The king is dead? Long live the king!
And the novel? Encore! Encore!
“I’ve Lost My Place!”
The popular Key West Literary Seminars, held each January at the southern tip of the USA, offer workshops for aspiring writers and guest appearances by more established ones. In 2001, the Seminar’s theme (which changes annually) was “The Spirit of Place.” That year’s writer-speakers included, among others, Merrill Joan Gerber, Peter Matthiesson, Annie Proulx, Susan Richards Shreve, Lee Smith, and myself; we participated in a spirited symposium on “The Loss of Place in Fiction: The Homogenization of American Life,” and then each of us delivered a talk on some particular aspect of the general subject. What follows are, in order, my symposium-statement and my presentation on the place of “place” in fiction.
IT MAY BE worth noting that the title of this symposium comprises two separate or at least separable topics: the first general, the second more specific, and both interesting. I’ll make a few remarks first about the general subject of a writer’s being cut off for whatever reason from a geographical/cultural place that had been important to his/her creative imagination, and then about the specific loss of place-identity to what we’re calling “the homogenization of American life.” Both, I’m going to argue, are non-problems — at least in themselves.
As for Topic 1: “I’ve lost my place!” is a lament almost as common among writers as among readers who neglect to use bookmarks. Among the former, the consequences of place-loss by voluntary or involuntary exile, for example, have historically been downright splendid for literature, however painful for particular writers as people. From Ovid through Dante to Joyce and Nabokov, and including the expatriate “Lost Generation” of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, et al., the Literature of Exile is so rich a tradition that it might arguably be well for Place-Lit if all writers were obliged to spend a figurative Junior Year Abroad in the course of their apprenticeship, the way Professor Larry Chisholm at Yale used to require his doctoral candidates in American Studies to spend a year or two in Biafra or Zimbabwe, say, for the purpose of acquiring an anthropological detachment from their subject-matter. In my own case, it was when I left my native Chesapeake tidewaterland after graduate school to go teach in central Pennsylvania that the place I’d put behind me became the locale, if not quite the subject, of my first several novels. But of course writers are so different from one another that no generalizations about the benefits of exile will do. Getting out of Ireland worked as well for Frank McCourt (of Angela’s Ashes fame) as it did for James Joyce; but whether that “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” at the end of Joyce’s very Irish Ulysses would have been good for Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor, for example, is another story.
And as to our real subject — the literary consequences of a place’s loss of its distinctive character to the “homogenization of American life”—I call it a non-problem for at least four reasons, while always acknowledging that anything might turn out to be a problem for some particular writer:
— First (a point I’ll expand upon in my later remarks on “The Place of Place in Fiction”), although many good writers revel and even more or less specialize in the realistic rendition of some particular locale, such rendition is not prerequisite to first-rate fiction. Ernest Hemingway declared that “every writer owes it to the place of his birth either to immortalize it or to destroy it”; I would add that he/ she may opt simply to ignore it, and to set her/his fiction in other real places, or in imagined or imaginary places, or nowhere in particular. I’m not recommending this, mind; only remarking it.
— Second, the loss of a place’s once-distinctive character, whether to cultural homogenization or simply to the passage of time, is what leads to the Literature of Nostalgia: a genre as rich as, and often overlapping, the Literature of Expatriation. Thus Faulkner, for example, whose Mississippi remained central to his imagination even after he himself shifted to exotic Virginia in his latter years, enjoyed contrasting the Old Yoknapatawpha with the New, where automobiles now zip down the streets “with a sound like tearing silk.” All grist for his mill.
— Third, the Homogenization of American Life and consequent attrition of place-identity can itself be a viable literary subject — as can anything, I daresay, in the hands of an appropriately inspired writer.
— And fourth, “homogenization” is always a matter of degree, and can cast what distinctiveness remains into higher relief than formerly. The film-director Jean Renoir observed that “the marvelous thing about [Hollywood] Westerns is that they are all the same movie. That gives a director unlimited freedom.”1 “Unlimited” is doubtless an exaggeration, but it’s a truism about any genre-art that its practitioners and fans become connoisseurs of small differences within the generic parameters. Against a background of the perceived homogenization of American life, the same might apply to non-generic art as well — as witness the title of Larry McMurtry’s recent essay-collection, Walter Benjamin at the Tasti-Freeze. A once-“wild” West that now has the usual constellation of strip developments and franchise businesses is admittedly less different from other places than it used to be; I submit, however, that a Tasti-Freeze in Archer, Texas, with a Larry McMurtry in it reading the late French literary critic and theoretician Walter Benjamin, remains a distinctive place indeed and (Q.E.D. by the book afore-cited) may be a fit subject for fiction, nonfiction, drama, or verse.
MIND YOU, I’M not arguing in favor of homogenization. But even biological clones are identical only genetically — and our DNA, as we all know, is by no means our whole story.
The Place of “Place” in Fiction1
JOHN O’HARA ONCE remarked that when he was between plots, all he had to do was take his imagination for a stroll down the streets of his native Pottstown, PA, remembering the families who lived in each house along the way, and soon enough he’d have the makings of his next story. One can scarcely imagine Flannery O’Connor’s muse in Ontario instead of Georgia, or William Faulkner’s singing sweetly of Down-East Maine. Fiction, whether narrative or dramatic, requires characters, action, theme, and setting, and for a great many writers of it — especially from the 18th century onward, with the ascendancy of the novel and the tradition of literary realism—setting becomes not only inseparable from those other components, but a virtual player itself, in numerous instances even a kind of authorial trademark: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Anne Tyler’s Baltimore.
This is so clearly the case that it’s worth remembering that the richly “textured” rendition of geographical locale is not prerequisite to great literary art. It was enough for Homer to invoke Odysseus’s Wine-Dark Sea and Rock-Bound Ithaca without going much beyond those formulaic epithets; we may get some pungent flavors of 14th-century Florence from Dante’s Divine Comedy or of 16th-century France from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, but it’s not from any Henry Jamesian “composition of place.” And in modern times, writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Donald Barthelme achieved first-rate literary art that in many instances is all but placeless. Indeed, one does well to bear in mind Borges’s memorable objection2 that to be an “Argentine writer” one need not lay on the tangos and gauchos and pampas and such, any more than the author of the Koran felt obliged to load that sacred text with camels (Borges cites Edward Gibbon’s observation that there is no mention of camels in the holy book of Islam, and then speculates that had its author been an Arab nationalist, there would be caravans of camels on every page).