Allegories of immersion: virtual narration in postmodern fiction

Marie-Laure Ryan

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." One is the philosophical meaning, which invokes the idea of potentiality. The virtual is the field of unrealized possibilities that surround the realm of the actual in a system of reality. This concept finds an application in narrative semantics as a qualifier for "worlds." As I have argued (Possible Worlds 24), a narrative text, whether fictional or not, projects not just a single textual world but a complete "modal system," or narrative universe, centered around a "textual actual world."(2) Within this universe, the potential type of virtuality is represented in two ways: in the as-yet unrealized representations formed by the characters, such as wishes, goals and plans, and in the horizon of possible events surrounding the textual actual world. This horizon is accessible to the reader independently of the characters' mental representation of it. The consideration of what may be called the "virtual complement" of the textual actual world tells the reader that some types of events could happen in a type of fictional world, while some other types could not. When a narrative universe comprises several levels of fictionality (i.e., when it presents recursively embedded fictions), it consists of a stack of systems of reality piled upon each other. Each of these systems comprises an actual world surrounded by its virtual complement and by character-generated virtual worlds. Moreover, since each system is unreal as a whole with respect to the preceding level, it is itself part of the virtual field when contemplated from the perspective of a lower level.

The other sense of "virtual" describes an optical phenomenon. According to Webster's dictionary, a virtual image is one formed of virtual foci: that is, of points "from which divergent rays of light seem to emanate but do not actually do so." This meaning can be metaphorically transferred to a type of narrative discourse that evokes states and events indirectly as they are captured in a reflecting device that exists as a material object in the textual actual world. This reflecting device could be a mirror, text, photograph, movie, or television show. By describing the representation - which functions as primary discourse referent - the narrator conjures the image of the depicted world. Literally speaking, of course, neither texts nor paintings, movies and photographs can be regarded as virtual images. Texts are not visual, and in paintings, film, and photographs, the light emanates directly from the surface of the object. But if we look at these media as mimesis or representations, they become metaphorically mirrors of an external reality. And since what is captured in a mirror is a virtual image, the description of their content becomes a virtual narration. To the extent that the reader of the virtual narration is able to reconstrue the narrated events, virtual narration becomes "as good as" real narration while remaining pragmatically distinct. This phenomenon activates another lexical meaning of the term "virtual": "for all practical purposes" (as in "virtual dictator").

The concepts of virtual world and virtual narration are logically distinct and narratively independent though they present strong affinities for each other. Virtual narration usually intercepts the reflection of virtual worlds - fictions within fictions - but if the reflector is a photograph, newspaper article, documentary movie, or even a simple mirror, the technique may represent events belonging to the same textual actual world as the reflecting object. (This world, of course, is virtual from the point of view of the "real reality" of which author and reader are members, but it functions as real world in the fictional "game of make-believe" [Walton 11-69].)

Conversely, virtual worlds are not necessarily evoked through virtual narration. In fact they rarely are, the device being a rather exotic one. Discourse offers three ways to represent nonactual worlds. The first - standard nonfactual statements such as counterfactuals and hypotheticals - maintains a foreign point of view on the nonactual. The narrator is located in a world (by definition, the textual actual world) and focuses on another. Nonambiguous semantic markers tell the reader that these events did not happen in the textual actual world. The second method - constitutive of fiction - is characterized by a shifting of point of view through what I have called a gesture of recentering (Possible Worlds 21-30): the speaker pretends to be a member of the foreign world and describes it in the real mode. Through this recentering, the speaker undergoes a change of identity, the change marking the distinction between author and narrator. According to this definition, every standard fiction is a virtual world evoked in the real mode. The third strategy, virtual narration, moves the virtual world into the textual actual world. Or, to be more precise, it moves a world of a higher level of reality into a world of a lower level (using the metaphor of a stack, I consider a fictional world higher than the world in which it is produced, and the world of an embedded fiction higher than its embedding environment).(3)

In the absence of a material reflector, the evocation of a virtual world within a fictional universe is not virtual narration, but simply narration of the virtual. An example of this situation would be the report of a dream or hallucination. In this case the only reflector is the mind of the experiencing character, and the mode of transportation into the virtual world is a psychic process. To the extent that the character lives the dreamworld as reality, the narration is in the real mode, and it constitutes a recentering within the fictional universe.(4) On the other hand, if the dreamworld is narrated as recalled by the character rather than as lived - this is to say, presented from the outside - its narration would fall into the category of the nonfactual.

