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.