week 2

Week 2 Lecture 1

Setting and Its Impact on Character

This week we see settings ranging from Iran to the Deep South of the United States, and that is merely when it comes to location.

Setting includes so many ideas beyond locale. Often when asked to describe the setting of a story, people make that mistake. Setting, as we see from Foster, includes time, season, weather, and countless other smaller ingredients. By defining the time and place for a particular story, we are already narrowing the world and its possibilities. One starts to make assumptions about race, gender, religion, wealth, vehicles, jobs, politics, war, peace, love, etc.

As you read the selections this week consider the following:

· How the setting creates a feeling or atmosphere, both for you and for the characters in the story.

· How the setting and the action of the story work together.

· How the setting contributes to understanding the important ideas and themes in the story.

Making a few minor adjustments to the story may cause the events to appear unbelievable.  For instance, the end of the twentieth century, versus, the beginning of the twentieth century.  What do you think about changing the race of a character?  Would the story shift….how drastically?

The setting of a story often influences the action, or at least works together with what the characters in the story are doing.  A foggy street in East Berlin is much better for the action in a spy thriller.  A rocky landscape on Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light years from Earth, suggests the action you would expect in science fiction much better than any typical street in the United States.

Character and setting are often dismissed by readers as just another word for scenery. Add some rain. Add some wind. Tell me what time of day it is. Tell me exactly where this person is standing. Is our black woman accidentally walking past a bar filled with angry members of the Ku Klux Klan? Is our German lover a Nazi? Is our American Soldier storming into a mosque to capture a member of Al Qaeda? Look how much that fine-tuning of setting did to the tales whose plots and characters you still do not know.

Consider this: if I kept telling you more and more specific things about the setting, would you begin to limit the possibilities for character? What if I told you our black woman is walking past the Klansmen on the night President Eisenhower forced Alabama to integrate its schools? Are you getting a more limited sense of possibilities for this character? Do you have a better sense of who she is and what could take place in the story than if I merely told you she is a woman in America? Bare in mind, we still do not know her age or what she is doing here.

That is only half of the equation. We were generating our notion of character by using setting as our springboard. Authors often do this. They want to tell the story of a time and place. William Faulkner, with the exception of much of his Hollywood screenwriting, was a man who devoted his writing to the South. Why? Because that is where he was from. Marjane Sartrapi is writing about personal experience, as well. “Write what you know” often proves to serve writers best.

However, what if someone has come up with a character first. The personality is entirely fleshed out. The physical description is so perfect that you swear you could describe the character to a police sketch artist and the author would beam with pride when she saw the outcome. But where and when do they exist? The world around a character determines a character’s fate as much as the events of the plot.

Each of the stories we are reading this week present characters in very specific settings. Think about the ripple effect of sliding the time forward or backward when reading each of these tales. Spin the globe beneath the characters’ feet a few hundred miles in any direction. Alter the weather. Lower the sun. Is the person the same? Can the story be the same?

Week 2 Lecture 2

Spiegelman and Sartrapi – Graphic Novels as Short Stories

I have tried simply referring to “Prisoner on the Hell Planet:  A Case History” and “The Veil” as “Graphic Short Stories.” The end result is that people assume they are either lewd or violent. Thus, until I come up with something better, “Graphic Novels as Short Stories” will have to do.

When it comes to Art Spiegelman and Marjane Sartrapi, we are dealing with very different artists and very different writers. The amazing things about writers who have decided to embrace the visual form is that their first pages – even their first “cells” (the official term for a comic book or graphic novel frame; it can be spelled with one or two l’s) – tell us so much. Reading these stories is entirely different than reading a standard “prose tale.” There are certainly those of us who look at the first page of a book and make our judgments based on the size of the font, the length of the first paragraph, the first word that catches our eye. It’s true but is that judgment nearly as drastic as the one you made when you flipped to the first page of or saw the first cell of “The Veil?”

