Mindy Withrow

Well Said: Welty on place in fiction

I am continuing with my Welty reading today as she asks, “What place has place in fiction?”  

Firstly, placing an account is what most makes us believe it, what makes us accept the lie of fiction—which is a lie “never in its inside thoughts, but always in its outside dress.”  Place is crucial because it is “the ground conductor of all the currents of emotions and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course.”

Secondly, place also controls the fictional character: “we must set him to scale in his proper world to know his size.” 

Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly (at least for me at the moment as I face fundamental decisions about several projects), place is the experience out of which the writer writes, his/her point of view.  She explains:

It is both natural and sensible that the place where we have our roots should become the setting, the first and primary proving ground, of our fiction.  Location, however, is not simply to be used by the writer—it is to be discovered, as each novel itself, in the act of writing, is discovery…

Naturally, it is the very breath of life, whether one writes a word of fiction or not, to go out and see what is to be seen of the world.  For the artist to be unwilling to move, mentally or spiritually or physically, out of the familiar is a sign that spiritual timidity or poverty or decay has come upon him; for what is familiar will then have turned into all that is tyrannical.

One can only say: writers must always write best of what they know, and sometimes they do it by staying where they know it. But not for safety’s sake… How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree?   No art ever came out of not risking your neck.  And risk—experiment—is a considerable part of the joy of doing, which is the lone, simple reason all writers of serious fiction are willing to work as hard as they do…

It may be the stranger within the gates whose eye is smitten by the crucial thing, the essence of life, the moment or act in our long-familiar midst that will forever define it.  The inhabitant who has taken his fill of a place and gone away may look back and see it for good, from afar, still there in his mind’s eye like a city over the hill….

There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes—closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes.  But the home tie is the blood tie.  And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all.  We would not even guess what we had missed…

We see that point of view is hardly a single, unalterable vision but a profound and developing one of great complexity.  The vision itself may move in and out of its materials, shuttle-fashion, instead of being simply turned on it, like a telescope on the moon.  Writing is an expression of the writer’s own peculiar personality, could not help being so.  Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal.  All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

From Eudora Welty, On Writing (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 39-59.

07. February 2007 by Mindy
Categories: On writing | 3 comments