Someone may ask me, what about how the setting is handled in modern fiction or postmodern fiction. It is true that it is possible to write a novel like Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar that deals with wordplay and has no setting, so to speak, or something by William S Burroughs (Soft Machine) that could be accused of something similar, or praised, and that setting in someone who shows the move from modernism to postmodernism like Beckett (The Unnameable, How It is) is almost done away with but these are the exceptions and while they are good to keep in mind, they need not be the example one wants to follow unless it comes naturally to one.
From setting in a short story that is usually just one, or in a drama that follows the Aristotelian unities, we see setting expand all over the globe in a novel like Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne.
I used several words along with setting and it may be nice to give brief definitions of them:
Setting is time, place, space, where, and when. Space is inclusive of the other words I used like foreshadowing, atmosphere, mood, tone, and (usually social) milieu/environment. But what do these words mean?
Setting can be integral or backdrop too. Egdon Heath comes to mind. It creates an atmosphere in which man is only "slighted and enduring" but not colossal like it, and that is why it matters, and can be and is very "Atmospheric". It may seem like backdrop but it is integral, more integral to Hardy's Wessex and philosophy of life than his characters, to put it more clearly.
"It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—“Bruaria.” Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. “Turbaria Bruaria”—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to the district. “Overgrown with heth and mosse,” says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred to—themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change."
We see Hardy use a word in there that was used earlier for setting, landscape. That is description that is all about atmosphere. Atmosphere is used interchangeably with mood, by many critics, but mood is probably more specific and more given to change faster. We find mood in the Phantom of the Opera. So clearly. It is there also in Emile Zola's Nana.
"It was the evening on which MM. Debienne and Poligny, the managers of the Opera, were giving a last gala performance to mark their retirement. Suddenly the dressing-room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half-a-dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after "dancing" Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment to "run through" the speech which she was to make to the resigning managers, looked around angrily at the mad and tumultuous crowd. It was little Jammes--the girl with the tip-tilted nose, the forget-me-not eyes, the rose-red cheeks and the lily-white neck and shoulders--who gave the explanation in a trembling voice: "It's the ghost!" And she locked the door. Sorelli's dressing-room was fitted up with official, commonplace elegance. A pier-glass, a sofa, a dressing-table and a cupboard or two provided the necessary furniture. On the walls hung a few engravings, relics of the mother, who had known the glories of the old Opera in the Rue le Peletier; portraits of Vestris, Gardel, Dupont, Bigottini. But the room seemed a palace to the brats of the corps de ballet, who were lodged in common dressing-rooms where they spent their time singing, quarreling, smacking the dressers and hair-dressers and buying one another glasses of cassis, beer, or even rhum, until the call-boy's bell rang. Sorelli was very superstitious. She shuddered when she heard little Jammes speak of the ghost, called her a "silly little fool" and then, as she was the first to believe in ghosts in general, and the Opera ghost in particular, at once asked for details: "Have you seen him?" "As plainly as I see you now!" said little Jammes, whose legs were giving way beneath her, and she dropped with a moan into a chair. Thereupon little Giry--the girl with eyes black as sloes, hair black as ink, a swarthy complexion and a poor little skin stretched over poor little bones--little Giry added: "If that's the ghost, he's very ugly!" "Oh, yes!" cried the chorus of ballet-girls. And they all began to talk together. The ghost had appeared to them in the shape of a gentleman in dress-clothes, who had suddenly stood before them in the passage, without their knowing where he came from. He seemed to have come straight through the wall."
This famous semi- introduction in Phantom of the Opera starts off rather normally in mood or its absence in a light-hearted way but shifts to one of unease, disquiet, and irritation even, which however presages something unsettling, foreshadowing the end of the novel. where the mundane opera house is transformed to a tragic place for a "corpse." A Corpse of a Ghost!
And tone? Jane Austen is full of the exquisite use of tone in Pride and Prejudice and so is Henry James in The Ambassadors, and both of social milieu, as is Tolstoy in War and Peace.
This has been a nice explanatory canter to expand on yesterday's note, but to fully understand me you must have read the writers and novels I refer to.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/122/122-h/122-h.htm#link2H_4_0003 (Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy , from Chapter 1 Book !)
http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/digi075.pdf (Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux translator of this version unknown to me, Chapter 1)
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