From Two-worldliness to Allotopia. Towards Philosophico-Literary Approach to World-building Narratives (original) (raw)

Dialectics of Space and Place across Virtual and Corporeal Topographies, ed. June Jordaan, Carl Haddrell and Christine Alegria, Oxford 2016, pp. 151-164

"In herein paper I shall argue, whether Umberto Eco’s definition of allotopia (Il mondi della fantascienza, 1984) as another, alternate but still “more real than the real one” world should not be revised in the light of cognitive narratology (VR, immersion and storyworlds in Marie-Laure Ryan 1991, Hermann 2002), constructivism (‘reduction of complexity’ in Luhmann 1984), psychonarratology (immersion in Nell 1988, Gerrig 1993) and topography of literature. Following Bernhard Waldenfels’ (1997, 2006) notes on the nature of otherworldliness and its liaisons with what I call ‘xenotopography’, I shall examine whether the typically fantastic trichotomic model of world (empirical world → symbolical gate → counterempirical world) is not nowadays being replaced with pre-established, immersive and imaginative storyworld (purum figmentum). Consequently, I shall claim that the philosophical premises of allotopia and world-building alike are comprising the significant shift between 20th and 21st century prose which manifests in the tendency to create a storyworld prior to the storyline—a ‘matrix for all possible narratives’ (Dukaj 2010). Thus, allotopia will have become a perfect term for a multitude of topographico-literary tendencies, just to mention world-building think-tanks in nearly every video game studio or fictional encyclopaedias, thoroughly describing geography, topography, cartography and chronography (cf. Gavriel Rosenveld’s term of allohistory) of a given storyworld, like for instance the Wookiepaedia for Star Wars franchise or K. W. Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-Earth for the preconceived world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s. The utterance of allotopian encyclopaedias in the coherent “heterocosm of reference’ (Hutcheon 1987) will be exemplified in Frank Herbert’s Dune, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Jacek Dukaj’s Inne Pieśni (‘Other Poems’)—novels peculiarly difficult to classify using typical nomenclature (they represent neither fantasy, nor SF, nor even a postmodern or magical realist novel). Moreover, as this prose is adhering the concept of ortsgebunden (Hausherr 1970)—i. e. the ‘place bound nature of literary forms’—by modelling spatial and spatio-tem­poral heterotopian frontiers within the allotopian storyworld, it allows to confront different ethnoses, places, or even lesser worlds—but not any more fairy-tale-bound empirical world which bestows upon a fantastic venturer the promising (though illusory) law to return."