The Spirit of Place

       Another symposium: this one at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks on the vernal equinox of 1975, in connection with a series of readings there by visiting poets and fictionists. I was attracted because the Dakotas were terra incognita to me; because my fellow symposiasts included at least two writers whom I enjoy listening to as well as reading: William H. Gass and Ishmael Reed; and because the topic -- "The Spirit of Place" -- spoke to my concerns in the LETTERS novel, still a-building.

       While on the Chesapeake we were fitted out and ready to launch a new sailing season, grimy snowbanks still sat about the flat Dakotas. I read from LETTERS; Ishmael Reed read from Flight to Canada, his novel then in progress, and took off afterwards from Grand Forks to Manitoba to check out the territory. Most moving of all was Bill Gass's reading, on location, of the chapter "We Do Not Live the Right life" from his novel-even-now-still-in-the-works, The Tunnel, with its astonishing descriptions of Dakota's astonishing weather, and of the great prairie there outside our windows. One could ask for no better demonstration of the truth that when a place is central to a good writer's imagination, it is because that place has become a metaphor for larger concerns.

       Reviewing my symposium remarks, I see that I was fumbling toward a notion of "postmodernism" set forth more fully in a later Friday-piece called "The Literature of Replenishment."

       Ernest Hemingway remarked that every writer owes it to the place of his birth either to immortalize it or to destroy it. He himself did neither for Oak Park, Illinois (I believe he made the remark apropos of Thomas Wolfe). It is an idle remark anyhow, as is every generalization beginning with the words "Every writer. . ."

       A good writer may be inspired in part by the locus genii of the place where he was born or raised: The "heart of the country" is near the heart of William Gass's fiction, though he depends on place less literally than Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner did. His is a Dakota of the mind, an Ohio or Indiana of the heart. But at least as often, the writer's place of origin may be of little or no significance to the work: We note in passing that Ishmael Reed escaped from Buffalo, New York, or that Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia and raised in Houston; but Reed's "place" is wherever his hoodoo leads him -- Harlem, New Orleans, Berkeley -- and some of the best of Barthelme's fiction takes place nowhere, not even in that Manhattan-of-the-nerve-ends where he lives.

       The very notion of place, or "setting," realistically evoked as a main ingredient of fiction, is no doubt as suspect at this hour of the art as are the conventions of realistic characterization or linear plot as practiced by our literary great-grandparents. Our modernist grandparents and parents long since outgrew such parochialism and left us free to choose from three basic attitudes toward the realistic rendition of place in short stories and novels, as toward the other traditional components of prose fiction. I find two of these attitudes regrettable, the third admirable.

       First, out of innocence or conservative inclination we may write as though Joyce and Kafka and Beckett and Borges and company had not written -- as though the phenomenon of modernism and all that gave rise to it in the history of Western art hadn't happened, or was a regrettable aberration -- and try to carry on where Henry James or Emile Zola or John Galsworthy left off. More Anglo-American writers than not (and about four-fifths of my students) write like this. The attitude strikes me as irresponsible to history, though I acknowledge that it does not preclude good work. A really fine artist can rise above his/her own aesthetics.

       Second, we may fall into the opposite error of confusing change in the arts with progress in the empirical sciences, and imagine that because the great modernists turned away from conventional realism, linearity, and continuity, we may never legitimately again paint ravishing nudes, or compose moving melodies, or tell marvelous stories in which are included recognizable places and people. Many of those who practice what is called "meta-fiction" or "sur-fiction" espouse this attitude, and those who misread my 1967 essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" would include me among them. But I deplore this position, too: It is not only sterile and decadent; it's unintelligent, and it robs the bank of human experience, in which we all have a greater or smaller deposit.

       Third, we may regard ourselves as being not irrevocably cut off from the nineteenth century and its predecessors by the accomplishment of our artistic parents and grandparents in the twentieth, but rather as free to come to new terms with both realism and antirealism, linearity and non-linearity, continuity and discontinuity. If the term "postmodern" describes anything worthwhile, it describes this freedom, successfully exercised. It used to be that an unmarried woman was immoral if she said Yes; for a while it seemed she was a prude if she said No; nowadays, she is free not only to say yes or no as she intelligently decides, but to do the asking. Similarly, the "postmodern" writer may find that the realistic, even tender evocation of place (for example) is quite to his purpose, a purpose which may partake of the purposes of both his modernist fathers and his pre-modern remoter ancestors without being quite the same as either's. The Joyce of Finnegans Wake, after all, is every bit as Irish as Sean O'Casey, without being, like O'Casey, every bit Irish. And Borges explicitly reminds us that one needn't write about gauchos on the Pampas or the fervor of Buenos Aires to be an Argentine writer.

       In his recent book Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino -- one of the most appealing of the "postmodernists" -- imagines a Marco Polo who describes for a weary Kublai Khan a great many fantastical, no doubt imaginary cities; at one point the Khan observes that perhaps all these invisible cities are variations of Venice: that Marco Polo has never left Home.

       That is the sort of Landgeist which may still haunt and inspire us in the closing decades of twentieth-century fiction.

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