Art, though, is never the voice of a country it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth.
Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all. Welty adds to history’s wisest meditations on art and echoes Tolstoy’s notion that art is a bridge of mutual understanding and argues that no form of art is better able to touch us than fiction: … Third, with the goodness - the worth - in the writer himself: place is where he has his roots, place is where he stands in his experience out of which he writes, it provides the base of reference in his work, the point of view. Second, with the goodness in the writing itself - the achieved world of appearance, through which the novelist has his whole say and puts his whole case. How so?įirst, with the goodness - validity - in the raw material of writing. Welty begins by considering how place shapes the “goodness” of good writing:Īs soon as we step down from the general view to the close and particular, as writers must and readers may and teachers well know how to, and consider what good writing may be, place can be seen, in her own way, to have a great deal to do with that goodness, if not to be responsible for it.
That’s precisely what Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909–July 23, 2001) explores in an extended 1956 meditation found in On Writing ( public library) - an indispensable handbook on the art of mastering the most important pillars of narrative craft, from language to memory to voice, and a fine addition to the collected wisdom of great writers. “Longest way around is the shortest way home,” James Joyce wrote in one of the most memorable lines in literature - so memorable and impactful perhaps because it harnesses so exquisitely the ineffable yet enthralling role of place in writing.