En visitant mon amie mimipalitaf, j’ai été inspirée par ses photographies de fleurs « au-coeur-du-mandala ».

Il est vrai que la nature est souvent source d’inspiration et qu’elle produit des mandalas sublimes, naturels, sans contrefaçon. Ainsi, il ne restait plus qu’à se laisser porter par Dame Nature.

J’ai associé une fleur rencontrée au détour du chemin

avec le soleil de fin de journée sur le lac de Garde (Italie)

et un bijou que j'avais depuis des lustres.

Rayonnement de la vie (peinture acrylique sur toile)

Pour un mandala qui s’appelle tout simplement : Rayonnement de la vie
et qui est dédié à toutes les personnes
qui connaissent/ont connu l'isolement de la curie thérapie.

voir d'autres mandalas : Mandalas

Le lac de Garde en Italie n'est seulement qu'à deux heures de la frontière autrichienne en voiture. Il est considéré par les Autrichiens et surtout les Tyroliens comme leur refuge et leur mer.

Pour info : La superficie du lac de Garde est de 369,98 km², sa longueur maximale de 51,6 km et sa plus grande largeur de 17,2 km, pour un périmètre de 158,4 km. Sa profondeur maximale est de 346 m, et l'altitude du plan d'eau de 65 m au-dessus du niveau de la mer.

lors d'une promenade à Bardolino où j'ai découvert une porte extraordinaire.


En s'approchant un peu, on peut découvrir les faiences


C'est qu'il a de la ressource, notre moine !

Après des semaines de suspense, la finale de Britain’s Got Talent a eu lieu samedi 30 mai 2009 regardée par une audience de 18 millions de spectateurs. Les trois meilleures performances ont été ainsi couronnées : 1^er Diversity (un groupe de jeunes danseurs), 2^e Susan Boyle, 3^e Julian Smith (saxophoniste)

Susan Boyle a subi une pression hors du commun ces dernières semaines ; portée aux nues dès le début de la compétition, la presse s’est acharnée à la poursuivre même jusque dans son hôtel. La presse à scandales a déchiqueté sa vie, campé dans son village. J’ai même vu sur Internet, un vidéo clip qui haranguait à ne pas voter pour Susan Boyle car elle allait de toute façon gagner. Donc autant voter pour les autres !

La finale a été éprouvante, les rumeurs propagées de démission juste avant la finale l’on rendu Susan Boyle très malheureuse, elle la fille de la campagne, issue d’un petit village écossais du West Lothian, la chanteuse amateur.

Susan Boyle est aujourd’hui selon les médias britanniques à l'hôpital. En raison d’un épuisement physique et psychique, elle a été admise dans une clinique de Londres sur les conseils de son médecin.

" Emotionnellement épuisée ! "

Traduction du commentaire de Pier Morgans sur son blog :

Pour moi, elle a été la plus grande découverte que le show est remarqué.  Et je regrette seulement que l'extraordinaire vague de publicité qu’elle a attiré a agacé bon nombre de personnes ; la Boyle mania a irrité plus qu’elle n’a profité à Susan. Voilà pourquoi les votants ont décidé de ne pas appeler pour elle.

Je crois sincèrement que si elle avait été dans les dernières auditions, plutôt que dans la première, elle aurait gagné facilement.

Je pense qu'elle a chanté absolument magnifiquement la nuit dernière étant donné qu'elle m'a dit qu'elle avait passé l'essentiel de la semaine à pleurer, à ne pas dormir ayant l’estomac s’en cesse retourner, et généralement ressentant une sensation de poids sur la poitrine.

Pour les sceptiques et les critiques qui l’ont dénigrée, je demande simplement : pourquoi?

Ce n'est pas la faute de Susan ! Elle est devenue ce phénomène mondial malgré elle...

J'ai été extrêmement fier de Susan la nuit dernière et j’ai été stupéfait de me réveiller en lisant les titres qui lui prédisait la fin de son rêve « END OF THE DREAM ».

Le rêve de Susan n’était pas de gagner un spectacle d’audition. C’était de faire carrière en tant que chanteuse professionnelle (si vous vous souvenez bien de sa première audition).

Et maintenant, elle va vraiment avoir une carrière. Je prédis qu'elle aura une grande vente d’album dans quelques mois et bien plus encore.

