s notion of a return to a mythic view of Scotland that lies entirely outside linear concepts of time. The continuance of human life, in this view, is predicated on a disaster: it is only when modernity fails, or when time itself has ended, that the mythic and ceremonial present can take hold. Yet Craig’s account of Brown’s work misrepresents not only a central paradox in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, but in the understanding of community. Brown and many of his contemporaries do not present this mythic sphere as an alternative to prevalent notions of history (in Craig’s progressive sense) and modernity. Brown does not advocate a return to a primitive or mythic way of life, nor does he suggest that this is even a possibility. Instead, the juxtaposition of linear and cyclical modes of being is used specifically to examine the nature of community as it is lived in the present. Craig perceives this turn towards the mythic as a unifying trope throughout twentieth-century Scottish literature, and particularly points to the work of Neil M. Gunn in his argument. For Craig, Butcher’s Broom and other early novels that depict recognisable

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places and historical events are concerned with uncovering ‘the mythic regions below the surface of history’28 as much as more explicitly mythic late works such as the utopian fantasy The Green Well of the Great Deep and the religious parable Blood Hunt. Gunn himself comes close to praise for such a mythic view in his claim that ‘verisimilitude’ is not sufficient justification for a novel:29 a factual account of real people and places would hold little interest for the reader. Instead, he claims novels must offer surprise and delight, a revelation of the world that is both new and recognisably true. This link between expectation and surprise is for Gunn best expressed in community. Community, he argues, is often thought of as a homogenising force that erases individual difference. The very opposite is true, however: for Gunn, community is the space where ‘each man had a character of his own’, and each individual’s actions are ‘astonishing’.30 A focus on community, on myth or on eternity cannot be thought of as a return to some prelapsarian or anti-modern arcadia, as Craig implies. The communal does not emerge intact from what Craig terms ‘primeval darkness’,31 or simply equate with ‘fantasy’, as Gifford implies.32 Instead, Gunn and Brown turn towards the mythic and the communal to expand the possibilities of fiction itself, and to illustrate community’s foundation not in unity, but in difference. The mythic and the communal are visible in, and pertain to, contemporary life in its everydayness. Community and the novel are closely linked in Gunn’s view because both employ traditional forms to reveal surprising individuality. Only within the formal structure of the novel, he implies, or through the relationships that constitute community, can the individual be known. The focus on non-linear time in the novels of Gunn and Brown cannot be considered, as Craig argues, as an ‘undoing’ of the form, but as a way to highlight the necessary relationship between fiction and community. A similar focus on the relationship between fiction and community can be found in the work of Robin Jenkins and Iain Crichton Smith, who also shift from depictions of real communities to wider inquiries into the nature of community itself. Both authors repeatedly focus on the relation between the writer and community. In their novels, as in the kailyard fictions of J. M. Barrie, ‘the values which this past community embody are challenged by a modern frame of mind’, as Nash claims.33 The writer, a figure outside of the community, is used as a palimpsest through whom the reader can experience a cohesive form of community now thought lost. Only rarely in any of these writers’ novels can the narrator enter into community, a unification that would be made possible only by death. The use of this external, individualised

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narrator highlights community’s continued importance in modern life, even as it is unobtainable in an idealised form. The weight given to myth and community in these novels does not herald a rejection of, or an alternative to, narratives of nation or ‘history’, in Craig’s specific sense of a progressive force. Instead, these works present community as a fundamental way of being. Rather than looking towards or rejecting specifically national models of community, this focus on community as such allows for a broader discussion of being in the world. The particular presentation of community found in these texts can be best understood in relation to Ferdinand Tönnies’s Community and Civil Society, one of the founding texts of modern sociology. Tönnies sets forth ‘community’ and ‘society’ as two related, but ultimately opposed, ways of understanding the place of individuals in the world. Community is the underlying constitution of civilisation and allows individuals to develop their identities in relation to a wider whole. Society, conversely, depends on pre-existing individual identities. Tönnies defines ‘community’ as the term applied to human unity, whether it be kinship, neighbourhood or friendship, while ‘society’ is used to describe individualism and inorganic commonality. Community as a localised and homogeneous common life is ‘now lost to us’, but also ever-present: “Wherever human beings are bound together in an organic fashion by their inclination and common consent, Community of one kind or another exists.’34 Community is not only a localised phenomenon, then, but more simply a way of being: small families and large labour unions are equally examples of community. Tönnies’s most important contribution to the study of community is his relation of common will to ‘fiction’. Tönnies argues that all commonality is always fictional, be it common good, or common ground or common personality: ‘such a thing can only exist by means of a fiction on the part of the individuals concerned’.35 Whether as theory or belief – that is, whether considered as philosophical abstraction or individual will – the common can be known only through shared fiction. Tönnies’s juxtaposition of ‘common will’ and ‘community’ suggests new interpretations of the nature of community. Tönnies’s final ideas about community cast new light on the work of Brown, Gunn, Jenkins and Smith. In their novels, community, as lived experience or as common will, does not exist in the present as an observable reality. No celebration of the mythic, the communal or even ‘the primeval’ can alter the course of history, nor does such a celebration allow the novel to present a vision of a viable alternative to contemporary life. For these novelists community not only is fiction, as Tönnies argues, but is precisely what is revealed by fiction. Fiction’s purpose, or use, is community, for community can only be accessed through fiction. These writers do not use the form of

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the novel to return to a world of eternal truths, as Craig has it, but to show that any such world is knowable only through and as fiction. Indeed, in a footnote added to later editions of his work, Tönnies claims that not only is commonality a fiction, but so is individuality.36 The importance of Tönnies’s work lies in his portrait of two types of social bond, community and society, which are not linked to historical periods and are ultimately revealed as fictions. Yet like Brown’s ‘turn’ discussed above, for Tönnies the rise of individualism and society allows for its own defeat. Like Auguste Comte, Tönnies suggests that as the will and moral consciousness of the individual develop, so too does the possibility for a collective moral consciousness. Community is made possible by its own antithesis. Community and society are always in constant flux; they are mutually necessary ways of understanding the world, known only as fictions. In a variety of different forms, this idea underlies a great deal of contemporary political philosophy, where the idea of ‘community without community’ is frequently asserted. Although this idea has been explored above, especially in relation to Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, it also underlies the work of Jürgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Giorgio Agamben and many others. All of these thinkers raise the issue of how, given that community is a necessary fiction, one can engage in an ethics and politics of relation. Indeed, for Nancy the ‘common end’ that arises from the absence of community is justice:37 without a pre-existing communal framework, the question of ethics becomes the central human concern. If community cannot be approached as a unified whole, it must instead be seen in terms of division and relation. In a text summarising numerous strains of contemporary ethico-political thought, Simon Critchley makes this point clear: ethics must be thought of as dividing subjectivity and opening it to otherness.38 Whether in Habermas’s focus on experiential practices within the ‘lifeworld’ or Levinas’s account of intersubjectivity, what unites many contemporary thinkers of political ethics is a focus on relation as it is experienced in the everyday, not as it might be presented in abstraction. Without a pre-existing, ideal community, ethics must be founded on individual relation. In a more nuanced manner, many of these thinkers thus return to Tönnies’s original idea: community can be reconstructed not by a return to itself, but by the development of individuals in relation. The ethical conception of community without community, in this sense, is entirely opposed to nationalist models of community. Nationalism, as Anthony D. Smith makes clear, draws on traditional religious conceptions of community, and makes the past itself sacred.

