‘Man is not made for defeat’

‘THERE is no such thing as coincidence,” we are often told. Rational mind-sets, it seems, refuse to accept there might be higher or other levels of reality that occasionally cross over with ours.

Ian Grimble, the late historian and broadcaster, suggested, while delivering the 1991 Neil Gunn Memorial lecture in Dunbeath, “by an extraordinary coincidence, if there is such a thing as coincidence, this is the centenary of two writers of outstanding books and letters, both of whom wrote masterpieces about life at sea”.

According to his hypothesis, as I understood it, the birth of Neil Miller Gunn in Dunbeath in November 1891, the novelist who penned The Silver Darlings, followed the death of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, who died neglected; “his masterpiece forgotten”.

Coincidence or some inferred process of synchronicity?

Synchronicity, as propounded by the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, in the 1920s, is “the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner”.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Ernest Hemingway who, in 1954, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, for “his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”.

All three novelists deployed literary devices to explore esoteric and psychological aspects of the human condition. Was it coincidence all three writers used the metaphor of an epic struggle with a creature from the sea as a cue to examine more complex issues?

Gunn, who wrote Highland River in 1937, relates the story of the barely nine-year-old Kenn who goes to fetch water at the village well, a pool in the river. His pail disturbs a huge salmon. Instinctively, Kenn throws himself into the river and begins an epic struggle as he grapples with the “demented torpedo” renowned in Celtic mythology as the “salmon of wisdom”. Against all odds he lands the fish. It is so long that even hauled over his shoulder its tail still drags along the ground... It was the defining moment of his life: “...of all that befell Kenn afterwards, of war and horror and love and scientific triumphs, nothing ever had quite the splendour and glory of that struggle by the well pool...”

Kenn never forgot the river and later, a man on a mission, he sets off to source the river’s beginnings in an allegorical quest for the meaning of life itself.

MELVILLE, who left home and embarked on a roving career as a cabin boy, went on to achieve early literary success before drifting into oblivion. His latter life was marred by periods of depression, alcoholism and, by some descriptions, insanity.

Moby Dick, now widely regarded as a great American novel, recounts the story of Captain Ahab, master of the Pequod, a “grand, ungodly, godlike man” who is obsessed with wreaking revenge against an albino whale that had bitten off his leg in a previous encounter.

Ahab is prepared to pursue Moby Dick to the ends of the earth even if it means jeopardising the lives of his crew and his own sanity. The die had been cast. Melville describes how “the white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them...” In a final act, following a fraught voyage, Ahab hurls his harpoon screaming: “...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”.

Critics dubbed the novel “the ultimate fusion of an epistemological and sexual quest”!

The Old Man and the Sea is the finely crafted description of Santiago, the ageing fisherman’s three-day fight to land a giant marlin, the first fish he had caught in 84 days. More of a novella, it is a superbly written narrative “of the beauty and grief of man’s challenge to the elements in which he lives”.

The marlin, once hooked, refused to succumb and hauled the old man’s boat far out to sea. Eventually, though, it gave up the fight. Just when Santiago thinks he has succeeded, sharks, attracted by a trail of blood left by the marlin, move in for the kill.

He fights them off but by the end only the head and tail of the marlin, roped to the boat’s hull, are left.

Hemingway was dismissive of any notion of subtexts. “The sea is the sea, the old man is the old man, the boy is the boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse.”

Critics saw in this work the author’s enduring belief in the human spirit: “Man is not made for defeat,” he had said. “A man can be destroyed but he cannot be defeated.”

All writers, it seems to me, are trying to reveal another dimension to their work through their storylines. Gunn’s work, always a “tightly interwoven tapestry”, worked at different levels; “other landscapes”. For The Scotsman columnist, Stephen McGinty, writing recently about literary legacies the question is simply: where is the Hemingway of today? Where indeed!

If Grimble is correct those very processes of coincidence, what may also lean towards synchronicity, should reveal a new incarnation from “the well at the world’s end...”

The critic, Alex Reid, suggested Gunn’s literary canon “takes on a larger significance if viewed as contributory volumes to a single work entitled ‘A Scottish Mystic’s Search for the Conditions of Human Fulfilment’”.

Theories of coincidence, synchronicity or serendipity’s “happy accident” add intriguing dimensions. What are we to make of what some might deem unconventional perspectives?

ONE of the best stories of coincidence comes from Rev George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community. A great Celtic seannachie – or Highland bard – he tells of the time when they were rebuilding the abbey precincts on Iona during World War Two and how they needed wood for the roof beams; something difficult to come by during the war years.

MacLeod brought his helpers down to the machair to pray for wood. At that moment a load of timber was blown from the deck of a cargo ship a few miles offshore. As they finished praying, the wood floated ashore; just the right number, just the right size.

One of George’s helpers complained, “That was merely a coincidence”, to which MacLeod replied: “Isn’t it interesting that whenever I pray that the coincidences seem to multiply?”

We can take the books we read for what they are worth at face value or read deeper meanings and draw more liberating insights. As Grimble, a towering intellect, reminded his audience towards the end of his lecture: “It’s not a small thing for Dunbeath to have produced a Platonic philosopher, who also mastered the Aesop art of writing fables, and who above all restored myth to its proper place as a form of illumination of the most important things in existence”.

A coincidence? You decide.

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