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4. A Walk in the Invisible Landscape: The Essay of Place
- University of Iowa Press
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=============================== 4 208 A Walk in the Invisible Landscape: The Essay ofPlace The test ofimagination, ultimately, is not the territory ofart or the territory ofthe mind, but the territory underfoot. That is not to say that there is no territory of art or ofthe mind, only that it is not a separate territory . It is not exempt eitherfrom the principles above it orfrom the country below it. It is a territory, then, that is subject to correction-by, among other things, paying attention. To remove itfrom the possibility ofcorrection is finally to destroy art and thought, and the territory underfoot as well. Memory, for instance, must be a pattern upon the actual country, not a cluster ofrelics in a museum or a written history. What Barry Lopez speaks ofas a sort of invisible landscape ofcommunal association and usage must serve the visible as a guide and as a protector; the visible landscape must verify and correct the invisible. Alone, the invisible landscape becomes false, sentimental , and useless, just as the visible landscape, alone, becomes a strange land, threatening to humans and vulnerable to human abuse. To assume that the context ofliterature is "the literary world" is, I believe, simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the community-that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the life of a place-may not be recognized by most theorists and critics for a while yet. But they willfinally come to it, because finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the study ofliterature and restore it to importance. -WENDELL BERRY, "Writer and Region" Folk Narrative and literary Narrative: The Essay of Place In a 1978 article, geographer Edmunds V. Bunkse called on scholars interested in accurately grasping the ways in which geography interacts and combines with real human lives to step beyond the confines of conventional academic geography and travel to places like the Coeur d'Alene mining district, talking to local residents, listening to their stories, seeing the land through their eyes. Contemporary approaches to geographical study, he feels, while cutting ever closer to the true nature of geographical experience, do not go far enough. "As part of their concern for a more concrete approach to the study of human interaction with the environment," notes Bunkse, "a number of recent advocates of 'humanistic' geography have expressed concern about the representativeness of studied attitudes and inside views." Such geographers as Edward Relph and Yi-Fu Tuan, he observes, "call for viewing cultural and individual experiences in space and place from 'within'through the eyes of a participant, and not an observer." While this is an important and laudable goal, Bunkse objects that the work of such geographers is often maddeningly theoretical; while it may be "intended to bring research closer to the lives of people," he finds it "abstract in its language and devoid of life and its variegated flavors. . . . In order to get closer to life," Bunkse proposes, "we must turn to the people themselves , to their expressions and evocations of life." 1 Folklore, he concludes , and as the people who live along the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River eloquently demonstrate, offers perhaps the clearest and most immediate and spontaneous view of a community's sense of place, of their particular fusion of landscape and imagination; it amply fleshes out the theoretical concepts broached by humanistic geographers. The sense of place does not gain public expression, however, solely through the folkloric narratives of oral storytellers with deep roots in the life and landscape of a particular location. That sense is, after all, primarily a pattern of thought rather than the stories and musings which give body to that thought-it is a way of structuring and interpreting geographically related memory and experience which generates a distinctive style of verbal communication, one which is not necessarily limited to oral performance. There are other "expressions and evocations of life" which offer equally immediate access to the meanings that people read in their landscapes; the same impulse which gives narrative voice to the sense of place through folklore burgeons forth as well in more A Walk in the Invisible Landscape : 209 [54.224.90.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:34 GMT) formal kinds of verbal expression. The essayist Scott Russell Sanders, for instance, has recently written an essay which takes as its very subject the confrontation of imagination with place.2 Returning with his family to their Indiana home after having...