Magical Locations!

                                                       

                                       

You belong to a place and a place belongs to you. The relationship is mutually nurtured by comfort, security and familiarity. What intrigued me as evidenced in the books is that writers have created fictional places in stories with which we wholeheartedly identify. Your doubts will all be laid to rest if I were to quote one such magical place. MALGUDI – the fictional small town in south India in the novels and stories of RK Narayan . A place just as ordinary with surreal connotations attributed to its enigmatic quality of endearment in our hearts. In one of the interviews he said, "Malgudi was an earth-shaking discovery for me, because I had no mind for facts and things like that, which would be necessary in writing about Malgudi or any real place. I first pictured not my town but just the railway station, which was a small platform with a banyan tree, a station master, and two trains a day, one coming and one going. On Vijayadasami I sat down and wrote the first sentence about my town: The train had just arrived in Malgudi Station." A place, where, in the words of Graham Greene, you could go "into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet us.”

Much speculation has been adrift since its conception and discovery by readers in the works of RK Narayan, but no concrete pinpointing has gained popularity so far. The place was imbued with details and structures of his upbringing as a child in a small town in south India. It was located on the banks of river Sarayu with a forest on the other end of the small town.  The town was inhabited by people whom he had met every day of his life. He was so familiar with their thinking that he could envisage their reactions to situations in his stories. The shops were the ones he had been to while walking to and fro from school, interspersed with buildings and houses he had frequented often. Mr Lawley’s statue seated on a horse at the railway station along with ‘Boardless’ a eating meeting place where all burning issues of Malgudi town were thrashed and  laid threadbare are the landmarks of the fictional town.

The inclination of writers to conjure up realistic fictional locations finds a precursor in older writings too. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha are familiar places we read about in their books. Hardy did not conjure up a fictional place but a FICTIONALISED WESSEX. This had me stumped the first time I registered it. A fine line exists between a fictional Wessex and a fictionalized Wessex. The latter is a real time Wessex which has been made make-believe with added landmarks, substituted names - a dream county from a realistic contemporary good old place.  Wessex is a real time location with a chequered history, the Anglo Saxon kingdom centered in the south and south west part of England before the Norman Conquest. He gave each of his Wessex counties fictionalised names, like Upper and Lower Wessex, Outer and Mid Wessex. It all began with the town of Dorset where he lived as a child, later he called Dorchester-  Casterbridge in the book ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’, and in ’ Far from the Madding Crowd’ he describes Wessex as a realistic dream county. Moreover he was primarily a poet and only wrote books to earn money, through the brand of ‘Wessex Novels’ as his books came to be branded and capitalized commercially. A clear indication of the mass appeal that a core geographical area with a political identity acquires, with populist brand culturing! A smart marketing gimmick!

Another monumental fictional location is YOKNAPATAWPHA in the novels and short stories of William Faulkner. Known for his famous work ‘Sound and Fury’ he was writer of southern literature of United States along with Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams and a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway. He explores the psyches of southern workers, slaves, descendents of slaves, and southern aristocrats.  The Yoknapatawpha County is recreated on the lines of his hometown Lafayette County and Holly Springs Marshall County.  

And now a peek- a- boo into the EMERALD CITY of ‘Wizard of OZ’ series written by L Frank Baum. The city is at the end of the famous yellow road. It is predominantly green, with vendors selling green lemonade for the children. Made in glass, emerald and other jewels it is fresh, and invigorating to the senses. In the stories initially, visitors are required to wear green eyeglasses but this practice is discontinued in other stories, yet the city is always described as lush and green. Fictional capital city of the Land of Oz, it is often referred to as the City of Emeralds. Built by the wizard in the story but in real life; a Baum fabrication. He especially shifted to Chicago to attend the World Columbian Exposition. He was greatly inspired by the white city, built in no time for the exposition and was fascinated enough to create something like it in his stories.

Here readers must be reminded about CASTLE ROCK in Stephen King’s series which is a small England town with dark secrets. The first story begins frighteningly with a serial killer targeting young girls. Later there is the menace of a dog affected by rabies attacking local residents. And further the horror stories are replicated in different circumstances with castle Rock as a constant setting in the thrillers. 

Writing lies at the intersection of true fact and fiction. It is a highly creative genre, with a wide playfield of ambiguity. The fertile ground of ambiguity gives writers the opportunity to create new worlds, characters, and completely imaginative environments. The play of reality and fiction, shadow and light, truth and the make-believe is a wide transcendental arena wherein writers can stretch themselves to the ephemeral and conceive out of world experiences for themselves and the readers who would but just about devour it all ravishingly.

Hi! Reader set yourself an exercise. Spin a fantasy of a place you would love to belong to for eternity. A paradise on earth with naughty corners, a lover’s street, a pub to thrash out all the world’s difference over happy hours, a gourmet’s delight . Maybe one day you could take me to your world of intriguing, beautiful and magical locations. Happy Imaginations!