Mal du Pays

The refrain of Randolph Stow's 'Outrider' echoes throughout his work as a central, counterpointed theme. Like a descant moving further and further away from its emotional and geographic base, the principal literary consciousness finds itself in a spatial estrangement from its remembered world, which floods the inner ear with a dissonant 'grievous music' played upon the heartstrings. I wish in the following to dwell upon some implications of this 'grievous music' in Stow's work: not only in terms of its tone, but also in terms of its perception of the human condition and especially its evocation of a spatio-temporal world

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Consonance and dissonance · Epistemology · Evocation · Literature · Perception · Sociology · Theme (computing · Tone (literature · Work (physics · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature