There have been two Brandon Sanderson profiles in mainstream media outlets in recent* weeks. Jason Kehe in Wired  and Adam Morgan in Esquire. The first begins by bemoaning the lack of mainstream literary attention paid to Sanderson and sets out to repair it; the second comments critically on the first, which was widely perceived as something of a hatchet job, though I didn’t think so. To me, both pieces read as positive overall, despite both containing criticisms. Kehe’s primary criticism is about Sanderson’s writing; Morgan’s is about Sanderson’s support, both moral and financial, for the homophobic Mormon Church. Both of these criticisms are undercut. Kehe comes around to the perspective that, while Sanderson writes bad sentences, this is fine because sentences don’t matter, only story does. What does it matter if someone is a bad writer, if writing itself is bad? Meanwhile, Morgan focuses on Sanderson’s commercial successes and how good he is as an entrepreneur and employer. What does it matter if someone materially supports homophobia, if they put queer representation in their books? 

Both profiles do make interesting points, as well, at least in the sense that it’s interesting to hear these claims made in this way, on these platforms. Kehe—who is obviously a fan, who else could read 17 to 20 novels by any given author and be familiar enough with the lore to claim bona fides—takes the criticism of Sanderson as a poor writer of prose to a very familiar place: story over sentences, worlds over writing. This is Asimov’s plateglassery combined with Tolkien’s celebration of worldbuilding; a conversation central to the genre for decades, in other words—this is what the New Wave was about. The disdain for ornate language, as I’ve written about before, has been a misguided literary commonplace for centuries, its roots in a combination of Christian denunciation of pagan excess and Orientalist denunciation of the florid East, now routinely presented as standard stylistic advice. Asimov’s essay on “plate glass” writing is only a minor variant of this tradition.

Tolkien, meanwhile, warrants special citation here because Kehe’s profile of Sanderson is quite reminiscent of the argument of Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories.” Both represent a Christian-framed mythology of consolation (perhaps inevitably,  the first hit for Tolkien’s essay as of this writing is a PDF of the essay hosted on the website of an explicitly homophobic Christian  sect, Calvary Georgetown Divide. I have here linked to a different copy) that presents the fantasist as (sub)creator, a maker of worlds, as Tolkien argues and Kehe reaffirms on Sanderson’s behalf. “On Fairy Stories” is, I believe, the essay in which Tolkien originally coined the phrase “secondary world,” now as commonplace as a dead darling. The religious framing is not necessary for the eucatastrophic ending that Tolkien describes, though he does frame it that way, but in his concept of worldbuilding it is inescapable. There is creation, the primary world, authored by a  primary creator, belief in whom and in which is fundamental to proper  living. And then there is the subcreation, the secondary world, authored  in homage, in which belief is required for proper reading. As above, so below: belief is paramount in both cases, i.e., the suspension of disbelief. Worlds must be made with care, consistency, and coherence. Such is the  responsibility of a (sub)creator. Kehe’s argument on Sanderson is this, rehashed: that Sanderson is not (much of) a writer but a (great) worldbuilder, both on and off the page. Morgan extends the latter part of that argument with his comparison of Sanderson’s 64-person enterprise to an indie game studio, with employees to help with every aspect of production from continuity to merchandise to event management.

This is all very well for the entrepreneurial, the would-be heads of  their own production studios, the subcreators-in-waiting, the wiki-ready and metatronic  among us. But I think it would be uncontroversial to say that—while I’m sure anyone would be pleased to make vast sums of money—many novelists, perhaps most, have no desire whatsoever to build or run the kind of enterprise-grade apparatus that  Sanderson has and does. Most novelists are not, in my experience, desirous of becoming startup founders. But this is also why I think the distinction between writers and worldbuilders is meaningful. This distinction, too, has its own long history in the genre. In a way, this, too, is what the New Wave was about. Michael Moorcock has long cogently argued that “worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication,” that the pseudo-realism that requires the suspension of disbelief is not something to aspire to. Or M. John Harrison in his instantly-legendary notes on worldbuilding in 2007:

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study.

In 2020, Helen Marshall published an excellent paper on this, called “A  flare of light or ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism?’: M John  Harrison’s radical poetics of worldbuilding” (full text available from here as a PDF), which contextualizes and comments on Harrison’s remarks in more detail and is well worth reading—among other things, it is a good counter to the contemporary ubiquity of the worldbuilding ideology among writers of fiction and critics alike, including the literary profile writers. 

