Review

Abstract

The theory of possible worlds (PW) was originally employed by analytical philosophers in the 1960s to provide the semantics for modal operators. Since the 1970s, literary critics disenchanted with formalist approaches have adapted this new theory to studies on fictionality and narrativity and developed it into a flourishing subdomain of postclassical narratology. The present collection Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, edited by Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan, investigates both the history and recent advances of this interdisciplinary approach. Authored by an international community of scholars, it outlines the theoretical development of this analytical framework, contributes to the ongoing debate over its unresolved problems, and presents new methods tested by a host of narrative forms.The volume consists of an introduction by its two editors, twelve articles, and a postface by the prominent PW theorist Thomas G. Pavel. In the introduction, Bell and Ryan first trace the origins of PW theory in philosophy. They start with Jaakko Hintikka's view of “language as calculus,” a paradigm shift toward a many-worlds ontology, “upon which [PW] semantics rests” (Martin 73). They then revisit the core concepts developed by PW philosophers who have echoed Hintikka's view, including the model structure proposed by Saul Kripke and its applications. While considering the philosophical notion of PW as a “bonus” for literature (3), Bell and Ryan also remind readers of the necessity of “some degree of adaptation” for its transfer to literature (8). In the second part of the introduction, the editors move to evaluate PW scholarship in literary studies. They survey literary critics (Pavel, David Lewis, Lubomír Doležel, Umberto Eco, Ryan, and others) who have adopted and modified the concepts from PW semantics, and highlight PW theory's major literary applications, such as theory of fiction, theory of genre, narrative semantics, and digital media. The introduction is concluded with an overview of the following chapters.The twelve chapters are organized into four parts. Part I examines some of the underexplored theoretical issues in PW theory. In the opening chapter, the late pioneering PW scholar Doležel utilizes Porfyry's tree structure to explicate his theory of fictionality. Justifying his choice for each of the hierarchically ranked binary nodes, he lays down a path to a semantics of fiction grounded in philosophical frames such as semantics, realism, and PW, and then explains fiction's “world-creating power” by borrowing from J. L. Austin's theory of performative speech acts (56). In “From Possible Worlds to Storyworlds: On the Worldness of Narrative Representation,” Ryan first elaborates on the basic properties of storyworlds. She then applies PW theory to distinguish different storyworlds via three variables: distance, size, and completeness. The distance between a storyworld and the actual world is measured by the number of “accessibility relations” linking them together. The size of a storyworld depends on the information it generates. Finally, Ryan manifests the distinctions between ontologically complete and incomplete worlds through the comparison of two dramas, Jean Racine's Phèdre and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In the last chapter of part I, Marina Grishakova introduces “virtual voice,” a concept raised by her in 2011 as a counterpart to Ryan's “virtual narrative.” However, unlike Ryan's model for “unrealized or unrealizable plot versions” (92), Grishakova's term is “perspective-oriented” (97) and represents “actualized discursive effect” (92). Through the examples from several contemporary fictions, the author also exposes how the “unstable, ambivalent or reversible” (99) relations between actual and virtual voices contribute to narrative dynamics.Part II attempts to depict readers' cognitive engagement with fictional worlds. In “Ungrounding Fictional Worlds: An Enactivist Perspective on the ‘Worldlikeness’ of Fiction,” Marco Caracciolo complements PW theory with enactivist philosophy to better describe fiction's “world-like quality.” He emphasizes the experiential nature of our imaginings of fictional worlds and claims that this process is evoked by narratives' embodied and affective “rhythmicity,” which draws on and reflects our real-life experience. He further illustrates his idea in the case study of Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape. In “Postmodern Play with Worlds: The Case of At Swim-Two-Birds,” W. Michelle Wang targets “play,” a distinct feature of postmodernist texts caused by their ontological complexities which often lead to readers' “cognitive disorientation” (133). To model these playful worlds and readers' efforts to restore coherence, she extends Ryan's “principle of minimal departure” with Pavel's term of “maximal departure” and notes that readers choose between these two rules according to three textual cues: the position, frequency, and nature of the departures of the textual universe from the actual world. Her rereading of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds that uses this adjusted framework