Britain’s Got Talent a été pour elle comme une déchiqueteuse, mais le show lui a permis de vivre et de réaliser son rêve.

Arriver en deuxième place est certainement la meilleure chose qui pouvait lui arriver. Elle peut maintenant se concentrer sur l'enregistrement d'un album sans les pressions et l'attention qu'elle aurait reçus si elle avait gagné l'émission.

En peu de temps, la timide souris grise aux yeux bleus est devenue une méga star sur Internet, invitée sur les plateaux de télévision. Elle ne s’y attendait pas ! Tout ce qu’elle voulait c’était « chanter devant la reine » !

Research paper on:

Lewis Grassic Gibbon
The Concept of Change in “Sunset Song”

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Scottish Literature

(This research paper was written by a non-native speaker, it could content some spelling mistakes. Feel free to take some ideas for further research, but do not use this text as your own. Your teacher could see it as a plagiary).

(Cet essai a été réalisé par un locuteur de langue française. Il peut contenir des erreurs mais il sera pour vous une source d'idées et d'informations pour de futures recherches. Ne l'utilisez pas dans son ensemble, car votre professeur pourrait vous accuser de plagiat).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell who was born in Scotland in 1901 and died in 1935. Grassic Gibbon was a major figure in the Scottish Literary Renaissance and wrote A Scots Quair which is a trilogy of the following novels: Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934).

A Scots Quair is a chronicle of the vanishing agricultural way of life in North-East Scotland. Grassic Gibbon's writing blended Scots and English languages, reproducing the “cadence and vocabulary of the Scots idiom, giving a new impetus to the development of a vernacular prose literature in Scotland” (Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 119). The trilogy as a whole gives a “powerful account of history and social change in Scotland” between 1911 and 1932 (Watson, The Literature 383). However, for the purpose of this paper, I am going to focus on the first book of the trilogy Sunset Song, where Grassic Gibbon recreated in his own words the landscape and farming life in the Mearns area of North-East Scotland where he grew up. He also portrayed a little fictional community as it was before the First World War.

As Douglas Gifford acknowledged in his article “Contemporary Fiction I: Tradition and Continuity”, the main character of the Sunset Song, Chris Guthrie, acts in Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy as a witness to “Land, Change, and Death”. He even considered her as a passive “Earth Mother” (599). This description is much unexpected although Susanne Hagemann stated in her essay that “[w]omen and nationhood prove to be connected in highly ambiguous ways” in Scottish writing and that A Scots Quair can be “interpreted both as a patriarchal and as a feminist text” (320).

It is true that male writers often placed Scottish women at the centre of the novel as “carrier of essential national identity, [and] as tradition bearer” (Gifford Contemporary 598). Through the narrative, the reader sees how Chris reacts to national identity feeling torn by her self-given two identities, the Scottish Chris and the English Chris. She connects with the land through the Scottish language, its songs, and legends but she can also demonstrate how literate she is conjugating Latin verbs. 

Although the depiction of women in a rural Scottish community as children and mature women is very conventional in the story, in the case of Chris Guthrie, the attitude of the father towards education for girls is progressive. However, Grassic Gibbon created his main character in “connections with landscape, maternity, relationships with men which were boundaries marking the territories women were supposed to occupy, allocated by men” (Gifford Contemporary 601). Predictably, the young Chris has to follow the patriarchal rules until her father’s death, after which, she shows initiative, takes her destiny into her own hands, and defies patriarchal social conditioning.

The following paper focuses on Chris Guthrie, of Sunset Song, as she grows from a child into adulthood and seeks a better understanding of the concept of changes, first, for the land and then from the heroine’s point of view that nothing endures. Progress and modernism greatly contribute to the changes. The role and symbolism of the standing stones will be discussed. In counterpart, religion and understanding of diffusionism followed by a short analysis in the changes brought by the First World War will be examined. Finally, a study of Grassic Gibbon’s concept of change will come as a conclusion to understand all the effects upon Chris as a woman who accepts changes.

Land & Peasantry

In Sunset Song, Scotland is going through inevitable changes. First of all, the prelude (or The Unfurrowed Field) gives the reader some background knowledge and describes the various historical changes from Norman times right up to the Twentieth Century. Then, the “old way of life of the crofter” comes into view, particularly at the beginning of the story, where the hard work of the peasant farmers is described sometimes poetically, sometimes imaginatively, with keeping in mind Grassic Gibbon’s point of view of early age of Scotland (Gifford Scottish 586).