Coming back to Christian symbolism of worldbuilding as a work of subcreation, Harrison had something to say about that, too

The whole idea of worldbuilding  is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.

This, I think, is the real danger of worldbuilding as a practice and a literary norm. This is the science-fictional root of longtermism, the clomping foot of the boy demiurges attempting to build a world of the world. As with the real homophobia behind representation on the page, this requires the suspension of disbelief. The world, to be built, must be made small. The technique requires the stripping away of complexities. It is not ambiguous that Eru Ilúvatar created the world. That is a simple fact, the kind of fact that is not only unavailable in what Tolkien called the primary world, not only ridiculous, dangerous and arrogant if treated as fact, not only contestable but with deep and consequential histories of contestation. It is common to describe worldbuilding projects as encyclopedic, but few worldbuilding projects have the space (or the interest) to investigate the depths of historical-psychological complexity, ambiguity, unknowability, and irreducibility that might be seen in the edit history of a single contested Wikipedia page—to say nothing of the epistemological failures of Wikipedia itself, its biases and overwhelmingly vast absences. Worldbuilding as a totalizing project cannot help but fail. My feeling is that “suspension of disbelief” and “secondary world” were not helpful ways to think about what is actually happening when we read a text, and yet they are tropes so influential and well-established that many of us take them as givens, as expectations of how we should read and what a fantastical text is supposedly doing.

Not everything that comes in the form of a  book is the same kind of object, even when they look vaguely similar. Some books are television—screenplays avant le deal memo. Some books are franchise tie-ins, in most cases anticipating the franchise. Some books are novels of one type or  another. It’s odd to see mainstream glossy magazine profiles unthinkingly—unknowingly?—reproduce arguments half a century old at minimum, but perhaps this is apposite. In my view, this is what Christopher Priest’s attempts to make slipstream a thing or Harrison’s own attempt to coin and claim New Weird was about: to carve out an acknowledged space for writing to be writing in all its slippery quiddity, the opposite of what Kehe claims for Sanderson—a place where the sentences matter, and are the whole of the matter. 

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* This was written, and published on my Patreon, at the end of March. If you’d also like to see my essays and updates early, you can sign up at https://www.patreon.com/vajra.

Last year when Nandini and I visited the Don Bosco Museum of Indigenous Cultures in Meghalaya, I remember pointing at this mural and being like oh hey they did a homage to— but at that moment, my mind was quite blank; I could remember only that I knew the original painting being referenced, but not what it was, and promptly forgot all about it before my phone got any signal again, so I didn’t look it up. But just now I happened upon the picture in my photo album and remembered this time: Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross.

The Don Bosco Museum is run by the Salesians, who have been active in the region for a century, and has several exhibits focusing on the history of Christian missionaries &c. in the region. Hence the mural, which is the least of these. The museum itself was constructed in the 90s, so the mural presumably must date from no earlier. Salvador Dalí made his painting in 1951, so in his Catholic fascist era—well, he had been a fascist for far longer, but in keeping with his move to Francoist Spain, the Catholicism was relatively new.

Dalí lived to cause offence and the most offensive thing a member of the Spanish avant garde could do, by 1951, was to endorse the church and praise the religious traditions that Franco claimed were the true Spanish heritage. This painting glories in sleek archaism. Its style may look cornily photographic or cinematic but actually it is closely modelled on visionary 17th century Spanish paintings by Zurbaran and Velazquez.

(from this 2009 article by Jonathan Jones)

That citation of Zurbarán is interesting, because perhaps even more than the novelty of the point of view, what I always found striking about the Dalí is that piece of paper resting on the cross at its top, folded into quarters and with a corner lifted, in place of a titulus crucis. It is faithfully recreated in the form of what looks like an equally blank scroll, in the Don Bosco mural. Neither says INRI, as one might expect, and they do not have an artist’s signature, as would be traditional with a cartellino (in Italian; in Spanish a cartela), a once-popular trompe l’oeil device to include a note (looking more or less exactly like that) about the painting or its painter in the painting itself. Francisco de Zurbarán used cartelas as signatures frequently, as did many other Spanish painters of the period, such as El Greco, in paintings such as these: El Greco’s Saint Andrew and Saint Francis (1595-1598) on the right, with the cartela on the ground beside them, or Zurbarán’s The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion (1628) on the left, where the cartela is pinned to the tree or post or which the saint is bound.

