Inverness Book Festival, Royal Highland Hotel, 2 October 2007

Kenneth White

ACTIVE SINCE 1986 the Neil Gunn Trust has embarked upon a number of projects including the biannual Neil Gunn Writing Competition to expand the legacy of the celebrated Caithness writer. In the context of the Inverness Book Festival and Highland 2007 it was extremely appropriate for the Trust to select Kenneth White to deliver the first Neil Gunn Lecture.

Writer, poet and thinker Kenneth White gave a Geopoetic reading of Neil Gunn’s novel “Highland River” to mark the 70th anniversary of its publication. White’s credentials are impressive; a former Chair of 20th Century Poetics at the Sorbonne, visiting Professor at the UHI Millennium Institute and Honorary Member of the Royal Scottish Academy, he was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Open University.

What is more impressive, however, is White’s ability to expand our intellectual geography and explore as Gunn did the source of our culture.

In his lecture “Into the High Land ­ The World of Neil Gunn”, White discussed the stance of the writer in terms of Nativism and Nationalism, and then traced the evolutionary stages of “Highland River” through “the communal scene”, the “sense of the land” and “the furthest ridge”.

These locations of shore, strath and moor are grounding for the protagonist and represent an “extension and expansion of being” as he journeys through them.  Both Gunn and White in their writings argue for Scottish Culture to be defined not by “vague emotionalism”, “local association” or “parochial observation”, but rather moving towards what Gunn described as “something ampler and finer”, “a real projection of homo sapiens”.

This desire to examine fully what it means to be human upon the earth is expressed as Gunn’s character Kenn moves progressively into the back country, echoed in White’s Geopoetical writings as “mindscape within landscape”. The rediscovery of “natural lines of development” are central to the work of both writers.

White spoke about some of the ways in which Gunn travels from “mouth to source” in his use of language, the associations of the double “n” in the main character’s name, for example with the “Finn Cycle” of Celtic literature.

He also stressed the way in which Gunn’s novel moves past Scots, Norse or Gaelic references towards the primordial, an experience of nature (an ultimately human nature) that is both real and physical.

The psychic synthesis of this experience and “accent on delicate subtle sensation” in Gunn’s novel suggests that “all man moves to is the light”. To examine life in this way in terms of  “light”, “delight” and “enlightenment” doesn’t suggest idealism or escapism but the desire to reach a state, “an extreme north of the mind” where the “whole being passes thoughtless into the condition of light”.

White’s discussion raised important questions about our attitude towards Scottish and Highland Culture and the kind of territorial reconnaissance necessary to reveal “the landscape inside”. For me this is the most compelling aspect of his argument, the awareness of self in relation to the world and the idea that to be naturally local is to also be naturally global.

It reflects a commonality or baseline of human experience rooted in the earth. Both the journey of Gunn’s protagonist and Kenneth White’s work would seem to be about the expansion of being and the integration of knowledge, scientific, philosophical and poetic.

In moving away from the communal scene of the village and into nature Gunn’s central character in “Highland River” moves further and deeper into himself and the source of his own culture – culture, that is, in its broadest terms, with the possibility of growth, of nurturing a human being.

Expanding our “horizon of intent”, opening out a fuller spectrum of thought in relation to culture is one of our greatest challenges in the 21st century.

White’s conclusion after his detailed and fascinating analysis of the different stages of human consciousness in Gunn’s text was to leave the audience with “a great open work field”. In light of this focus year it was an appropriate challenge invoking a significant legacy of thought.

(The Neil Gunn Lecture received funding from Highland 2007 and RACE. The Inverness Book Festival runs until 5 October)

© Georgina Coburn, 2007

Links

• Inverness Book Festival
• Neil Gunn