Where Am I?

I’m genuinely interested to hear other readers’ responses to this query about your experience of visualising fictional settings…

Writers often go to great detail in their description of settings – the territory, place, town, building in which their story takes place. Some of us value the depth and the care they take, although I recall from my teaching days that students quite often complained that ‘there’s too much description’; they wanted to get on with the plot, and I realised that in our primarily visual age, with its action-packed plots, they were frustrated by the slow pace of such passages in a novel. But, how does your imagination work when you engage with an author’s descriptive passages?

I almost invariably find that my imagination superimposes the setting of a novel located in an unfamiliar place onto a landscape which I am already familiar with whenever it can: it will use my home town, school campus, or holiday destination I’m familiar with, and merge or blend in the details as and where possible. In other words, somehow, the stored stock of images and memories of a whole lifetime is being called upon to configure the setting for a novel or story… Sometimes I’ll be conscious that this is happening, and other times once I’ve built up a description in my mind, I’ll suddenly be reminded that I’ve modelled it subconsciously on where I went to school, or something like that.

This doesn’t always happen: I don’t have personal stock images of the Antarctic or the Sahara, to pick a couple of examples, but even then my imagination will try and use smaller stock images to fit descriptions of buildings or rooms within such settings, for instance.

I’ve realised I have no recollection of discussing this with anyone. Do I have a lazy imagination, or does everyone’s work in a similar fashion?

The staircase (continued): Character

This is the next level in terms of depth of engagement with a text: there are various questions to consider. Is a character convincing (if the writer is writing a realist novel)? If it’s a fantasy, then the criteria may be rather different, but somewhere along the line issues of plausibility or credibility come in to play as necessary to convince us to stay with a particular text. We need to be interested in a character’s progress and development – hence the popularity of the bildungsroman, for example. That’s what keeps us interested in Jane Eyre, in Villette, in some of Somerset Maugham‘s novels, to name a few.

This is also the next level of analysis: we can consider not only the individual characters, but also the relationships between them, and whether we find their interactions convincing. We may encounter such things as the development of romance, feuding, issues of loyalty and betrayal, exploration of friendships… We will also have our own response to specific characters – we may like or dislike them, want certain things for them in terms of the plot development: they take on lives of their own, independent of the author, even though they are the creations of that author. This can lead to us disliking the ending of a novel because it does not turn out the way we think it should have done…

For an illustration, I turn to two of my favourite characters, Holmes and Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The relationship between them is quite sketchy, as are their individual characters in general. But there is a relationship, starting off from an engineered encounter, introductions and their negotiating the terms on which they will share rooms. As the stories progress, we see through small details the trust that develops between them, the things they like and dislike in each other, the differences between them. Watson is twice married in the stories, and moves out of 221b Baker Street; he has a medical practice of his own at one point, and yet what we might find rather unconvincing is the ease with which his long-suffering wife allows him to join Holmes on any and every caper when he is asked… Holmes’ response is very touching on the couple of occasions where he realises he has overstepped the mark, and exposed his loyal friend to too great a danger. Though the detective stories are the most important thing, as readers we are glad to meet the pair again, in some familiar surroundings, but about to embark on a new adventure. Incidentally, this is probably why I do not like the new modern takes on Holmes, but that’s another matter.

Looking at a couple of more serious examples, from a novel I loved to teach – To Kill A Mockingbird – we can see how skilfully Harper Lee uses her characters in the book. We have the complex relationship between brother and sister, parent and child relationship between them and their single parent father, and then more generally the whole range of relationships between adults and children is put under the microscope: Dill’s sad and fantasised relationship with his father, the strange relationship between Boo and Arthur Radley, Boo’s protectiveness towards the children, Mayella’s appalling relationship with her father which is shockingly laid bare at the trial…

Because we are people too, we can live vicariously through the characters of a novel, and this seems to me why the characters are the make or break element in the success of a book: if there’s no-one who speaks to us, to interest us, to grab our attention and have us interested in their fate – imaginary though it is – why would we bother?

The staircase (continued): Plot

Plot is story. A series of events is introduced, developed and played out; there is often suspense and tension to keep the reader engaged and involved. There is a denouement – full or partial according to when the novel was written – Victorians liked to tidy everything up, modern writers are not so bothered, or are even deliberately bloody-minded, and go for open endings.

It’s useful to think about what drives our first reading, especially if you are one of those readers like me, who comes back again and again to his favourite books. First time round, plot draws us along: what happens next? How will it end? And such questions shape our initial response, at least. Was it a good story? Did we like the way it ended? Think about – as I suggested in the last post – the way we sometimes disagree with the way a writer ends her/his novel, based on our interpretation as we read, usually of characters. And if we feel the ending is wrong, surely the next thing we must ask ourselves is, OK, so why did the author choose to end it like that?

Re-readers will know what’s coming next. Usually we will retain at least an outline of the plot in our memories, and will be able to recall how the story ends. This means that we are not so plot-driven second, or nth time round, and can have a different focus to our reading, indeed we can deliberately choose a specific focus if we want to or need to (for study purposes perhaps). We will pay more attention to other details, perhaps notice many small things that we glossed over on that first, plot-driven reading.

The Sherlock Holmes stories come to mind here. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read them over the past fifty years. Usually, I don’t recall the ending until I’m well into a story, so that the pleasure is not ruined by knowing who did it straight away.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum, when we consider a vast novel like War and Peace, of Vassily Grossman‘s twentieth century masterpiece, Life and Fate. Real and fictitious events interwoven unfold against a huge canvas; many different plot strands are interconnected, and it’s often hard to keep track of all the threads; sometimes we are given lists of characters in an appendix so we can refer to them when we get confused. Then we are glad when a particular, or a favourite strand re-emerges after having disappeared for some time, and continuity is re-established.

Teaching Literature: the staircase

I used to use a metaphor, the novel as a staircase, when I was teaching English Literature. It’s an idea I think students found helpful, and it works, with differing levels of sophistication, at all the stages of teaching. It’s a small staircase: it has only three stairs. The bottom step is labelled ‘plot‘, the second ‘character‘ and the top one ‘themes and ideas‘. If you’re an ex-student of mine, you can stop reading now and go get a cup of tea.

The staircase offers a sequence for exploring a novel (or indeed any work of literature that tells a story); it also offers a way of showing students how to develop their analytical skills and move from lower to higher marks and grades.

Plot is the bottom level; without it you can’t have a story. If you don’t know the plot, can’t understand it, sequence it and summarise it, you aren’t going to get very far in an examination. If you have plot secure in your mind, you will be able to write some sense and get some marks.

Character is the next step up: you need characters in a story, you need to know who they are and how they interact, and understand their personalities to an extent. Secure understanding here enables a student to access the next stages in a mark scheme, and consequently higher marks.

The top step is the themes and ideas: what the writer has to say and wants her/his readers to be thinking about, reflecting on as they are reading. As a reader, you can have an opinion about these ideas, and it doesn’t have to be the same as the writer’s. The more you can analyse at this level, the more chance you have of accessing the very highest grades on offer.

The idea isn’t rocket science, and I never claimed it was; it took a number of years to evolve into what I’ve presented above. It worked well with a lot of the texts I taught, particularly at GCSE, (although I introduced the concept in outline much earlier), such as To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth. Now I find myself unconsciously applying the model to other novels or plays I’m reading: it offers a useful scaffold or framework for exploring a text.

Lesson over. For those who would like more detail, I’ll write more fully in upcoming posts. Who knows, someone may find this stuff useful; in my retirement, I no longer use it.