Speaking of Stories: Language, Libraries and Scottish Jokes

by Kirsty Gunn

At a family ceilidh last Christmas my husband was asked, as he always is, to tell a few jokes that he tells very well.  He learned these stories - for stories they are, really, and not jokes as such at all  - from his father who was an excellent raconteur, and had scores of such anecdotes on hand to entertain parties of fishermen and women and after dinner guests and his family.

So the tradition holds; my husband entertaining his own family on a dark night in Sutherland by the fire...A story in itself, you might say, beginning here, the first paragraphs of this essay. We sat on the edge of our seats, a party of us, knowing the punchlines by heart, along with the other turns of phrase and sentences that we knew were going to arrive in due course; preparing ourselves in advance for the pleasures and satisfactions of a narrative that we knew so well. My father, who also loves David’s father’s jokes, has a certain look on his face as he listens to these tales of impecunious gamblers and  canny neighbours and timorous shepherds, just waiting for the moment he particularly relishes– a look that describes someone who is just, but only just, holding himself back from bursting into great gales of laughter.

This story that we were hearing now was the one about the three farmers who meet at the yearly “Fee’in’ Merket” and compare notes, keeping a sharp eye on each other by way of talking up their crops and the number of children they’ve managed to produce. The whole thing is set in Stonehaven around the middle of the last century I am guessing and comes complete with precise place names and a certain tone, the pronouncement of particular words and phrases... “Well, now...” David leans back and narrows his eyes, exhaling a long and hard won sigh. “There were these three old schoolfriends, you see. One lived over near Fyvie way, another was in Aboyne, and the other, wee Eck, he lived in Huntly, and they’d not met for a while, so they decided...” It’s a great story.

It struck me then, as David settled into the details, laying out the ground and circumstances, inching, line by line, through the delicious subtleties of character and place that were conveyed in the timbre and spacing and sheer rhythm of the narration, that I wanted to write about all this: About how the joke, the story – being almost entirely in the telling - is not even so much a “story”, with story’s certain givens and rules, as a situation of language. I say “situation” not only because of the way these anecdotes and tales are indeed located in a  specific place, with certain geography and cultural markings, but for the way they are also placed most certainly in the time of their telling. They exist, precisely, in the room, in the space between the narrator and those of us who are doing the listening; played out minute by minute, second by second, in the interaction of word and response, response and word. Altogether, when you think about it, these stories that are spoken aloud by way of an after dinner entertainment or an item at a ceilidh are less about plot and payoff as they are about their very texture and sound.

This may be obvious, of course; all stories fare better in the charge of one who knows how to deliver them; sense and understanding crucially dependent upon the figure, the face, the voice, the timing. And language rendered not as the vocabulary and syntax and speech of a printed, published story which has been memorised and then recited but as expression, as words, to paraphrase literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, “in the mouth” of the speaker... Well of course this is to have a resonance much as music has resonance, where dynamics and expression and the pull of a time signature and phrasing contribute so much more to the notes that are printed on the score. But something other than performance, is what I am getting at, too, gesturing towards something that is surely more subtle than a presentation or an act. For just as there is a kind of exchange in operation, some contributive effect based on that “situation” of both speaker and listener, so, I am also starting to think, is the narrating voice – though the rest of us sit quietly by the fire, only listening – somehow... shared. By paying attention, as critic Harold Bloom tells us, we “create’.*

Many of the tales David tells as part of his repertoire - as surely they are by now, a set of fictions precisely ordered and governed,  handed down, “told down” one might say, from father to son - are set in the region of the “Fermers’ Story” here, in Angus and Aberdeenshire, but also a fair number of them in Fife where David’s father was born. My own father who is a Caithness bagpiper has a different geography for his stories – they take in another kind of landscape, and, yes, because of his interests and that part of the world, there’s often music in there somewhere. In fact, canntaireachd, a form of singing the notes of the music for the Highland Bagpipe that is passed down through generations from teacher to pupil as father to son, may well be a perfect metaphor for what I am trying to say here.** That this precise, ancient and Scottish form of musical ‘notation” that is actually sung as notes in the air instead of read as marks on a stave, might express perfectly a form of narration that is heard, not read, spoken, not written. For sure, so much of the delight in this very regionally-minded storytelling I am writing about is to do with that kind of conveyance -  the way voice and body combine to bring a place to life, have it be present in our midst as much as the characters whose story it is seem to be present. ***

