131© The Author(s) 2018K. Shaw, K. Aughterson (eds.), Jim Crace,https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_9

8 Searching for the Gleaning Fields: Gleaners and Leanness in Jim Crace’s Harvest

Natalie Joelle

Jim Crace’s Harvest tells of the coming of lean efficiencies: a rise of ‘Leanness’ that entails loss for gleaners (Harvest, 5). Like Crace’s earlier Arcadia, in which the protagonist’s mother ‘fed herself on what she gleaned amongst the cobbles, the fruit discarded, bruised, mislaid’, before the outdoor market is razed to build an indoor arcade, gleanable spaces vanish (Arcadia, 84). Gleaning also lends scant hope in lean times for the characters of Crace’s later Signals of Distress, when their livelihoods are damaged by chemical competition: ‘What could they do, then? […] Glean oats’ (Signals, 80). From Arcadia to Harvest, Crace’s growing fascination with gleaners spans a decade of his career as a novelist, developing a forma-tive early engagement with the sound of the word:

That word gleaner was a word that I’d learnt ahead of my time when I had a small vocabulary which really did not need the word gleaner—I’d learnt the word gleaner and it attracted me immensely. […] I did not need the word ‘gleaner’ and there it was […] sitting in the waiting room, waiting to be used […] vocabulary is my driving force […] every single word holds a story. (Crace 2014)

N. Joelle (*)Birkbeck, University of London, London, UKe-mail: natalie@gleaning.info

natalie@gleaning.info

132

‘There it was’: the word ‘gleaner’ resounded in ‘the waiting room’ of Crace’s imagination before its meaning was needed, an intriguingly unusual and specialised term. If vocabulary is Crace’s ‘driving force’, then it is the word ‘gleaner’, as it is repeated, rhymed with, and varied to evoke ‘leaner’ that drives the narrative of Harvest in its exploration of enforced ‘lean thinking’, which James Womack and Daniel Jones typify in their globally influential business bestseller as striving to ‘do more and more with less and less’ (Womack and Jones 2003, 15).1

Harvest begins with ‘harvest end’ (2). It is a time for the village to glean, to bend, and to gather grain that has been left by the reapers. For Walter Thirsk, Crace’s conflicted and unreliable narrator, gleaning during this time after harvest is a timeless practice: ‘ancient gleaning rights’ are linked to an equally ‘ancient understanding’ that the village’s paternal landowner, Master Kent, will take ‘care of us’ (Harvest, 9, 18, 10). Yet Walter sees his world alter. As in Crace’s first collection, Continent, and his many novels thereafter, ‘Modernisations are in process’ (Continent, 127).2 Gleaning in the unnamed everyvillage takes place not only after harvest but also after every harvest: the villagers’ ‘break from labour’ is now seen as a severing from field-work as such; the reapers’ ‘final sheaf’ their last (Harvest, 2–3). In the course of the narrative, Walter comes to call glean-ing ‘that ancient day’, calling time on customary rights that will be scratched out in the name of the ‘Progress and Prosperity’ promised by large-scale animal agriculture after enclosure (Harvest, 195, 99).

The first scratches are the rasps of mark-making by a mysterious, leaning outsider: a strange, stumbling ‘skew-whiff’, so-called Mr Quill, who ‘was recording us […] or more exactly marking down our land’ with ‘the scratch-ings of his chart’ (Harvest, 10, 7–8, 4). His ‘scratchings’, or, as the narrator specifies, his markings down, presage economies by evoking the commercial sense of the phrase ‘cut in price’. The scratches inscribe and they wound. There will be cuts. On this ‘final day of harvesting’, his lines terminally parallel the scythe: ‘we mowed with scythes; he worked with brushes and with quills’ (Harvest, 4). He also works with a leaning gait: ‘lop-sided when he moved’ (Harvest, 5). Standing with difficulty as he scratches ‘the squares that stood for cottages, the ponds, the lanes, the foresting’, it is in part the labour of his stumbling steps ‘not well suited to the balks and bumpy edges of a field’ that shape his leaning body, which falters as it stands whilst it strains to make the map stand for a potentially more efficient or lean place of production (Harvest, 4, 5). Enclosure cartography contorts Mr Quill with a violence Walter fears will continue to extend from board to body: ‘those scratchings on his board might scratch us too, in some unwelcome way’ (Harvest, 5).

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

133

Mr Quill’s presence in the village is not unheralded. Their ‘frugal’ crops anticipate the mapmaker’s form: ‘Plenty, here, has wed itself to Leanness […] our plants […] grew as short, askew and weakly as our limping visi-tor’ (Harvest, 4–5). ‘Leanness’ is a quality of both plant and person: Crace expands its established meaning from ‘the condition or quality of being lean, thinness, meagreness, poverty (of land), barrenness’, to include the condition or quality of leaning, being ‘askew’, and ‘limping’ (OED online). Things in the village are awry, existing in the uneasy marriage of abstract contraries leanness and plenty, or, in the terms of Crace’s fragmentary notes to the novel, ‘in the margins of plenty and leanness’ (Crace, 2011–2012, HRC Container 48.13). A.  L. Rowse’s description of Elizabethan agriculture, noted by Crace to alternate ‘between the plenty of harvest and the leanness of Lent’, lends the author emphasis upon the lean and leant (Rowse 1973, 108 in Crace, 2011–2012, HRC Container 48.13). In the figure of Mr Quill, leanness and the leaning body are inter-twined: personifying powers that work to make things leaner in lean times.

