Arcadia: The Importance of Place and History on Narrative

A Comparative Analysis in Literature

Joe Hunt

March 29, 2020

Thirty-five miles east of Colorado Springs lies the town of Calhan, proud home of its own school district, two gas stations, and Norman’s Video Store, which rented VHS tapes up until 2010. Piecemeal cars sputter exhaust from corroded mufflers, rolling down dust-laden roads. Atop the highest elevation on Boulder Street is my home, shaped and reshaped over nearly one hundred years. The front lawn is neatly mown, well over a dozen species of flowers in bloom patrol the edges of the porch like loyal sentries, and a cherry tree, truncated halfway up its length, competes with the twenty-five foot spruce for sunlight.

There, on the porch, my Dad drinks powdered iced tea by the pint from a plastic pitcher older than I am. I greet him, am crushed between huge arms mottled brown-red with countless hours under the sun, and am pricked by the grey stubble that forever accompanies his protruding chin.

There, on the kitchen wall corner, my fingers trace over annotated notches, cut over sixteen years. The hallway seemed so much larger when I viewed the world at five.

On the twenty-second night of the first month of 2016, the Calhan Fire Department found him. Acute bronchopneumonia in the setting of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. James Robert Hunt was 57. He died sometime in the night on the twenty-first, one day before my twentieth birthday.

I became the sole denizen of that house, whose floor creaks before the two-stair incline between the living room and my bedroom; it was all that I had left of him.

Tayeb Salih, the London-educated Sudanese author of Season of Migration to the North, tells the story of an unnamed narrator who returns to his mother country, serving as a civil servant in Khartoum. In his novel, Salih endows the stark locales of Sudan with emotive power and purpose in guiding his narrator through processing the enigmatic history of Mustafa Sa’eed, who brings home his own demons that cause anguish for nearly everyone in the narrator’s home village of Wad Hamid.

Likewise, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” expounds the baffling effect of an infinite repository; enshrined within, all past and future knowledge – alongside their proofs and, most troubling, counter-proofs of various validity. Borges’ library accommodates a multitude of individuals trying to discern some greater meaning, purpose, or comfort among its endless landings.

Through both of works, readers witness just how strongly location influences narrative by experiencing, in some small way, the impressive ability for a place to influence how we perceive and process reality.

Borges explores the metaphysical exertions on the mind by one’s environment in “The Library of Babel”. Published in 1941, Borges’ story transports the reader to the ordinal, alien world populated with all manner of books, each comprising exactly 410 pages of twenty-two symbols and three punctuation marks. The orthography of the perceived universe, as it were. One may discover a book which repeats the symbols M C V, or exhibits total nonsense. Building further upon this basis, the narrator describes the discovery that no two books in the library are identical, that every possible combination of written word is contained within the library:

“… that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All – the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, …”.

At first, an attentive reader might realize that, even with a large catalogue of twenty-five characters arrayed in eighty lines across 410 pages, the possible number of works is definitively finite. The library itself is knowably large – it follows then that the extent of the library is within human understanding - the scholars have accepted as fact that it has always existed, and shall always continue to exist. Yet Borges describes something akin to an uncountably infinite collection of tomes, which encompass all of human thought, emotion, and experience; nuanced variations of true or false events, with no effective means, no Rosetta Stone, with which to judge the veracity of accounts.

Borges describes the effect upon the librarians: the proud or greedy realization that, somewhere, in some book, there must exist a “Vindication”, some sublime discourse on one’s past and future; the hopeful hypothesis that a total, comprehensive description of the Library rests, undisturbed, in some unknown landing, in some unprecedented language; despair, as a man realizes no traversal, no matter through how many galleries, would carry them towards a probable chance discovery of some canonical tome. Neither would wanton inquisition and destruction of unworthy catalogues affect change:

“...One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles”.

This place encapsulates the totality of experience – devilishly ordinal in its inscrutability.

Similar emotions are evoked in Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih’s second novel. Here, in the heart of post-British colonial Sudan, Salih’s narrator has returned to his village, Wad Hamid, outside Khartoum along the Blue Nile. Salih writes of the metamorphosis caused by British colonial rule: the place that he calls home, rooted though it is in tradition and religion, has come to be neatly divided into beareaus of land management, agriculture, and civil politics. Along the Blue Nile, irrigation by mechanical innovation form the vanguard of what is, ultimately, the fate of traditional ways of life.

