A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If by Marie-Laure Ryan

Abstract

Reviewed by: A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If by Marie-Laure Ryan Edward Wells (bio) Marie-Laure Ryan, A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If, The Ohio State University Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-0-8142-1508-1, 226 pages, $89.95 A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If is a scholarly work on a storyworld-based theory of narratology. However, its strengths lie beyond the scope arguing the merits of such a theory. They include its thorough address of fundamental concepts connected to narrative including, truth, fiction, narrators, and representation. The book's systematic address of these topics in a relatively easy-to-access manner allows the book to serve as a useful resource for educators focused on narratology and related concepts. If one is interested in wading quickly into the depths of "the implications of the concepts of world for narratology" (1), this book is an accessible entry point. The ideas present may also offer considerable provocation for scholars of narratology. Ryan includes primers and exploration not only of their central topic but for many of the concepts fundamental to narrative and fiction. The Introduction alone offers insight and detail of the history of narratology and a foundational understanding of the theory Ryan develops: "[n]arrative texts cannot represent 'all that exists,' but they can, and should, represent how individual existents relate to the people and objects that define their living environment" (7). The book is written in a way that allows each chapter to familiarize the reader with the chapter's focal topic within the context of narratology rather than foregrounding Ryan's storyworld theory of narratology. The chapter topics follow: Truth, Fiction, Narrator, Characters, Plot, Mimesis and Diegesis, Parallel Worlds, Impossible Worlds, Virtual Worlds, and Transmedia Worlds. The expansive and historical orientations present throughout are one of the recurring strengths of A New Anatomy of Storyworlds. They offer straightforward perspective and dominant ideas to which one may align or work against to form one's position. As one moves through the text, within the thoroughness of Ryan's thought, one faces the foundational consideration that any character, any event, must have a world, in the sense of a container, even if that container is a fictional nothingness. This consideration alone makes evident that storyworlds do have a fundamental place within narratives, if not a primacy. The first chapters are particularly interesting though their content makes clear that the body of the text is not limited to pressing major points of the argument for a storyworld-based theory of narratology, so much as immersing the reader in a broad perspective which itself is informed by the storyworld-theory. The first chapter, as an illustration of the approach and tone throughout much of the book, considers in detail the practical consideration of whether truth is an apt defining characteristic of fiction. If one is interested in concepts of truth, this chapter is a highly functional introduction and map of the highlights. It clearly lays out many of the relevant primary texts, such as Aristotle's Metaphysics; Alfred Tarski's The Semantic Conception of Truth (1969); Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989); [End Page 127] David Lewis' Truth in Fiction (1978); and Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1990), among others. Toward the end of the chapter, there are three sections on truth from a perspective more attuned to narratology. These sections—Fictional Truth, Literary Truth, and Mythical Truth—are additional examples of what makes the book so functional as a broad reader which can take one from beginner toward expert remarkably swiftly. Following these sections, Ryan's reflective conclusion to the Truth chapter returns to a thought introduced at the beginning of the chapter, Alan D. Sokal's 1996 challenge of the postmodernist critique of scientific truth in "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" reprinted in The Sokal Hoax (2000). Ryan conversationally wonders "what would happen if the postmodern critique of truth as correspondence succeeded in bringing the scientific community down to its knees" (33). While it...