This leaner selects the first of the last gleaners. In their annual post- harvest ritual, Master Kent entrusts Mr Quill ‘to choose the Gleaning Queen’: ‘he surely can be counted on to be an even-handed judge’, Kent insists, a phrase that is repeated sceptically by the narrator (Harvest, 66). Mr Quill, the mapmaker and violinist—‘our lop-sided fiddler, our even- handed judge’—has, in mind as in body, the potential to be more biased than bal-anced (Harvest, 66–67). Mr Quill makes charts ‘at Master Kent’s request’, but his exact allegiances are unclear (Harvest, 4). From a line of smiling candidates, including ‘more blushing’ and ‘more bodily’ ‘older girls’ sub-jected to the male gaze, Mr Quill settles on a Gleaning Queen Elizabeth: ‘little Lizzie […] not five years old’ (Harvest, 66–67). Whereas Walter’s pause generates distrust of Mr Quill’s disinterested judgement, ‘little Lizzie’ is ‘a little frightened by his smile and his lop-sided gait’ (Harvest, 67).

The leaner’s unexpected selection of ‘a gawky girl’ gleaner is significant. The ‘privilege’ of the Gleaning Queen is to control access: without ‘a sov-ereign to rule the stub’ the villagers remain ‘gathered at the entry to the field, we stay and wait’ (Harvest, 59, 61). Agricultural historian Stephen Hussey observes that the role of the Gleaning Queen wielded great ‘com-munity power’: mid-nineteenth century gleaners report that they should not enter an ‘ungleaned field without being led’ by their Queen, on pain of their gleanings being forfeited and ‘bestrewed’ (Hussey 1997, 64–65). The novel’s Gleaning Queen must ‘take the first step on the field’ (Harvest, 68), or as Crace’s notes put it, ‘her feet must touch the field first’ (Crace, 2011–2012, HRC Container 48.3). Other gleaners recall that the

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

134

‘“Queen’s” job was to see all started and finished at the same time and all had a fair crack at the whip’; ‘those who infringed would have their glean-ings taken from them and scattered. “Fair shares for all” was the motto’ (Hussey 1997, 64–65). Yet Crace’s Lizzie Carr, who frequently has ‘little’ as her epithet, can assume none of this authority: she would ‘either like to run away and hide or to give vent to tears’ (Harvest, 68).3 The decision the ‘even-handed judge’ makes to appoint a child in this role implies the end of even handfuls between gleaners (Harvest, 67). The mapmaker’s act of choosing ‘little Lizzie’ embodies more power than chosen Lizzie can herself express. In a crucial tipping point for the villagers, access to the practice of gleaning has become the prerogative of the leaner.

As the novel opens, the anticipated bending gesture of the Gleaning Queen balances the unfolding of seasonal time:

We should face the rest day with easy hearts, and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years. Everything was bound to keep its shape. (Harvest, 10)

Fulfilling the foreboding tone of the proleptic addendum—‘That’s what we thought’ (10)—Lizzie’s initial movement is not to bend. Unbound from the ‘usual sequences’ and ‘shape’, her gleaning is mediated by lean-ing: ‘she drops down to her knees and leans forward to search for her grain’ (Harvest, 68). ‘Our own Gleaning Queen’ is not ‘the first to bend and pick’: rather, closely directed by Master Kent, who instructs with whispers and a gentle push, ‘she does what he has said’ and echoes Mr Quill’s leaning posture (Harvest, 68). With her movements circumscribed by the owner of the field, and by her father and uncle who ‘take her to the edges of the stub’, the Gleaning Queen becomes a precarious leaner, rather than powerfully representing the interests of those who glean (Harvest, 67).

The GleaninG Field

The treatment of gleaning in Harvest crystallises moments in the shift towards leaner thinking, an optimising trajectory from subsistence to sale, or, from ‘enough’ to ‘more’, in the words of Edmund Jordan, cousin-in- law to Master Kent, who with ‘a zeal for progress’ seeks to reclaim and

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

135

reform the village estate that the childless and now-widowed Kent held by marriage (Harvest, 186, 100). The customary promise of gleaning is that ‘anything we glean is ours to keep […] we do not need to add it to the common wealth, or store’ (Harvest, 65). As Walter muses fatalistically ‘I stand at the threshold of the gleaning field and wonder what the future has in mind for me’, behind ‘in mind’ we cannot but hear the more idiomatic ‘in store’, which evokes the economies of both common wealth and com-merce (Harvest, 64). At the ‘threshold’, Walter reflects on the possibility of ‘a world beyond the rule of seasons, a redrawn world’ (Harvest, 64): Crace’s choice of ‘threshold’ hints at a future, less seasonal life with its primary sense of the boundary to a built interior space, whilst the post- harvest present remains sounded in its etymological root ‘thresh’ (OED online). For Thirsk, the ‘threshold of the gleaning field’ is the place of thinking the transition between seasonal and ‘redrawn’ worlds.

