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July 8th, 2011 / 4:40 pm Michael Filippone—

What about plot? Is character plot? I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, “Character is plot. Plot is character.” Do those two sentences even mean the same thing?

July 8th, 2011 / 4:57 pm gavin—

You hear that, I think, when the setting seems to take on a life of its own, when it seems as important as the characters themselves: Moby-Dick’s ocean, McCarthy’s deserts, Erickson’s LA. But couldn’t you just say, Wow, that’s one damn cool use of setting, and not get all personifying about it.

July 8th, 2011 / 5:11 pm Johnny E—

. . . hmm . . . in west of here, the setting actually is the character around which the other four dozen characters revolve . . .

July 8th, 2011 / 5:41 pm Matthew Simmons—

Characters can interact with and be acted upon by setting. Characters can invest emotionally in a setting, and have a setting, say, disappoint them in that way another character can disappoint them.

But this happens within the character. The setting remains setting, no matter how much the characters “make” the setting a kind of character.

What I’m suggesting is that a writer doesn’t (shouldn’t?) fundamentally approach setting the way one approaches character.

So, maybe:

Character can think Setting is Character.

Writer shouldn’t think Setting is Character.

?

July 8th, 2011 / 6:17 pm Nicholas Liu—

I’ve waited forever for someone to say this.

July 8th, 2011 / 7:42 pm Matthew Simmons—

I’m not saying setting can’t be active. I’m just saying that doesn’t make it a character. Haunting the heck out of a house doesn’t, to me, mean approaching it the way one approaches a character. It just means haunting the heck out of it.

Not sure I think the concept is stupid. I tend to approach writing devices/concepts/whatevers on the spectrum from “useful” to “not useful,” depending on what I’m writing. At Warren Wilson, though, Susan Neville introduced the possibility that climate might be a more useful concept than setting. I tend to find it so.

July 8th, 2011 / 9:58 pm MFBomb—

Also, saying that “setting, as a concept, is stupid,” is rather bold, considering the significance of “place” in American Letters. Though, again, perhaps you are speaking for a time period–today–that seems to eschew “place” in fiction and instead set stories in “places” that are pretty much place-less and could exist anywhere.

July 8th, 2011 / 10:04 pm MFBomb—

It almost seems like a rather crude way of privileging man over nature, doesn’t it?

July 8th, 2011 / 10:31 pm deadgod—

Context impinges as though it had personalities, as though it were people.

Fragrant, humid air, an abandoned factory, the moon and starry vault in a rural nighttime, chaotic, howling streets, the humming florescent quiet of a 4 a.m. stop-n-rob, a cubicle festooned against mortality–

fictively, how are these not ‘characters’ as the unnamable I is?

July 8th, 2011 / 10:45 pm MFBomb—

“Context impinges as though it had personalities, as though it were people.”
———–

Context impinges personification of environment?

July 8th, 2011 / 10:57 pm Barney—

yeah, cough up.

July 8th, 2011 / 11:01 pm Ken Baumann—

Using The Shining as an example, I want to ask: how isn’t the hotel a character? It has desires, goals, responds to stimulus, moves and changes its physicality (the architecture and location of rooms), has various personalities for different guests… It’s about as agented up as something not-human can get. It’s more of a character than most house pets.

July 8th, 2011 / 11:17 pm Maxb—

pretty quiet for a change, monsieur kitchell

July 8th, 2011 / 11:31 pm M. Kitchell—

–The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James
-the photography of Todd Hido
-Gregor Schneider’s “Haus U r”
-Miroslaw Balka’s “The End”
–Paradise, Philippe Sollers (arguably characters here, but not operating at the same level as a character is expected to)
–Mezza Voce, Anne-Marie Albiach

July 8th, 2011 / 11:32 pm Darby Larson—

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7idi_5IaMrk

July 8th, 2011 / 11:40 pm M. Kitchell—

wrong. The Cage is book-length “graphic fiction” (aka a graphic novel). the Balka & Schneider works mentioned are art environments, Mezza Voce is écriture, and the Sollers is most markedly narrative prose.

also, are you insisting that prose poems can’t be narrative?

