Wesley A. Kort
Duke University
Introduction
Theories of time are stabilized by conventional categories and problems, while theories of place and space are far more shaped by the interests of those who sponsor them, philosophical, architectural, geographical, social scientific, cultural critical, etc.(1) One consequence of the fact that theories about place and space come from diverse sponsors and are not controlled by conventional terms is that questions of space and place and of our relations to them appear more elusive and complex than, perhaps, they need to. Another consequence is, as Michel de Certeau points out about dealing with the everyday, that in this area there are many competent and interesting contributors but no dominant or authoritative voice, school, or method.
Why have spatial theories taken second place to theories of time? One answer is that time, by its vulnerability to abstraction and measurement, is more philosophically engaging. Kant, in his early discussions of space, subordinates spatiality to temporality precisely because spatial relations are more physical. Time, thereby, is judged more universal, and time, he contends, includes, with everything else, space.(2) Michel Foucault, viewing the situation from another angle, gives a second answer. Questions of place and space have been the province primarily of military and political interests, and such interests are too impure for philosophers.(3) A third answer lies in an argument I recently made(4) that a major shift in modern culture occurred when Vico applied to reading the histories of non-biblical peoples Bacon's practice of reading nature as a second scripture that was not optional but necessary if one is to know God. Hegel added a crucial ingredient to Vico's shift when he dissolved the distinction between the histories of biblical and non-biblical peoples and posited reading history as the way by which the effects of Providence are actualized. As reading nature as scripture first complemented and then displaced reading the Bible as scripture in the eighteenth century, so in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reading history as scripture, while at first it complemented reading the Bible, eventually displaced the Bible as scripture.
Without attempting to be exhaustive, I want to add a fourth answer to the question of why in modern culture theories of time and history upstaged theories of place and space. Modern culture was able to adjust to the loss of shared religious beliefs as they apply to temporality as it was not able to adjust to that loss in regard to spatiality. The loss of an ultimate beginning and ending, of Creation and Apocalypse, was redressed by the elevation of moments within history as decisive. Christianity already had done this by affirming the birth of Jesus as a beginning point that rivaled, if it did not overshadow, the beginning marked by Creation. Marking historical watersheds and distinguishing periods in history from one another is part of the tradition and becomes an obsession in the modern period. Monarchies, revolutions, radical cultural shifts: these all serve to mark decisive beginnings and endings, and modern culture can, perhaps, be no more accurately characterized than by the assumption it carries about itself as a period sharply distinguished in nature and value from what preceded it. But the erosion of a dominant religious view regarding ultimate places and their stabilizing and normative status, i.e. heaven and hell, could not so readily be redressed.
The emergence of interest in theories of place and space within the last few decades is largely due to the questionable standing of modern culture's temporal self-description. Disillusionment with the culture's history, due to increasing alienation from and within rapidly emerging urban areas, increasing ambivalence about relations to non-Western peoples, and the First World War, turned into a sense of betrayal, of being part of modern history as though one has been, in the words of William Golding, conned into a great "mincing machine."(5) Western history became not the emergence of Providence or even human potential but a record of violence, oppression, and terror. Cultural self-definition shifted from historical to spatial terms, consequently, and by the close of the twentieth century place and space emerge as primary matters of attention. That shift is basic to what is often referred to as the rise of a post- or anti-modern culture. As Fredric Jameson remarks, "…I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism proper."(6) We find ourselves in a difficult and complex situation, therefore: the culture's self-definition has shifted from temporal to spatial terms, but there is little in and across discourses regarding spatiality that stabilizes them, gives them continuity with one another, and provides norms.
One effect of this situation is that place-relations are often valued at the expense of mobility and the temporal associations carried by mobility. Indeed, this evaluation of place-relations over mobility often implies a contrast between attitudes that are in some way or to some degree judged as traditional and "sacred" in contrast to mobility and temporality that are judged as modern and "profane." For example, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, in their own essays and in others collected in their Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, point out a pervasive assumption in recent ethnographic studies that the close relations of indigenous peoples with their locations carries a moral and spiritual value that the modern ethnographer, by being mobile and unattached, lacks. Ignoring the obvious advantages of mobility that ethnographers enjoy as participants in modern culture, they overvalue the less mobile by assuming that rootedness is morally and spiritually superior. Another example is a noticeable shift among Americanists in locating the moral and spiritual values of American culture not so much in its history and destiny as in its "sacred" sites. Such books as John Sears' Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century and David Chidester's and Edward T. Linenthal's (eds.) American Sacred Space reveal a growing validation of sites as securing the moral and spiritual aspects of American identity. From another quarter, cultural geographers like Yi-Fu Tuan theorize human place-relations with an eye toward restoring "place as the locus of human fulfillment."(7) As well, the interest, ranging from popular to sophisticated, in myth and ritual can also be seen as a fascination with what transcends, stabilizes, or defies history. And the value imputed to Native American cultures and the spiritual authority of their place-orientations has mass-media standing.
The high value currently placed on rootedness affects the status of the category of "sacred space." It becomes easy to pit "sacred space" against the "profane" identified as modern history. The effect is to deploy the category of sacred space as though such space were simple rather than complex, abstracted from rather than related to power, and universal rather than diverse. In a recent collection of essays to which the editors, John Eade and Michael Sallnow, add their own contributions, anthropological studies reveal that "sacred" places, such as goals of pilgrimage, are so highly valued and effective not because they are simple, politically pure, and universal but because they are complex, controlled, and particular.
