Regional Writers - 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' (3) Geography and social issues
- Created by: Alasdair
- Created on: 07-06-18 15:33
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- Regional Writers - 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' (3) Geography and social issues
- Alan Sillitoe on 'maps'
- 'We are all born into the world with a sense of place, simply because a certain part of our senses is rooted forever to the locality in which - as an old-fashioned novelist might put it - we first saw light.'
- 'Just as general need maps upon which to plan his campaign or fight his battles, so an author requires them for his novels and stories, even if they exist only in memory, or in his imagination. [...]
- 'Joseph Conrad drew charts of Costaguana for his novel 'Nostromo', and in 'Victory' and 'Lord Jim' one feels he was using them in these books also, a redrawing perhaps of the Admiralty Charts with which he had been so familiar.
- 'It is safe to assume that James Joyce [writing in Paris] kept a street plan of Dublin close to his desk, on which to which out one or two permutations in 'Ulysses'.
- 'Joseph Conrad drew charts of Costaguana for his novel 'Nostromo', and in 'Victory' and 'Lord Jim' one feels he was using them in these books also, a redrawing perhaps of the Admiralty Charts with which he had been so familiar.
- 'For my Nottinghamshire novels and stories, which account for the greater part of my writing, I have always had near me a street plan, as well as a one-inch map of the area to the west and north of the city.
- 'These last two items are not essential for my writings about this piece of territory, because I know every nook and cranny, every hole and corner of it, and always will, but still is is good to be correct.'
- Region: Nottingham: Radford and Lenton
- e.g. Eddison Road, Castle Boulevard, Market Square, Derby Road, Canning Circus
- p. 122-23
- 'The maze of streets sleeping between tobacco factory and bicycle factory drew them into the enormous spread of its suburban bosom and embraced them in sympathetic darkness.'
- Stanley Atherton
- 'For Sillitoe's characters streets are usually more inviting than fields or open country'
- Alan Sillitoe's Nottingham
- Built environment
- (P.3) 'It was Benefit Night for the White Horse Club, and the pub had burst its contribution box and spread a riot through its rooms and between its four walls. Floors shook and windows rattled, and leaves of aspidistras wilted in the fumes of beer and smoke.'
- Natural environment
- P. 72: 'Rain and sunshine, rain and sunshine, with a blue sky now on the following Sunday, and full clouds drifting like an aerial continent of milk-white mountains above the summit of Castle Rock, a crowned, brownstone, shaggy lion-head slouching its big snout out of the city, poised as if to gobble up uncouth suburbs hemmed in by an elbow of the turgid Trent.'
- Noise
- P. 26 'Machines with their own small motors started with a jerk and a whine under the shadows of their operators, increasing a noise that made the brain real and achieve because the weekend had been too tranquil by contrast, a weekend that had been terminated for Arthur in fishing for trout in the cool shade of a willow-sleeved canal near the Balloon Houses, miles away from the city.'
- Built environment
- Alan Sillitoe on 'maps'
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