July 8th, 2011 / 11:53 pm M. Kitchell—

uhm…. ok, cool. “you win” i guess *eye roll*

July 8th, 2011 / 11:58 pm Matthew Simmons—

Like all of Andy Warhol’s work, unpack this and you find the biggest, wildest character of them all staring back at you. From the bottom. Of the. Suitcase. In a wig.

http://emuseum2.guggenheim.org/media/full/2005.68_ph_web.jpg

July 9th, 2011 / 12:06 am Franklin Goodish—

the hotel in the shining is a freddy, most assuredly not a winnie or wendy.

have you all ever been to Estes Park, CO, to see the hotel where S. King stayed when he wrote the book? it’s a character for sure, particularly if you’ve had a few fat tires.

July 9th, 2011 / 12:08 am M. Kitchell—

I dunno, I kind of feel like operating under the assumption that it’s a “character” element that provides the narrative element to Hido’s photo sort of conflates character into a number of other signifying elements, which sort of recontextualizes “character” as much as I insist on recontextualizing “narrative.” There is the idea that the power the photographs hold, the power that the art environments I’ve listed hold, take on their narrative element out of our experience with them–that’s really more taking issue with phenomenology, right? Like what is there outside of ourselves?

I think there’s some relevance to the idea of “if a tree falls in the forest, does any one hear it/does it make any sound?” There’s the narrative of nature that is happening without any specific human-as-character intervention (if we suppose an atheistic reading of the universe, which I obviously am). Or in the issue of artifice in general, if a writer writes a story devoid of characters, is the author a character? He’s “presence” in the sense that he created the narrative contexts whether or not he’s filled them with “people.”

Meillassoux posits an “outside” of phenomenology, which is more or less what a lot of the speculative realists & co deal with, so I’d like to suggest that a space (whether it can be a text, a photograph, or an installation) can hold narrative whether or not we are privy to it, which suggests that these narratives can exist as narratives without character.

July 9th, 2011 / 12:09 am M. Kitchell—

Also, does an absent narrator have to be a character? Like, the lighting, the angle, the framing are all present, but why are we calling those characters?

July 9th, 2011 / 12:11 am Darby Larson—

eh. i think its separate. i mean now we are talking about levels of eccentricity in the artist and that should be irrelevant. if you can supplant the author-character into the art then that rules out everything. does the narrative of a tree growing in the forest contain the character of god?

July 9th, 2011 / 12:13 am M. Kitchell—

i’m binding a book right now bro, the computer is the epicenter of my universe and i happen to be right in front of us. being a member of the 21st century i have this wonderful capacity to multitask.

July 9th, 2011 / 12:21 am Maxb—

multitasking is so 1987; were i you, i’d focus

July 9th, 2011 / 12:23 am Bradley Sands—

I don’t really care whether or not a setting is considered a character because it seems like it’s all semantics to me, but settings undergo development as characters undergo development during a story or novel. They can achieve change. If a setting is sentient, it can have goals and either achieve them or fail during its pursuit of its goals.

July 9th, 2011 / 12:38 am Matthew Simmons—

So you think a building can have a Bildungsroman?

July 9th, 2011 / 12:49 am Matthew Simmons—

The “sentient building” exception is, I’m loathe to admit, a bit thorny and may take a little time. And possibly proves my statement wrong.

Where are we without exceptions to every hard and fast rule.

But then, when King created a sentient building out of The Overlook, wasn’t the thing that made it sentient the collected anger of the spirits that had been wrongly done up there? Didn’t Kubrik fall into the Indian Burial Ground trope? Isn’t that simply a group of characters fucking up a setting?

Demolished easily enough by saying, “No, it’s just the building that’s mad,” I guess.

Responding to stimulus, moving and changing, and having agency are all things I’m willing to say a setting can do without jumping over the line into characterhood.

