Setting and environment

The Queen, giving great allowance for my defectiveness in speaking, was however surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. She took me in her own hand, and carried me to the King, who was then retired to his cabinet.

POINT OF VIEW. VOICE AND FOCALISATION

The summer was waning when Shann took his two sons and went ahead to explore the way. For three days they climbed, and for three nights slept as best they could on freezing rocks, and on the fourth morning there was nothing ahead but a gentle rise to a cairn of gray stones built by other travelers, centuries ago.

Arthur C. Clarke, History Lesson (1949)

A story may begin with a set-piece description of a landscape or townscape that is to be the primary setting of the story (for example, the sombre description of Egdon Heath at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878)). It may begin with a self-introduction by the narrator (“Call me Ishmael” in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)). A writer may begin with a philosophical reflection. Many novels begin with a “frame-story” (Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) consists of a deceased woman’s memoir which is read aloud to guests at a country-house party who have been entertaining themselves with ghost stories). Traditional beginnings of fairy-tales are ab ovo.

· In non-chronological order: the story can be anachronic with a combination of diverse stories. Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just one thing after another, it allows the reader to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events.The writermay start the story in medias res: for example,begin a mystery story with a murder and then circle back to the events that led up to the murder (famous Agatha Christie’s detective novels and stories). The narrative of the Odyssey begins halfway through the hero’s hazardous voyage home from the Troyan War, loops back to describe his earlier adventures, then follows the story to its conclusion in Ithaca.

A flashback (analepsis) takes the reader to the event that happened prior to the present and clarifying it. It changes the interpretation of something which happened much later in the chronology of the story:

My feelings about Garfield are further bedeviled by what Garfield has become. He has shrunk – almost literally – from the strong, commanding figure he once was to the slighter, more tentative person that old age and illness have rendered him (…) He has a variety of cancer – I’m not sure which – and has only about two years to live. Just after a strange request, stranger perhaps because he made it of me. He asked me to take a photograph from my father’s bedroom window, looking down towards the river. He wanted a photo that would show the path by the side of the field, the trees, the big pool and the fields and farms beyond. I agreed of course, but never got round to it. So here is the beginning of a feeling of guilt which is mixed in with all the other feelings making the whole lot more confused than before.

D.S. Mackenzie, The Language of Water (1991)

A flash-forward (prolepsis) interrupts the present chronology of the story and connects it to the future. Foreshadowing occurswhenthe writer hints about something that may happen in the future, it can help build suspense or arouse curiosity:

With the reindeer it was more complicated. They were always nervous, but it wasn’t just fear of Noah, it was something deeper. You know how some of us animals have powers of foresight? (…) The reindeer were troubled with something deeper than Noah-angst, stranger than storm-nerves; something… long-term. (…) And it was something beyond what we then knew. As it was something beyond what we then knew. As if they were saying, “You think this is the worst? Don’t count on it”. Still, whatever it was, even the reindeer couldn’t be specific about it. Something distant, major… long-term.

J. Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)

Descriptions can be presented in the following way:

· In order of impression: the writer begins with the image that creates the most powerful impact and then describes the peripheral or less compelling images: “He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man, who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea”

Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)

· In spatial order – organizing physical descriptions of people and places:

The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference – orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple.

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

· Zoom in and zoom out techniques bring along a panoramic view then focusing on progressively finer and finer details and ending with a close-up description of one aspect of the scene or vice versa, these are two cinematography terms applied to writing:

The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Duration refers to the relationship between the length of time over which a given event occurs in the story and the number of pages of narrative devoted to describing it. Thus, duration is what produces the sense of narrative speed. To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf comprises three parts of different duration (the second one is the shortest but still covers the period of ten years, while the first and the third render the events of one day).

Frequency involves the relationship between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story (the same event may occur more than once) and in the narrative (a single event may be described more than once).

The plot is the chain of events which are gradually unfolded in accordance with the author’s conception and the way the novel is arranged. A long story or a novel may have several lines of the plot, interwoven, sometimes whimsically entangled. Subplot or side-story is a ploy line that has no direct connection to the main one, but is important for understanding various aspects of the characters’ personalities and the world created by the author.

