CODA
Seminal Works: Realism Versus Fantasy in Fiction
I confess: I am of two minds about the role of place or setting in the modern novel, and in fiction generally.
Sometimes, I feel that the function of setting is absolutely significant. Traditionally, setting has been held to be among the most important of elements in long fictions, perhaps the most important fictional ingredient as far as establishing the unity of a sub-created world is concerned; it is often crucial to creating mood or atmosphere in such works. "We were the land's before the land was ours" conveys the raison d'etre of setting. Whether one thinks of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Joyce's Dublin, Twain's Missouri, Conrad's Congo, Penn Warren's Louisiana or Lowry's Mexico, the sense of setting or place is pivotal for the credibility or authenticity of fiction, and is deeply tied to that old mantra of novelists: "Write about what you know."
That is the traditional view.
At other times, however, I mistrust this received view. The glue of unity is rather a key element of style, an admittedly elusive ingredient. If fiction—the fine art of literature—is meant to convey truths or realities that are universal or even eternal, what has the novelist to do with the particularity of setting? It is the Janus-faced dualism of character-and-plot, a two-sided complementarity, which will be authoritative for the execution, which will inform and guide design and determine aesthetic and stylistic choices. On this account, setting is purely secondary, important only for creating an illusion of credibility, for
One may appeal to precisely the same list of novels invoked above to make the point. It is Faulkner's developmentally disabled Benjy, dirt-legged Candace or white-passing Joe Christmas, Joyce's mythic couple, Leopold and Molly Bloom, Conrad's bestial Kurtz and swaggering Nostromo, Twain's French-bashing Negro slave Jim and delinquent Huck, Penn Warren's tragic politician Willie Stark, and Lowry's besotted Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, with whom we are concerned: we want to know why they make the choices they do, and what happens to them...matters. Without wanting to deny the historical settings of these novels, I maintain that they might have taken place anywhere. It is the impression made by the characters and the story that we will carry away with us after reading the final page. Setting and place are matters relevant only to establishing a credible illusion in the reader's mind, a de facto peg on which to hang the vivid magic of character.
Of course, a writer's familiarity with particular places and historically specific times will naturally inform his works, providing an index whose accuracy will be of interest primarily to historians and critics of literature but not to general readers, whose motives are restricted to perceived relevance of a particular character's struggles to their own lives and struggles, and the vividness with which it is drawn. But this kind of familiarity can be acquired by reading and by the vicarious absorption of research pertinent to creating a credible illusion of time and place for the reader. Otherwise how could legitimate historical fiction—Kenneth Roberts's Northwest Passage or Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe—ever be written? The writer of novels need not have direct experience or familiarity with particular place or setting in order to establish an authentic mood or atmosphere that is key to sustaining a credible appearance or illusion of reality.
Let us illustrate this by considering some examples:
1. Setting: can help in the portrayal of character.
"...it was so quiet and lonesome out, even though it was Saturday night. I didn't see hardly anybody on the street. Now and then you just saw a man and a girl crossing the street with their arms around each other's waists and all, or a bunch of hoodlumy-looking guys and their dates, all of them laughing like hyenas at something you could bet wasn't funny. New York's terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed."
—The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Setting is barely noticeable in this instance, which seems to demonstrate rather that a vividly drawn character can help establish the setting than the other way around. One might substitute the name of any large Eastern American city for "New York" without the slightest diminishing of this passage's fictive charm.
2. Setting: in some works of fiction action is so closely related to setting that the plot is directed by it.
"The new man stands, looking a minute, to get the set-up of the day room. One side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed, practice arm wrestling and card tricks...Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine's product, the Chronics. Not in the hospital, these to get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the street giving the product a bad name.
