the

The International
Journal
the ARTS
in society

Volume 2, Number 1

Worldmaking as Art Form

James DiGiovanna

www.arts-journal.com
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY
http://www.arts-journal.com

First published in 2007 in Melbourne, Australia by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd
www.CommonGroundPublishing.com.

© 2007 (individual papers), the author(s)

© 2007 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground

Authors are responsible for the accuracy of citations, quotations, diagrams, tables and maps.

All rights reserved. Apart from fair use for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as
permitted under the Copyright Act (Australia), no part of this work may be reproduced without written
permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact
<cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com>.

ISSN: 1833-1866
Publisher Site: http://www.Arts-Journal.com

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY is a peer refereed journal. Full papers
submitted for publication are refereed by Associate Editors through anonymous referee processes.

Typeset in Common Ground Markup Language using CGCreator multichannel typesetting system
http://www.CommonGroundSoftware.com.
Worldmaking as Art Form
James DiGiovanna, University at Stony Brook, New York, USA

Abstract: In this paper I propose that the category of “worldmaking” be considered as an art activity with its own set of
evaluative criteria. Drawing from theories about the force and meaning of fictional sentences, the paper attempts to find a
way in which the truth conditions of these sentences serve, in part, to establish aesthetic qualities of certain artworks. Using
some of Nelson Goodman’s criteria for rightness of scheme, and such categories as richness, connectedness, and distinctness
from the lived world, the paper finds a place for a genre that includes William Blake’s later poems, the writings of H.P.
Lovecraft, the paintings of Henry Darger, and the works of other such artists who, I propose, are better understood as
makers of worlds than as poets, novelists or painters. Further, the category of worldmaking and its aesthetic criteria will
be seen to be applicable to other forms including computer simulations, fictional histories, comic books and imaginary
landscapes.

Keywords: World-Making, Art Forms, William Blake, Nelson Goodman, Fictions, Truth-value of Fictional Sentences,
Creation

Introduction and Definition Some solutions include: a Meinongian approach

that assumed fictional entities could possess “nuclear
N THIS PAPER I’d like to propose a category

I of art form, “worldmaking,” as a valid and inde-

pendently interesting art practice. This will be
distinct from fiction, drawing, painting, etc,
though it will draw from all these. Most of its practi-
tioners are unknown to modern art criticism, and
those that are critically accepted are accepted as
artists of other forms. Worldmaking is, in short, the
creation of fictional worlds. It is often performed in
the creation of novels, stories, comic books, and
visual art, but where narrative, painting, poetry, etc.
are the main goal the art form is only incidentally
worldmaking, or worldmaking is a constitutive part
of the art form. I’m more interested in the moments
and instances where worldmaking is the goal, and
the particular form is the means to worldmaking.
Fictional worlds are topics of interest to both
philosophers and literary critics, but their tactics and
concerns are not those of this paper. In general, for
philosophers, fictional worlds present a problem of
reference. Beginning with Russell, as Rorty1 notes
in Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse,
the difficulty of assigning meaning to terms with no
actual referents has created a number of tactics for
determining the semantic value of claims in works
of fiction.
properties,” i.e. defining characteristics, but only in
a text to which they belong2; a speech act theory that
allowed for sentences in fiction to have their standard
meaning shorn of illocutionary force3; David Lewis’s
position that all fictional worlds are actually real,
assuming they are possible4; and Rorty’s position
that fictional discourse is a form of ironic speech.5
In general, though, these philosophers are not ter-
ribly concerned with the aesthetics of fictional
worlds, but the problems that they pose for meaning
(though I think these problems are relevant to the
aesthetics.)
In literary criticism, the question of fictional
worlds is raised aesthetically, but the point of the
fictional world is to support character or narrative,
or to enhance the aesthetic effect of the novel (usu-
ally it’s a novel) in which it appears.6 What is under-
studied is a theory of the fictional world as the work
of art.
In raising worldmaking as art form, I look at a
form of conceptual art: the fictional world being the
concept. In the cases where worldmaking is the art
form, we’ll find that narrative and characters (and
maps and paintings and etc.) are used to produce
world. It is not the case, amongst these artists, that

1
Richard Rorty “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse” in Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, 1982
2
See Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds, p. 48, for a discussion of Meinongian solutions.
3
Richard Ohman discusses this option in “Speech-Acts and the Definition of Literature” in Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971). It’s also
followed by Mary Pratt in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse., Indiana, 1977, and in a number of other works, all following
a similar tact of using the lack of illocutionary force to distinguish fictive from non fictive speech.
4
David Lewis On The Plurality of Worlds Oxford, Blackwell, 2001
5
Rorty, p.136
6
See, for example, Elena Semino Language and World Creation in Poems & Other Texts