But Sunset Song “portrays a harsh, cruel world” particularly well envisioned by Chris’s following thoughts of Scotland (Bold 130) as for example: just after singing The Flowers of the Forest at her marriage, Chris Guthrie-Tavendale feels “how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land and sky in dark autumn evenings” (Sunset Song 165).

In addition, indicative of the vulnerability and the dependency of the crofters, weather and seasons play an important role in the narrative. The last sentence of chapter one reveals the farmers’ expectation from Mother Nature: “the drought had broken at last” (SS 62).

The authentic depiction of the country and the hardships of farming life are due to Grassic Gibbon’s upbringing on crofts in the “Howe of the Mearns, especially at Bloomfield above Inverbervie, later fictionalised as ‘Blawearie in the parish of ‘Kinraddie’” (Watson, The Literature 384). Grassic Gibbon liked to recall that he was from a peasant background and he often expressed his pride that the land was so closely and intimately his (Watson, The Literature 384). However, he developed what Watson described in his article as a love-hate relationship with the land and Chris took shape as his “spokesperson and [became] the vessel for his own imaginative spirit” in order to express these ambivalent love-hatred feelings (The Literature 386).

Therefore, by the end of the First World War, the small farmers are passing away due to social changes – newcomers working for larger farms, tractors and machinery replacing horses, battery farming – breaking the traditional cycle. (Gifford Scottish 586). The First World War’s impact can be seen plainly on the Scots countryside as for example the trees are merely cut down for the war industry. The first one to notice the change is Chae (a minor character):  first, from his house when he looks out of the window and says that the woodmen have ruined his “land”, and then when he wandered around Kinraddie, he found it “a strange place and desolate” one (SS 202-204).

From the point of view of Chris’ brother, Will, Scotland is “dead” or “dying” (SS 216). On the contrary, Chris believes in Scotland saying to herself “Scotland lived, she could never die, the land would outlast them all” (SS 217). Here, Chris’s profound attachment to her country is expressed when she “equates [Scotland] with the land, with nature” in contrast with her brother who “thinks of Scotland in terms of human beings and their activities” (Hagemann 320).

However, it is noticed that Grassic Gibbon throughout all his works expressed his regrets that the “traditional community and its intimate connection with the land” was coming to an end (Gifford Scottish 585).

Chris Guthrie

In Sunset Song, Grassic Gibbon created “a strong female protagonist” which shows a “new and Modernist perception of the condition of women in society” (Gifford, Scottish 594). Surprisingly, he characterised Chris as a strong-minded woman who describes herself as having a dual personality “two Chrissies”, letting us think that she has some psychophrenic tendencies. Chris Guthrie identifies her “Scottish Chris” with the land but also with “the speak of the folk around her” and her “English Chris” with education (Watson, A History 417). She even says to herself (and tells the reader) that they “fought for her heart and tormented her” (SS 32). Roderick Watson is, nevertheless, amazed that the main character, who shows integrity, does not choose to become a teacher after being free of the shackles of patriarchy and poverty (Watson, A History 417). Therefore, Watson argues that it is perhaps because her home parish offers the security of an extended family circle (Watson, The Literature 387).

Furthermore, the “patriarchal stereotype linking women with nature and men with culture remains intact” through the novel (Hagemann, 320). And then, Douglas Gifford alleges that women act as guardians of national soul and tend to be “enduring witnesses rather than agents of significant change” (A History 598).

Throughout the narrative, the heroine faces “so much adversity and loss” but her “perceptiveness and cool detachment” marked her as an “intellectual and [also as a] spiritual centre of the trilogy” (Gifford, Scottish 594). It is said that she is intellectual, because she goes to college in the “Ploughing” chapter, learns French, Latin and Greek, and spiritual because she connects with nature. However, the “Chris of the land” is also sitting at the college, thinking of traditional myths which appear in the form of a heraldic animal carved into the main building (SS 44).

