Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 17, Number 1 (1992)

"Sounds in the Empty Spaces of History": The Highland Clearances in Neil Gunn's Highland River and Alistair MacLeod's "The Road to Rankin's Point"

  • Christopher Gittings
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1992-01-01

Abstract

The narrators in Alistair MacLeod's "The Road to Rankin's Point" and Neil Gunn's Highland River return to the moments of disjunction caused by the nineteenth-century highland clearances in order to recover parts of themselves and their culture through a reconstruction -- through remnants of oral narrative, music, and the ruins which mark the landscape -- of the lost people in their ancestral pasts. For both MacLeod and Gunn, the dislocation and cultural erasure caused by the clearances have deep resonances in the present-day communities they write of and recurring ramifications in the continuing disintegration of highland culture due to migration. Scottish and Canadian writers such as Gunn, MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, and Iain Chrichton Smith textualize the culturally disruptive moments of the highland clearances in moments when past and present intersect in order to establish personal identity in the present and make visible, through the subjectivity of personal narrative, what received history has rendered invisible.