PARTISAN REVI EW
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things regardless of an author's specifications concerning setting,
or interior, or even the physical appearance of the characters. As a
matter of fact, it is difficult for many readers to follow and assimi–
late into coherent "pictures" the details of an author's description,
particularly if it is lengthy and complex.
Sartre, in
The Psychology of Imagination,
discusses at some
length the way we form images, or mental pictures, and gives
ample evidence of how flimsy, inconstant, and lacking in details
these presentations actually are. As for the experience of reading a
novel, Sartre suggests that the images we form--our mental pic–
turing of the scenes and characters--are very few in number and
incomplete, and that they seldom occur while we are actually in
the process of reading, but tend to come
between,
when we have
put the book down and our thoughts wander over the material in
retrospect.
Having considered these things we might conclude that set–
ting, at least when presented in detail or considered by itself, is
superfluous
in
fiction--Iargely irrelevant from the modern
reader's point
0
f
view, and betraying a sloppy indulgence on the
part of the author. There are exceptions, of course, such as Tol–
stoy, who can make the minutiae of description interesting, and
Proust, who elevated nuance and rendering of place and physiog–
nomy into an art in itself, so that you must be able to appreciate
this aspect of his work or miss much of what he has to offer. In
the main, however, a novelist cannot get away with much purely
descriptive matter. Our attention span and our levels of response
are evolving further and further away from the static and toward
the linear and the fast-moving.
Our principal concern is setting, in the sense of place, land–
scape, and "atmosphere." Description in the sense of physical de–
lineation of persons, or decor, has inevitably crept into the picture
because these things are closely related to the presentation of
setting, insofar as they come under the general designation of
objective space and the representation of its contents . Setting,
though it falls under this heading, and though its concerns are
spatial, constitutes a particular category.
I would like to suggest that for novelists of a certain tempera–
ment, setting, rather than being a mere stage or background on
