How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised by Thomas C. Foster

Author:Thomas C. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780062344205
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

19

Geography Matters . . .

LET’S GO ON VACATION. You say okay and then ask your first question, which is . . . Who’s paying? Which month? Can we get time off? No. None of those.

Where?

That’s the one. Mountains or beaches, St. Paul or St. Croix, canoeing or sailing, the Mall of America or the National Mall. You know you have to ask because otherwise I might take you to some little trout stream twenty-seven miles from a dirt road when you really want to watch the sun go down from a white sand beach.

Writers have to ask that question, too, so we readers should consider its implications. In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation, and every writer has to ask, every time, Where is this one taking place? For some, it’s not that tough. William Faulkner often said he set the majority of his work on his “little postage stamp of ground,” his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. After a few novels, he knew that ground so intimately he didn’t even have to think about it anymore. Thomas Hardy did the same thing with his mythic Wessex, the southwest corner of England—Devon and Dorset and Wiltshire. And we feel that those novels and stories couldn’t be set anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn’t say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland. They’d say different things and perform different acts. Most writers, though, are less tied to one place than Faulkner or Hardy, so they have to give it some thought.

And we readers have to give their decisions some thought as well. What does it mean to the novel that its landscape is high or low, steep or shallow, flat or sunken? Why did this character die on a mountaintop, that one on the savanna? Why is this poem on the prairie? Why does Auden like limestone so much? What, in other words, does geography mean to a work of literature?

Would everything be too much?

Okay, not in every work, but frequently. In fact, more often than you think. Just think about the stories that really stay with you: where would they be without geography. The Old Man and the Sea can only take place in the Caribbean, of course, but more particularly in and around Cuba. The place brings with it history, interaction between American and Cuban culture, corruption, poverty, fishing, and of course baseball. Any boy and any older man might, I guess, take a raft trip down a river. It could happen. But a boy, Huck Finn, and an older man, the escaped slave Jim, and their raft could only make the story we know as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by being on that particular river, the Mississippi, traveling through that particular landscape and those particular communities, at a given moment in history. It matters when they reach Cairo and the Ohio empties into the big river; it matters when they reach the Deep South, because Jim is running away in the worst possible direction.

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