Jan Alber
The basis of possible worlds theory is “the set-theoretical idea that reality—the sum of the imaginable—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct elements. This universe is hierarchically structured by the opposition of one well-designated element, to all the other members of the set” (Ryan 2005, 446). Possible worlds theorists such as Lubomír Doležel, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pavel, Ruth Ronen, and Marie-Laure Ryan place the actual world (AW), the world in which we are all located, at the center of their model, while what they call “alternate possible worlds” (APWs) (such as our dreams, visions, utopias, hallucinations, and fictional narratives) revolve around the center (the AW) to which they are all connected and form alternatives. Furthermore, the relations between APWs and the AW may involve different types of accessibility. An APW can entertain closer or more distant relations to the AW, but in general, a world only counts as being an APW if it is accessible from the AW, the world at the center of the system.
In 1699 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imposed a restriction on possible worlds by arguing that “possible things are those which do not imply a contradiction” (1969, 513). This statement clearly influenced the ways in which theorists and critics have since thought about APWs in general and fictional worlds in particular. Marie-Laure Ryan writes that the most common view in possible worlds theory associates possibility with logical laws: “Every world that respects the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle is a PW” (2005, 446). From this vantage point, worlds that include or imply contradictions are unthinkable or empty. Indeed, the standard view in logic is that if a single contradiction enters a system of propositions, anything can be inferred, and it becomes impossible to construct a world out of these propositions (Goldstein 2005, 92).
However, Marie-Laure Ryan has shown that this view is too strict in the case of fiction because readers of literary narratives do not treat logical inconsistencies as an excuse for giving up the attempt to make inferences: “If contradictions are limited to certain areas—to what [she calls] the holes in a Swiss cheese—then it remains possible to make stable inferences for the other areas and to construct a world” (2006, 671n28). She also writes that “texts such as nonsense rhymes, surrealistic poems, the theater of the absurd, or postmodernist fiction may liberate their universe from the principle of noncontradiction” (Ryan 1991, 32; see also Ryan 2009).
Similarly, Ruth Ronen elaborates on the notion of logical impossibility as follows: “Although logically inconsistent states of affairs are not restricted to specific literary periods or genres, with postmodernism, impossibilities, in the logical sense, have become a central poetic device, which shows that contradictions in themselves do not collapse the coherence of a fictional world” (1994, 55; see also Ashline 1995; Littlewood and Stockwell 1996; and Stefanescu 2008). The philosopher Graham Priest likewise argues that “there are, in some undeniable sense, logically impossible situations or worlds. . . . In particular, a [logically] impossible world/situation is (partially) characterized by information that contains a logical falsehood but that is closed under an appropriate inference relation” (1997, 580; see also Priest 1998). His short story “Sylvan’s Box” (Priest 1997), for example, confronts its readers with a box that is empty and full at the same time. The narrator describes this box as follows: “At first, I thought it must be a trick of the light, but more careful inspection certified that it was no illusion. The box was absolutely empty, but also had something in it. . . . The experience was one of occupied emptiness. . . . The box was really empty and occupied at the same time. The sense of touch confirmed this” (Priest 1997, 575–76, emphasis added).
Lubomír Doležel is also willing to entertain the idea of logically impossible worlds. However, he argues that the writing of impossible worlds in the strict logical sense “is, semantically, a step backward in fiction making; it voids the transformation of nonexistent possibles into fictional entities and thus cancels the entire world-making project. However, literature turns the ruin of its own enterprise into a new achievement: in designing impossible worlds, it poses a challenge to the imagination no less intriguing than squaring the circle” (1998, 165).1 My own position parallels that of Ryan, Ronen, and Priest and therefore goes beyond the thesis that Umberto Eco presents in The Limits of Interpretation: Eco merely points out that logically impossible worlds can be “mentioned” because “language can name nonexistent and inconceivable entities.” But he argues that we can draw nothing but “the pleasure of our logical and perceptual defeat” from them (1990, 76–77).
In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, Hermione Granger receives a time-turner that allows her to attend several classes at the same time. According to Professor Dumbledore, the time-turner enables the same person “to be in two places at once” (Rowling 1999, 528). In the case of this fictional world, Hermione can be at different locations at the same time. Hence, p and non-p are simultaneously true. This APW violates the principle of noncontradiction, but I do not see how or why this logical impossibility should lead to the reader’s perceptual defeat. I argue that readers can accept such a scenario under certain conditions. In this specific case, they can attribute the logical inconsistency to the possibility of magic in the represented world.