Salih then introduces Mustafa Sa’eed, Sudanese pariah and the fulcrum of his novel. Sa’eed, born in Sudan, showed an early gift for academics, which he attempted to satiate by attending secondary school in Cairo, finally ending at the London University where he becomes a lecturer. Here, Sa’eed masters his studies and publishes work in economics and social studies, enjoying the comfort that academic prestige draws in western circles. Nonetheless, he suffers from terrific ennui. His affliction: an inhuman, dispassionate use of individuals as means to an end. He acknowledges the help he has received in his studies, but feels no warmth or gratitude; he is responsible for the death of his wife, and partially responsible for the suicides of former, discarded lovers Isabelle Seymour, Anne Hammond, and Sheila Greenwood. Further, Sa’eed’s inability to moderate himself come to affect everyone in the village, further perpetuating the influence of British dominion in the lives of Salih’s characters, geographic or otherwise. Mustafa acknowledges all of this while he recounts his history to our narrator, who listens intently and whose personal struggle to cope with these revelations form the basis for the main conflict of the novel.

It is important to notice that Sa’eed actively decided to return to Wad Hamid, rather than Cairo or Khartoum, in order to exorcise the influences of his London education. Mustafa’s western-abetted intellectualism impairs, rather than enhances, his ability to connect with others, and he yearns to live a simple life. He states

“Yes, I now know that in the rough wisdom that issues from the mouths of simple people lies our whole hope of salvation. A tree grows simply and your grandfather has lived and will die simply. That is the secret”.

Our narrator, like Sa’eed, returns to Wad Hamid so he can enjoy the respite of having a strong sense of belonging. Of being home.

Mustafa’s revelation of his past - and later, subsequent death - leads the narrator to doubt his perception of his home and of Sa’eed. In later chapters, our narrator meets a retired civil servant who attended school with Mustafa, who confirms that our antagonist was indeed a noted academic, but the information of Mustafa’s humble retirement is questioned by a man who worked in the Ministry of Finance. An alternate story that Sa’eed is still in London emerges. The discordant nature of information surrounding Mustafa obfuscates the attempts of the narrator to understand him, fueling greater paranoia and obsession. We additionally observe the inverse influence of man on place -subtle or otherwise - Mustafa has over the village through following chapters, witnessing the destabilization or destruction of the village’s values and social order.

It is here that parallels between Borges’ and Salih’s narrators coincide: both struggle to grasp the what and the why of their circumstances. Certainly, both narratives offer deliberately baffling and contradictory environments to the reader, which encourage one to doubt the validity of a given account. Salih weaves a convoluted narrative populated with various accounts of Mustafa Sa’eed, which the narrator must process in his obsession with understanding a man he shares a great commonality with; Borges entrenches his reader in a world described by definite rules, lacking incontrovertible means of grasping it.

The invalidity of attempting to interpret the world as a rational space is suggested in both works. Borges’ narrator recollects that a sect of librarians hold that all books are ruled more by random than deterministic processes – that, “the rule of the library is not ‘sense’, but ‘non-sense’”. He acknowledges their existence in a disapproving tone, but their inclusion as a factual observation is not refuted, as, in the penultimate paragraph, he acknowledges increasing suicides or degenerate pilgrimages as evidence of the eventual downfall of the human species. The library, in its infinite existence, will outlast us - the immutability of place is, perhaps, the only solace to mutable inhabitants.

Salih, likewise, allows his narrator a moment of respite partway through his journey back to Khartoum in the seventh chapter. There, in the desert, he rides in a lorry, accompanied by the driver and a handful of travelers along the most direct route through Sudan. Here, under unyielding sun, he borders on incoherence. He begins to question the validity of Mustafa’s involvement in the deaths of his mistresses:

“...an idea occurred to me; turning it over in my mind, I decided to express it and see what happened. I said to them that she had not killed him but that he had died from sunstroke – just as Isabella Seymour had died, and Sheila Greenwood, Ann Hammond and Jean Morris. Nothing happened.”

Salih’s desert obliterates memory; insomnia, imposed by a relentless sun.

The driver finally parks the vehicle at sundown. The lorry is fueled with water and oil, men with alcohol, and our narrator with a cigarette, beneath a cool, compassionate night sky. Here the narrator states in the cool of evening after much work, the driver sings – then one, two, a multitude of voices join in. Soon a clamour, as travelers along the road converge and everyone celebrates, but for what? To whom?

To nothing.

“A feast without meaning, a mere desperate act that had sprung up impromptu like the small whirlwinds that rise up in the desert and then die. At dawn we parted.”

While the library indirectly antagonizes Borges’ narrator, the parallel between how the place of each writers’ narrative affects interpretation and processing of events is apparent. Just as Salih’s narrator undergoes a profound metamorphosis first to understand, then to separate himself from, the mystery of Mustafa Sa’eed by relenting to the desert, Borges’ attempts to explain the impermanence of our world through the immense structure he inhabits – the world. In both works, the man is inseparable from the place, the course of his actions determined in minute ways by their surroundings.

Citations

Borges, J. L., & Hurley, A. (1998). Jorge Luis Borges: collected fictions. New York: Penguin Books.

Ṣāliḥ al-Ṭayyib, & Johnson-Davies, D. (2009). Season of migration to the north. New York: Review Books.