Thirsk does not cross the threshold as a gleaner. Instead he ‘stands back’, observing ‘the noisy rush of gleaners, their concentrated thorough scampering’ and abandons gleaning ‘double-bent’ for the opportunity of ‘walking the village bounds’ with the leaner:

Normally, I would not wish to miss my gleaning spoils. I could expect to come away with sufficient grain for some private ale and porridge flour. […] But Mr Quill proposes something more pleasing. (Harvest, 69)

‘More pleasing’ is in part the chance to co-create Mr Quill’s cartography. Gleaning and mapping happen in parallel: ‘They’re gleaning barley until noon, then will be gathered on the threshing floor’, Walter observes, before possessively continuing, ‘Mr Quill and I will have the margins and the commons to ourselves’ (Harvest, 72). Thirsk rejects ‘sufficient’ in favour of ‘more’. Walter’s wonder at enclosure maps that make the fields ‘less commonplace’ by their ‘compound patterns’—and more com-pounded with less in common—is ‘more’ than the expected gains of gleaning:

Mr Quill has turned his scratchy charts into something odd and beautiful. […] I’ve seen equally compound patterns, no less ineffable than these, when I’ve peeled back bark on dying trees, or torn away the papering on birches. I’ve seen them sketched by lichens on a standing stone, or designed by mosses in a quag, or lurking on the under-wing of butterflies. I found these ordinary abstracts in the least expected places hereabouts: I have only to lift

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

136

a stone, or turn some fallen timber in the wood, or reverse a leaf. The struc-tures and the ornaments revealed are made purposeful simply by being found. But none of these compare for patterned vividness with Mr Quill’s designs. His endeavours are tidier and more wildly colourful—they’re cer-tainly more blue—then anything that nature can provide. They’re rewarding in themselves. They are more pleasing than a barleycorn. (Harvest, 71; 133)

Whilst others glean, Walter finds the mapping techniques of the leaner ‘more pleasing than a barleycorn’, such as those which the Gleaning Queen had earlier ritually presented to the crowd: ‘she’s old enough to know how to separate out the barleycorn by running her fingers against the bristles […] now she’s holding out her hand to show her barley pearls to us. The moment is always a rousing one’ (Harvest, 68). The ‘always’ joys of Gleaning Day are rivalled by a new design. ‘More wildly colourful’ than the wild and more extraordinary than the ‘ordinary abstracts’ of bark, lichen, moss, wing, stone, wood, or leaf, Mr Quill’s ‘scratchy charts’ scratch Walter’s senses in a more-than-welcome way, their ‘more blue’ a delight. The maps appear detached from the end of subsistence, from the need to glean ‘spoils’ (Harvest, 69). Viewed by Walter for their colour and form, Mr Quill’s works are ‘rewarding in themselves’. His aesthetic engagement with Mr Quill’s cartography replaces gleaning, just as the maps, as utilised for lean transformation, will bring about the end of glean-able fields by converting arable land into pasture. Privileged access to the ‘pleasing’ replaces common ‘leasing’, a synonym for gleaning that appears in Crace’s vocabulary list (Crace, undated, HRC Container 48.11).

lean MeaT

Gleaning is transitional in Harvest. Vellum, the material basis of enclosure mapping, is itself a by-product of slaughtering a calf ‘to mark the end of harvest and their election of the gleaning Queen’ (Harvest, 14):

I can see the puckering where that little hand-reared animal, which was so moist and succulent for us at our gleaning feast, was cut along the spine, peeled off the ribs and then spread out for butchering. Her twin flanks are still joined at the garth, along an uneven ridge of skin. They provide for Mr Quill an amply proportioned square. […] The knife dislodges any waste, any nuds of lime or tags of veal, but I have to snap out hairs at their bulbs with my fingers. […] I will not say I enjoy being this intimate with an animal I’ve known and liked (and eaten, actually). (Harvest, 128)

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

137

The surfaces worked by Mr Quill the leaner are from the same source as the gleaning feast’s ‘moist and succulent’ lean meat (Harvest, 128). The effect is emphasised by the specificity of the animal: ‘the little hand-reared calf, rejected by its mother in the spring and kept by Master Kent in this same barn, has been slaughtered’ (Harvest, 32). Indeed, to the printed title of an eHow article entitled ‘How to Make Vellum’, Crace adds by hand, ‘from an animal you know’ (Crace, 2011–2012, HRC Container 48.13). The particularly ‘little’ killed calf shares its diminutive adjective with ‘little Lizzie’, the Gleaning Queen; both small bodies are used to aid changes in land use towards large-scale animal agriculture: the powerless gleaner and the fleshy by-products of the gleaning feast help in finding an increasingly lean system.