In contrast to Eco, who simply gives up the interpretive process, I will show in this chapter that readers can indeed make sense of worlds that contain logical contradictions. For me, all propositions representing events or states of affairs are ultimately the result of somebody’s subjective experience or imagination. In other words, all narrative representations—regardless of whether they involve logical impossibilities or not—somehow reflect human motivation, which is part of their very texture (see also Fludernik 1996; Ludwig 1999, 194). Like Ruth Ronen, therefore, I refuse to view logical impossibilities as incompatible with the notion of fictional world and with sense-making operations; rather, I see them as a “domain for exercising . . . creative powers” (Ronen 1994, 57) that we as readers are invited to make sense of.
Jan-Noël Thon distinguishes between two types of logical impossibility. On the one hand, he discusses the representation of logically incompatible situations (such as the various scenarios or plotlines listed in Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” [1969]). On the other hand, he mentions local situations that contain logical contradictions (such as Hermione’s magical ability to be at two locations at the same time). Thon comments on this distinction as follows: “As far as the narrative representation of local situations is concerned, I tend to agree with Lubomír Doležel (and others) that situations represented as contradictory are not imaginable, or at least not imaginable in the ways that situations represented as noncontradictory are” (2016, 59).
In this chapter, I will deal with both kinds of logical impossibility. As I will show, it is not only the case that humans can come to terms with lists of logically incompatible scenarios; we can also process local (fictional) situations in which, say, a character is here and not here at the same time (or one in which the narrator or a character is alive and dead simultaneously).
More specifically, I argue that it is because logical contradictions elicit emotional responses—they may make us feel uneasy, confused, afraid, fearful, joyful, or pleased—that we build interpretations on the basis of the “experiential feel” (Caracciolo 2014, 55) they evoke in us.2 Despite the existence of logical impossibilities in the storyworld, we can enact what happens in the narrative. In the case of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, we enact Hermione’s attending two different classes at the same time (including her feelings of delight regarding this possibility). It is joyful to experience how this likeable overachiever outsmarts the school system at Hogwarts. As Caracciolo explains, “The main thrust of enactivism is that experience, far from being the computational process whereby we construct an internal model of the environment, is an embodied, evaluative exploration of the world” (2014, 97). Caracciolo also writes that “while the imaginative contents and experiential qualities of reading fiction may deviate from real-world engagements, the underlying structure of interaction is the same: readers respond to narrative on the basis of their experiential backgrounds” (5).
My readings of logically impossible phenomena are based on the notions of enactivism and the embodied mind, that is, the idea that mental processes can be found on a continuum with brain-related bioevolutionary phenomena and cultural practices such as storytelling (Varela, Rosch, and Thompson 1991). Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo distinguish between first- and second-generation theories in the cognitive sciences as follows: “‘Second generation’ refers to a specific strand in contemporary cognitive science, one foregrounding the embodiment of mental processes and their extension into the world through material artifacts and cultural practices. ‘First generation’ theories in the cognitive sciences conceive of the mind as based on abstract, propositional representations. Like a computer, the first-generation mind would process information as largely independent from specific brains, bodies, and sensory modalities” (2014, 261).
Like Kukkonen and Caracciolo, I foreground the fundamental embodiment of mental processes. My basic argument here is that our emotional reactions to logical contradictions serve as a first orientation or “protointerpretation”: it is because of our bodily reactions that we deal with logical impossibilities in the first place.
Let me discuss some examples of APWs that contain logical contradictions by first highlighting the emotional effect that they have on me before moving on to more detailed interpretations. I define an emotional response as one specific type of bodily reaction to narratives. More specifically, I follow Patrick Colm Hogan, who discusses emotions in terms of four components. For him, emotions involve (1) eliciting conditions that then evoke (2) a feeling or phenomenological tone. This feeling in turn leads to (3) an expressive outcome (i.e., physiological manifestations of the emotion), and this outcome then determines (4) our attentional focus (2003, 169–70). My examples concern different narrative parameters. In what follows, I will look at logical contradictions in relation to narrators, narrative endings, and temporalities.3 Furthermore, my examples are ordered in such a way that the degree of incoherence increases as I move from one example to the next: the texts of my corpus become more and more extreme.