“Chris Guthrie represents Scotland in many ways” and can be seen as its incarnation (MacDiarmid 123). As mentioned earlier in this paper, the two Chrissies, one from Highland and one from Lowland Scot, go to Duncairn’s college each morning letting us think that the “English Chris” has more importance than the “Scot Chris”. Nevertheless, a passage suggests that she instinctively turns to the “Chris of the land” without further thinking as for example when the narrator says: “Chris took a bit peep or so in Religio Medici and nearly yawned her head off with the reading of it, it was better fun on a spare, slow day to help mother wash the blankets” (SS 59). MacDiarmid even argues that there is another level of this split suggested by “the English Chris”, the Chris, who wins the bursary, conjugates Latin verbs and pleases the Dominie. For him, there is no doubt which of these “two Chrissies wins out”; it is the “active Chris, the Chris of the soil, and the Scots Chris” (MacDiarmid 123).

However, Chris’s life is “dramatically altered by three events” in Sunset Song. First, her mother commits suicide and takes the lives of the twins, then her father dies and her husband is killed in the war (Bold 132). These highly melodramatic incidents often cause Chris to reflect upon life and its meaning. Even if she feels free after her father’s death and thinks of studying again, she chooses to listen to her own inner voice “the Chris of the land” and stays in Kinraddie. Gifford writes, “it seems that […] Chris’s role is to remain passive – to observe, to reflect, to endure all kinds of displacement” – and that she does not try to elevate her condition (Scottish 595).

As far as the topic of displacement is concerned, Chris moves with her parents from Echt, a fine land for rain, to Kinraddie, with moors and hot summer. There, she steps out of childhood turning into a mature woman in a gradual transition, moving from wife to mother to widow. Something, however, distinguishes Chris: her own “determination to remain spiritually and mentally her own person in the face of the community” but she also appears as a “solitary figure” (Watson, The Literature, 389).

Nothing Endures

Chris recognises throughout her life that “nothing endures” (SS 46). She says it, for the first time, just after the kiss given by her classmate Marget. She enjoys the sweet kiss but is embarrassed too. Despite her young age, she is aware that shyness, shame, even thrilling sensations do not last. The second time, “she minded Greek words of forgotten lessons, Παντα ρει, Nothing endures“ thinking of the land and nature, and mentioning the Pictish folk, their “sailing and passing” (SS 119). Everything is in movement, the landscape under the crofter’s hand and even her, balancing from one Chris to the other one. Speaking of the land, she questions herself if “her love might hardly endure” as she also experiences feelings of hatred like the author (SS 120).

As Ian Campbell acknowledged in his essay “Chris Caledonia: The Search for an Identity”, Grassic Gibbon offers an “opportunity to analyse a Scottish dilemma” (Campbell  130). Chris is the personification of this dilemma, torn between Scotland and England, in the flesh of a girl of the land and the educated one, going from one side to this other. She “embodies feelings [Grassic Gibbon’s own feeling which he] had known all his life and knew to be shared by his readers”, as a personal conflict (Campbell 130).

Progress and Modernism

Grassic Gibbon’s personality and experiences with farming life are extremely intricate in the trilogy. He shows in Sunset Song that the life was hard in rural Scotland at the beginning of the 20^th century but also that Sunset Song is the depiction of a fading peasant age. “He dismisses the idea that civilisation is civilising and contrasts the kindness of the Old Stone Age with the cruelty of contemporary Europe” (Bold 125).

Then, Macaree points out that besides the personal story of Chris, there is another time scheme in operation. Folks have battled against the natural difficulties to settle in Scotland, as the reader follows Chris migrating with her family “through darkness to an unknown destiny“. However, the social organisation around Chris has “after eight centuries of existence” collapsed through its “own debility in the face of changes” in the outside world as for example the impoverishment of its forests through the destruction of trees in woodlands (125).

New technologies also have a symbolism in the rural novel. Even in the introductory descriptive passage, there is the “alien technological image of the motor-car” shooming through the roads (Palmer McCulloch). The motor-car is intruding in the life of the community. They are associated with danger; first, John Guthrie is evicted from his farm because of an altercation with a female motorist, then Chae’s child is nearly killed by a car. Following this argument, Chae has been summoned and fined for assault at Stonehaven. When he comes out of the courthouse, he says there was “no justice under capitalism” (SS 27). Palmer McCulloch writes that Grassic Gibbon unobtrusively introduces the “ideological context of the novel alongside its modernistic descriptive prose and focalisation” (ASLS homepage).