July 9th, 2011 / 12:49 am deadgod—

Some element(s) of context can be anthropomorphization(s). All the “characters” in a story are anthropomorphic; they are fictive people.

Why can an element of “setting” not be a “character” in the way that a human “character” can?

July 9th, 2011 / 12:59 am MFBomb—

Yes, I realize that fictive characters aren’t real people.

Why can an element of “character” not be a “setting”?

The OP seems to be responding to a common, superficial aphorism that oversimplifies a complex relationship. We both agree that the relationship is complex; the aphorism often misses the mark.

July 9th, 2011 / 1:09 am Bradley Sands—

The caves feel things and they speak. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I believe you leave it up to the reader as far as whether or not they actually do these things or if the man is only believing they are doing these things. Although perhaps you make it clear later in the book considering I just skimmed the first few pages. If not, it can be read either way. It’s out of your hands and the readers “own it” while they are reading. And who’s to say you couldn’t have written it with the intention that the caves are actually characters rather than the man mistaking them for characters?

July 9th, 2011 / 1:35 am deadgod—

That’s fair enough for me; to me, telling someone ‘setting must be a character’ is as, ah, unhelpful – as contrary to experience – as telling someone that ‘setting can’t be a character’.

I’m pretty conventional in that I like pretending that characters in stories are real people.

– but the phenomenologists have a strong and difficult point: when I see my neighbor taking out the garbage to the curb, do I know that that person is a person in the ways that I am and not an anthropomorphism of my pragmatic imagination? I don’t reasonably doubt that other people are really people, but nor is the personhood of a “character” in a story necessarily more compelling than the will and agency ‘given’ to an element of the “setting”.

—

Are writing classes really that obnoxious about calling “setting” “character”?

July 9th, 2011 / 1:41 am Matthew Simmons—

For the record, the caves never feel or speak.

And I must insist that I, as the author, am at least one of the people allowed to state my intention in writing something I have written.

A fair point, though. It’s to an extent in the reader’s hands. But the writing was all in mine. And when I write, I approach setting and character in different ways. And, really, I think everyone mostly does, too. When people say, “Setting is character,” I don’t think they’re really saying anything other than, “This setting is really vivid and active.” But I don’t think that means the setting is a character.

July 9th, 2011 / 1:48 am Matthew Simmons—

>Are writing classes really that obnoxious about calling “setting” “character”?<

Yes.

The books in the "Writing" section of my bookstore are worse, though.

Half an hour of shelving and my knickers get in a twist, and I run to HTML Giant.

July 9th, 2011 / 1:52 am Matthew Simmons—

Ha! Not when I’m God/Emperor, they won’t!

Now putting out the “Gone Out for a Cocktail” sign.

July 9th, 2011 / 2:04 am deadgod—

At that level of analysis, “character” would – or could – still have a definition narrower than ‘everything’!

Let’s let “character” = ‘the imputation or assumption of personhood’. A description of a forest, say, that tells you that the forest is ‘malevolent’ is describing a “character”, eh?, where a description that tells you what a forest looks like but scruples to make of the forest an agent or intender or feeler of passion is not describing a “character”.

July 9th, 2011 / 2:12 am MFBomb—

“Are writing classes really that obnoxious about calling “setting” “character”?”
__________

Uh, yeah. Where do you think this stuff comes from?

“Show, don’t tell” is another idiotic workshop maxim.

July 9th, 2011 / 5:35 am Bradley Sands—

Yurt the Yurt. Her parents were not very creative. Her last name is also Yurt.

July 9th, 2011 / 5:22 pm Iamnotspikelee—

A character is usually related to being
‘alive’ in some way, seen as ‘a being’. Inanimate objects can be
characters because they are projected upon, meaning, we give them
‘being’ by infusion. Hence, setting is the world, and the world is alive
in many various ways and can act-react accordingly to its own laws.
Setting is the place in which something happens, and place has
character, and therefore *is* character, feel me? Yeah, I know, kinda
dope.

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