A couple days ago, I read a passage (from Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris) that describes the sensation of stepping into a new house. It captures, better than anything I’ve read before, the disarming feeling of encountering a space that you know will become familiar, when it is still strange:
It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart. By having come, you already begin to store up the pains of going away. From what you see, there is to be no escape. Untrodden rocky canyons or virgin forests cannot be more entrapping than the inside of a house, which shows you what life is. To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself…. Through looped white muslin curtains the unsunny sea daylight fell on French blue or sage-green wallpapers with paler scrolls on them, and watercolors of places that never were. The rooms smelt of Indian rugs, spirit-lamps, hyacinths. In the drawing room, Aunt Violet’s music was stacked on the rosewood piano; a fringed shawl embroidered with Indian flowers was folded across the foot of the couch; the writing table was crowded with brass things. In a pan-shaped basket by the sofa were balls of white knitting wool. Aunt Violet seemed to have lived here always. The fire was laid but not lit. Each room vibrated with a metallic titter, for Uncle Bill kept going a number of small clocks. Out of these high-up windows you saw nothing but sky. The rooms looked not so much empty as at a sacred standstill; Karen could almost hear Uncle Bill saying: “I have touched nothing since my dear wife’s death.”
The stunning confidence of this paragraph lies in Bowen’s decision to describe the protagonist (Karen’s) first impression of a place, not as a listing of details about the place (which comes at the paragraph’s close), but by the blankness and vague horror of newness, of not knowing yourself or your place in the place. (“To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself.”) But what does the house look like? the reader wants to know. I’ll get to that, Bowen seems to say, but first, let’s register the blindness of newness, then the slow seeing, which will fade, within days, into another kind of blindness: that of familiarity.
Eudora Welty, another fiction writer, and a friend of Bowen’s, wrote an essay about place in fiction (i.e. setting) that I love. In it, she writes:
It is by the nature of itself that fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place. The human mind is a mass of associations- associations more poetic even than actual. … The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of “What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?” -and that is the heart’s field.
Fiction writers love setting because it is effortless symbolism: encountering place, a character either feels in harmony or in vexing dissonance to it. Stepping into a sunny garden is either an embodiment of the character’s new love or else the wilting tiger lilies, the too-close sounds of traffic, the unrelenting sun, are just another horrible aspect of a horrible day, and the character hurries back inside.
Place is necessarily what is outside of us but the trap of consciousness all too often means that our perspective on place, our literal view, is bound by what is occurring inside, that invisible inner landscape that gets writ large on what we see: the streets, the sea, the shop windows.
Writers often say that they can only write about a place once they’ve left it. I am the same: somehow staring at one place helps me evoke another. I think I need the solidity of a setting I can see; it anchors me enough to write a firm elsewhere.
In Berlin this spring and summer, I traveled nearly an hour almost every day to Krumme Lanke or Schlachtensee. I never tired of staring at those lakes, and I often took the same photographs, each day, of the same scene. There are places that are restive, that call forth other places without eliding the scenery before us. I don’t know yet where that place will be for me in Austin, and I wonder if I will recognize it when I see it.