VIRTUAL NARRATION AS WINDOW ON THE PAST: WILLIAM GIBSON

As stated above, not all uses of virtual narration lead to a higher level of reality. In William Gibson's Virtual Light, the device is used to open a very temporary window on a previous stage in the history of the fictional world. A character named Yamazaki watches on television a BBC docu-drama about the life of the "AIDS saint," J. D. Shapely, a jailed prostitute who develops a mutant, nonlethal strain of the AIDS virus and whose blood is used to manufacture a vaccine against the disease. He is later murdered by Christian fundamentalists and becomes the object of a religious cult among members of the underground culture of San Francisco. The text alternates between a real-mode narration of the historical events and a virtual-mode description of their representation on the screen. Since the television movie is a dramatization of real facts, the switch from real to virtual narration does not introduce a new ontological level, but presents a subworld temporally distinct from the stage of the textual actual world that forms the focus of narration (a stage that moves along with the progression of the narrative). As the show's title is announced on television, J. D. Shapely's life story is presented in a standard flashback style as a report of true facts: "James Delmore Shapely had come to the attention of the AIDS industry in the early months of the new century" (228). When dialogue is introduced, however, the text switches from retrospective to virtual narration. Since the dialogue represents the lines spoken by the actors, the focus is no longer on past real events but on the dramatization presently shown on the screen:

Yamazaki watched as Kutnik [the doctor who discovered Shapely's mutant virus], played by a young British actress, recalled, from a patio in Rio, her first meeting with Shapely: '... He was a very open, very outgoing, really a very innocent character, and when I asked him, there in the prison, about oral sex, he actually blushed....' The actress-Kutnik looked as though she were about to blush herself. (229)

After this passage the text returns to nonvirtual retrospective narration of the real J. D. Shapely's story. We know that the following passage is no longer a description of the movie because the television has been turned off:

Yamazaki cut the set off. Dr. Kutnik would arrange Shapely's release from prison as an AIDS research volunteer under Federal Law. The Sharman Group's project would be hindered by Fundamentalist Christians objecting to the injection of "HIV-tainted" blood into the system of terminally ill patients. (230)

The window on the past closes with the definitive return to the main plot: "But it was such a sad story. Better to sit here by candlelight, elbows on the edge of Skinner's table, listening for the song of the central pier" (230). The combination of the virtual and the retrospective mode has fulfilled its function of providing background information. The purpose of virtual narration, in this case, is to move the past into the present so that we can learn about J. D. Shapely without losing sight of Yamazaki. In a window use such as this one, the episode depicted by virtual narration remains clearly framed from the main plot. The window is opened and closed again, once it has fulfilled its explanatory function.

The very transitory use of virtual narration in Gibson's novel creates no breach of logical possibility, no transgression of ontological levels, no imperialistic takeover of the narrative diegesis by the content of the window. It may therefore be called the unmarked case of virtual narration. In all the examples to be discussed below, virtual narration will lead into another level of reality, and the window will be often reluctant to close. This will result in a destabilization of the relations between actual and virtual worlds within the textual universe.