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It is only in the past that the ‘peculiar values and traditions of the community, without which there could be no nation and no national destiny’, can be found.39 The national – and by extension, the regional – community is not merely founded on tradition, but is tradition itself. The ethical community, on the contrary, removes all traces of tradition and idealism in its focus on interpersonal relations. Craig’s conception of a community of difference that nevertheless informs and relates to ideas of nation is finally unworkable. An ethics of human relation stands against a return to traditional communal structuring: a community of difference cannot be a nation, and a body of fiction, such as Brown’s, that explores and manifests a community of difference cannot be thought of solely in terms of national, and especially nationalist, literature. Ryan D. Shirey and Alex Thomson have recently articulated the continuing importance of nationalism in studies of Scottish literature. According to Thomson, ‘national literary history is nationalist literary history’, and such a literary history can never be critical.40 Similarly, for Shirey the ‘spectre of nationalism continues to haunt contemporary readings of Scottish literature and culture and becomes itself a problem with which writers and scholars must “come to terms”’.41 Any understanding of Scottish literature predicated on a pre-existing nationalist model is likely to invoke traditional conceptualisations of nation and community that are no longer – and perhaps have never been – tenable. As Eleanor Bell has argued, a critical tradition that has been focused on ‘canon-building and the construction of the national tradition’ is unlikely to be able to account for fundamental changes in the nature of community.42 Bell, however, is too willing to see the destabilisation of community as an essentially modern phenomenon. For Bell, following Gerard Delanty, strictly nationalist criticism is unable to address ‘the many forms of fluctuation affecting previously “stable” communities’.43 As with Craig’s approach to nation, Bell’s account of community reinforces the conceptualisation of a pre-existent unity that it explicitly questions. While both critics move towards a relational conception of nation and community, their arguments are nevertheless founded on the ideas of coherence and stability that they seek to complicate. While this paradox is perhaps endemic to any critical study that approaches a national literature, an investigation into the entwined foundationalism and anti-foundationalism in Brown’s work provides new possibilities for the study of Scottish literature and, indeed, literature in general. Brown’s importance in an account of Scottish literature comes in part from his dual insider/outsider status. Born of a Scottish mother and an Orcadian father, he at once links his work to that of George Douglas Brown as part of a Scottish tradition, and introduces

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Orkney in direct opposition to mainland Scotland (FI 7–21). His primary literary influences are not Scottish, but Icelandic.44 His work is part of a self-proclaimed Scottish literary tradition, yet also draws heavily on both local and international traditions. The complexity of his work cannot be accounted for by a traditional nationalist reading: while it can be productively read through Craig’s view of national dialogues, it also exposes the limits of nation as a defining parameter. From a more theoretical perspective, Brown’s continued importance to a discussion of community can be found in the way that he, like many of the philosophers mentioned above, shows community to have always been founded on difference. The very cyclical nature of his writings that, according to Craig, places his work outside of history is a way not of proposing an alternative model of community, but of demonstrating the impossibility of an idealised community. Brown’s frequent condemnations of modernity and progress are not calls for a reversion to an earlier way of being. Instead, his work demonstrates that the failure of a unified community is not a particularly modern problem, but is intrinsic to the nature of community itself.

II. Community, Ethics and the Fiction of Common Life In one of his more explicitly political texts, Nancy claims that ‘Philosophy is the destabilization, the suspension, and the dissolution of the mythical present’.45 This destabilisation is equally active in fiction. While Nancy’s political writings seek to question the present, however, Brown’s works, alongside those of many of his contemporaries, question the ‘mythical present’ by first asserting the instability of the mythical past. The relation between historical community and fiction is made clear by the philosopher Sarah Kofman: only the foreignness of that which can never be held in common can found the community. An idyllic community which erases all trace of discord, of difference, of death, which pretends to rest on a perfect harmony, a fusion conferring immediate unity, can only be a fictional community, a beautiful (psychotic?) story.46

This beautiful story of an idyllic community is found throughout Brown’s fiction, and is the very story he uses his fiction to question. Brown’s fiction simultaneously presents a community founded on difference and a community founded on harmony. These two senses of community are always at work: to see one as evolving from or superseding the other would constitute a misreading of Brown’s conception of

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community and an attempt to make utopian what is predicated on the present. Brown’s writing is especially notable in this regard because he highlights the way this discourse is possible only in fiction itself. Only fiction can present the unified and stable community, as Kofman makes clear, but if that is the case, then it follows that fiction is the best medium to present the tension between the idealised community and the community without community. Only fiction can present the very form of community it simultaneously destabilises. Fiction’s ability to embody this tension is ultimately approachable as a matter of ethics. As Martha C. Nussbaum has argued in an account of literature and moral philosophy, ‘certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist’.47 Bell gestures to an ethical function of fiction in the introduction to Questioning Scotland, in which she recommends an investigation of the ‘self-conscious ethical imperative’ in literature in place of a critical tendency towards ‘parochial, stereotypical, cultural nationalist terms’.48 This acknowledgement of the ethics of reading owes much to Derrida, for whom reading is not an attempt to decipher the sense of what is already in the text, but is necessarily a question of ethical responsibility. Reading begins with the Other. Writing, too, as Derrida articulates in an essay on Levinas, is a response to the Other.49 Texts cannot be thought of as static artefacts. Instead, the acts of reading and writing are engagements between individuals. Texts are always relational, and reading and writing are always active exchanges. For Wayne C. Booth, a focus on the ethics of literature is itself constitutive of community. Fictions that invite ethical thought in turn invite agreement; to accept the ethical construction of a text is, at least temporarily, to agree with it.50 The interpretive community – the community of readers – is thus visible as a community formed by the text’s own ethical imperative. Fiction, in this sense, forms and reflects upon community. Nussbaum traces this idea to Greek theatre: when a work of art is presented to a community of spectators under particular conditions such as a civic or religious festival, the spectators are made aware that the values of the community are themselves being expressed. Narrative art is, in Nussbaum’s reading, a vehicle for ‘communal self-understanding’.51 In moral philosophy, this function is particularly related to the novel. The novel requires for its existence a community of readers, a community that it in turn forms. The novel, Nussbaum argues, ‘is a cultural construct that itself helps to constitute its readers as social beings. It uses the language of community, and joins readers with both characters and author (and with one another) in the bonds of community’.52 The novel is a form that both depicts and constitutes community.