Jokes, then -  these kinds of stories – travel. They bring their geography and identity with them, to the new place where they are being told and let us come inside and live there. I remember, growing up in New Zealand, the pleasure my father and his Scottish friends took when a story came out that was from “Home”. How the cadences and vocabularies and syntax all spoke in such a way that there, in the midst of a Christmas holiday in summer on the other side of the world, we were immediately transported back to that other beloved place. On the beach in December, maybe, but in our minds and emotions, in the language and words and accents that were in the air, somewhere else - by our fire in Sutherland, even, we may as well have been.  Yes, we know jokes speak a sort of universal language, that humour is international, but what I am describing is not only a simple relaying of a place’s particularity and essence by description and taking pleasure in that. This is a something participatory, contributive, as I mentioned earlier - a quality engrained in the voice, in the very centre of the sentences of the story, that comes to be embodied in the the teller of the tale and, in turn, as our responses synch in with the words, settles within the bodies of  those of us who are listening.

I saw this happening the night that I am writing about. The way my husband brought Huntly and Aboyne to the fireside, with accents and mannerisms and a way of casting the world in the candid and highly localised terms of those places; the way we all inhabited that market over at Stonehaven as we listened, became locals ourselves, you might say, in our appreciation. David  had got to the part where the three friends are comparing farms. “I’ve ten acres with mostly fat cattle, ye ken, over Fyvie way... The others saying they had mostly sheep and neeps...” And as he spoke he became not only the farmer but his own father too, in part, who, in turn, in his telling had returned from South Edinburgh where he lived to his own place of origin not that far from where the story was set. So as David came into that role, in voice, posture, gesture, he came into Aberdeenshire and Aberdeenshire came into him – as it did, then, for all of us. Of course, we know that it is by listening, for whatever reason, we affirm our connection to each other. For however brief a time, as we pay attention, we take up residence in the sensibility of the person we are listening to and feel, don’t we, a brief intimacy with them then, a bond?  And what I am now realising is that perhaps THAT’S what the joke is about, after all. The story a celebration of the language and situation of its telling, yes, and the place where that language comes from, but in the end it’s the simple interconnection between narrator and those who come into that space and shares that it is life affirming and meaningful, that brings a smile to our face and makes us laugh. The mystery of the joke resides, its deep pleasure and sense of fun, in the way that by listening to it the language of the story becomes our own. A kind of miracle occurring: That in hearing, we also speak.

I was reflecting upon all this  - linguistic affect, the impact of timbre, the very pitch, if you like, of vocabulary  – while resident in Merton College, in Oxford, recently.  Thinking hard, there in England, about how the sound of being Scottish inflects everything we do – from calling out in a hushed quad as though across the High Street in the teeth of an Edinburgh wind to using the familiar pre-emptive negative to express volition, which, to English ears, sounds so very challenging. For sure, I could hear so precisely, in that enclosed and lovely College down South, how strongly my own voice and manner and sense of humour and way of being  – there, deep in the body of ancestral England! - was so fixed elsewhere. How it was, similarly, that I just couldn’t help myself - a subject of the United Kingdom after all, though stravaiged in from the Highlands- but laugh at a certain kind of story, “get it”, in a way that would only make sense north of the border. And how, too, I could no more monitor that appreciation other than in my body, somehow, within my very sense. It seems to be as though, just as with hearing of a “Fee’in’” market, “Ach, well now you see...”  something sets off a sort of visceral, atavistic response to a code embedded deep in our dna, in our cultural memory and being’ness when we respond to Scottish syntax, tone and phrase. Language, I was reminded, taking my place in the dining halls and drawing rooms and libraries of Oxford’s oldest college, is not simply vocabulary, a form of communication conveyed in words. It sounds...