ANIMATED PICTURES AS VIRTUAL NARRATION: ROBBE-GRILLET

The reflective devices available to virtual narration fall into a dynamic and a static category. In the dynamic category are texts and movies. In the static category are paintings and photographs. Possessing no temporal dimension, the static reflectors present a limited narrative potential. Usually, the description of a painting does little more than evoke a narrative setting. But frozen gestures may be pregnant with an immediate past and future, and their description can lead to an embryonic narration. In Michel Foucault's description of Las meninas, for instance, the painter is shown about to take a step toward the canvas ("tout-a-l'heure ... faisant un pas vers [la toile], il se remettra a son travail" [19]). The temporal dimension can be increased by a serialization. In Michel Butor's Passing Time, the myth of Theseus is virtually narrated through the description of a sequence of tapestries. But if the evocation of a picture is to grow into a sustained narration, the frozen frame must be animated. As Brian McHale has observed (115-19), this animation involves an effect of trompe-l'oeil. In Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth - the text used by McHale to illustrate the technique - the text describes an engraving titled The Battle of Reichenfels:

The picture, in its varnished wood frame, represents a tavern scene. It is a nineteenth century etching, or a good reproduction of one. A large number of people fill the room, a crowd of drinkers sitting or standing, and, on the far left, the bartender standing on a slightly raised platform behind the bar. (150)

At first, the description contains many signs of the image status of the referent. The picture is scanned by the eye of an observer: "At the far right a group of men" (150); the description is an act of deciphering: "On closer examination, the isolation of three soldiers seems to result less from the narrow space between them and the crowd than from the direction of the glances around them" (151); the figures in the painting are referred to as "personnages" (characters);(5) they exist not as human beings but as representations: "The child is shown facing straight ahead"; their gestures are frozen: "Fists are clenched, pounded on table, or brandished in mid-air"; the interpretation of the picture is a response to specific pictorial devices: "The contrast between the three soldiers and the crowd is further accentuated by [the] precision of line, [the] clarity in rendering" (152). As the picture is being read, however, a scene emerges in greater and greater detail: the signs of "pictoriality" gradually disappear and the scene acquires a life of its own which increases its vividness. For a while the text could still pass as picture description:

The military overcoat is buttoned up to the neck, where the regimental number is embroidered on a diamond-shaped tab of material. The cap is set straight on the head, covering the hair, which is cut extremely short, judging from its appearance at the temples. (153)

But soon the narration switches from the virtual to the real mode. A durative element is introduced ("continues"), and the depicted scene, now emancipated from the painting, acquires a temporal dimension.

The soldier, his eyes wide open, continues to stare into the half-darkness a few yards in front of him, where the child is standing, also motionless and stiff, his arms at his side. But it is as if the soldier did not see the child - or anything else. He looks as if he has fallen asleep from exhaustion, his eyes wide open. (153)

What I call "the real mode" is in this case a present-tense camera-eye narration: a narrative style typical of mid-twentieth-century fiction, but real in the sense that it presupposes the existence in the same world of implied narrating "I" and discourse referents. The transition from virtual to real narration is not a return to the primary level of reality, where the picture exists as object, but rather a recentering into the world of the picture. (In Gibson's example, by contrast, the return to the real mode was a "popping out" of the television drama.) The world of the picture, freed from its flat and static nature, now takes over as textual actual world. We know that we have left the primary textual world for good and that the recentering is complete when we read: "It is the child who speaks first. He says: 'Are you asleep?'" (153). For the next hundred-and-twenty pages - the main body of the novel - we will remain inside the pictorial world. Then the action will freeze, the textual magic being over, and we will be staring at a picture again.

As the switch from virtual to real narration takes place, the picture disappears, suggesting through its self-obliteration that a picture cannot support a narrative development. Nor can virtual narration sustain itself very long. When looking at a picture, it is difficult to regard it for an extended period of time as the sign of an absent object without moving through the sign, without experiencing the presence of the object. Through its tendency to revert to real narration - an illusionist, presence-creating mode of expression - virtual narration reveals the centripetal pull of narrative worlds. In showing a world as reflection, the text heightens and frustrates, at least for a while, the reader's desire to break through the reflecting medium and to experience the represented world as autonomous reality.

