In his famous, but rather absurd, essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Roland Barthes ranted about the impending dismissal of authors from literary criticism, to be replaced by a sort of totally objective super-reader that would focus on the text as if sprung from language itself, with no active mediation from the author. The justifications were not truly Barthes’s original ideas, but a sort of distillation of formalist currents alive in France and Russia since the 1930s that also fuelled US New Criticism in the 1940s. Barthes attributes to capitalism the bothersome presence of the author in the media, as an advertising prop for the book. The irony, of course, is that after strenuously denying that the author had to be regarded at all, Barthes became a most potent presence in the scholarship about his texts. I mean, he even wrote an autobiography.
I’ve been disputing Barthes’s ideas for years, on the grounds that they are nothing but a narcissistic projection of the literary critic. Lacking humility before the creativity of the literary author, Barthesian literary critics assume that their reading contains the ultimate truth about the text, far above anything the author may opine, and even when this truth is subjected to the rigours of postmodern deconstruction or of today’s post-truth. The text, we have been told again and again, is the only reliable reality, whereas the author must be always seen as an unreliable construct and, at worst, as a ghostly medium through which the mystique of literature flows thanks to his or her performing of writerly acts (Oxford linguistics was all the rage in Barthes’s 1968).
Today I’m working on a segment of an introduction to a book, for which I need to think hard about how we deal academically with the fiction writer’s ‘production design’ as opposed to the work carried out by designers in audiovisual productions of adaptations of speculative fiction. I’ve read Stefan Ekman and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s essay “Notes Toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building” (Fafnir 3.3, 2016, 7–18) to that end and have stumbled upon yet another instance not just of the author’s death but of overkill.
Ekman and Taylor name “three major categories of world-building based on how the imaginary world is approached: through the author’s creative effort (authorial world-building); through the reader’s (re-)construction (readerly world-building); and through the critic’s analysis and interpretation (critical world-building)” (8). Before focusing on critical world-building, they rather curtly dismiss authorial and readerly worldbuilding. Of the processes authors engage in, Ekman and Taylor claim that “While it is of course possible to discuss this kind of world-building process, it is difficult to subject it to critical analysis, because, ultimately, actual authorial world-building processes cannot be analysed by anyone but the author in question; no one else has access to their mind. It is possible to analyse oral or written comments that a writer makes regarding their world-building (interviews, public comments, private communication, published letters), but such analysis will always suffer from problems with imperfect recollection and veracity” (10, my italics), presumably on the author’s side.
Now, imagine raising Leonardo Da Vinci from the dead, eager to discuss ‘La Gioconda’, only to tell him, “you know what? I don’t really care about what you have to say, and I’ll stick to my own (subjective) reading, on the basis of the evidence provided by the painting itself. Who cares if the painting is yours? You wouldn’t be able anyway to say anything of substance about it, lacking the theoretical framework that I possess.’ Deep sigh… If we spoke more often to living writers we might begin to understand whether they think of ‘design’ when considering the locations and settings of their fiction, down to the look of their characters. But, anyway, let me put together what I have so far.
I need to mention first J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1947), a discussion of this genre as a literary form, originally offered as the lecture “Fairy Stories” in the Andrew Lang series of the University of St Andrews, in 1939. Famously, Tolkien distinguished between Primary and Secondary worlds in fantasy, meaning, respectively, those set in a (modified) mundane setting and those totally apart from our own world. Tolkien’s own The Lord of the Rings is the most famous example of Secondary subcreation. This is the main concept that Mark J.P. Wolf amplified in his indispensable volume Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012) and in subsequent works, such as his edited volume Exploring Imaginary Worlds: Essays on Media, Structure, and Subcreation (2020). Whereas Wolf’s monograph focuses mainly on fantasy and on Tolkien, interestingly the collective volume has essays on realist authors Fiódor Dostoevsky or Thornton Wilder. For, here’s the thing: even a mimetic, ultrarealistic novel set in the present requires the building of an imaginary fictitious world because fiction is not documentary.
