Flooding
Thoughts on setting, memory, and point-of-view
One of my regular assignments this semester is an “aesthetic blog” on various craft elements, completed at the end of each unit. I’ve decided to share a version of these blogs here. The post for the first three units can be found here, here, and here. This unit, the fourth of six, focused on worlds and point-of-view, particularly in relation to setting.
Setting is the most frequent thing I steal from real life when I’m writing fiction. I’m not a visually-inclined person, so I find it hard to completely fabricate a place I’ve never been. I think this is related to being bad at directions: My family likes to give me a hard time about the fact that I still don’t have a clear sense of the highways in the Twin Cities; that as a child I did not know how to navigate to school or Target, both of which were maybe a mile away from our house and required only two turns. I chalk this up to my inclination to daydream during drives, preventing me from ever internalizing how we got from Point A to Point B.
And so I take most of my stories’ settings from places I’ve been. I sometimes think of this as a necessary crutch to help the least-developed part of my imagination. But it also feels like an unavoidable impulse, a gravitational pull, especially for the landscapes I associate with the past.
When I look back at the fiction I wrote as an undergrad in college, I seem to have an obsession with cornfields. I grew up in the Twin Cities, but our house was across the street from the University of Minnesota’s corn and soybean fields. Thinking of my childhood evokes memories of walking or playing in those fields, as well as the ones that bordered my grandparents’ home in Iowa. So it’s perhaps not surprising that they cropped up (pun intended) with unerring frequency in the stories I was writing when I first left home, still in the Midwest but surrounded by the groomed quads and trees of a college campus, rather than thick rows of growing corn.
My undergrad thesis was an unfinished novel set near the Boundary Waters, where we’d gone camping as kids. The novel that I finished this summer splits its time across many settings I’ve been to—Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Francisco, California; Toledo and the Camino in Spain—but the crux of the story lies in the deserts of eastern Washington, where I taught for a couple of years after college. More recently, I’ve found myself gravitating towards familiar places associated with water: the St. Joseph River in South Bend, the Irish Sea, the Great Lakes.
Toni Morrison, unpacking her relationship to memory and the past, fittingly uses a geographical metaphor:
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” (77, emphasis mine)1
Similarly, in “A Literature of Place,” Barry Lopez remarks that “a human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at an early age.”2 The earliest places and spaces we inhabit stay with us the longest, shaping how we see the world.
It makes sense to me, then, that the emotional landscape of a piece is bound up in the physical landscape, that the settings of stories are, in the end, not accidents of geography, but places that can reveal characters and perhaps are characters themselves. Setting in a story is not just what we see—what the writer describes to help us visualize a scene—but also how we see. It shapes our vision, both in a literal sense and an emotional, metaphorical one. Walking between rows of corn, I can’t see far in front of me; it physically shapes my point-of-view. When the corn is cut at the harvest, the barren field, the far stretch of brown ground under an empty sky, changes my point-of-view, but not just in the physical sense. It makes me see the world as more lonely, exposed. I might feel that way, myself.
“The Summer After the War” (Kazuo Ishiguro)
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s story “The Summer After the War,”3 setting holds the unspoken memory of past violence. It begins with the aftermath of a typhoon, which has left fallen trees, broken branches, and general disarray in its wake. The narrator, a young boy staying with his grandparents, immediately ties the storm to an earlier source of destruction: the war. This war lies within recent memory, enough so that he can recall its “waste,” but not enough that he can understand its history and origins, the debates surrounding it, or the role his grandfather played.
The story drops this reference of the war into the description of the garden and then immediately moves back to the storm, to the quick erasure of the havok it wrought on the garden:
Within a few days, the garden had been tidied, the broken tree piled against a wall together with all the branches and dead foliage. Only then did I notice for the first time the stepping stones which wound a passage through the shrubs towards the trees at the back of the garden. Those shrubs bore a few signs of the assault so recently endured; they were in full bloom. . . In all, the garden ceased to hold much resemblance to that defeated place I had glimpsed on the right of my arrival.
The passive voice “had been tidied” does not indicate who is doing the tidying, minimizing the human effort such cleaning up would take, even as the action reveals the human need to control the setting, to forget the past, to reconstruct a neat and ordered garden that bears few marks of the storm’s violence.