In terms of my own interests, there is quite a practical aspect to all this. For as long as I can remember I’ve been engaged by the aural texture of literature – more than by story, say, or character. From my first novel onwards there’s a continuing preoccupation with creating a sort of “soundscape” for the narrative - whether that’s in drawing out the plangent tones of Highland piobaireachd or, most recently, fabricating the tinkly mirror-lit conversations of parties and bars that could not be further from the Sutherland hills that I can see at the window, here at my writing desk. I’ve always wanted to make the kind of sentence that will lift off the page and envelop reader and writer alike.**** Strangely, though, it was in the Upper Library at Merton, established by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1276 and a quietly serious place of English scholarship and study, that I came to realise fully how Scottish literature, with its history of ballad and orature and clear aural qualities, might have been more of an influence on my own literary efforts than I thought. For it was while I was sitting there in the medieval reading room, the only person upstairs in the world’s oldest continually open library, that I heard that sound of Scottish writing so distinctly in the still air it came as a kind of recognition.

We each of us have a language that comes from the world around us – the people and  places we are familiar with, that make us feel familiar – and we put it into the books we write. How characters talk, the vocabulary and the diction of narrative... This is necessary, after all, not only to our understanding of the texts we read but also - as we do talk about, in reviews and in our literary appreciation of the social and cultural significance of the speech that finds its way into novels and short stories – in helping us develop a perception of ourselves. So I “heard” a language, a clear differentiation of one text from the others, when I sat in the hushed reading carrel, selecting, at random, essays, novels, travel writing, natural science... And discovered there, in a five hundred year old volume of writing about  the north east of Scotland, including a map that was so detailed it practically included the fireside in Sutherland with which I began this essay, the notes and cadences of a Scotland as clear and direct that it was as though voices were speaking.

Writing, I was reminded then, on a morning in Oxford in early Spring, that is alert and reflective of all the subtle shifts in tone and register we hear when we are speaking and listening to each other, is as fresh and vital as the present tense of living. It has power and presence and force. And just as poetic language must be used, as Edwin Muir reminds us, if it’s not to fall into away into mannerism, so the printed words of an anonymous 16th century writer showed me that sound is not only an underlying base note of our literature but is, as much as theme and style, part of its very temperament. People talk a great deal about needing stories to show us who we are, what we’re made of and who we might be. I rather think, as I settle once again into the one about the farmer from Fyvie, or begin writing something of my own, that it’s the language stories are made of that’s complex and surprising and vital. We are who we say we are. “We carry” as Burns Singer writes, “that which we are carried by.”

Notes from this essay

*Harold Bloom, in “The Anatomy of Influence” writes compellingly about the need, not only to pay attention to literature, but, if possible to memorise it so as to really make it our own. “Possess Hamlet by memory” Bloom says, “and he ceases to seem merely clever or as crazy as the rest of us.”

** A discussion of canntaireachd could happily form the basis of another essay about orature and literature, and the similarities, in Scotland, between the two. It was during a discussion with James Kelman in the late nineties about Gertrude Stein and the use of time in his own fiction that I first became aware, too, of the political aspect of a fiction that sounded as though it was spoken not “published”.

***Is this particular to Scotland, I wonder? Are “stories” told at parties in England as reliant upon their geography? Or is this something pertaining to our country, with its dramatic geographical differences and areas of isolation? Certainly the differences between an after dinner story about an Angus farmer and a crofter in Caithness might be about as different as either one in comparison to a story set south of the border. There’ s much to think about here...

**** “The Big Music” was a novel I wrote, set in Sutherland and based around the structure and sound of piobaireachd, that was published before my most recent, “Caroline s Bikini”, which takes place in West London. The two may not, on the surface, seem to have anything at all in common, but for the fact that the latter, despite its glamorous southern setting, with its pool parties and gin and tonics, is actually a tale told told by a Stuart about a Gordonston and has, I like to think, cadence and toe that owes more to Muriel Spark than to the Home Counties.

Final Note: Burns Singer is a truly wonderful 20th century  Scottish poet who is not as well known as he might be. For my money, “To Four Friends, Drowned in Loch Lomond, Easter 1944” gives Milton’s “Lycidas” a run for is money in its traumatic failure to stopper grief while apparently smoothing the waters of a tragic drowning in beautiful elegy.