When posited as a contrary to profane history, sacred space becomes not only abstract but also dependent on the profane. The general, negative judgment of modern history as evil or profane serves as a warrant for various constructions of space as good or even sacred. During the twentieth century, particularly due to the two World Wars, a cultural confluence emerged from contrary sources, religious and secular, political and aesthetic, that posited modern history as evil. Current attention to spatial at the expense of temporal orientations is supported by a shared certainty regarding history.
Let us take Mircea Eliade as an example. His influence continues not because of the Idealism of his phenomenology of sacred space but, I should think, because he posits sacred space as an alternative to modern history as profane. As he says at the beginning of The Sacred and the Profane, "The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane [his emphasis]."(8) There is no uncertainty for Eliade about what is profane; it is Western history and Western understandings of history. A displaced Romanian, he militated against Hegelian and other progressive theories of history and historicism. Contrary to what he termed the "terror of history" he advocated a reinstatement of place and placement. Spatial orientation serves as an antidote to the dislocation, alienation, and trauma caused by modern history in general and the history of war and Western European domination in particular. Homo religiosis, as central, original, and normative "man," subordinates time to place and understands time as cyclical and subsumed under natural processes. While he also imputes an ontological standing to sacred space, the clarity and stability of his theory is derived from the position of certainty that he gives to the profane, which, for him, is primarily modern history and assumptions that history produces novelty, is irreversible, lacks inherent significance, and is constituted by discrete events.
Eliade's theory of sacred space retains currency in present cultural and religious discourses, in other words, because it shares with so many other theorists the assumption that the "profane" is known and its negative evaluation culturally shared. The profane, i.e., modern history, provides the secure, common base upon which various "sacred" spatial alternatives are erected. Whether the sacred is a political or social utopia, the collective unconscious (Jung), internal freedom (Bultmann), the Church (Barth) or whatever, it draws its viability from its contrary relation to what is taken as certain, namely, the profane. Theorists who otherwise share little assume in common that modern Western culture, especially as defined by its history and understanding of history, is deeply deficient, even evil. This standard move is problematic because it conceals the fact that the negative is stabilizing, affecting, and even controlling the positive, even while the negative is denounced. In addition, the move depends on what Julia Kristeva identifies as symptomatic of narcissistic tendencies in the culture, namely, forming relationships negatively by constructing a common enemy, an action she diagnosis under the heading of "Romeo and Juliet."(9) One does not need the kind of psychological insights of Kristeva to recognize that in a society as diverse and mobile as ours there is a need to create some sense of commonality, and this commonality can most easily be secured by creating a common problem or evil, namely the profane as modern history.
In my opinion, theories of sacred space, if they are to regain substance, need to move not from a negative evaluation of a contrary but from a more adequate theory of positive place-relations. Nor, in my opinion, is it possible to work the other way around, namely, to infer a general theory of positive human place-relations from the a theory of sacred space posited as the highest form of place-orientation. What is needed is to posit a more adequate theory of positive place-relations, to discern a norm for clarifying what is positive about them, and to distinguish between "sacred" and "profane" by amplifying and complicating that norm.
In service to the task of forming a more adequate and stable theory of positive place-relations, I have been examining works of English fiction written between the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the closing decades of the twentieth to determine what kind of implicit theory of positive place-relations can be extrapolated from this fiction and placed in conversation with other spatial theories. [In order to limit the length of this paper I have omitted at this point arguments crucial to the transition here being made. First, I would argue that although late modernist and postmodernist discourses are weighted with spatial language, this language has no place of its own, is atopos or free floating and has its standing primarily as a contrary to the language of history and temporality that continues to carry the marks of stability despite shared, negative judgments about its moral nature or consequences. Second, I would argue that narrative discourses, although discounted by much postmodernist theory, gives place to spatial language, that the language of place and space is always a part of narrative discourse, and that the language of place and space shares with the other languages of narrative the potential for prominence and even dominance.] I have chosen to work with six writers, three early and three later modernists, whose work reveals both awareness of the problem of spatial orientation in a time of rapid and radical dislocations and whose work gives prominence if not dominance to the language of space, place, and place-relations. I have extrapolated from their narratives the implicit or incipient theory of positive human place-relations by which present spatial orientations in the culture are questioned and alternatives to them proposed.(10) I then place this theory in conversation with other, recent theories of human spatiality. Finally, I take up the question of norms for evaluating places and place-relations, turning, only then, to a discussion of sacred place.
I
The first component of the theory of human place-relations drawn from these narrative discourses is the proposition that place-relations are of three kinds: cosmic or comprehensive, social, and personal or intimate. The three kinds are distinct but also clarify one another by reason of their differences. However, while kinds of place-relations are discernible because they differ from one another, positive place-relations of one kind tend to occlude those of another kind.
