Lubomír Doležel
In 1975 an article by Thomas G. Pavel titled “Possible Worlds in Literary Semantics” appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. This study substantially enriched literary theory by linking it to the modal logic of possible worlds. Pavel, then professor of linguistics at the University of Ottawa, was trying to develop a new approach to the theory of fiction. He read an article on modal logic by the logician Saul Kripke that he found inspiring, and fictional theory based on possible worlds was born. Pavel continued his research in fictional theory, and in 1986 Harvard University Press published his book Fictional Worlds, which became a classic in this growing field.
I approach the problem of fictionality from the same position as Thomas Pavel—as a theorist of literature originally trained as a linguist. The theory I present here is formulated primarily with regard to literary and, more specifically, narrative fiction. That does not mean that I restrict fictionality to literature. I believe that other genres of literature, lyric poetry, and drama, as well as theater, fiction film, fictional genres in television, ballet, painting, and sculpting, each by its own semiotic means creates or constructs fictional worlds. Necessarily, the problem of fictionality is not a monopoly of literary scholars; instead, developing and evaluating conceptions of fictionality are interdisciplinary tasks.
At present, the two most active centers of this inquiry are narratology—itself an interdisciplinary field—and analytic philosophy. My efforts over the years have been aimed at synthesizing the main theoretical ideas and suggestions that emerged in these two fields.
Every theory rests on some tacit assumptions. I find it necessary to make explicit one of them because it determines the fundamental position that I take in my work. It is the choice of the research tradition, in the sense of Larry Laudan (1977), in which we place ourselves as researchers. Let me just mention without argumentation that even those scholars who deny the relevance or even the existence of tradition proceed in the framework of the tradition denying tradition. I believe that the only research tradition in which the concepts of possible and fictional worlds can be developed is the tradition of a rigorous and explicit theory and concept formation. There is no possibility to discuss fictional world in a fuzzy, impressionistic language.
In the twentieth century our disciplines developed this tradition in Prague and in Parisian structuralism and semiotics. American new criticism should be considered a special branch of this tradition. Since this tradition was rejected by poststructuralism, we can see the theory of possible/fictional worlds as a sign of the emergence of post-poststructuralism.
In this chapter, placing myself in the tradition of rigorous and explicit theory and concept formation, I use the method of the tree to delineate the concept of fictional worlds. The “data structure” known as the tree has a venerable history (see Eco 2014), originating with the third-century philosopher Porfyry, and it has recently achieved a new prominence by being widely used in contemporary sciences, especially in biology, linguistics, and computer science. In the tree structure, the logical history of the concept of fictional worlds will be seen as a hierarchically arranged succession of binary nodes; at each of these nodes we will choose one of two alternative directions (see fig. 1.1).
I believe that the journey is worth undertaking for two reasons. First, it represents the logical structure of the concept dynamically: as we look backward we will discover more and more general frameworks in which the concept of fictional worlds is placed. Second, we can develop alternative conceptions of fictionality for comparative purposes.
There is a frightful confusion today about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. It is caused, in my opinion, by the neopragmatists’ claim that pragmatics is the supreme, even exclusive dimension in the study of signs. Semantics is downgraded, sometimes even erased. The transfer of responsibility for concept and theory formation to the users of signs (i.e., the readers of literature, the viewers of visual signs, etc.) has had fatal consequences—an uncontrollable relativization.
Fig. 1.1. Tree diagram to delineate the concept of a fictional world.
In the study of literature, specifically of literary reception, one neopragmatic conception has gained prominence: the German Rezeptionsästhetik (e.g., Iser 1978; Jauss 1982). The representatives of this school assigned text interpretation to anonymous readers. They denied identity to the literary text. In the Anglo-American version of neopragmatism, fictionality is most frequently taken as a speech-act convention. “The essence of fiction,” writes Nicholas Wolterstorff, “is to be located in the nature of the speech acts performed when telling or writing a narration” (1988, 248). The paradigmatic version of fictional pragmatics, proposed by John Searle, treats fictional speech acts as pretended assertions: “The author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts, normally of the assertive type, without any intent to deceive” (1979, 65).
The assumption about the pretended character of the fictional speech act is empirically unverifiable. For me, it is at this point irrelevant, because it offers explanation for the speech act of fiction making, not for its result, the fictional world. I will deal with the pragmatic aspect of the fictional speech act when I get to the reverse phase of the tree evolution.