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The root of modern accounts of the relationship between literature and community can be seen in eighteenth-century German Romanticism. In the twenty-seventh letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, for instance, Schiller argues that while nature and reason both influence the relation between an individual and society, it is only beauty that creates community.53 Community is made possible through art. Yet the inverse argument, that common life itself is a work of fiction, has notably been introduced into discussions of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Scottish literature by Ian Duncan and Susan Manning. Duncan finds in David Hume the central claim behind Scott’s novels, that fiction is the most appropriate medium for a presentation of reality. In the conclusion of the first part of the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume demonstrates that reality is produced through collective, consensually shared imagination. For Hume, as for Tönnies, common life – as a construction of reality created by a system of conventions – is both fictive and the underlying framework of thought. Crucially, however, this is not an undermining fiction. As Hume repeatedly asserts, sceptical philosophy may be limited to common life, but can never ‘undermine the reasonings of common life’.54 Recognising the fictiveness of common life does not finally alienate the individual from common life, but makes him aware of his relation to it. All philosophical thought is dependent upon common life, and any philosophy, even a sceptical one, must begin within that framework. Hume does not criticise fiction, but rather uses it as an instrument of criticism. As Duncan argues, Hume legitimises the fictive as the ‘“authentic” representation of common life, since common life is a consensually reproduced fiction’.55 Hume’s account of the primacy of imagination makes fictional realism in the British novel possible. Only when one first recognises common life as a consensual fiction can fiction itself be seen as bearing on common life. Walter Scott’s Waverley, for instance, uses historical and romantic tropes to articulate a sceptical approach to narrative history that culminates in a ‘sentimental and ironical reattachment to common life’.56 A more strident development of Hume’s philosophy in the novel can be found in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams in which, as Leo Damrosch argues, ‘Godwin sees that if experience is fictive and if consensus breaks down, then fiction is nothing but fiction’.57 The fiction immediately following Hume reveals the fictive nature of common life by highlighting its own fictive qualities. While Manning is chiefly concerned with the relationship between Hume’s thought and the political and social issues of his day, her account of the tension between fragmentation and unity in the Treatise also bears on the nature of fiction itself. While analytic thought fragments,

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she claims, writing ‘establishes connections; these, Hume is clear, are the continuities of fiction, but they are nothing short of necessary fictions’.58 ‘Union’, as both a political construct and the development of sympathy, is only available through the imagination. Manning argues that the relation between union and fragmentation is a particularly noteworthy feature not only of Hume’s thought, but of Scottish literature in general. Hume’s epistemology ‘remains active in Scottish and American fiction as it does not in English literature’.59 Duncan also demonstrates that a reading of Hume contributes specifically to an understanding of Scottish literature in the period immediately following him, as well as to ideas of literature in general. The work of Scott, Galt and Hogg certainly manifests many of the same ideas of the relation between fiction and common life, and between union and fragmentation, that are found in Hume. It is also possible, however, both to see these relationships explored as ardently in more recent Scottish fiction and to recognise them as the central concerns of the novel itself. The Humean fiction of common life and the common life of fiction proposed by Nussbaum and Booth are finally complementary ways of approaching literature, specifically the novel. On one hand, these are indisputably different, and historically conditioned, senses of ‘fiction’. Damrosch argues that even if truth itself is fictive, ‘mental fictions that are tied to real experience differ from fictions that invent experience which no one has ever had’.60 Yet this tension is allowed for and explicated in the blurred boundaries of regional fiction. Novels that at once purport to represent truly a particular place, time and way of life, and at the same time reveal themselves as works of imagination, open up the possibility for the relation of the real experience of common life and its representation in fiction. It is by no means accidental that Wolfgang Iser chooses the pastoral as his primary example of the fictive, which he defines as the ‘as if’ that brackets the real world.61 The pastoral form highlights the relation of generic and geographical borders and offers an ‘interweaving of two worlds’.62 This same interweaving can be seen in regional fiction, which displays a tension between the local and the universal, the real and the fictive.63 As fundamentally different as Scott’s, Barrie’s and Brown’s ideas of both region and verisimilitude are, the works of all three use the genre of regional fiction to offer new insights into the relation between region, fiction and language itself. The use of outside narrators already removed from the community, the use of regionally-specific language and the focus on geographical borders all highlight the shifting relation between the world and the text. As Damrosch points out, Hume frames his account of knowledge in terms of language: ideas are stimulated by words themselves, even

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marks on the page. Nowhere can the chain of consensus be seen more readily than in texts.64 Knowledge of the death of Caesar, for instance, is based ‘on the unanimous testimony of historians’, known through ‘certain characters and letters’.65 Consensus, as the basis of common life, is enabled through writing, just as much as it enables writing. Similarly, Hume frames his presentation of the association of ideas in a discussion of poetry. As Donald W. Livingston makes clear, for Hume the cultivation of literature is closely linked with the cultivation of normative thought: literature is ‘nothing less than the perfecting and understanding of the human mind’.66 Common life is constituted by language (both ritual and everyday) and narrative; these two elements, as Livingston argues, underlie both morality and community. More recent philosophers have looked to language itself for insight into the nature of common life and community. For Giorgio Agamben, the paradoxes underlying common life can be resolved through a focus on the primacy of language. He writes: There can be no true human community on the basis of a presupposition – be it a nation, a language, or even the a priori of communication of which hermeneutics speaks. What unites human beings among themselves is not a nature, a voice, or a common imprisonment in signifying language; it is the vision of language itself and, therefore, the experience of language’s limits, its end. A true community can only be a community that is not presupposed. Pure philosophical presentation, therefore, cannot merely be the presentation of ideas about language or the world; instead, it must above all be the presentation of the Idea of language.67