As Franz Karl Stanzel has shown, there are authors who present the gradual dissolution of a dying first-person narrator’s consciousness up to the threshold of life. He calls this type of narration “dying in the first person” and argues that “the difficulties arising from the presentation of the death of a narratorial ‘I’ have not deterred authors from selecting the first-person form for the fictional presentation of this extreme situation” ([1979] 1984, 229–32, 229). As I will show, various authors even go one step further and confront us with narrators who have already died but are for some reason still capable of narrating. Such narrators violate the principle of noncontradiction because they are alive (i.e., not dead) and dead (i.e., not alive) at the same time.
Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, for instance, opens as follows: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973” (2002, 5).4 Later on, we learn that the narrator, who was raped and murdered by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, has entered heaven and speaks from there (16). In the words of Lisa Zunshine, we are here presented with “a violation of our intuitive ontological expectations, which forces us to reconsider all familiar social scenarios concerning death” (2008, 72). The Lovely Bones transcends our real-world parameters, and we are invited to work on our reading frames to come to terms with the novel’s storytelling situation. I argue that we are urged to activate our knowledge about people who are alive (and able to tell stories) and our awareness of the fact that the dead cannot speak. In a second step, we combine these schemata to picture a scenario in which somebody who is dead nevertheless speaks to us.
When we are confronted with dead narrators, we can generate new frames by blending preexisting schemata. Mark Turner explains the process of blending by pointing out that “cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit—that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures . . . [such as corpse and living person] and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure . . . [such as speaking corpse]” (2003, 117). As an example, Turner mentions the character of Bertran de Born in Dante’s Inferno. This character is “a talking and reasoning human being who carries his detached but articulate head in his hand like a lantern.” Turner argues that “this is an impossible blending, in which a talking human being has an unnaturally divided body” (1996, 62, 61).
From my vantage point, the described blending process goes hand in hand with our emotional reactions to such figures. While Bertran de Born (like the ghosts in Gothic novels) presumably elicits feelings of fear, the phenomenological tone in the case of The Lovely Bones is of a different nature. The following passage gives readers an idea of what it is like to experience heaven in the novel. As recipients, we can enact the experiences of Susie Salmon: “When I first entered heaven I thought that everyone saw what I saw. That in everyone’s heaven there were soccer goalposts in the distance and lumbering women throwing shot put and javelin. That all the buildings were like suburban northeast high schools built in the 1960s” (Sebold 2002, 16). Later on, the first-person narrator tells us that each dead person inhabits his or her own private version of heaven: “After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine—didn’t duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside” (17).
In the words of Caracciolo, readers enact the narrator’s consciousness just as they enact the represented narrative space (in this case, the space of heaven) by “simulating a hypothetical bodily-perceptual experience on the basis of both their experiential background and the textual cues” (2014, 104).5 In my case, the elicited phenomenological tone is one of calmness and contentedness.
These feelings serve us a first clue regarding an interpretation of this dead narrator scenario. The Lovely Bones invites us to picture a situation in which a dead girl continues to interact with the world she had to leave. Perhaps one can explain this scenario in terms of our difficulties to envision death as the definite end of our existence or in terms of the wishes of the bereaved that the dead somehow continue to exist. Indeed, Greta Olson argues that the position of the narrator highlights “the novel’s major theme: How does a lovable family, each member of which is both frail and human, all too human in her or his frailty, move on after one of its members has been brutally ripped out of its midst?” (2005, 138). For instance, at one point, Susie’s father builds “a balsa wood stand to replace” her, and he starts talking to her: “Susie, my baby, my little sailor girl, . . . you always liked these smaller ones [ships in bottles]” (Sebold 2002, 46). In this context, Mark Turner points out that “a child who died in the past is still mentally with us. The child never leaves, is always there to cast her shadow on the day, even though our days have changed radically since her death. In the blend, we can imagine her living and appropriately aged” (2002, 16).
On the other hand, one might also argue that in this storyworld, the dead Susie continues to interact with the actual world because heaven actually exists and allows her to right a wrong. In other words, readers are urged to posit a transcendental realm in which the dead narrator can still act, and her dealings make sure that poetic justice is achieved after all. The dead Susie is objectively involved in Mr. Harvey’s punishment through death at the end of the novel, and it is highly unlikely that he will enter heaven as well. Both of my readings are in fact based on my first emotional reaction: the wish of the bereaved that the dead may somehow continue to exist and the idea of poetic justice closely correlate with feelings of calmness and contentedness.
