QUICK, WHAT DO THESE have in common: Middle-earth, Macondo, West Egg, Yoknapatawpha County, San Narcisso, and Narnia? They’re places you (and I) have never lived, and never will. They’re not fit for human habitation. And no matter how scrupulously detailed or sumptuously furnished, they can’t be our towns and cities and farms. Not Joyce’s Dublin nor Farrell’s Chicago nor Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown nor Carlos Fuentes’s Mexico City (since I’ve abused his title here). Don’t get me wrong—I like them. They’re great places for fiction to take us; often they are quite similar to the real deal, occasionally even better. They are, however, not the real deal.
One thing I insist on with my students is that we understand the essential artifice of the novel. It is a made-up work about made-up people in a made-up place. All of which is very real. We are asked to believe in and treat as potentially real a space that is manifestly imaginary. Headaches are guaranteed.
Consider this, on June 16, 1954, five men undertook a lugubrious trip round Dublin. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of Bloomsday, the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is set. The group included a cousin, Tom Joyce, the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young writer Anthony Cronin, the painter and publican John Ryan, and Brian O’Nolan, who wrote the celebrated newspaper column “Cruiskeen Lawn” under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen and had published a novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (on which, more later), under the name Flann O’Brien. Their goal was to recreate the wanderings of the characters in the novel. O’Nolan at least had the spirit of the thing right; although they convened in midmorning, he was already drunk, as was his wont. Each member of the little party was assigned a character from the novel that he would enact as they proceeded. Their goal was to arrive at each of the celebrated landmarks of the novel at the hour assigned by the book. They had skipped the morning’s first site, 7 Eccles Street, where main character Leopold Bloom fries himself a pork kidney. Eventually, the trip bogged down, quite sensibly, it seems to me, at Ryan’s pub. It was a project doomed to failure, of course, and for more reasons than the difficulties of trundling the sodden O’Nolan into and out of cabs. At the same time, it proved a smashing success in ways none of the principals could have foreseen or, likely, would have wished.
In the half century that followed, Bloomsday became big business, literally, providing an annual tourism bonanza. All those Americans smitten by the master must be housed, fed, and guided around the stations of their Bloom-worship. The industry had grown so large by the 1990s that Bartholomew Gill turned the occasion into a mystery, Death of a Joyce Scholar, in which a lecherous and rapacious Joycean meets a brutal but not entirely undeserved end. And for the centennial, on June 16, 2004, Dublin hosted a celebration of Bloomsday, complete with breakfast for ten thousand on Grafton Street. I don’t know how accurate the bill of fare was that day, but the mere thought of thousands of sautéing kidneys put me right off my oatmeal. But here’s the thing: those later celebrations are just as doomed to failure, on the literary level, as that first desultory attempt. I’m sure the chamber of commerce sees things differently, and while I felicitate the city with seizing the day, as it were (this is the place that held its millennium celebration in successive years rather than settle a dispute over the actual date of the Viking landing), I am unmoved on literary grounds.
Here’s my point. Even if you have street addresses, and with Joyce we do, you can’t walk where Stephen Dedalus and Bloom and Buck Mulligan and the rest walked. They’re not actual streets. Rather, they’re representations of streets. Joyce, who lived in self-imposed exile, was famous for hitting up friends and relatives for every bit of documentary evidence about his home city and the time period that interested him—old playbills, city directories, advertising circulars, newspaper cuttings, racing forms, any scrap of paper that might advance the cause of verisimilitude. He was notorious for stealing bits of conversation he picked up while eavesdropping on his father and his friends in pubs. Needless to say, he was not the most popular of John Joyce’s children among the elder’s cronies. You can think of him as a dutiful and slightly obsessive biographer. Yet he differs from biographers in that he turns all that material inward. If the goal of a biography or history is to recreate the objective reality of its subject, the novel’s goal is to create the subjective reality of its object. Joyce says he wants to create the conscience of his race, yet veers to the fictive when he invents characters to inhabit his simulacrum of Dublin rather than tracing the activity of real persons. He openly rejects the documentary options—biography, history, journalism—in favor of the made-up world of Bloom and Molly and Stephen. His interest isn’t truly in recreating the Dublin but in creating a Dublin, which his characters can inhabit. What he does is to trick the eye, to offer enough detail to cause readers to believe that they can see this Dublin, or rather, to offer enough detail that readers will supply the rest. He manages this nifty trick, as most writers do, with numerous specifics, in his case, street names, actual shops, genuine addresses, the National Library. It’s pretty convincing, even if short on hard description. We experience that “reality” subjectively, from inside characters’ thoughts. Stephen hears the stones crunching under his boots as he walks along the strand in the Proteus episode; the men in the office feel the wind rush through in Aeolus; Bloom sees and hears the fireworks display while watching young Gerty McDowell in Nausicaa. Yet by definition it can’t be a complete rendering of the city. Such a thing would get in the way of our focus on the people in the novel. You will process more sensory information about your own town in a ten-minute walk than you can about Dublin by reading the entire 768 pages of Ulysses.
It’s all rather like Marianne Moore’s line about poetry creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Novelists create imaginary cities and imaginary persons with real crises, real issues, real problems.
The nurse will now dispense aspirin to all who feel overcome.
How imaginary? How much do you want?
Take the obvious situation. We know, for instance, that there is no Middle-earth. You can scour the real earth and not find the Shire or Rivendell or Isengard or Mordor. Many apologists for the novel will say the Shire stands for England and Mordor for Germany, the whole geography representing the struggle against Nazi domination in World War II. This is undoubtedly true. J. R. R. Tolkien has drawn a world strongly suggestive of his own. The important thing here, however, is that it is not his own. That world is not anyone’s except the characters’ in the novels.