It is only when one accepts the fictiveness of common life and abandons pre-conceptions of nation and community that the paramount importance of language becomes clear. Community does not pre-exist language, nor can language simply reveal a pre-existing community. Instead, it is by looking to language itself that any community can be known. Language provides a way to rethink ‘imagined communities’; when nation, region and all other presuppositions are removed, what remains is the central relation between language and community. Few if any novelists would attempt Agamben’s idea of ‘pure philosophical presentation’, if such a thing were even possible, and fiction can instead be said to focus on ‘the presentation of ideas about language or the world’. Yet fiction’s ability to recognise itself as such, to reveal the fictiveness of common life precisely by portraying it as fiction, allows for an opening of Agamben’s promised idea of language. This removal of presuppositions about the nature of community and the world in favour of the idea of language appears at the resolution

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of each of Brown’s novels. Each text climaxes in a death – either of the individual or of an entire community – after which language itself is revealed. This is not a purely romantic notion, where art is elevated above everyday life. Instead, each of Brown’s major novels ends with pure language, language that is at once revealed in material presence and divorced from everyday use; there are no longer any available presuppositions about nation or history, but only language itself, and the promise of language. In Greenvoe, the enactors of the ancient ritual cannot determine whether the dust speaks the words ‘Rain. Share. Yoke. Sun’ or ‘Resurrection’ (G 278). Language does not exist in the form of communication, but simply is, as tied to the land as to its human audience, and ultimately ambiguous. In Time in a Red Coat, Maurya speaks lies to no one, and the only path to knowledge is to ‘read the stone’ (TRC 249). Language is not a form of interhuman communication, but again is as pure, and as distanced from human life, as a stone. Jock, at the close of Magnus, shouts prayers to no one, and then walks in silence: language, as prayer, is finally removed from mundane experience and has its own life. Vinland ends with three sentences, each given its own paragraph, which present a loosely causal chain between materiality, time and language: ‘Next day Ragna gave the gold coin to the abbot. They buried Ranald on the following day. On the third day, the monks sang a requiem for him’ (V 232). The requiem does not have an audience – even in the form of the novel’s readership – but can exist only as an idea of pure language. Finally, in Beside the Ocean of Time, Thorfinn and Sophie speak of a poetry yet to come, a language that will pass beyond their own human experience and unify ‘the end and the beginning’ (BOT 217). Thus, at the end of these novels, by opening common life to language, Brown portrays both the fictiveness of community and the possibility that fiction, as language itself, can create common life. Community is revealed as a product of language, and only accessible through language. As much as this is a statement about the nature of art, it is also inherently ethical and political. Arendt, indeed, argues that works of art are closer to politics than any other object, insofar as both are only possible in the public sphere.68 No work of art can exist in isolation, but depends on public recognition. For Brown, fiction is a way to demonstrate the continued need for community and the primacy of the public sphere: the community of readers becomes the truest form of community possible. Fiction is, in this sense, inherently political, insofar as it both presents and creates common life. Community can only be recognised as a product of language; human relation can

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only be known through fiction. This is a new form of ‘community without community’: community is present only through consensually shared fictions. The elevation of language at the end of each novel suggests a possible utopian reading: if the realm of poetry and language is made visible only after the destruction of the world, then fiction is removed from lived, everyday experience. Yet as Jacques Rancière makes clear in an article about the nature of government, utopia is itself closely connected to realism: ‘Utopia is not the elsewhere, nor the future realization of an unfulfilled dream. It is an intellectual construction which brings a place in thought into conjunction with a perceived or perceptible intuitive space.’69 This is precisely what the visions of language and community at the close of Brown’s novels indicate: they offer not an alternative to history, nor a reaffirmation of a Durkheimian unified community, but instead indicate how language reveals the fictiveness of common life, and how common life can be revealed in fiction. These novels do not point towards a future community, nor do they solely reassert the primacy of a past community; instead, they demonstrate how the nature of community can be made present in language. As Rancière clarifies, in lines reminiscent of Brown’s, The encounter of literary power with democratic literarity is itself bounded by the proposition of a new writing of a new community: communal breath, lines of iron and water of the community animated by the living link, of the community as a living work of art.70

It is only when community is revealed as itself a work of art, not as a presupposition or a pre-existing reality, that a discussion of the nature of community can truly begin. This focus on the nature of community as fiction can be found throughout twentieth-century Scottish literature: the impossibility of traditional forms of community and the possibility of community in fiction unites novels as diverse as Gray’s Lanark, Jenkins’s The Missionaries and Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners. It can be seen in the works of Muriel Spark and Janice Galloway, Iain (M.) Banks and Ali Smith, James Robertson and Shena Mackay. These writers have little in common stylistically or thematically, and least of all in terms of nationalist perspectives, but are united in a continuing investigation into the relation between fiction and community. Nor is this focus limited to Scottish writing. Brown’s closest peer is the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. The similarity of their approaches to fiction is often astounding: not only are they both Catholic novelists writing accounts of rural communities with particular reference to Icelandic sagas, but the plots

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of their novels often bear comparison on a one-to-one basis. Greenvoe is closely paralleled by The Atom Station, Beside the Ocean of Time by World Light, The Golden Bird by The Fish Can Sing, and so on. While the limited number of Laxness’s works currently available in English makes a full comparison difficult, such an analysis would be immensely rewarding.71 For both writers, the impossibility and necessity of community lie at the heart of their novels: the novel itself becomes a form with which to explore the nature of community. A similarly productive comparison can be made between Scottish novelists of the 1960s and 1970s and their Austrian contemporaries, including Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Marlen Haushofer and Elfriede Jelinek. The absence of such comparative studies suggests the limitations of a national(ist) model of Scottish literature. It is difficult to argue that the Scottish writers listed above share a conception of nation. Similarly, sweeping pronouncements on the nature of Scottish fiction that attempt to reject a nationalist model are often problematic themselves. Schoene, for instance, claims that: ‘In opposition to the writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance contemporary writers are less preoccupied with the propagation of a consistent communal identity than with the struggle for the identity of individuals as well as regional, ethnic and sexual minorities.’72 While such claims are undoubtedly true in part, they establish a false binary. Fiction can never be an account of individuals or of communities, but instead offers community, itself a fiction, as the way individuals are known. If there is a unifying thread in contemporary Scottish literature, it is an interest in the possibilities of fiction itself. In the final year of his life, Brown wrote of giant bonfires 150 years previously, into which all of Orkney threw their belongings. From this fire, each crofter would light a torch to be carried back to his own house. This fire, Brown writes, represented ‘a communal ceremonial beauty that has vanished forever’.73 Yet even as he laments a vanished community, Brown here provides an account of the way in which community has always been a consensual fiction: it is only as the Orcadians decide that the Johnsmas fires represent community that they do so. The symbolic function of the bonfire is a mutual fiction, shared by the community, which in turn informs and represents community. Whether the fiction of ritual and myth, or fiction in the form of texts, community can only be known – and, finally, can only be – as fiction. Brown’s fiction is best appreciated as a demonstration of what it is that fiction does: create community. That he is not alone in this perspective, but shares elements of his thought with writers from many intellectual and national traditions, suggests new possibilities for the study of Scottish

