Abstract
This article looks at the narrative techniques employed in two collections of creative non-fiction essays by the Scottish writer and poet, Kathleen Jamie. In Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) the narrator uses the theme of travel as a platform for expressing the liminality of natural and cultural zones. At the same time, the concept of motion and the boundless travel experience are often turned into their diminutive forms. In order to transgress the dual notions of outside/inside, human/nonhuman and the visible/unseen, Jamie employs a number of visual strategies. She introduces experimental methods of observation to free perception from the constraints of the dogmatic predictions which emerge from the automatization of sight. Jamie exposes our own illusions of what “natural” is or where exactly “nature” resides, prompting us to rethink our own position in the system. In this she often demonstrates the ethical environmental agenda of contemporary Scottish writers and exposes the intrusion of globalism into parochial zones.
Highlights
This article looks at the narrative techniques employed in the creative non-fiction essays by Scottish writer and poet, Kathleen Jamie
The act of unhurried, unmediated examination has hitherto been an act of love. (...) [These bodies] all call for the same plain tenderness. (Jamie 2005: 131). In her slow progression among the exhibits, specimens of human life, she remains soundless and respectful, but never fails to ask questions that startle: “Where, I wonder does one acquire the corpse of a toddler?” (Jamie 2005: 136) When she scrutinizes a row of skeleton foetuses arranged by size and age, questions about life, disease, and suffering bring the sudden recognition that nature is not “out there” but inside
Jamie borrows from the layers of geology, topography, history, and memory, which all emanate with what oftentimes remains
Summary
This article looks at the narrative techniques employed in the creative non-fiction essays by Scottish writer and poet, Kathleen Jamie. It is not being elsewhere that is the main direction in Findings and Sightlines, but rather it is seeing differently Both collections reveal human entanglement with the world of the outside and the inside, and Jamie’s narrative strategies are used to mobilize the reader’s attention towards the place in which human nature and that of the bird, fish, or spider continue the same spectacle of life. This realizes the concept of “attentiveness” which, according to Louisa Gairn (2008: 156160), Jamie has placed at the core of her writing project. She is the one who crosses the border, who loses the world and re-discovers it again, who goes, to use Urbain’s metaphor, through the eye of a needle to ask fundamental questions about the nature of being
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