"The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
How can the 'form of the past' come to persist in the present? Furthermore, how can a region, or a place, make us 'feel' a certain way? Though there are really no ready answers here, let me draw your attention to Thursbitch (2004), a beautiful novel by Alan Garner which tells the story of the valley of the same name. Here, it seems that the landscape gathers together and somehow preserve the lives, thoughts and memories of those who have lived in and visited that valley. In the contemporary strand of the story, Sal, suffering as she does from a degenerative disease that causes short-term memory loss, returns to this valley over and over again as it quickly becomes the sole place which her memory clings onto and in which she feels safe. As a geologist, Sal can readily name and classify the valley's rocky outcrops and layers at first sight. Yet, there is far more to this landscape for her. She expresses to her carer, Ian, her impression that "this place knows we're here". Ian is more sceptical, merely permitting that what appears to be a "strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place".
Many writers on place have commented upon its characteristic 'gathering' quality. In addition, many have tried to explicate the 'interanimation' of self and world that the comments of both Sal and Ian, taken as two equally compelling but incomplete perspectives, beg us to consider. For the philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1996), that places gather is one of the essential traits revealed by a phenomenological topoanalysis. They gather not only material things but also "experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts." Interpretative archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994) explores how particular landscapes take on meaning for the human inhabitants that dwell there, and how personal biographies and biographies of place are intimately connected. Places themselves, Tilley writes, "may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in them".
Furthermore, particular objects and features of the landscape can provide particularly compelling foci points in the lives of individuals and groups, "providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and involvement." (Ibid: 16) This is certainly the case in Thursbitch too, where the high stones and sacred spring that grace the valley offer points of orientation for Jack Turner and his neighbours, as well as acting as symbolic markers at which the land can be honoured, "just so long as it's done proper, and we mind us manners". The question remains however, as to whether this power of a place to gather together experiences and histories and to become a nexus of meaningfulness for human individuals and communities, is, as Ian would have it, a projection of our selves onto an inert and empty place. Or, whether we allow that place itself has a certain agency, as Sal would seem to aver when she remarks on the 'sentience' of the landscape.
In Place and Experience (1999), another philosopher of place, Jeff Malpas, demonstrates that place can be seen as a complex but unitary structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. He explains how these elements are established only in relation to each other and within the topographical structure of place. He refers to Proust's In Search of Lost Time to show how places have a fundamental role in forming the identity of people, and vice versa. Although places may have an agential role in the formation of identity, it is important to note that this is an identity established not only in place, but in time also. As he writes, "Proust's achievement is to display the disclosure of the multiplicity and unity of experience, and so of the world, as something that occurs through the spatio-temporal unfolding of place."
My understanding of place has been largely influenced by Jeff Malpas and it makes sense to sketch out here some more of his position. For Malpas, place is definitely not to be regarded as simply a specific region of space, defined chiefly by its objective location. Neither however, is place to be regarded as a purely subjective phenomenon, that is (as some humanist geographers have at times implied) a personal response to a particular environment that one finds oneself in. Place does indeed have all of these as aspects, but is also so much more. "Places", he writes, "are established in relation to a complex of subjective, intersubjective and objective structures that are inseparably conjoined together within the overarching structure of place as such." In the book Place and Experience (1999), Malpas devotes many chapters of painstaking philosophical analysis, drawing on the likes of Martin Heidegger and Donald Davidson, to show how place possesses this complex but unitary structure. In essence, he argues that far from being grounded in subjectivity, place is itself the ground for all of our experience. In other words, the very nature of human being, of human thought, is established in place. Place, when understood in such a way, takes on an unprecedented significance as the following quotation clearly shows.
"...the claim is that we are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are engaged; and that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a central role – our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place-bound.”
These are striking claims to be sure, and there are ones that I will no doubt come back to in future work. Speaking of which, it is now only a couple of weeks before I begin at university again, a change of place I am very much looking forward too!
References
Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Casey, E. (1996) ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in Feld, S. and Basso, K. H. (Eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.
Garner, A. (2004) Thursbitch. London: Vintage
Malpas, J. E. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg
Thank you. It's what I keep trying to articulate, but, unless I come a cropper, shall never succeed in doing.
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