Place and the Scene of Literary Practice by Angharad Saunders

Author:Angharad Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2017-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

The modality of these walks is suggested in Bennett’s choice of phrase: traversing. Traverse implies zigzagging, criss-crossing and meandering. There is no set destination or route, but rather a desire to let place speak (Anderson et al. 2010). As such, a pathway may be picked up only to be abandoned as something catches Bennett’s eye, seducing him in a new direction. Encountering new viewpoints may slow or direct movement, while turns and returns offer not a new perspective as such, but what James Gibson terms, a ‘path of observation’ (1979: 195); a mobile inhabitation of the world. Another meaning of traverse is to examine closely, to spend time and expend energy in place so that, as Bennett observes, things reveal themselves. This is perhaps moving closer to the kind of walking Phillpotts undertook, but unlike Phillpotts Bennett does not give himself up to the landscape. There is a purpose to the walk, there is something to be gained or extracted from it. Often this something was a discrete and identifiable narrative entity; for instance, as Bennett mentioned, his early morning walks appear in Anna of the Five Towns (begun as Anna Tellwright) as follows:

Five contiguous towns – Turnhill, Bursley, Hanbridge, Knype, and Longshawe – united by a single winding thoroughfare some eight miles in length, have inundated the valley like a succession of great lakes … They are mean and forbidding of aspect – sombre, hard-featured, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys has soiled and shrivelled the surrounding country … nothing more seemingly remote from romance. Yet be it said that romance is even here – the romance which, for those who have an eye to perceive it, ever dwells amid the seats of industrial manufacture.

([1902] 2001: 24–25)

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