La Théorie littéraire des mondes possibles (review)

The thirteen chapters of this book offer an excellent overview of some of the best work now being done in that branch of the theory of fiction that concerns possible worlds. Although it is in French and many of the contributors are associated with French academic institutions, it does not specifically concern French literature or any line of theory particularly associated with France. Indeed, as Françoise Lavocat notes by way of introduction, the theory of possible fictional worlds has played a relatively small role in French critical discourse, while English-language publications in this field are numerous and highly developed. Saul Kripke’s work on modal logic and names in the 1960s and 1970s was and remains an important stimulus for such studies. Other leading voices over the decades are among the contributors to the present volume. They include Thomas G. Pavel (Fictional Worlds, 1986), Marie-Laure Ryan (Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, 1992), Ruth Ronen (Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, 1994), and Lubomír Doležel (Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, 1997). The point of this volume is largely to introduce a French-reading public to this field, but for readers of French this collection shows that the concept of fictionality can be a useful tool not only for those long associated with alternative worlds, such as Richard Saint-Gelais, who has previously published numerous articles on crime fiction and science fiction, but for others, such as Marie-Luce Demonet, Christine Noille-Clauzade, and Marc Escola, who are well known for work in literary and linguistic theory but not specifically for studies of counterfactuality. One of the most interesting contributions here is also the most sceptical: Marielle Macé insistently points to the difficulty of pinning down the notion of ‘world’, sometimes used as a metaphor and sometimes not, as she probes fictional attempts to recreate the thought processes of historical characters. In another, very original study Sophie Rabau shows how classical philology, in attempting to fit together different, and even incompatible, versions of stories produces still another world: ‘il nous faut postuler un univers qui n’est pas le monde visé par telle ou telle version, mais qui englobe tous les mondes visés par les histoires’ (p. 227). Marc Escola investigates the relation between the syntax and the semantics of fictional texts and the processes employed by readers to fill in gaps between what the text provides and what semantics require. These chapters and numerous others show that the theory of fictional worlds is useful for anyone who deals with narrative and not only with those genres, such as science fiction, that are habitually associated with the term ‘monde possible’.