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY,

VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1, 2007
http://www.arts-journal.com, ISSN 1833-1866
© Common Ground, James DiGiovanna, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com
116 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2
the world is a support for the art, or that it is a neces-
sary element toward a larger artistic goal. Rather,
the goal is worldmaking, and the various arts (e.g.
novels, paintings, poems, etc.) are merely mediums
for this goal.
Outside the philosophical interest in reference,
there is another philosophical tradition that can
provide grounding for worldmaking as art. A series
of a philosophers who have thematized the creation
of worlds, though usually from an epistemological
perspective, and generally thought of not as purely
fictional worlds, but as ways of coming to know the
actual world. Leibniz’s idea of perspectivism, i.e.
that individual perspectives differ, and can even ap-
parently contradict, but are equally true,7 influenced
Nietzsche, who developed from it a theory of fic-
tions: that things like the self, world, etc, are construc-
ted from our perceptions in a creative act.8
Heidegger, following Nietzsche, saw our individu-
al perspectives as “world pictures.”9 Each world
picture, potentially irreconcilable with the others, is
a form of creative “projection” that lays out a world.
These ideas of world making, often called “per-
spectivism,” though, were not yet dealing with fic-
tional worlds understood as such, but rather the fic-
tionality of the actual world, or at least of any descrip-
tion that purports to be of it.
In a very similar vein, but coming from the tradi-
tion that produced Russell, Lewis and speech act
theory, Nelson Goodman takes up the Nietz-
schean/Heideggerean idea of perspective or world
picture and explicitly calls it “worldmaking.”10 I’ll
draw part of the aesthetic theory from Goodman’s
work, though I should note that Goodman, though a
philosopher of art, thought of worldmaking not as
the process of creating fictional worlds, but as the
process of understanding the actual world.
What Goodman sought was an epistemologic-
al/metaphysical model that preserved truth where
two contradictory statements appeared to be true at
the same time, for example, a phenomenal descrip-
tion and a physical description. If contrary versions
are both true of the same world, then the familiar
philosophical problem arises: that everything, or
nothing, is true, because anything follows from a
contradiction. So Goodman alters the standard Tarski
sentence for truth, writing “the familiar dictum [i.e.
Tarski’s sentence] ‘ “Snow is white” is true if and
only if snow is white’ must be revised to something
like “Snow is white” is true in a given world if and
only if snow is white in that world.”11
7
See Monadology section 57 “simple substances create the appearance of many different universes. They are but perspectives of a single
universe.” P. 156 in Monodalogy and other Philosophical Essays, trans Paul and Ann Martin Schrecker. Bobbs Merril, Indianapolis, 1965.
8
See Gay Science, for example section 290, where the self and the environment are said to be “shaped and interpreted” by “this or that
poetry and art.”
9
Martin Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture” in The Question Concerning Technology, Harper and Rowe, New York, 1977
10
In Ways of Worldmaking, Hacket, Indianapolis 1978
11
Ibid pp 120
For Goodman, this meant that there is a phenom-
enal world and a physical world, a world of biology
and one of literary criticism, and maybe a world for
me and my friends, and one for you and yours.
But, without getting into the difficulties of the
epistemological theory (which I think are not as ser-
ious as Goodman’s critics maintain, but that’s anoth-
er topic) this is a perfectly good theory for the ana-
lysis of fictional world, and will lead us into a discus-
sion of the fictional world as independent work of
art.
So we can easily apply Tarski truth conditions in
a fictional world: “Ferdinand’s father lies full fathom
five beneath the water” is true in the world of The
Tempest if Ferdinand’s father lies full fathom five
beneath the water in the world of The Tempest.” And
of course, he doesn’t: it’s false. We can easily distin-
guish true and false claims in a fictional work by
reference to the world imagined in that work, which
we access much as we access the actual world: by
whatever evidence is available.
In this case, it’s the textual evidence. Ferdinand’s
father Alonso is seen alive on another part of the is-
land, thus Ariel’s “Full Fathom Five” song is false.
But, and this is the interesting point, in worlds of
fiction some sentences are absolutely indeterminate
as regards their truth. There is not only no textual
evidence to resolve them, they may not have any
such resolution. While it’s either true or false that
there was a historical prince of Denmark named
Hamlet who killed a man named Laertes, it is neither
true nor false that during the duel in Hamlet a peasant
boy named Lars was rolling marbles in the streets of
Stockholm.
In other words, the fictional world is not complete.
And this is where the fictional world as independent
work of art begins to differ from the fictional world
as element in a work of art, or as support or place
for characters, action, theme, etc.
Those who engage in worldmaking as art form,
seeing the world as the object of the art form, are
inherently interested in the answer to virtually any
question about their world, whereas for those works
of art where world is an element, most potential
questions are irrelevant. So the worldmakers seek to
make more complete worlds, often at the expense of
narrative economy in works of fiction. In following
up from Goodman’s adoption of the Tarski truth
conditions, worldmaking is where the artist is more
concerned with creating the truth conditions for fic-
tional texts than with the creation of the texts. This
 JAMES DIGIOVANNA 117