VIRTUAL NARRATION AND SELF-REFERENCE

What would happen if an entire story were told in the virtual mode? I do not know of any genuine literary case, but I can provide what may be called an artificial example or perhaps a literary joke: a text single-mindedly written as the illustration of an idea, and offering no other aesthetic reward than the slightly perverse pleasure taken in the absurdity of the achievement. The text is a self-referential story by David Moser, titled "This is the Title of this Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself." It was sent to Douglas Hofstadter in response to a column he wrote for Scientific American in 1981 on the topic of self-referential sentences. Here is the beginning: "This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence. This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself" (37). After a whole paragraph of pure self-referentiality - where sentences reflect upon themselves as opaque objects and not as vehicles of signification - the text sets a story in motion by exploiting the potential of sentences to refer to an extralinguistic reality while maintaining "the sentence" as primary referent: "This sentence is introducing you to the protagonist of the story, a young boy named Billy. This sentence is telling that Billy is blond and blue-eyed and strangling his mother." I will spare the reader the passages of pure self-reference (which vastly outnumber the narrative passages) and quote the thrilling climax and heart-breaking resolution:

This sentence, in a last-ditch attempt to infuse some iota of story line into this paralyzed prose piece, quickly alludes to Billy's frantic cover-up attempts, followed by a lyrical, touching, and beautifully written passage wherein Billy is reconciled with his father (thus resolving the subliminal Freudian conflict to any astute reader) and a final exciting police chase scene during which Billy is accidentally shot and killed by a panicky rookie policeman who is coincidentally named Billy. (40)

The virtual character of this narration is obviously rooted in the metalinguistic character of the text. Just as a picture depiction narrates by describing what is shown in the picture, this text tells a story by displaying the signifieds of its own sentences. This mode of self-referentiality differs from the "narcissism" or self-consciousness so often found in postmodern fiction in that it is achieved on the sentential rather than on the textual level. This leads to a much more specific form of self-reference. Much of postmodern metafiction describes itself indirectly as member of a larger class that includes any text meeting the specified conditions. If the text talks about art, for instance, we regard it as self-referential by assuming that it exemplifies the properties described as constitutive of art. In the text discussed above, self-reference is individual rather than generic: the expression "this sentence" excludes any other sentence from its field of reference.

By describing itself as a "paralyzed piece of prose" the text demonstrates the lucidity of its self-analysis (notwithstanding the boasting about its being "beautifully written"). Virtual narration is just a trick, and the reader's amusement quickly subsides after its identification. It takes a magician with a bag full of other tricks to build the device into an interest-sustaining narration. The authors of the next examples are masters of that trade.

VIRTUAL NARRATION AND THE DECEPTION OF THE AUDIENCE: BORGES

As supports of virtual narration, individual sentences suffer from the same limitation as still pictures: they open too small a window on the temporal flow. It takes a succession of frames to capture a narrative action. It is therefore in the description of objects such as texts, movies, and plays that virtual narration achieves its full narrative potential. Since describing a text or movie usually amounts to recounting the action in condensed form, there is perhaps no purer form of virtual narration than the plot summary: an activity taken so much for granted that we hardly judge it worthy of narratological attention. That "summarizing" is not actually narrating can be demonstrated on both pragmatic and formal grounds. Pragmatically, summary differs from narration through the nature of its referent: summary represents a text while narration represents a world. On the formal level, summary uses different tenses: the present, future, and present perfect rather than the preterit, future perfect, and past perfect. Linguists such as Harald Weinrich and Emile Benveniste regard the former group of tenses as constitutive of a register of discourse, or commentary, while the latter group characterizes a register of narration or history.(6) Another formal difference, one loaded with pragmatic implications, concerns the display of verbal art. While narrators may use exotic narrative techniques or rhetorical devices, summarizers should avoid nonliteral language, present events from a "neutral" perspective rather than through a character-focalizer, and adhere as closely as possible to the underlying logical and chronological sequence of events. Actual narration is verbal performance; summary is not. Actual narration invites reader participation in the fictional world; summary maintains a distanced contemplation.

