At the still point of the turning world

[oursin]

Latterly for assorted reasons I have been given to thinking about the trope of the quest or the hero's journey and what other narratives there might be that don't involved moving from point a to point b. (Okay, maybe all narratives could be described as a journey on some level of metaphor: youth to experience, ignorance to knowledge, to enlightenment, to redemption - but doesn't this somehow weaken via generalising what is a useful trope if more contained?) And also considering the gendering of this.

(Do narratives in which the structure is one person flees from/is pursued by another count as quests or heroic journeys? - discuss, possibly with reference to Farscape.)

So I have been thinking about narratives in which the protag/s remain in the same place: this was possibly additionally provoked by that interview I linked yesterday with Aung San Suu Kyi; also by a vague recollection of my darling Dame Rebecca being a bit scathing about the New Woman novel trope of the young woman leaving home, and wishing there were more about young woman staying at home and effectively imposing her will and wishes upon her family.

Is the archetype here Penelope, sitting at home weaving and waiting and maintaining a fragile peace?

It also occurred to me that one instance of staying the same spot and doing one's duty might be BtVS - with some divagations, sure, but basically, she's staying where she's put on the Hellmouth.

What do people do that might make plots where they stay in one place?

- Building something.

- Defending something.

- Sorting something out (e.g. classic murder within closed-circle of some kind mysteries)

- Manoeuvring one's way through court intrigue (or analogous - massive corporate entity might work just as well?)

Anywa, I would be interested in other suggestions of staying in one spot plots, and of stories that involve someone doing just that.

Comments

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have long been intrigued by two related motifs: time-dilation stories (in which one character's experience runs faster than everyone else's, which generally restricts the plot to one location) or stories in which the viewpoint character is immobile or even sessile. They're rare, because it's hard to do well. But they're fascinating because they're so different from the usual.

Re: Hmm...

[oursin]

Oh, interesting! I immediately thought of What Katy Did as an example of an immobilised viewpoint character - but she does rise from her bed of invalidism at the end.

Re: Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I once edited a novel for a friend (sadly, it hasn't been published yet) where the character was a sentient tree. So, running away from problems was not an option. The plot actually did involve political intrigue, but it worked very different from the usual.

Oh, and there are stories that take place inside one of the characters, such as The City Who Fought. Those often have a static quality for the character-who-is-the-setting.

Re: Hmm...

[gillo]

It's quite surprising if you re-read What Katy Did to see that she only spends relatively few chapters on her bed of pain, after which she has repented sufficiently for being a Wild Girl and, converted by the saintly Cousin Helen, has become the Heart of the Home and is thus permitted to rise from her bed and walk again.

Re: Hmm...

[oursin]

I think that skew of perspective in remembrance is not unique - I remember re-reading The King Must Die after a lapse of some years and being a bit astounded at how much of it was not set in the Bull Court.

Re: Hmm...

[aedifica]

The first book that came to mind on reading this post was a time-dilation one: Singularity, by William Sleator. The main character lives a year alone, more or less, while about a day passes for the rest of the world.

[nineveh_uk]

What Katy Did, in which Katy's emotional journey takes place largely within a single room.

[oursin]

Snap! see above. Yonge does invalid characters quite a lot, but I don't think they're ever the sole or main viewpoint.

[nineveh_uk]

In contrast to Katy, Cousin Helen seems to get about quite a bit. But perhaps that is because she is a hopeless case and Katy isn't - and her narrative is pretty much set.

Emma? There are a couple of days out, but it is the only Austen novel that doesn't involve the heroine travelling, to the extent that even the romantic journey ends with Emma's staying at home (does Mr Wodehouse even give over his bedroom to Mr Knightley, one wonders?).

[oursin]

Isn't Cousin Helen being taken to or from various health resorts? (though no-one seems to suggest taking Katy to the healing waters at any point).

I'm now thinking about the people who leave Middlemarch (or get spat out by it) versus the ones who stay. (Those who walk away from Middlemarch, heh.) Most of the travelling in Felix Holt has happened before the book begins, and the action is pretty localised. Ditto Silas Marner - he fetches up in Raveloe and stays, and Godfrey's wife turnes up there and dies in a ditch.

[laughingrat]

Naturally, it's not actually what you're looking for, but I can't help thinking of the Scouring of the Shire. And it's really the exact opposite of what you're talking about, since that is a Taking Care of Home Business that was directly enabled by their experiences as traveling heroes.

[oursin]

That's an interesting trope in itself, the coming back after the quest - at one level it's 'The Blue Bird is actually roosting in the back garden', but it can be a good deal more complex.

[laughingrat]

*nods* In a way, I think Tolkien made it clear that Hobbits overall are a tough, sturdy, but complacent people. I wonder if our heroes had stayed home, whether or not they would've been able to defeat Sharkey/Saruman. I'm guessing not. It might not even have occurred to them.

[mme_hardy]

There would have been cross Folkmoots with resolutions of non-support.