The narratives of the six writers, while all shaped by a language of place and space that is prominent if not dominant, differ from one another as to which of the three kinds of place or space is of chief significance. They do this while also attending to the other two kinds of places. This allows us to draw some hypotheses: 1. an adequate theory of place-relations will include awareness of the complex, three-part repertoire of human spatiality, and a theory of human place-relations that neglects one or more of the three kinds or transfers qualities of one kind of place-relation to one of the other kinds damages our understanding of human spatiality; 2. a positive place-relation will be of one kind and will occur at the expense of the other two kinds; 3. and the differential character of human place-relations forms a valuable source of critical awareness of actual or potential negative factors in relation to places, since it allows comparison of a place not only with places of the same kind but also with places of the other kinds. Curtailing the complex or three-fold nature of human spatiality serves to produce or exacerbate negative place-relations.
I argue that the narratives of Thomas Hardy and Graham Greene, however different they are in other respects from one another, can be yoked together as directing attention to the primacy of cosmic or comprehensive space. That is, their narrators and characters attempt to retrieve or to search for place-relations that can be accessed outside of, prior to, between, or beyond places that are humanly constructed and controlled. Their narratives imply that the problems of human place-relations can be addressed only if attention is first of all given to comprehensive space.
Since for both writers cosmic or comprehensive space is sharply contrasted to places constructed and controlled by humans, it is a space encountered as unpredictable and even threatening, and this characteristic makes it both discomforting and beneficial. What makes comprehensive space salutary in narratives by both writers is that spaces of the other two kinds, especially social space, have become too confining, despite the magnitude of social space. The contrast created between comprehensive space and social spaces is sharply dawn, then, and a critique of the propensity in social space to presume the status of comprehensive space is implied.
In addition to countering the excesses of social space, cosmic or comprehensive space has other benefits. It has a limiting and sobering effect on human pride. It also allows human beings, despite the many ways in which they differ from one another, to feel a degree of kinship with one another because comprehensive space, unlike social space, is inclusive of people and not structured by lines that primarily separate and even exclude people. Finally, cosmic or comprehensive space allows for some sense of commonality with other creatures, since it is a space shared by humans with them.
A major question about cosmic or comprehensive space is its dependence on beliefs about "Nature."(11) This question is part of the narratives by both authors. While in The Return of the Native and A Burnt-Out Case we find characters in significant relations to natural places, nature is not simply there. The heath and the forest, while distinguishable from social, economic, and political space, are affected by it. Natural places, while central to the narratives, are also recognized as marginal in relation to dominant social spaces. In addition, heath and forest, rather than themselves constituting cosmic or comprehensive space, grant access to it. A significant move in the fiction of these two writers is that the power and significance of comprehensive space are related to but not identical with the "natural." Narratives by both writers depict nature as in retreat. For Hardy, the heath is becoming more a memory to be retrieved than a reality to be encountered. His material is from an earlier generation, and his narratives do not advocate the emptying of urban populations onto the heaths and moors of England. But attention to the heath as it once was provides a discipline of bracketing constructs, and this bracketing allows one to see the limits of those constructions and possible accesses to comprehensive space provided at their edges, in gaps, and by transitions. Greene also does not expect the denizens of modern Western culture to leave it all behind for ventures into central Africa. But distant places reveal, if not the limits of Western culture, at least its odd and frazzled edges. There, too, the peculiarly destructive effects of modern culture's constructions can be seen. Such exposures, even when achieved indirectly, can help to bracket social space.
In support of their use of the heath and the forest as sites to access comprehensive space, we can say the "natural" still operates in our culture as a contrary not to "supernatural" but to "artificial." It directs attention to what precedes, comprehends, and evades humanly constructed and controlled places. As D.W. Meinig says, "Nature is fundamental only in a simple literal sense: nature provides a stage."(12) Indeed, despite its retreat and suppression, the "natural" continues to carry moral force and meaning as that which precedes human constructions and that upon which such human constructions depend. The fact that the word "natural" helps to sell products reveals both how thoroughly the category has been included in the market and how tenacious the qualities of goodness and reliability in "natural" as opposed to "artificial" are. Because of the importance of "nature" as a cultural site of access to comprehensive space, it should, as long as possible, be retained.
When we turn to social space we face the problem not of reference or accessibility but of size. Social space tends to displace comprehensive space and to swamp personal space. There is, in the work of all six writers, agreement that social space in modern culture threatens to or has already taken over the role of comprehensive space and dictated the conditions of intimate space. Joseph Conrad and William Golding, for whom social space is most important, are critical of social spaces constructed in modern, especially urban, settings and attempt to substitute differing kinds of social spaces for those characteristic of the culture. Conrad does this primarily by exposing not only the size and power of modern urban spaces but also their dependence on and determination by abstract, formal relations. The tendency toward abstraction makes social spaces not only increasingly self-enclosed and divorced from their contexts but also impersonal and lifeless. The implied correctives are to relate social space more fully to specific conditions, to consider Western social spaces as specific to their culture rather than as universally transportable, and to allow social spaces to be marked by uncertainty and self-criticism. Golding's critique of modern social space emphasizes the importance of change and movement in social space and the role of visionaries, principally artists, for providing the direction for such change. In addition, the kind of social space that appears to be advocated in his fiction is one in which differences are not absorbed by some abstract whole but, rather, one in which differences are unified by and toward a social goal. Vision and goal in his work hold social contraries and tensions in productive relations to one another.
