Literature

Where in the world is language, and where in language is the world? Where, in other words, in another’s words, ‘is the place where language works?’1 Without doubt, the whereabouts of literary beings are never simply geographical. Location is also a case of locution. For a literary being, language is their whole world. Whenever such a creature wonders where in their world they are, whether or not their question is throwaway, their question is a wonderfully literary one. From Jean Martle’s query in Henry James’s The Other House (1896) — ‘“Where am I?” her scared silence seemed for the moment to ask’ — to a character called Neary’s qualification of the question of ‘where?’ with ‘if and when’ in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), this is so.2 In fiction, the distance or nearness of a narrative to a character is constantly in question. The narrative that tells us a character’s story may be in the first person, or in the third; second person perspectives are also of course possible if not as commonplace. But if with first person narrative we think of ourselves as being especially cosy with a character, then when such a narrative is told in the past tense the ‘I’ doing the telling is necessarily at a remove from the ‘I’ it tells us about. In third person narratives, meanwhile, we often find ourselves astonishingly close to a character’s most intimate feelings and thoughts, despite these being communicated by someone or something else — be that ‘else’ anonymous, omniscient, or otherwise.