https://unbound.com/books/alangarner/Disciplinary perspectives on and from the work of Alan Garner.
The array and quality of contributors to First Light; A Celebration of Alan Garner (2017) reflects the breadth of Garner’s interests and disciplines from which his work draws. I could not think of earth or landscape without evoking his work.
Garner describes himself as having ‘the combination of an academic and a magpie’s mind that sees, finds, or makes connections and patterns where others do not.’ (Garner 1997. pg. 225). His Magpie is counterpart to Le Guin (1987) and Haraway’s (2016) Bag Lady.
Garner’s trans-disciplinary thinking is beautifully illustrated by storyteller Ben Haggarty’s tale of accompanying Garner up onto Alderley Edge to watch a pair of archaeologists toiling over a recreated experimental bronze age furnace. After several hours, when the furnace shoots its copper into the trough, Alan says ‘there Ben – that’s what they mean by drawing the sword from the stone’ (Haggarty pg. 112).
There is glowing data (Maclure 2013) and thing power (Bennett 2010) throughout Garner's art and life - take for example the 'roughly used' oak shovel that Garner retrieves from his infant school. He keeps in his kit bag during National Service and persists in trying to investigate its origins for 40 years. He eventually meets archaeologist John Prag who carbon dates the shovel finding it to be 3500 years old (Prag 2016).
Bob Cywinsky, Professor in Physics tells the story of a small interdisciplinary group of physicists, archaeologists – and Garner.
“From the moment of out first meeting, it has been very clear that neither Alan not I respect, or even acknowledge the wholly imaginary boundaries between these equally important and interwoven threads of our [disciplinary] culture.” (Cywinsky pg. 59)
‘I learned from Alan […] that the intellectual process of creating a novel […] is amost identical to that which underpins scientific methodology.” (pg. 60)
‘We marvel together at how science, art and the landscape were all brought together half a million years ago by an almost-man who expertly shaped a beautiful and beautifully functional Palaeolithic hand-axe and I marvel alone at how this object has itself led to the literary masterpiece that is Boneland.’ (pg. 58-59)
From a Cheshire family of rural craftsmen, Garner was the first of his family to be educated at University. Perhaps his most influential interdisciplinary journey has been from the tongues of skilled labourer to educated academic - and back again.
As storyteller Hugh Lupton puts it, Garner speaks ‘with a language that dances on that knife edge between grammar and song, the native who has been away and returned…’ (Lupton 2016 pg 172-3).
Garner is envoy from the sentient landscape. His work excavates matters of class, the loss of oral and folk culture, colonialism and madness through deep time and deeper myth. Mark Fisher said of Garners’ ‘Temporal Vortices’ that [his] 'scrambling of time is so complete that we are not left with any secure sense of “past”, “present” and “future” at all' (2016, pg 92).
Garner, who ran the Cheshire lanes with Alan Turing and lives a stone's throw from Jodrell Bank, has been a new materialist long before any academy dreamed of such things. As such I would say that his work, like Myth itself, transcends disciplines.
http://theriverofmilk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/waiting-for-boneland.html
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