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literature. Community is finally the nature of fiction, and fiction is itself the presencing of community.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Anderson and Norquay, ‘An Interview with Alasdair Gray’, p. 7. Linklater, Orkney and Shetland, p. 256. Snell, ‘The Regional Novel’, p. 50. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., pp. 15, 42. Gifford, ‘Out of the World and into Blawearie’, p. 298. Gifford also includes Brown in a surprising listing of writers whose work demonstrates a ‘detachment from history and politics which is virtually complete’: Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh (p. 297). Murray and Murray make similar claims in Interrogation of Silence. Dunn, ‘An Island Voice’, p. 4. Sharpton, ‘“Hamnavoe Revisited”’, p. 24. Schmid, ‘Keeping the Sources Pure’, p. 28. Kavanagh, A Poet’s Country, p. 237. Schmid, ‘Keeping the Sources Pure’, pp. 31–2. Craig, ‘Scotland and the Regional Novel’, p. 222. Nash, Kailyard and Scottish Literature, p. 52. Quoted in Crawford, Scotland’s Books, p. 530. Craig, ‘Scotland and the Regional Novel’, p. 253. Craig, Out of History, p. 12. Craig evokes ‘parochial’ as a particular term of abuse in this passage, and makes no mention of Kavanagh’s reclamation of the term. Ibid., p. 37. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 237. Craig, ‘Scotland and the Regional Novel’, p. 221. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 116. Crawford, Scotland’s Books, p. 6. See Craig, ‘Scotland and Hybridity’, for a full account. Eleanor Bell discusses Craig’s conceptualisation of ‘national imagination’ in Questioning Scotland, pp. 80–9. Schoene, ‘A Passage to Scotland’, p. 115. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 166. Craig, ‘Scotland and the Regional Novel’, p. 253. Craig, Out of History, p. 59. Craig, Modern Scottish Novel, p. 153. Gunn, Atom of Delight, p. 8. Ibid., p. 111. Craig, Out of History, p. 59. Gifford, “Out of the World”, p. 287. Nash, Kailyard and Scottish Fiction, p. 62. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, pp. 13, 28.

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35. Ibid. p. 53. Italics in original. 36. Ibid., p. 130. The Scottish philosopher Andrew Seth arrived at much the same conclusion in 1887, the year of Community and Civil Society’s first edition. See Craig, ‘Beyond Reason’ for a fuller discussion of Seth’s relation to both Hume and Macmurray. 37. Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 61. 38. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, p. 130. 39. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, p. 115. 40. Thomson, ‘“You can’t get there from here”’, p. 16. 41. Shirey, ‘A Shrinking Highlands’, pp. 1–2. 42. Bell, ‘Postmodernism, Nationalism’, p. 86. 43. Bell, Questioning Scotland, p. 132. 44. Schmid’s ‘Keeping the Sources Pure’ provides a thorough account of Brown’s more contemporary influences, focusing on Edwin Muir, Thomas Mann, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She also notes in closing that a further discussion of T. S. Eliot is required (pp. 275–6). 45. Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 80. 46. Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 30. 47. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, p. 5. 48. Bell, Questioning Scotland, p. 2. 49. Derrida, Psyche, p. 150. 50. Booth, Company We Keep, pp. 91–2. 51. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, p. 16. 52. Ibid., p. 166. Nussbaum’s account of Henry James’s use of ‘we’, rather than ‘I’ (p. 48) in the construction of narrative voice can be interestingly contrasted with Craig’s use of ‘we’ whenever he writes of Scotland. Craig’s most pertinent thoughts on community finally lie not in his explicit accounts, but in community-building statements such as ‘Scotland is our intended nation’ (‘Scotland and Hybridity’, p. 251). 53. Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, pp. 137–8. 54. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 36. 55. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p. 124. 56. Ibid., p. 29. 57. Damrosch, Fictions of Reality, p. 227. 58. Manning, Fragments of Union, p. 42. 59. Ibid., p. 58. 60. Damrosch, Fictions of Reality, p. 60. 61. Iser, Fictive and the Imaginary, pp. 12–17. 62. Ibid., p. 226. 63. Although critics such as Snell strongly argue against an identification of the regional novel with the rural novel, pastoral and rural modes have repeatedly been used in Scottish regional fiction. The appearance of Spenserian ‘Shepherds’ Calendars’ in the works of Hogg and Ian Macpherson is one notable example, but many writers, not least Brown, make use of specifically pastoral modes in their work. 64. Damrosch, Fictions of Reality, p. 27. 65. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 58. 66. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, p. 267. 67. Agamben, Potentialities, p. 47.

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68. 69. 70. 71.

Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, p. 190. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 15. Rancière, Flesh of Words, p. 110. While no such study currently exists, a number of interesting works have been published on the relation between Scottish literature and medieval Nordic texts, including D’Arcy’s Scottish Skalds and Sagamen and Margaret Elphinstone’s ‘Some Fictions of Scandinavian Scotland’. 72. Schoene, ‘A Passage to Scotland’, p. 114. 73. Brown, The First Wash of Spring, pp. 204–5.