[laughingrat]

*snerk*

[legionseagle]

Hobson's Choice?
Maggie moves out temporarily essentiall to shift and highlight the position she holds in the family and renegotiated her triumphant rdturn

[ankaret]

Flora Poste goes and imposes her will on extended family, but I don't think she or the Abbé Fausse-Maigre would have any truck with the Hero's Journey as a trope.

[azdak]

To Kill A Mocking Bird is, at least in part, about learning how to carry on living in your home town once you've seen its evil underbelly. I think that might come, broadly, under "defending something".

[antisoppist]

What about school stories? You do get journeys in the sense of characters who don't "fit in" at the start learning to become a good Chalet School/Jane Willard/Springdale girl, but it is the school and its ethos that is the constant and those who do not assimilate are expelled/rejected.

[kathmandu]

Fleeing from pursuit is irrelevant to the questness or lack thereof. A quest story is one in which the hero voluntarily leaves their usual life and goes beyond their familiar places and activities for a purpose beyond their own interests. Frodo and company were in a quest story because they left their homes to attempt things they'd never done before in the cause of saving their land and people, and incidentally themselves. The fact that pursuit set in shortly after they began their journey adds to the excitement without changing the nature of the story. The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley, is classic quest: our heroine spends years patiently reconstructing an ancient recipe for fireproofing ointment (which is an academic quest) and then uses her succesful formula to defend the kingdom from dragons.

The key is that a quest changes your life and brings you to a better place than you started in, but getting there involves scary difficult challenges that you wouldn't face just for yourself: it requires the extra motive power of altruism to make you go that far beyond your comfort zone. The Tightrope Walker, by Dorothy Gilman, is a fine example of a non-fantasy quest.

[kathmandu]

Reviewing your point about a narrative that doesn't involve a journey, I want to clarify that "brings you to a better place" refers to a better situation in life: happier, safer, more knowledgeable, with new/more friends and skills.

The Lotus Cup is a YA novel that feels fairly questlike to me: our heroine stays in the home she's grown up in, but finds an old piece of beautiful art pottery, learns how to replicate it (again with the research as stationary quest), uncovers family history, and changes her path in life.

[mme_hardy]

An important variant is "this is where I live, I'm rooted in it." Not because the person is defending something, just that the plot occurs where the person intends to stay. See: most of Austen; although arguably the nonexistence of mass transit has something to do with it, Mr. Darcy would never permanently leave home because it's his.

[oursin]

A lot of Arnold Bennett is about v specific locality (one half of The Old Wives' Tale, Anna of the Five Towns. The Card)- and in the Clayhanger trilogy, it's Hilda who leaves and comes back, and Edwin who stays in the Five Towns. And several early Wells comic realist novels are about an AU in which a Wells-type figure didn't get out, or lacks whatever it is got him out.

Hardy, of course, is about you can't get out of Wessex or off Egdon Heath even if you try. Though as I recall Tess does at least move around working at different farms.

[mme_hardy]

[movie announcer voice] Nobody escapes Hardyland.

[legionseagle]

You can marry out, but you can never leave.

[cija.livejournal.com]

A lot of L.M. Montgomery has to do with absolute consuming obsession with one place, and staying there -- it is like the whole gothic love affair between a woman and a house thing, but rather than the dark mysterious house of one's husband, the intimately known house of one's childhood. When I was a child I thought there was something really really horribly wrong with Anne of Green Gables and the rest, just exactly because of that feeling -- although by the time I grew sophisticated enough to articulate what was different about the narrative structure compared to all the orphan escape fantasies I liked better, I was also sophisticated enough to grasp that it wasn't a failure to understand the point of growing up but a totally different thing.

But Montgomery does not only heroic staying-at-home, but also detached and humorous observation of small-town life and small-town people that is almost entirely devoid of contempt and despair. I don't pretend to understand it but there it is.

[oursin]

In Anne of GG's case I suppose that it's driven by her having been an orphan bounced around hither and thither, and finding a place to be (years since I read any of them, I admit).

[sciarra]

I don't know how Wuthering Heights would fit here, but it would fulfill the creep factor that an obsession with place and person brings.

[adrian_turtle]

Gothics in general tend to be stationary, because of the architectural focus.

[sciarra]

True--although The Mysteries of Udolpho involves journey to the castle and then Emily's subsequent escape from it. And Northanger Abbey does center on place once we get there, but I don't feel like they're as stationary as prompt was looking for. Does that make sense?

[gillo]

Emma came to mind immediately. Arguably Mansfield Park too - although Fanny goes to Portsmouth it is essentially only to confirm that Mansfield Park is where she belongs. Of course outsiders are presented mainly in terms of threat in both of these books - dangerous London ways, morals and fashions (even haircuts) have to be evaluated and rejected by Our Heroine.

Archer's Goon (Diana Wynne Jones) is about discovering that your home and family are not what you always assumed them to be - Howard is trapped spatially within the town and has to explore his own territory to discover what it really is.

Chalice (Robin McKinley) is about a young woman who is spiritually and legally tied to her home - would this count?

