When I think about Edmonton through the lens of childhood, what I remember most is how often I thought of certain places as totally different from what they actually were. My backyard was transformed by imaginary geography. The rock box my backyard (it's like a sandbox, but with … rocks) was actually an entire house! The garage was a stable where kept our horses (if by horses you mean bikes, and at that age, I did). The soccer goalposts in the field by the local elementary school were the gates to a portal that would TRANSPORT YOU ACROSS SPACE AND TIME! A lot of childhood narratives don't just shape a place; sometimes they completely superimpose an imaginary place over it.
What strikes me about A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry is that the narrator Neil doesn't seem "imaginative" -- in a traditional sense, anyway. He's a very head-in-the-clouds sort of kid, but there's no fantastical embellishment in his story. There's no attempt to mythologise Glengarry -- to imagine it as someplace else (think: Alice Major's layering of Roman history), or just as something other than what it is. Instead, he's all about persistent, curious investigations of the fabric of life around him: he's fascinated by places of origin, by markers of difference, by lived experiences.
So we could maybe call A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry parochial, but not in a derogatory sense. As we discussed in class, the novel seems to make an argument for the importance of embeddedness: how place shapes your growth as an artist, and by extension, the value of "local" art. Neil's observations about Glengarry are suffused with this really subtle, quiet kind of love -- he sees and decodes everything with the kind of childhood innocence that confers significance on everything, no matter how "small" or "unimportant." So I'd say that Neil is imaginative: it's just a different kind of imagination, one more in line with de Certeau's appreciation of the everyday.
To be honest, I hadn't really thought about place and authorship before this term (this year I've been reading a lot of speculative fiction/scifi, which has a totally different set of rules when it comes to writing/decoding place), and I hadn't seen the value of this "embeddedness" before reading McGillis. I've always found a strong sense of place to be a bonus, not a necessity, but McGillis has me rethinking that position. My favourite book, The Logogryph, is actually by another local author, Thomas Wharton; I hadn't realised it before this week, but even though book is 95% fantastical metafiction, that last, essential 5% is a frame story which anchors the narrative, and it's all about places and pasts.
Yeah, I agree that Neil doesn't have the imagination of a typical 10-year old. It seems like every time I see a young kid, playing with toys cars or little action figures, I try to put myself into their head. What could they possibly be thinking about?
ReplyDeleteThen I think back to when I used to do the very same thing. I remember this old diorama type thing my parents bought me, that was essentially an entire city with roads and building and everything a city needs. I would "drive" cars along those roads for what was possibly hours, and I could stay within this fake world without losing focus.
It's weird to think that although the brain of a child is far less developed than that of an adult, they have far more vivid imaginations than us. I could never imagine myself sitting with toy cars they was I used to. It's kind of absurd.
This is why it's hard to see Neil as a child. I just can't. He's far too much of an old soul.