Text and Utopia

This post is rated AR for Academic Rambling.

I was talking with Mairead Conneely, and we were discussing utopia and landscape. She is studying how people from the Aran Islands and visitors to the Aran Islands create a literary vision of the islands that sort of matches the landscape on the ground, but in creating an identity out of writing the landscape, they create a new utopian (small letter 'a') in their minds. Often this imagined utopia is based on the past, and when the writer returns from exile, because exile helps anybody see the Old Country in Kodachrome, they see that the modern world has kept moving onwards, and the Old Country has become some undiscovered new country.

Ultimately, it's okay if the literary vision doesn't match the actual landscape, but readers, insiders and outsiders, demand some kind of authenticity (which is ultimately yet another utopian vision of what reality should (but may not) be). So the Aran Islanders create 'Synge's Seat' where the great author sat to write his plays. Of course, he sat on some kind of ledge, but there is a nice little shelter with a stone seat built up so visitors can feel some kind of landscape based communion with the author. The same thing is true in Howth, Yorkshire, for the Bronte stuff. Up on the hill is supposed to be the 'Wuthering Heights' cottage and the 'Wuthering Heights Tree' and they are both well visited and well photographed and have nothing at all to do with the texts in any way. Oh, and let's not forget that there IS NO 221B Baker Street. They had to add it in because so many people came looking for it. At the Sherlock Holmes museum on 221B Baker Street (they had to request the address), they write, 'The rooms in Mr Holmes´s apartment on the first floor are maintained just as he would have left them nearly 100 years ago!' Note the utopian use of the conditional verb in this astonishing sentence.

So readers, unfamiliar with the landscape of the text, experience the text as creating a vision of the imagined landscape. when they visit the actual place, the text landscape may be more real than the actual landscape and actually become a barrier to experiencing the place because its 'smaller than I expected' or 'dirtier than I expected'. It would seem that there could be a certain amount of Landscape Shock in the same way that people experience Culture Shock. There is a convoluted desire for 'authenticity' and yet a requirement that 'authenticity' means that the landscape conform to the imagination of the reader.

Alternatively, insiders, who know the landscape first, and then read about it, require the author's imagination to match their experience. In a way, when the author and the reader overlap enough, I think this enhances the reading because it heightens the feeling of 'authenticity' but at the same time it can inhibit the reading if the author's presentation of her imagined world does not sufficiently overlap with the reader's imagined world. This is, of course, the classic problem with adapting novels to film, but I think it reaches a certain poignancy when it is applied to experience of actual landscapes on the ground, as it were.

I think about Ben Bulben. I went out to Sligo and I 'climbed Ben Bulben's back' in my more credulous days when I thought Yeats was writing about an actual place. As a fanatical reader, I thought, 'Oh, wow. So this is Yeats.' and I looked out over the sea and came over all artistic. Having read a bit more closely, I see that Yeats never was writing about Ben Bulben, but that's okay with me. I just translated the experience into a nice hike on a sunny day with a great view of the sea.

Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the interaction of reader, writer, and landscape because they all three have a kind of Ven Diagrammatic relationship. I wonder what the center intersection is? I need to draw the picture and think about that one.

Now history texts have an interesting place in my wonderment. I mean, it is actual ground on which the text happened, in one way or another. I can go to the Manassas National Battlefield Park (known to others as the Battle of Bull Run) in Virginia, and there they have little maps with circles and arrows showing what happened. I walked out on the expanse of green field, thought about the text, and felt queasy. I have to admit, it really did heighten the emotional power of the text of the battle to have the physical connection (true or not) with the story. When I was in California attending a conference in San Diego, I hiked up to the place where they filmed M*A*S*H. There is an old rotting jeep full of weeds, and the tall flat place where they landed the helicopters. Here was a real place associated with an imaginary Korean landscape portrayed in a TV show. It made me dizzy to think about it, but it was a hot day, so maybe it was really just dehydration.

And this leads me to think about Robert Frost. (Don, if you are reading this, tell me what you think about this.) Was he not criticized for being too local? Too rooted in a specific landscape? Well, for cryin' out loud: if he was able to so vividly evoke that landscape for insiders and outsiders, I think that is a pretty big artistic achievement. I think of 'Tramps in Mudtime' or 'Birches' by Frost, and I really feel the vividness of the landscapes Frost evokes, but then I realize that the landscape of 'Birches' is located in Leverett, so I took his landscape and overlaid it on my own, and it worked. I need to find someone who is from the desert and talk with that person about Robert Frost. How does that person experience Frost's landscapes? I supposed much the same way that I experience the literature of Naughib Mahfouze...I've never been to Cairo, but I feel like I have. I have a great desire to go to Cairo and walk around like Mahfouze did. I feel like it would make his writing more vivid for me.

Maybe it is better not to have a specific location associated with an author so that one can just walk around in the generative atmosphere. Not go to Dublin and trace Bloom's steps, but just go to Dublin and walk around. I want to take Ralph to the four corners area of the Southwest because he likes the Hillerman novels, but we don't have to go to Windowrock. I think it is better just to hike around Canyon de Chelly. You know: leave the specific places in the utopia of the author's mind, and participate in the glamour of the landscape but not anchored to some imagined 'real' place that doesn't exist anyway. Yeats, ultimately, wrote the best landscape poetry because it never existed and thus is accessible to everybody. You can't get to the Isle of Innisfree. You can only look at it from the shore and imagine the evening full of linnets wings. All for the best, really.