The following elements of the plot are distinguished:

· exposition sets the scene giving the revealing description of the main character or introducing the central conflict, it may contain a short presentation of time and place;

· knot (the starting point and the subsequent unfolding of the main line of the plot);

· complication (separate incident helping to unfold the action, it might involve thoughts and feelings as well);

· climax (the highest intensive point in a story, the decisive moment on which the fate of the character and the final action depend);

· denouement [dei'nu:maŋ] (“the untying of a knot”) – subsequent events after the climax).

There are the following plot devices: plot twist (any unexpected turn of the story that gives a new view on its entire topic), foreshadowing, flash-forward and flashback, red herring (distracting the readers’ attention from the plot twists), meta-reference (the characters display an awareness that they are in a book).

The plot is based on the conflict as a driving force in literature. A realistic fictional disagreement must rise naturally out of the personalities and attitudes of the characters.

Questions: What is the plot structure of the story? Is the action linear, circular, or fragmentary? How predictable are the events in the unfolding story? Are there any events that seem similar or contrasting? What is the central conflict? Does the story use a particular idea or phrase as a recurrent leitmotif? Are there any events that don’t relate to this conflict? Is it important to know the plot of the novel, not just in terms of what happens, but in terms of how the plot provides a framework for the themes and ideas? Which episodes were given the greatest emphasis? Where does the narrative begin (in medias res or ab ovo)? Does the narrative follow the chronological order of events or rearrange it? Is the end clear-cut and conclusive or does it leave room for suggestion? How does the objective, chronological time relate to the subjective, psychological time?

Language in use for analysis

a good narrative technique

a writer of great narrative power

gloomy descriptions of nature

unlikely coincidences

to enhance the expressiveness of the description

to spin a moving and bitter-sweet story with the usual skill

a plot of classical cunning and intricacy

a brilliantly crafted story

one of the most inventive and least predictable authors

montage techniques

to enthrall the readers with vivid descriptions of

The narrator speaks to us without any ironic intervention by the author.

The twists in the plot are surprising.

The book is full of funny anecdotes, keen observation and intelligent exploration of…

The conclusion reinforces the dominant impression.

The things expressed in the text are seen from a certain perspective in terms of their relation to the events and characters. The key items are the following: who it is who tells the story, from what perspective, with what sense ofdistance or closeness, with what possibilities of knowledge, and with what interest.

The point of view in a piece of writing is the perspective from which a story is told: the first-person point of view – the narrator participates in the action and uses the pronoun “I” to refer to himself/herself; the second-person point of view – the narrator uses the imperative mood and the pronoun “you” to refer to the reader; the third-person point of view – the narrator does not participate in the action, instead, the action is described as happening to some he, she, or it.

In fiction, the first-person point of view can be very powerful. In this kind of narrative everything is presented through the narrator’s eyes. This means that the only access we have to other characters is through the narrator’s perception of them. It also means that you should be aware that the narrators’ own characters will affect their judgement. The use of a first-person narrator can create a range of effects, including tension, irony and humour. The speaker is not the writer, but rather a character created by the writer’s imagination. The gap between the narrator’s awareness and the reader’s awareness is a major factor in many novels. Some writers choose to write in the first person to let readers know that the personal experiences or ideas expressed are one’s own. Everything is seen from the perspective of the character, who is also the narrator. By inhabiting the world of one character fully, a writer creates intimate and moving portrayals of individuals and their stories. In the following passage, the narrator is Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who describes his adventures in an imaginary land.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1735)

The first-person narrator is involved in the world of the story. The extent and variation of the temporal and cognitive distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I determines the quality of the narrative. Robinson (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)) forms the centre of his own story (I-as-protagonist). This leads to a greater illusion of reality, as well as the sense of immediacy and credibility. The first major English woman author Aphra Behn uses the first person as a minor character and observer (I-as-witness) in her exotic narrative Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688). She comments on the natural limits of awareness without direct access to others’ feelings and thoughts: “I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be witness of, I receiv’d from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself”.

In addition, adventure novels (R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)), diaries, letters, essays, memoirs and autobiographies as well as epistolary novels (S. Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1749), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)) offer models of writing in the first person, which are connected to the central position of the individual.

Using the second-person point of view, a writer often tries to elicit a personal response or action from individuals in the audience. You can find the example in the extract from Tony Parsons’ Man and Boy (1999): “ By thirty you have finally realized that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of good time”.