Summary may be inherently recalcitrant to art, but in the hands of a wizard like Borges it is turned into a strategic device with rather intriguing interpretive consequences. "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" exploits the reader's tendency to reinterpret the virtual narration of summary as real narration, setting a textual trap that dealt a humbling lesson to the author of this paper. Weinrich observes that the register of summary is used not only to describe existing texts; it is also the form through which authors in their journals evoke their literary projects. In "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," the summarizing activity concerns indeed a future text. The narrator writes: "I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. Details, rectifications, adjustments are lacking; there are zones of the story not yet revealed to me; today, January 3rd, 1944, I see it as follows" (72). This statement introduces a sketch of the future (or virtual) story. The sketch takes over the narrative diegesis, and the text never returns to the primary level of reality specified by the date, January 3rd, 1944. The virtual story thus is and is not "the" story: it is not because what is really told is only the narrator's intent to write it, but it is, since its sketching forms the point of the text.

Not only does the sketch differ from the text it describes through its schematism, through some missing details, and through the use of the tense group characteristic of the register of commentary, it also presents in the third person what is intended to be a first-person narration: "The narrator's name is Ryan. He is the great-grandson of the young, the heroic, the beautiful, the assassinated Fergus Kilpatrick" (Borges 72). Ryan decides to write the biography of his ancestor, a hero of Irish independence, who was assassinated in a theater the day before a victorious rebellion broke out. The circumstances of the murder seem mysterious: they present too many coincidences with historical facts (the murder of Caesar, Lincoln's assassination) and literature (entire scenes seem to have been borrowed from Macbeth): "Ryan investigates the matter (the investigation is one of the gaps in my plot) and manages to decipher the enigma" (74). From this point on, the tense switches to the register of narration: "Kilpatrick was killed in a theater, but the entire city was a theater as well, and the actors were legion, and the drama crowned by his death extended over many days and many nights. This is what happened" (74). What happened is that Kilpatrick was discovered to be a traitor by one of his companions, James Alexander Nolan. Nolan decides that Kilpatrick should be executed, but in a way that would maintain his image as a hero. The execution would therefore be disguised as an assassination, and all the witnesses of the scene would be willing participants in the cover-up, acting out a script and reciting lines specified by Nolan. The performance of the drama-execution is narrated with an eloquence that sharply contrasts with the sober tone of the summary: "The things they did and said endure in the history books, in the impassionate memory of Ireland" (75). At this point the reader is transported to the scene of the action: narration has switched from the virtual to the real mode. After the dramatic climax of the play-in-the story, the narration returns to an ambiguous present. It could be read as the resumption of the summary mode, but it could also be interpreted as historical present, a narrative use of the tense often marking suspense or serving the purpose of increasing the vividness of the representation:

In Nolan's work, the passages imitated from Shakespeare are the least dramatic; Ryan suspects that the author interpolated them so that in the future someone might hit upon the truth. He understands that he too forms part of Nolan's plot.... After a series of tenacious hesitations, he resolves to keep his discovery silent. He publishes a book dedicated to the hero's glory; this too, perhaps, was foreseen. (75)

This paragraph - the last of the story - is incompatible with an interpretation of the text as literary project. If the narrator were describing a future story he would say something to the effect: "whether or not this will be foreseen remains to be decided" or "will be left open." Does the reader remember at this point who the narrator will be - namely, Ryan - or does she read the story as a straightforward, nonvirtual third-person narration? The question is worth asking because its possible answers shed a different light on Ryan's behavior. Whether or not he is the narrator affects eventually the outcome of the matching of wits that takes place between him and Nolan. In my book Possible Worlds, I offered the following interpretation: Ryan reads Nolan's plot as an attempt to make sure, through the implantation of clues, that the cover-up will be deciphered in the future and that the genius of Nolan's scheme will be recognized by posterity. In order to avoid being manipulated by Nolan, Ryan decides to keep the discovery secret. But "this" perhaps was also foreseen by Nolan: what Nolan wanted was for posterity to conspire in the cover-up, so that the hyperreality created by the drama would live on forever. By misreading the role foreseen for him by Nolan, Ryan thus unwittingly becomes Nolan's puppet: he wanted to counter Nolan's plan, and all he did was fulfill it (193-200). In developing this interpretation, however, I forgot that the future story would be told by Ryan. It will therefore be an autobiography in the fictional world, in which Ryan will indeed reveal his discovery, confess his decision to cover it up, and explain his late realization that his action may have been foreseen by Nolan. This realization could indeed function as a motivation for Ryan's narrative act. If we read the end of the story as "real narration" told in the third person (if we take Borges's text to be the story rather than its sketch), Nolan outsmarts Ryan by forcing him to play a role in his drama; but if we remember (despite the author's attempt to trick us into forgetting) that Ryan himself will tell the story and that through this act he will reveal his belated deciphering of Nolan's purported plan, it could indeed be Ryan who will have the last word over Nolan, as Kilpatrick's treason will be finally exposed to posterity. When I failed to see this interpretation and declared Nolan the winner, I fell victim to a narrative scheme no less subtle than Nolan's attempt to secure Ryan's silence through double deception. Through this revision of my earlier interpretation, I reenact (or maybe anticipate since the first-person "confession" remains to be written) Ryan's belated correction of his former text, the biography of Kilpatrick.

