Sense of place

By: David Lodge
Translated: Meliza Krasniqi

In LA you can't do anything if you don't drive. And I can't do anything if I don't drink. And the drink-drive combination is really impossible. If you just unbuckle your seatbelt or shake out a cigarette ash or stick your fingers in your nose, then the Alcatraz autopsy comes with questions to ask later. Any indiscipline, any violation and there you have it, a pig in a helicopter looking to draw a grain on the carpet.

What can a poor boy do? He leaves the hotel. Vraimont. Beyond the boiling Watts, where the downtown skyline carries God's green snot stains. Walk left, walk right, like a pack of rats in a fast-rushing river. This restaurant doesn't serve drinks, this one doesn't serve meat, this one doesn't serve heterosexuals. You can have a chimpanzee, you can have a tattoo on it, twenty-four hours a day, but can you eat bread? And if you see a sign on the far side of the street that says MEAT – DRINK – FOOD, forget it. The only way to cross the street is if you're born there. All the crosswalk signs say DON'T WALK, all the time. This message is the essence of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stand still. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried taxis. No way. The taxi drivers are all Saturnians who aren't even sure if this is the right or left planet themselves. The first thing you should do, on any trip, is learn how to drive.

MARTIN AMIS Money (1984)

AS IT HAS ALREADY BECOME CLEAR to the reader, the division of my book, The Art of Fiction, into different “aspects” is somewhat artificial. The influences on fiction are numerous and interconnected, with each aspect drawing on and contributing to the other. Selected excerpt from the work money Martin Amis's, as an example of place description, could have served just as well to illustrate Skazin or Defamiliarization, as well as any topic yet untouched. This is another way of saying that description in a good novel is never only with description.

The sense of place is a relatively late development in the history of prose. As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, the cities of classical romances are, for the plot, interchangeable curtains: from what we are told, Ephesus might as well have been Corinth or Syracuse. Early English novelists were hardly very specific about place. For example, in the novels of Defoe or Fielding, London lacks the vivid visual detail of Dickens's London. When Tom Jones arrives in the capital in search of his beloved Sophia, the narrator tells us that he:

was a complete stranger to London; and as he first arrived in a quarter of the city, the inhabitants of which had very little communication with the landlords of Hanover Square or Grosvenor Square (for he entered by the street Gray's Inn), wandered for some time, before finding his way to the fortunate palaces, where Luxury is separated from the ordinary. . . whose ancestors, born in better days, due to various merits, brought wealth and honor to their descendants.

As interpreted by the author's ironic vision, London is described entirely in terms of the variations in class and status of its inhabitants. No attempt is made to make the reader "see" the city, or to describe its sensory impact on a young man arriving from the country for the first time. Compare Dickens's description of Jacob's Island in Oliver Twist:

To reach this place, the visitor must penetrate a labyrinth of secret, narrow, and muddy streets, crowded with unkempt and poor people of the lower classes. . . The cheapest and weakest products are piled up in the shops; the poorest and simplest articles of clothing hang on the doors of the vendors, which spill out from the low wall and windows of the houses. . . he walks beneath the facades of houses that sway and protrude onto the sidewalk, the bare walls seeming to shake as he passes, the chimneys half-ruined, half-scrapped, the windows protected by rusty iron bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect.

 Tom Jones was published in 1749, while Oliver Twist in 1838. The intervention of the Romantic movement reflected on the effect of environment in man, it opened people's eyes to the sublime beauty of the landscape and, in time, to the grim symbolism of cityscapes in the industrial age.

Martin Amis is a late representative of the Dickensian tradition of urban gothic. His haunting and shocking look at the post-industrial city reconciles an apocalyptic vision of culture and society in a state of utter ruin. As in Dickens, his settings often seem more animated than the characters, as if life were draining from people and re-emerging in demonic, destructive form in things: streets, cars, tools.

The narrator of the work money, John Self (Amis also follows the Dickensian play on names) is not exactly a complex or sympathetic character. He is young urban professional evil, addicted to fast food and fast cars, bad food and pornography. He travels between England and America in an attempt to secure a film deal that would make him rich. London and New York are the main locations of his action. The latter is ahead in terms of physical and moral misery, but the nature of the business necessarily leads Self to Los Angeles, the capital of the film industry.

The challenge of the chosen form of this novel is that the style is also an eloquent description of the urban wasteland. also expressive of the narrator's sluggish, narrow-minded, uncultured character. Amis manages this difficult trick by disguising his literary skills behind a barrage of street slang, swear words, insults, and jokes. The narrator speaks in a Mid-Atlantic dialect that is partly derived from popular culture and the mass media and partly from Amis's own possible fabrications. For example, to decipher the first paragraph of this excerpt you need to know that Alcatraz is a famous California prison, that "pig" is a term of abuse for a policeman, that "to draw the grain with" means to take aim, "carpet" is American slang for a wig (although Self uses it to refer to real hair), and we assume that "copter" is part of the word derived from "helicopter." The metaphor for the city's polluted sky, "God's green splatter," refers to the Old Testament god who descends on modern-day Sodom, and is as unexpected as TS Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when "evening lies across the sky/like a patient on the operating table," and it also owes something to Stephen Dedalus' description of the sea as "green splatter" in the first episode of UlyssesBut while Prufrock has high cultural pretensions and Stephen consciously distorts Homer's favorite epithet for the sea, "summer-dark," John Self seems simply like a schoolboy's tantrum, and this distracts us from the literary sophistication of the image.

The main trope of the description of Los Angeles is hyperbole or exaggeration. In this respect it resembles the narrative skaz, Guard on the ledge mentioned earlier. But Amis's fragment is more of a rhetorical scene than anything else in Salinger's novel. He performs a series of comically exaggerated variations on the usual theme, e.g., that Los Angeles is a given and car-dominated city ("The only way to get across the street is if you're born there"); and on the unusual observations that America favors cheap retail and that American taxi drivers are often young immigrants who don't know the streets.

Not long ago, upon arriving in Boston, I took a taxi whose driver took three tries, aided by radiotelephone consultation in Russian with command, before he found his way out of the airport. It is not easy to exaggerate this kind of incompetence, but Amis found a way: “The taxi drivers are so Saturnian that they are not even sure whether this is the right or left planet. The first thing I have to do, on every trip, is teach them how to drive.” The echo of the common slogan about wearing a seat belt, “Clink, every trip,” immediately follows the allusion to science fiction—Amis’s prose revels in such juxtapositions, drawn from fertilizers of the contemporary urban subconscious. This echo also reinforces the joyful, finger-snapping rhythm of the entire fragment, which at one particularly rapturous moment risks exploding into rhyming verses (“You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed”) (They don't rhyme in Albanian.ë the verb wash and the noun tattoo).

The danger of most descriptions of a place scene (the novels of Sir Walter Scott are examples) is that the string of well-formed declarative sentences, combined with the suspense of narrative delay, puts the reader to sleep. There is no such danger here. The present tense describes both the place and the narrator’s movement through it. The changes in verb moods – from demonstrative (“He leaves the hotel”) to interrogative (“But can you eat lunch?”) to imperative (“Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run!”) and the second-person plural pronoun (“You walk left, you walk right”) – involve the reader in the process. After reading many pages of this kind of writing, you may fall asleep from fatigue, but not from boredom. /Akademia Magazine/Telegraph/