provides fresh insights about the novel. In “Logical Contradictions, Possible Worlds Theory, and the Embodied Mind,” Jan Alber centers on how readers cope with logical impossibilities in postmodern literature. Like Caracciolo, he also adopts an enactivist perspective to simulate readers' cognitive processes and suggests that logical contradictions can be comprehended by readers in that they will first “elicit emotional responses” (160) and then “trigger … experiential background” (170). To specify his account, he offers close readings of three fictional narratives, each involving a different type of logically impossible scenario.Part III probes into different genres—time travel story, fantasy, utopia, and dystopia included—through the lens of PW theory. In “Escape into Alternative Worlds and Time(s) in Jack London's The Star Rover,” Christoph Bartsch attends to temporality, which is underdiscussed within the PW framework. He follows Lewis's division between “external time” (i.e., the empirical time of the textual actual world) and “personal time” (i.e., the distinct timeline experienced by a character) and displays how interactions—especially divergences and conflicts—of the two temporal dimensions contribute to plot dynamics in time travel stories like Star Rover. In “‘As Many Worlds as Original Artists’: Possible Worlds Theory and the Literature of Fantasy,” Thomas L. Martin focuses on fantasy, a genre eclipsed by realism literature over a long period of time and relegated by one-world semantics to mere impossibility. Recognizing the “natural” compatibility between PW theory and fantasy (211), Martin redefines literary worlds in fantasy as “ontologically other worlds” (218) with their own “intelligibility and credibility” (206). He then draws from Ryan, Doležel, and Pavel to show how PW theory helps decipher fantasy worlds in terms of their relations to the actual world. His discussion of Nancy Traill's and Farah Mendlesohn's studies on the modes of the fantastic further demonstrates the theory's explanatory power for this genre. The last chapter of part III concerns utopias and dystopias. Aiming to go beyond the dominating “political and sociological” frameworks for the studies of these two genres (225), Mattison Schuknecht resorts to PW theory to introduce a “formal and narratological alternative.” His new model comprises two approaches: the transuniversal approach and the intrauniversal approach. The former, examining the relations between the textual actual worlds of the utopias/dystopias and the actual world, expands Ryan's accessibility relations to include two genres in her text typology. The latter, comparing their textual actual worlds from the perspective of Doležel's system of narrative modalities, serves to distinguish between the two fictional worlds.The final part of the book explores how digital media and PW theory can shed light on each other. In “Digital Fictionality: Possible Worlds Theory, Ontology, and Hyperlinks,” Bell updates PW theory to deal with the ontological ambiguity brought by external hyperlinks—a medium-specific device in digital fiction. She puts forth three effects that resulted from different ways of using hyperlinks, namely flickering, refreshment, and merging. Each effect is exhibited via a specific digital text. The second chapter, Françoise Lavocat's “Possible Worlds, Virtual World,” is devoted to the analysis of virtual worlds created by digital media, particularly video games. Taking the metaverse Second Life as an example, Lavocat first analyzes the ontological status of virtual worlds and compares these worlds with the actual world and fictional worlds in literature. Next, she draws distinctions between the virtual worlds of metaverses, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and single-player games by Doležel's notion of modalities. The collection ends with Daniel Punday's reflections on how affinities between PW theory and Lev Manovich's theory for the new media can assist the former in better modeling fictional worlds. Punday first shows the analogy between Manovich's idea of the “separation of interface from data source” (299) in digital media and the independence of fictional worlds from the texts presenting them in PW thinking, and then points out that it can be used to understand different PW models, such as transfictionality and transmedia narratives. Meanwhile, the metaphor of algorithm can help reveal how readers treat texts by discovering their governing rules and gathering clues from their genres.As Pavel comments in the postface, PW theory belongs to “a more general, theoretical study of what literature focuses on, depicts and presents to its public” (316). Indeed, through the extensiveness of their subjects, methodologies, and case studies, the contributors of this collection demonstrate PW theory's potentials for addressing a variety of literary issues and prove its relevance in unveiling the nature of literature. The collection will not only be of great interest to philosophers of language and literary theorists, but also those who aspire to discover and navigate through alternative possible worlds, be it fictional or nonfictional, textual or intermedial.