Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 1995"

Allegories in immersion : virtual narration in postmodern fiction

Abstract: Through its insistence on the concept of virtuality, the possible-world approach has brought a new dimension to the study of narrative. The first stage in the study of the interplay between the actual and the virtual in narrative communication has focused on the level of the narrated. In Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, for instance, I proposed a concept of "virtual narrative" that referred to the as yet unrealized projections and unverified retrospective interpretations motivating the behavior of characters. But the opposition real-virtual also finds useful applications in the exploration of the discourse component of narrative. Some of the concepts recently introduced on the narratological scene have a strong flavor of virtuality: I am thinking of Gerald Prince's notion of the "disnarrated" and of David Herman's "hypothetical localization." In what follows I propose to add another element to this growing repertory: the concept of virtual narration. I regard this concept as the discourse counterpart of my earlier, story-oriented notion of virtual narrative. REAL NARRATION Under the term of "virtual narration" I understand a way of evoking events that resists the "expectation of reality" inherent in language in general and in narrative discourse in particular. Philosophy may periodically relativize, destabilize, and even reject the notion of reality, but narrative and expository language knows little of these doubts: even in an atmosphere of radical antirealism - such as the contemporary zeitgeist - it remains firmly rooted in truth and reality. The unmarked case of modality is the indicative, and to narrate in the indicative is to present events as true fact. The repertory of semantic categories at the disposal of narrators (or essayists, for that matter) often forces the writer to a firmer commitment to facts than caution would call for.(1) It is through tacked-on modal markers that language defactualizes, relativizes, or switches the reference world from the speaker's reality toward a nonactual possible world. In the type of narration I call "real," the narrator presents propositions as true of the world in which he is located, and the audience imagines the facts (states or events) represented by these propositions. If the reader has other means of access to the reference world she may, after considering the described states of affairs, evaluate the narrator's statements as true or false. She may also do so on the basis of the internal coherence of the narrative discourse. If the statements are valued as true, the expressed facts are stored as knowledge; if not, they are excluded from the reader's representation of the reference world. As long as the narrator (or implied "I") uses the indicative mode, the reference world is identified as the world in which the narrator is located. This "real" mode of narration is found in both fiction and nonfiction and is independent of the truth value of the discourse: even the false can be told as true fact; otherwise lies would never deceive and errors never mislead. But "real" narration is not the only way to evoke events to the imagination. With appropriate markers of irreality, narrated events may be ascribed to a foreign world. Counterfactuals and hypotheticals refer to another world in the realm of the possible; reports of dreams or narration in the mode of free indirect discourse conjure private mental worlds standing in opposition to the physical reality of the textual actual world. Events may even be called to the imagination as nonexistent. The processing of a negative sentence - for instance, "Mary did not kill her husband" - involves imagining the world in which Mary kills her husband. The narratological study of the modes of expression that sever the expectation of reality is only beginning. One of these modes is what I call "virtual narration." VIRTUAL NARRATION As a preliminary to the definition of virtual narration, let me review two senses of the term "virtual. …

Introduction : from possible worlds to virtual reality

Abstract: In: virtual reality. Out: reality. So claimed on December 31, 1994 one of those countless lists of predictions that invariably herald the coming of a new year.(1) What is out is the concept of a reality where the mind and the body encounter the resistance of matter, where the laws of gravity hold, where some events happen that you cannot take back, where you live only one life. What is in is a realm where all your wishes can be fulfilled, where you live multiple lives, where you can inhabit multiple personalities, and where nothing "counts" because it is only a game, an endlessly repeatable and endlessly variable simulation. With this pronouncement, a major theme of postmodernism has gone mainstream. As Benjamin Woolley describes the contemporary mind set: "Reality has left the physical world and moved into the virtual one" (235). For the past twenty years, what has been "in" for cultural theory was any kind of concept that opposes and challenges nature, essence, and reality: copies, fake, fiction, conventions, the artificial, make-believe and role playing. The news of "the death of reality" and of its replacement by hyperrealities did not await electronic mail td spread throughout the cultural, critical, and literary scene. In an intellectual climate that regards concepts as toys to play with and that favors consensus over correspondence theories of truth (if truth remains an issue at all), professions of radical antirealism are often more an intellectual game than a metaphysical commitment, for such a commitment would reinstate "the absence of reality" as surrogate reality: this is to say, as transcendental object of knowledge. (Hard-core postmodernists would of course reply that playing games is the only metaphysical commitment left after the death of reality.) Games may be played in a spirit of nonseriousness, but they are part of a culture, and as such they must be taken seriously. Thus, regardless of our personal position concerning the nature, existence, or epistemic accessibility of reality, we must address the theme of its crisis and the emergence of alternative concepts if we want to understand the contemporary zeitgeist. The focus of this issue of Style is a conceptual space encompassing two manifestations of what may be called "the parareal": one--possible worlds, or PW--a philosophical notion currently developing into a tool of literary criticism; the other--virtual reality, or VR--a technological phenomenon that has recently captured the public's imagination, attracting along the way theoretical attention from the academic community. The relation between postmodernism and PW theory can be described as a love-hate affair. The love part stems from the endorsement by PW theory of an ontological model consisting of a plurality of worlds. In this model, contemporary thought finds a philosophical basis for its endorsement of diversity in all its forms, from multiculturalism within society to a pluralism of coexisting individuals within the subject. According to Brian McHale, the transition from modernism to postmodernism is defined by a shift from an epistemological to an ontological dominant: "Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability" (11). McHale's assimilation of plurality with instability--a fairly typical move in postmodern thought--points, however, to the hate part of the relationship. The rallying cry of postmodern theory is the negative prefix: as Linda Hutcheon observes, the term "postmodernism" is "usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization" (3). Encompassing all of these notions, of course, is the almighty concept of deconstruction. This approach to diversity runs contrary to the structure assigned by PW theory to its ontological model; hence the hate component. By designating one world of the system as actual and by opposing it to the surrounding nonactual possible worlds (as Saul Kripke defines the so-called "M-model"), PW theory postulates an ontological center that dispels any chance of equality among the members of the system. …