7 - Innocence and Dystopia: Young Art and Old Hector and The Green Isle of the Great Deep

Summary

To treat Young Art and Old Hector (1942) and The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944) together is to trace the course of a providential accident and to explore the ways in which the creative mind generates thought by setting characters a challenge, as in legend or folk tale.

While struggling with the emotional complexities of The Serpent, Gunn was asked by the editor of Chambers’ Journal to provide a series of short stories. The readership of this durable institution liked outdoor adventure and romance without explicit sex. Dark thoughts were unwelcome. In Gunn's childhood old men and young boys were often in each other's company because neither could do a full day's heavy work in the fields. Why not use this relationship to tell traditional stories to show how knowledge and culture are passed from generation to generation through one-to-one understanding? In Young Art and Old Hector, Hector, the old man, is teaching Art, the boy; by the end of the Green Isle Art is teaching Hector.

After the stories had appeared in book form Naomi Mitchison wrote to Gunn mildly protesting that, since she had not come across this relationship in the Highlands, could there perhaps be something sentimental or escapist in the choice of subject?

The word ‘escapist’ applied to anything he had written was a red shirt waved before a Highland bull, and although pride later caused him to deny it, Mitchison's challenge put into Gunn's mind the idea of tackling through the two characters in the stories the most dangerous contemporary threat to human freedom.

He had long been concerned with the way in which Stalinist Russia had been using subtle and destructive interrogation techniques to induce sincere devotees of the revolution to confess themselves traitors to the Soviet State. (It was a similar concern which drove Orwell to write 1984.) How would two disparate representatives of Highland values, Young Art and Old Hector, fare if set down in a sophisticated totalitarian society?