Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds - Review

Style, Fall, 1998 by Marie-Laure Ryan

Lubomir Dolezel. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. xii 339 pp. $45.00 hardcover.

The timing of the publication of this book tells a deceptive story. Heterocosmica appeared in the wake of a number of other books on the application of possible worlds theory to literary semantics (Pavel, Ronen, Maitre, Semino, and myself), but none of these books (with the possible exception of Pavel's) would have been what it is, nor arguably written at all, without the inspiration provided by Dolezel's earlier work in this area. This is not to say that Heterocosmica is a mere gathering of older essays. The ground-breaking ideas proposed by Dolezel in the seventies and eighties form the core of the book, but they have been revamped, expanded, illustrated with new materials, adapted to a wider audience (one not as conversant in logical semantics and analytical philosophy as the readership of the original articles), and above all developed into a comprehensive theory.

The main body of the book consists of two parts, Narrative Worlds and Intensional Functions. Each of them is introduced by a "starter terms" section devoted to the extended definition of basic concepts. The chapters that compose the two parts are labeled in the table of contents as either analytical (i.e. straight discussion of literary texts), theoretical, or theoretical with examples. Though the book is relatively restrained in its use of technical language, a glossary at the end of the book should help readers cope with the conceptual rigor of Dolezel's use of terminology.

Dolezel's theoretical assumptions, stated in the prologue, "From Nonexistent Entities to Fictional Worlds," can be summarized as follows:

1. Fictional worlds are possible worlds constructed by language through a performative force granted to imaginative literature by cultural convention.

2. Fictional worlds are not representations (mimesis) of the actual world but autonomous realities called into being through the unrestricted creative power of fictional language. The limits of the fictionally possible are the limits of the expressible, or imaginable.

3. Fictional worlds differ ontologically from the real world through their incomplete nature. Because it is impossible for the human mind to think up an object (much less a world) in all of its properties, every fictional world presents areas of radical indeterminacy (i.e. ontological gaps).

4. Fictional language can be referential without entering into a mimetic relation to the real world. Through this position, Dolezel distanciates himself both from the neo-Saussurian, deconstructionist view that language can only refer to itself, because all realities are language-made, and from the position of "one-world" philosophers (Frege, Russell, Searle), who hold that language can only refer to actual, i.e. autonomously existing individuals. In Dolezel's model, reference to an entity does not presuppose its language-independent existence.

The first part of the book provides an exploration, bordering on a typology, of the basic constituents of narrative worlds. Whereas narrative grammars (such as Prince's) formulate the minimal conditions of narrativity by means of a syntactic pattern of events, Dolezel describes these conditions in terms of what philosophers customarily call the "furniture" (i.e. inventory of existents) of a possible world. Not surprisingly, the minimal conditions for the development of narrative action is the introduction of one individual in a fictional world. The one-person world suffers from severe dramatic restrictions, since it excludes human competition, but Dolezel's discussion of three "one-person worlds" (chapter one) shows that interpersonal conflict can be fruitfully replaced with themes such as the attempt to establish civilization in the wilderness (Robinson Crusoe), the challenges of outdoor life, (Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River") or the struggle of the individual with the phantasms of his own mind (Huysmans, A Rebours).

In the second chapter, "Action and Motivation," the one-person world is expanded into a multi-person universe through a theory of action inspired by analytical philosophy, especially by the work of G. H. von Wright. In this chapter Dolezel proposes a rigorous discussion of such key narrative concepts as actions, events, motivation, motivational forces, and the narrative role of unintentional events. Despite the stated focus of the book, this theory is no less relevant to the study of factual narrative than to literary fiction. Of particular interest is Dolezel's classification of action on a scale that leads from the fully rational to the impulsive and akratic (akrasia is an "incontinence or weakness of will" [70] that tempts characters to act against their own interests), all the way to the irrational and the insane. I wonder, however, if these last two categories wouldn't often benefit from being described as a course of actions that proceeds rationally from the character's personal beliefs. In this case, irrational action would not be a case of random behavior, but a matter of conflict between private worlds and the consensual world. Recognizing a realm of subjectively explainable action would not eliminate irrationality from literature, but on the contrary, bring into sharper focus the realm of the radically irrational, such as the behavior of the court in Kafka's The Trial. The dynamics of the multi-person world are illustrated in chapter 3 by discussions of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Dickens' Little Dorrit, and the work of Milan Kundera.