B. S. Johnson’s “Broad Thoughts from a Home” is a fictional narrative that contains logical contradictions of a different kind. This short story confronts its readers with a list of mutually exclusive endings. It “ends” as follows:
Magnanimous gesture: the reader is offered a choice of endings to the piece. Group One: The Religious. (a) The quickest conversion since St. Paul precipitates Samuel into the joint bosoms of Miss Deane and Mother Church. (b) A more thorough conversion throws Samuel to the Jesuits. (c) A personally delivered thunderbolt reduces Samuel to a small but constituent quantity of impure chemicals. Group Two: The Mundane. (a) Samuel rapes Miss Deane in a state of unwonted elation. (b) Miss Deane rapes Samuel in a state of unwonted absentmindedness. (c) Robert rapes both of them in a state of unwonted aplomb (whatever that may mean). Group Three: The Impossible. The next post contains an urgent recall to England for (a) Samuel (b) Robert (c) both; on account of (i) death (ii) birth (iii) love (iv) work. Group Four: The Variable. The reader is invited to write his own ending in the space provided below. If this space is insufficient, the fly-leaf may be found a suitable place for any continuation. Thank you. (1973, 110)6
The enactment of these endings involves a certain experiential feel: I find this proliferation of endings rather amusing. I think it is funny that Johnson refuses to provide a clear ending or definite closure and instead presents us with a list of endings (but I can see that others might find this disorienting, worrisome, or annoying).
Let me take the elicited phenomenological tone as the starting point of my interpretation. The ontological pluralism of this passage may in fact serve different purposes. To begin with, these endings ridicule our readerly expectations concerning a stable and reliable ending that provides closure. Many narratives (such as Shakespearean plays, Victorian novels, and Hollywood films) have a definitive ending (such as a wedding or the death of the protagonist). “Broad Thoughts from a Home,” by contrast, tries to take us out of the realm of the familiar and the well-known. This narrative invites us to actively reflect upon our expectations regarding stability and security through its anticlosural or open-ended character. In addition, we are invited to laugh at ourselves and our (perhaps ridiculous) yearning for closure.
Alternatively, one can explain the various endings of Johnson’s short story by assuming that “the contradictory passages in the text are offered to the readers as material for creating their own stories” (Ryan 2006, 671). From this perspective, the narrative serves as a construction kit or collage that invites free play with its elements. “Broad Thoughts from a Home” invites us to choose the ending that we prefer for whatever reason.7 This interpretation closely correlates with Roland Barthes’s ideas about “the birth of the reader,” which, according to him, must be “at the cost of the death of the Author” ([1968] 2001, 1470). Barthes argues that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. . . . When the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic” (1469). In stories such as “Broad Thoughts from a Home,” however, the author cannot be found. Johnson is absent and does not guide his readers at all. Hence, they are urged to make up their own minds, choose their own endings, and construct their own stories. As in my first example, the initially elicited phenomenological tone (i.e., the impression that Johnson’s list of logically incompatible endings is amusing or funny) feeds into the playfulness with which my two readings correlate.
My final and most difficult example concerns time travel into the past. As we all know, time travel is not possible in the real world but common in genres such as fantasy and science fiction. In such texts, the characters are in the possession of either a magical device or a time machine that enables them to visit the worlds of the past (or sometimes the future). It is perhaps also worth noting that journeys into the past are markedly different from journeys into the future: “In spite of its psychological plausibility, time travel into the past seems to be a logical impossibility, because any alteration of history is implicitly paradoxical” (Stableford 2006, 532).8 The logical impossibility of time travel into the past is usually illustrated on the basis of the so-called grandfather paradox, which poses the following questions: “What happens if an assassin goes back in time and murders his grandfather before his (the assassin’s) own father is conceived? If his father is never born, neither is the assassin, and so how can he go back to murder his grandfather?” (Nahin [1997] 2011, 114, see also 7).9
The basic argument is that if we travel into the past and change the past by killing our grandfather, we also change the present because we no longer exist. This new present would make it logically impossible for us to travel into the past in the first place. The impossibility of time travel into the past is also asserted by the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, who argues that “the absence of present evidence of time travellers from the future is proof enough of the impossibility of time travel into the past” (Stableford 2006, 534). In an interview, Fermi said, “If we are not alone [in the universe], where are they?” (Stableford 2006, 178–79).
