Xelas Magazine Blog

Mythologizing "Place"

2007-10-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

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.

The Politics of Literature and Place

2007-10-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

All art is political -- and all analysis, more so. Interpreting the merit of any work requires making decisions that empower certain values over others -- and with them, certain world-views. As with any political system, that ability to empower is maintained by a system of legitimacy: some process or standard by which the ownership of power is accepted by readers and fellow writers. Traditionally, that literary power was granted to institutions -- newspapers, journals, academia -- and experienced writer/critics of great repute. But some would argue technology is challenging those hierarchical models; that the individual is now more empowered than ever. So you might be wondering: In the contemporary world of literature, what sort of ownership does Xelas Magazine pursue?

Yet a better question might be, what kind of land are we attempting to govern? Because while all art is political, all politics are territorial. But what does that sense of place mean when we're talking about literature -- where are stories and poetry; how would you chart them on a map?

In the Western literary tradition alone we have hundreds of conflicting perspectives regarding the nature and function of art: Art as chronicle. Art as myth. Art as beauty. Art as truth. Art as device. Art as art. At present, even the dominant source of poetic debate is divided, existing as much between a "post-avant-garde" movement and its presumed nemesis, a "School of Quietude", as it does between the emergence of performance or slam poetry and the tradition of print, academic writing. The world of fiction is likewise fragmented: Is the short story dying ? Is the novel ? Have novels lost their distinctness, becoming glorified short stories? Is hysterical realism dominating contemporary literature? If so, is this even a negative development?

Yet one facet remains unchanged in all literary circles, regardless of the group, time-frame, or culture being assessed: the distinctness of each politicized voice. Whether literature is read as reflecting actual writers or creating new perceptions of them, the act and acceptance of writing is not dependent on some absolute, detached concept of Truth: rather, it relies on individual cues, based on preferences built by previous social exposures.

Some of these exposures are beyond our control: where we were born, where we were raised, and what traditions we were first taught. If we are exposed to it at all, literature, for a large part of our childhoods, is what we are told it is. These exposures can be innocuous too: the structure of a plot, as we're taught it in elementary school; the manner and substance of stories as they're relayed within the family; the books read and praised by our young peers. They can also appear, at the outset, wholly unrelated to art: the violence many children are exposed to doesn't intrinsically make a statement about literature, but it can in time provide an argument for perceiving art as confession, escape, or release.

The presence of other media also plays a significant role in the contemporary world: Faced with the choice between reading and watching a movie, children have to question the merit of investing time in works that don't involve more of their senses. Similarly, when faced with the choice between reading and playing video-games, children have to decide if there are unseen benefits to selecting an activity that requires more passive involvement. This is not to suggest movies and video-games are superior to books; simply that because these are some of the oppositions faced by children, their understanding and appreciation for literature often emerges in relation to their understanding and appreciation for other dominant forms.

But after a certain point, while many exposures still occur outside our direct control, we gain a new ability as participants in the literary world: the ability to make conscious selections, and therefore to decide on new exposures. As adults, this act of exposure manifests in many ways: the ability to travel within and outside our country; the ability to attend conferences and readings of our choosing; the ability to enter into conversations with others or buy whichever books we like; the ability to determine for ourselves the merit of traditional institutions and alternative voices, and the opinions they each espouse.

And yet necessarily, even these most conscious of selections is regionally dependent. That is, writers and readers are naturally in a state of response to their surroundings, and the literary cultures therein. The sort of discussions being held in local papers and literary journals, for instance, limit our ability to participate in them; as does the breadth and depth of bookstores, libraries, and writing groups; and when we look beyond our community to find what it's missing, or establish our own niche organizations to fill perceived voids, this too is a kind of response.

What sort of land are we operating on, then, but a land of conversations -- a place of constant interactions between bodies of work, individual works, individuals, and the social paradigms they inhabit? And yet to use the word "land" in such a context suggests warring states of fixed localities. But can even the most entrenched literary positions be considered "fixed", especially considering the impact of time? What might have been revolutionary two or two hundred years ago may now be status quo, even antiquated; and far from the real world, where the size, strength, and mobility of one's army directly relate to one's power, in the realm of ideas mainstream popularity is rarely treated with similar regard.

What we have, then, is a culture necessarily in flux, invariably torn between a desire for "newness" and an abiding respect for the potency of works that came before. This land of conversations might thus be considered no land at all, but a vast body of water -- with all the benefits of fluidity therein. Strong undercurrents of collective thought still drive this "country", but with boundaries far less rigid. The conceit of open water also allows for the possibility that even a single work, writer, or critic may have a pronounced effect on the paths of motion for the whole.

So how could any literary institution attempt to govern, or even police, such a place? With what tyrannical rule would one attempt to own the ocean of ideas?

And yet Xelas Magazine, like any journal that accepts submissions and selects what it deems to be the best, necessarily partakes in a kind of ownership. How then to reconcile this assumed authority with the vastness and fluid complexity of the literary world? Time will help, allowing us to define in practice the place Xelas Magazine theoretically occupies in this overwhelming scene. But more important by far will be our use of this literary ocean. Will it be exploited to our own benefit, some piece of it staunchly claimed as if that whole isn't in a constant state of flux? Or will our presence help convey the very nature of this landscape for what it is: a fluid body of literary conversations, fuelled by ideological collisions both large and small, that collectively represent what our literary culture says about current individual relationships with words and the worlds they inhabit.

If Xelas Magazine's choice in this regard isn't clear just yet, our hope is that it will become so in the months to come. While selecting and publishing writing that inhabits a "sense of place" is a dominant facet of our publication, we have unveiled this blog to do precisely the kind of work that crucial function will not allow: to promote, and further, real conversations about the kind of writing being released, glorified, despised, cherished, and otherwise identified in the literary ocean at large.

Welcome to Xelas Magazine's on-going Letter-from-the-Editors.

Just call us Ishmael.