VIRTUAL NARRATION AND THE NONSCRIPTIBLE: BORGES

In most of its uses, virtual narration is a stylistic choice. Its tendency to revert to real narration demonstrates that there exists two ways to evoke the same reference world: from the outside and from the inside. In some cases, however, a world can be contemplated only from the outside, and resorting to virtual narration becomes a necessity. In "The Garden of Forking Paths," Borges describes a novel written by a character:

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is an explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder; the intruder can kill Fang; they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pen, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. (26)

Why did not Borges actually write the novel of Ts'ui Pen? Because it is an impossible fiction - impossible meaning here nonscriptible, rather than breaking logical law. Virtual narration is the only way to suggest to the imagination a work which, by definition, would be infinite. With the development of hypertext, computer technology has taken some steps toward making a novel like Ts'ui Pen's actually writable. Hypertext will let the reader follow the forking paths independently of each other, and each branch will be represented in the real narrative mode. But even hypertext is physically limited; it will present some forking paths, but unlike Ts'ui Pen's novel, it does not exhaust the realm of the possible.

Another virtual evocation of an unwritable fiction occurs in Borges's story "The Secret Miracle." The hero, Jaromir Hladik, has been captured by the Nazis and awaits execution. He asks God to grant him the time to finish a drama that will give meaning to his life. His wish is granted, but the time allocated is lived only in his mind: rather than postponing his execution, God allows him to compress the creative output of a full year into the span of one second. During that "year of the mind" Hladik finishes the drama. The plot is evoked through virtual narration. It concerns a baron, Roemerstadt, who lives in a castle and receives strange visits. He has "the uncomfortable feeling that he has seen them somewhere, perhaps in a dream."

In the dialogue mention is made of his sweetheart, Julia von Weidenau, and a certain Jaroslav Kubin, who at one time pressed his attentions on her. Kubin has now lost his mind, and believes himself to be Roemerstadt.... The incoherencies gradually increase; actors who had seemed out of the play reappear.... The first actor comes on and repeats the lines he had spoken in the first scene of the first act. Roemerstadt speaks to him without surprise; the audience understands that Roemerstadt is the miserable Jaroslav Kubin. The drama has never taken place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives endlessly. (91)