So, what, it doesn’t count?
Not at all. In fact, it’s entirely what does matter. The responsibility of setting is to the characters in the story. Their world doesn’t have to be ours, but it absolutely has to be theirs. Consider Manhattan filled with hobbits, wizards, fairies, and fighting Uruk-hai. Orcs swarming up Wall Street, dwarves in the basements of skyscrapers. Now, that’s just stupid. Sounds like the cheesiest kind of horror movie, where you laugh all the way. Or in the cornfields of Nebraska. No, Frodo, Gandalf, and company need their own landscapes, their own geography. Epic romance needs mythic space. On the other hand, that same mythic landscape would look preposterous inhabited by Henry James characters. Isabel Archer in Isingard? Milly Theale in Mordor? I think not. On the other hand, Saruman in Isingard is just right. Or Sauron in Mordor. Here’s the description of the entrance to that bleak land.
Across the mouth of the pass, from cliff to cliff, the Dark Lord had built a rampart of stone. In it there was a single gate of iron, and upon its battlements sentinels paced unceasingly. Beneath the hills on either side the rock was bored into a hundred caves and maggot-holes; there a host of orcs lurked, ready at a signal to issue forth like black ants going to war. None could pass the Teeth of Mordor and not feel their bite, unless they were summoned by Sauron, or knew the secret passwords that would open the Moran-non, the black gate of his land.
That ought to be forbidding enough for anyone. Notice the signs of rigidity, militarism, and destruction: mouth, Teeth, bite, maggot-holes, orcs, black ants, battlements, sentinels, army, host, Dark Lord, black gate. And in just one paragraph! This is a place of death-in-life, a place without freedom or individuality or, evidently, humanity. Tolkien doesn’t miss a trick, nor should he. As a scholar of ancient languages, he is intimately familiar with both the larger structures and the nuances of the epic romance, the really big story of great events and great heroes. In the Ring trilogy, he harnesses every one of them, including, as here, the aura of complete evil surrounding the Other, the Enemy. Now this is clearly not a description of setting that can work in very many types of novel, but it does have its special use. Frodo and Sam have to have the bejeebers scared out of them at the enormity of the task confronting them, and readers need to grasp the hopelessness and peril of their attempt. From this one glimpse alone, and there are a number more to follow, all parties get the message.
So, imaginary, even if borrowed from real life, whatever that is. But also functional in their own context. Sounds like we’re closing in on a maxim, doesn’t it? Here, then, is the Law of Bogus Locales: Places in a work of fiction are never real but must behave as if real.
And just what are the implications of this law? First, the made-upness. Any setting in a work of fiction is an imaginative construct and distinct from any actual place, even when it looks just like it. Novelists, if they use real places as models, select, limit, add to, modify, and sometimes just plain falsify those places. They don’t include whole towns, whole streets, just as they are. Why? For one thing, the volume of information would prove overwhelming for readers. Novels would be three times longer, and nobody wants that. Some writers, chiefly the great realists and naturalists, pride themselves on the use of exact details of real locales. Gustave Flaubert, for instance, in L’éducation sentimentale, intends for readers to experience specifically the Paris he knows—the sights, the sounds, the smells of a real city. Joyce follows his example with his Dublin in Ulysses. Neither, however, is the real city, the whole city, and nothing but the city. The selection of details—including these, excluding those—turns these “actual” cities into artistic constructs. Good thing, too. Almost no one, even its greatest admirers (I speak as one), would wish Ulysses longer than it is.
Besides, with indiscriminate detail comes loss of focus. If Fitzgerald included everything on the drive in from West Egg to New York, our attention wouldn’t be drawn to the three things that matter: the ash heaps, Wilson’s garage, and the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Those three items matter; the rest does not.
And second, internal reality. One of the requirements of a work of literature, if it is to be aesthetically satisfying, is wholeness. That comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, and pretty much everyone who has offered a comment since him has been onboard. Part of wholeness is having appropriate places for characters to exist and to undertake actions. In general, fabulous characters and experiences are best suited to fabulous landscapes. When the children in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe slip through the wardrobe into Narnia, they have effectively left the world of the mundane (if Nazi bombing raids forcing them to leave their home can be considered mundane) for the fantastic. Witches? Talking lions? Centaurs? Only on the far side of the wardrobe. On the other hand, the wholly mundane nature of the American prairie suits the characters and actions of Willa Cather’s novels. The very nature of the stories she wants to tell requires places that are not merely ordinary but very specific in nature. The tale of the passing of the West that she tells so economically in A Lost Lady, for instance, requires farmland and a small town on what was once the frontier. When she moves her tale farther west to New Mexico in Death Comes for the Archbishop, the type of narrative changes to one of larger scope both geographically and historically. Those places in either Cather or Lewis work because they offer an internal consistency, a wholeness, within the reality of the novel.
In part, their “reality” is our doing. Readers participate in the creation of these fictional worlds, filling in the gaps in description, seizing on details, making the possible world actual in imagination, agreeing, for a little while, to inhabit the uninhabitable. I’ve spoken elsewhere of reading as an interaction between two imaginations, that of the writer and that of the reader. Nowhere is this more important than in settings. Novelists cannot possibly provide every detail of their imagined worlds, nor would readers thank them if they did. So readers are obliged—and undertake willingly—to accept the realities on offer, even enriching them when necessary. We have our limits, of course. We won’t accept shoddily made imaginary worlds or logical inconsistencies that occur through error or authorial laziness. But give us a well-made world with laws we can understand, even if they aren’t our laws, and we’re a pretty happy bunch. After all, those worlds take us out of our own for a few hours, and then bring us back again—and isn’t that what we’re seeking?