Storm Jameson’s Phenomenology of Place and Ethics of Responsibility in The Hidden River

Storm Jameson’s The Hidden River (1955) projects a phenomenological nexus between place and identity, but what happens when that Heideggerian concept of “dwelling” is compromised by one family member’s wartime betrayal of a kinsman? At issue under such circumstances is an ethics of choice that confronts two of the narrative’s main characters, one of whom is a former Resistance leader and older brother to the malefactor. Jameson’s late modernist novel set in 1949 raises deeply philosophical questions about what constitutes “justice” shortly after the Nazi Occupation of France. It also dramatizes the fragility of attachment to a particular geographical milieu, in this case the Loire Valley, as a matrix of self-definition.