The Story of
Storytelling in Jim Crace's The Gift of
Stones
© 2002 Karoly Rozsa, University of Debrecen, Hungary
Jim Crace’s novel The Gift of Stones tells us about the
birth of storytelling. It seems that storytelling results from the energy
generated by the clash of two opposing forces back in the prehistoric ages. The
forces are represented by a village of knappers and the heath. Let us see, very
strictly sticking to the text of the novel, how this antagonism is pictured.
The village is the place of order
and harmony. Everybody has their own role, everything is predictable here.
Stone directs the individual lives, it sets the timetables. Stone does not only
provide livelihood but it is also a (temporary, as it turns out) protection
from the outside world: “... we could not be touched because we possessed the
gift of stones”.[1] The village
is compared to an anthill several times (19, 56) with its well-organised life
and hard-working people, its uniformity. When a new shaft on the hill is
opened, all “the boys and girls were ordered there. It was their job to stand
in line with baskets and tip the disturbed topsoil — and the
useless stones, the surface flints made unworkable by frost —
into disused workings” (8). “... their progress would seem like a waterfall of
people, a dozen slow streams meeting in a impatient, fresh cascade” (9). The
village “was obsessed with work, with industry, with craft” (9). The
inhabitants lead a sober life: “No one got drunk, no one had drink. The fabric
of the village was made strong by the warp and weft of rules. Intoxicating
drink was not allowed. It produced bad flint” (21). The stoneys do not drink,
which only emphasizes their dry life. Fluidity would lead to bad flint, the
loss of uniformity, the development of individuality, let alone creativity.
One day poison filters into this
rigid world. A little boy is attacked and shot by a poisoned arrow and this
event is a turning point in both his and the village’s life. “Those of us who
have kicked an anthill will understand the chaos in the village. The dreaming
ants, so used to patterns and chores, had been sent wild and spirited by the
unheralded disorder of the day and by this thin excuse to shout and smile and
swagger” (19). The poison immediately affects the life of the village. For a
moment the villagers can get rid of the strict rules, the attack leads to a
carnivalesque disorder. Who are the intruders? Horsemen from the outside world.
They are completely different from the villagers. “It was a simple matter for
the riders from beyond the hill, much used to drinking, perfume, quarrels,
horsetheft, wars, to first give father too much drink from their leather
travel-mates of spirit and then to strike him neatly on the chin” (28). The boy
does not only go beyond the borders of the village, he also gets drunk (even if
not intentionally), which is simply breaking the rules of the village. The
horseman, by wounding his arm, initiates him into the secret of the world of
wind. The people of the outside world
are cheerful and not at all obsessed with work. “There was more laughter
amongst these dozen than amongst the hundred on the hill. They blew birdsong
with blades of grass. They were in no hurry to begin the business of their day”
(10). Another difference between the outsiders and the people of stones is
their outlook. The latter’s faces are always grey and white with dust and
chalk. The former are long-haired and short-tempered (10). The boy describes
one of them like this: “You’d think it [his face]
was a leather purse with teeth. You never saw his eyes. He had a horseman’s
squint. He was only young, but he was weathered as a piece of bark” (32). So
the horsemen grow a protection layer from their own bodies – their skin hardens
into a crust –, whereas the villagers only use ‘make-up’, i.e. a false
protection only, which cannot protect them from the changes of the outside
world, as it turns out by the end of the novel. In the village existence is
based on stone. It shows strong links with hill, rock, earth, flint and chalk.
It is the world of order, routine and symmetry. It is unchanging, dull, sober
and dry. Like stone. The villagers try to block out wind because wind is about
change, it brings news from the outside world, it is against order. Wind is
flying and dreaming. Wind is fantasying. It is turbulence. Stories. All these
are unknown to the down-to-earth craftsmen. The village is the world of
craftsmen and tradesmen, that is, men. There is hardly any reference to women
living there. It is a patriarchal society. A masculine world. It is no place for dreams and emotions. It
is about solid reality. When the father takes Doe and her daughter to the
village, he says: “Compared to what we’d left behind, the turmoil and the
passion of the heath, here was a world of symmetry and composure” (103).
What is set against the village is the outside world. It is harsh
and windy. It is the world of cliffs and the sea. It is an inverted world: “The
sea viewed from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down. Its gulls have
backs. You’re looking down on me” (38). Beyond the borders of the village there
is a world where no villagers go. On one level this is the cosmos/chaos
dichotomy of mythology. On another level, it is a cultural (perhaps political)
dichotomy between the stationary and the dynamic. On yet another level, the two
poles gather to themselves various attributes (stone-wind, etc.) that seem to
support and solidify the opposition.
There is, however, the little boy
with one arm in the village, whose habit seems to be transgressing borders. He
is different from the inhabitants. Not only is he an orphan with no legitimate
origins and status but he differs in his outlook as well: “... though there
were children of his own age and younger whose weight and muscles had matured,
he was still a bulrush of a boy, a stem, his elbows — both elbows,
still —
thinner than his arms, his chest as flat and formless as a slate. His cousins
said his face was disobedient and dreamy, a combination which they found more
than doubly irritating” (3). He does not possess the gift of stones. “He’d
never make the best of workers. He had no love of stone. He’d spent too long
idly on the beach or in the woods” (21-22). The boy avoids the dust of shaft
and workshops. He does not like the hardness and rigidity of stone and the
village. “He liked the springy, bracken path that led up from the crusty
boulders of the shore, with wind and spray at his back” (3). He often goes
beyond the borders of the village and once he is shot by an arrow, and
eventually he loses his right arm. After that it is impossible to find a role
for him in this world where working with two hands is regarded to be the only
way of existence. It becomes obvious that he belongs to another world. He wants
to be a bowman, a horseman: “... the sum of my ambition at that time was not to
kill the bowman for the damage he had done but to be the bowman, to be on
horseback in the wind like him, to let the heavy arrow fly at anything I
wished, to struggle loose from stone” (32). He undoubtedly has certain
attributes that make him similar to a horseman: “The bowman’s face, his smile,
his eyes, expressed in full what neighbours in our village had most distrusted
in my own face. Look, you see it now, a little blunted, true... but dreams...
but turbulence... but downright cussedness. He could have been my brother”
(32-33). In this sense, the arrow is something that contaminates him: the fluid
poison (the dynamism of the outside world) seeps into the village world through
him.