Writers use the third-person point of view when the emphasis is on the message rather than on the message-giver. When writing fiction from the third-person perspective, one must decide whether to use a limited or omniscient point of view. In writing from the third-person limited point of view, the narrator speaks from the perspective of one character. For example, the point of view in the following passage is limited to the perspective of Louise Mallard as she anticipates the news that her husband has been killed in a train accident.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it she did not know; it was too subtle and allusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour (1894)

In writing from the third-person omniscient point of view, the narrator is able to reveal the unspoken thoughts of all the characters. Omniscient means “knowing everything”. Being omnipresent and omniscient, the authorial narrator can see into the future, read various characters’ thoughts and even their subconscious. An omniscient narrator will have a distinctive tone and voice, and an attitude to the characters and events described. Sometimes the narrator’s opinion will be made clear in a direct address to the reader; sometimes it will emerge through the tone of the narrative. Omniscient narrators can move backwards and forwards in time, from one setting to another, can reveal what characters are thinking and feeling. In the following passage from The Great Fire of London (1982), Peter Ackroyd describes family relationships entering the minds of both spouses: “ Laetitia Spender sometimes thought that, if she closed her eyes for long enough, she might cease to exist, she might discover her vanishing point. Her reality, she was convinced, was known only to herself; for everyone else she was Spenser Spender’s wife, very attractive, really, hadn’t she been a model once? She hated being called “Lettuce” or even Letty: it confirmed her status merely as an object. But somehow the names had stuck – perhaps she did resemble an abbreviation or a vegetable. At these moments she would shut her eyes and try to imagine herself dead; or she would argue bitterly with Spenser over small things – over the question, for example, of how many tea-bags should be placed in a tea pot. She took no satisfaction in provoking such arguments, but there was nothing else for her to win.

Spenser never thought about their relationship, which meant that he never thought about her”.

Sometimes a story is told by multiple narrators. While reading a novel told in this way, one is to look for how different narrators’ views of people and events differ from each other, and consider the effects that are created by the reader being drawn into separate yet complementary worlds. In Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, for example, a series of narrators take over the story at different points, contributing to the novel’s dense, multi-layered effect. BleakHouse (1853) by Charles Dickens has two distinct narrative voices, the character Esther Summerson, and a third-person narrator who presents the parts of the narrative in which Esther does not feature. Julian Barnes’s Talking it over (1991) and Love, etc. (2001) are a presentation of the same events from the point of view of the main characters who form a love triangle.

Dramatic point of view presents the story objectively, mostly through dialogues. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) his simple style, careful structuring and dialogues help to get the most out of the least.

The physical location from which a writer views a subject is called the vantage point. In the essay Shooting an Elephant (1936), George Orwell recalls when he was called upon to deal with a rampaging elephant. Orwell uses the vantage point of the narrator surrounded by two thousand hostile villagers. Telling the story from this vantage point helps the reader gain greater appreciation of the pressures and circumstances that led Orwell to shoot the elephant.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of faces above the garish clothes – faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hand I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I would have to shoot the elephant. (…) The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two-thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (1936)

Vantage point can also refer to a distancing in time. For example, George Orwell wrote Shooting an Elephant long after the incident took place. Looking back at the event from the vantage point of time contributes to the ironic tone and sense of shame that permeate the essay.

Distance is created when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, a “go-between” through whose consciousness the story is filtered. The more intrusive the narrator, the greater the distance between narration and story. Conversely, the least distance is created when we are unaware of the narrator’s presence, when a tale seems to “tell itself”. Distance is also created by the absence of descriptive detail. Thus, the least distance, or the greatest imitation of life, is produced by maximum information and minimum presence of the narrator.

Perspective refers to point of view, or the eyes through which we see any given part of narrative. Although the narrator may be speaking, the point of view may be that of one of the other characters, and the feeling of the point-of-view character may be different from those of the narrator.

