Littoral Impressionism in The Wreck of the Archangel by George Mackay Brown

Abstract

George Mackay Brown’s poetic renderings of northern archipelagic world have never been considered in the context of the techniques of literary Impressionism as deployed to attain the aesthetic effect of reader engagement. It is possible to view the author’s mature collection of poetry The Wreck of the Archangel as composed on the principle of littoral Impressionism that expands Joseph Conrad’s idea of art as expressed in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. This article will examine Brown’s ecosophy of community that emerges from his major aesthetic principles used to give the reader the literary experience of the seatangled multiperspectivity. Brown’s unique lyrical-narrative insights into multiplicity of qualia and ecopoetic focus result in particular aesthetic effect of phenomenological immediacy. Adopting such perspective on the Orkney author might be an important point for reassessment of his position in the history of Scottish and British literature.