To See Things in Their Time

N MAKING-a distinction between two forces that are prominent in her fiction, Eudora Welty has written that has always nursed, nourished, and instructed man. . . . Man can feel love for place; he is prone to regard time as something of an enemy.1 Her feeling for the difference in the way one responds to place and to time has a quality specifically Southern about it. The Southerner, who has become the object of so much analysis in recent years, literarily, politically, and sociologically, seems indeed a creature very much at home with the concept of place in his life and not at all comfortable with Time. The South has long been associated, in the popular mind at least, with an ideology that exalts place at the expense of time, that uses its sense of place to resist time and progress. Time and progress belong to the world outside, or so the myth goes; on the plantations or in the small, sleepy Southern towns that are the popular images of the South, time is held back by the places themselves. Thus Miss Welty describes a group of her own Southern characters in their relation to outsiders: They only hoped to place them, in their hour or their street or the name of their mother's people. Then Morgana could hold them, and at last they were this and they were that.2 The dominant place image that emerges through Miss Welty's fiction is the small Southern community that acts as an integrating force: we have in Shellmound, Morgana, Banner, Mount Salus, places with lasting identity that each community uses to define itself, but places also that live themselves because of the living attitudes of the people who dwell in them. The importance of these places, of any places, as vital images for fiction resides for Miss Welty in the way they are seen. Place provides knowledge of

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