Location, Location, Location.

This article first appeared on Birmingham Words in May 2004

In the opening pages of his book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres writes of the painting by the Spanish artist Goya. In this painting two antagonists are locked into a struggle each with the other, and this is the struggle that, at the outset, engages our attention. Who will win? Who will lose? We are fascinated by the struggle, mesmerised by the spectacle the two men who are at odds with each other. A thousand questions crowd into our minds. Who are they? What are they doing there? We want to know the story of their struggle. We want to know who to cheer for, who we should stake our money on.

Yet, Serres points out, there is something else going on in the picture, something that we miss because of our enthusiasm for the battle. The two figures are knee deep in something — mud, perhaps, or quicksand — and they are sinking fast. The audience, enthralled by the struggle, ‘to the point of joining in’ forgets that this is a struggle that is happening somewhere. ‘Aren’t we forgetting the world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh?’ asks Serres.

Serres’ book is not about writing fiction, but the image of the two antagonists locked into battle unaware of the quicksands into which they are sinking is one that repays some reflection for fiction writers; for it is all to easy in writing to forget the world of things themselves, to forget that, however interesting the interactions between our characters, these interactions must take place somewhere. This somewhere is not merely a pretty backdrop for the really interesting business of the relationship between the two characters, but it is the very thing that makes their meeting possible at all. There can be no meeting without a world in which the characters meet. Not only this, but a world sets up certain possibilities for those characters and closes down others, so the world determines the possibilities of the relationships that develop in the work. For example, if I am standing in an empty room and the princess who is object of my desires is standing in the same room, then I can lean over and kiss her – provided she lets me – without any great difficulty. But if I am on one side of a ravine and she is on the other, if there is no bridge, if the ravine is too wide to jump across, then the picture is different. I may want to kiss her. She may, even, want to kiss me. But there is more at stake here than the characters and their desires: there is the brute fact of being in a world where there are impediments to these desires. It is the location of the interaction that sets out the possibilities and that thus forms the entire story. Do I jump anyway and risk plummeting to my death? Do the princess and I strip naked and form a bridge out of our clothes, shimmying across the abyss quivering with desire and dread combined? If so, how is the bridge to be built? We may need tree stumps to tie our clothes to. Do we meet in the middle, having both decided to cross and have a final kiss before plunging, naked, to our mutual extinction? Or does only one of us cross. Location, that is to say, matters: stories are born out of locations. Characters are too: for there to be people, first there must be a world for them to inhabit.

The most succinct and beautiful summing-up that I know of the importance of location within fiction is to be found in Umberto Eco’s Reflections on the Name of the Rose. In the section called ‘The Novel as Cosmological Event,’ Eco begins, ‘What I mean is that to tell a story, you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details.’ From the construction of a world, he claims (and perhaps only from the construction of a world) a story can arise. The problem, Eco says, is this construction of a world. If we do this well enough, then the words will practically come on their own. And this can be done in a very systematic fashion. Let us say that there is a mountain here. Then we can put a house on the mountainside. Next we have to ask what kind of path leads up to the house, for there must once have been a path. We may also ask what the weather is like, what time of year, what time of day: the day and the night, as we all know, hold different possibilities. Is the mountainside forested or is it barren? If it is forested, what kind of trees? Each question we ask, each decision we make, the world becomes more finely wrought. The importance is to hold firmly to the world as a whole, to be precise about it. Faith may or may not be able to move mountains, but if you have put a mountain in the East of your story, then it is easy to find that lack of care has caused it to shift to the West. This is sloppiness, not faith; and even if a reader does not notice this consciously, she will pick up on it subconsciously, and an element of disbelief will creep in.

Eco writes of the painstaking labours by which he built the world of the medieval monastery that is the setting for his bestselling The Name of the Rose. What is striking is the level of care he took, the lack of ambiguity. He researched, he paced up and down his study to work out, step by step, the dimensions of his world. He knew exactly how far it was from the refectory to the cloisters, he said, so that if he had two characters engaged in conversation walking from one to the other, when they reached their destination, then their conversation would come to an end. This amount of care is something that goes unnoticed, because we take it for granted that a world is coherent and that it all fits together, but it is something that pays off in the finished work. Yes, we may be interested in what Beverley says to Sarah. We may want to know why John is giving Peter the cold-shoulder, or why Patsy is making eyes at Nigel. We are interested in human dramas, we are interested in character. But character is always rooted somewhere, and formed by a location. ‘Characters,’ Eco writes, ‘are obliged to act according to the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.’ Which means that fiction is not pure invention, as light as the breeze. It also means that, to be believable, both the author and the characters in the end will be constrained by the world in which they find themselves.