The weaknesses of the pragmatic interpretations lead us to choose at this junction the direction toward semantic conceptions of fictionality. However, due to the contemporary confusion in the concepts of semantics and pragmatics, I decided to return to the original distinction made by one of the founders of the semiotic theory, the American Charles Morris. He distinguished three “subordinate branches” of semiotics: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntactics studies the formal relations between signs, semantics concerns “the relations of signs to their designata,” and pragmatics focuses on “the relation of signs to their interpreters” (Morris 1938, 8, 21). At the same time, however, he emphasized that “the various dimensions are only aspects of a unitary process” (30). It is within Morris’s framework that I claim that “fictional world” is a semantic notion. Its ground is not in the character of the fictional speech act but in the specificity of its domain of reference. It is precisely on this axis that the concept of the fictional world emerges: fictions have a reference that is not the actual but a possible world. Following Philip Bradley and Norman Swartz (1979), we can strengthen this argument by pointing to the logic of possible worlds: their truth conditions (i.e., semantic conditions) are stated as “true in/of a possible world.”
In order to build a semantics of fiction, we have to choose its ontological base, a certain general conception of reality. Our choice at this intersection could be traditional, the metaphysical distinction of realism and idealism. However, the “linguistic turn” of the twentieth century and the field of semiotics allow us to restate the basic ontological question as the opposition of realism and constructivism.
The Czech analytic philosopher Petr Koťátko (2006) presents the realist position under the designation “naive realism.” His designation hints at the traditional metaphysical notion that any metaphysical system is philosophically naive because none can be supported by a consistent and generally acceptable logical argument. The undecidability of metaphysics has always been felt; recently, it has been explicitly articulated by a practitioner of this ancient philosophical discipline. In connection with David Lewis’s “modal realism,” Phillip Bricker states: “The debate goes on; as with other metaphysical debates, a decisive outcome is not to be expected. . . . There seems to be a fundamental rift—unbridgeable by argument—between ontologically conservative philosophers who have what Bertrand Russell called ‘a robust sense of reality,’ and ontologically liberal philosophers who respond, echoing Hamlet: ‘There is more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy’” (2008, 131).
To avoid this undecidability, Koťátko placed the basic ontological problem in the general semantics of signs (semiotics). He formulated the basic choice as questions: “Do we express ourselves in language about the world and about objects existing independently of our utterances and of our language, or is what we express ipso facto formed (structured, organized) by language? Do we express ourselves about a linguistic construct?” (2006, 25). And he answers the questions by affirming the realist position: language is “one of the means of our interaction with our environment and with each other”; “the ability of language to serve for speaking about entities independent of our utterances and of our language is anchored in the very constitution of language and in the role that it plays in our way of life” (27).
The position of constructivism, that is, the view that reality is a social construct, was succinctly and unambiguously expressed by Nelson Goodman: “We can have words without a world, but no worlds without words or other symbols” (1978, 6). Goodman did not answer, did not even ask, where we could find “words without a world.” It seems that in general constructivists have difficulty answering Ian Hacking’s (1999) question: “Social construction of what?”
Consequences of radical constructivism can be best observed in the postmodern philosophy of history, where this view has achieved wide popularity. It was announced by Roland Barthes (following Nietzsche): “From the moment language intervenes (and when would it not intervene?), the fact can only be defined in a tautological fashion. . . . The fact can only have a linguistic existence (as a term of a discourse), and yet everything proceeds as if this existence were nothing but a pure and simple ‘copy’ of another existence situated in the extrastructural domain, in the ‘real’” ([1967] 1981, 16–17). Armed with this presupposition, Barthes was ready to answer his original question: “Does this narration [the narration of past events] differ, in some specific trait, in some indubitably pertinent feature, from imaginary narration, as we find it in the epic, the novel, the drama?” His answer is negative (65, 73).
