Literary Landscapes

INTRODUCTION

By John Sutherland

“There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein, now by choice a Parisian, once wrote, haughtily, of her home city Oakland. These are words that could not be said of any of the books examined and described in this volume. Indicating that Californian city’s historical emptiness, positing the location as, disappointingly, a kind of anywhere, with no features to mark it out as either memorable or categorically distinct, Stein gives us a scornful shorthand for defining the elusive “sense of place”: an essential “thereness” or “isness,” without which a city’s edges fall apart.

Immediately one’s mind starts questioning the idea, subverting it. Was Oakland, when Stein was brought up there (where her childhood was, as Philip Larkin said of his hometown, “unspent”) the same as where the hippy revolution of the 1960s found its home? Did the Beatniks give Oakland a “there” which wasn’t there, and couldn’t be foreseen, in Stein’s childhood? Is “Cannery Row” still what the name describes as when fish are canned elsewhere and the place lives mainly as a shrine to lovers of John Steinbeck’s fiction? This, and many other questions on literary topography, are pondered, illuminatingly and informatively, in the essays that follow.

As a collection of the world’s most memorable fictionalized geographies, Literary Landscapes can be summed up as an investigation into Stein’s “thereness”—the enduring fixity of place (“There’ll always be an England”) and the fluidities and meltingness that places are subject to. They melt and reform themselves, over social time, historical time, and geological time. Describing literary place, in the dimensions of time and space, requires a fine critical touch—which, one can confidently assert, is displayed in the pages that follow.

All the works described in this volume capture, are even built upon, a sense of their authors having been to, seen, experienced, and been able to relate all the qualities of a place that, in combination, lodge that locale in cultural and geographical specificity. From Hardy’s Wessex to Mishima’s Japan, from Bulgakov’s Moscow to Proulx’s Newfoundland, the literary landscapes collected here are singular in their sights, sounds, associations, and representations; they could not be mistaken for anywhere else.

The idea of “literary landscape” was, originally, founded on a paradox. Entering the English language as a loan word by way of the Dutch landschap in the early seventeenth century, a “landscape” initially denoted a purely visual representation. The natural world had begun to emerge from its position as an undervalued backdrop, becoming a major artistic genre from Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin onward, but its depiction was a pictorial skill.

By contrast, “literary landscape,” the subject of this richly detailed and illustrated volume, cannot, like fine art, be experienced as representation by the eye alone. Literary landscape is composed of words which must be recomposed in a frame of imagination. “The inward eye,” British “Lakeland” poet William Wordsworth called it, drawing a distinction between perception and imagination. Just as the painter can choose his balance of verisimilitude—striving for eye-witnessed accuracy—and creative depiction, so the writer must decide how much of an influence his “inward eye” will have on the scene depicted. What one might call “creative bias” comes into it—subjective coloration. And sometimes moral judgement: when Bunyan called London “Vanity Fair” (“a place of ostentation or empty, idle amusement and frivolity”) he meant something quite different, morally, from what London-loving William Makepeace Thackeray presents in his novel Vanity Fair. Thackeray rather liked amusement and frivolity.

Some writers open up more than others to the demands of imagination combining studious historical research with the literary artist’s creative licence—Chinua Achebe’s chronicle of pre-colonial life in Nigeria, for instance (1958, here), or Eleanor Catton’s recreation of Victorian Hokitika on an epic scale (2013, here). Interweaving his knowledge of folklore with authentic details of life in postwar Tokyo, Natsuhiko Kyōgoku’s portrait of the city (1994, here) hovers between fact and fiction—creating a landscape at once familiar and foreign, populated by phantoms.

For others, a more photographically exact portrayal of place yields a greater reward. Often these writers draw upon a personal topography, recreating the intimate corners of their own uniquely felt experience. From August Strindberg, whose Hemsö was recognized as a lightly veiled version of Kymmendö where he had spent his childhood summers (1887, here), to Armistead Maupin, who invests his richly vibrant chronicle of San Francisco with his own experiences of the city (1978, here), personal biography informs and colors these characterizations of place and renders them all the more fascinating because of that.