Walter leaves his partaking of the celebratory veal to an evasive paren-thetical afterthought—‘(and eaten, actually)’—but there is complicit ‘veal grease’ on his and ‘everybody’s chin’ (Harvest, 128,  48,  33). Animal grease eases the process of lean transformation towards extracting ‘oily wool on the back of our own livestock’ (Harvest, 42). When Master Kent’s horse Willowjack is killed as a result of mysterious violence, he reports, ‘My cousin tells me I am wasteful, not to have the “useless” carcass baked for its grease’ (Harvest, 114). The ‘efficient’ and ‘unceremonial’ Master Jordan boasts that when his dog became ‘too old for the job and had to be despatched’ (Harvest, 98) he ‘yielded thirteen pounds of grease’ (Harvest, 114). Master Jordan’s attitude to animal bodies anticipates the efficiencies of the meatpackers, whose production line technologies aptly continue to inform ‘lean’ systems and enabled them, in Upton Sinclair’s stirring words, to ‘use everything about the hog except the squeal’ (Sinclair 1946, 38).4 Nearly all value is extracted by the owner’s lean process, allow-ing workers little scope, like those in the harvest field, to ‘bundle up and bind the sheaves […] not too carefully […] on the principle of ten for the commons and one for the gleaning’ (Harvest, 6). Confiding Master Jordan’s criticism to our narrator, and ‘leaning closer so that he is not overheard’, Master Kent states that to Jordan’s mind ‘I am improvident for not putting Willowjack to the same good use. […] I have insisted on my way and won the argument […] if only I could always’ (Harvest, 114). Master Kent is under pressure: whilst communicating standing his ground in response to some of Master Jordan’s recommended lean efficiencies, his posture is already leaning.

Walter’s work during Gleaning Day (‘more pleasing’, ‘more pleasing’, and ‘more valuable’ than gleaning) is implicated in creating ‘a settlement

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

138

of More’ from ‘a village of Enough’ (Harvest, 69, 133, 76, 186). The mapped ‘hereafter’ offers a village without gleanable spaces, Walter imagines:

[T]here are doves. They’re circling, white consciences on wing. At first the sight of them is heart-lifting. But still they’re circling. They cannot find a place to feed. This is their hereafter. They’re searching for the gleaning fields, but there are none. (Harvest, 46)

Troubled ‘consciences’ circuit the sky, unsettled and unsettling, alluding to guilty evasions by those villagers potentially responsible for setting Master Kent’s dovecote alight. Two disruptions of the gleaning doves’ peace herald the intensified use of animals: displaced from sustenance, these imagined avian grain gleaners behave like carnivorous vultures around carrion; whilst earlier doves, ‘the same thieving birds they’d hoped to keep from gleaning’, are believed to become ‘undeserving meat’, ‘roasted to the bone’ (Harvest, 11–12). The paragraph projects lost flights of gleaning by concluding with heavy monosyllables: ‘but there are none’ (Harvest, 46). The end of gleaning after the end of har-vest is imbued with weighty pathos: ‘The gleaning field is already empty’, Walter reflects, ‘Today it is difficult for me not to see heavy meaning in its emptiness’ (Harvest, 80). The field that had provided ‘a worthy glean-er’s sheaf’ will be turned to pasture; ‘the sheaf is giving way to the sheep’ (Harvest, 42).

The gleaned is giving way to the lean. The objection, in the words of Sam Leith, that ‘politics and economics don’t enter’ Crace’s text cannot be sustained without ignoring how the novel fleshes out the increasingly capitalised economies of coming large-scale animal agriculture (Leith 2013). While Walter is engaged in the product of the gleaning feast’s slaughter, ‘making pauper’s vellum from the calf, Lizzie Carr, still very much the Gleaning Queen in her green cloth’ is seized and held in Master Jordan’s ‘custody’ (Harvest, 138–139). At the height of the village’s pro-cess of lean transformation, its chief gleaner is figured as meat: ‘this year’s Gleaning Queen the scrap of flesh they were fighting for’ (Harvest, 141). The Gleaning Queen is despatched from the village into a carnivorous commercial economy: ‘Little Lizzie’ ends her brief, powerless reign ‘secured amongst the luggage like a market goose’ (Harvest, 201). She is a luxurious lean delicacy, ‘a fancy goose in a green cloth wrap’ (Harvest,

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

139

201). Crace’s figuring of the Gleaning Queen as a goose recalls a popular seventeenth-century anti-enclosure verse, which he had noted:

The fault is great in man or womanWho steals a goose from off a common;But what can plead that man’s excuseWho steals a common from a goose? (Crace, undated, HRC Container 48.11)

Goose Lizzie is stolen from the gleaning field, whilst the gleaning field is stolen from goose Lizzie and the gleaners she represents. As she leaves, the Gleaning Queen is as useless as the matter gleaners discard: ‘I’ll not forget her blowing on the grains to winnow off the flake and how the barley pearls were weighty on her palm. But now she is like chaff herself. A sneeze could lift her up and take her off’ (Harvest, 195). With the end of the gleaning fields, the Gleaning Queen herself seems ungleanable.

The Word ‘Gleaner’The word ‘gleaner’ holds a story: influentially arriving ahead of time, the term was as unusual and anachronistic to Crace’s young lexicon as the archaic and lost role of the Gleaning Queen in Harvest seems today in contemporary agro-industrial cultures (Crace 2014). In the final stages of Harvest, the word regains some of the strangeness of Crace’s initial encounter, as he complicates the story of lost gleaners he had told in Arcadia by estranging its sense. Alone in the deserted village, Walter devours hallucinogenic mushrooms. In his mesmerised narrative,

The fairy caps were keen to keep me on the ground. They would prefer it if I sank into the grass, if I became as rooted to the soil as them. […] I had a twin, a standing twin, who came to rescue me. This other one who had my face, who looked like me and smelt like me and sounded like me, had got me by my shoulders and I was being pulled. I was being gleaned by him. My head came up and back. My bones solidified at last. (Harvest, 48–50)

Crace extends the meaning of ‘gleaned’. The gestures of Walter’s twin are familiar from the novel’s fields, but the object of gleaning is neither its more common agricultural nor metaphorical usages: what is gleaned is neither grain nor information. In this uncommon usage of a practice

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

140

familiar in the pre-enclosure commons, Walter gleans himself. The divided narrator imagines himself being gleaned from his supine delirium into uprightness: rescued by his own likeness and given backbone. His ‘stand-ing twin’ looms above, as ‘unnerving’ and ‘shape-shifting’ as the enclosure cartography that engrosses him at gleaning time (Harvest, 135, 108).

