Speaker
Description
Michael Crummey’s Sweetland (2014) is frequently examined as a novel about resettlement, outport decline, and ecological loss, but it can also be read as a meditation on the human lifespan and its embedding within communal life. This paper proposes to interpret Sweetland through the lens of Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology, which emphasizes the intersubjective constitution of meaning, the role of memory, and the tension between individual biography and collective “stock of knowledge.”
At its centre stands Moses Sweetland, an elderly fisherman who refuses to leave his Newfoundland island even after the government resettlement program empties the community. Sweetland’s decline and solitude dramatize the human confrontation with mortality, yet his story also reveals how life’s meaning is shaped through shared practices and memories. Schutz insists that our biographical experience only becomes significant when situated within intersubjective contexts. Sweetland’s memories of family, neighbours, and a once-thriving community exemplify this: his past gains coherence from the lifeworld he once shared, even as that world dissolves.
The decline of the outport settlement mirrors the trajectory of a human lifespan—birth, flourishing, decline, disappearance—demonstrating Schutz’s point that communities, like individuals, possess finite “time perspectives.” In Sweetland, the erosion of collective life means that Moses’s memories risk becoming unintelligible once detached from communal validation. His resistance is not only against physical displacement but also against the existential loss of a shared world in which his biography makes sense.
Furthermore, Schutz’s concepts of “finite provinces of meaning” and the “stock of knowledge at hand” illuminate the interplay between individual and environment. Sweetland’s island constitutes a province of meaning saturated with local practices of fishing, storytelling, and survival. As modernization and resettlement dismantle these practices, both the community’s and Sweetland’s lifespans converge toward closure. Mortality, then, is experienced not only biologically but socially: when the lifeworld disintegrates, so too does the horizon that sustains an individual’s existence.
This paper will argue that Sweetland enacts a phenomenology of aging and mortality that resonates with Schutz’s insights. By portraying lifespan as simultaneously personal and communal, Crummey links individual decline with the dissolution of intersubjective worlds. Reading Sweetland through Schutz allows us to see mortality less as an isolated endpoint and more as the unravelling of the social fabric in which human life is embedded.
Selected Bibliography
Crummey, Michael. Sweetland. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2014.
Endress, Martin, George Psathas, and Hisashi Nasu, eds. Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schutz. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.
Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World, vol.1. London: Heinemann, 1974
Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World, vol.2. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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