World Building in Tolstoy and Tolkien

In my last post, I suggested that there is an important difference between the kinds of world-building that occur in classic novels and in speculative fiction. I am now going to immediately contradict myself (or at least complicate my claim).

Firstly, reading any novel is a kind of entering into an “other” world—no matter how different or similar that world might seem to our own. When I say “world” I don’t mean the sum total of physical stuff in the universe—I mean what Virginia Woolf calls “a luminous halo,” the effervescent glow of consciousness through which we encounter phenomena and make sense of it.[1] When we get immersed in a book, we enter temporarily into a new glowing halo of consciousness—one that we share with David Copperfield or Clarissa Dalloway or Bilbo Baggins. Paul Ricoeur provides perhaps the best explanation of this phenomenon. He describes the experience of reading in terms of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration, and while his brilliant theory of triple mimesis is very complex it involves in essence a kind of passage from the world as we conceive it in our daily lives through the other-world generated between the pages of the book and then back into our own world—but in that final transition we might find that the world of the book has subtly transformed the horizons and preconceptions of our own world. Thus, reading is a kind of synthesis between our world and the book’s world, and this is just as true of Jane Austen’s Emma as it is of Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education.

Secondly, the worlds of many classic novels might be almost as foreign to us as the worlds of Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Sanderson’s Cosmere. Leo Tolstoy writes with the assumption that his audience has a certain background in the social mannerisms, political controversies, and intellectual preoccupations of nineteenth-century Russian aristocratic society, but most readers today do not have that background knowledge. I’ve never been a Russian aristocrat anymore than I’ve ever been a hobbit (and if I had to choose I’d rather be the latter). And yet when I read Anna Karenina I find that I’m able to slip into Tolstoy’s world with relative ease! And in much the same way, in Tolkien’s capable hands, I find myself confidently strolling through the valleys and mountains of Middle Earth. How do both authors overcome the (to me) strangeness of their worlds’ particulars to draw me fully into the story-worlds?

I think that by attending to why Tolstoy works for me we might be able to learn something about why Tolkien works as well. Does Tolstoy offer exhaustive explanation of the finer points of Russian social etiquette? Not at all! He assumes that I know how such things work, because such things are—to him—obvious.[2] One might think that this lack of explanation would pose a problem, but actually I think it proffers the solution instead. Because Tolstoy has built a rock-solid bridge between me and his various point-of-view characters I find that I’m kind of unconsciously bamboozled into feeling that, yes, I do know how Russian aristocratic social etiquette works. If examined, this illusion is immediately dispelled, and yet I intuit just enough understanding of the social web that makes sense of this world that I can keep gliding along with the far more important business of understanding the hearts and minds of the richly varied humans that meet and mingle within the pages of the novel.[3] If Tolstoy laboriously caught me up to speed on all the ins and outs of why Anna uses the forms of address that she does with different characters, I would be painfully reminded of the distance between me and Anna—in learning about Anna’s world I would be drawn out of that world. But in intuiting just enough for my mind to take over and fill in the blanks (even if I’m not actually filling in those blanks accurately) I’m able to dive deep and stay immersed not so much in the world of nineteenth-century Russia but rather the world of Anna Arkadyevna herself.

Those of us who read or write much speculative fiction are already familiar with what I’m describing here—this is the dreaded pitfall of excessive exposition. Tolkien, like Tolstoy, can immerse me in his world most effectively by explaining less and showing more, and how exactly Tolkien and other great fantasy and scifi authors do this is what I’ll begin exploring through close reading and analysis in more blog posts soon to come!

I’m going to begin analyzing first pages of various speculative fiction works—comparing and contrasting the techniques they use to immerse me in their worlds—so if you have suggestions for works I should analyze you can comment here, post in the forum, or shoot me a message!

[1] See Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader, New York, 1925, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106007635110. [2] He also assumes that I speak and read French, which is quite annoying since, sadly, I don’t. [3] Of course, some nineteenth-century writers do give extended accounts of the details of the society they are representing in their novels, and those problematic sewage systems aren’t as interesting as you think they are, Victor Hugo.