Loss, Diaspora, Displacement, and Parentage in Alistair MacLeodʼs No Great Mischief
Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief is a novel about family, history, clan bonds and the preservation of Scottish tradition and history by Scottish immigrants in Cape Breton, Canada. Spanning over two centuries, narrator Alexander MacDonald’s family history maps out the generational effects of the...
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| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
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Études écossaises
2016
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief is a novel about family, history, clan bonds and the preservation of Scottish tradition and history by Scottish immigrants in Cape Breton, Canada. Spanning over two centuries, narrator Alexander MacDonald’s family history maps out the generational effects of the Scottish diaspora on the extended clan, clann Chalum Ruaidh, including loss of land, language, music, and clan members. Clann Calum Ruaidh becomes dispersed within Canada itself, although it is never spiritually divided as kinship bonds are repetitively enforced, and its members remain, as Lily Cho writes of diasporic communities, “connected by a sense of a homeland” (2007, p. 12). Yet while the novel is about familial relationships during a lifetime of cultural preservation in a new country, what ultimately haunts the text is significant loss of parentage. If the diasporic experience means to be “marked by loss”, as Cho suggests (2007, p. 19), then Alexander and the various members of clann Chalum Ruaidh are undoubtedly diasporic subjects. The novel is shaped by familial loss and the characters as products of the Scottish diaspora are challenged to preserve their Scottish traditions, language, lore and sense of the homeland in Canada in and amidst these tragedies. Throughout the text, the diasporic experience is manifested in the deaths of the parents of central characters such as Alexander, Catherine, Calum, the initial children of Calum Ruadh, and Grandfather MacDonald. While parentage is a means with which these characters connect to Scotland and Scottish tradition, the preservation process is hindered by the deaths of parents in clann Chalum Ruaidh. The mother and father figures in the clan function as the closest ties to the Scottish homeland generationally and genealogically, and as they disappear, these ties to homeland and history become obscured, and the children of the clan, displaced. |
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