A Brief Survey of Possible-Worlds Literary Semantics
Maria ŞTEFĂNESCU
Universitatea « 1 Decembrie 1918 » din Alba Iulia
The paper attempts to offer a brief introductory account of possible-worlds literary theory, with
particular emphasis being lain on issues such as fictional reference, the relationship between sense
and reference, the intensional vs. the extensional semantics of fiction, the manifold aspects involved
in interdisciplinary transfers.
There has always been a polemical ring about possible-worlds literary semantics, less
acute in the pioneering days when its practitioners settled for the somewhat limited goal to contrast
and complement hermeneutics and reader-response criticism, more so later when the theory
advertised itself as the inheritor and promoter of a “sober spirit of critical thinking at a time of
bloated verbosity” (Doležel 1998, x). The promise made by possible-worlds literary studies is
twofold: to offer a semantics of fictionality which reinvests the concept of fictional reference with
its full import while avoiding the pitfalls of mimetic theories, and to achieve this within a
framework provided by modal logic but rendered flexible enough to account for the specificity of
literary works.
Although its distant ancestry can be traced back to Leibniz’s idea that our world is the
best of the infinitely many which exist in God’s mind, the logical theory of possible worlds was
developed in the 1960s with a view to improving the explanatory power of classical formal logic.
Its appropriation by a number of literary theorists – L. Doležel, U. Eco, Th. Pavel, D. Maître, M. L.
Ryan, R. Ronen, E. Semino and N. Traill – was not, however, the smooth and fully-rewarding
process of interdisciplinary borrowing one might have wished for. As it was soon noticed, fictional
worlds resisted description in terms of hypothetical abstract sets and failed to meet the requirements
of maximality, consistency, homogeneity and closeness under logical implication. Clearly, the
logical concept of ‘possible world’ could not be adopted tale quale; moreover, the amendments it
needed were many and threatened largely to obliterate its original meaning. But the few tentative
acknowledgements that there was a “unique and incompatible interpretation attached to possible
worlds by each discipline” (Ronen 1994, 48 – my emphasis) were unconsequential: intent on saving
the project, possible-worlds literary theorists (Ronen herself among them) directed their efforts
towards substantiating what seemed the more palatable claim that although “specific features of
fictional worlds of literature cannot be derived from the possible-world model of formal semantics,
yet they can be identified only against the background of this model frame” (apud Ryan 1992, 530).
Arguably the most important theoretical achievement possible-worlds literary theorists pride
themselves on is the possibility to redefine fictional reference in terms of a multiple-world model.
Not surprisingly so, since the main battle fought in the field has been against mimetic theories
construed as claiming that, whether copies or representations, artworks are secondary with respect
to the represented reality (Doležel 1990), always and naively identified with the actual world. It is
possible-worlds semantics that will provide the much-needed theoretical framework which will put
an end to the “structuralist moratorium on referential issues” (Pavel 1986, 10) without incurring the
need to fall back on the one-world model of reference. Because they project their own reference
worlds, so the argument goes, fictional worlds are fully autonomous. However, paradoxically, “the
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autonomy of fictional worlds, an autonomy that literary theory strives to secure, in a way works
against the attempt to describe these worlds in terms of specific similarities and degrees of
accessibility among worlds” (Ronen 1996, 27). So much so, that most attempts to establish a
typology of fictional worlds and to account for the relations of accessibility among them rely
heavily on what comes dangerously close to the (in)famous one-world model of reference. D.
Maître’s taxonomy of fictional worlds, as well as those of M. L. Ryan (taken over and applied to
poetry by E. Semino) and Nancy H. Traill, chooses as a criterion for classification the degree of
similarity between the fictional world and a more or less unproblematic notion of the actual world
(D. Maître: “the reader always tends to ‘naturalize’ a text, to find its meaning as far as possible in
terms of his understanding of the real world [Maître 1983, 79], M. L. Ryan: “we reconstrue the
central world of a textual universe in the same way we reconstrue the alternate possible worlds of
nonfactual statements: as conforming as far as possible to our representation of the actual world”
[Ryan 1991, 51] and, with more of a Kantian inflection, E. Semino: “poetic text worlds can also be
described and classified in terms of their distance from what we take to be the world of reality”
[Semino 1996, 25]).
One cannot help but notice here the pressure of the original theory to which the
literary scholar succumbs malgré lui: although in an uninterpreted Kripkean model, the choice of a
world to be placed at the center of the system is aleatory, once a specific semantic interpretation is
given, this world is automatically identified with the real world. The same kind of pressure might
explain Ryan’s plea for a “vertical conception of meaning” according to which “the primary role of
language is to pick objects in the textual world” (Ryan 1998, 142). What else but a Russellian
understanding of language as a nomenclature would prompt one to argue, rather stunningly, that “if
the text is a mirror, words are transparent signs. Their function is to be a passport to the fictional
world, to transport the reader into an alternative reality. Once the fictional world becomes present to
the imagination, the language that monitored the mental simulation is partly forgotten” (Ryan 1988,
141).
Less inclined to believe in such an unproblematic functioning of language, L. Doležel
turns to G. Frege’s semantics in search of a more appropriate theoretical framework for his own
theory of fictionality. ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’ are interpreted, via Carnap, as ‘intension’ and
‘extension’ and are used to develop a unified semantics of fictional worlds. At the extensional level,
its task will be to elaborate a typology of worlds classified according to their degree of complexity
and to describe the two macro-operations that shape them (selection of a world’s categorical type
and imposition of modalities). The process through which fictional worlds are construed by the
author and reconstrued by the reader, in and from the text itself, will be accounted for by an
intensional semantics. Two intensional functions are investigated, the saturation function which
projects explicit, implicit and zero texture onto the fictional world, constructing the domains of
facts, hypotheses and gaps respectively, and the authentication function which establishes the kind
and degree of existence one ascribes to fictional possibles.
Fictional reference is not the only issue over which Doležel’s semantics “parts
company with Frege” (Doležel 1998, 26); it does so, most significantly, over the definition of
intensions as “function[s] from the fictional text’s texture to the fictional world” (ibid., 139). While
this shift towards a Montague-like understanding of the concept brings about a well-known
systemic elegance, it also incurs serious theoretical problems, some inherited, some specific to a
semantics of fictionality. As C. Ortiz-Hill has demonstrated, Frege’s own analysis of intensions is
fraught with difficulties: with a view to obtaining objects out of concepts (which he needed for his
project to ground arithmetic logically), Frege translated the subject-predicate structures of natural
languages into an extensional formal language and thus became himself the first logician to
(unwittingly) reify intensions. Ever since, analytic philosophers have made every effort to render
intensions “amenable to extensional treatment” (Hill 1991, 123). The possible worlds interpretation
of Sinn as a function that gives one the reference (see Montague’s classical definition of intensions
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as functions from possible worlds to extensions) is prompted by the belief that “when we think of
the intension of ‘female President of the U.S.A.’, we are still thinking of extension but not the
extension in our world (i.e. the empty set). We are thinking of the extension the expression has in
some possible world” (Allwood, Anderson, and Dahl 1977, 128 – my emphasis).
Although Doležel is aware of the consequences of the extensional bias displayed by most modal
logicians and shares B. Partee’s criticism that Montague’s intensions are, in fact, still functions in
an extensional sense (Doležel 1998, 137), he seems to believe that the intensional half of his own
semantic project can be preserved intact and, with it, the contention that the intensional functions
can capture exhaustively the domain of sense. However, by claiming that “one and the same
fictional world can be structured intensionally in many different ways by different intensional
functions” (Doležel 1998, 141), one does not automatically demonstrate that “intensional functions
thus provide what we have expected from them: they give us indirect but operational access to the
empire of sense in its most complex and subtle manifestation, in the structuring of fictional worlds”
(Doležel 1998, 141). Under closer inspection, the two intensional functions analysed by Doležel
prove to work extensionally: the authentication function establishes what is to count as fact in a
fictional world and the saturation function determines its degree of completeness (that is, in both
cases, the relevant entities, the fictional worlds, are extensional sets). The level of complexity and
subtlety thus reached in pursuit of the sense of a literary text seems rather limited; it is the necessary
but not sufficient grasp of what might be called, for lack of a better word, the ‘factual’ content of
the story.