When it comes to graphic novels, authors are given the opportunity to juxtapose words and images at every turn. Though it is next to impossible to read Spiegelman or Sartrapi’s words at the very moment when you are looking at the image, the experience is as simultaneous as possible. The eye shifts back and forth from the images to the words. We do not simply read the words, then look at the picture, then move on. There is an ebb and flow, a back and forth. Image and language almost dance with one another. They are inseparable. 

Art Spiegelman In "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History," Art Spiegelman describes in horrific detail, through pictures, his failed effort to overcome his mother's suicide. This dark, gloomy, depressing cartoon enables Spiegelman to express his feelings of loneliness, doubt, fear, anger, and blame.  This was also an attempt to express the lack of closure. It is a descriptive essay.

Art Spiegelman also has another story in our collection. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize Winning graphic novel Maus. Spiegelman set out to tell a true story: his father’s surviving a concentration camp. When Spiegelman sat down to write the story, he drew a graphic novel where the Jews were mice, the Nazis were cats, and a variety of animals represented the other parties of World War II. When people asked Art Spiegelman how he came to this artistic conclusion, he responded that telling his story with these images presented the reality more effectively than concrete descriptions or realistic drawings. To Spiegelman, what took place during the holocaust was so beyond the realms of comprehension and description, the only storytelling method that sufficed was to step as far away from reality as possible.

In Spiegelman’s “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” we have a son recently released from a mental hospital, his mother, who is a Holocaust survivor, and Art’s father, who he refers to as the “murderer,” in a week where we are studying setting and its impact on character. Can you extract these characters from their setting? Are the characters the setting? Is the setting the main character? It is difficult to tell. 

Marjane Sartrapi Marjane Sartrapi is also writing and drawing about the Middle East. Persepolis, the graphic novel from which “The Veil” is an excerpt, was made into an Academy Award nominated animated film only a few years ago. The impact of her story and the way it has brought the female Iranian experience to light for the rest of the world is astounding.

In this novel, we have a more traditional plot taking place. It is also a work of non-fiction, but, rather than being a journalistic account, “The Veil” andPersepolis as a whole are Sartrapi’s memoir. What Sartrapi does so masterfully in this brief piece is present a slice of world history as seen through the eyes of a child. This first person account leads us through the story and also addresses us directly. We are not only spoken to through the narration that borders the top of each cell, young Marjane addresses us directly through dialogue.

The entire tale moves expertly between narration and dialogue, using each sparingly but providing the reader with precisely the right about of information. I doubt if you typed up the text from “The Veil” if it would be much longer than a page. And yet, there is so much more happening here than a page worth of story. This elaborate plot explains, through images and words, a key moment in Marjane Satrapi’s life and the ripple effects of this historic event on her friends and multiple generations of her family. That is an amazing thing to accomplish with a page worth of words. We truly get to know this character. We travel through her life. We follow her through her dreams. We meet God! All that in six pages. Imagine if this story were only the words: think of the impact it would lose.

Look at the first two cells of the first page. Cell one: we meet the individual. Cell two: we see how the veil obscures that individual’s identity. Could that have possibly been explained more effectively with language? Consider how even in these first two cells we see the impact of the veil on Marjane Sartrapi. This individualistic voice will guide us through the tale, yet, by the time we reach only the second image, we have already lost visual track of which of these young girls is speaking to us – purely due to the uniformity of the veil. As we read graphic novel short stories, particularly ones that move from cell to cell as Sartrapi does, it is vital that we keep track of the juxtaposition of one image to the next and the story elements that juxtaposition emphasizes. We are not merely dealing with the words and images; we are dealing with their connective relationship to one another as we proceed through the tale.

Week 2 Lecture 3

William Faulkner and Anne Beattie 

William Faulkner – “A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner is considered by some to be the greatest American author of the 20th Century. Bare in mind, I am going to point that out about more than one author in our class: that accolade is not reserved for Mr. Faulkner. But being in the running for greatest author of any century is worthy of note. He was born in Mississippi and -- even though he traveled the world and spent a considerable chunk of his life as a screenwriter of hits like The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not – he died in Mississippi. Faulkner’s home was the South. He knew it well. It was the setting of nearly every piece of fiction he wrote. Though that may seem narrow and one might wonder why he didn’t write more about his experiences in other parts of the world, his descriptions and use of language were effective enough to win him two Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Peace Prize. 

I long debated whether to include this story in the madness category or whether it worked best in the setting category. Though this story has great relevance to our illness and madness unit, ultimately it seems the most powerful literary element in Faulkner’s tale is setting and its demonstration of emotion and character. “A Rose for Emily” is such a rich tale, giving readers the perfect insight into the power of Faulkner’s writing and what an effective storyteller he was.

Think of the timeline of this story. “A Rose for Emily” is what is referred to as a “frame narrative.” The story starts in one time period at one location. We bounce through multiple time periods and events working our way back to that original location. Despite its many events and the order and manner in which Faulkner reveals Emily’s story to the reader, the plot remains clear and the portrait of his title character only increases with detail. We start knowing virtually nothing about this woman. By the end, she could not be a more specific character. This does not mean there aren’t endless questions about Emily, her motives, or her lifestyle. Of course there are! But would you ever confuse this character with anyone else?

The mystery character is the narrator. To some extent this voice sounds as if he speaks for the town. He uses collective pronouns that seem to express not only his opinion, but also the communal mindset of Jefferson. This rendition of the story, according to our narrator, is not merely his account: it’s the tale a group has agreed upon. But why does Faulkner use this technique? Why not simply tell the story from a third person omniscient point of view? Why not simply tell the story from a specific character’s point of view? Could it be that using this collective narrating voice was Faulkner’s expert way of turning the entire town into one voice?

Setting is obviously crucial to this story, as it is to any tale. Faulkner’s familiarity with the South and his ability to paint pictures of locations with extreme specificity bring the story to life. One of our essay topics will be about setting and character in “A Rose for Emily,” thus you can explore the topic more there. But this specific town and time tell us such a great deal about who this character was. She is dead at the start of the story. We get to hear so little from her own mouth when we journey into her past. And yet, through the setting and a couple of distinct moments this person jumps off the page as a rich character full of life. Consider how much setting breathed life into this character.

Anne Beattie – “Snow” From Faulkner’s Jefferson to Anne Beattie’s home in the country: what a grand shift of setting between these two tales. What starkly different authors with surprisingly different writing styles. 

With Joe Sacco, it seemed as if he were writing a travel brochure. Here, with Anne Beattie, we have a directly addressed account of a relationship, where the narrator blasts the recipient over his ideas of their relationship and what took place between them. Rather than exploring the elaborate plot of “A Rose for Emily” or “The Veil,” rather than revealing a tragic part of the world like “Refugeeland,” Anne Beattie has used a continuous stream of descriptive settings to explain the contents of her heart.

We must always consider what the author is attempting to do with his or her story. Telling a tale is not always the only point. If I were to ask you to summarize the plot of “Snow,” I wouldn’t be surprised if you shrugged or if you had the opposite reaction and ended up giving me a summary that is longer than Ms. Beattie’s mere page and a half tale. But what were her intentions? Answering that question seems to get to the point of “Snow” far more than asking what took place. The intentions have far more to do with what “Snow” is about than the events do. Yet look at the way in which Anne Beattie chose to express those intentions. She could have ranted and raved about emotions. She could have described the man who is no longer here. Instead, she opted to use setting to express everything. She even shows the disagreement between the narrator and her former lover by pointing out how he would have recounted the setting differently. Why not tell us what he thought of the relationship? Why not explain to us why he left? Why not give us the dialogue from the final argument between these two lovers?

Could it be because that this account answers far more than a direct retelling of the relationship ever could demonstrate?

It’s a bizarre story, experimental even. But it has a certainly loveliness to it. The sentence -- “Even now, saying ‘snow’ my lips move so that they kiss the air” (Charters 75) – carries so much weight. What a perfect way to encapsulate remembering this particular lover. What a beautiful way to describe that there is no one for her to kiss. What a masterful way to have a character speak about setting to demonstrate where she once was and where she is now.

Last modified: Tuesday, November 22, 2016, 8:52 AM