The Motions of Emotions in the Poetry and Prose of George Mackay Brown

1The twentieth century, still reeling from the excesses of Romanticism, was, on the whole, chary of emotions, whether in critical discourse (one thinks of structuralism, or W. K. Wimsatt’s charges against ‘the affective fallacy’) or at the creative end of literature—Hulme and the imagists, or T. S. Eliot declaring in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) that ‘poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.’1 Nor can the more recent reader-response criticism be said to have focused more on the affective responses than on the cognitive process involved in the act of reading (see Wolfgang Iser, for instance). And how could emotions still be on the agenda in a postmodernist era which takes for granted the absence, the decentering or scattering of the individual creative or productive subject?

2To be sure, after a period of immaturity that smacked of belated romanticism, George Mackay Brown, a contemporary Scottish writer (1921- 1996), was no exception, as he soon was to embrace a creed of utmost impersonality and coolness of style. The striking contrast between those two successive positions calls for a number of remarks. In particular, it will be observed that the emotional charge that is purposely no longer loaded into the text, converts into a magnified affective response on the reader’s part. So much so that another kind of authorial guidance has to come into play for these new and wild emotions experienced in reading to become manageable again, much as in tragic catharsis.

3‘The Transformation’2 was written in 1947, at the age of 26, as the first draft of a poem entitled ‘Saint Magnus in Egilsay’ :3

4The language used in these first two stanzas is over-expressive. The whole scene is modalized by the poet’s wonder (l. 15) or nervousness (see the self-questioning ll. 8-9), all his feelings being generally emphasized by enjambements which seem to carry the speaker forward on an upsurge of emotions. Though it could be argued that the periodic syntax counters to some extent the emotivity of the expression by controlling the inconsistency of spontaneous thought and expression,4 yet it does precisely also add to the sense of the speaker’s (thinking) presence, which overflows into an abundance of personifications (l. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 20), metaphors (l.1: ‘wafted his breath’; l. 2: ‘sighed it into life’; l. 9: ‘An axe heaved’; l. 12: ‘virgin limbs,’ etc.) and hyperbolic descriptions with extremely vivid terms (‘spouting blood’; ‘gurgled,’ ‘twitching,’ ‘clenched,’ etc.). This lyrical effusion will strike any reader as being excessive and therefore unconvincing. Instead of having a true emotional impact, the poem only manages to draw forth at best the reader’s condescending amusement at its obvious immaturity or second-rate quality.

5By contrast, the short-story ‘Witch,’5 published thirty years later, appears as a prime example of the opposite style, characterized by restraint, economy—‘clean, uncluttered and precise use of words’—,6 starkness even, and, with regard to the telling voice, just as in ballads and sagas, a ‘rigorous externality,’7 ‘a model of impersonality which lets the facts speak for themselves and leaves the reader to form his own opinion of what happened.’8 Brown admired

the ‘pure’ art of the sagamen; everything extraneous, such as detailed descriptions of people and places and comments by the author on what is happening, is ruthlessly excluded. Perhaps Hemingway of modern authors comes closest to that tough bare austere style... (Brown Witch, x)

6And indeed a narrative can hardly be blunter and more straightforward than ‘Witch’:

LAIRD [speaking to Marian, the accused]: Art thou a witch?
At this, she raised her fists to her head and made no further answer.
That same day, in the afternoon, she was convoyed to Kirkwall on horseback, to the palace of the earl there. All that road she spoke not a word. There in Kirkwall a chain was hung between her arm and the stone. (Brown Witch, 8)

7‘The narrator is a sixteenth-century clerk simply recording what he has seen,’ (Bold 55) there ‘to make due note of [Marian’s] utterances’ (Brown, Witch, 8). The presentation in this opening scene verges on the surreal, with a deliberate shift of focus from the character to an object. In the last sentence of the above excerpt the topic is no longer Marian but the chain, Marian’s arm being relegated to the status of part of the comment. There does not seem to be, for the narrator, any difference in interest between the chain, the stone and the arm, unlike what it would have been if the text had said: ‘her arm was chained to a stone.’

8The detachment of the ‘chronicler’ reaches an unendurable degree in the torture scene:

Then the probe was put into the said Marian’s body, in order to prove an area of insensitivity, the devil always honouring his servants in that style. These parts were probed: the breast, buttocks, shoulders, arms, thighs. Marian displayed signs of much suffering, as moaning, sweating, shivering, but uttered no words. On the seventh probe she lost her awareness, and fell to the ground. They moved then to revive her with water. (Brown Witch, 10, italics mine)

9This catalogue-like account has the matter-of-fact accuracy of a medical examination, the technical jargon of the surgeon showing through in a later passage:

Because her toes were blue and swollen after the extraction of the cuticles, she could not walk but with much difficulty. Therefore they bound her arms and carried her out on to the street. (Brown Witch, 21)

10D. M. Budge very rightly sees in this style ‘the writer’s immaculate control of the emotional temper of language,’ (Brown Witch, xv) and adds:

The betrayal of human dignity and decency, and of justice and fair play, is presented calmly in a situation where many writers would have exploited in full the horrors and terrors of the victim’s interrogation and fate. Unerringly, George Mackay Brown releases only one emotive phrase....