However, once we accept the possibility of time travel in an APW, we can easily picture situations in which history is changed (through interventions by the time traveler) so that certain events in the past are determined by instances of time travel in the present. Science fiction narratives typically form causal loops because despite the time traveler’s interventions, it is still the case that time in the storyworld moves forward so that the past “automatically” leads to the present and the present to the future. Brian Stableford argues that “such causal loops . . . have an intrinsic aesthetic fascination, . . . especially when they are ingeniously convoluted” (2006, 354).
Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies” confronts its readers with an excessive number of perverted causal sequences through which an intersexual time traveler creates himself and in addition becomes both his father and his mother.10 “All You Zombies” is told by a time traveler who works as a bartender at Pop’s Place in New York City. In 1970 he meets an unnamed man who calls himself “unmarried mother” (Heinlein [1959] 1980, 205) because he writes stories in confession magazines for women. This man tells the first-person narrator (i.e., the bartender) that he used to be a little girl who was left at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. In 1963 she was impregnated by an older man who then left her: “He . . . kissed me good night and never came back” (208). After having given birth to her daughter “Jane” (211) in 1964, which involved “a Caesarian” (209), the doctors discovered that the mother was in fact intersexual and that complications during the birth procedure forced them to turn her into “a man” (209). The unnamed man also tells the bartender that the baby was “stolen from the hospital nursery” (210). We are here invited to enact the experiences of the “unmarried mother.” Heinlein’s short story urges us to address the question of what it is like to have such experiences. I feel pity for the unnamed man who seems to be an innocent victim: s/he was an orphan; s/he was abused by an older man; the baby was taken away; and s/he was forced to undergo a sex change.
In the second part of “All You Zombies” this sad bar story turns into a convoluted science fiction/time travel narrative. To begin with, the bartender informs the unnamed man that he knows the whereabouts of the father of the baby: it is in fact the unnamed man himself. In the bar’s storeroom, the bartender reveals himself to be a temporal agent, and with the help of his time machine, a “USFF Coordinates Transformer Field Kit, series 1992, mod. II” (Heinlein [1959] 1980, 212), the two characters travel back in time to the city of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1963, and we learn what actually happened in the unnamed man’s life:
“All You Zombies” contains various reversed causalities in which an earlier event is caused by an instance of time travel at a later point in time. Furthermore, we gradually learn that all the figures in the story (including the baby) are “instances from the same character trace” (Ryder 2003, 217). Since the unnamed man impregnates his former female/intersexual self, he is both the father and the mother of Jane. Furthermore, the baby, who gets taken to the year 1945 by the time traveler, develops into the female/intersexual version of the unnamed man of 1963, who in turn develops into the unnamed man, who talks to the bartender in New York in 1970. Finally, at the Sub Rockies Base, the unnamed man of 1985 develops into the time traveler, who has ultimately caused all the events (starting in 1945) by traveling into the past from his present, that is, 1993.11 The most important reversed causality has to do with the fact that the narrator travels back in time to create himself, which can aptly be described as a “strange act of self-creation ex nihilo” (Gomel 2010, 53).
Elana Gomel argues that this “splintering of the temporal continuity of the self” parallels the postmodernist idea of the “death” of the traditional humanist subject (2010, 53). Indeed, at first glance, the excessive time traveling that leads to the coexistence of character duplicates seems to be yet another postmodernist celebration of the multiplicity of conflicting positions that the subject can assume in the multifaceted world in which we live. Stuart Sim, for instance, defines the postmodern understanding of the self as follows:
Postmodernism has rejected the concept of the individual, or “subject,” that has prevailed in Western thought for the last few centuries. For the latter tradition, the subject has been a privileged being right at the heart of cultural process. Humanism has taught us to regard the individual subject as a unified self, with a central “core” of identity unique to each individual, motivated primarily by the power of reason. . . . [For] . . . postmodernists, the subject is a fragmented being that has no essential core of identity, and is to be regarded as a process in a continual state of dissolution rather than a fixed identity or self that endures unchanged over time. (Sim 2011, 299)
But let me also take my emotional response to this story into consideration. When I experience the various instances of time travel described in Heinlein’s narrative, I do not inspect a preexisting picture-like image. Instead, I engage in an embodied exploration of and thus enact what is experienced in the storyworld. Indeed, “What really matters,” according to Caracciolo, is “the experiential nature of our imaginings” (2014, 100).