In both of the above paintings, the cartela exists within the world of the painting, much as the unsigned note does in the Dalí. That is interesting because there are cartelas that exists on a different diegetic plane (and of course I am fascinated with travel between diegetic planes, this being a major concern of my own writing) such as, for instance, Zurbarán’s own Adoration of the Shepherds (1638) below, which places the trompe l’oeil cartela figuratively on the surface of the painting, as if it were literally a tag attached to the canvas.

Last year, there was some Dalí news. In the 70s, a good twenty years after the painting above, Dalí revisited it to create a sculpture of the same name: Christ of Saint John of the Cross. Or rather, he made a wax model that could be used to cast multiple bas-relief sculptures using a process that is known as lost wax casting.

This is how lost wax casting works, in brief, as I understand it. An artist makes an original model in clay or wax or anything they want to work in. A mould is made from this model, and the desired number of wax copies can be made using the mould. A given wax copy like this is coated with a kind of sandy slurry to create a heat-resistant final mould around it. This is then put in a kiln under extreme heat to melt the wax out (hence “lost wax” as a name for the method), leaving a hollow, heat-resistant mould into which molten bronze or another suitable metal can be poured for the final casting. While multiple such bas-relief casts of the Christ of Saint John of the Cross have been circulating, the original wax model that Dalí made in the 70s had been lost until last year, when it was found and appropriately overpriced. Presumably due to it having been lost, this wax model is also apparently called The Lost Wax, which is either somebody’s very clever pun on a lost wax model used for lost wax casting, or just everybody being very confused about what’s going on. The model, and a typical bas-relief, look like this.

To me, it looks like absolute ass, just a total piece of shit, though of course I am not a doctor. It seems odd that Dalí would tie this garbage to his (controversial, probably fascist somehow, but iconic) painting by using the same title. Much casual commentary seems to claim that the bas-relief is replicating the painting in three dimensions somehow, which is nonsensical to me since the angles are completely different, this one being much more conventional—frankly, I don’t know if the doubled angles of the painting can even be represented in sculpture at all, it seems to me that this is impossible by design? But perhaps this is, to borrow a phrase kept alive to this day by Sri Lankan newspaper editors, only Dalí belatedly snook-cocking at the paragone. Anyway, the interesting thing about this sculpture is that it lacks the cartela, and the INRI has reasserted itself. Whatever he was doing in the 50s, here he is doing something else.

How can we read an unsigned cartela in place of the titulus on a cross? Is that absence about the authorship of the painting, or the authorship of the crucifixion? The diegetic plane—the surface of the cross, not the surface of the canvas—suggests the latter, and perhaps that is why this crucifixion is bloodless. Perhaps, too, the absence of the titulus mirrors the absence of the nails and the thorns: every instrument of pain has been removed from this crucifixion, including the cruel words. Or perhaps it is that signature itself is superfluous in the age of celebrity, so there is only the gesture, only the sign of a signature. All this you see in fiction, too. Everyone from Stephen King on down has written themselves in as a character, and that’s not even counting more or less thinly disguised author inserts or autofiction. But there is also a broader question in the unsigned signature, which it seems to me lies in what we sometimes call style, which is a poor word for this thing, this suchness, this idea of a particular articulation of the world expressed in the work produced by a singular human embodied consciousness, which is to say, it is the articulation of the world by the world—its complexity, its violences, its graces—as refracted through a tiny lens, this eye of a needle, that we call a person.

Both Dalí’s painting and sculpture refer repeatedly to the Christ of St. John of the Cross, which is an actual drawing drawn by St. John of the Cross, a crucifixion “from above,” made in the 1570s. This is what John drew.

It is remarkably strange, most especially in the angles. Different from what Dalí chose to go with, but equally unusual, and now post-Dalí, certainly more so. Not only the angle of viewing, but in the off-kilterness of the cross itself. It leans backwards, lit from behind; Christ hangs forward, shadowed. Unlike Dalí, John of the Cross did not omit the nails. This drawing is small. Four inches high, three inches wide. It would stand, a cross-section, comfortably inside the human brain. Juan de Yepes y Álvarez, who had been John of the Cross for less than a decade by then, saw this in a vision and drew what he saw. Or at least, that is how we say it, when we speak of this sort of thing, how we contain the thought of someone’s mould overflowing with something raw and glowing and overheated, on the verge of shattering. There is no indication that John of the Cross intended this drawing to become public, to whatever extent that meant anything four and a half centuries ago. Dalí, too, claimed that he saw his painting in a vision, in a cosmic dream, but he would say that, wouldn’t he.

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