Abstract
Jim Crace’s Harvest tells of the coming of lean efficiencies: a rise of ‘Leanness’ that entails loss for gleaners. The word ‘gleaner’ is repeated, rhymed, and varied to evoke ‘leaner’ and drives Harvest’s narrative in its exploration of enforced managerial ‘lean thinking’. Harvest shares the deep antipathy to trade and capitalism of Crace’s earlier works, refracted through today’s ecological crises. The novel is a timely critique of society’s ideological embracing of leanness as a social and economic practice. Crace’s fascination with gleaners and their relationship to ‘Leanness’ warns against the threat of a lean, ungleanable world.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘lean’ was coined to describe, develop, and disseminate the managerial 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.
- 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 greenhouse gas emissions than all transportation combined.
- 10.
- 11.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Robert Macfarlane for bringing Harvest to my attention, and to Carol Watts and Daniel Eltringham for generative conversations during work that informed the development of this chapter.
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Joelle, N. (2018). 8 Searching for the Gleaning Fields: Gleaners and Leanness in Jim Crace’s Harvest. In: Shaw, K., Aughterson, K. (eds) Jim Crace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_9
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