One characteristic of modern social space that Conrad and Golding put clearly before us and subject to critique is its domination by rationality. The consequence of that domination is to make the placements of people, the distinctions between them, and the relations between their positions not only formal and impersonal but fixed and ends in themselves. The binding of social space to rational categories secures what Lefebvre calls "mental space."(13) Modern social spaces, especially because of the importance for them of bureaucracy,(14) are easily imagined, as Lefebvre points out, as neutral, universal, and homogeneous. Society becomes an abstract container, a mental frame that contains diverse spaces and subjects them to an overall rational structure. This understanding of social space as a unified and controlling container is extended by the increasing power of communication, transportation, and commercial relations that modern social spaces require and foster.
Social spaces, it should be remembered, are always particular human constructs, and they ought neither to be identified with rationality nor thought of as universally extendable. Lefebvre's emphasis on social spaces as products counters these errors by stressing both the particularity of social spaces and their limits. The problem is that social space is largely constructed by invisible lines that designate particular places for various kinds of activities, objects, and, even, people. These lines are necessary if social space is to protect people and human interests from, while also relating them to, one another. However, these lines should operate to enhance more than to restrict human life. In addition they overlap and penetrate one another so that social spaces should not be read as single texts but as inter-textual. The positive potential of social place-relations is to elicit from persons their contributions to a life that is larger and richer than could be provided by and for particular persons or small groups. Crucial to the construction of positive social spaces is the belief that human activities and interactions are basic to social structures and not only or primarily determined by them.
The narratives of E. M. Forster and Muriel Spark emphasize place-relations that occasion and support personal identity and intimate relations. The principal difficulty for securing personal or intimate space is to distinguish it from the cultural authority of ownership and individuality. Personal space does not depend on ownership, and it is relational. In Howards End the houses that are owned by the Wilcox family reveal how fully places have been absorbed by social and economic power and interests. And in Spark's The Only Problem, Harvey's ownership of a house in the northeast of France is only a first step toward the work he undertakes to secure some sense of his own particularity and integrity in response to a society intent on dissolving his particularity into social categories.
In addition, personal space, if it is to secure a role in a theory of human place-relations, cannot be defined only negatively. The force and significance of personal or intimate places arises from their enhancement of potentials within persons and their relations, potentials that have content, so to speak, of their own. However, it is difficult to designate this content, since the personal and intimate largely elude categorization. The qualities of actual, positive place-relations under the heading of personal or intimate space are variable and elusive.
The need for and the benefits of personal attachments to particular places may be more necessary and complex than we realize. For example, Gaston Bachelard in his The Poetics of Space, argues that our earliest and most formative memories are ordered not temporally but spatially, and this ordering is determined largely by the house or houses of our youth. He deals extensively, for example, with the verticality of the house and the different qualities of the attic and cellar. While he privileges the past in his discussion of personal space, he also includes the future, since he contends that people imagine an alternative life for themselves often in terms of an abode. In addition, he discusses hiding-places within the house of one's youth that secure, he argues, the sense of worth the child needs to develop. He deploys his theory of personal space against the early Heidegger, who assumes that we are cast into the world and not placed in it, and Bergson, for whom personal experience is temporally defined and for whom spatialization has a depersonalizing consequence.(15)
Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, in ways similar to Forster and Spark, ties personal place-relation to self worth, human relationships, and creativity. She marvels that, given the lack that women have suffered in personal place-relations, there have been any women writers at all. This fact is even more surprising when one considers that people of genius, rather than less sensitive to negative criticism and acts of personal devaluation, are more sensitive than others to them.
Personal space is the site, finally, from which moral critiques of society can take shape and where personal potentials can be actualized, new forms of personal identity secured, and new kinds of human relations created. Forster makes clear that personal place-relations potentially counter social space because they can support moral and spiritual awareness and social critique. In Muriel Spark the spiritual qualities of personal identity and relationships require intimate space to counter the forces and designs of modern social space. People who engage in disciplines that cultivate a relation to personal space are perceived by society as odd or dangerous. Exiting society and the culture in order to enter a personal or intimate space is a radical, threatening act.
II
Now that we have clarified the first component of an adequate theory of human place-relations, namely, that there are three kinds, we can turn to the second required component. Place-relations have two aspects, physical and spiritual.
This two sidedness of place-relations comes into view when the earlier modernists, Hardy, Conrad, and Forster, are compared to the later, Greene, Golding and Spark. The earlier modernists try to redress the problems of spatial orientation by retrieving from their earlier years or the previous generation primarily the physical qualities of places and relations to and within them. In contrast, the later modernists, due to the disillusionment with the culture received from the past, a disillusionment caused primarily by warfare, turn not to the past but to the future and not so much to the physical as to the spiritual aspect of place-relations. While the earlier modernists are not indifferent to the spiritual and the later modernists are not indifferent to the physical, the stress of the earlier is on the physical and of the later on the spiritual side of place-relations.
All three kinds of human place-relations are two-sided; both sides need always to be present, although one side will likely dominate the other side. As these writers seem drawn to stress one kind of place-relation at the expense of the other two kinds, so they seem to stress one of the two sides of place-relations rather than hold them in balance.