Walter’s rootedness within his world is hallucinatory. As he is restored, united with his twin, he is also uprooted. ‘Being gleaned’ by the twin is both a violent departure from roots and a rescuing return, a coming back (‘at last’). Here, gleaning is held in tension between two agricultural sys-tems. Walter’s ‘sudden twin’ gleans his human sheaf with the force of a farmer shearing sheep; yet immediately after this gleaning, Walter resists animal agriculture, walking the bounds ‘freeing any animal that was still tethered or penned’ (Harvest, 250). In comparison to the ritual of the Gleaning Queen, to glean oneself is direct and perfunctory. This is glean-ing after gleaning: the use of the word abstracted from its customary agri-cultural sense, expressing a changed and changing world.

Gleaning, repeated, rhymed with, and varied drives the narrative of Harvest from ‘always’ to ‘hereafter’ (Harvest, 65, 39). Walter often recalls the unusual truncation of Master Kent’s traditional gleaning day speech:

It seems an age since […] we’d named our Gleaning Queen and the master had said what he always says about ‘this noble day’, how in order of their station everyone and everything would benefit from gleaning—the families who worked so hard, the thoughtless cattle and the thankless geese and finally the hogs. He had not said that hogs precede the oxen and the plough. […] Our final harvest must have come and gone. (Harvest, 65)

At first to glean seems an unambiguous good; the lean efficiencies that follow ‘our final harvest’ a fall from gleaning where ‘everyone and every-thing would benefit’. Yet Crace’s choice of the word ‘benefit’ reminds us of the tense villager-master inequalities that the soon-to-be-lost tradition encodes: Master Kent’s doves ‘take our grain; he takes their eggs; we see no benefit’ (Harvest, 77). The ‘master’s near-white doves […] descended on the stub and were already robbing fallen grain that, by ancient gleaning rights, should have been ours’ Walter reports; the doves are ‘thieving’ (Harvest, 9,  77). The villagers violently protect their gleanings ‘with stones, clapping-boards and slings’ (Harvest, 59). Gleaning is a ‘noble day’ in the interest of the nobility: the master insists upon a bucolic ideol-ogy of mutual benefit, without mentioning the gleaning birds that

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

141

mostly benefit him, presaging the enclosures he presents as ‘an organisa-tion to all our advantages’ (Harvest, 39).

Master Kent’s customary gleaning speech also prepares the ground for sheep farming by annually reinscribing an order of being in which animals have a natural ‘station’ that is subordinate to human need: ‘After us will come the livestock, he says, in order of their station: our cattle will be loosed into the field to reduce the stubble, then the geese, for fattening, and finally our hogs will be allowed to root and nose the soil’ (Harvest, 65).5 Told ‘from aloft like a huntsman talking fondly to his hounds or beaters’, Master Kent’s gleaning words reinforce human-animal domina-tion required by future shepherds (Harvest, 65). The ritual of gleaning involves a litany of inequalities. Gleaning is not uncomplicatedly a practice of sufficiency that is disrupted to provide ‘more’. The influence of the leaning mapmaker does not only upset a balanced community, but extends the existing imbalances of life in the pre-enclosed field. The leaner meth-ods of production embodied in sheep farming continue the underlying assumptions of the village’s gleaning ritual: that animals come ‘after us’ and can be controlled and used for human benefit.

Just as leanness was a quality of the village’s crops before the arrival of their leaning, limping visitor, the lean efficiencies of large-scale animal agriculture extend the assumptions underpinning their gleaning tradition. Crace’s acoustic play with gleaning and leaning captures that the village’s transformation does not happen ex nihilo, but shifts sounds and ideas already in the air: whilst Edmund Jordan’s external intervention is the catalyst for enclosure and he fantasises about ‘the chance to start from scratch’, the scratches, as we have seen with the gleaning feast’s calf- vellum, are made upon something (Harvest, 186). From glean to lean, sheaf to sheep, and beating to bleating, Crace’s rhymes suggest a world where the potential for decline is present in the sound.6

Crace shows the meaning of gleaning to alter with changes in the worked landscape and invites what might be considered a gleanerly way of reading, in which words lean towards their post-harvest sense. The ‘map of the sheep fields that are looming over us’ foretell a weaving economy (Harvest, 136); to ‘expect our seasons to unfold’ (Harvest, 10) hints at coming ‘drystone walls and winter folds’ (Harvest, 187). As Walter and Mr Quill are lost ‘in the engrossments’ of mapmaking (Harvest, 131), they are engrossed in engrossing: a process of enclosure that Crace’s notes from Walter’s agricultural historian namesake Joan Thirsk define as ‘to amalgamate one or two farms’ (Thirsk 1959, Glossary in Crace, undated,

