6 Chapter 6: Analyzing Setting

Chapter 6: Analyzing Setting

                Just as characters are not real people, settings are not real conjunctures of time and place, even when a work of fiction is set in a readily recognizable historically existing location. Rather, setting is a textual effect of time and place, real world or fantastic to varying degrees, constructed out of words on pages: setting is a fictional sense of time and place. And even when a work of fiction is set in a real world time and place, like late 19th-century Vienna or Corpus Christi, Texas on July 27, 1984, a work of fiction, like any other type of cultural production, can at most offer a certain interpretive rendering of that time and place, a particular “take” of representation. Think about it: there is no one single definitive meaning of or way to know any particular place at a certain historical juncture, let alone represent it. Let’s take a particularly well-known place, New York City, for example. Depending on your worldview, your politics, your first- and second-hand experiences of NYC, books and movies you’ve consumed that are set there, and so forth, you will have a fundamentally different understanding of what it is like as a place and you would include different scenic sensory details, characters, and locations within the city to bring off this idea that you have were you using NYC as a setting for a work of fiction (and this is of course partially side-stepping the fact that NYC, like any big city, isn’t homogenous – it has many different neighborhoods with different socio-economic and cultural characteristics). Is it an industrious city of generations of immigrants and acts of self-reinvention? A place of danger and possibility? An urban Babylon of moral decadence? The culturally rich and vibrant city that never sleeps? The black heart of global capitalism? Of course in a sense it is all these things, but any act of drawing on NYC as a setting is going to emphasize one or a few of these while downplaying or ignoring the others through the necessarily selective process of creating a textual sense of setting.

So setting is the “world” in which a narrative takes place, be it some place that has actually existed in human history, like an unnamed mid-sized U.S. suburb in the early 21st century or Paris on the eve of the French Revolution; a fantastic and made-up local like a space station somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy 2,000 years in the future or a magical kingdom populated solely by goblins and mer-people; or some admixture of the two. Setting partakes of the physical features of a narrated place like roads and buildings or natural features like hills and streams; of sensory details like the sights, smells, and sounds of a place; of weather; and of the cultural practices that animate a place. Another useful way to think about setting is that it sets a horizon of the possible—a matrix of what can happen within that narrative world physically, socially, technologically, even legally. Can a character come back from the dead? In a work of realist fiction set in any era up to this date, no. But in a work of fantasy like the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series, yes, a character can be brought back magically from the dead. And in a work of science fiction set in a far-distant era science might be posited to have evolved to a point where an individual can be brought back medically from the dead. Can a character telephone for help in a case of emergency? Yes, in a work set in the U.S. or Western Europe after landlines became widespread by the early 20th century. But in a work set in a more economically under-developed part of the world or in an earlier era, this wouldn’t be possible. In a work set in the early 21st century, however, a character calling for help would be even easier due to the widespread availability of cellular communication devices, even in the developing world. Can a character openly pursue a same-gender romantic relationship? In the United Kingdom homosexual sex was still a capital (death penalty) offense as of the earlier 19th century. In the middle 20th century it was still illegal there (though the penalty had been reduced to a jail sentence) and still diagnosed as a mental illness in the United States (for which the preferred treatment was electroshock therapy). So you can see that things we might consider a basic given about the world, like what is illegal and what is a mental illness, can actually be very historically contingent, and we have to keep this in mind when we are approaching the setting of a work.

Because of this and for the sake of being properly cued in to the givens about a setting that a narrative is playing off of, it is important to bring a sense of context (socio-historical and cultural) to the table when thinking critically about setting in a work of fiction. What were the basic truths accepted by the population of a place? What was the economic structure of this society? What rights and social roles did different social groups have? How did people get around physically? Grasping the context(s) that inform a story’s setting may take some research on your part (or at least some thoughtful questions to your instructor), but this is essential work if you want to get fully at the meanings being developed in a work of fiction. For instance, we will better understand what a story is saying about gender if we realize that our heroine couldn’t just leave her domineering husband, because in the era in question (such as the 19th-century U.S.) women couldn’t easily get a divorce in that part of the world and husbands could still legally beat their wives. But in a work set in the Islamic world, where divorces have been much more legally obtainable for both women and men, the social dynamics of this sort of domestic conflict in a work of fiction would play out differently.

Setting can have a particularly pivotal, even defining role, in some genres of fiction. Works of science fiction are set in some near or distant futuristic world where the laws of the physical universe as currently understood by science are obeyed, but technologies more advanced than what the human race is currently in possession of allow things like interstellar travel and the existence of cognitively and somatically complex robots to exist. Fantasy narratives are set in a universe completely separate from our own–even if it may draw certain trappings from it like knights as a character type or basic human psychological motivations. Fantasy fiction is defined by these settings where magic, supernatural beings, and/or fantastic creatures like dragons and elves can exist. Historical fiction, on the other hand, is scrupulously set in an identifiable human historical locale, like Roaring Twenties Chicago or Delhi during the Indian Uprising of 1857, and among other themes it advances will be the meanings this particular place and time hold, particularly in relation to the place and time of the narrative’s publication. That is, that narrative of Roaring Twenties Chicago will convey certain ideas of what that place was like and why it particularly deserves our attention, but in a way that is inflected by the ways Roaring Twenties Chicago resembled or cast light on the author’s own time period.

Analyzing setting involves seeing it not as some inert backdrop to the narrative, but as playing a dynamic role in the production of meaning in a work of fiction. Like all other formal structures in a work of fiction, setting creates meaning in and of itself and in conjunction with the other formal structures of fiction. Viewing setting in isolation, we can ask what themes are generated by the text’s representation of place – what is it saying about the social milieu(s) it presents, or about human relationships to the geographical or climatic features that figure in the setting? We might ask, for example, what a work set in New York City’s Upper West Side is saying about the social customs and preoccupations of the economic elite during a particular era, or what a work using a redwood forest as part of its setting is saying about the deeper nature of time beyond the scale of a human lifetime. When we think analytically about setting as it relates to character, we might ponder how a work like Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” uses shipwrecked men struggling to stay alive in the vast open ocean to say certain things about how humans struggle against their physical environment in a cold, indifferent universe.

Sometimes what is particularly striking about setting is its minimalism or genericness – as in a work set in some undifferentiated “small town” or in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, which is simply set by a country road near a small hill and a tree. When the setting of a work lacks particularity like this, the work is both shifting emphasis away from setting towards the other formal structures of fiction and it is suggesting a certain generalizability or universalness of the themes it is dealing with—the same is also often true of characters in works of fiction who go unnamed.

Aspects of setting can also be read figuratively—that is, not literally but as standing for ideas—as symbols. The swimming pools in John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer” can be read as symbolizing something about the aimlessness of the lifestyle of the postwar suburban U.S. leisure class, while a dead end street in a story might symbolize something about a limitation of life possibilities.

Suggested Fictional Readings to Accompany this Chapter

                Works that necessitate students mentally putting themselves into a rather different time, place, and/or culture are particularly useful for developing skills of analyzing for setting. Works like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners might fit the bill, or James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” where 1950s Harlem is so vividly drawn that it almost takes on the status of a character. But I frequently use Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” because it necessitates an understanding of the gender and mainstream moral-religious dynamics of its late 19th-century rural Cajun Louisianan setting, as well as an ability to analyze how aspects of a setting can have a figurative function the helps develop the core themes in a narrative.