At the end of the novel, the new technologies begin to undermine traditional ways of farming and also new technologies such as incubators appear. The Kinraddie crofters face inexorable changes caused by the “technology in the form of the armaments of war [which] brings the final disintegration of the [peasant] community” (Palmer McCulloch).

The Standing Stones

The standing stones are a very significant symbol in Sunset Song first, because they stand for a connection with the past and secondly because they are for Chris a place of retreat after every turmoil. She often goes there resting next to the ancient stones and the loch which are considerated by Douglas Gifford as “places of mana which connect with [Chris’s] timeless essences”. It is also interesting to notice that he states in his essay that “Scottish women have generally remained sceptical concerning such mystic links between places, history and living beings” (Gifford, A History 590).

As the standing stones remain, the world changes. According to Alan Bold, the novel is “haunted by the tragic impact of civilisation” and the transformations it brings to the lands. “[Grassic Gibbon’s] fervent Diffusionist belief that the Golden Age of the primitive hunter [which] had been destroyed by the curse of civilisation pervades the novel” (125). The Golden Age is voiced by a minister explaining to his community that the first voyagers sailing the sounding coasts brought the heathen idols of the great “Stone Rings” and revealing as it is exactly written in the novel that the “Golden Age was over and past and lust and cruelty trod the world” (SS 53).

According to Bold, the “Stones represent a marker for a way of life that vanished”. However he also considers that they show “a recrudescence of the old Pictish spirit” and that this way of life could come again (Bold 133). In contrast, Young argues that Sunset Song is the story of the last few years of the genuine Pictish folk of the Mearns and their final defeat by the forces of civilisation (Young 127).

So Chris Guthrie seeks refuge at the Standing Stones at the beginning of each chapter. There she feels that she can let her memory flow back over her and can bring to mind her last experiences. Reflecting on the passage of epochs, she sees that life continues despite the deaths. The connection between the standing stones and the passage of time allows Grassic Gibbon to express his “Diffusionist feelings for the timeless value and innocence that […] prevailed when the world was young” (Watson, The Literature 388).

Also at the end of the novel, the two-three stones are used as a War memorial for those who died during the Great War. According to Roderick Watson, the sermon of the minister Colquohoun and the singing of ‘Flowers of the Forest’ serve to “recall once again, older perspectives on mutability and human loss (The Literature 389).

Religion

Already at the beginning of the story, the narrator provides the reader with some negative comments on religion. It starts by criticising the little kirk, which was built in the time of the Roman Catholics by “coarse creatures” and the minister who would glow down at the female organist “more like John Knox than ever” (SS 7). Even the paintings on the windows, which represent some Catholic principles (Faith, Hope and Charity), do not find grace in the narrator’s eyes because they were made by “coarse creatures like Catholics” (SS 8). This shows right at the beginning of the book the intolerance of other beliefs.

As already mentioned, Grassic Gibbon was strongly influenced by the philosophical Diffusionist theory. Brown appreciably says that two points of explanation must be made to understand Grassic Gibbon’s point of view. His “philosophy of life was a belief in original innocence” (before the coming of civilised men). The downfall of original innocence began after the discovery of agriculture in Egypt and with the misuse of worship of tyrannous gods and kings, cults of property and power, and wars by a so-called civilized society (Brown 122). Young adds that Sunset Song is “permeated by the Diffusionist myth” and if the reader does not analyse the book in these terms, much of its significance will be missed (Young 127). In addition, he reveals that Grassic Gibbon was a good anthropologist and consequently he knew that the Standing Stones had a religious function. As a good Diffusionist, he also knew that religion had no place in the Golden Age and came only with the coming of civilisation (Young 127).

The standing stones’ symbolism leave perplexed at the beginning and it can be thought that the story would be about druids and ancient Scottish legends. The narrative leads the reader step by step through a range of issues involved with old practices. But, as Ivor Brown pointedly criticises there is “no place to expound [Grassic Gibbon’s] whole doctrine of the archaic civilisation, its diffusion, and its decay” if the story is not about it (122).

In contrast, John Guthrie’s (Chris’s father) strong belief in God leads us to believe that religion is important for the community but the reader gets to know that Rob of the Mill (a minor character representing the other opinion of the community) does not believe in ministers or kirks. Nevertheless, Guthrie is an extremely respectful believer and God’s name should not be given to beings or misused in his presence. As Young defines it, religion has had a sad effect upon the people of Scotland. “Calvinism […] has been an oppressive force of great magnitude” and the best representation of its inhumanity is portrayed in the brutal, bigoted John Guthrie (Young 127).