Sometimes authors choose to work on a large canvas landscape, powerful and dramatic, dwarfing humanity; others work on a smaller scale. Jane Austen, whose novel Persuasion (1817, here) begins the collection, could be described as a miniaturist. From Hampshire to Somerset, her novels stay within a narrow range; she herself was a writer “who only England knew.” She had sailor brothers who had seen the world, but not Jane, who never left England’s shores (except, perhaps, for the adjoining Isle of Wight). Yet her novels display, as Sir Walter Scott wrote of Emma, “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.” Yet, even the “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory,” as she called it, on which she wrote can give us an occasional large canvas landscape. One such is in the Donwell Abbey Picnic scene in Emma. The picnickers have nothing much to say to one another, and Emma looks down from the hill on which she is standing:

What is Austen saying here in her encomium of the “Englishness” of the “sweet” landscape? Emma Woodhouse has this serene confidence that her country’s countryside was the best anywhere in the world: the dates tell us that these were ominous years for Anglo-French relations, with Waterloo, Napoleon’s exile, victory, then peace and the inauguration of the “British Century.” Not even a parson’s daughter in rural Hampshire could be unaware that society was changing. In short, this is an exquisitely described landscape—worthy of the miniature ivory artist—with a heavy historical subtext to it. Though rooted in her own observation, the novel becomes a commentary on a world beyond personal experience, as a vehicle for affirming “Englishness.”

Austen acknowledges in her writing that any conception of “landscape” is inextricably bound up with human presence and human purpose and human idiosyncrasy. Throughout this volume runs the presiding conviction that any landscape will be a synthesis of place and people: from Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1817, here) to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922, here), Gerard Reve’s The Evenings (1947, here) to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012, here), across this international canvas the creation of place relies not just on physical details of geography, but on shared habits, customs, and values: a constellation of social actions which, in turn, contour the original concrete reality. Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988, here), Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005, here) and Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper (1982, here) make the point particularly plain: land is instrumental in creating a shared sense of identity, whether national, regional, or tribal.

No collection such as this can hope to be wholly comprehensive, although it can aspire to as wide a coverage as possible. This volume’s discriminating selection was driven by three criteria: firstly, each book must conjure a land that exists, or has existed. These are “literary” landscapes, but their bounds extend beyond the textual, insofar as they relate to tangible, visually “real” locations, in the specifics of their characterisation if not explicitly by name. Second, as the difference between the Paris of Balzac (1835, here) and the Paris of Modiano (1997, here) makes clear, these are books which are rooted in historical time as well as locale: “thereness” depends on history as much as on geography. As much as this collection might serve as a travel companion to the different corners of the globe, it is also a time machine, creating different visions of the same city. No one could confuse Edith Wharton’s New York (1920, here) with Jay McInerney’s (1984, here). One of the fascinating questions raised by this volume is whether there is, so to speak, a “New Yorkness.”

Finally, within the global reach of this literary selection, place is always more than mere “setting.” Where that descriptor implies “atmosphere” or “background,” landscape becomes a subject in its own right across the books in this collection, to the extent that some of these imaginings of place have, miraculously, even worked their own impact on the environments they describe. Ocean View Avenue was renamed “Cannery Row” in 1958 to commemorate John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name (1945, here). In Hongoeka Bay, developers gave up their harassment of the local Māori community in the aftermath of the publication of Potiki by Patricia Grace (1986, here), which allowed the community to build their own ancestral home. Offering commentary, criticism, eulogy, these writers define the countries and communities they describe.

This is a book to read, relish, and learn from. Its intention is to share with the reader insights which have enriched the contributors’ pleasures in, and reward from, great literature; specifically the places in which great literature founds itself. No one reading this sumptuous book will be tempted to think of literary landscape as mere “background.”

The reader of today has advantages denied, in most cases, their predecessors. I (now aged 80) was seventeen years old before I ever left British shores. My grandparents never left them. My son (born in 1974) had traveled the four corners of the planet before he was seventeen years old. Born in London he lives in Los Angeles and prefers to holiday in South America. He is not atypical of his multi-placed generation.

We are, as never before, a travelling, “sight-seeing,” “place-knowing” race of humans. It is a privilege. The contention of this book (grandiose, it may sound, but genuine) is that we should cultivate our historically unique sense of place and use the resource of great literature (more available to us, like travel, than our ancestors) to do so.

Enjoy.