Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Lawrence Durrell: sense of place, one last word

"One last word about the sense of place; I think that not enough attention is paid to it as a purely literary criterion.  What makes 'big' books is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents.  I don't mean the books which are devoted  entirely to an elucidation of a given landscape like Thoreau's Walden is.  I mean ordinary novels  When they are well and truly anchored in nature they usually become classics.  One can detect this quality of 'bigness' in most books which are so sited from Huckleberry Finn to The Grapes of Wrath.  They are tuned in to the sense of place.  You could not transplant them without totally damaging their ambience and mood;  any more than you could transplant Typee.  This has nothing I think to do with the manners and habits of the human beings who populate them; for they exist in nature, as a function of place."

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from the essay: "Landscape and Character"
Spirit of  Place


This quality of "bigness" that Durrell speaks of seems to be dependent upon the significance, the importance of the landscape, the natural setting found in the novel.  I can see this in Huckleberry Finn,  where the Mississippi seems to me to be the most important character in the novel.  The same is true for Typee  or Moby Dick  or  The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I wonder, though, about The Grapes of Wrath, though I might suppose the dust bowl early in the novel might be significant, yet that is only a small part of the novel.  It seems to me that most of the novel takes place in California and the landscape doesn't seem to play that important of a role, or at least not as important as the human relationships there.


"This has nothing I think to do with the manners and habits of the human beings who populate them; for they exist in nature, as a function of place."

The above statement is, to me, the most controversial idea.  It is an extremely significant theme that appears again and again in Durrell's works.  This idea may be the reason why he was a very highly regarded travel writer before his novels overshadowed them.  

6 comments:

  1. i'm intrigued by the idea of space and it's role in fixing reality in the reader's mind... books located in cities don't seem to me to be as memorable as those placed in larger settings; maybe because they are more complicated... more buildings, more streets, more people; whereas in the out-of-doors, with larger spaces to deal with, plains, mountains, deserts, rivers, the memory has fewer objects with which to locate the plot... i guess i'm remembering Claude Levi-Strauss's Triste Tropiques, in which he devotes a whole chapter to describing a sunset, viewed while shipbound for South America... but that may have been impressive simply because it was unusual... dunno... what do you think?

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    1. Mudpuddle, that may be why urban settings don't seem as memorable. Exceptions might be certain buildings that stand out. But urban areas are more complex and also much more is crowded into a small area whereas natural settings have much more uniqueness and perhaps have fewer elements to experience.

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  2. I’m trying to come up with a Fiction in which setting (landscape, cityscape, environment, etc) is not relevant. I’ve come up with no such examples. Any ideas? Examples of absence might help explain importance of presence.

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    1. R.T., I can't either. The setting, regardless of how extensively or poorly it's portrayed, still sets limits on what is possible.

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    2. well, in cities, a lot of it is rather anonymous: like in a mystery, often the plot could be unfolding in almost any locale; just flowing from one building to another, and going down a nameless street... things look similar, in a generic way... but with landscapes, there's usually more definition, no?... as in valleys or mountains with peculiarities that stand out in the mind; buy maybe that's true of cities, also... i'm beginning to think i was making bricks w/o straw... hmmm....

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    3. Mudpuddle, while the cityscape may be generic, it still does control the story to a certain extent. Events take place in cities that would be difficult to portray in rural or in natural settings such as jungles or deserts or at sea.

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