Kirsty Gunn

Highland River: A Creative Response

The following is an edited version of a text created out of a workshop and talk given at The Dunbeath Heritage Centre on October 22, 2016.

That event  formed the basis of lectures delivered at the University of Dundee, and elsewhere as a result of various invitations to read 

from and discuss my novel, “The Big Music”, set in Sutherland and Caithness, and to talk about how Neil Gunn’s writing has influenced my own thinking about the novel form. “A Highland River”, in particular, has continued to remind me of the form’s unconventionality, of its capacity to be ever-changing in nature, yielding fresh insights into writing and aesthetic processes that renew themselves with every reading. 

My own writing is indebted to Gunn’s groundbreaking work in fiction. The following, which I’d like insert here as a sort of tribute, comes from the opening section of my novel, “The Big Music”, set in a similar part of the world as “Highland River” and drawing strength 

from it:

“The hills only come back the same: I don’t mind, and all the flat moorland and the sky. I don’t mind they say, and the water says it too, those black falls that are rimmed with peat, and the mountains in the distance to the west say it, and to the north... As though the whole empty wasted lovely space is calling back at him in the silence that is around him, to this man out here in the midst of it, in the midst of all these hills and all the air. That his presence means nothing, that he could walk for miles into these same hills, in bad weather or in fine, could fall down and not get up again, could go crying into the peat with music for his thoughts maybe, and ideas for a tune, but none of it according him a place here, amongst the grasses and the water and the sky... Still it would come back the same in the silence, in the fineness of the air... I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind.

(from “The Big Music”, p 3, Faber and Faber, 2012)

To be in the Dunbeath Centre, overlooking the harbour and the 

village, and around it at the particular arrangement of earth and sky and sea that was the landscape and backdrop to Neil Gunn’s early life and his lifelong imagination, is to feel as though one might be inside the mind of the great writer and natural philosopher: in here, looking out, thinking.

Here is also the home of the Neil Gunn archive - and to spend time amongst the great wealth of materials and sources and publications  somewhat gorgeously haphazardly collected in what feels like a personal study, an intimate library at the top of the spiral stairs under the eaves...This feels like a gift indeed.

I want to talk about Neil Gunn’s “Highland River” in this context, of a 

place both material and imagined and of the river that runs through it, just beyond the view from the windows here and also in the mind, a real and a dreamed river that might run through a creative practice  – energising and enlivening it, giving fresh inspiration.

I want to suggest that we see this seminal novel of Neil Gunn as not only richly representative of his work as a whole – in the way all his fiction draws together the natural and the supernatural, reality and fiction, from “The Grey Coast” to “The Atom of Delight” - but also as an example of high modernist art, a story that is a story about its own making, intensely, literarily self aware, a construction of different themes and subjects and processes that make the reader think about what it is to bring all these together, within the same book covers, so to speak, and to make conscious, formal decisions about our reactions to that reading as we are doing so. Do I believe this  part of the narrative? Why is this information being enclosed here? How do I feel about the narrator preaching to me at this point 

of the plot? Why has this sentence affected me so, when its emotional timbre might be heard as nothing more than a sentimental harking back to a time, a sensibility, that no longer exists? These are all the kinds of questions that can course along quite easily through our minds, interrupting our thoughts even as we are deep inside a story, even as “The Highland River” has gathered us up and is bearing us along on its currents... 

But more than celebrating any of these things, more than revering the way a unified theme - that central river - contains modernist disruption, more than recognising the pleasures of reading one text in the context of many, and more than the imagining of a book as a place and the place as the book, I want to bring “Highland River” to the fore as a source for individual literary and artistic activity: To use 

the novel as a sort of “Creative Workbook”, I call it, finding within it various ideas and approaches to novel writing that can be use to nourish and feed a creative practice.