Physicality grants space value because physicality grounds and steadies human life and forms modes of relationship not only between people but also between their bodily identities and physical contexts. For Hardy, the physical aspects of space are associated with the cosmic context of human life shorn of cultural attempts to conceal, tame, or ignore its force. Human beings, rather than to the partial and fragile world of human constructions, ought primarily to be related to a world comprehended by a physical space that has force and that grants human life an integrity that only relation with the "real" can provide. For Conrad the physical aspect of social place-relations is provided by human labor. Human labor, in Conrad, while it carries unavoidable ties to economic and political factors, is directed basically toward the threats and potentials of the physical world. Labor becomes distorted when it is defined primarily by the economic and political ties it carries. Behind Conrad's many depictions of distorted social space stands the model of social place-relations formed primarily by the crews of sailing ships at sea, social place-relations established more or less directly by physical labor. Finally, the physicality of space for E. M. Forster is provided by the human body's accustomed residence in a place and its relations there with other bodies. Intimacy, which is defined primarily but not exclusively in terms of sexual relations, needs and establishes its own places. The validity and integrity of personal identity and relations give them a moral authority that has potential consequences for society that are morally beneficial.
Kant, in his early writings on space, makes clear that human place-relations and spatial orientation are grounded in physicality. While he privileges absolute space, imputing to it a reality independent of the existence of all matter and as a ground for the existence of anything material, he recognizes that human judgments about space are radically affected by physicality. Entities have relations to one another determined by the body, distinctions between left and right, front and rear, above and below, for example. This gives rise to the understanding that things are distinguishable form one another because they occupy differing places. Perception, then, presupposes and does not construct spatiality, and that presupposition is bodily grounded.(16)
It is not surprising that a theorist like Lefebvre, working out of a generally Marxist framework, would emphasize the physicality of human place-relations. He develops his theory in the conviction that "the material conditions of individual and collective activity" antedate the ways by which people are related to locations, that the language of space derives from and is secondary to labor, and that the body and forms of physical activity are basic to the construction of space.(17) This is what lies behind his relentless exposure and vigorous attack on what he calls "mental space." The effects of mental space in its repression of the body and physical labor are, for him, devastating. That evil is vastly compounded by the conflation of mental with social space. He counters that evil by decrying the absorption of labor and its constructions by an all-inclusive social, political, and economic space. He sees the subjugation of particular spaces to a general, uniform space as a means of control, and he opposes the inevitable denigration of what he considers to be human reality, particularly the labor of human bodies. He posits the laboring body as "base and foundation, beyond philosophy, beyond discourse, and beyond the theory of discourse."(18)
As I said, the fictions of Greene, Golding, and Spark extend the language of space not in a backward and downward direction toward the past and the physical but in a forward and upward direction, toward the future and the spiritual. While positive human place-relations in the earlier modernists have to be largely recovered, for the later modernists they need primarily to be discovered. So, in Greene's work, the place for which his characters look is located at the edges of materially constructed space and in the interstices between competing human institutions. For Golding's fiction the visionary is identified as crucial to the possibilities for human creativity in social space. Without such visions social space hardens and fragments, and people perish. Social space must be oriented upwardly and towards the future by goals and aspirations. Finally, Muriel Spark's fiction discovers personal place-relations not only as distinguishable from materially constructed space but also as opposed to the virtual non-material space constructed by the media and reproduction. In a culture of image, almost nothing personal can be articulated, and the culture so mimics the aura of spirituality that it is difficult to define personal space in an upward and forward direction without being usurped by the social. Taking exception to social space and categories demands intense personal attention and discipline.
Joseph Frank provides a theory of space derived from and directed toward what he refers to as "the spiritual attitudes that have led to a predominance [in modern literature] of spatial [rather than temporal] form." What he means by "spatial form" is a coincidence between the "art medium" and "human perception," a theory that he derives from Lessing.(19) By being an instant of inter-relationship, "form" is abstracted from time and made spatial. Using this category, he reads modernist work as designed to produce such moments. Modern narratives and poems tend to suspend sequence and reference and to defer recognition until the whole is read, its sundry parts then combining to occasion a spontaneous, self-referential, and momentary unity with the reader. We reach the clearest declaration of Frank's aim when he discusses Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and its theory of the relation of art to history. Following Worringer, Frank argues that sequential and referential styles are typical of cultures in which people have a positive relation to their historical conditions while non-naturalistic styles, which for him define literary modernism, arise when such rapport is lacking. Spatial form in modern literature provides readers with moments of wholeness that stand in contrast to historical circumstances. Frank then goes beyond Worringer to endorse the philosophical conclusions to which his argument leads. He affirms the implicit idealism of several of the writers he considers and turns, in his last paragraph, to the religious Idealism of Mircea Eliade. Modern literature, he concludes, transmutes time into timelessness, transcends history, and is revelatory of what art is and should be, namely primarily spatial rather than temporal, and, in some sense, sacred--or at least myth-like.