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Muir, Edwin, Selected Prose, ed. George Mackay Brown (London: John Murray, 1987). Muir, Edwin, The Structure of the Novel (London: The Hogarth Press, [1928] 1957). Murray, Isobel, Introduction, Magnus, by George Mackay Brown (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1998), pp. vii–xi. Murray, Isobel and Bob Tait, ‘George Mackay Brown: Greenvoe’, in Ten Modern Scottish Novels (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), pp. 144–67. Murray, Rowena, ‘The Influence of Norse Literature on the TwentiethCentury Writer George Mackay Brown’, in Dietrich Strauss and Horst W. Drescher (eds), Scottish Language and Literature, Medieval and Renaissance: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference, 1984 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1986), pp. 547–57. Murray, Rowena and Brian Murray, Interrogation of Silence: The Writings of George Mackay Brown (London: John Murray, 2004). Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1996] 2000). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘La Comparution/The Compearance: From the Existence of “Communism” to the Community of Existence’, trans. Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory 20.3, August 1992, pp. 371–98. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Creation of the World, or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, trans. Richard Stamp and Simon Sparks, in Simon Sparks (ed.), A Finite Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 51–77. Nansen, Fridtjof, ‘The Norsemen in America’, Geographical Journal 38.6, 1911, pp. 557–75. Nash, Andrew, Kailyard and Scottish Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1881] 1997). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1873–76] 1997). Nussbaum, Martha C., Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (London: Penguin Classics, [1978] 1981). Patocˇka, Jan, Body, Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák, ed. James Dodd (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1998). Profumo, David, ‘She of the Black Brown Hair’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 1984, p. 676.

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Rancière, Jacques, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1998] 2004). Rancière, Jacques, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 2007). Rapport, Nigel, Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Riach, Alan, Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of a Modern Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 2 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [1983] 1985). Robb, David S., ‘Greenvoe: A Poet’s Novel’, Scottish Literary Journal 19.1, May 1992, pp. 47–60. Robinson, Marilynne, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, [1998] 2005). Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1795] 2004). Schmid, Sabine, ‘Keeping the Sources Pure’: The Making of George Mackay Brown (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2003). Schoene, Berthold, The Making of Orcadia: Narrative Identity in the Prose Work of George Mackay Brown (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995). Schoene, Berthold, ‘A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Tradition’, Scotlands 2.1, 1995, pp. 107–22. Scott, Tom, ‘Orkney as Pairt O an Eternal Mood’, Chapman 60, April 1990, pp. 32–8. Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe (Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics, [1820] 1998). Scott, Walter, The Pirate (London: Adam and Charles Black, [1822] 1897). Sharpton, William, ‘“Hamnavoe Revisited”: An Interview with George Mackay Brown’, Chapman 84, 1996, pp. 20–7. Shirey, Ryan D., ‘A Shrinking Highlands: Neil Gunn, Nationalism, and the “World Republic of Letters”’, International Journal of Scottish Literature 3 (2007), accessed 27 July 2008, . Smith, Ali, Introduction, Greenvoe, by George Mackay Brown (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004). Smith, Anthony D., Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, [1998] 2003). Smith, Iain Crichton, ‘Books from the Journalism’, in Hilda D. Spear (ed.), George Mackay Brown: A Survey of His Work and a Full Bibliography (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), pp. 7–17. Smith, Iain Crichton, Consider the Lilies (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, [1968] 1987). Smith, Iain Crichton, Towards the Human: Selected Essays (Edinburgh: MacDonald Publishers, 1986). Snell, K. D. M., ‘The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary Research’, in K. D. M. Snell (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–53. Spear, Hilda, George Mackay Brown: A Survey of His Work and a Full Bibliography (New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). Speirs, John, The Scots Literary Tradition: An Essay in Criticism, 2nd edn. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). Stanford, Derek, ‘One Summer Week’, Scotsman, 27 May 1972, section 2, p. 3. Strysick, Michael, ‘The End of Community and the Politics of Grammar’, Cultural Critique 36, Spring 1997, pp. 195–215. Taylor, Alan, ‘Traveller from Eden of Orkney’, The Sunday Herald, 18 February 2001, p. 10. Taylor, Alexander Burt, Introduction, The Orkneyinga Saga, trans. Alexander Burt Taylor (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1938). Taylor, Charles, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991). Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2007). Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Thomson, Alex, ‘“You can’t get there from here”: Devolution and Scottish Literary History’, International Journal of Scottish Literature 3 (2007), accessed 27 July 2008, . Thomson, D.P., Orkney Through the Centuries: Lights and Shadows of the Church’s Life in the Northern Isles (Perth: Munro Press, 1956). Tönnies, Ferdinand, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1887] 2001). Waugh, Robin, ‘Saint Magnús’s Fame in Orkneyinga Saga’, Journal of English and German Philology 102.2, April 2003, pp. 163–87. Weber, Max, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1920] 1964). Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (London and New York: Routledge Classics, [1949] 2002). Wittig, Kurt, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1958). Young, Julian, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 4, 107, 120, 121–2 Agamben, Giorgio, 155, 161 allegory, 96, 99–102, 103 Allison, Henry, 20 Anderson, Benedict, 6–7, 25n Annwn, David, 126, 127 anthropology, 8, 28, 73, 82–3 Arendt, Hannah, 95, 104, 113, 120, 121, 162 Ariès, Philippe, 77 Around the Orkney Peat-Fires, 114 Austrian fiction, 164 Badiou, Alain, 155 Bal, Mieke, 102 Barrie, J. M., 8, 9, 10, 153, 160 A Window in Thrums, 9 Bataille, Georges, 22, 83–4, 88, 129, 130, 132, 139 Beckett, Samuel, 143 Bell, Eleanor, 156, 158, 165n Benjamin, Walter, 80, 81, 100 Bevan, Archie, 3, 5 Blanchot, Maurice, 4, 21, 22, 24, 88, 129, 137–9, 141, 155 on disaster, 39–41, 145 Bloch, Ernst, 95, 122 Boland, Eavan, ‘The War Horse’, 123n Bold, Alan, 25n, 56n, 57n, 86–7, 127 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 75, 83, 86, 87, 88, 92n Booth, Wayne C., 95–6, 158, 160 Bosanquet, Mary, 92n

