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5 - Highland River

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Summary

Many writers never escape from childhood. Only as a child were they shaken, brought awake, fully engaged with experience, only as a child were they capable of wonder. As a result, only when they return to childhood as a subject are they capable of seeing life living itself with fresh vitality in language and response.

Unless this awareness and sense of wonder can be carried into adulthood, writing must eventually lose authenticity and become prosaic. Highland River (1937), which is mainly about childhood, is the book in which Gunn escapes from it. At times the book seems an almost conscious attempt to do so, as if the writer has chosen a method intuitively, and then realized in the course of writing that he is performing a peculiar piece of liberating ventriloquism.

His publishers wanted another Morning Tide. That book had broken open the negative melancholy in which he had been locked, and appealed to the public because childhood restored freshness and vigour to his style and perception. Faber suggested specifically that he might try a novel based on the river beside which he had been brought up. The suggestion was inspired by a pleasant, unassuming book centred on a placid English stream which could have given Gunn little to enthuse about. He was never very responsive to suggestion in any case. But the river in the strath always ran in his mind as the source of his inner life, the ground of his education, and the essence of his early experience.

He knew he could not rewrite Morning Tide, and hit upon a technique to avoid doing so. He detached himself at two removes from his own childhood in order to engage with it more fully. First, he imagined the book as the character Kenn's memories and reflections upon his younger life. Second, he chose to see Kenn not as the young Neil Gunn, but as the young John Gunn, his immediate junior as brother, and lifelong friend.

Why? Because he knew that in order to encompass his aim he needed to avoid the intense identification which had destroyed The Lost Glen. Third, he is even more securely protected by the device of narrating Kenn's story in the third person, while identifying it as Kenn's recollections, so that the narrative voice is ambiguous.

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Neil Gunn
, pp. 45 - 48
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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