11Marian’s intense suffering is neutralized by plain scientific understatements (‘Marian Isbister discovering much anguish of body at each insertion,’ [Brown Witch, 10]) or lists of symptoms (‘Marian displayed signs of much suffering, as moaning, sweating, shivering,’ [Brown Witch, 10]) whose interpretation by the reader does not tally in the least with the narrator’s absence of reaction—to such an extent that we cannot but chafe at that indifference or neutrality. Instead of the expected textual variations of narrative and emotional tension (flashbacks or anticipations) that characterize natural story-telling,9 the reader meets nothing but unbearable inhuman mechanical enumerations. Hope and despair are abolished, and so is suspense, since the narration will simply reflect the inexorable occurrence of events presented as banal in spite of their unbearable character. The acme of the story shows no sign of this abating:

Then was Marian Isbister taken down to her prison. And at once came to her William Bourtree, Simon Leslie, John Glaitness and John Beaton, with shears, razors, and pincers, who cut off her hair and afterwards shaved her skull clean, denuding her even of her eyebrows. Then one by one with the pincers John Glaitness drew out her finger-nails and toenails; and this operation caused her much pain. (Brown Witch, 20)

12One realizes here that understatement is one of Brown’s favorite stylistic devices, directly inherited from his Orcadian background:

Orcadians are given to understatement.... No doubt this parsimony with words is rooted deeply in our nature and history. The Orkneyinga Saga is a mine of understatement.... more can be said by means of understatement than by laying words on with a lavish trowel. The bare phrase is nearer the truth, always.10

13Euphemistic verbs or phrases are used throughout his prose and poetry to designate the worst atrocities such as the transfixing by means of a sword—in ‘A careful gleam was put in their bellies’11—or the killing of the beast—in ‘the Dragon tasted the bronze fish’ (FP 4)—, culminating in the lapidary conciseness found in epitaphs: ‘Here lies Sigurd the fisherman / Dead of hooves.’ (‘Grave Stone,’ FP 30)

14Another device for downplaying and even precluding the emotional impact of descriptions is the zeugma and the sense of universal derision which it generates. ‘[An old one] drenched the house with grief, biography, mothballs’12 (FP 53) and ‘With wounds on them and bits of silver’ are two instances taken from the poetry. But putting the cutting of Marian’s hair on a par with the extraction of her nails partakes of the same technique: neither ‘operation’ is meant to be perceived as more traumatic than the other.

15It is only in the final description that the narrator appears slightly more involved:

As she hobbled through the Laverock with her fingers like a tangle of red roots at the end of her long white arms, and her head like an egg, some had pity for her but the voices of others fell on her in a confusion of cursing and ribaldry and mockery, so that the holy words of Master Andrew Monteith could scarcely be heard. (FP 21)

16The metaphors (‘a tangle of red roots,’ in particular) and the hypotaxis (‘As . . . and... but... so...’) are signs of his emotional and intellectual screening of the horror of the scene. In retrospect, we miss even more his utter lack of mediation in the rest of a short-story whose syntax has been pruned down to parataxis, blotting out the authorial voice in the process.13

17Parataxis was soon to become George Mackay Brown’s hallmark, as an extensive comparison between the translations by A. B. Taylor of The Orkneyinga Saga and his own very free adaptations of them in An Orkney Tapestry would evidence. A quick look, for instance, at:

Earl Magnus with his band of men arrived first in Egilsay. And when they espied Earl Hakon coming, they say that he had eight warships; then he knew for certain that there was foul play afoot . . .14

18and:

Earl Magnus with his company arrived in Egilsay first. They saw Earl Hakon advancing with his eight ships. They knew then that the nets were spread.15

19will testify to the shortage of connectives in Brown’s prose and poetry. For parataxis seems to cut across generic borders in his writing. In the novel Magnus, for instance, ‘Girls fell into the rockpool, flowed, climbed out into the sun with sweet silver streaming bodies. They shrieked’; (Brown Orkney, 69) and in ‘Building the Ship,’ (FP 3) ‘Saws shrieked, sputtered, were sharpened, sang. / Dunes were pale with strewment of boards.’ Because in Brown’s writing parataxis goes hand in hand with the eradication of what Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni calls ‘subjectivemes’—that is all traces of subjectivity, as it can be manifested in affective, evaluative, modalizing and axiological marks,16—the reader is left with ‘an apparently random selection of items... without... any ordering principle’ (Murray 94) or properly expressed feelings.