Voice refers to the voice of the narrator. The voice we hear (the narrator’s) may not be the same as the eyes we see through (the perspective). When we analyze the voice, we analyze the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told). Voice helps us to determine the narrator’s attitude toward the story and reliability. The voice of the story-teller may be anonymous (like in a folk tale – “Once upon a time…”), the voice of the epic bard (Virgil’s “Arms and the man I sing”), the confiding, sententious, intrusive authorial voice of classic fiction. After the turn of the XX century the intrusive authorial voice has tended to be suppressed or eliminated, the action is presented through the consciousness of the characters or by handing over to them the narrative task.

We can also distinguish voice (who speaks) and focalisation (who perceives) of the work of literature. The invisible, covert narrator is merely a voice that reports information. The author passes on the task of evaluating the story to the reader. The overt narrator appears as a mediator in the discourse, introduces himself/herself and the stories to the reader, gives comments that guide the readers’ understanding. As to the narrator’s position the heterodiegetic narrator does not belong to the world of the characters, the homodiegetic narrator belongs to the story world and is called autodiegetic if telling the own life story.

The narrator’s presentation can be reliable or unreliable. The reader has basically three strategies to test the reliability of the narrative, to check its consistency, coherence and correspondence. A consistent narrative does not reveal contradictions between the narrator’s words and actions, values and judgements, self-image and images the others have. A coherent narrative presents a story in which one event leads to another without significant logical gaps.

There is no direct correspondence between reality and fiction, which creates its own world, but rather one between the fictional models of reality and the dominant view of the world at the time of writing. Strange characters and unreliable narrators defamiliarise the vision of the world and challenge our views.

The story is presented in the text through the mediation of some prism, perspective, angle of vision verbalized by the narrator. Anglo-American term for this is “point of view” though “focalisation” is more preferable term as it includes not only grammatical parameter, but also cognitive and emotive one. For example in Timbuktu (1999) by Paul Auster the narrative is the third person, but everything is perceived through the dog’s eyes. So the user of the third person is the narrator and Mr. Bones is focalizer. Focalisation asks who perceives, what, in which way. Focalisation and narration are separate and distinct things.

Types of focalisation depend upon two criteria: position relative to the story and degree of persistence.

· According to the position relative to the story focalisation can be external or internal. Internal focalisation locates the perspective within a character, limiting the information to his/her perceptual and conceptual grasp of the world. This type generally takes the form of a character focalizer (as in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.P. Salinger). External focalisation presents information of characters’ external behaviour, such as speech and action, excluding feelings and thoughts. Its vehicle is a narrator-focalizer. This type is predominant in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to mention a few works.

· According to the degree of persistence focalisation can vary between fixed focalisation, which is restricted to one and the same perspective throughout the narrative (J. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)), variable focalisation, which presents different scenes through different perspectives (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)), or multiple focalisation, which invites comparisons between several perspectives of the same event (Julian Barnes, Talking It Over (1991)and Love, etc. (2001)).

There are different facets of focalisation:

· The perceptual facet (space and time) concerns the sensual range of the focalizer.In spatial terms the external/internal position of the focalizer takes the form of a bird’s-eye view (panoramic view or simultaneous focalisation of things happening in different places) vs. that of a limited observer. In temporal terms, external focalization is panchronic in the case of an unpersonified focalizer, and retrospective in the case of a character focalising his own past. On the other hand, internal focalisation is synchronous with the information regulated by the focalizer.

· The psychological facet deals with the focalizer’s mind and emotions. There are two components: cognitive (unrestricted/restricted knowledge) and emotive (uninvolved/involved).

· The ideological facet concerns the ideology of the focalizer that can be presented as authoritative, or there can be a juxtaposition of different views. The view can be presented in implicit or explicit way.

Questions: Identify the voice. What does the voice have to do with what is happening in the text? How involved in the action or reflection is the voice? What is the perspective or 'point of view' of the speaker (social, intellectual, political, even physical)? Think about the narrative viewpoint. From whose point of view the story is told? Which narrative situation prevails? Why might the author have made that choice? Identify the narrator. How much does the narrator know? Is the narrative factual / dry / emotional / credible / melodramatic? Skim the text and underline references to the narrator. Is the gender clear from this extract? What kind of focalisation prevails?

Language in use for analysis

The story is told from the point of view of…

The narrator speaks to us without any ironic intervention by the author.

The voice of the narrator is immensely flexible. It ranges from reflective amusement to anger / resignation / tenderness / exasperation / fear and horror…

The voice of the central character has a distinct role, though it can always be modified by direct intervention of the narrator’s own voice.

