Is America A Place?

 Englesberg Ideas provided me with the essay The lost art of chorography. I had never heard of chorography until this essay. This gave me some ideas for my work, especially "Chasing Ashes". I have to say that I was trying for the effects of chorography without knowing what I was doing - or doing very well - in the section I have written called "Road Tripping". I think parts of Raintree County made use of this technique - the swamp scenes are the ones that come to mind.

But is America a place? Years ago, I contemplated the idea of community service in the federal criminal justice sphere. Community seems very attenuated in the federal sense. No, a community seems smaller - a town, a city, a county. Not even a state seems anything more than a collection of communities. The federal government is a collection of a collection of communities. Therefore, is a national community only an idea, even an ideal, which runs counter to American reality?

If the answer to that question is yes, then how can I adopt the following descriptions of chorography to an American story?

Although nature and travel writing remain established forms, chorography has been largely, undeservedly forgotten in the literary landscape. Yet this protean form, deriving from the Greek choros (‘place’) and graphia (‘writing’), combining geography and topography, social and cultural history, antiquarianism and mythology, panegyric and lament, is a vital chapter in intellectual history. It was not just Shakespeare’s dramas that were profoundly influenced by chorography, but much of the literary culture of early modern England, including the work of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton and Thomas Hobbes. The story of chorography, though, begins in the ancient world.

Ptolemy’s Geography (c.149 AD) began by stating that ‘Geography is a representation in picture of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein,’ whereas ‘chorography, selecting certain places from the whole, treats more fully of the particulars […] even dealing with the smallest localities, such as harbours, farms, villages, river courses and such like’, ‘as if one were to paint only the eye or the ear by itself.’ Ptolemy thus frames chorography as an art of place. If geography has ‘need of mathematics’, he said, then ‘chorography needs an artist’. Classical thinkers tended to emphasise the illustrative and cartographic aspects and ‘visual literacy’ of the form. Later, medieval scholars began to realise more fully the etymology of chorography as ‘place-writing’.

Here it seems is a possible solution; frankly, because I am much a dullard to divorce geography from history.

Richard Helgerson writes in Forms of Nationhood (1992) that ‘Chorography […] is the genre devoted to place, as chronicle is the genre devoted to time.’ In practice, however, it was often difficult to separate history from geography and chorography. The royalist polemicist and historian Peter Heylyn wrote in Microcosmus (1621) that: ‘as Geography without History, hath life and motion, but at randome, and vnstable; so History without Geography, like a dead carkasse hath neither life nor motion at all’. Chorography, then, was not quite history, yet could not help verging onto the historical, because it dealt with the remains of the past – natural and human – that endured in the present, whether preserved intact or as ruins, ghosts, folk tales or the indexes of environmental change, such as erosion, clearance, reclamation and drainage.

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In Re-Visioning the Earth (1996), Paul Devereux sought to revive the form: ‘chorography, not topography […] place as expressively potent, place as experience, place as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’. The counterpoint to Bouvier’s rapture is the cynicism of Iain Sinclair. London Orbital (2002) conducts an autopsy on London’s body politic as much as a perambulation of its hinterlands. ‘Hungry for place’, Sinclair is driven by ‘an urge to walk […] to the point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts’.

And then here are difficulties:

Chorography is one of English literature’s most eccentric and mercurial forms, mixing antiquarianism, history, poetry, and geography into a patriotic paean to the land and its people. Chorography’s synchronic rather than diachronic format – the precedence of place over a past or future unfolding in time – offers a window into a radical form of writing, different from history and fiction, then or now.

Paean is a "joyous song or hymn of praise, tribute, thanksgiving, or triumph." Oh, no. There are too many things in this land that are unworthy "of praise, tribute, thanksgiving, or triumph."

Then I tripped over the terms synchronic and diachronic.

Synchronic: "concerned with events existing in a limited time period and ignoring historical antecedents."

Diachronic: "an adjective that describes phenomena (such as language or culture) that change over time."

One thing I dislike about American culture is that it is almost ahistorical. Gore Vidal wrote Americans have historical amnesia.

GORE VIDAL: Well, isn’t it pretty clear that the dictatorship is in place? We’re not supposed to know certain things, and we’re not going to know them. They’re doing everything to remove our history, to—they’ve damaged the Freedom of Information Act. Bush managed to have a number of presidential papers, including those of his father, put out of reach of historians, or anybody, for a great length of time, during which they will probably be shredded, so they will never be available. And what I’ve always called jokingly the “United States of Amnesia” will be worse than an amnesiac; it will be—have suffered a lobotomy. There will be no functioning historical memory of our history.

 Even places have a history. What is farmland was once woodlands, which were once upon a time a swamp where dinosaurs cavorted. My mind is not limber enough to forget the historical antecedents of a place. One point I make in "Road Tripping" involves a historical marker delineating the frontier between America and the Native Americans; only the United States now possesses both sides of the treaty.

All I can think to do right now is to juxtapose what is against its history.

This brings me back to the title of this piece, which I will restate as: is America, the United States, not a place but a collection of places?

Let me make a list of American literary places:

1. Hawthorne's Great Stone Face
2. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables/Salem
3. James Fenimore Cooper's wildernesses
4. Washington Irving's New York
5. Melville's Nantucket
6. Twain's Mississippi
7. Twain's Hannibal, Missouri
8. Dreiser's Chicago
9. Booth Tarkington's Indianapolis
10. Upton Sinclair's Chicago Stockyards
11. Sinclair Lewis's Main Street
12. Sinclair Lewis' Cincinnati
13. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Long Island
14. Ernest Hemingway's Michigan
15. Faulkner's Mississippi
16. Edith Wharton's New York
17. Willa Cather's Nebraska
18. Willa Cather's New Mexico
19. Steinbeck's Monterey
20. Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco
21. Thomas Wolfe's Asheville, NC
22. Langston Hughes' Harlem
23. Zora Neale Hurston's Florida
24. Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles
25. Nelson Algren's Chicago
26. Richard Wright's Chicago
27. Ralph Ellison's New York
28. Toni Morrison's Cincinnati & other parts of Ohio
29. Kurt Vonnegut's Ilium. NY
30. William Styron's Virginia
31. Ross Lockridge, Jr's Raintree County
32. Junot Diaz's New Jersey
33. Robert B. Parker's Boston
34. Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn
35. Gore Vidal's Washington, DC

There my memory ends.

I would add a caveat - that many places work as a dramatic setting. However, and if I may use Mr. Vidal again as an example, in 1876 he makes clear that his New York and his Washington have distinct personalities. 

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