The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature

NINE: To See Things in Their Time: The Act of Focusing in Eudora Welty's Fiction

NINE To SeeThings in Their Time: The Act of Focusing in Eudora Welly's Fiction i making a distinction between two forces that are prominent in her fiction, Eudora Welty has written that "place has always nursed, nourished, and instructed man. . . . Man can feel love for place; he is prone to regard time as something of an enemy."1 The feeling for the difference in the way one responds to place and to time has a quality specifically southern about it. The southerner, who has become the object of so much analysisin recent years, literarily, politically , and sociologically, seems indeed a creature very much at home with the concept of place in his life and not at all comfortablewith time. The South has long been associated, in the popular mind at least, with an ideology that exaltssense of placein order to resist time and progress. Time and progress belong to the world outside, or so the myth goes; on the plantations or in the small, sleepysouthern towns that are the popular images of the South, time is held back by theplaces themselves. Thus Miss Weltydescribes a group of her own southern characters in their relation to outsiders: 'They only hoped to place them, in their hour or their street or the nameof their mother's people. Then Morgana could hold them, and at last they were this and they were that."2 1. Eudora Welty, "Some Notes on Time in Fiction" Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Fall, 1972), 483. 2. Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples (New York, 1947), 90. 181 I 182 The Dream of Arcady Miss Welty has said of her South as place, "It endows me, and it enables me."3 Time, on the other hand, seems to act against the urge to preserve, the urge to hold in, and so it is, especially for the southern imagination steeped in a personal and particular sense of place, "something of an enemy."Still the awarenessof time is essential to any vision of man's possibilities. Frederick Hoffman warns, in his study of place in southern fiction, that "the most vividlyconcrete particular can become the worst kind of abstraction if it is allowed towork erosively upon the present. That is why the most successful of place literature is that which presents its details as freshly and intimately renewable."4 The danger implicit in resting one's fictional environment on too static a sense of place is avoided in Miss Welty's work, which often, in fact, uses the idea of the need for dynamic concepts of place as a major theme. For Miss Welty a sense of place is where art begins: "The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place."5 Yetfor her place is "mysterious," not fixed, and it is alwaysin its relation to the social, to the human, that place is developed in her stories and novels. Indeed , a place acquires its importance, its mystery only when people find themselves using it to identify and understand themselves. The mystery about place lies "in the fact that place has a more lasting identity . . . than we have, and we unswervingly tend to attach ourselves to identity."6 Through Miss Welty's early essay on sense of place in fiction aswell as in subsequent writing, a definite design emerges concerning her idea of how place functions, and the design seems to hinge on two qualities—identity and endurance—out of which grows an essential third factor, renewal.Place has "lasting identity"; man, seekinghis own identity, "attaches" himself to a place because it offers a concrete mechanism through which he can order and hold onto the beliefs that give meaning to his life. 3. William F. Buckley, The Southern Imagination: An Interview with Eudora Welty and Walker Percy," Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Fall, 1972), 493. 4. Frederick J. Hoffman, "Sense of Place," in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs (eds.), South: Modem Southern Literature inIts CulturalSetting (New York, 1961), 74. 5. Eudora Welty, "Place in Fiction," SouthAtlantic Quarterly, LV (January, 1956), 59. 6. Ibid. To SeeThings in Their Time 183 In "Some Notes on River Country," Miss Welty explainsher concept this way: "Perhaps it is sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure." Yetit is not this endurance of place alone that matters: 'Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in its story live as long as the place does, though they...