Hayden White provided further ammunition to the view that there is no fundamental distinction between historiographic and fictional narrative. He claims that explanation in history consists in matching “a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he [the historian] wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say fiction-making, operation” (White 1978, 85, emphasis added). British historian Alun Munslow dragged this position to a radical extreme: “The past is not discovered or found. It is created and represented by the historian as a text” (1997, 118). Here, I feel, constructivism reveals its counterintuitive character.1
A recently formulated dichotomy, in my opinion, contributes substantially to our choice at this node: Jaakko Hintikka’s “ultimate presupposition of twentieth-century philosophy.” It harks back to Leibniz’s project of a universal regimented language (characteristica [lingua] universalis and calculus ratiocinator), but Hintikka’s immediate inspiration was a brief paper on Gottlob Frege’s logic by Jean van Heijenoort (1967). Van Heijenoort distinguished between logic as “calculus” and logic as “language.” Hintikka (1988, 1997) transferred this distinction into the philosophy of language, speaking about two conceptions of language: language as calculus and language as universal medium. In his later contribution, Hintikka noted that the term “calculus” has “multiple connotations” and therefore can be misleading; instead, he suggested speaking “of the model-theoretical tradition in logic and philosophy of language” (1997, xi).
Hintikka’s suggestion was significantly enriched by Martin Kusch, another Finnish analytic philosopher. He undertook a thorough analysis of the philosophy of language of prominent phenomenologists of the twentieth century and came to this conclusion: Husserl accepts the concept of language as calculus, while Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s conceptions treat it as a universal medium (Kusch 1989, 130–34, 225–28, 257).
Hintikka differentiates the two positions fundamentally in their answer to a critical question: Can we or can we not “escape our language”? He explains that if you treat language as calculus, “you so to speak stop your language and step off. In less metaphoric terms, you can discuss the semantics of your language and even vary systematically its interpretation.” This implies, in my opinion, that you can “get through” language and gain a view of the world as existing independently of its verbal representations. In contrast, when we see language as the universal medium “we cannot in the last analysis escape our language and as it were look at it and its logic from the outside” (Hintikka 1988, 53–54). From this distinction Hintikka draws a very important conclusion: “One of the most important consequences of the view of language as the universal medium is the uniqueness of our language and of its interpretation. All that language is good for on this view is to enable us to talk about this world. We cannot (unless a great deal of further explanation is given) use language to discuss other possible worlds. . . . Thus the very possibility of possible-worlds semantics depends on some version of the assumption of language as calculus” (54). Hintikka’s formulation, together with the previous critique of constructivist semantics, leads us to take at this node the direction toward the realist position in the philosophy of language.
At this binary choice we have to decide whether a satisfactory conception of fiction will be placed in the frame of one-world semantics or in the frame of a semantics based on the plurality of worlds. The one-world frame is the base of a popular tradition established by Bertrand Russell: “There is only one world, the ‘real world.’ . . . It is the very essence of fiction that only the thoughts, feelings etc. in Shakespeare and his readers are real, and that there is not, additional to them, an objective Hamlet” (1919, 169). According to Russell, fictional entities (such as Odysseus) are nonexistent entities and as such have no properties; fictional terms (the name Odysseus) lack reference (are “empty”); and fictional sentences are false. This view spells disaster for fictional entities, especially for fictional characters. By denying them properties, Russell’s conception is the exact opposite of what the creators of fictions do, namely, assign specific properties to their fictional persons.
The second one-world conception of fictionality is the doctrine of mimesis, which ties fictions to the actual world, explaining them as its imitations or representations. This conception has been dominant in the Western cultural tradition since its emergence in antiquity (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle). It achieved wide popularity, especially in its Aristotelian guise, which transforms fictional individuals into actual universals (types). And despite its rejection by modernist poets and artists, it has survived until today in various guises.2 The semantics of fictional worlds requires a conception of fiction broad enough to accommodate not only “realist” fictions but also various types of nonstandard and experimental fictions of the past, the present, and the future. Modern fiction making, a supreme and autonomous exercise of creative imagination, has cut ties to the actual world.