is cohesive with Davidson’s attempt to use Tarksi’s is in describing the language, history and technical
truth conditions to equate a theory of truth with a culture of his various peoples.)
theory of meaning.12 Whether this works for real- Further, many visual artists are concerned with
world meanings and truth, it does provide a means worldmaking. Certainly Odilon Redon, the Pre-
for distinguishing between those artists who are in- Raphaelites (especially Edward Burne-Jones), and
terested in worldmaking and those interested in, say Heironymous Bosch created multiple works in the
fiction: the worldmaker seeks to create the truth same fictive realms. Amongst contemporary visual
conditions for whatever depiction of the world is artists I might cite Stanislaw Szukalski, Björn Dah-
produced (often by hands other than his or her own, lem, Ernesto Caivano and Paul Noble.
as these worlds are frequently collaborative.) Historically, many examples could be found, but
I don’t think that there is a very long, proper history
The Literature of Worlds of worldmaking. While works like the Oedipus cycle,
the Bible, the mythic cycles of Sumeria and Babylo-
The paradigm case of a well-known worldmaker is
nia, the Nordic mythic cycles, etc, are in a way cases
J.R.R. Tolkien, who sketched out in great detail his
of worldmaking, they are presented as facts or as
world long before he wrote the novels that occur in
fictionalized facts, and the creators and their intended
it. In developing languages, describing cultures,
audience thought, at least on some level, that the
drawing maps, and writing histories and mythologies,
stories in the mythic cycles took place in the same
he was interested in trying to create a fully realized
reality in which the story-teller lived.
place. The stories, then, capitalized upon this world
The Nordic myths, for example, speak of the nine
and were a means of presenting it to the public.
worlds, but our world is one of those worlds, and
In his “On Fairy Stories” he says that fairy stories
those other worlds interact with and exist in the same
are not marked by the appearance of fairies, but by
continuum as this world. The Nordic cycles are some
being set in “Faerie, the realm or state in which fair-
of the finest examples of worldmaking, but there are
ies have their being.”13 Place is the central concern,
not presented explicitly as fiction.
and “fairie” isn’t simply the setting of some individu-
Similarly, even though Sophocles knows he’s
al tale, but a relatively complete place: “it holds the
fictionalizing with the Oedipus cycle, the world of
sea, the sun, the moon, the sky, and the earth and all
Oedipus is supposed to be the same one in which
things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone,
Sophocles lives, only a little earlier. The creation
wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when
myths of Mespotomia, the stories in the Bible, the
we are enchanted.”14 Tolkien even described the
tales of the Yellow Emperor, all take place in what
creators of this place as “sub-creators”15 on the
is thought of as an actual, if not perfectly represented
model of God creating the universe.
past.
Of course, to some extent, all novel writing in-
For worldmaking to arrive as a self-conscious art
volves worldmaking. Those novels set in a world
form, we need the idea that the world is being created
very like our own would be the least centrally inter-
by and in the stories, poems or paintings, and that
ested in worldmaking as I understand it here, while
the world in these works is in some way distinct from
set in a world least like our own will have to include
the world in which we live.
a stronger element of worldmaking. Series of novels
set in the same world may have more of worldmaking
(science fiction often does this; Nabokov does this Blake as Worldmaker
with Pnin and Pale Fire, Faulkner obviously does
Worldmaking, as I wish to define it, finds a complete
this with Yoknapatawpha county.) Subsets of
example in the works of William Blake. While the
worldmaking would include “alternate history,” the
earlier myths and cycles and so on are the stuff on
creation of a country (for example, Ruritanian Ro-
which Blake makes his world, he is nonetheless
mances like The Prisoner of Zenda, the Graustark
acutely aware of the made or fictional character of
novels of George Barr McCutcheon, and the Gor-
those worlds. He even faults the prophets of the Bible
menghast novels of Mervyn Peake) and the creation
for not admitting that they were worldmaking.
of a people (Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels can be seen
“Choosing forms of worship from prophetic tales.
as an exercise in fictional anthropology, which is
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had
one element of worldmaking; notably, much of
ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities
Tolkien’s work is less interested in narrative than it
reside in the human heart.”16

12
In “Truth and Meaning” and “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” amongst other essays. In Donald Davidson, Truth and Interpretation,
Clarendon, Oxford, 1984.
13
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” in The Tolkien Reader Ballantine, New York, 1966. pp38
14
Ibid
15
Ibid, pp 49
16
William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell plate 9
118 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2