In the case of mimetic fiction, the usual concepts invoked in pre-theory scholarship in relation to what I’m calling design are place and setting. Thus, I’ve come across delicious pre-theory works such as Leonard Lutwack’s book The Role of Place in Literature (1984), and a couple of very cool articles: Nikolaus Pevsner’s “The Architectural Setting of Jane Austen’s Novels” (1968) and William R. Risley’s “Setting in the Galdós Novel, 1881-1885” (1978). Also, lots of MA dissertations on similar topics, submitted in the 1970s and 1980s. This model of analysis based on close reading, however, fell out of grace to be replaced in the 1990s with, guess what?, narratological theory. The website called The Living Handbook of Narratology offers an article called “Space” (2012) by top specialist Marie-Laure Ryan, which begins by connecting Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ (the set of space-time relations characterising a particular genre or work) with Genette’s ([1972] 1980) “diégèse,” Werth’s (1999) “text world,” and Herman’s (2005) “storyworld.” Ryan warns that ‘setting’ is a too loose term that needs to be reconsidered and defines it as “the general socio-historico-geographical environment in which the action takes place.” Thus, the setting of Wuthering Heights is 1790s Yorkshire, regardless of the number of specific indoor and outdoor locations where the scenes take place.
Here’s the funny thing: ‘space’ is a concept closely linked to SF (though, yes, in another sense), but Ryan sticks to non-fantasy genres and, like all narratologists, has no use for ‘worldbuilding’ (what I prefer to call ‘design’). Not that SF specialists have much interest in how narratology approaches (deep) space, either. ‘Worldbuilding’ is commonly used in speculative fiction (fantasy, SF, horror, utopia/dystopia) by authors, reviewers, academics and fans, but as Ekman and Taylor warn, this is a concept that (like ‘settings’) needs to be reconsidered.
The marvellous Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction has and article on ‘world-building’ (I prefer ‘worldbuilding’ with no hyphen), according to which the concept was first used by English philosopher/astrophysicist A. S. Eddington in Space, Time & Gravitation (1920); I have been unable to find an alleged earlier usage in vol. 33 (Dec. 1820) of the Edinburgh Review. Next, author Philip K. Dick seem to have used the label in his short story “The Trouble with Bubbles” (1953), where ‘world-building’ is “the ultimate art form. It takes the place of all entertainments, all the passive sports as well as music and painting.”
S. Coleman may have been the first to use ‘world-building’ for criticism. He wrote in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (August 1974) that “The deemphasis of detailed world-building separates [Larry] Niven from the writers with whom he is usually grouped, ‘hard-science’ writers like Poul Anderson or Arthur Clarke.” Apparently, Brian Attebery imported ‘world-building’ into academia in Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980). By the mid-1990s ‘world-building’ was already common in SF and fantasy studies, and a source of unease given its alleged informality (against which Ekman and Taylor warned).
The points I want to make here are that a) ‘worldbuilding’ applies to all kinds of fiction; b) it goes far beyond the narratological notion of ‘space’ to be closer to what is called in the audiovisual industry ‘production design’; c) since fiction is not a ‘production’, perhaps we might use ‘design’ for authors. By this I mean that to make a story work, writers need to place their characters in specific locations, which need to be imagined or ‘designed.’
Just as production designers are responsible for giving material reality to the world imagined in the screenplay and coordinated by the director and the produced, fiction authors of all types must incorporate into their plots their design for the required world. This encompasses the whole ‘look’ of each novel or short story: the general setting (when and where), but also the specific locations for each scene, the props, and the look of the characters. Design relies on description to be transmitted to readers, who must supply with their imagination what authors do not describe (or not, depending on their willingness to collaborate). This is very different from looking at the work of the production designer on the screen, but the principle is similar: if Emily Brontë hadn’t ‘designed’ Wuthering Heights no reader (or film adapter) would be able to make sense of the plot. Quite another thing is throwing away the author’s design to imagine as readers (or adapters) whatever pleases us.
So, I’m waiting for the day when a SF specialist and a narratologist sit down together to explore how the twin notions of ‘worldbuilding’ and ‘space’ overlap, and what is needed to make them converge. It would be lovely if authors on both sides of the fantasy divide could join them to discuss how they ‘design’ their fictions. And I would love to join the conversation!