Raymond Williams offers an alternative to Lefebvre's materialism and Frank's idealism. His inclusive cultural theory sponsors an understanding of human spatiality that affirms both its physical and spiritual sides. He puts the options nicely when he says, "Either the arts are passively dependent on social reality, a proposition which I take to be that of mechanical materialism or a vulgar misinterpretation of Marx. Or the arts, as the creation of consciousness, determine social reality, the proposition which the Romantic poets sometimes advanced. Or finally, the arts, while ultimately dependent, with everything else, on the real economic structure, operate in part to reflect this structure and its consequent reality, and in part, by affecting attitudes toward reality, to help or hinder the constant business of changing it."(20) Williams stands behind the third option. If one pushes his theory a bit there seems to be within it a primary emphasis on social space crated by the "common loyalty" of workers.(21)
What I find particularly intriguing about Williams' theory its emphasis on a "whole way of life" and, even more, its dependence on a theory of internal relations. The relations he poses between aspects of human culture, such as physical and spiritual, are grounded in a sense of human life itself as basically relational. As he says, "Politics and art, together with science, religion, family life and the other categories we speak of as absolutes, belong in a whole world of active and interacting relationships, which is our common associative life."(22) These relationships include not only the relations of people to one another but also the relations of "man's ideal development" to "his 'animal nature' or the satisfaction of material needs."(23) He puts it this way in another place: "Yet I am saying that cultural theory is at its most significant when it is concerned precisely with the relations between the many and diverse human activities which have been historically and theoretically grouped in these ways [i.e., literary and social] and especially when it explores these relations as at once dynamic and specific within describably whole historical situations which are also, as practice, changing and, in the present, changeable."(24) Finally, Williams, rather than posit realities that either archeologically (Lefebvre) or teleologically (Frank) antedate language, views language as constitutive, integrative, and inclusive. "Language," he says, "then, is not a medium; it is a constitutive element of material social practice."(25) While I think that Williams tends to favor the material over the spiritual and while he is attentive exclusively to social space, I agree with his position in many other respects.
III
The third component of an adequate theory is the norm for evaluating the qualities of place-relations. I believe that the fictional narratives provide a single norm that runs across kinds of place-relations and includes, in varying degrees, their two sides.
Perhaps it would be best to approach the matter of norm by way of the absence of relation to place, i.e., placelessness. Placelessness can be both imposed and chosen. It is imposed by exclusion and confinement. Imposed placelessness is to some degree unavoidable; we are understandably excluded from some places, and we are required to be in places where we would prefer not to be. However, imposed placelessness can be a major aspect of some parts of our lives or of the lives of some people, and that is when its negative character becomes recognizable. However, placelessness is also chosen. We maintain stances of detachment from places because we frequently do not want the responsibilities and limitations associated with relations to places.
Placelessness, detachment, or unrootedness need not be taken, then, as only questionable or negative when compared to place-attachment. In his Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity, Ian Baucom detects this negative appraisal of mobility in nineteenth-century English cultural theory by pointing out how Carlyle and, especially, Ruskin, evaluated the mobility of industrial workers as making such people less English and more like Arabs and Gypsies.(26) Mobility, it should be seen instead, is crucial to human place-relations because, for one thing, it allows movement between the three kinds and the two sides of place-relations that constitute the full spatial repertoire. However, mobility as constant in a person's or people's life appears also to suggest deficiency, and detachment from place altogether suggests some kind of self-abstraction. I agree with J. E. Malpus who says that subjectivity is likely to be deformed when wholly detached from place because "place is not founded on subjectivity, but is rather that on which subjectivity is founded."(27) Exile or alienation is no less a potentially negative condition when self-imposed than it is when imposed by others.
Let us move from placelessness to its contrary, ownership and the questions it raises. Ownership counters placelessness not only by the inclusion it grants the owner but also by the power it grants to exclude others. Ownership also provides an alternative to elected placelessness. Ownership allows a person to have things the way he or she wants them, and it counters the fact that people have very little to say regarding the many places in which they commonly find themselves. Ownership and imposed and chosen placenessness are mutually clarifying. And as not all placelessness is evil, ownership is not wholly negative. The latent negative effects of ownership for place-relations arise first of all from the control that ownership provides. Ownership is inclined to eliminate reciprocity between person and place, to eliminate relationship. The negative effects of ownership arise, secondly, from the fact that ownership along with its contrary, placelessness, have become primary in our culture, perhaps even exhaustive. They should, it seems to me, have only partial status. What is missing between them is a whole center-range of human spatiality that can be described neither as placelessness nor as ownership.
An important aspect of current spatial theory is the attention being given to the need for and experience of relations to places that include feelings, memories, and beliefs. It becomes clear that such attachment can mark all three kinds of place-relations. Sociologists emphasize social spaces as sites attached to and enhancing social relationships.(28) Leroy Rouner's (ed.) The Longing for Home turns attention to intimate spaces, to their enhancement of personal tastes and interests. And Yi-Fu Tuan stresses the counter-positioning of hearth and cosmos as kinds of spaces with which people have meaningful relations.(29) This interest in "place attachment," especially by social theorists, attempts to do justice to the physical specificity of human place-relations and the meanings that accumulate in sites by virtue of what people have done and can do to and in them. My misgiving with this line of theory is that "place attachment" stresses projection or deposit almost exclusively, making the site passive. I think this weakness becomes clearer when people, taking this approach, analyze "sacred" places entirely in terms of their significance as an accumulation due to what people have done to, in, and on them. (30)
A contrary to such an emphasis is spatial theory oriented to place-relations described under the figure of "home." This need not be a house. William James speaks of feeling "at home" in the universe. I am uneasy with this designation as a norm for positive place-relations because it stresses too heavily arrival and completion, finality. The term neglects the positive potential of mobility and the way by which home, especially as house, can also become a prison. Nonetheless, there is a steady stream of studies of human spatiality that counter modern mobility with an emphasis on the significance of being placed, rooted, or at home.(31)While "place-attachment" over-emphasizes construction and projection, making the location passive, "home" over-emphasizes the inherent qualities of the location, making the person or people passive.
