Xelas Magazine

If a good writer, when describing the place in which a story or poem occurs, brings vibrancy to her words so that we are transported to that place along with her, a great writer mythologizes this place and invites us to participate in its rituals, its secrets, and its mysteries. I'm talking about writers whose stories seem to spring as much from the dirt as from the person.

But what drives this myth-making? In his essay, On Grief and Reason, Joseph Brodsky (recalling Auden) says, "[W]hen an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. . . . Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror." If the American (and by extension, the American author) and the tree (or place) are equals, they only are because the latter exists without being fully contextualized by the former. Myth-making, then, represents this American compulsion to contextualize--to tame even--a place. In doing so, however, the author should be aware of the tension therein: This "place" exists, distinct, larger than ourselves, and asserts its otherness in ways which baffle us.

Consider Amy Hempel's collection of stories, "Reasons to Live." California is frequently a third character, unspeaking but nevertheless felt. In Why I'm Here, Hempel presents a narrator who moves from place to place every three months. When asked why she doesn't stay in one place longer, the narrator admits she doesn't know but that she wouldn't feel like herself otherwise. She says, "you can count on this for damage: Three moves equals a fire," where 'fire' likely refers to the frequent wildfires resulting from the Santa Ana winds. She tries to make a rule and apply it to the unpredictable (her compulsion to move, the fires). If the narrator overlooks the tension inherent in this act, Hempel does not. In titling the story "Why I'm Here," Hempel acknowledges this tension in trying to contextualize a place. "Here" exists because "I" occupy it; "here" is fully realized through residence, even ownership. But what is "here" when here changes so frequently and who am "I" when, without these relocations, "I" won't exist?

If Hempel explores the tension between person and place through contradictions, James Dickey, in his poem Kudzu, explores it from and through distance. He writes, "In Georgia, the legend says / That you must close your windows / At night to keep it out of the house," and uses the familiar invocation of legend to lend his admonition weight. At once, we know this is not just the poet making this claim. It is Georgia, folklore, common knowledge. Dickey then evokes the otherness of this new kudzu-claimed landscape: "Silence has grown Oriental." Not only are we at odds with our location, our location is not even our own: "Japan invades." We are now at the bottom of a hierarchy. Above us exist the poet, legend, and this foreign entity invading our place. Dickey further mythologizes this sense of otherness by invoking deep-seated, cultural fears: stepping into the dark unknown, snakes and snakebites, and being smothered (overwhelmed) by this invading force. But these fears re-prioritize our selves: "The night kudzu has / Your pasture, you sleep like the dead." We are no longer outsiders but drawn in. Gone is the invocation of legend; we are now initiates. Our sleeping like the dead (and yet still waking) symbolizes death and rebirth, a mystery. The world we awaken to is no longer the same, "stalls / Strain to break into leaf." Our attempts to tame this place (with its farms and pasture lands) have failed. We are left with only a dim hope of rooting out and re-carving our own niche into this space.

"Because they were boys, no one believed them," begins Ron Rash's story, Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes, and presents us with (literally) a "big fish" story. Rash quickly raises the tension between how we perceive the space we inhabit versus its actual scope since the place of this story is defined by each character's knowledge of it. A group of old men (self-proclaimed experts on the locale and its wildlife) decide to see for themselves and soon witness the enormous fish. Their sense of place now challenged, the men must re-orient their understanding to accommodate this new find. In doing so, they frequently invoke the legendary: a goldfish fed on corn and okra that grew to 57 pounds, a salamander that swam from Japan, an irradiated catfish. Regardless of their (rejected) hypotheses, they are now believers. In opposition to their belief stands the local game warden, an outsider, whom the town regards as "arrogant and a smart-ass." For the old men, it is no longer sufficient to believe; they must prove. And so they set about trying to catch the fish. What is interesting about how this story mythologizes place is that although the old men are bent on capturing the fish and thus writing themselves into the legend, when they finally see the fish up close, "over six feet long and enclosed in a brown suit of prehistoric armor, the immense tail curved like a scythe," and hook it, they opt to let it go. They keep one scale, though, and present it as proof to the game warden.

Though the old men attempt to create myths out of their surroundings (and write themselves into them), unlike Hempel's narrator, or the speaker (and audience of) Dickey's Kudzu, these old men re-contextualize themselves vis-à-vis their place. Rash undermines that drive to mythologize (and resolves the tension therein) by having his characters encounter nature, recognize it as an equal, and return--not bewildered or shocked, but re-defined.

If each of these writers (and, as I've claimed any great writer) mythologizes place, what does this mean in terms of the act of reading? Why make this claim at all? Going back to Brodsky, we should re-envision the story not as containing a place but as comprising it. When we encounter a story for the first time, we do so as equals. We approach, perhaps tentatively, this thing which is fully-formed and not part of our own context. We look to it for rules to guide ourselves--this search the basis for our yearning for the universal, the commonalities which link us to the author (and to others). We yearn to be initiated into the story, to experience the epiphanic moment in which we are reborn inside the narrative. We become believers. Yet it is with (at least) a little irony that we do so for we know that we will leave the story. And it is in this space between the encounter and the return that the "place" (of the story) occurs. When we emerge, we have re-oriented ourselves with this new knowledge. We are something "other" than what we were. We are re-defined.