The first of the author’s novels that I read was “BloodHunt” – a land locked narrative, that one, and I remember intensely the feel of coming into its topography and it was an extraordinary sensation, to be turned loose into a landscape I knew well and that was aboutit, but also wasthe place itself, made up of sentences and paragraphs and pages... but let me turn back to the Dunbeat coast and river. I said earlier that “Highland River” is perfectly representational of Neil Gunn’s novels. By this I mean that its interest in themes of the natural world, and what, as another writer also with a sense of spiritual intensity about his work, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had it, 

might be called “inscape” – the idea of a divine loveliness and order in natural things, from the flow of a river, to the relationship that exists between a mother and a son enacted in the kitchen of their home – as well as its reflections upon history, folk lore, geography and the culture, are all spread through its pages pages in increments, if you like, in discrete sections and interventions; the same themes that we see recurring in different permutations across all the novels to different degrees, but here portioned almost equally. “Highland River” is not more supernaturally charged than, say, “Green Isle of the Great Deep” but there is an element of that novel in it. And it has less of the social historical dimension than we find in, say, “Butchers Broom” but a social and historical presence is felt nevertheless. There are touches of “The Silver Darlings”, too, and of “The Grey Coast” and, when you start thinking in this way, of all Gunn’s fiction... In chapters, scenes, moments of characterisation and drama...It’s as if it gathers all of Gunn’s thinking into its waters.

And its “thinking “ is densely literary, too – as, again, we see represented in all the work but, I would argue,  made more obvious here, for it is a book, “Highland River” that is self consciously concerned with notions of form and technique and style.  So this is never just work that seems to be  ‘about’ a something, a story, an idea, a drama. Instead the words, as any modernist would remind us, are the thing itself. And that thing, as Dairmid Gunn’s sensitive and suggestive introduction to the Canongate edition of the novel reminds us, is “being’. The “journey”, the “expedition” is , as he quotes from his Uncle’s frontispiece, “the source of the delight.”

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Let me take the following section of the novel and look at this idea quite closely, by way of an example of the effect of the whole, the rhythm and sentences of it, reflexive and self conscious - interrupting narrative with comment and suggestions for interpretation, never set down as a ’scene’, never still:

“During all that winter season the river lay dead. Its waters were always swollen by rain or melting snow and never lost their peaty darkness. Often, on his way to school, Kenn would climb the parapet of the bridge and peer down into likely spots in the pool below, but rarely in this close season was the movement of a fish seen.

            There was something in the river these months that was cold and deathly. The path by its bank was miry, the trees looked dead and curiously warped as if the fuzzy lichen was suffocating 

them...There were broken, rotten branches, brown leaves and bronze bracken heaped and mouldering; yielding mole’s earth...and in the distance always a bleakness that was unadventurous and repelling. The only thing of colour was the moss and it was green on yellow, soft, damp, and unobtrusively everywhere.

them...There were broken, rotten branches, brown leaves and bronze bracken heaped and mouldering; yielding mole’s earth...and in the distance always a bleakness that was unadventurous and repelling. The only thing of colour was the moss and it was green on yellow, soft, damp, and unobtrusively everywhere.

            Yet the river had one persistent and even compelling attribute during this time, and that was the noise it made. Kenn was rarely conscious of hearing it until in bed, but then, just before his going to sleep or in some sudden hush of the night, its sound would rise up upon the world and flood all the hollows of silence with its turbulence. It was the noise of the rushing of all the seas, until in a moment it was the river itself flowing past in the darkness down by the well, the river he knew, but beyond his command now and in league with the elements beyond life.

            The snug warmth of the hollow in the bed where he lay all curled up would sometimes induce a feeling of extraordinary glee, so that he would breathe under the blankets and laugh wide 

-mouthed and huskily. Hah-haaa!he would chuckle, gathering all his body into a ball and touching his knees with his chin...

            It was great fun to be so safe in this warm hole, while the dark, cold river rolled on its way to the distant thunder of the sea.”

From “Highland River” pp 70 -71, Canongate edition. 

See how shifting and subtle is the surface of the text, ever changing as the river itself that it describes. We go from a flattened near-colourless landscape described in terms of images, to a roiling 

-mouthed and huskily. Hah-haaa!he would chuckle, gathering all his body into a ball and touching his knees with his chin...

            It was great fun to be so safe in this warm hole, while the dark, cold river rolled on its way to the distant thunder of the sea.”

From “Highland River” pp 70 -71, Canongate edition. 