Similar to the garden, the grandparents’ house bears scars from the past. The narrator at first assumes that they, too, are from the typhoon, before he realizes that the house’s destruction, in fact, “originated from the war.” Unlike the garden, the repairs of the house proceed at a slow pace, with the grandfather working a few hours each day, alone or with the assistance of a few workmen. “There was no sense of urgency about the matter,” the narrator observes. “There was plenty of room in the rest of the house, and in any case, progress was necessarily impeded by the scarcity of materials. Sometimes, he would wait days for a box of nails or a certain piece of wood.”
If the quick tidying of the garden shows a desire to deny the past’s destruction, the slow repair of the home shows the ability to live alongside it. Regardless of pace, though, both settings emphasize the work of repair, of restoring a place to its former state.
These repairs coincide with conversations between the grandfather and the narrator about the war and the grandfather’s past life as a painter. The grandfather responds to the narrator’s questions, but his responses are often measured and reticent, reluctant and withholding. The narrative around the war, like the reconstructed settings, is one that has been carefully crafted to avoid its messier parts.
Then the past arrives, in the form of a guest at the door: the grandfather’s former pupil. The grandfather and pupil talk, but the narrator hears gaps in their conversation, silences and pauses and things not spoken about directly. After, he tries to uncover the missing details, asking Noriko, the grandparents’ housemaid, to explain “the China campaign.” She does, but only because she assumes he is asking “an ‘education’ question,” not a personal one. As she references the debate and uncertainty surrounding the war (Should the Japanese have invaded China?), she still refuses to say that the army was in the wrong, ending with a platitude that excuses any former mistakes: “War was not a good thing, everyone knew that now” (emphasis mine).
Throughout the story, the characters’ interactions with setting show a desire to control and contain the past, but the past comes flooding through nonetheless. The grandfather spends considerable time teaching the narrator to paint, itself a way of controlling the landscape, as the artist attempts to contain it to the page. The grandfather, encountering the narrator in a moment of frustration with a painting, fixes it for him. The grandfather’s actions are depicted as healing: “he touched the end [of the brush] with his fingertips as if to heal it, then came back and sat down” (emphasis mine). The grandson attempts to follow suit: “[I] tried to emulate what I had just witnessed. I succeeded in painting a number of thick wet lines across the paper. My grandfather saw this and shook his head, believing I had been erasing my picture” (emphasis mine). The scene emphasizes a preference for healing over erasure, for fixing the damage down by the past, rather than completely denying it, even as the characters enact both actions over the course of the story.
The repair of multiple settings—the garden, the house, the paintings—shows that the past can’t be healed if it isn’t somewhat acknowledged. This becomes clearer near the end of the story, when the narrator discovers one of his grandfather’s paintings. Up until this point, he’s only heard of his grandfather’s prowess as a painter, never seen any of his works. The painting is a disappointment: a propaganda poster for the war, a style and subject that contradicts the narrator’s imaginings of his grandfather’s work. The narrator dislikes it, even without fully understanding what it is.
Like the guest, the painting allows the past to come flooding into the present. The past that the grandfather would rather not speak of, the reason he no longer paints, the emotionality behind his encouragement of the grandson’s paintings and his repeated denials of his own promise as a young artist.
Ishiguro’s story emphasizes, to me, setting as a site of memory. The garden and the house remember, even as the grandfather wants to forget—to heal, if not completely erase.
It’s a negative memory in this case, full of violence and regret. But the story is not without hope: the narrator and his paintings, imperfect and amateur though they may be, motion towards a promising future. Even so, the narrator’s curiosity, his interactions with the garden, the house, and the paintings, show how the past reasserts itself, not as a totaling force, but as something that must be reckoned with, lived with.
The memories contained in setting can be positive too. They can be nostalgic or bursting with happiness. Setting can hold solitude; it can recall moments of deep connection. It can remember death, but also life; sorrow, but also joy. It can remind us of how we saw the world at a moment in time; it can bring that old way of seeing rushing back into our present, meeting our current point-of-view, colliding with it or reaffirming it.
I’m left thinking of Whitman’s declaration in “Song of Myself” about the capacity of an individual to hold multiple perspectives at once. Setting, it seems, is equally capacious: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”4
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. University Press of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 65-80.
Lopez, Barry. “A Literature of Place.” Portland Magazine, Summer 1997. https://uwosh.edu/sirt/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2020/04/Lopez_ALiteratureOfPlace.pdf
Ishiguro, Kazuo. “The Summer After the War.” Granta, vol. 7, 1983, https://granta.com/summer-after-the-war/.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself, 51.” Poets.org, https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51.