The designation I have come to use, rather than "attachment" or "home," is "accommodation." I mean several things by it. First, it suggests a mutual adaptability in positive place-relations, an adjustment, an achieved reciprocity between persons and places. Places draw something from and add something to persons, and persons draw something from and add something to places. Second, accommodation suggests capaciousness. Positive place relations are commodious. They unify physical and spiritual, past and future, restfulness and stimulation. Third, accommodation suggests that place-relations are not final. They are enabling, even liberating, and the positive qualities of a place-relation are closely associated with non-finality. Finally, accommodation suggests the ingredient of place as gift. There is something unplanned and surprising about a positive place-relation, something new. One is unexpectedly incorporated, confirmed, exhilarated, and enriched by a place, whether comprehensive, social, or intimate. "Accommodation," then, suggests these qualities as basic to positive place-relations: reciprocal, capacious, liberating, and gift-like.
It may stretch your patience, perhaps, to point out in narratives by the six writers in my study that the positive place-relations narrated or implied by them, especially in their narratives' endings, could be accurately described by the term "accommodation," as I have defined it. Nevertheless, let me venture a few sentences about a text by each of them.
Clym Yeobright, in The Return of the Native, returns to the heath with expectations and plans that are unrealistic. His exposure to it requires accommodation to its harshness. That adjustment explicitly yields wisdom. The heath, in turn, becomes a fitting arena in which Clym can carry on his pedagogical program, since it also is a teacher of wisdom. In addition, the heath is commodious enough to grant a sense of continuity with the past, expressed primarily in rituals still extant there, and with the future, adumbrated in Clym's teaching ministry. And the relation of physical and spiritual to one another in the place is secured not only in and by the rituals but also in and by the moral integrity and charitable qualities that are recognizable in people, who, like Venn, live close to the heath. However, the heath is too difficult and unpredictable a place to allow Clym's return to carry a sense of finality or completion. Finally, the gift-like quality of relation to the heath is that the heath not only is anything but humanly constructed but also that by so being it is a welcomed relief to the sense of superficiality and self-deception that Clym judges to be characteristic of Parisian life. The gifts bestowed by relation to the heath, especially because of its magnitude and vicissitudes, are truthfulness, integrity, and an identity relatively free from illusion.
In Conrad's The Secret Agent we are dealing with a wholly negative image of social space and social place-relations. We have to infer from these negative characteristics what a positive social space and relation to it would be like. So, for example, it is mutual adjustment that is exactly what is missing in the relation of Verloc to his social environment. He and the political bureaucracy stand in no mutuality at all. The social space is also negative because it does not allow Verloc to experience past and future as related to one another. Nor is there any relation between the physical and the spiritual in the lives of the Verloc family. Rather than capacious, the social space is confining and reductive. Indeed, it is imprisoning; there are no alternatives available. Efforts toward greater freedom only create more confinement. Finally, there is noting gift-like about this social space. All the surprises are bad ones.
Mutual adjustment between persons and place is very much a part of the situation of Ruth and Helen at the close of Howards End. The house can accommodate change, suggested by Helen's pregnancy and her interest in the larger world, as it can also accommodate the Schlegel furniture. The ability of the women, especially Ruth, to adjust to the house and its legacy is also clear. The close of the narrative also makes clear the commodious character of personal space, its ability to hold past and future as well as physical and spiritual together. Ruth continues the spiritual presence of Mrs. Wilcox, and, by taking in Helen and her child, Ruth adumbrates a future that will differ from the past. And the spiritual legacy of Mrs. Wilcox is related by Ruth's presence in the house to the material assets of the Wilcox males. However, the house, while stabilizing relations, also provides no permanent location. Helen especially will not allow herself to be confined by the kind of space it represents. Finally, the house is very much a gift, a bequest to Ruth by Mrs. Wilcox. The gift quality of the place is extended by Ruth's hospitality to Helen.
Querry and the heart of Africa evoke something from one another by the end of A Burnt-Out Case. The location has a positive, quickening effect on Querry, however complicated the place is by the effects of European imperialism. And by allowing him to take up his work again, Querry is able to have an effect on the place. The attention the place supports to physical realities, especially to the forest and to the bodies of the ill, are tied very closely for Querry to questions of moral integrity, charity, and a lack of anxiety concerning his own dying. However, there are enough ambiguities in Querry's relation to the heart of Africa to keep it from becoming final. Indeed, he always recognizes that he must move on to something further. Finally, the heart of Africa and the comprehensive space to which it grants Querry access are gifts. He did not go to Africa as part of a plan or with expectations. The asylum it grants from constructions imposed on him by the culture he left behind and the sense of mystery it provides make the place gift-like.