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Bowie, Andrew, 100 Brown, George Douglas, 13, 14, 15, 16, 156 The House with the Green Shutters, 10–12, 17 Brown, George Mackay agricultural themes in, 2, 31–2, 66, 75, 82, 107, 117–18, 126, 134–5 ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, 131 Beside the Ocean of Time, 24, 31, 35, 43, 49, 80, 94, 97, 105, 106, 107, 113–22, 137, 152, 162, 164 ‘The Broken Heraldry’, 37–8, 43–4 ‘A Calendar of Love’, 32 A Calendar of Love and Other Stories, 28 Catholicism of, 4, 52, 58, 65, 122, 163 ‘The Cinquefoil’, 51–2 Collected Poems, 126 ‘The Corn and the Tares’, 42 critical reception of, 3–4, 25n, 125–8, 148–9 ‘The Eye of the Hurricane’, 36, 108 ‘The Feast at Paplay’, 89–90 ‘Five Green Waves’, 113–14 For the Islands I Sing, 4, 10, 25n, 37, 58, 65, 86, 125, 130, 132, 135, 137, 138, 143–4, 149 The Golden Bird, 24, 105–8, 113, 114, 164 Greenvoe, 3, 10, 16, 24, 28, 30–55, 58–9, 94, 96–7, 105,

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Index 114, 115, 117, 119, 122, 136, 137, 141, 151–2, 162, 164 Letters from Hamnavoe, 133–4 ‘The Life and Death of John Voe’, 108–9, 114 The Loom of Light, 58, 64, 65–8, 69, 71, 73, 82 Magnus, 24, 31, 58, 62, 63–4, 66, 67, 68–89, 90, 91, 94, 96–7, 99, 100, 107, 112, 113, 122, 138–9, 162 Northern Lights, 139 on community, 4–5, 16, 22, 23, 24, 30, 37–9, 54–5, 63, 78, 90, 96, 121, 125, 128, 130–1, 132–45, 148–9, 152, 157–8, 164 on progress, 37–8, 48, 105–6, 114, 121, 133–4, 140, 157 on the seamless garment, 63–4, 66, 67–8, 73–4, 90, 96, 110–11 An Orkney Tapestry, 37, 50, 52, 58, 62–5, 69, 76, 81, 115, 116, 125, 141 ‘Orkney: The Whale Islands’, 3 ‘The Paraffin Lamp’, 140 Pictures in the Cave, 114, 122 ‘Prologue’, 1 ‘The Scholar’, 108 ‘The Sea-King’s Daughter’, 115 ‘The Seller of Silk Shirts’, 46 ‘Seven Poets’, 42 A Spell for Green Corn, 75, 107–8 ‘St Magnus’, 90 ‘Themes’, 2 Time in a Red Coat, 24, 94, 96–105, 106, 111, 113, 114, 116, 122, 152, 162 ‘Tithonus’, 107 The Two Fiddlers, 25n Vinland (novel), 24, 94, 97, 105, 109–13, 114, 116, 140, 162 ‘Vinland’ (poem), 109 ‘Weather Bestiary’, 46 The Well, 152 Winter Tales, 141–2 ‘The Wireless Set’, 140 ‘Witch’, 28, 30 ‘A Work for Poets’, 3 Brown, Susan Love, 28

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179

Brunsden, George M., 64 Burns, Robert, 125 Butler, Judith, 26n Calvinism, 52 Carr, David, 102 Caygill, Howard, 20 Chekhov, Anton, 143 Christianity, 30, 44, 53, 59–62, 63, 64, 73, 75, 79–80, 82–4, 89, 99, 100–1, 111, 131, 144 Clearances, 9, 31 community and Being, 20–2, 53–4, 128, 129–30 and death, 22, 40, 45, 66–7, 68, 84, 88, 107, 138–40, 142, 143–4, 162 and ethics, 5, 19–20, 29–30, 72–3, 95, 155, 158 and fiction, 4, 6–7, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 41, 54–5, 78, 94, 101, 105, 113, 114–15, 122, 138, 143–4, 149, 151, 153–5, 157–65 and individuals, 7, 10–11, 19, 22, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38, 46–51, 54–5, 74–5, 81, 83, 88–9, 94–6, 97, 101, 108, 113, 116, 117–18, 120, 121, 125, 129, 132, 134, 139–40, 145, 153 and modernity, 4–5, 19, 30, 37, 39, 41, 48–9, 50, 106–8, 122, 132, 152 and religion, 4, 28, 29–30, 33, 51–3, 64, 65, 79, 100–1, 116–17, 131 and ritual, 30, 32–3, 43–5, 46–7, 52, 53, 79, 151–2 and sacrifice, 59, 73, 74, 75, 78, 82–4, 87, 88–9, 90 as foundation, 4, 5, 6, 10–18, 19, 22, 29, 94–5, 125 as interpersonal relation, 5, 12, 17, 18–19, 95, 103–4, 105, 113, 121, 122, 135–6, 154 definitions of, 5, 125 in Scottish literature, 5–18, 149–54, 156, 160, 163–4 national, 5–7, 150–1, 156

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Comte, Auguste, 155 Corlett, William, 30 Craig, Cairns, 3, 7, 8–9, 11–12, 14, 15, 18, 25n, 29, 48, 127, 150–3, 154, 156, 157, 165n, 166n Crawford, Robert, 8, 18, 25n, 128, 150 Critchley, Simon, 130, 155 Dainotto, Roberto M., 7–8 D’Arcy, Julian, 109 Damrosch, Leo, 159, 160–1 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 90–1 de Beistegui, Miguel, 92n Delanty, Gerard, 156 de Man, Paul, 100 Derrida, Jacques, 72–3, 80, 131–2, 158 de Vries, Hent, 72 Duncan, Ian, 33, 34, 159, 160 Dunn, Douglas, 149 Durkheim, Émile, 29, 30, 39, 129, 163 Eckhart, Meister, 84 Edinburgh, 11–12, 16, 49, 119 Eliot, T. S., 143–4 Erlendson, Magnus (Saint), 58–62 Fergusson, Maggie, 25n, 125–6 Forster, E. M., 34–5, 37 Fraser, Nancy, 26n Frazer, James George, 75 Frye, Northrop, 23 Fynsk, Christopher, 130, 132 Galt, John, 8, 150, 160 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, 16, 31 A Scots Quair, 12–14, 15 The Speak of the Mearns, 14–15 Gifford, Douglas, 149, 165n Girard, René, 74, 75, 82, 85, 88 Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, 159 gossip, 10–11, 17, 32 Gray, Alasdair, 148 Lanark, 163 Gunn, Neil M., 152–3, 154 Blood Hunt, 153

