5. Nurtured by place
5.1. Attached to place
Nurtured by place
The city has no centre other than ourselves.
— Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul: Memories of a City
5.1. Attached to p lace
I found myself running through the streets as if I possessed them. Somehow I had been present at their beginning; or, ra-ther, there was some presence within me which had always existed in this soil, this stone, this air. (Ackroyd 1994, 42.)
Thus does Matthew Palmer, the protagonist in Peter Ackroyd’s novel The House of Doctor Dee (HDD), discussed in the previous chapter, recall his feelings as a teenager, when he “first began to understand London” (ibid.).
Young Matthew’s deep sense of togetherness with the city he was born in is typical of how characters in Ackroyd’s novels are tightly connected with their surroundings, occasionally almost to the point of personifying the place they live in, or even transforming into a genius loci. However, Mat-thew’s experience is also typical on a more general level and familiar to
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most people. Although it may not always amount to the degree of posses-sion — as in the case of Matthew and London — many of us still feel a close attachment to our place of birth and growth. Even if life were to move us far away from our place of origin, chances are that the place would still not be moved away from us — or at least it would retain its significance, albeit in another sense (Gustafson 2001a, 672). And for those who stay the bond may grow even stronger. As the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk writes about his own hometown: “I’ve never left Istanbul — never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood. [- -] Istanbul is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am” (Pamuk 2006, 6).
Doubtless due to its nearly universal applicability,74 place attachment
— defined in brief as an “emotional bond between people and a particular place or environment” (Seamon 2014, 26) — is an aspect of people-place bonding that has been studied with increasing intensity and from ever multiplying viewpoints over the past couple of decades (Lewicka 2011, 207, Manzo and Devine-Wright 2014, 15–16; Hernández, Hidalgo, and Ruiz 2014, 175–178; Patterson and Williams 2005, 361). Furthermore, preoc-cupation with the concept has not been limited to only the most obvious academic branches — such as environmental psychology or community design — but has spread to many other disciplines as well, including ger-ontology, economics, and leisure research (ibid.). As a phenomenologically rooted concept (e.g. Seamon 2014, passim), place attachment is also well suited to humanistic applications — although, as yet, they seem to be in the minority in place attachment research. Thus, the concept can also read-ily be appropriated for the purposes of literary studies.
However, just as the prevalence of place attachment as a human phe-nomenon has resulted in a multidisciplinary scientific discussion on the
74 Although the phenomenon as such may be defined as universal, studies have shown that it is by no means uniform. (See section 5.2.3 below.)
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topic, it has also contributed to a noticeable terminological confusion — “a broken jigsaw puzzle” of diverse place-related concepts, including to-pophilia, rootedness, place dependence, place identity, or, sense of place, to name a few (Lewicka 2011, 208). According to some critics, this may even have hindered the field’s progress (Counted 2016, 11; Giuliani and Feld-man 1993, 271; Patterson and Williams 2005, 362). Furthermore, in addi-tion to the “abuse of terminology” (Counted 2016, 11), theoretical devel-opment and methodology have been inconsistent as well (Counted 2016, ibid.; Lewicka 2011, passim; Manzo and Devine-Wright 2014,17; Hernán-dez et al. 2014, passim).
Still, despite the methodological and terminological confusion, the study of place attachment has strong phenomenological roots, echoing the anti-positivist approach of humanistic geography which emphasizes the role of place as a subjectively experienced location rather than merely an objectively quantifiable expanse (Ley and Samuels 1978, 11; Low and Alt-man 1992, 1–2; Lewicka 2011, Williams 2014, 127; see also above, chap-ters 1.2, 2.3, and 4.1). Broadly defined, the beginnings can already be found in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, first published in 1957. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, interest in the emotional aspects of people-place bonding seemed to explode, with various ground-breaking early studies and anthologies published during those decades. (Low and Altman 1992, 1–2; Lewicka 2011, 207; Counted 2016, 9; Scannel and Gifford 2014, 43–
44.) Many of these seminal studies, including Yi-Fu Tuan’s writings on “to-pophilia” — “the human love of place” (Tuan 1990, chapter 8) — and on the experience of place (Tuan 2001) as well as Edward Relph’s exploration of the human environmental experience (Relph 1980), represented the ho-listic-qualitative, phenomenologically based research tradition.
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Parallel to the qualitative research trend, also an alternative line of place research emerged, focusing on quantitative measurements and anal-yses of people-place bonding and preferred especially in the fields of envi-ronmental and community psychology. (Lewicka 2011, 208; Manzo and Devine-Wright 2014, 18; Patterson and Williams 2005, passim.) Still a third tradition of place theory — “social constructivism” — has seen the people-place relationship as a predominantly social construct (Morgan 2010, 11). A general discussion on place attachment naturally benefits from the inclusion of the quantitative and the socially-oriented viewpoints along with the phenomenological-humanistic tradition (ibid.). However, in a literary context, the phenomenological viewpoint in particular, with its emphasis on subjective experience and on the affective qualities of our re-lationship to place, offers functional tools for examining the role and sig-nificance of place attachment in the life of the fictional characters.
In the present chapter, the focus will be on Peter Ackroyd’s novel Three Brothers (2013), a story of three London brothers, born soon after the Sec-ond World War, who follow different lifepaths in and out of LSec-ondon during the post-war decades, each of them in some way affected by the mysterious disappearance of their mother. In the analysis, I shall lean on the phenom-enological research tradition, employing David Seamon’s (2012, 2014) generative model of six place processes. Seamon’s model, based on the di-mensions of geographic ensemble, people-in-place, and genius loci, offers tools for both perceiving the dynamism and variety of place attachment and recognizing the role of genius loci in people-place bonding. However, in addition to Seamon’s phenomenological perspective, the similarities tween place attachment and interpersonal attachment theories also be-come useful when exploring the metaphorical merging of the mother and the metropolis in the novel.
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