Literature and Landscape

The two books I read for this week are The Language of Landscape by Anne Whiston Spirn, and South Africa: The Structure of Things Then by David Goldblatt.  I’d like to use narrative structure to compare ideas in the two books. 

In The Language of Landscape, Spirn uses poetry and literary allusions as a vehicle to speak about the landscape.  She often references Mark Twain and his descriptions of the Mississippi River to talk about the ever-changing nature of the landscape.  She also uses the phrase “literature of landscape” to characterize the way in which one should read the landscape.  Just like in literature studies, one must closely “read” aspects of landscape in order to further understand the hidden connections within each landscape or part of a landscape.  One must also be able to literally and figuratively read the stories that the landscape is telling.  Each part of a landscape—the rock, the hill, the tree, and the path—has a story to tell.  The history of a tree is hidden in its trunk and in its branches and in its leaves.  The difference between the story that a tree has to tell and the story that a person constructs, is that the former makes no moral judgements or distinctions between what constitutes a worthy story; it simply accumulates occurences.  Man incorporates these stories into his culture, oftentimes creating narratives about survival, power, and failure around them.  In this way, a narrative dialogue between the landscape and its human inhabitants is formed.

            Goldblatt’s book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then looks at landscape through the lens of photography.  This automatically struck me as a very interesting way in which to capture ideas about landscape.  The camera is a fascinating medium in that it can bring out aspects of the landscape that can otherwise go unnoticed.  For example, in the picture of the Hindu Temple on page 8, given the perspective the picture is taken from, you can see another building through the doorway on the left.  This provides an interesting counterpoint to the structure of the temple.  If you were looking at the temple in real life, you probably wouldn’t really put the other building in context with the structure of the temple.  In a picture, the photographer can frame the shot in such a way that interesting landscape qualities are brought out and emphasized.  On the other hand, photography is a limited medium in that it can only capture visual aspects of the landscape.  Goldblatt must make up for this by providing a narrative history.  Still, he doesn’t fully engage all the senses in his description of landscape the way I think Sprin does.  Sprin practices what she preaches.  She compellingly uses of narrative to make the landscape quite literally come alive, and, in doing so, is able to engage all of my faculties.  Goldblatt, in part limited by the medium, falls a bit short narratively speaking, and ends up making a less forceful, but still interesting point about the nature of landscape.