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

142

HRC Container 48.11). Their ‘engrossments’ evoke ‘the closing and engrossment of our fields with walls and hedges, ditches, gates’ (Harvest, 40). ‘Shearing’ outsiders’ heads as punishment adds fleece to ‘our village fabric’ (Harvest, 46, 169). The chaff that ‘embroidered’ ‘the service trees between our dwellings and the gleaning field’ (Harvest, 60) also spins a ‘sheepscape’ (Harvest, 129) of ‘worsted, twill’, where villagers may be left worse off escaping weaving after the efforts of Mr Quill (Harvest, 101). The villagers on the cusp of a wool economy exchange ‘sheepish glances’ (Harvest, 47, emphasis in original). Crace gives Walter a ‘great abundance of uncommon words’, and to the novel this abundance of words that shift after the enclosure of the commons (Harvest, 94). Harvest demands a gleanerly reading, attentive to meaning in the moments between the end-ing of arable agriculture and preceding pasture.

lean Poor PeoPle

‘The Gleaners […] was one of the first paintings I’d seen as a kid in a book’, Crace recalls, stating that the iconic Jean François Millet canvas ‘encapsulates the whole atmosphere’ of Harvest (Crace 2014).7 In Millet’s painting, as in the novel, the harvest recedes, leaving gleaners in the fore-ground. The parallel postures of Millet’s gleaners, who echo one another bent double in a doubled bend, are evoked by Crace’s mimetic inversion ‘double-bent’ (Harvest, 69). The text’s juxtaposition of the gleaners’ ‘resting’ and ‘working’ hands present a particularly Millet-like tableau:

Already many of my neighbours have gathered up a worthy gleaner’s sheaf; they hold it in their resting hands, a drooping horse’s tail of flaxen stalks, while their working hands peck and pick across the stub like hens. (Harvest, 69)

Whilst in Millet, the gleaners’ hands holding their gathered grain seem effortful, part of their labour, Crace creates the sense that gleaning is end-ing, even during the process, by describing the gleaners hands as ‘resting’. This idea of gleaners resting in their gleaning comes as Walter, himself resting a hand from agricultural labour following injury, holds ‘one hand raised and cupped’ as if ‘a beggar’, and about to begin ‘a hands-free work-ing day with Mr Quill’ (Harvest, 59). The less manual labour of Mr Quill’s chart-scratchings allows Walter, unlike other village ‘hands’, to ‘escape the brittle straw unscratched’; the unwelcome scratch of this relatively ‘hands- free’ work is that it creates conditions in which hands are not free to work

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

143

for subsistence (Harvest, 6). The gleaners’ ‘resting hands’ foretell the loss of livelihoods: ‘I’m sure that there will be a place for shearers and for sheep-boys. Or for some. […] He will employ what hands he needs. But we will sadly need to make economies’ (Harvest, 101–102).

Following an ‘unrestful day of rest’ (Harvest, 32), Gleaning Day starts with an unnervingly overstated calm: ‘No one who knows the busy, kindly, scented universe of crops and the unerring traces of its calendar could mistake this morning’s aromatic peace and quiet for anything but Gleaning Day’ (Harvest, 61). The hyperbolic ‘no one’, ‘unerring’, and ‘anything but’ take the expression of tranquillity too far; the time of leasing infused with lazing heralds a fantasy of enforced pastoral ease: ‘Master Kent has had a dream which makes us rich and leisurely. Every day becomes a day of rest for us’ (Harvest, 41). As Gilbert Slater, one of Crace’s sources, states: ‘before the fields were enclosed […] the poor had then plenty of employment […] and could also collect a great quantity of corn by glean-ing […] but that the field being now in pasturage, the farmers have little occasion for labourers’ (Slater 1907, 108  in Crace, undated, HRC Container 48.11). Thirsk anticipates ‘our employments are to be surren-dered to the yellow teeth of three thousand sheep’ (Harvest, 107). The rest of redundancy is unrestful, motivating the forced movements of the novel’s vagrants, ‘fugitives from sheep’, whose ‘ancient livelihoods have been hedged and fenced against their needs’ (Harvest, 148).

Harvest’s narrative of the end of ‘ancient livelihoods’ and ‘ancient gleaning rights’ recalls J. L. and Barbara Hammond’s account of a loss of a timeless tradition, which Crace had consulted (Harvest, 148–149, Crace, undated, 48.11). ‘From time immemorial’, they write, ‘the labourer had sent his wife and children into the fields to glean or leaze after the harvest’ (Hammond and Hammond 1920, 83). The novel maps the end of ‘time immemorial’: Mr Quill’s flat artistry ‘hasn’t captured time: how long a walk might take; how long a piece of work might take; how long the sea-sons or the nights must last’ (Harvest, 136); ‘this ancient place would soon be new’ (Harvest, 196). Master Jordan’s proposed agricultural improve-ments bring in new measures of labour time to replace ‘ancient’ points of reference in the landscape: ‘taller than any ancient oak that we might fell’, a disciplining steeple bell will ‘hurry everyone to work […] those few that can remain’ (Harvest, 103). The oak tree threatens lean transformation: ‘How can it profit us that there are trees, an oak, let’s say, producing shade […] at my expense’, Master Jordan rhetorically questions (Harvest, 101–102). Walter navigates by the tree as he attempts with quiet defiance

