In her iconic essay, first presented as a speech in 1955 and published in 1978 as a part of the collection, The Eye of the Story, Eudora Welty sets out a definitive theory of place. The essay, called “Place in Fiction,” begins with the idea that place is “one of the lesser angels” of fiction writing, “the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like character, plot, and symbolic meaning…are doing a good deal of wing-beating,” but, as if she has talked herself out of this declaration, she ends the essay by proclaiming the essential nature of place to good fiction writing.
Though character, plot, and meaning are often the showier elements of a story, the elements which most engage readers, those “lowlier angels”—to use Welty’s phrase—such as point-of-view, setting, and place—are nonetheless foundational to the story and the showier elements could not be vibrant without them. Well-written stories rely on an egalitarianism of the elements, each supporting and intertwined with the other. As in the threads of a spider’s web, anchors, bridges, frames, radii, and spirals are all essential to catch the fly.
Welty’s essay covers a lot of ground, arguing not only about place, but “regionalism,” various authors’ approaches to place, and a good deal of hagiography about the novel’s ability to “accommodate practically anything on earth.” But the crux of the essay is about place, which she seems to both distinguish from and conflate with setting and location, but asserts that “feelings are bound up in place.” These are, the essay implies, both the feelings of the author and those of the readers.
Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place.
As I understand this somewhat playful convolution, place begins with the concrete details—what I would call setting—and from this setting, springs emotions—imparted by the author and received by the reader.
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