On the Peripheries of Little Things: World’s Disharmony and the Search for Truth in George Mackay Brown’s Poetry

Halszka LELEŃ

Abstract

In the article, I scrutinize the post-Romantic vision of poetry in the works of George Mackay Brown, a major Scottish writer who is still unfamiliar to many Polish readers. The vision in question is an outcome of Mackay Brown’s search for the best means of communicating direct truths about the world. In his output, Brown described the lives of various individuals, members of the Orkney community working in all sorts of trades and immersed in not always harmonious cycles of island life. He focused on the archetypal features and occupations of his protagonists with the intention to tell the readers something about humankind in general and also about themselves. He was guided not only by a desire to commemorate the disappearing world of some more pure insular reality, which is often repeated about him in literary criticism. On top of that, the writer provokes his readers to search for a broader meaning of his kaleidoscopic insights into the local insular reality. He unobtrusively weaves together the generalized cultural meanings with very subtly implied primary denotations derived from the agriculture- and fisheries-based way of life. Ultimately, his literary peregrinations would translate into a spiritual journey. His poems unravel that Mackay Brown was striving to communicate generalized human experience situated outside of any historical time and to bring out its universal meanings. The analysis of Mackay Brown’s poems undertaken in the paper shows that he consciously advanced a humanistic vision of writing rooted in the culture of the past, simultaneously pointing to poetry as a means of communication which facilitates a broader and deeper, multifaceted insight into reality. The aim is to establish what it is that Brown tries to achieve when he inspires the reader with a broadened and not just aesthetic artistic perception. In his poems, the writer searches for some glocal truths and through them he activates in his addressee the structures of memory so as to induce the necessity of some poetic reflection on transcendence. He thus advances, in his own way, the program shared by many contemporary artists, thinkers and poets, such as Czesław Miłosz, John Paul II, T. S. Eliot, and George Steiner.