Writing about place

(Part two)

Presumably there’s some advantage to writing about place from the stranger’s or visitor’s point of view. The artistic process of de-familiarization takes over — you see things from a fresh and often startling perspective, and observe ironies that others might miss. The outsider’s senses seem more alert, more absorbent,

Here’s Stanley Stewart writing about going upriver in Borneo:

In Borneo there were only two destinations: upriver and down.

 Downriver were the sorry towns of Chinese shop-houses, the shuttered government offices and the anxious people of the coast. Upriver was the interior, a world of forests and fat brown streams, of head-hunters and disappointed missionaries, of blowpipes and all-night raves in longhouses decorated with human skulls. Upriver took you to places the roads couldn’t reach. It was not merely a destination. In Borneo it was what people were: hulu — upriver.

Down at the dock the river clawed at the rotting pylons. The boats looked like airplane fuselages that had lost their wings in some nasty incident. Inside the passengers sat in rows of broken seats, mesmerized by the onboard entertainment, a relentless diet of kung fu videos. I took my place between an enormous bald Iban in the terminal stages of emphysema and a boy with a lapful of roosters. A cloud of diesel fumes signaled our departure.

Note the discrepant element here: amidst all that exotica pops up the image of “kung fu videos”; note, as well, the contrast between the big man approaching death and the scrawny kid full of life.

For me, however, the challenge lies much less in writing about the exotic than in finding freshness in the familiar.

Sometimes a place lies somewhere in the mind, more than in any specific location. See how Nancy Gibbs evokes summer camp in this piece she wrote for Time:

… It’s not only kids who thrive on time travel. Time dissolves in summer anyway: days are long, weekends longer. Hours get all thin and watery when you are lost in the book you’d never otherwise have time to read. Senses are sharper — something about the moist air and bright light and fruit in season — and so memories stir and startle. Go on vacation with your siblings; you will be back in the treehouse of code words and competitions and all the rough rivalries of those we love but do not choose as family. I am more likely to read trashy books, eat sloppy food, go barefoot, listen to the Allman Brothers, nap and generally act like I’m 16 than I’d ever be in the dark days of February. Return to a childhood haunt, the campground, the carnival, and let the season serve as a measuring stick, like notches on the kitchen doorway: the last time you walked this path, swam this lake, you were in love for the first time or picking a major or looking for work and wondering what comes next. The past was plump with questions whose answers you now know, and summer is when we get to review the exam and make corrections.

Especially in fiction, where narrative strategy is very important, place is crucial—not just as setting, but as the figurative or metaphorical bed in which the narrative can take root and flourish. The fiction writer is or should be keenly aware of the symbolic value and resonance of place or choice of setting, while remembering not to be too obvious about the metaphor. If this is done early and organically enough, seemingly without premeditation, then powerful possibilities can emerge.

Let me take three of my favorite examples, culled from three classic 20th century short stories.

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. (James Joyce, “Araby”)

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. (Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”)

The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. (John Steinbeck, “The Chrysanthemums”)

Joyce’s reference to “blindness” anticipates the central concern of the story, which is the young boy’s inability to see the truth; Hemingway’s landscape stands in the middle of nowhere, just like the couple we’re about to meet; and Steinbeck sets up an image of enclosure or entrapment, which is Elisa’s condition.

Sometimes the strategy can be more devious, as in Shirley Jackson’s opening scene from one of American literature’s most controversial short stories, 1949’s “The Lottery”:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. (Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”)

Anyone who has read this much-anthologized story will realize what Jackson had in mind with this small-town scene worthy of Norman Rockwell: she’s setting a trap, creating a perfect summer morning as a prelude to the horrific deed about to follow, the communal murder of one of their own.

The employment of place should create an atmosphere, a mood — or, in other words, an attitude that the writer expects the reader to share. In this way, the external description of a place, our impressions of it, can mirror what lies inside us, and how we see the world. What we see or choose to see — and almost just as importantly, what we leave out of the frame—is how we feel.

Sometimes this attitude can be explicit, as when Anthony Bourdain, in Kitchen Confidential, wrote about Baltimore:

My first night, I slept in a vacationing waiter’s apartment. It was a strange bed, with a strange cat, in a shabby, two-family Victorian. I lay awake, kicking and scratching, swatting the cat at my feet. The next day, I was brought over to the official residence of visiting dignitaries from New York: a three-story townhouse, brand-new but built to look old, in the center of the fake historical district. It was pretty swank: wall-to-wall carpeting, four bathrooms, vast dining room, living room and top-floor studio. The only problem was, there was no furniture. A bare futon lay in the middle of the floor on the third story, a pathetic black-and-white TV with coat-hanger antenna the only offered amusement. The spacious kitchen contained only some calcified rice cakes. The only other sign that anyone had ever lived there was a lone chef’s jacket in one of the closets — like an artifact, evidence of an ancient astronaut who’d been here before me.

Note how his use of words like strange, fake, bare, pathetic, and calcified conditions us to share his attitude.

Finally and always, writing about place is writing about oneself. The story is implicitly as much about the observer and the reporter as it is about the place itself. As Exie Abola puts it in his essay on the travelogue, “Often the journey takes the form of a quest, a search for something of immense consequence but not necessarily known, not necessarily found. The journey’s import is not in arriving at the destination but in knowing what it means to arrive, and in knowing its cost. The traveler breaches a boundary, geographical and personal, goes farther than he has ever gone before. Sometimes the quest is unsuccessful, open-ended, and the search continues, implied beyond the confines of the narrative.”

Or, in the words of Pico Iyer, “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.