In this Blake begins the first theory of worldmak-
ing and makes himself a self-conscious worldmaker.
Blake decided that the existing myths and stories
that formed the spiritual and imaginative background
of our mental lives were not up to the task of the
present age. So he decided to create new ones, and
the difference would be: where Isaiah, Ezekiel and
Newton17 claimed to have discovered or described
the reality, Blake thought that he was describing a
reality, or one way the world could be understood.
Thus, he saw his work as fiction, but one which one
could believe in.
Here “believe in” doesn’t mean what it means in
“I believe in UFOs,” but rather what it means in “I
believe in democratic governance.” It’s a vision of
things that one can work with and live with, much
as Plato’s philosopher, in the Republic, is said to
accept that the city-in-speech, the beautiful city, is
not and cannot be real, but he nonetheless acts as a
citizen of that country.18
Blake’s mythic world appears largely in the epic
works Visions of the Daughters of Albion; Song of
Los, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Los, The Book
of Ahania, Milton, Jerusalem, and The Four Zoas.
These texts do not tell a single tale stretched over
great length, as an epic or tragic cycle would. Rather,
they tell diverse stories taking place in the same
world, one created when a great giant, Albion, fell.
In falling his identity has splintered into that of many
gods and spirits, and also into the places where these
gods and spirits will live. These further emanate and
interpenetrate, forming the cast of characters for his
tales.
The emphasis on places is tremendously important
in worldmaking: the landscape or “where” must be
given by the author. So, Blake has lands like “Beu-
lah,” a realm of subconscious activity and the source
of imagination, inhabited by the “Daughters of Beu-
lah,” who are like the muses of classical mythology.
Beulah is a land of hills and vales, it contains “caves
of sleep,” a graveyard, couches for the sleeping, etc.
In other words: a complete map of Beulah could be
drawn, as well as its relations to Blake’s other realms,
Eternity and Ulro.
Now, even more important for worldmaking than
the mapping of these realms is that these realms have
their own physics and logic. In Blake’s world,
dreams become real. A person can become another
person, or part of a person, and a person can split
into several others. So, for example, in Blake’s
Milton, Blake’s foot can house a Milton who is a
Urizen (Blake’s law-giving God) who is a Satan who
inhabits a Rintrah (the rebel who rebels against the
law), all while other parts of Milton perform separate
tasks in separate worlds.
In other words, Blake lays out the truth conditions
for the claims in his texts. So while in our world it
is prima facie false that Blake is Milton, within the
rules and structures of Blake’s world, it is true that
Blake is Milton.
Key Features of Worldmaking
In testing to see if worldmaking is a goal of an art-
work or series of works, we can look for the follow-
ing symptoms:
In the ideal case, there will be a series of works
which use same world.
That world should differ noticeably from “our”
world.
That world should have a geography and a his-
tory of its own.
Further, that world can be enhanced in its differ-
ence by having physical laws different from our
own (understanding “physical laws” in the sense
of the absolute laws which govern the interac-
tion of any entities in that world, even if those
entities are not physical as we would understand
the term.)
Here, it’s important to notice that Blake not only
wrote poetry, but illustrated his world with images
of it: he painted and engraved scenes, characters and
places in his world, fleshing it out visually and
verbally, and indicating that it was not a just a set of
literary works, but rather a place that could be ap-
proached by virtually any representational art form
(and, I would argue, by non-representational art
forms: one could write the music of a made world,
and if Blake were musically inclined I have no doubt
we would have heard the songs of Beulah. Perhaps
they would have used a completely different scale
system, or a different set of sounds.)
Borrowing from Nelson Goodman: A
Theory of Worldmaking
Blake certainly understood his world as fictional.
But then he understood all worlds to be fictional. He

17
These are some of the “poets” cited by Blake in works such as Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Isaiah and Ezekiel), Milton and Jerusalem
(both of which criticize Newton for his “single vision” version of science; in short, Blake thought Newton a brilliant poet who’d created a
new way of seeing the world, but faulted Newton for claiming he had found the one, true, and only way of seeing the world.
18
Plato is, in many ways, a worldmaker with this text, undermining my claim that Blake is the first. He’s certainly a more self-conscious
worldmaker than the mythic poets and playwrights who’s stories were supposed to be, on some level, true. For Plato, the city-in-speech is
expressly a fictional place. However, because he limits himself to the one city, and because the description of the city is supposed to be
completely subsumed to the moral lesson (whether or not that’s true, it’s certainly the stated intention of the speakers in the text), I’d
bracket him as not fully concerned with worldmaking, but rather using it as a means to an end.