The mutual adjustments between Jocelyn and the cathedral in Golding's The Spire, while not by any means without their painful and injurious sides, are evident in the fact that the cathedral evokes from him the aspiration to build the spire, and the spire is completed largely because it draws so much from him. The social space is changed by the contributions of persons to it, and the location calls those contributions from the people. The capaciousness of the social space is also clear. The cathedral joins past and future and physical and spiritual together. The question of foundations, for example, is crucial to the construction of the tower and spire, and the completion of the spire has a reorienting effect on the social context. Finally, the spire is a gift, a surprise. Despite the storm, it stands. While planning and skill go into its construction, it is also improvised, and the result to some degree is unexpected. Golding weaves a language of grace and a language of judgment together in the narrative to convey the very ambiguous nature of human social constructions, their costly and edifying sides.
In Spark's The Only Problem Harvey, at the end, seems to have discovered a personal place that is at least partially outside of and free from the determinations of social categories and identity constructions. The effects on him of this place are registered by the caring roles he assumes at the end. The past that he takes to his discovery of personal space is his long-standing interest in the exiled position of Job, and the future opens to his caring for others, particularly the young. The physical and spiritual are interrelated in that the location and Harvey's sense of personal integrity are inseparable. His newly achieved relation to personal space is temporary, however, if for no other reason than that he is preoccupied with the nurture of children. Finally, securing personal space is a matter not only of concentration and determination but also of gift. The painting by Georges de La Tour of Job and his wife, which supports Harvey's quest for personal space, and the discovery of what constitutes exit from the determinations of the social space come as gifts, as unexpected.
The four connotations of "accommodation," namely, mutually adjusting, comprehensive of past and future and of physical and spiritual factors, tentative and releasing, and gift-like, serve to give content to the norm for positive place-relations that runs through these narratives. What is advocated by the fictions as a response to the negative spaces that result from the dominant culture is a spatiality constituted by place-relations of three kinds, by place-relations with two sides or aspects, and by place-relations evaluated by a single norm, which I call "accommodation."
Conclusion
Returning to the question raised in the introductory section of this paper, I repeat that a theory of sacred space and its alternative, profane space, should be based on an adequate theory of human place-relations rather than either on abstraction or on the putative certainty and cultural agreement regarding the profane, in particular the profane as modern history. Sacred places, then, become sacred not (or not only) because they are so different from other places but because they are so much related to and like places and relations to them that are positive. The ingredients that go into constituting the sense of placement a person or people may have in what could be called "sacred space" are the ingredients characteristic of positive place-relations more generally.
One could say, then, that in "sacred" place-relations the four aspects of accommodation come into focus: place as mutual adjustment, as inclusive of contraries, as freeing, and as gift-like. In addition, the two sides of place-relations are also affirmed; the relation between physical and spiritual is confirmed. Finally, the three kinds of place-relations flow together. A sense is granted of what comprehends human constructions, of inclusion within a humanly constituted fullness, and of having one's value as a particular person verified.
Notes
2. "Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World" in Kant's Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space ed. and trans. by John Handyside (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1929), pp. 19-29.
3. See Michel Foucault, "Questions on Geography" and "The Eye of Power" in Power/Knowledge:Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 trans. Colin Gordon et al., (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 63-77 and 146-165.
4. See my "Take, Read:" Scripture, Textuality and Cultural Practice (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) pp. 51-58.
5. William Golding, The Hot Gates (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1966), p. 100.
6. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review, No. 146 (1984), p. 64.
7. Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos & Hearth: A Cosmopolite's View (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 6.
8. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959), p. 10.
9. See Julia Kristeva, "Romeo and Juliet: Love-Hatred in the Couple" in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 209-33.
10. For the narrative theory that underpins my work, a theory that defines narrative discourses in terms of four languages any one of which can be dominant, that relates the languages of narrative to sets of beliefs, and that relates those beliefs to the necessary components of a workable world, see, especially, the introductory section of my Story, Text and Scripture: Literary Interests in Biblical Narrative, "Narrative: A Reassessment" (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 6-23. This theory warrants my interest in the narrative language of place and space and my contention that it can play a prominent, if not dominant, role in a narrative and does so in the fiction of these writers.
11. For an informative and comprehensive study of the various roles played by "nature" in western cultural history, see Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
12. D. W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye" in D. W. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 37.
13. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), passim, especially pp. 3-5, 94-5, 103-4, and 295-300.
14. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al., and ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), Vol. 3, pp. 950-1136.
15. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: The Orion Press, 1964), p. 7.
16. "On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space" in Kant's Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space, pp. 19-29.
17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 71.
19. Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), pp. 3-62.
20. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 274.
22. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. 39.
24. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, Tony Pinkey (ed.) (London" Verso, 1989), p. 164.
25. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 165.
26. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 20.
27. J. E. Malpus, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 35.
28. See, for example, Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low (eds.) Place Attachment (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1992), which is a set of sociological studies of place relations.
29. See Leroy S. Rouner (ed.), The Longing for Home (Notre Dame, IN., University of Notre Dame Press, 1996) and Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth.
30. See, for example, Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
31. See, for example, Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York: WW. Norton & Company, 1995), Robert M. Hamma, Landscapes of the Soul: The Spirituality of Place (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria, 1999), and Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (Mahwah, N.J., 1988).