20Even when emotional manifestations steal their way into the text, occasionally filling in the ‘blanks’ (to take up one of Wolfgang Iser’s favourite phrases) created by the lack of intellectual presence, as in:

I went with Swedes down a river in Russia.
The domes of Byzantium! My eyes dazzled.
There were too many Norskies in that town.
Their axes a hedge about the emperor,17

21the expressivity of the writing soon gets curbed. Thus, here, the second line gathers lyrical momentum in its first hemistich, made up of an iamb (‘The Domes’) followed by a hypercatalectic anapaest (‘of Byzantium’) culminating in the exclamation mark. Whereas one would expect this rhythmic progression to be amplified, the final antispast (‘My eyes dazzled’) reverses the rhythm; instead of a weak syllable followed by one or several stressed syllables as in the first hemistich, we have a foot beginning in a similar way and then falling off, thus stifling the euphoria that had been building up.18 Besides, the reduplication of the interjection causes the latter to lose intensity by a descriptive statement of the meaning. The same phenomenon occurs in ‘Phew! that wave made a tangled web of the oars’ (Brown, ‘Helmsman,’ 22), where contrary to ‘Phew!’ in which the speaker is entirely involved, there is a split in the rest of the sentence between the emotional side of him and the cold intellectual one. As J. Dewey points out, there is a difference between giving way to, and expressing, an impulse; raging is not the same as expressing rage.19 Similarly, Marian in ‘Witch’ is more gifted at stating her suffering (‘I have much pain and much sorrow’ [Brown, Witch, 20]) than shouting it out.

22More generally, the uninterrupted succession of monotonous lines replaces expressiveness with mechanical description and, as in sagas, lends, ‘an inevitability [to] the tale which grips listener and reader. The workings of fate are not insisted upon, but never seem to be far off.’ (Taylor 110) The ‘steady, orderly march of events’ (Taylor 110) not only supersedes emotional expression on the narrator’s part, but eventually curbs the reader’s spontaneous surges of feelings such as anxiety or impatience at the narrator’s shift in tone or lack of affective commitment. This is nowhere as blatant as in the ‘poem cycle’ entitled Fishermen with Ploughs: ‘A ship called Dove sails west out of Norway in the ninth century carrying a tribe of fisher people.... Fate sits at the helm,’ says the preface. Here is the beginning of the first poem, ‘Building the Ship’ (FP 3):

23Even more so than in the earliest English poems (Widsith, Deor, etc.), each line here is end-stopped and constitutes a unit unto itself, marked off from the others by a strong stress either in the incipit or at the end. Narration is thus halted at every line; there is no forward sweep in anticipation of what comes next. Indifference prevails: death (l. 14) and sex (l. 15) are on an equal footing. The voice is almost oracular, akin to the fatum of the Romans, establishing as final what it utters line after line. As ‘there is nothing like a non-narrative reality,’20 the mechanical diction is indissociable from the irreversibility of the events and the superior order that governs them—‘the recurrence of pattern-within-flux’—21 and which is also that of speech (the ‘pattern will work itself out with the inevitability of a saga,’ says the bishop of Orkney in the same novel), as if the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc was the motto of Fate. Man—and the reader— have no choice but to accept what is meant to be with stoical indifference.

24Just as the writer ‘is somebody from beyond time and place: an oracular messenger telling them what the story really means,’ (Brown 1968) the reader is gradually lulled into acceptance of the events as the reading unfolds, particularly in those pieces where repetition comes to the fore, sometimes creating a hypnotic effect. If in ‘Witch’ such phrases as ‘There was much laughter and shouting at sight of her naked head,’ ‘There was much drunkenness and dancing along the road to Gallowsha,’ ‘There is much grief at every milestone,’ ‘That year was much popular disorder in the islands,’ etc., tend to occur every so often throughout the narration, like punctuation of a higher order providing a framework for an impersonal or collective voice, repetition will reach the condition of incantation in some poems, as in ‘Time a Stone’22 with its magic burden:

Once I was lissom and sweet and tall
An old mouth at a rock
Fishermen hung sea silver at my wall
An old mouth at a rock
One lingered, fishless. My blood beat like a bell
An old mouth at a rock
…

25Thanks to the dreaminess induced by such repetition, the reader is in a position to perceive a pattern behind the ‘tumultuousness of the action,’ (Eliot 232) ‘an underlying serenity, ... the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlight. It is the pattern drawn by what the ancient world called Fate.’ (Eliot 232)

26So the perception of the pattern beneath the story is also an effect of the patterning of the language itself. ‘The Blind Helmsman’ (FP 6) is a case in point:

Man goes, man voyages, into the blackest sun.
Nor doth hero long keep
Lithe limb or lissomness or laughter.
Honey is bitter at last in the mouth.
Fareth a shadow to the ghostly feast-halls. (Italics mine.)

