In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6. New Jersey Real Estate and the Postsouthern Sense of Place: Richard Ford’s Independence Day Some way into his second autobiographical narrative, Frank Bascombe acknowledges that “[i]t might be of some interest to say how I came to be a Residential Specialist, distant as it is from my prior vocations of failed shortstory writer and sports journalist.”1 He recounts how “[f]ive years ago, at the end of a bad season” (91) he moved to Florida and thereafter to France. It appears that the “foreign but thrilling exterior landscape” (92) of France followed New Jersey, Detroit, New York, and Florida as—to use Walker Percy’s terms again—one more place feeding Frank’s spatial “species of consumption .” But Frank does now (it is 1988) acknowledge that his move to Florida was part of a “major crisis” (91). Moreover, it soon becomes apparent that, since departing France, Frank has been striving far more seriously to solve his Percyan “predicament of placement vis-à-vis the world.”2 He has embarked upon an existential search for his own sense of place by returning to “Haddam itself, which felt at that celestial moment like my spiritual residence more than any place I’d ever been, inasmuch as it was the place I instinctively and in a heat came charging back to” (93). Most important, though, Frank’s New Jersey homecoming is not simply an attempt to achieve self-placement via a familiar, mystified (“celestial,” “spiritual”) faith in the material geography of “Haddam itself.” Frank is also determined to reach out to other people: to put into practice that “responsibility to a somewhat larger world” he began to feel in Florida. As he puts it, he returned to Haddam “with a new feeling of great purpose and a fury to suddenly do something serious for my own good and possibly even others’” (93). Since The Sportswriter, then, Frank has moved beyond self-e≠acing immersion in, and consumption of, capitalist geographies; but he has also avoided what Edward Soja calls vulgar existentialism—the “pure contemplation of the 1. Richard Ford, Independence Day (1995; reprint, London: Harvill, 1996), 91. All subsequent page references will be incorporated into the main text. 2. Percy, “Why I Live Where I Live,” 5, and Lost in the Cosmos, 113. isolated individual.” Instead, he has begun to reconsider his personal predicament in terms of social relations: “everything I might do had to be calculated against the weight of the practical and according to the standard considerations of: Would it work? and, What good would it do for me or anybody?” (94).3 In this chapter, I hope to show that Frank’s new job as a “Residential Specialist” is crucial to his revised sensibility. It plays a defining role in allowing Frank to move, in Je≠rey Folks’s words, “from solitude back to society” by providing him with the opportunity to “do something serious for my own good and possibly even others.” Frank abandons his earlier land and literary speculations in and upon postmodern, capitalist geographies. As his job helps him to understand that (in Michel de Certeau’s dialectical formulation) “space is existential” and “existence is spatial,” Frank enacts Soja’s “spatialized ontology.” This involves “the active emplacement and situation of being-inthe -world”—specifically, Frank’s own “larger world” in and beyond Haddam. Working with real estate allows Frank to see how capitalist property relations impact upon the economic and existential production of (a sense of) place. Ultimately, having worked through these sociospatial realities, Frank formulates his own theory of independence as a practice that enables his selfplacement —albeit contingent—in postsouthern America.4 Frank’s New Philosophy of Place Early in Independence Day, we encounter the kind of sly but clearly disparaging reference to the South that Frank frequently made in The Sportswriter . Evidently, Frank still favors New Jersey’s sense of place over Mississippi ’s. He asserts that: “Of course, having come first to life in a true place, and one as monotonously, lankly itself as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I couldn’t be truly surprised that a simple setting such as Haddam—willing to be so little itself—would seem, on second look, a great relief and damned easy to cozy up to” (93). This characteristic skepticism toward the South introduces (albeit only implicitly at this point) a central tenet of Frank’s new philosophy of place. This tenet is that one should not fetishize the material locus in “itself,” as...

Share