The art of the writer lies in his careful movement between the point of view of his protagonist and that of his watchful, linguistically exact, narrator.

Narrative requires a setting, which may vary from concrete to general, and often has a particular culturally coded significance. Setting can create an appropriate atmosphere arousing some expectations of events to come or indirectly characterise the personages.

There is the setting in terms of time and place and the setting in terms of the physical world.

The actual place or places in which the events happen can be significant for several reasons. Any physical object might be described:

· in specific detail, as single or multiple locations for characters in action (providing a realistic background). Consider the way A. Trollope describes the setting in The Warden (1855): “Hiram’s Hospital, as the retreat is called, is a picturesque building enough, and shows the correct taste with which the ecclesiastical architects of those days were imbued. It stands on the banks of the little river, which flows nearly round the cathedral close, being on the side furthest from the town. The London road crosses the river by a pretty one-arched bridge, and, looking from this bridge, the stranger will see the windows of the old men’s rooms, each pair of windows separated by a small buttress. A broad gravel walk runs between the building and the river, which is always trim and cared for; and at the end of the walk, under the parapet of the approach to the bridge, is a large and well-worn seat, on which, in mild weather, three or four of Hiram’s bedesmen are sure to be seen seated. ”

· in a more tonal way as the scenery and the atmosphere the characters perceive and interpret, thus being used the physical environment can reflect the moods and behaviour of the characters in the novel, and establish the mood of the narrative, and create associations; weather description is frequently a projection of human emotions onto phenomena in the natural world: “The evening of this day was very long, and melancholy, at Hartfield. The weather added what it could of gloom. A cold stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling, and the length of the day, which only made such cruel sights the longer visible.” (Jane Austen, Emma (1816))

· as a motif (in Ice (1967) by Anna Kavan the setting is unspecific in terms of time and place, but snowy, icy, frozen environment described sets the main motif of narcotic dreams and people’s isolation);

· as acquiring aesthetic meaning and assuming symbolic or allegoric role (allegory ties an image or event to a specific interpretation, a doctrine or idea; symbols refer to broader, more generalized meanings). In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway’s famous anti-war love story, the setting is used symbolically: the mountain symbolizes life and hope; the plain is the image of war and death; we soon see rain as another symbol of death;

· as creating a moral, political and social environment, referring to the world of the novel in the sense of social inclusion and exclusion as well as drawing and transgression of boundaries marked by race, class, gender, religion, nation, etc.; the society the novel describes can include geographical setting, but also encompasses social and historical factors that help to identify the nature of the novel’s world. The world of the novel may be as small as a family or as large as a whole country, it can be the focal point of conflict. Setting can characterise the social status (wealth/poverty, aristocracy/bourgeoisie), character traits (independence/tendency to imitation, taste / lack of taste, practicality / impracticality, etc.), sphere of interests and views.

Fiction generally claims to represent 'reality' (this is known as representation, or mimesis) in some way; however, because any narrative is presented through the symbols and codes of human meaning and communication systems, fiction cannot represent reality directly, and different narratives and forms of narrative represent different aspects of reality. A narrative might be very concrete and adhere closely to time and place, representing every-day events; on the other hand, it may represent psychological, moral or spiritual aspects through symbols, characters (used representatively), improbable events, and other devices.

So, setting can be used for a variety of purposes; consider this a spectrum: concrete - tonal - connotative - symbolic - allegorical.

Scenery plays special role in a literary work. Scenery can be lyrical (not connected directly with the plot), of primary importance for the plot development, fantastic or symbolic.

Questions: How does the extract make use of setting? Where and when does the story take place? What mood is created? How does the setting affect the events? How are the physical setting and psychological events related? What impression do you receive from the passage? Go through the passage and underline words and phrases that create a particular effect. What is the importance of the physical environment in the text you are studying? Are there examples of symbolic use of place (semantic space, externalised mirror image of character)? How is the setting used: to create a sense of realism? / to create mood? / to represent or create states of mind or feelings?/ to stand for other things? Is it a single setting or multiple settings? Does it relate to cultural context? What is the interrelation between the objective location and perceived atmosphere, between internal space and external space?

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