During the war, Chris asks Chae (another minor character) when the war is coming to an end and he answers: “God only knows”. Here Chris says “And you still believe in Him?” (SS 205). But, here the reader does not see any foremost changes in the story; some peoples believe, some do not. Expressing Grassic Gibbon’s ideology, only some socialistic or communistic views are uttered. Amazingly, Chris Guthrie does not follow her bigoted father’s belief. For example, at the end of Sunset Song, when Will (Chris’s brother) visits her, she asks him if he will come with her to church. He asks her if she is “getting religious”. By her answer, Chris gives a real good insight of Scots’ faith: “I don’t believe [the Scots] were ever religious […], not really religious like Irish or French or all the rest in the history books. They’ve never BELIEVED. [The kirk is] just a place to collect and argue […] and criticise God” (SS 217).

The standing stones are a symbol to “linked Scottish earth to all enduring and universal things, symbol of the early men who were happy until they missed the way” as Brown said (122). But, Young added that the stones were the reminders of that great and tragic step in Scottish history when men encountered civilisation (127). It is also amazing that they are memorials to the Golden Age and Grassic Gibbon turned them at the end of Sunset Song into a war memorial.

First World War

The war breaks out and with it, destruction. At first, no one pays attention to the war. Chris is not particularly interested; she listens to Chae Strachan and does not pay attention: “a war was on, Britain was to war with Germany”. She really does not care (as she is pregnant) and at this point, her husband does not care either (SS 186). But, the Great War is going to mark and destroy “everyone in the little community” (Watson, The Literature 389).

Men live to fight and Ewan Tavendale (Chris’s husband) goes to fight against the Germans too. Ewan is primarily excused from military service due to his “status as a farmer” (Bold 133). But feeling the village’s pressure and because he does not want people to think of him as a coward, he leaves his family and farm to enlist for war service. But when “Ewan comes back on leave before going to France, he is transformed” into an efficient fighting machine (Blod 133). Chris does not recognise her husband and sees him as a stranger. The kind, shy Ewan Tavendale does not exist any longer and Chris hates him for his brutality.

As the war affects people, it also affects the land. Consequently, changes are seen in the way of life because more commercial farming takes over until the “old peasant crofter-class finally passes away” (Watson, The Literature 389). The First World War provides a climax and with the end of the war comes “the sunset of a people and of a whole way of life. “Civilization seems to have triumphed completely in Kinraddie” (Young 128).

Grassic Gibbon’s Concept of Change

“Just as A Scots Quair was planned in three books, so each book is made to operate on distinct levels” (Bold 133). According to Alan Bold, there are three levels: narrative, poetic and mythical. In addition, the story’s mood is rather emotional and from time to time ironic, and sometimes sounds like a comedy. The narrative level deals with the story of Chris and with the English-Scots prose. The poetic level is concerned with the Scots singing and the mythical one referred to the symbolic meaning in Chris’s life (133). In addition, A Scots Quair trilogy deals with three specific social environments (parish, borough, city); Chris will have three husbands (Ewan Tavendale, Robert Colquohoun, Ake Ogilvie) and each book is concerned with three great social events (First World War, general strike, class war) (Bold 134). According to Bold, Chris will remain the “common factor, the constant and eternal feminine principle of creativity and endurance” (134).

In Sunset Song, the point of view is continually shifting from a defined to an undefined narrator. Grassic Gibbon uses an “incomparable flexibility and ambiguity of point of view”. The narrator can be one of the fictional characters or an anonymous individual or the community itself with a gossiping tone (Young 127).

Grassic Gibbon certainly chose his title carefully. Young thinks that the author chose the sun as symbol of the Golden Age and its disappearance interpreted in the singing sunset (127). The sun is truly present in the story and two examples can be cited: first, the relationship of sun and singing: the sun is “shining bravely” when Rob past whistling the songs “Ladies of Spain and There was a young maiden and The lass that made the bed for me” and secondly, the alliance of sun and past: Chris’s mother is “against the sun as though you peered far down a tunnel of the years” (SS 18 & 26). According to Roderick Watson, “A Scots Quair belongs with the several great books in Scottish literature which have dealt with the theme of the divided self and the spiritual antithesis between ‘masculine’ authority and ‘feminine’ sensitivity” (The Literature 393).

