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Would everything be too much?
Okay, not in every work, but frequently. In fact, more often than you think. Just think about the stories
that really stay with you: where would they be without geography. The Old Man and the Sea can only
take place in the Caribbean, of course, but more particularly in and around Cuba. The place brings
with it history, interaction between American and Cuban culture, corruption, poverty, fishing, and of
course baseball. Any boy and any older man might, I guess, take a raft trip down a river. It could
happen. But a boy, Huck Finn, and an older man, the escaped slave Jim, and their raft could only make
the story we know as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by being on that particular river, the
Mississippi, traveling through that particular landscape and those particular communities, at a given
moment in history. It matters when they reach Cairo and the Ohio empties into the big river; it matters
when they reach the Deep South, because Jim is running away in the worst possible direction. The
great threat to a slave was that he might be sold down the river, where things got progressively worse
the farther south you went, and he s floating straight into the teeth of the monster.
And that s geography?
Sure, what else?
I don t know. Economics? Politics? History?
So what s geography, then?
I usually think of hills, creeks, deserts, beaches, degrees latitude. Stuff like that.
Precisely. Geography: hills, etc. Stuff: economics, politics, history. Why didn t Napoleon conquer
Russia? Geography. He ran into two forces he couldn t overcome: a ferocious Russian winter and a
people whose toughness and tenacity in defending their homeland matched the merciless elements.
And that savagery, like the weather, is a product of the place they come from. It takes a really tough
people to overcome not merely one Russian winter but hundreds of them. Anthony Burgess has a
novel about the Russian winter defeating the French emperor, Napoleon Symphony (1974), in which he
brings to life, better than anyone, that geography and that weather: the vastness of it, the emptiness,
the hostility to the invading (and then, retreating) troops, the total absence of any possibility of
comfort or safety or solace.
So what s geography? Rivers, hills, valleys, buttes, steppes, glaciers, swamps, mountains, prairies,
chasms, seas, islands, people. In poetry and fiction, it may be mostly people. Robert Frost routinely
objected to being called a nature poet, since by his count he only had three or four poems without a
person in them. Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time
the spaces that inhabit humans. Who can say how much of us comes from our physical surroundings?
Writers can, at least in their own works, for their own purposes. When Huck meets the Shepherdsons
and the Grangerfords or sees the duke and the dauphin tarred and feathered by the townspeople, he
sees geography in action. Geography is setting, but it s also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance,
industry anything that place can forge in the people who live there.
Geography in literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work.
Theme? Sure. Symbol? No problem. Plot? Without a doubt.
In Edgar Allan Poe s The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator spends the opening pages
describing a landscape and a day as bleak as any in literature. We want to get to the titular house, of
course, to meet the last, appalling members of the Usher clan, but Poe doesn t want us there before
he s prepared us. He treats us to a singularly dreary tract of country, to a few rank sedges and
white trunks of decayed trees, to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn, so that we re
ready for the bleak walls of the house with its vacant eye-like windows and its barely perceptible
fissure zigzagging its way down the wall right down to the sullen waters of the tarn. Never perhaps
have landscape and architecture and weather (it s a particularly dingy afternoon) merged as neatly with
mood and tone to set a story in motion. We are nervous and dismayed by this description even before
anything has happened, so of course when things do begin happening, when we meet Roderick Usher,
one of the creepiest characters to ever grace the pages of a story, he can t give us the creeps because
we already have them. But he sure can make them worse, and he does. Actually, the scariest thing Poe
could do to us is to put a perfectly normal human specimen in that setting, where no one could remain
safe. And that s one thing landscape and place geography can do for a story.
Geography can also define or even develop character. Take the case of two contemporary novels. In
Barbara Kingsolver s Bean Trees (1988), the main character and narrator reaches late adolescence in
rural Kentucky and realizes she has no options in that world. That condition is more than social; it
grows out of the land. Living is hard in tobacco country, where the soil yields poor crops and hardly
anyone makes much of a go of things, where the horizon is always short, blocked by mountains. The
narrator feels her figurative horizons are also circumscribed by what seem like local certainties: early
pregnancy and an unsatisfactory marriage to a man who will probably die young. She decides to get
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