In contrast to one-world theories of fictionality, the “Leibnizian conception,” based on the idea of the plurality of worlds, enables us to formulate the concept of fictional worlds as possible worlds. It is well known that the modernized notion of possible worlds was originally suggested as the model for modal semantics formulated by Saul Kripke (1963).3 But soon it proved to be very useful in a wide range of theoretical disciplines. Let me quote the opinions of two philosophers who agree on this point, although they hold very different views on what possible worlds are. According to Joseph Melia, “The philosophical benefits that possible worlds offer are rich indeed” (2008, 135), but he did not go beyond this generality. Bricker is more specific: “Philosophers agree for the most part that possible worlds talk is extremely useful for explicating concepts and formulating theories.” He points to a number of philosophical fields in which this “talk” has proved its usefulness: “analytic metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology, and ethics” (Bricker 2008, 111). Unfortunately, he did not take notice of the key document of the interdisciplinary reach of the idea of possible worlds, namely, the proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65 (Allén 1988). In this volume the concept was tested in a number of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, history of science, and linguistics through literary and art theory to quantum mechanics and cosmology.
In its original version as formal semantics of modality, the concept of possible worlds was ontologically neutral. This neutrality was formulated at that time by a Russian logician: possible worlds semantics should be taken “simply as mathematical models of the corresponding logical calculi, without any philosophical interpretation” (Slinin 1967). But outside formal semantics the model could not preserve its ontological innocence. As recognized by Robert Adams (1989), a fundamental split exists within the doctrine of possible worlds, namely, the opposition between actualism and possibilism. For possibilism, the actual world “does not have a different status” within the set of possible worlds, while for actualism, the actual world is “a standpoint outside the system of possible worlds from which judgments of actuality which are not world-relative may be made” (Adams 1989, 202).
I do not claim that a semantics of fiction on the basis of possibilism could not be developed. But I have two reasons for choosing actualism at this node. First, actualism is consistent with the realist position in the philosophy of language, which I have chosen at the second node. Second, if there is a need to defend the borderline between fiction and reality, it is actualism that offers us support. And in our time the strengthening of this borderline is necessary because certain trends in postmodern thought (such as the constructivist conception of historiography mentioned above) weakened it or even tried to erase it.
Now we are faced with the final binary choice, which some philosophers consider a barrier preventing them from treating fictions as possible worlds. It is well known that the possible worlds of Kripke’s model are “total” and “maximally comprehensive” states of affairs, or, as Takashi Yagisawa put it, “maximal cohesive mereological sums of possibilia” (1968, 180). In other words, the possible worlds of modal logic are infinite and complete sets of abstract entities. John Perry calls this conception “the strong version of possible-worlds theory” (1988, 125) and names David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker as philosophers who adhere to it. The infinite size, number, and variety of possible worlds can be handled by logical formalisms but is beyond the reach of tools and models of empirical research. For all empirical researchers, this caveat has been expressed by Barbara H. Partee: “A maximal set is not appropriate for empirical research, such as, for example, linguistics” (1988, 118). Are we to leave possible worlds in their original purely formal manifestation and refuse them as a theoretical base of empirical inquiries?
In answering this question, we are again offered a helping hand from Hintikka. He considers the claim that possible worlds have to be infinite a “hangover” from the conception of language as the universal medium. But in the conception of language as calculus, where “we really are free to re-interpret our language,” we can also choose freely the universe of discourse language refers to. This universe hence does not have to be an entire world in the commonplace sense of the word, that is, a possible world history; it can be a “‘small world,’ that is, a relatively short course of local events in some nook or corner of the actual world” (Hintikka 1988, 55). The concept of small worlds was taken up by Umberto Eco, who extended its application to fictional worlds. Eco also emphasized that outside formal semantics we need “furnished” possible worlds made up of “individuals endowed with properties” (Eco 1989, 343). Small and concrete possible worlds are a legitimate base of theorizing in empirical disciplines. Correspondingly, we conceive of fictional worlds as small structured worlds consisting of a finite number of possible particulars: persons, events, actions, places, and so on.
A semantics of literary fiction based on this conception of possible worlds as small worlds was launched as early as the 1970s. In the late 1980s and especially in the 1990s a number of synthesizing works laid a firm foundation for a comprehensive possible worlds semantics of literary fictions.4 Soon other literary scholars expanded the project.5
The discovery of possible worlds semantics would seem to end our journey in search of a semantics of literary fictions. However, we have not yet answered a very important question: How are these worlds created?