The first passage of the novel is
about his severed arm:
“My
father’s right arm ended not in a hand but, at the elbow, in a bony swelling.
Think of a pollard tree in silhouette. That was my father’s stump. Its skin was
drawn tight across the bone and tucked frowning into the hole left by the
missing lower joint. The indented scar was like those made in the ice by boys
with stones —
a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish pus. The arm was rarely dry or free
from pain. As he grew older it would seem (he said) that his wasted and
unsummoned semen had found less rewarding outlets from his body than he would
have wished. He picked it rolled and spongy from the corners of his eyes after
sleep. It gathered on his tongue and stretched into stringy tresses when he laughed
and spoke. It formed white blisters on his lips, on his thighs, between his
toes. It dried and hardened in his nostrils. And it formed pools of sap in the
vents of his severed elbow.” (1).
The above description
suggests that he is strongly connected to something that is fluid, liquid and
flowing as opposed to the solidity of stone. He is often compared to plants or
parts of plants:
“Think of a pollard
tree in silhouette. That was my father’s stump” (1).
“... he was still a
bulrush of a boy, a stem” (3).
“I grew up like some
wild plant, ragged, unattended, not-much-use” (35).
As a plant he could
not find his place in the world of stone. No plant is able to live in a
environment like that. It needs a place like the outside world, the heath,
which he finds accidentally: “The landscape changed. It was no cliffs and
coves. Low heathland swept gently to the shore where thrift blacktufted lichens
lived side by side on rocks with barnacles and limpets. There were clumps of
seablite, flourishing on spray. There was arrow grass and milkwort. All the
herbs and medicines and dye-plants that we saw bunched and dried and up for
barter in the market-place were in abundance here” (40). The heath is the world
with no protection. It is wet and windy. It is the world of chaos and
unpredictability. Entering the heath is as though he entered the world of his
stump. It is worth comparing the lines describing his arm and those written
about the heath:
“The indented scar
was like those made in the ice by boys with stones — a small uneven
puncture, wet with brackish pus. The arm was rarely dry and free from pain”
(1).
“The skin would
stretch and pucker, frown upon the world. And it would drip its poison and its
undiminished path forever like tree sap, like semen, like a punctured boil”
(29).
“The first thing that
my father noticed was the stench. The saltland heath – sodden and
yellowed by the winter – was sweating in the sun. It smelled like
rotten fruit, like beer, like cow’s breath. The earth was passing wind; it
belched at every footfall; its boil had burst; it was brackish and spongy with
sap and pus and marsh” (75).
The heath is
personified, it functions as a human being. Later it is identified with the
father himself: “For her [Doe] my father was the
heath” (130).
“But we have missed my father
and the heath. As his tale had journeyed on and brought us to that point where
Doe, transformed and fattened, was working on the hill, we have felt the
absence of the man whose rudder-tongue could steer us free from our small
world. We are all tired of stone. We crave some geese or ships, some smoke or
riders, some moonlit footprints shining like a pair of tumbling glow-worms in
the damp. We crave again my father’s single restless hand, the teasing
undulations of his voice, his tales, his falsities.” (130)
These last lines can be
regarded as a definition of the heath as a counterworld of the village.
Inhabited by a woman and a little girl and with its lush vegetation the heath is
the realm of the feminine. Once the father sings a song: “How sad is he who has
no wife. His seed is trapped. It turns to poison in his loins. His blood runs
hot and burns. It dries his body and he leads a pale and angry life” (90).
These lines give the definition of the stoneys. In a masculine world sterility
prevails. The lack of the feminine brings dryness, the man wears pale, white
chalk make-up. The song is about him,
the liar, the storyteller, which can be proven textually: “As he grew older it
would seem (he said) that his wasted and unsummoned semen had found less
rewarding outlets from his body that he would have wished. He picked it rolled
and spongy from the corners of his eyes after sleep” (1). Being refused by Doe,
the father “went outside, the dog his one companion, and discharged his poison
on the buds and seedlings of the heath. It gathered, rolled and spongy, in the
dew...” (91). There is a clear parallel between his semen and his pus. His
penis is the source of life just as his stump is the source of stories.
“It gathered on his tongue
and stretched into stringy tresses when he laughed and spoke” (1).
“... and hung in stringy
tresses form the reeds” (91).
“And it formed pools of sap
in the vents of his severed elbow” (1).
“It formed its salty pools
of sap amongst the vented lichens and the moss” (91).
The elbow and the heath are sources of tales. They both are conditions of storytelling. His elbow makes the father different, drives him to the outside world from which “he would return weighed down and weary with new tales” (156). Were it not for his arm and his being a villager who is attracted to the outside world, tales might not exist or come to life at all. His desire for the new, the other is the source and moving force of narratives. What is indispensable for the birth of storytelling is the clash between two antagonistic forces (two opposing worlds) and the subject who suffers the outcome of the energy discharge and who is sensitive enough to realise its significance, that is the storyteller. “Was I the only one to see that, all around, the world was tumbling, spinning, wild? The bats were flying in the sun, the butterflies at night. You only had to briefly lift your head above your parapet of stones to see that where the village ended mayhem ruled and danced” (133).