It is notably not only the case that the “unmarried mother” is extremely sad; the temporal agent and first-person narrator, the ultimate source of the character duplicates, is decidedly unhappy as well. At the end, he realizes that he only deals with versions of him- or herself and thus longs for real Otherness. More specifically, the temporal agent seeks to reach beyond the boundaries of the text by addressing the implied reader: “I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?” (Heinlein [1959] 1980, 215, emphasis original). Furthermore, he says, “You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me . . . here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully” (215, emphasis original).
Given this desperate (and perhaps even heartbreaking) yearning for real Otherness, one might read this short story as a critique of the solipsism with which the self-referentiality of postmodernism correlates (see also Currie [1998] 2011, 171). In the preface to “All You Zombies,” we are told that “solipsism” is “the theory that nothing really exists outside the self.” In addition, it “can be a terrifying concept in the hands of a skilled writer like Robert A. Heinlein” (Heinlein [1959] 1980, 205). Indeed, in Heinlein’s narrative, the first-person narrator has “engineered a world where he/she . . . is its own first and final cause” (Slusser and Heath 2002, 14) but has become tired of engaging in the construction of convoluted event sequences that involve only duplicate versions of him/herself. Instead, s/he yearns for a real dialogue or confrontation with somebody else, a true encounter of Otherness. In the words of Elana Gomel, “All the significant others in his/her life are him/herself”; “s/he has never had a relationship with an Other” (2010, 57).
From my perspective, logical contradictions in APWs neither cancel the entire world-making project nor imply our perceptual defeat. On the contrary, logical impossibilities can lead to highly stimulating textual phenomena such as the ones discussed in this article. In fictional narratives, characters can be at two different locations at the same time (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban); a box may be simultaneously empty and full (“Sylvan’s Box”); narrators can be alive and dead (The Lovely Bones); narratives may present us with multiple mutually exclusive endings (“Broad Thoughts from a Home”); and the logical impossibility of time travel into the past (including its disconcerting consequences) can be negotiated (“All You Zombies”).
As I have shown, we can come to terms with such phenomena by attributing them to, say, the realm of magic; our wishes and desires (including the wish that the dead may continue to exist in a transcendental realm); the mocking of our readerly expectations regarding closure; the idea of narrative as a construction kit that invites free play with its elements; or a critique of solipsism. Regardless of the specific interpretive path we choose to follow, logical impossibilities do not paralyze our interpretive faculties. I believe that this is so because all narratives—even those that contain logical contradictions—activate what Caracciolo calls “our experiential backgrounds.” He argues that “engaging with narrative has an experiential feel not only because it activates traces of our past interactions with the world, but also because it reproduces the network structure of any kind of experience” (2014, 55, emphasis original).
In other words, our evaluative enactments on the basis of our sensorimotor skills (which are derived from our bodily experience of the world) lead to practical engagements concerning the question of “what it is like” to have a certain experience. In general, APWs that contain logical impossibilities are accessible from the perspective of the AW because they trigger our experiential backgrounds and elicit a certain emotional response. The only limit case I can think of is constituted by logical contradictions that are created for their own sake, as in nonsense poetry, some of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels, or some of the films by David Lynch. These cases may elicit a certain phenomenological tone, but it is very difficult—if not impossible—to develop our emotional reactions into proper interpretations. In all other cases, the resulting experiential feel serves as an instinctive “protointerpretation” on which we can build our more sophisticated readings. I think it is because the discussed logical impossibilities touch our bodies that we try to interpret them and the APWs in which they occur.
1. On the other hand, Doležel has recently written (more positively) that postmodernist narratives “do not resolve contradictions but let all flowers, however incompatible, however disharmonious, bloom in one and the same garden bed” (2010, 5).
2. Marco Caracciolo argues that the term “experiential feel” closely correlates with the reader’s ability to get a sense of what it is like to have a certain experience; it denotes “a distinct phenomenal character . . . that cannot easily be reduced to the linguistic meaning of the text” (2014, 101). Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht states that “any form of human communication, through its material elements, will ‘touch’ the bodies of the persons who are communicating,” and this is what he calls “presence effects” (2004, 17).
3. According to James Phelan and Wayne C. Booth, “The narrator is the agent or, in less anthropomorphic terms, the agency or ‘instance’ that tells or transmits everything—the existents, states, and events—in a narrative to a narratee” (2005, 388). Narratives are often argued to consist of beginnings, middles, and endings. Endings, in turn, may or may not provide closure, which refers to “the satisfaction of expectations and the answering of questions raised over the course of any narrative” (Abbott 2005, 65–66). Temporalities are in a sense more basic than stories or plots: story (or plot) entails time (or temporal progression), but temporal progression does not necessarily entail plot (or story).