According to Leibniz’s amendment of the story of creation, the divine mind had the ability to survey and evaluate an infinite number of possible worlds and was able to select the best of them for the act of creation. Contemporary thinking about possible worlds does not locate possible worlds in some transcendental depository where they await discovery. As Kripke put it, “Possible worlds are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes” (1980, 44), and M. J. Cresswell specifies: “Possible worlds are things we can talk about or imagine, suppose, believe in or wish for” (1988, 4). How then are possible worlds of literary fictions “stipulated”? They are constructed by the creative activity of writing. By writing a text, the author creates a fictional world that had not been available prior to this act. There is no other medium of construction (and reconstruction) of fictional worlds of literature than the literary text. In order to serve this function, the fictional text has to possess a special world-creating power. How do we explain this power? In order to answer this question, we have to reverse the direction of our journey and take text theory as the second base for our conception of fiction. And we will have to choose again between two options (see fig. 1.1).
My explanation of the world-creating power of fictional texts will be given in two steps. The first step is the claim that fictional texts lack truth value. In this thesis, I follow Frege ([1892] 1960, 62), who recognized that fictional texts (sentences; he calls them Dichtung) are neither true nor false. Indeed, it makes no sense to ask whether Gustave Flaubert was telling the truth or not when he made Emma Bovary die by poisoning herself. There was no world, no life, no death of Emma prior to Flaubert’s writing; therefore, there was no basis for the truth valuation of his sentences.
The second, no less important step in the development of our conception of fictional poiesis is the recognition of a specific illocutionary force of fictional texts. To explain this force, I turn to the theory of speech acts, specifically to J. L. Austin’s concept of performative speech acts. He suggested this concept in his well-known book, How to Do Things with Words (1962), and elaborated it in a paper, first published in French the same year and later translated into English (Austin 1971). The paper is important because in it the concept of the performative is specified by being contrasted to the constative. The distinction harks back to Aristotle, who removed certain classes of texts (such as invocations, prayers, etc.) from the authority of logic and relegated them to the domain of rhetoric (De interpretatione 17a). According to Austin, a performative speech act “has its own special job, it is used to perform an action” (1971, 13). A performative speech act gains this power not by truth conditions but by felicity conditions. A necessary (although not the only) felicity condition is the speaker’s authority to perform a certain action by words (e.g., the judge’s authority to sentence somebody to prison).
I explained the specific world-creating power of the fictional text by the theory of authentication: a possible world is converted into a fictional world when it is authenticated by a felicitous (i.e., authoritative) fictional text (1998, chap. 6). It is as authenticated possibles that unicorns and fairies, Odysseus and Raskolnikov, Brobdingnag and Chevengur exist and that readers can gain access to them, fear them, or feel pity for them, as well as talk and argue about them at any time—as they do with respect to actual entities.
The story of authentication in narrative texts is, however, more complicated. Because authentication can be achieved by different narrative text modes—third-person narration (also known as Er-form), first-person narration (also known as Ich-form), subjective narration, and so on—as well as explicitly or implicitly, we are forced to speak about various degrees or ranks of fictional existence. Some fictional facts exist absolutely, others with a subjective tinge, some as definite, others as virtual, and so on. Does it mean that our semantics of fiction has to accept a broad (Meinongian) conception of existence? The Hungarian fictional worlds theorist Zoltan Kanyó thought so, and Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) presupposes so in speaking about “virtual worlds.” I am not imposing this ontology, but I maintain that not only possible worlds semantics of fiction but also various developments in today’s science and technology force us to struggle anew with the very concept of existence. What we learned in deriving the concept of fiction can thus provide us with arguments in the perennial but again topical philosophical conflict: the conflict over what exists and what does not exist. Fictional worlds seem to challenge our standard binary thinking about existence.
1. For a detailed critique of the constructivist philosophy of history, see Doležel (2010).
2. See especially Erich Auerbach ([1946] 1957). Some contemporary scholars who defend the doctrine of mimesis have made the term fuzzy.
3. For recent developments in the philosophy of possible worlds, see the anthology Possible Worlds: Logic, Semantics and Ontology, edited by Guido Imaguire and Dale Jaquette.
4. See Pavel (1986); Ryan (1991); Eco (1994); Ronen (1994); and Doležel (1998).
5. See Semino (1997); Červenka (2003); Fořt (2005). The attention of my readers should not escape the popularity of possible worlds semantics of fiction in contemporary Czech theory of fiction and narratology. It is a result of the expansion of the domain of structural thematics initiated by the Czech literary structuralists Jan Mukařovský and Felix Vodička (see Bremond et al. 1995).
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