I suspect a lot of the stuck-in-one-place stories are essentially about learning to recognise your surroundings for what they are - to see childish things with the eyes of an adult or mundane things with an open mind. Not necessarily coming-of-age stories, but about a quest to understand more fully what one has always known - if only oneself.

ETA: Cranford probably belongs in there somewhere - our narrator visits but observes an essentially stationary life in which people arrive and depart or, as in most Gaskell, die, but the point of view remains within the same small sphere.

[mme_hardy]

Cranford is an excellent example.

[oursin]

At the moment I'm reading Elizabeth and her German Garden and have a feeling that that may be another version - finding oneself in a place not necessarily entirely congenial and setting out to make it congenial or at least to smooth the rougher edges.

[garrity]

Do narratives in which the structure is one person flees from/is pursued by another count as quests or heroic journeys? - discuss, possibly with reference to Farscape

Also, BSG? It's a fun combination of quest for a destination, but a destination you're seeking because of pursuit and enemies and destruction of your old home.
(Arguably, much like Chrighton is always looking for the way home.)

Stories in one place are often looking for the creepy/supernatural/unexpected underbelly of that place, or sometimes take place in settings which are already liminal destinations for the protagonist (The Secret Garden, Cold Comfort Farm). Which would suggest it's never so much about motion as about creating that liminal setting, and motion is one obvious way to get there.

[fallingtowers]

I do think that both Farscape and BSG are indeed heroic journeys, even very much so in the classical sense. Farscape feels like the Odyssey in space while BSG tried to be the Aenid.

[kore]

....oooh, I like that.

[alphaviolet]

There might be some ideas here: http://computersherpa.deviantart.com/art/Periodic-Table-of-Storytelling-203548951

[castiron]

Would Godden's In This House of Brede fit with this? Granted, there's a spatial journey at the very beginning and the very end, but for 90% of the book the viewpoint characters are in one physical location.

[oursin]

Oh yes, I think nun stories fit right in - though the archetypal The Nun's Story has the protag being moved around numerous different houses of the order, including to the Belgian Congo at one point.

In This House of Brede does emphasie the not-being-able-to-get-away thing at certain points.

late to the entry sorry

[nessreader.livejournal.com]

What about Sylvia Townsend Warner's Corner That Held Them about several generations-worth of medieval convent? The time span of the novel is centuries and generations blur but it all keeps within the walls.

Less nun-ny would be Mrs Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks which is a midvictorian comic version of Emma, where a pious Scottish girl comes to a provincial town to be an angel in the house for her sardonic doctor father and rules society with mapp+lucia fist. The whole book, she is stuck in the town, a whale in a goldfish bowl. It was one of the books Mrs O wrote to cash in on the taste for Barsetshire novels so it has that flavour.

Re: late to the entry sorry

[oursin]

There is, on reflection, a whole genre of gentle stories of provincial life - 'two or three families in a country village': Angela Thirkell (how rarely does anyone even get as far as Barchester), O Douglas, 'Miss Read', D E Stevenson. And of course Yonge: though people do go away (e.g. Norman May to New Zealand, Angela Underwood to the Australian outback, the N American backwoods in The Trial, and the whole Peru section in Dynevor Terrace) the main story tends to happen within a particular place.

[wordweaverlynn]

Trash Sex Magic by Jennifer Stevens. I have some serious reservations about the book -- many of them about her handling of class issues -- but there's a great deal of good writing and interesting characters in it.

[oursin]

Hmmmm - I'm now wondering how far a lot of 'urban fantasy' is about staying where you are and fighting the demons/maintaining an uneasy truce with the fae, or whatever. It's not a genre I read much of in its more recent recensions.

[mme_hardy]

That's an excellent, excellent point. People in urban fantasy -- which I do read -- are fixed on solving/ameliorating the problem *right here*.

[rydra_wong]

I was pondering "city stories" (whether they qualify as urban fantasy in the current sense or not), where the imaginary city and exploring it is central to the story.

A lot of Mieville's books spring to mind: the characters may travel about inside the city, but they don't journey beyond it (and their travels are often circular, rather than linear). Leaving the city may be where a book ends, but not where it begins.

[libskrat]

Many of the Discworld books seem to fit? The witches rarely leave Lancre (though one could argue about Granny Weatherwax's out-of-body experiences, I suppose), and quite a few of the Vimes books and "craft" books (e.g. The Truth, Going Postal, Making Money) leave Ankh-Morpork briefly and reluctantly if at all. (In Going Postal this is even a minor plot point; Our Antihero has been a travelin' man, but can't be any more.)

Contrast with Monstrous Regiment, where there's clearly some hero-journeying going on.

[oursin]

I wonder how often (see comments on threads above) this trope maps to 'place as character'? (Whether it is a convent, a generation starship, a colonists' settlement on a new world, or Cold Comfort Farm.)

[mme_hardy]

Oh! And Tiffany Aching, of course, has no intention of leaving the chalk.

[edit: But she does in one of the books, so never mind.]