At some point in your exploration of this thought-provoking analogy you’re bound to wonder about themes and first impressions. How do you deliver a theme. How do you introduce a first impression. I love Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Landscape Garden” as an analogy for both design characteristics: delivering a first impression and a theme. I used to give my students a copy of the story, ask them to read the first page, and then ask “Where does the story begin?” Some would say near the bottom of the second column. No. Others would say in the middle of the first column. No. Others would say with the first word in the first paragraph. Again, No. Then I’d tell them “The story begins with the first word in the title, is repeated in the short poem under the title, and then again in the first few paragraphs.” Having shared that, I’d point out the story’s publication date 1848 and ask what the definition of Landscape and the definition of Garden likely were in the mid1800s. After recognizing landscape as wild and untamed, and garden as cultivated and controlled, they were prepared to find an elaboration of that in the poem and finally a fuller elaboration in the story. At the discussion’s conclusion I always enjoyed asking, “Why did Poe say ‘The Landscape Garden’ as opposed to ‘A Landscape Garden?’” so, in literature as in film first impressions are often provided immediately. In film it is so interesting that the film’s story is often played out in the background of the opening credits as in Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway’s 1974 film Chinatown.
Think about it. Where does a novel’s first impression (and theme) make an appearance? How about a painting or sculpture in a gallery of showroom? And what about a landscape, a building or complex of buildings, or a sequence of interior spaces? Is it a few feet before the arrival at the site, a quarter mile, across a broad landscape? What precedes and leads up to the first impression? Remember “a sequence of additive messages or information.”