also believed that his world was a true and real world
(as did Tolkien with his “subcreator” theory,) though
not the true and real world. Importantly, his world,
for all its truth, was nonetheless the product of creat-
ive, artistic activity.
Here, Goodman is helpful in presenting a theory
of fiction that makes the created world valid even if
it’s not a simple representation of the perceived
world.
“Works of fiction…obviously play a prominent
role in worldmaking,”19 writes Goodman, who goes
on to claim that our understanding of the world of
lived experience is informed by the fictions we read.
But further, Goodman describes a theory of how
worlds are made well: if they resonate in our lives,
that’s a sign of a well made world. Perhaps more
importantly for the art of worldmaking, though, is
the criteria of internal consistency: “More venerable
than either utility or credibility as definitive of truth
is coherence, interpreted in various ways but always
requiring consistency.”20 And I think that, when
people speak of “realism” in works of speculative
fiction, they mean something like coherence or con-
sistency, because these make the world seem, as
Goodman notes, true.
Of course, “true” is probably the wrong word.
Goodman notes that the truth of a world is not the
definitive mark of it’s success. Rather, made worlds
are successful by their “relevance and their revela-
tions, their force and their fit—in sum their right-
ness.21” So while we certainly can’t say that a made
world is true, we can say that it’s right; we apply
aesthetic criteria, obviously, and Goodman has
sketched out some of those criteria and some of the
ways and means of worldmaking.
Applying this to worldmaking as art, we now look
for two specific criteria: repleteness and coherence.
The latter is one of Goodman’s marks of truth or
rightness, but here I’ll use it to describe an element
of the aesthetic rightness of the made world. Replete-
ness is one of Goodman’s “symptoms” of art: I’ll
need to partially redefine it for the purpose of
worldmaking, and explain its role and the sense of
“symptom.”
To be clear, what I’m presenting is not Nelson
Goodman’s theory of worldmaking. That theory is
precisely not a theory of fiction, but of fact. Instead,
I’m borrowing from it to present some marks of the
art of worldmaking.
19
Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, pp 103
20
Ibid, pp 124
21
Ibid, pp 19
22
Ibid, pp 124
23
Ibid, pp 125
24
An extreme case of this is in DC Comics (the owners of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman) a “crisis” series occurred that attempted
to realign all the continuities between the various titles so that they agreed. See Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC Comics, New York, originally
published April 1985-March 1986 in 12 installments.
25
Pp 230, Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Hackett, Indianopolis, 1976
JAMES DIGIOVANNA 119
First, “symptom” in Goodman’s sense, is some-
thing that hints at a judgment, but does not demand
it. So if we find symptoms of worldmaking, they lead
us to think that the artwork is worldmaking, though
other considerations can mitigate against this.
The first symptom is coherence. Obviously,
Goodman is not the only coherentist. Coherence
theories of truth are those that state that truth is co-
herence with a body of sentences (this would be the
version attributed to writers like Derrida) a set of
institutional practices (Foucault) a theory (Quine and
Kuhn) or some such constructed and probably lin-
guistic entity. Goodman says that “coherence [is]
interpreted in various ways but always requires
consistency.”22 That the fictional world has internal
consistency is a desiderata of the worldmaker. Thus,
Tolkien’s heavy working out of the background de-
tails of his world, Blake’s elaboration of the geo-
graphy and physics of his world, and, to look ahead,
the concern with “continuity” in such made-world
forms as comic book universes and shared science
fiction realms (Star Trek would be an example here.)
For Goodman, coherence is a test, but not an absolute
or infallible test, for truth.23 For the worldmaker, it’s
a test of the goodness of the world, and if there is an
incoherence, it needs to be explained or fixed. This
is why, for example, Star Trek fans complained about
historical discrepancies between different Star Trek
series, and why in the worlds where comic books
occur, much time is spent righting the continuity.24
Coherence is important for the establishment of
truth conditions within a fictional world and is a
particular point of interest for fans of such worlds.
If claim X is true, it must be true generally of the
world; if it is contradicted in some particular tale,
artwork, etc., set in that world, the contradiction is
a point of contention and demands for its repair are
made.
Coherence is then a symptom of worldmaking and
of positive aesthetic judgments in worldmaking as
art form. The prevalence of coherence demands and
concern with coherence in such works is indicative
of their status.
The next symptom, repleteness, is introduced by
Goodman in Languages of Art. 25 Here he uses the
term to describe an aspect of the aesthetic mark,
whether that mark is a word, line, daub of paint, etc.:
that all of it is relevant. So, for example, if we see a
zig-zagging line in a sales or stock market chart, only
120 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2
the basic shape and direction of the line counts. But
if an artist used the same line as a painting or
graphic artwork, the color of the line, the weight or
thickness of it, the roughness or smoothness of the
