Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds

Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Pavel starts from previous understandings of fiction that center atomically on the truth-value of characters, events, and utterances, and points out the limitations of defining fiction on that granular a level — instead, he argues for an understanding of fictional worlds, “…a model that represents the users’ understanding of fiction once they step inside it and more or less lose touch with the physical realm” (16).

His understanding of fictional worlds allows for a degree of porosity between the actual world and worlds of different truth-value. Key to his argument, and distinct from a fictional world, is the realm of myth, which through its sacred meaning is actually endowed with greater truth-value than actual experience. Myth becomes fiction as its position in the culture, over time, slips away from the sacred.

Pavel also discusses realism as “not merely a set of stylistic and narrative conventions, but a fundamental attitude toward the relationship between the actual world and the truth of literary texts” (46).

Fictional worlds should not be considered possible worlds in a literal sense… rather they are “abstract models or conceptual constructions” (49). But even this conveys a sense of independence, and decouples the world to a certain extent from the “creator” or author. Fictional worlds can contain contradiction yet still cohere as worlds. (49)

Pavel’s understanding of fictional worlds and reference decouples, to some extent, fiction from its medium or text, which is useful to me:

The worlds we speak about, actual or fictional, neatly hide their deep fractures, and our language, our texts, appear for a while to be transparent media unproblematically leading to worlds. For, before confronting higher-order perplexities, we explore the realms described by compendia and texts, which stimulate our sense of referential adventure and, in a sense, serve as mere paths of access to worlds: once the goal is reached, the events of the journey may be forgotten. (73)

Of course, it’s no more accurate to assert the exclusive truth of transparent referential travel to a fictional space than it is accurate to assert the absolute influence or opacity of the form, and I don’t think Pavel is doing this. Rather, he makes an argument for keeping referentiality in the picture, for understanding the referent as well as the text making reference as important and discrete:

The desire not to dismiss the medium leads, for all practical purposes, to the loss of the worlds.

But would this not, again, lead to the neglect of what internal models can show us — the detailed meanderings and obstacles of our journeys through fictional spaces? (75)

This leads to a discussion of borders between fictionality and actuality, in which he mentions variants of a fictional world, and the elements that connect variants:

Narratologists distinguish between basic elements of a story — cardinal functions in Barthes’s terminology, narremes in Dorfman’s — and less significant elements, whose presence may be dispensed with without the story’s losing its coherence and identity. In such a view, it may be assumed that a sequence of conjoined sentences is basically true of the world w if all important states of affairs are represented by true sentences. (80).

Pavel avoids easy truisms about the nature of fiction, and his discussion of boundary is no exception: “While proposing a general ontological framework for fiction — the salient structures — I argue that the demarcation between fiction and nonfiction is a variable element and that as an institution fiction cannot be attributed a set of constant properties, an essence” (136). In support of this he points out the dual ontological status of sacred spaces:

“This situation instantiates a remarkable property of ontological systems, namely the fact that they rarely command an unqualified loyalty… the points of articulation at which the two worlds meet in what can be called a series of ontological fusions” (138).

He then situates fictional systems in this model: “Taking the division of the ontological space into central and peripheral models as a very general formal organization of the beliefs of a community, we may localize fiction as a peripheral region used for ludic and instructional purposes” (139).

Beyond the discussion of myth as a truth state, Pavel has some useful statements for me on what myth does: “Myths, being narratives, are composed of chains of events; by virtue of their privileged ontology, they serve as models of intelligibility for events in the profane world… as paradigms of sense they furnish explanations for profane events” (131-2).