Orders of Geo-Kinetic Manifestation in Ivan Doig´s The Sea Runners

Abstract:

This phenomenological study presents a map of spatial forces in Ivan Doig’s The Sea Runners. The investigation calls attention to forms of space-experience that come across as a sense of embeddedness in environment. Events, places, feelings, and moods materialize as being nested within greater events and places that are likewise nested in even larger ones. The study shows that experience, place, memory, hope, and narrative have nested structures. The embedding of narrated realities within larger realities is identified as a mode of organization central to the text’s complexity. Even the smallest acts, events, moods, and feelings are set within larger ones with greater scope, reach, or extension. The literary force of The Sea Runners is made possible by a sustained presentation of complexly interlocking orders of embedding. These orders are co-ordinated and synchronized in terms of movement. The study shows how kinetic systems of circulation, vanishing, encircling, and transformation overlap and reinforce each other so as to create a comprehensive co-ordination effect that colours the presentation of landscape and travel. Movement is highlighted in the essay as a factor that makes it possible for these kinetic structures to be fused in various patterns of co-ordination. In The Sea Runners, place and motion complexly combine to shape the narrated flow of lived experience. In its various orders of fluctuation, space-experience flows in intimate association with life-feeling and movement-sensation. Certain basic kinetic categories are delineated as being at the heart of the text’s overall structure. The study brings its findings to a conclusion by discussing these kinetic categories of lived space as running parallel to categories of lived temporality.