4. Dead narrators proliferate in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction: the narrators of Samuel Beckett’s “The Calmative” (1954), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967), Vladimir Nabokov’s “Terra Incognita” (1968), Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), Robertson Davies’s Murther and Walking Spirits (1991), Percival Everett’s American Desert (2004), and one of the narrators of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (2001) are also dead; the narrator of “Past,” the first section of Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), is the ghost of a chambermaid who had fallen into a food elevator, while Destiny and Desire (2011) by Carlos Fuentes is narrated by the severed head of Josué Nadal, a young attorney; the narrator of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) is the allegorical figure of Death itself; and in Maggie Gee’s Dying, in Other Words (1981) and The Burning Book (1983), the world ends so that nobody is left to report it—nevertheless, we are presented with reports in both cases.
5. Perhaps one could define Caracciolo’s approach as an embodied or enactivist version of Ryan’s principle of minimal departure. Ryan’s principle predicts that “we project upon [fictional] worlds everything we know about reality, and . . . make only the adjustments dictated by the text” (1991, 51). Ryan argues that readers only alter their realist expectations if a narrative text explicitly tells them to do so. While Ryan’s principle involves the idea of real-world knowledge, Caracciolo argues that we engage in an embodied exploration as we enact the narrative on the basis of our prior experiences.
6. Further examples of forking-path narratives are Ts’ui Pen’s novel in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1961), Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16th (1963), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La maison de rendez-vous (1965), John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969), Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire (1997), Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), the film Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998) by Tom Tykwer, and Rudolph Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder (2008). In this context, one can also mention Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories, certain computer games, some types of hypertext fiction, and alternate reality games. Christoph Bode discusses all these texts as what he calls “future narratives” (FNs). While many narratives negotiate the future at the level of the content, FNs in the sense of Bode stage the future through their form; they contain “nodal situations” that allow for more than one continuation. These “nodes” are the conditio sine qua non of FNs: they use their structure to present the future as open and undecided. FNs thus enable “the reader/player to enter situations that fork into different branches and to actually experience that ‘what happens next’ may well depend upon us” (Bode and Dietrich 2013, 1). In contrast to Bode, I am less interested in the element of choice; I here focus on the logical incompatibility or mutual exclusiveness of the represented scenarios.
7. Similarly, John Ashberry sees Gertrude Stein’s “impossible work” as an “all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of particulars” (1957, 251).
8. On the other hand, the physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claim that once we have the technological means to do so, “it is possible to travel to the future” (2005, 105, emphasis added; see also Nahin [1997] 2011, 29–48).
9. According to Gregory Benford, the so-called many-worlds cosmology is a way of overcoming the grandfather paradox: if one assumes that coexisting universes exist, then one can argue that “the grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, passing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical” (1993, 186, 189).
10. Another causal loop can be found in Lord Dunsany’s play The Jest of Hahalaba (1928), where a man receives a copy of tomorrow’s newspaper (through magic) and reads his own obituary, which then causes him to die (see Nahin [1997] 2011, 122). In this case, we are presented with a causal loop because the future determines the present (and vice versa). Further examples of causal loops occur in Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941) and Charles L. Harness’s “Time Trap” (1948). See also Brian Richardson’s outstanding analysis of reversed causalities in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he demonstrates, the play frequently “inverts the order of cause and effect,” and this “submerged ‘drama of temporality’” mirrors “the central concerns of the play” (1989, 283–84). Further science fiction novels that contain an excessive number of reversed causalities and display a playful attitude toward identity are Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries (1971) and David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), both of which I would place on the overlap between science fiction and postmodernism. In The Star Diaries Ijon Tichy splits into an uncontrollable number of avatars that continuously argue with each other, while in The Man Who Folded Himself Daniel Eakins, the first-person narrator, generates so many character duplicates that he keeps “running into versions of [him]self” (Gerrold 1973, 83) at all times. The narrator describes this populous community of duplicates as follows: “I am not one person. I am many people all stemming from the same root” (86).
11. At the end, the narrator notes that “a Caesarian leaves a big scar but I’m so hairy now that I don’t notice it unless I look for it” (Heinlein [1959] 1980, 215).
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