Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place

Preface

Preface There is a poem by James McGowan that I like very much. Its title is "On Writing an Illinois Poem," and its speaker is a would-be Midwestern bard who wants to write honestly and well about his adopted state. He finds himself unable to put pen to paper, though, sensing that he is not equipped for the task; he is stymied by a fundamental inability to grasp the meaning of Illinois. I shouldn't do it yet; don't know this place. I've been here now three years and don't relate. One notes things, though: the squares-of land that is; the prairie's laid in blocks and towns are just a smaller grid; roads meet in perpendicular and go in only four directions (though a thousand miles in each). He is put off by the very nature of the landscape that faces him, an alienating tableau ofstraight lines, compass points, and rectilinear fields, boring in its regularity, appalling in its monotony, intimidating in its spaciousness ; it is a blank surface which resists his imagination and thwarts his understanding. He views it accordingly with a combination offear and contempt, speaking with scorn of this smooth cold plane where "there is nothing for the mind to climb on" and which is farmed by men whose fields grow tall, while houses crack in years of wind and children split and wrinkle, die in their rows. In the end, though, the speaker is sufficiently self-aware to realize that what he sees is somehow not the real Illinois, that his newcomer's perception bears none but the most superficial physical resemblance to the view of the state held by people who have spent their lives there. He senses that there is a deep world of human meaning laid atop that opaque Xlll surface which he eyes with such disdain, an invisible landscape which the natives see but which has not yet been revealed to him, and knows that he is not the person to write a poem about this place-at least not a poem that comes anywhere near capturing the voice of local truth. But yet I understand so few things ofthis land and peopleflats and facts and squaresI should not write. I think, though, that there is there must be mystery, dimension, deptheach citizen his soul, each grid its ghostsI 've heard of towering substance, strength, imagination, prairie art, and love- (and rumors of the circles and the symbols out of sight, behind thick blinds, in dark, in woody parlors). This book is about that mystery, dimension, and depth-not only in Illinois, but in any place where people live and listen and remember and talk and write. It is about the words that we superimpose on landscapes -the "Illinois poems" that sound in each of our lives. In it, I attempt to come to an understanding of the sense of place-that complex of meaning that gives a landscape significance in the eyes of the people who inhabit it, marking it off from the surrounding terra incognita-and demonstrate the ways in which that sense gains expression in words, words that map out the contours of that invisible landscape of meaning which McGowan's narrator would give voice to if he could. The sense of place achieves its clearest articulation through narrative, providing the thematic drive and focus for the stories that people tell about the places in their lives. These stories need not be limited to anyone medium, for both folk and literary narratives about place bear a striking thematic and stylistic family resemblance; they are simply manifestations in two different media of the same narrative impulse, and I accordingly examine both kinds of narrative in this study. For my oral materials, I discuss stories which I collected in the Coeur d'Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle; for my consideration of written works, I focus on what I call the "essay of place," the personal essay which takes as its subject a particular place and the writer's relationship to that place. One of my hopes for this book is that it will lead readers to a renewed and enhanced appreciation of the places in their own lives and the inXIV : Preface visible landscapes which surround them. It has done so in my case; indeed, since (like everyone else) 1 have been deeply engaged in landscapes and places every day by...