The clomping literalism of character
(copied over from Bluesky for ease of future reference)
Arguing about worldbuilding! Genuinely one of my favorite discourses. Particularly delightful that it is being kicked off by Vajra Chandrasekera, whose Saint of Bright Doors I recently read and liked and is secretly all about world-building and who gets to do it, and why. 1/
This isn’t at all to say that I agree with his take on worldbuilding. He is firmly in what I’m going to call the writerist camp (he[1] frames it as “writers” versus worldbuilders, which rather gives away the game), who accuse worldbuilders of both misguided literalism and totalitarian politics. 2/
[1] Chandrasekera clarifies in a reply it wasn’t his juxtaposition, but one made in Kehe’s article.
https://vajra.me/2023/05/06/the-lone-and-level-sands/
Now it’s not as if worldbuilding is immune to clomping literalism. Nor is it innocent of fashy/neoliberal/techno teleology. But the writerist argument that worldbuilding *necessarily* drowns in literalism and edges always towards neoliberal climate nihilism/EA long-termism beggars belief. 3/
The argument generally involves some combination of tight critiques of particular writers (Tolkien, Asimov, etc) and then a broad gesture towards clompy pop worldbuilding (GRRM or Sanderson) and these days, a zoom in on Torment-Nexus-building tech guy to See What Worldbuilding Hath Wrought. 4/
Each of these critiques has merit. When assembled into an indictment of worldbuilding qua worldbuilding, it becomes a strawman. To condemn all of worldbuilding, you ought to be going after the strongest cases: this IMO means Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, a book which sadly no one has read. 5/
But let’s set all that aside. What reading Chandrasekera’s essay crystallized for me was how, even as the writerists fling well-earned stones at Asimov’s plate glass house, they remain blissfully unaware of how vulnerable their own traditions are to a parallel set of critiques. 6/
My friend, you are writing *novels.* Novels, a genre whose history is decidedly historical: a lineage that even in its most expansive definition reaches back perhaps twenty centuries in a handful of places, and in the specific tradition writers are working in today is not three centuries old. 7/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel#18th-century_novels
First off, the novel as a historical fact is terrifyingly contiguous with advent and spread of techno-imperialism. If what we’re doing here is picking out problematic examples and waggling our eyebrows meaningfully, I am afraid the writerists are going to find themselves on the backfoot. 8/
But the second, more interesting point to make is that the modern novel itself has an extremely finely honed and clompingly obsessive realism all its own; one that even the most fanciful practitioners of the form adhere to with a loyalty which sf/s worldbuilding cannot match. 9/
Moorcock’s self-explication is useful here. He contrasts his work against worldbuilding by analogy to the pathetic fallacy, beloved of the Brontës, of having weather reflect mood. 10/
“I only invent what’s necessary* to explain the mood of a character. I haven’t thought about an imaginary world’s social security system; I don’t know the gross national product of Melniboné….That’s why I don’t see myself as a worldbuilder…If the story doesn’t need it, it’s not there.” 11/
https://locusmag.com/2014/12/michael-moorcock-multiverses/
(*And isn’t such a reduction of writing to the “necessary” simply another example of the Eurocentric disdain for ornateness Chandrasekera rightfully skewers elsewhere? https://vajra.me/2020/12/16/a-murder-of-darlings/)
He’s describing worldbuilding as writerly device, always harnessed to story. But read carefully: what is the purpose of the story? To explain character. This use of world to explore internalities of character is not some neutral “need” of writing. Rather it is, like the novel itself, historical. 12/
He’s describing here world-building as a writerly device, always harnessed to the purpose of the story. But read carefully: what is the purpose of the story? To explain character. This use of world, of writing, to explore the internalities of character is not some neutral or universal aim of writing. It is rather, much like the novel itself, the product of a particular historical movement. 12
Ada Palmer’s essay on Shakespeare’s Henry IV captures a pivotal moment in this history, when “character” went from inborn qualities inevitably revealed to the tabula rasa, developmental psychological sense Locke more or less invented and through which we still understand it today. 13/
https://reactormag.com/historical-shakespeare-age-of-netflix/
This latter sense of character and character development is, I argue, utterly hegemonic within the contemporary novel. That sells it short: across every genre, every medium of story-telling, character is the very air we breathe. It’s almost impossible to imagine a story that isn’t about character. Almost. 14/
What is one sort of story one might tell in which “character” is not central? Where the central purpose to which words are turned is not the explication of internal psychological dynamics? Might it be…worldbuilding? 15/15