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Butcher’s Broom, 31, 152–3 The Green Well of the Great Deep, 153 Sun Circle, 109 Haar, Michael, 130 Habermas, Jürgen, 106–7, 155 Hardt, Michael, 155 Hardy, Thomas, 15, 127 The Dynasts, 124n Hart, Francis Russell, 3, 9, 31, 137 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 81, 111, 121, 129 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 6, 12, 20, 24, 78, 85, 134, 142, 143, 144, 145 on Being, 21–2, 129, 140 on Being-towards-death, 84–5, 139 on community, 21, 135–7, 141 on Enframing, 140–1 on Mitsein, 12, 54, 130, 135 history, 2, 3, 8–9, 14, 35–6, 50–1, 58, 63, 79–80, 102–3, 105, 106, 109–10, 116, 122, 149, 151–2, 154 Hogg, James, 34, 125, 160 Hollier, Denis, 94 Horkheimer, Max, 107 Huberman, Elizabeth, 57n, 126–7 Hughes, Derek, 73, 84 Hume, David, 20, 160–1 on common life, 33, 159 Iser, Wolfgang, 160 islands, literary perspectives on, 17–18, 30, 97 Jameson, Fredric, 23, 120 Jegstrup, Elsebet, 48 Jenckes, Kate, 41 Jenkins, Robin, 153, 154 The Changeling, 108 Fergus Lamont, 16 The Missionaries, 163 Joyce, James, 76, 127, 143 Kant, Immanuel, 20–1 Kavanagh, Patrick, 149, 150 Kierkegaard, Søren, 48, 72–3, 74, 84 Kofman, Sarah, 157–8

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Index Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 54 Lawrence, D. H., 1, 28, 34 ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, 124n ‘Sun’, 34 Laxness, Halldór, 163–4 Levinas, Emmanuel, 155, 158 Linklater, Eric, 148 The Men of Ness, 109 Livingston, Donald W., 161 Lukács, Georg, 110 Lyotard, François, 117 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 30 ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, 2 McGann, Jerome, 136 McIlvanney, William, Docherty, 16 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 6, 19–20, 22, 28–9, 30, 114, 131 Macmurray, John, 6, 18–19, 26n, 103–4, 150 MacNeice, Louis, 23, 56n Mann, Thomas, 143, 144 Manning, Susan, 159–60 Martin, David, 30 Marx, Karl, 1 martyrdom, 59–62, 66, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 79, 84–6 masks, 9, 132–3, 134, 142 Mass (Catholic), 65, 79–80, 81, 100–1, 111, 122 Massie, Alan, 146n metaphysics, 20–1, 129, 136–7 Millar, John Hepburn, 150 Miller, J. Hillis, 15, 124n miracles, 64–5, 69–70, 90 Mitchison, Naomi, The Land the Ravens Found, 109 Mooney, John, 58, 61–2, 70, 71, 77, 85 Muir, Edwin, 37, 42, 56n, 116–17, 131, 144, 146n ‘The Horses’, 42 Muir, Willa, Imagined Corners 16, 163 Murray, Brian, 3, 5, 57n, 98, 119, 141, 148 Murray, Isobel, 32, 34, 56n, 57n, 86

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181

Murray, Rowena, 57n, 64, 98, 119, 141, 148 myth, 2, 3–4, 9–10, 23, 38, 41, 42–6, 63, 106, 109–10, 112, 115, 119, 131, 138, 141, 151–3, 154, 157 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 22, 24, 31, 41, 47, 53–4, 73, 75, 88, 120, 128–9, 135, 137, 139, 141, 155, 157 on community, 1, 20, 45, 105, 129–31, 132, 134, 139 on myth, 42, 44–5 Nash, Andrew, 150, 153 nationalism, 7, 155–7, 158, 163, 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 24n, 25n, 30, 100, 131–2 nostalgia, 1, 10, 12, 33, 45, 139, 142 Nussbaum, Martha C., 158, 160, 166n Orkney, 2, 3–4, 5, 25n, 28, 30, 35, 55, 56n, 58, 62, 67, 89, 96, 97, 104–5, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 125–8, 133, 138, 144, 145, 146n, 148–9, 156–7, 164 parochialism, 1, 149, 165n pastoral, 32, 33–4, 71, 97, 135, 160, 166n Patocˇka, Jan, 80, 123n polis, 49, 95–6 Profumo, David, 99 Protestant Reformation, 29, 37–8, 43–4, 53, 54 Rancière, Jacques, 24n, 163 Rapport, Nigel, 8 regional fiction, 7–9, 127–8, 148–51, 160 Riach, Alan, 9 Ricoeur, Paul, 102, 110 Robb, David S., 40, 47 Robinson, Marilynne, 92n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95 sacrifice, 72–5, 76, 80, 81, 82–4, 85, 87 sagas, 3, 34–5, 76–7, 85, 144, 163

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182

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Longer Magnus Saga (LMS), 59, 60–1, 62, 67, 70 Orkneyinga Saga, 33, 34, 58, 59–60, 61, 64, 65, 69, 77, 81, 89, 106, 112–13 Shorter Magnus Saga (SMS), 59 Schiller, Friedrich, 159 Schmid, Sabine, 148, 149, 166n Schoene, Berthold, 3–4, 38, 44, 52, 66, 97, 99, 127–8, 138, 144, 148, 151, 164 Scott, Tom, 56n Scott, Walter, 8, 9, 10, 26n, 148, 150, 160 Ivanhoe, 110 The Pirate, 2–3, 25n Waverley, 159 Seth, Andrew, 166n Shirey, Ryan D., 156 Smith, Adam, 33 Smith, Ali, 36–7 Smith, Anthony D., 25n, 155–6 Smith, Iain Crichton, 16–18, 26n, 132, 153, 154 Consider the Lilies, 16–17 In the Middle of the Wood, 108 Snell, K. D. M., 148 sociology, 29, 154 Speirs, John, 6 Stanford, Derek, 56n

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storytelling, 95–6, 97–8, 102, 110–11, 114–17, 119, 122, 141–2 Strysick, Michael, 38, 78 Tait, Bob, 32, 34, 56n, 57n Taylor, Alexander Burt, 61, 63 Taylor, Charles, 6, 19–20, 22, 27n, 28, 29–30, 37, 131 Thomson, Alex, 156 Thomson, D. P., 62 Tir-nan-og, 97, 109, 111–12 Tolstoy, Leo, 145 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 108, 154–5, 159 utopia, 29, 95, 104, 105, 114, 116, 120, 149, 163 Vikings, 63, 109, 112, 114 Watson, John, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, 13 Waugh, Robin, 60 Weber, Max, 19 Weil, Simone, 94–5, 122 Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting, 16 White, Hayden, 102 Wittig, Kurt, 6, 25n, 26n Young, Julian, 136, 142

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