brush or pen used to create it, etc. would all count
towards its meaning.
In worldmaking, what is replete is the imagined
world. Every aspect of it counts as part of the art-
work, even those not present in some individual
work, and even those that have never been represen-
ted.
Again, returning to Hamlet: there is no sense in
asking what Ivan the peasant is doing in the fields
near Moscow while Hamlet is dueling with Laertes.
The reason that a play like Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead makes sense is because these
characters are explicitly thematized in Hamlet. A
story set in Moscow while Hamlet is dueling would
have no obvious connection to the Hamlet, and, un-
less some aspect of Shakespeare’s play was brought
in, it would not make sense as a literary production.
But a story set in another hamlet full of Hobbits,
either before, during, or after the events in Tolkien’s
novels, does make sense as part of the same large
work of worldmaking. Made worlds thrive on this
sort of elaboration: the many Star Trek series, for
example, occur in the same universe; Batman and
Wonder Woman inhabit the same world, even if
written and drawn by different people in different
magazines; two people or two areas in the online
world Second Life may never interact, but they share
a world. This is why Tolkien laid out hundreds of
years of history, drew maps of areas where none of
his novels are set, devised languages most of whose
words never appear in a novel.
The imagined construct, the world, has a sense of
repleteness to it. It is nearly inexhaustible, and every
aspect of it counts. Since some of it never appears,
what counts is partially conceptual; that one assumes
that there is more to the world, or that it has a com-
pleteness to it, is part of this artwork, and the replete-
ness lies in this sense, much as the repleteness of a
mark in a graphic work lies in the sense that every
aspect of it, not merely its shape or color, counts.
Repleteness of world and coherence of world are
only two criteria: virtually every other aesthetic cri-
teria found in other art forms can be brought to bear
on made worlds: in short, if a replete, coherent world
is boring, lifeless, or lacking in interest, it’s not likely
that it’s a successful work of art. If people become
excited and interested by it, it probably has more to
it than repleteness and coherence, but if it’s a world
26
Michel Houllebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World Against Life, McSweeney’s, New York, 2005
27
Mike Harrison, on his blog, at http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/very-afraid/. Harrison is the author of Nova Swing, winner of the
Arthur C. Clarke award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2006.
28
It’s notably thematized, though not in the way presented here, in a writings on science fiction and fantasy. The collection Styles of Creation:
Aesthetic Technique in the Creation of Fictional Worlds covers the use of fictional worlds as formal and stylistic element in science fiction,
fantasy and horror literature and film, for example. Ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, University of Georgia, Athens, 1992
conceived as end or goal, it would likely have those
two things.
Worldmaking as Art Form
Notably, Michel Houllebecq, in H.P. Lovecraft:
Against the World Against Life 26 claims that Tolki-
en, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard will be
remembered as the great literary artists of the 20th
century, while Joyce, Musil and Proust would be re-
legated to secondary status. I think, in reading
Houllebecq’s criticism, one of the reasons that he
thinks this is because of the successful creation of
world in these texts.
It’s clear, as Houllebecq notes, that these authors
do not conform to the standards of modernist literary
criticism. They are not about ambiguity and layers
of meaning and prose stylings; rather, they create
dense worlds with an immersive quality. One could
argue, in fact, that the focus on world is to the detri-
ment of the literary work. The novelist Mike Harrison
wrote “every moment of a science fiction story must
represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalizes the
urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives unnecessary
permission to acts of writing (indeed, for acts of
reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability
to fulfill their part of the bargain, because it believes
that it has to do everything around here if anything
is going to get done.”27
Harrison is not wrong, but he’s not interested in
the art of worldmaking (what he calls “worldbuild-
ing.”) Rather, as a novelist, he’s interested in narrat-
ive. Worldbuilding is a different art form, and can
be at odds with the goals of narrative. This is prob-
ably why it has remained unappreciated in main-
stream criticism and literary theorizing.
Instead, it exists in a ghetto of a ghetto: since its
most salient as a feature of science fiction and fantasy
writing (though it is not the case that it is only found
there) it begins outside the realm of standard literary
criticism.28 Further, within the ghetto of genre liter-
ature, it is only seen as as element of the larger work.
Instead, sometimes, I would argue, it is the larger
work, and the individual stories, novels, films, etc.,
are merely elements of that larger work.
Thus, certain artists who worked in worldmaking
were generally considered poets or painters or what
have you, when they should have been considered
worldmakers, and some were considered bad artists
of their type, when they may have just been con-
 JAMES DIGIOVANNA 121

