Experimenting with Historiographic Narrative and Guidebook Style in An Orkney Tapestry by George Mackay Brown

Abstract

In An Orkney Tapestry George Mackay Brown creates a collage guidebook that exceeds the precepts of non-literary text and becomes an intermedial, literary guide to stories, traditions and identity of the archipelagic place. At the same time it is an experimental work that tests the concept of the duality of the story and the fable (understood in the sense proposed by Edwin Muir) that seems to Brown as redemptive in terms of culture preservation. Brown’s semiotic and systemic choices seem to be aimed at countering the modern loss of meaning. The Orkney writer engages in dialogic reworking of the northern European tradition, striving for the heraldic, reader-oriented way or representation. The use of the technique of literary collage and fragmentary storytelling makes this book into an intermedial commentary on culture and its celebration.