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

144

to defend the coming spring from pasture by ploughing: ‘is that your fierc-est riot and unrest, to […] mark your outrage on a field?’ (Harvest, 239). Whilst Thirsk’s choice of tree recalls a fiercer riot at Kett’s Oak, the site of a sixteenth-century Norfolk uprising against an enclosure pictured in Crace’s notes (Crace, 2011–2012, HRC Container 48.13), his oak, never-theless, will not be optimised: ‘The oak is known for being still. It will not duck its head or lean’ (Harvest, 229). The ‘ancient’ oak is unleaning: its sense of a non-specific past ‘older than ourselves […] that linked us to eternity’ ill-suited to assist the speed-ups of lean production (Harvest, 196). Rather than eliminating wasted movement, ‘an end to all the saun-tering’ (Harvest, 123), ‘of wasting time’ (Harvest, 122), the trunks of the ‘wasted woods’ (Harvest, 186) offer shady places where people can lean in rest: ‘somewhere […] where we can press our backs’ (Harvest, 195). Lean pastures will be the loss, not just of places of gleaning, but of leaning.

Walter’s last journey follows the path of the poor after enclosure in Crace’s sources: ‘When the common where he had gleaned his firing was fenced off, the poor man could only trust for his fuel to pilferings from the hedgerows’ (Hammond and Hammond 1920, 106). Following the vil-lage’s final gleaning and desertion, Walter walks out of its bounds, trusting the hedgerows to help: ‘I’ll not go hungry […] I can blacken my tongue with bramble berries […] for long enough for me to find another place where I can rest’, he hopes (Harvest, 273). His overconfident ‘I can fill my mouth with fruits and nuts at every step’ foregrounds his restless precarity: Walter’s hedgerows, like the imagined ‘free food of the countryside’ in Arcadia may be ‘high and maggoty before it’s ripe’ (Arcadia, 273). Walter is ‘displaced’ by the ‘more predictable’ profits of animal agriculture—by ‘fleece’ that ‘can grow and thicken in the dark’—to forage for ‘hazels’, ‘elders’, and ‘sloes’ (Harvest, 104, 41, 273). His exit into heightened hun-ger bears out the seventeenth-century satirical aphorism, cited amongst Crace’s sources, that ‘enclosures make fat beasts and lean poor people’: he leaves a post-gleaning world for leaner times (Lupton 1632, 107 quoted in Ernle 1922, 291 in Crace, 2011–2012, HRC Container 48.13).

leaner Gleaners

Crace began writing Harvest following reports in ‘The Guardian about land being seized by soya corporations in South America’, who grow soy to feed animals in European factory farms to support increased demand for

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

145

meat (Crace and Harvey 2013).8 Whilst the gleaning practices replaced by leaner principles in the novel are archaic, the resonance, as Crace explains, is ‘contemporary, which is the way in which humankind and their relation-ship with the land is always being put under pressure’ and ‘can be changed just by the whim of industry’ (Crace and Harvey 2013). Harvest shares the ‘deep antipathy to trade and capitalism’ of Crace’s earlier works, particularly refracted through today’s ecological urgency to contest meat culture (Crace in Proctor 2000).9 Harvest is a timely critique for a society expanding its use of lean meat and methods, which shows how the lean production of ‘fat beasts’ for profit entails displacement of soon to be ‘lean poor people’ (Lupton 1632, 107).10 Crace’s fascination with gleaners and their relation-ship to ‘Leanness’ cautions against the threat of a lean, ungleanable world.

The story held by the word ‘gleaner’ in Harvest encapsulates recent agricultural history. As its sense shifts, under the pressure of coming effi-ciency improvements, from an annual practice in the gleaning fields to the figurative act of Walter’s twin, the novel imagines the journey of the word in a way that suggests, in microcosm, the changing meaning of gleaning by ‘the whim of industry’ in the mechanical and chemical agricultural rev-olutions of the twentieth century (Crace and Harvey 2013). Today ‘searching for the gleaning fields’ (Harvest, 46) reveals the concept of gleaning to be co-opted via marketing as a mainstay of global grain pro-duction, by means of GLEANER brand combine harvesters and cereal herbicide branded GLEAN, which aim to maximise their users’ yields.11 In harvests after Harvest, the term glean continues to be leaner.

In Crace’s Harvest, as on Millet’s canvas, there can be no gleaning without leaning, inviting a tussle around the text’s cover image worthy of the debates within it. ‘I’ve just come from a jacket art meeting and brought Millet’s The Gleaners’, writes Harvest’s New York editor (Nan Talese in Crace, 2012, HRC Container 50.7). But in the boardroom, the idea was unanimously dropped: ‘all involved thought it to be not what readers are looking for in the marketplace’ (Talese in Crace, 2012, HRC Container 50.7). The novel’s play with gleaners and leanness stands agricultural gleaning at the threshold of lean’s semantic field and wonders what the future has in mind.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Robert Macfarlane for bringing Harvest to my attention, and to Carol Watts and Daniel Eltringham for generative conversa-tions during work that informed the development of this chapter.

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

146

noTes

1. The term ‘lean’ was coined to describe, develop, and disseminate the man-agerial and technological efficiency innovations of the Toyota Production System to an Anglophone audience and was first used by Krafcik (1988); before being expanded, it reached a wide readership, by James Womack et al. (1990) and Womack and Jones (2003).