cerned with something other than the obvious aesthet-
ic criterion of their medium.
I would give as prime examples Tolkien, Love-
craft, Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” books, and
the truly awful novels of M.A.R. Barker29. What I
think is interesting in this grouping is that their
storytelling and prose may be weak or awkward, but
the sense of completed world is very strong, and I
think an aesthetic judgment passed on that criterion
merits them high marks, whereas as novelists they
might be placed somewhat, or substantially, lower.
Another reason that worldmaking is often over-
looked is that it is often a shared activity, and the
idea of the individual artist as greater than the com-
mittee of artists is strong in 20th century art theoriz-
ing. But in worldmaking, the collaborative form is
the most active: there are many people now engaging
in the creation of artificial countries, writing artificial
anthropologies and even creating artificial languages,
and placing these together on shared “world maps.”30
Comic book worlds can be shared fictional worlds:
the “universe” in which Superman and Batman and
Wonder Woman reside has been built up over the
last sixty years by hundreds of writers and artists.
The Star Trek franchise may suffer in quality, but
the richness of its world is astonishing; there’s a Star
Trek encyclopedia, for example, written from within
the perspective of this shared world.
Many games, especially computer and “pen and
paper” role-playing games, utilize worldmaking,
though rarely with great artfulness. Second Life is a
currently vibrant example of a highly collaborative
made world which grows and expands in its replete-
ness and coherence constantly.
The question then arises as to what good world-
making looks like, and what aesthetic criteria would
lift it up to excellence in art. I’ll offer a few cases.
William Blake’s early poems are doubtless
charming, and a wealth of criticism extols their vir-
tues, but at least one element that caused his work
to be praised is its consistency, it’s internal coher-
ence. Northrop Frye notes that “Consistency, then,
foolish or otherwise, is one of Blake’s chief preoccu-
pations…the poems of Blake form a canon…any-
thing admitted to that canon, whatever its date, not
only forms a unified scheme but is in accord with a
permanent structure of ideas.”31 It is this canonical
quality of the work, its coherence in image and idea,
that attracts Frye, and with good reason. While
Blake’s later poems may be wanting in poetic qualit-
ies (it’s hard to take seriously a poem with the line
“And sixty-four thousand Gnomes, guard the
Northern Gate”32) they nonetheless continue this
single project, and their images shape that single
world.
Henry Darger’s work is compelling, at least in
part, because of the richness of the world he offers.
Even without knowing that Darger wrote and illus-
trated 15,145 pages, the feel of the world behind the
work comes through. There’s consistency from illus-
tration to illustration that clearly sets them in the
same world. The repleteness of the world, and it’s
internal coherence, infuse the work.
H.P.Lovecraft is often maligned for his overwrit-
ten prose and lax storytelling. Edmund Wilson de-
scribed his work as “bad taste and bad art”33, but a
mark of his worldmaking skill is found in the fact
that so many other writers chose to set works in his
milieu. Clearly, the attraction wasn’t simply Love-
craft’s prose or stories: it was the elements of those
stories that they could work with and expand upon.
These writers wished to use his world, because that’s
what they were drawn to.
Blake, Darger and Lovecraft are all, in their way,
“outsider artists,” and my next example is even fur-
ther outside, as I’ll pick an artist whose work is not
(yet) appreciated, and who works almost exclusively
in worldmaking.
Greg Stafford has for the last forty years been de-
veloping his world, which he calls “Glorantha34”, in
the form of maps, stories, king’s lists, histories, an-
thropological studies, illustrations (by others:
Stafford himself does not draw), and novels. Stafford
originally designed the world as a setting for other
writer’s fictions, bringing to light an important aspect
of worldmaking: it was not the fictions he wished to
create (though he made these too) but the place for
the fictions. Glorantha was ultimately used as the
basis for several novels, board games, a series of
short stories, three role-playing games, and a great