Considerably more successful than its intensional counterpart, the extensional
semantics of fictionality elaborated by possible-worlds theorists gives pride-of-place to
narratological issues (the concept of ‘narrative world’, the modal structure of fictional worlds, the
description of the dynamics of plot in terms of productive conflicts between sets of possible worlds)
thus taking full advantage of the propensity the theory shows towards dealing with the logical, the
coherent and the orderly in literature. But, unfortunately, not all literary works behave themselves;
as Ryan aptly puts it, “this approach works very well with simple narratives that deal with clearly
defined systems of beliefs and motivations, with narratives whose characters are transparent to
themselves, know what they want, and make definite plans to pursue their goals, but is much more
limited with novels that attempt to represent inner life in its fluidity and full complexity” (Ryan
1998, 156). Whereas the possible-worlds interpretation of the myth of Oedipus sounds distinctly
more convincing than its famous structuralist predecessor, and so do many accounts of
contemporary experimental writing, a vast amount of literary works remains outside the reach of
possible worlds criticism. As do, indeed, some of the phenomena constitutive of literature as such: a
theory which needs to rely so heavily on monovocal language (if the constituents of a fictional
world are to be determined with any degree of certainty, the authentication function has to connect
unequivocally one speaker to one/many fictional fact(s)) will find it exceedingly difficult to
accommodate what Bakhtin has described as ‘novelistic discourse’. The tendency, illustrated by
Doležel’s treatment of free indirect discourse in Madame Bovary, is to play down the importance of
the irreducibly dialogic quality of the text and to subordinate one voice to another (Emma’s
subjective perception to the impersonal authoritative narrator) with a view to safeguarding the unity
of reference. To argue, by way of compensation, that “narrative texts that incorporate subjectivized
Er-form support a three-value authentication function where a new value –‘relatively authentic’ –
joins the values ‘authentic’ and ‘nonauthentic’” and that “[t]his kind of authentication creates a
transitional zone of relative fictional facts between the factual and the virtual domains” (Doležel
1998, 277) will not do: the important aspect, which goes completely unnoticed in Doležel’s
treatment of free indirect discourse, is the awareness of the fact that not only language but reference
itself is inescapably modified by plurivocity (in Bakhtin’s formulation, “The way in which the word
conceptualizes its object is a complex act – all objects, open to dispute and overlain as they are with
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qualifications, are from one side highlighted while from the other side dimmed by heteroglot social
opinion, by an alien word about them” (Bakhtin 1981, 277).
There is a sense in which the fascination with the highly sophisticated logical theory
of possible worlds gets the better of literary scholars, to the effect that they borrow some of the
theoretical framework of the original discipline without always paying due attention to the
implications which this process of ‘appropriation’ may have for the study of fiction. Although many
areas of literary theory clearly benefit from such an interdisciplinary transfer – in particular those
concerned with reference in fiction, the modal structure of fictional universes, the interaction
between the many sub-worlds of a given fiction, the trans-world ‘migration’ of fictional characters,
and the extensional taxonomies of fictional worlds – considerable difficulties are still encountered
by possible-worlds literary theorists in their efforts to avoid assessment of fictional worlds in terms
of their perceived distance from the actual world, to clarify the relationship between sense and
reference in fiction, to provide more ample space for the treatment of the former, and to account for
the large amount of literary texts which resist a referential approach narrowly focused on plot and
character.
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