Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr: Lesson 16 Part two

Setting

Image by Daniele Buso on Unsplash

Setting: Let’s talk about Stones for Ibarra and so we see how setting operates in story. Like point of view, through whose eyes we see the story, setting is mightily more complicated in fiction than where the story takes place.

To place us again for part two of this lesson¹:

Eudora Welty advises² how “Place” is key in our stories:

“Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel’s progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Every story would be another, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Imagine Swan’s Way laid in London, The Magic Mountain in Spain, or Green Mansions in the Black Forest. The very notion of moving a novel brings rudder havoc to the mind and affections than would a century’s alteration in its time. It is only too easy to conceive that a bomb that could destroy all trace of places as we know them, in life and through books, could also destroy all feelings as we know them, so irretrievably and so happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor, bound up in place. From the dawn of man’s imagination, place has stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where the god abided and spoke from if ever he spoke.

Feelings are bound up in place ….”

Before we move deeply into how setting works, we need to talk about the over-used advice: Write what you know. This advice is not about direct autobiography—or for goodness sakes—catharsis. It’s all about risk—the key to invention.

Milan Kundera³:

Welty⁴ helps us understand the risks we encounter when we invent and write close to the bone:

In Stones for Ibarra, as in many good stories, setting is tied to conflict. Let’s look at how that works in this novel— and how we can learn by studying what Harriet Doerr did.