29
Barker is an interesting case in that his work has a strong cult following, but is highly marked by his interest in world over story. To this
end, his novels are impenetrably dull, with main characters who are linguists who spend dozens of pages talking about the syntactic structure
of languages that, within his fantasy world, died out thousands of years earlier. It is exactly this sort of thing that turns off those interested
in novels and fascinates those interested in worlds. See especially (or better, don’t!) his Man of Gold, DAW, New York, 1983, or any of
the books in his “Tekumel” series. But really, don’t!
30
I’d note that a number of on-line role-playing games do just this; Second Life is perhaps the most successful example.
31
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1965, pp 14
32
William Blake, Jerusalem, plate 13
33
Quoted in S.T. Joshi, introduction to An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft, Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, Rutherford, 1991
34
Stafford’s anthropological/historical treatises on his created Glorantha include Mythologies of the Western, Southern and Eastern Lands
of Glorantha; The Entekosiad, a summation of the myths known by women in one of his fictional land; The Glorious Reascent of Yelm,
the male myths from the same land; The Fortunate Succession, a king’s list; King of Sartar, a fake history redacted, complete with contra-
dictions, from a collection of disparate chronicles, and dozens of other works.
122 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2

many illustrations and paintings, poems, stories and
myths.
However, the detail of the world far surpasses the
needs of these uses. Stafford has drawn maps of the
entire world, written extensive anthropological
studies of its various inhabitants, laid out their
mythologies, produced many texts supposedly writ-
ten in this world, written over two thousand years of
its history, and given incredibly detailed accounts of
the myths, stories and religious practices found there.
Because of this immersive quality, the extent to
which the myths change over time and in response
to war, the movement of peoples and their encounters
with other peoples, the world has the key features
we’re looking for: coherence and repleteness.
Stafford expressly understands worldmaking as his
art form.35
Conclusion
While the artists above come from different art
forms, different media, different times and have
deeply different views on art, what they have in
common is a direction of their art towards the cre-
ation of a rich and compelling world. That world
may be characterized by its geography, its inhabit-
ants, its history, or its physics, in any combination,
but the artists’ work is directed towards the coher-
ence and repleteness of these worlds (as well as the
more elusive quality of making them interesting.) In
short, the concerns are with creating the truth-condi-
tions for claims about the world, which is what al-
lows so many others to pick up and play with these
worlds.
The concern with the nature of fictional discourse
in speech-act theory is also addressed here: instead
of saying that the utterances in fiction lack illocution-
ary force, we can say that they have precisely the
same illocutionary force as they do in their normal
usage, only they do so only for the fictional entities
in the fictional world, as cashed out in the fictional
occurrences and environment of that world. Illocu-
tionary force is always context-bound; here the con-
text is world, understood as the complete set of rel-
evant objects and events surrounding the utterance.
While philosophical concerns with truth conditions
and illocutionary force may seem external to aesthet-
ics, in this particular case they are central, since a
paradigmatic goal of worldmaking is precisely the
concern with coherence, and the ability to produce
truth-conditional claims about or in the worlds cre-
ated is a mark of that coherence; the ability to pro-
duce many such claims is a mark of the repleteness
of these worlds.
Clearly, other aesthetic criteria need to be brought
in to judge the artistic excellence of these works, but
at least for the purpose of delineating an art form,
these serve as a start.

About the Author

Dr. James DiGiovanna
James DiGiovanna teaches at John Jay College and at Stony Brook’s Master’s Program in Philosophy of Art
and Aesthetics, where his work focuses on themes of self-creation and the intersection of aesthetics and ethics.
He is also an award-winning film reviewer and filmmaker, and author of a number of published short stories.

35
In an interview online at http://www.rpg.net/columns/interviews/interviews13.phtml Stafford describes Glorantha as an “artistic expression”
and “creative outlet.”
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY

EDITORS
Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Robyn Archer, Performer/Director. Former Artistic Director, European Capital of Culture 2008,
Liverpool, UK.
Tressa Berman, Executive Director, BorderZone Arts, Inc., San Francisco, USA; Visiting Research
Faculty, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia.
Judy Chicago, Artist and Author, New Mexico, USA.
James Early, Director of Cultural Heritage Policy, Smithsonian Institution, Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage, and Acting-Interim Director, Anacostia Museum Center for African American
History, USA.
Mehdi Faridzadeh, President, International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC), New York and
Tehran, Iran.
Jennifer Herd, Artist, Curator, and Founding Faculty, Bachelor of Visual Arts in Contemporary
Indigenous Arts, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
Fred Ho, Composer, Writer, Producer. New York, USA.
Andrew Jacubowicz, Faculty of Humanities, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
Gerald McMaster, Curator of Canadian Art, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada.
Mario Minichiello, Academic Director and Chair, Loughborough University School of Art and
Design, UK.
Fred Myers, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, New York University, USA.
Darcy Nicholas, Contemporary Maori Artist. General Manager, Porirua City Council, Pataka
Museum of Arts and Cultures, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Arthur Sabatini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Arizona State University, USA.
Cima Sedigh, President, Global Education and Health Alliance, Faculty of Education, Sacred Heart
University in Fairfield, Connecticut, USA.
Peter Sellars, Opera Director, World Cultures Program, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Judy Spokes, Director, Cultural Development Network, Australia.
Tonel (Antonio Eligio), Artist, Art Critic, University of British Columbia, Canada, and Havana,
Cuba.
Marianne Wagner-Simon, Independent Curator and Producer, Berlin, Germany.

Please visit the Journal website at http://www.Arts-Journal.com for further information:

- ABOUT the Journal including Scope and Concerns, Editors, Advisory Board,
Associate Editors and Journal Profile
- FOR AUTHORS including Publishing Policy, Submission Guidelines, Peer Review Process and
Publishing Agreement

SUBSCRIPTIONS
The Journal offers individual and institutional subscriptions. For further information please visit
http://ija.cgpublisher.com/subscriptions.html Inquiries can be directed to
subscriptions@commongroundpublishing.com

INQUIRIES
Email: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com