Yet the power of the book goes beyond question of solely national identity, for as the New York Times reviewer saw so clearly in 1933, Sunset Song ‘may be read with delight the world over.’
The present text follows that of the first edition of 1932 as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of roman, not italic, capitals for words emphasised in direct speech. Misprints that were never picked up in later editions have been corrected, and in the interests of clarity I have added marks of punctuation in three places. We have gone back to the original longer paragraphs of 1932, and the map of Kinraddie has been prepared by George Mackie from the one in the first edition.
If the book is entirely new to you, do not be put off by the glossary at the end. Whether you are Scots or English, American, Australian or Nigerian, speed-reading will sweep you into the action, and if—as Gibbon himself advised in the note prefaced to the American edition of 1933—you start with the Song itself, leaving the Prelude till later, you will soon find yourself effortlessly grasping the main sense of unfamiliar words from the context, and responding with delight to the heroine’s inner voice and the rhythms of the community’s speech. But do not skip the Prelude altogether: as the New York Times reviewer was acute enough to observe on 2 April 1933, it is ‘a very skilfull piece of literary engineering.’
It was Gibbon’s strategy in his introductory note (p.xiii) to pretend that he was writing in English, with only a few modifications. But in reality he achieved something rather different. He cloaked the Scots vocabulary in English spelling, writing ‘blether’ as ‘blither’, ‘blaw’ (to boast) as ‘blow’, ‘braw’ (fine, handsome) as ‘brave’, and so on, easing the reading for non-Scots. But for native speakers, the pronunciations and meanings automatically given to words like ‘ongoing’ and ‘childe’ strengthen their conviction that they are participating in a life that is both familiar and national, though gone, perhaps, for ever. Furthermore, different readers respond differently to matters of content as well as of style.4 Those who have read Gibbon’s essays and historical writings may be tempted to see the whole trilogy in terms of the diffusionist philosophy of history, an early twentieth-century version of primitivism with its notion that civilisation is a decline from some Golden Age.5 It is an interpretation which is easily combined with naive allegory, equating Chris Guthrie with the Land itself, and by extension with Scotland as a nation. There are even readings which push allegory to a ludicrous extreme, identifying Long Rob of the Mill with Robert Burns and Ewan’s desertion from the trenches with the Jacobite retreat from Derby in 1745.
Some readers have been irritated by what they see as Gibbon’s overuse of ‘and’ and ‘you’. But the repeated ‘ands’ are a necessary feature of the style’s extraordinary fluidity and motion: while ‘you’ is perhaps his most effective device for displaying both his entire fictional world and the mind of his heroine. In the Prelude and Epilude the voice is mainly that of a crony narrator generalised from the community, though it sometimes modulates into another through which the author’s more sensitive perceptions can appear, as in the historical sketch of Kinraddie in the Prelude. The crony narrator, the ‘voice of the folk’ as he has been called, often employs ‘you’. Gibbon’s—and the reader’s—most vivid perceptions are mediated through Chris Guthrie’s consciousness, which exists within frames of third-person past-tense narrative and description. We respond with ease as Gibbon’s style shifts so smoothly between Chris’s mind, these frames, and the crony narrator.
Gibbon often uses ‘you’ in a way quite rare in fiction, which he may even have invented: ‘self-referring you’, as Graham Trengove has called it.6 Self-referring you serves to dramatise a character’s thought; while generic you, equivalent to ‘everybody’, strengthens the impression of universality. By running the two together when dealing with Chris, Gibbon creates the overpowering conviction that even in the most particular and intimate moments of her life, Chris’s experiences are universal. Gibbon’s style is thus one of the great achievements of the trilogy, and should be seen in relation to Scottish forerunners like John Galt, as well as in the context of modernist innovators such as Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner.
Thomas Crawford
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
1. See Ian Carter, ‘Dorset, Kincardine and Peasant Crisis: a comment on David Craig’, Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (4) 1975, pp. 483–8.
2. I owe this piece of oral history to Dr W. R. Aitken, the distinguished bibliographer.
3. David Craig, ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’, Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (1) 1974, pp. 47–68.
4. The point is discussed more fully in Ian Campbell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1985), pp. 53–4.
5. The best account of Gibbon’s Diffusionism is in Douglas F. Young, Beyond the Sunset (1973), pp. 9–15.
6. Graham Trengove, ‘Who is you? Grammar and Grassic Gibbon’, Scottish Literary Journal 2 (2) 1975, pp. 47–62.
If the great Dutch language disappeared from literary usage and a Dutchman wrote in German a story of the Lekside peasants, one may hazard he would ask and receive a certain latitude and forbearance in his usage of German. He might import into his pages some score or so untranslatable words and idioms—untranslatable except in their context and setting; he might mould in some fashion his German to the rhythms and cadence of the kindred speech that his peasants speak. Beyond that, in fairness to his hosts, he hardly could go: to seek effect by a spray of apostrophes would be both impertinence and mis-translation.
The courtesy that the hypothetical Dutchman might receive from German a Scot may invoke from the great English tongue.
L.G.G.
KINRADDIE lands had been won by a Norman childe, Cospatric de Gondeshil, in the days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf-beast, come through the hide window, tearing at their throats. In the Den of Kinraddie one such beast had its lair and by day it lay about the woods and the stench of it was awful to smell all over the countryside, and at gloaming a shepherd would see it, with its great wings half-folded across the great belly of it and its head, like the head of a meikle cock, but with the ears of a lion, poked over a fir tree, watching. And it ate up sheep