27On top of paratactic regularity—and very often induced by it—the writing resorts to a high degree of formalization, including emphatic sentences (both aphorisms and judicial sententiae) and archaic word forms or syntactical forms (inversions, etc.) that reinforce the stately and the proverbial quality of a sometimes alliterative language (l. 3), and suggest, in Alan Bold’s words, ‘a voice from the past.’ (Bold 18)

28That is what Michael Riffaterre or Paul Zumthor would term ‘monumentality,’ that is a formalization or ritualization23 of the language such that the ensuing ‘verbal monument’24 is ‘able to impose its structure on the reader.’25 Thereby, adds Zumthor, ‘it’s as if the circumstances, the hic et nunc of the voice, were abstracted from the real life space and time and somehow mythicized.’26 The mythic perception of events goes hand in hand with the ritualization of language, due for the most part, in Brown’s writing, to parataxis. A quick look at a later version of the intial poem, ‘The Transformation,’ will show just how much all these considerations already apply then:

29Parataxis has made inroads, calling for ‘a sacrificing of verbal extravagance,’27 as in ‘A red wave broke,’ replacing the original ‘red spouting blood’ or, even more strikingly, ‘the tempestuous blood / Burst upon flint and shard and quickening dust’ in yet another version. The metaphors acquire a more universal, and even mythic, dimension. In ‘thighs of stone’ for earth, or in ‘red wave’ for blood, the human body and the cosmos are involved in a process of mutual symbolization, the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm and thereby swapping psychology for archetypes, sentimentalism for cosmic or mythic occurrences. This tendency to widen the scope gets confirmed poem after poem. Thus, in ‘Dream of Winter: Brodgar,’ (CP 80), whereas a early draft says ‘I saw my body pinned against the night / With burning stars’ (l. 8; italics mine), a later version has ‘He saw his body nailed against the night / With ritual stars.’ The passage from the first to the third person is concomitant with the mythicization (‘ritual’) of the data, which another line clearly evinces: from ‘Then the dream broke, and I awoke from evil’ to ‘Then the myth broke, and he aroused from evil,’ the subjective ‘dream’ has become communal and archetypal. As in traditional tales told round the winter fire ‘the hero looms larger than life, and... the tale is more a legend than a story.’ (Brown Witch, viii)

30It actually partakes of myth, which aggrandizes and universalizes reality28 and ‘provides an orderly representation of the world.’29 Similarly, the telling of the story imposes a ritualized and non-psychological diction on natural delivery: ‘mimesis30 is poïesis, and vice versa.’ (Ricœur 56; my translation) ‘Art imposes a pattern on the endless flux’ (Brown 1997) of both events and words, thus providing the structural foundation for another order of experience where emotions can be processed and transmuted into more sedate and universal moods: ‘What every poet starts from is his own emotion.... —to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.’ (Eliot 137) It is in that sense that we ought to understand D. Rabaté’s comment that ‘a narrative is a cathartic promise.’31 The process of mimesis causes a realignment which is both intellectual and emotional (cathartic), as Philip Weller and Leon Golden point out:

Aristotle held... that anarchy in the soul is most effectively prevented not by starving and repressing the emotions but by giving them expression in a wisely regulated manner.... [The cathartic process] must involve a new emotional perspective and even, arising from that, a new intellectual vision.... The tragic catharsis and the ensuing emotional calm have produced in the spectator a new insight into what the plot of the drama, its action—which is to say, its meaning in motion—most essentially represents.32

31It is because our emotions have been levelled out in this manner and because reality has been schematized that aesthetic pleasure at contemplating narrated traumatic events becomes possible. ‘We enjoy,’ declares Aristotle, ‘looking at most accurate pictures of things the sight of which is offensive to us in reality, such as the forms of the most repulsive monsters and corpses.’33 It is representation that makes the unbearable pleasurable. Whether or not T. S. Eliot is right about Hamlet, it is significant that he should put his finger on the inadequacy of the process of representation in the play, that is the discrepancy between his emotion (‘disgust’) and what causes it—his mother, who ‘arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.’ (Eliot 146)

32The aim of paratactic formalization in George Mackay Brown’s writing is to see emotion through, so that the reader is no longer personally, but impersonally moved. The point is to ‘achieve a higher sort of tears’ to use a Roland Dubillard phrase.34 Not the whimpering and sobbing that goes on in ‘Sealskin,’ ‘the women standing along the pier with their dabbling handkerchiefs, and the men gulping and turning their faces away,’35 but the purified and ritualized grief of the mourning women in the short story ‘A Time to Keep’36:

Gales of lamentation... from the women, as the terror went through them, the long ritual keening with which they glutted and purified the world from the stain of death. (My grandmother and her neighbours went on for three nights before a funeral, their cries simple and primitive and beautiful as the sea).