It is important to notice that numerous tragedies happened during Sunset Song and in Chris’s life which correspond to a cycle of birth, life and death (her mother killed herself and her twins, her brutal father passed away and her husband is shot). In addition, three men from the village (included Ewan Tavendale) died in war.

Each chapter of Sunset Song corresponds to farming seasons related to the “fertile cycles” of cultivation: Ploughing, Drilling, Seed-Time, Harvest. It is described as a constant revolution.

Grassic Gibbon liked to destabilise his readers by writing against the Kailyard trend. The idealized picture from Scotland is impeded by the hard work of the peasantry. L. A. G. Strong in his essay reveals that Grassic Gibbon was certainly torn between the desire to depict the life and the landscape realistically and the desire to give an “idealized picture”. According to Strong, the “bewildering changes of tone” and the “lack of organization in the narrative” ensued from this longing (Strong 120).  

And then, Chris can be seen at the end of the book as a survivor. Additionally, Bold sees her as a phenomenon, “a survival of the primitive type” (Bold 133). It seems to me important to keep in mind that Chris is described as the eternal feminine principle of creativity and endurance in the first book (Bold 134).

Conclusion

This paper conveys my great interest in understanding Grassic Gibbon’s diffusionist belief and in appreciating his narrative quality through the description of Chris’s character and the land with a rural realism. I also tried, during the writing of this paper, to start sentences with but, and, so and then as Grassic Gibbon does in Sunset Song in order to feel his writing.

Grassic Gibbon excels in capturing the essences of Scotland, exploring progress, rediscovering ancient tradition and understanding religion. Sunset Song is not just the story of Chris Guthrie and of Kinraddie but a total “critique of human civilization” with its chronic failures, emphasis on time, labour, and wealth (Young 126).

Scotland went through historical changes. In Sunset Song, the land is confronted with agricultural and social changes and from Will’s point of view, “she” is losing “her soul”. But, Chris still believes in it. She sees the changes and knows that folk cannot avoid them. She learns to live with the changes, in herself (from innocent childhood through teenage years right into adulthood) and the ones which happened around her (dislodgment, births, marriage, deaths) and, merely just not accept them. The “Chris of the land” triumphs over the “Chris of the books”. She observes, reflects, endures near the standing stones which act as a mystical anchorage.

Surprisingly, the reader sees her determinism growing throughout the novel, by facing the patriarchal society. As Watson wrote, she is distinguished in the narrative by her determination to “remain spiritually and mentally her own person in the face of a community which offers only the narrowest and most domestic of roles to women” (389). She remains as strong as the standing stones.

Very special words have been said from Sunset Song but the following quotation written in 1934 by Basil Davenport deserves to be the final comment as recap: “this trilogy is an enduring memorial of a land” (Davenport 121).

Works Cited

D’après Gerhard Huber, chercheur spécialisé ès sport à l’université de Heidelberg, la plupart des diabétiques peuvent contrer leur diabète de type 2 grâce au sport. Il ajoute que le diabète mellites est une maladie à laquelle on peut « échapper ».

Les effets positifs de l’activité physique sont bien connus. En règle générale, le sport aide non seulement à ralentir l’évolution d’une maladie mais aussi sert à améliorer le bien-être et donc la qualité de vie. 

Donc la pendule peut être remise à l’heure et cesser d’avancer puisque Gerhard Huber a conduit une enquête sur plus de 250 diabétiques et que cette étude s’est révélée positive.

De plus, une nouvelle étude américaine a démontré clairement et nettement que le diabète de type 2 entraîne une augmentation de la tension et des valeurs lipidiques. Un groupe de patients a donc été divisé en deux : le premier groupe a reçu une médication normale ; le deuxième groupe a reçu une médication associée à la visualisation d’un film comique pendant 30 minutes. Ces derniers patients ont montré après deux mois de ce traitement hilarant une réduction de la concentration d’hormone du stress. Ces diabétiques ont même vu après un an leur taux de cholestérol HDL (le bon cholestérol) augmenté d’un quart. L’autre groupe n’a pratiquement pas constaté de changement.

Alors qu’attendez-vous pour bouger et rigoler !

ça a l'air si simple...

Source TT 20/05/2009 & 29/04/2009 N° 111