Re: Non-specific settings
- From: mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mary K. Kuhner)
- Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:52:53 +0000 (UTC)
In article <1i53mup.ne8bo51p98ruzN%green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Catja Pafort <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The whole lengthy discussion has made me wonder.
I like a story to be settled in time and place, the feeling that *this*
story could only have happened to *these* characters in *that* world,
but now I wonder: is there a time and place when being less specific
would be an advantage to the reader? A sketchier world, more everyman
characters - under what circumstances, for which stories would you
prefer _not_ to have them pinpointed down?
Of all the productions of _Richard III_ I've seen, the one that
impressed me the most was deliberately unstuck in space and time.
Costumes were from assorted periods, and the stage was mostly bare with
occasional props, again from assorted periods (at Richard's coronation
they released bunches of red, white, and blue balloons). It had the
effect of focusing attention starkly on the central dynamic of
Richard and his ability to coerce or entice others into his evil.
(It helped that the actor playing Richard was terrific.)
The next year the same theater (Oregon Shakespeare Festival) tried the
same approach with _Hamlet_, which to my tastes came out as a muddy,
confused, dismal failure.
I don't know why this worked for me, but it did. I think there could be
a written equivalent. I guess it wasn't unhinged in character, though,
only in time and place.
I'm finding it much easier to think of theater examples of this than
written ones. It may be that a whole novel is too long to be unstuck in
time and place, and I don't read that much short fiction anymore.
Another good theater one was OSF's production of _The Firebugs_, where
the lack of setting was definitely being used to make the characters
Everyman, and in fact to underscore the complicity of the audience.
(They did it in the Black Swan, a tiny theater, and I had the pleasure
of being in the front row, so that when the chorus was pouring fuel to
burn the place down they were pouring it on my toes. The play is
about peoples' failure to act, and having faux gasoline poured on my
toes--and not acting--was tremendously powerful.)
Hm. That suggests that if you were looking for *complicity* as the
effect your story would produce, you might want to go for
underspecifying setting and character. I've seen some interactive
fiction (text adventures) that work this way. Andrew Plotkin's
"Dust" comes to mind. Its setting needs to be specific enough for the
mechanical gameplay to work, but is deliberately very generic: the
protagonist's apartment needs to be "like" the player's experience of
their own college life, I think, and generic helps.
Again, it's hard to imagine at novel length.
There may also be a choice here: you could evoke Everyman by being
concrete and specific about very ordinary experiences, or by
being more general and vague.
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxx
.
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