Whether they are itinerant miners, students bound for university, or those in pursuit of economic stability, many of the characters who inhabit MacLeod's two published volumes of haunting and lyrical short stories The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986) are bome away from their Cape. Tabtight professional, free when you need it, VPN service.
This paper examines how Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, in his latest short story entitled “Clearances”, attempts to reconnect the twentieth-century maritime culture of Cape Breton, Canada, to an idealized Scottish past that dates back to the eighteenth-century clearances of the Highlands. Along with No Great Mischief, the only novel he published in his lifetime, his short stories tackle the themes of displacement, forced migration and collective memory. Ms Office 2007 Free Download Utorrent Kickass Games here. After focusing on the role played by the Atlantic Ocean in his short stories as a reminder of historical and cultural displacement, this study will explore how MacLeod’s “Clearances” reconstructs a forgotten line of filiation between Cape Breton and the Highlands that sends characters and readers back and forth in time. MacLeod’s purpose to emphasize the prime importance of local culture is twofold: his stories not only serve to resist oblivion, they also express a refusal to surrender to the powerful pressures of a present-day process of globalization that challenges and threatens the survival of local identities.
1 Alistair MacLeod’s reputation as a short story writer began with the publication of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood in 1976, which revolves around the themes of loss, identity, exile and sense of place in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. MacLeod was born in Saskatchewan in 1936 and moved with his family to Cape Breton to live on the family farm. Before becoming a teacher and a writer, he worked as a miner and a fisherman, jobs that were to help him understand workers who struggled every day to survive and provide for their families.
Ansys Autocad Import Layers here. Drawing upon this experience, MacLeod’s work has extensively focused on the life struggles of the inhabitants of Cape Breton whose local history dates back to the eighteenth-century Highland clearances in Scotland. Many of the Highlanders who were defeated at the battle of Culloden in 1746 were forced into exile and had no other choice but to cross the Atlantic in search of a new life in the colonies. Those who chose Cape Breton in Eastern Canada had to face harsh living conditions and new challenges upon arrival, but they remained loyal to their Scottish origins by preserving their language and culture. The harsh winds and choppy oceans that MacLeod describes in his stories echo those of Scotland, so much so that Colin Nicholson, in one of his articles devoted to Alistair MacLeod’s first collection, labelled his stories “elemental fictions” (p. 90). Indeed, MacLeod uses the weather as a metaphor for the hardships of early Canadian settlers and diasporic communities, a metaphor that became one of the dominant features of early Canadian literature.
In the 1970s, these features were theorized by Margaret Atwood in her seminal work, Survival, in which she argued that “for early settlers and explorers, [survival] meant bare survival in the face of ‘hostile elements’ and/or natives: carving out a place and a way of keeping alive” (p. 32). In 1968, MacLeod’s first short story, “The Boat”, tells the story of a young boy destined to walk in his father’s footsteps and become a fisherman. The story focuses on the tight connections between Cape Bretoners, their history and the ocean they depend on for their livelihood.
“The Boat” was republished in Island: Collected Stories (2001), a chronologically organized collection of sixteen short stories that includes all the pieces from his earlier collections— The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986)—and two new short stories, “Island” (1988) and “Clearances” (1999). This paper will focus on his last short story, “Clearances”, which concentrates on a nameless protagonist’s inability to come to terms with the changes implied by modernity. 2 To this purpose, I will examine the role played by the ocean in the preservation of a Scottish heritage and how it partakes in the restoration of a cultural continuity between Cape Breton and the Scottish Highlands. Even though “Clearances” will remain the main focus of this study, I shall refer to his novel and a few of his previous stories that deal with displacement and collective memory in a similar fashion. First and foremost, I will discuss how the Atlantic Ocean in his story serves a dual purpose to tell stories of loss and displacement on the one hand and reconnection through memory on the other. The second part of this article will examine how the vast distances implied by the ocean call for the narrative reconstruction of a line of filiation between Cape Breton and the Highlands and I will devote the last part of this essay to MacLeod’s narrative representation of the clash between local identity and globalization. 3 Like many of his previous stories, “Clearances” deals with how strongly the past affects the present, and the narrator’s nostalgic tone illustrates the classic theme of regret over the disappearance of an entire tradition or way of life. Dt466 Injector Cup Replacement.