2. Later novels exploring the impact of modernisations on communities include The Gift of Stones, Signals of Distress, and Arcadia.

3. I am grateful to Olivia Clear, student at The Close Reading Room, Morley College for this interpretation.

4. For the link between the moving assembly line and the disassembly line in Henry Ford’s imagination, see Adams 2000, 79–80. For the lasting impact of this innovation on lean flow, see Womack et al. 1990, 283. For a critical account of this connection, see Joelle 2017.

5. See Neeson 1996, 3.6. In these effects Harvest continues Frank Kermode’s sense of Crace’s style

as operating at the ‘end of the fiction spectrum where the novel is most like a poem, most turned in on itself, most closely wrought for the sake of art’ Kermode 1998.

7. Jean François Millet, The Gleaners, oil on canvas, 1857, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

8. See also Crace’s statement: ‘Going home on the train I read in my Guardian about South American soya barons turning people off their land. […] The purpose of this book belongs more to that article in the Guardian about soya barons […] than it does to history’ (Wroe and Crace 2013). For an example of this coverage and its relationship to the meat industry, see Thomas 2011.

9. FAO 2006 suggests that animal agriculture is responsible for more green-house gas emissions than all transportation combined.

10. For the increasing dominance of lean thinking across sectors, see Moody 1997, 101; Stewart et al. 2009, ix.

11. See Kinnane 2002, 212–213; AGCO 2014, 107.

Works CiTed

Adams, Carol J. 2000. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Print.

AGCO. 2014. Great SUPER: The Story of the Gleaner Super Series. Atlanta: Snowden Tatarski. Print.

Crace, Jim. 1991. Arcadia. New York: Atheneum. Print.———. 1996. The Gift of Stones. New York: ECCO Press. Print.

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info

147

———. 2008. Signals of Distress. London: Picador. Print.———. 2013. Harvest. London: Picador. Print.———. 2014 Writing the Contemporary. University of Brighton, 2014 Talk.———, and others. 1954–2013. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,

The University of Texas at Austin, Jim Crace Papers. Manuscripts.Crace, Jim, and Kate Harvey. 2013. Picador Podcast: Jim Crace. http://www.

picador.com/blog/february-2013/picador-podcast-jim-crace. Online.Ernle, Lord. 1922. English Farming. London: Longmans, Green and Company.

Print.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2006. Livestock’s

Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf. Accessed 15 Mar 2015. Online.

Hammond, J.L., and Barbara Hammond. 1920. The Village Labourer, 1760–1832. London: Longmans, Green and Company. Print.

Hussey, Stephen. 1997. “The Last Survivor of an Ancient Race”: The Changing Face of Essex Gleaning. The Agricultural History Review 45 (1): 61–72. Print.

Joelle, Natalie. 2017. Gleaning Lean Culture. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24 (4): 737–752. Print.

Kermode, Frank. 1998. Into the Wilderness. The New  York Times, April 12. https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/12/reviews/980412.12kermodt.html. Online.

Kinnane, Adrian. 2002. DuPont: From the Banks of the Brandywine to Miracles of Science. Wilmington: du Pont de Nemours and Company. Print.

Krafcik, John F. 1988. Triumph of the Lean Production System. Sloan Management Review 30 (1): 41–52. Print.

Leith, Sam. 2013. Jim Crace’s Closed Communities. Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 2013. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1217589.ece. Online.

Lupton, Donald. 1632. London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quartred into Seuerall Characters. London: Nicholas Okes. Print.

Millet, Jean François. 1857. The Gleaners. Oil on Canvas. Musée d’Orsay. Paris.Moody, Kim. 1997. Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy.

London: Verso. Print.Neeson, J.M. 1996. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in

England, 1700–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.Proctor, Minna, and Jim Crace. 2000. Jim Crace. BOMB 71: 44–49. Print.Rowse, A.L. 1973. The England of Elizabeth. London: Macmillan. Print.Sinclair, Upton. 1946. The Jungle. London: T Werner Laurie. Print.Slater, Gilbert. 1907. The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields.

London: Archibald Constable & Co. Print.

8 SEARCHING FOR THE GLEANING FIELDS: GLEANERS…

natalie@gleaning.info

148

Stewart, Paul, Mike Richardson, Andy Danford, Ken Murphy, T. Richardson, and Vicki Wass. 2009. We Sell Our Time No More: Workers’ Struggles Against Lean Production in the British Car Industry. London: Pluto Press. Print.

Thirsk, Joan. 1959. Tudor Enclosures. The Historical Association Pamphlets. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Print.

Thomas, Glyn. 2011. Global Food Crisis: The Cost of Soy—in Pictures. The Guardian, 1 June 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2011/jun/01/global-food-crisis-soy-in-pictures. Online.

Womack, James P., and Daniel T. Jones. 2003. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. London: Simon & Schuster. Print.

Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. 1990. The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production—Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry. New  York: Macmillan. Print.

Wroe, Nicholas, and Jim Crace. 2013. Jim Crace: “At the Watford Gap It Hit Me That the English Landscape Was Absolutely Drenched in Narrative”. The Guardian, 16 August 2013, sec. Books. http://www.theguardian.com/cul-ture/2013/aug/16/jim-crace-interview. Online.

N. JOELLE

natalie@gleaning.info