—One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken KeseyIt's unclear exactly what action is being referred to or indeed how setting might be understood to direct the plot here. Strictly speaking, no action occurs in this description but only a passing reference. The only possible candidates for action are (a) the "new man" standing, "looking" and (b) "younger patients...arm wrestling." Kesey's stylistic use of personification in the nouns "Acutes", "Chronics" and "the Combine's" surely does more to establish and convey our sense of location in a state mental institution than any description of time, place and period does to facilitate action. Would anyone not already familiar with mental hospitals or Kesey's novel be able to tell from this passage alone what the setting is? Of course the setting's already been established through context in the preceding 18 pages of the book, though this fact hardly supports the claim that setting directs plot in the passage. Then, too, it could be argued that Kesey wants to establish the futility of action built into the very atoms of a state mental institution in order to more sharply contrast it with the choices and actions to come.
3. Setting: can establish the atmosphere of a work.
"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country."
—The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Again, if we define setting as "the time, place and period in which the action takes place", then Poe's description—however evocative of mood or atmosphere—fails to provide a specific index. Poe's narrator might be anywhere on earth, in a dream or The Twilight Zone. Surely it is more accurate to say that word choice, tone and sound do more to establish mood than setting or place.
Authenticity: A Function of Interaction Among Characters
This is not, of course, to disparage realistic fiction, that is, fiction that purports to closely mirror itself on a "real world" indexed by particularities of time and place. The popular novels of John Grisham, P. D. James, Jack Higgins, and Kenneth Roberts depend heavily upon their authors' familiarity with inside information about specific professions and events—law, police and courts, forensics, espionage and the French and Indian War—as well as on details and items establishing particular time and place. Setting plays so fundamental a role in the novels of P. D. James, some critics have suggested, that it functions as a virtual character. While such novels display a blending of factuality and imagination, the imaginative part is subsidiary to the body of facts and submerged in the demands of genre, which constitutes a serious limitation.
The novelist Stanley Elkin admired people who, like Ernest Hemingway, could write this kind of realistic fiction, while confessing that this was not at all the sort of fiction that Elkin himself wrote. The critically acclaimed author of The Dick Gibson Show, A Bad Man, Searches & Seizures, and The Living End, Elkin was both a skillful literary artist, teacher and theorist of creative writing. James Joyce, William Faulkner and Jorge Luis Borges presumably did write Elkin's kind of fiction. Who would deny that works like Ulysses or Light in August or Labyrinths capture or possess reality to a high degree, even a higher degree than the strongest works of realism? More importantly, fiction that exhibits a greater element of fantasy or stylistic innovation is capable of something that no realistic fiction can achieve: namely, by adventuring into new areas of experience, such fiction can explore and articulate some of the deeper issues and problems confronting society, not yet appearing on the public radar or brought fully into conscious awareness. By identifying social problems, political pitfalls and cultural time-bombs, such literature contributes to needed human adaptation and societal transformation in the face of the historical reality of inescapable and inexorable change.
Recently, journalist and activist Chris Hedges reread Herman Melville's Moby Dick and described it as the most incisive and prophetic diagnosis of American society ever written. Amiri Baraka similarly invoked Melville as a salient analyst of American identity. The late Gore Vidal described the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant as the Moby Dick of American nonfiction.
One need only reflect upon the list of great books banned in the United States (some of which remain on banned book lists)—from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Ulysses to Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch—to realize that imaginative literature has important social and political as well as literary and aesthetic functions, and that these sets of purposes may in fact be quite inseparable.
Dennis Weiser is a poet, novelist and philosopher, whose articles, poems and stories have appeared in Chouteau Review, New Letters, Abramelin: The Journal of Poetry and Magick, p.r.n., Thorny Locust, Literary Juice and several anthologies from Outrider Press. A crowd-funding campaign at Unglue released his sci-fi novella, The Third Awakening, worldwide as a free eBook licensed through Creative Commons. His profile is included at Poets & Writers, Who's Who in America (2007) and Who's Who in the World (2008). A member of the Academy of American Poets, Dennis is currently writing a crime novel set in present day Kansas City, Missouri.
Sinister Dynamic: Global Governance and the Reconstruction of Nature is forthcoming.
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