See how shifting and subtle is the surface of the text, ever changing as the river itself that it describes. We go from a flattened near-colourless landscape described in terms of images, to a roiling 

lyrical depiction of place as sound, and from there of sound as meaning – that: “It was the noise of the rushing of all the seas.” Gunn’s use of syntax, incorporating both local rhythms of speech with the distinctive placing of the verb at the end of a phrase -  “rarely in this close season was the movement of a fish seen” – and idiolect – “miry” “mole’s earth” “wide-mouthed” – that describes the writer as poet, along with a more overarching objective prose style, displayed as a combination  of standard third person exposition and an indirect narrative that foregrounds the personal subject – that’s Kenn’s “it was great fun”, his “likely spots” – as well as a more insistent authorial presence who comments on and interacts with the various activities and developments of the story, is particular and robust. It allows all kinds of things to happen, all kinds of tonal varieties to sound, without strain. Its quality is porous and flexible; it gives into its subjects, but is not defined by them. So we move from seeing to hearing to thinking to feeling, coming in and out of Kenn’s point of view, merging with an authorial panoptical sensibility that reports and comments and suggests, meaning upon meaning layering in the text.

In all then, I want to suggest that “Highland River”, as well as being 

lyrical depiction of place as sound, and from there of sound as meaning – that: “It was the noise of the rushing of all the seas.” Gunn’s use of syntax, incorporating both local rhythms of speech with the distinctive placing of the verb at the end of a phrase -  “rarely in this close season was the movement of a fish seen” – and idiolect – “miry” “mole’s earth” “wide-mouthed” – that describes the writer as poet, along with a more overarching objective prose style, displayed as a combination  of standard third person exposition and an indirect narrative that foregrounds the personal subject – that’s Kenn’s “it was great fun”, his “likely spots” – as well as a more insistent authorial presence who comments on and interacts with the various activities and developments of the story, is particular and robust. It allows all kinds of things to happen, all kinds of tonal varieties to sound, without strain. Its quality is porous and flexible; it gives into its subjects, but is not defined by them. So we move from seeing to hearing to thinking to feeling, coming in and out of Kenn’s point of view, merging with an authorial panoptical sensibility that reports and comments and suggests, meaning upon meaning layering in the text.

In all then, I want to suggest that “Highland River”, as well as being the kind of novel that embodies the features I have suggested above, is actually a kind of deliberately fashioned hybrid – that “Creative Workbook” as I mentioned earlier. A novel, yes, but also a history, a memoir, an example of nature writing, of personal essay, a work of geography, a prose poem... A form of thinking about the novel’s form even as it extends it, pushes it in to these other places, suggesting ways in which we may answer to it; reading across its many aspects, interrogating our reading as we do so, never settling in to the passive role of reader-to-narrator, but rather making sense of, drawing together the different elements, responding to them, both separately and as part of an interlocking pattern that 

comprises the whole. In turn, from all these features we, as artists, may select and use different elements to create our own writing, drawings and collage, and perhaps later, extending this, to performance, film and installation, all as a way of “reading” an extraordinary novel. 

“Highland River” is both a text we read, and a sourcebook we may use on our own creative journey. The “expedition” itself, as Dairmid Gunn reminds us in Neil Gunn s words, is “the source of the delight”.

This event was made in collaboration with my sister the artist Merran Gunn who created an artistic response to the writers Highland River: Creative Response  workshop, with her own painting "Highland River Triptyche". This painting is part of an going collaboration between us of text and image. 

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comprises the whole. In turn, from all these features we, as artists, may select and use different elements to create our own writing, drawings and collage, and perhaps later, extending this, to performance, film and installation, all as a way of “reading” an extraordinary novel. 

“Highland River” is both a text we read, and a sourcebook we may use on our own creative journey. The “expedition” itself, as Dairmid Gunn reminds us in Neil Gunn s words, is “the source of the delight”.

This event was made in collaboration with my sister the artist Merran Gunn who created an artistic response to the writers Highland River: Creative Response  workshop, with her own painting "Highland River Triptyche". This painting is part of an going collaboration between us of text and image. 

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Imagined Spaces 

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Imagined Spaces grew out of a conversation between Gail Low and Kirsty Gunn, who are both writers and teachers of literature and writing, and who had found themselves increasingly disillusioned with the way that education in the Humanities has, of late, taught students to instrumentalise education, instead of enabling them to explore and test, and question, and really think for themselves about their subject and interests.

It is a new project at University of Dundee which is supplemented by their The Voyage Out Press, which has brought out four successful titles: The Voyage Out: An International anthology of Writing Art and Science, The Four Marys (a play), THIS (a poetry collection) and To Bodies Gone(a history of anatomy at the University of Dundee). 

https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2020/11/27/imagined-spaces/

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