In this summary, we are told that there is a character named Roemerstadt, another named Kubin who thinks he is Roemerstadt and who, in the world of his madness, presumably coexists with another Kubin, whom he sees as other (and as mad!). After a while the spectator becomes aware that the character he thought was Roemerstadt is actually Kubin-thinking-of-himself-as Roemerstadt. By specifying this discovery, the virtual narration transgresses the boundary of the dramatic action. What it describes is not merely the world of the play but the effect of the play on a spectator external to this world. Virtual narration turns here into stage direction. But how can the stage direction be implemented? How, in other words, can the performance itself force upon the spectator the realization that Roemerstadt is actually Kubin? The visual and verbally mimetic language of the stage does not possess the potential of narrative diegesis for ontological displacement: that is, for evoking events as virtual. What is shown on stage passes as reality. It is only retrospectively or through framing devices (such as a play within a play) that an action represented on stage can be virtualized. The dramatic script must prescribe a popping out of a virtual world and a return to a lower level of reality for this virtuality to be recognized. But the drama described in Borges's story makes no provision for such a popping out. During the first iteration, the spectator is supposed to believe that Roemerstadt is Roemerstadt, as the drama represents the world of Kubin's madness from Kubin's point of view. It is only during the second iteration that he realizes Roemerstadt's true identity and understands Kubin's madness as madness, thus gaining epistemological access to the ground level of reality within the textual universe. But what will lead to this discovery if the action of the second iteration is an exact copy of the first iteration? Will the repetition be sufficient to tell the spectator: this is imagined and not real? Will the internal incoherence of the action lead to such a diagnosis? Or in the absence of any overt sign of virtuality, will the spectator decide instead that the textual universe is absurd at the core? (Recognizing Kubin's madness as madness would on the contrary salvage the logical coherence of the textual actual world since absurdity would be confined to a virtual world.) The only way for the spectator to learn unambiguously about Roemerstadt's real identity would be for the play to adopt the point of view of the sane characters and to have them refer to Kubin as Kubin, while he refers to himself as Roemerstadt. Within the textual universe the world of the sane characters would clash with the world of the madman, and the sane world would pass as basic reality. In such a play, however, the stage would show events that actually happened in contrast to Hladik's projected drama, whose virtual narration specifies: "the drama has never taken place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives endlessly." The originality of the play, as described in the summary, resides in the spectator's gradual awareness that the stage action never takes place while it takes place under his eyes. The virtual must be both represented as real and acknowledged as virtual. But insofar as Roemerstadt's real identity remains concealed within the world of Kubin's madness, this effect rests on a paradox. Hladik's drama can be virtually narrated, but it could never be performed.

These two forms of virtual narration resemble the Gibson example in that the action shown through the technique remains clearly framed from the main plot and occupies a very temporary window. The return to real narration that follows the evocation of both Ts'ui Pen's novel and Hladik's drama is a return to the primary level of reality. In contrast to "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," the narrative action of the primary level is intrinsically worthy of interest.

VIRTUAL NARRATION AS ALLEGORY OF READING (I): CORTAZAR

Julio Cortazar's very short story "Continuity of Parks" (three pages) has been described by Brian McHale as a "strange loop, or metalepsis" (119-20; the term "strange loop" is borrowed from Douglas Hofstadter [1980], and "metalepsis" from Genette). As a strange loop, the story presents the literary equivalent of the Escher lithograph Print Gallery, in which a spectator contemplates a painting of a town that loops back upon the gallery and includes the spectator:

A man reads a novel in which a killer, approaching through a park, enters a house in order to murder his lover's husband - the man reading the novel! The "continuity" in this text is the paradoxical continuity between the nested narrative and the primary narrative, violating and thus foregrounding the hierarchy of ontological levels. (McHale 120)

What McHale does not discuss is the technique through which the hierarchy is violated. At the beginning of the story we are told that the character on the primary level - let us call him "the man (or reader) in the armchair" - has been reading a novel for a few days and permitted himself "a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterization" (63). At this point the book is still an opaque object, described in terms of literary metalanguage. The real reader does not see the world of the novel until a virtual narration begins. The development of this narration parallels the gradual estrangement of the reader-character from his material surroundings:

the novel spread its glamour over him almost all at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him.... Word by word, licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. (63)

"He was witness": the man is now recentered into the fictional world; but we real readers have only access to this world through its reflection in the man's consciousness. The virtual narration is less a book description than the description of an act of reading. Despite his absorption in the plot, the man remains appreciative of the narrative art: he is able to combine a mimetic and a semiotic perspective. The fictional world is experienced as both a reality and a fabrication:

A lustful, panting dialogue raced down through the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt as if it had all been decided from eternity. Even to those caresses which writhed about the lover's body, as though wishing to keep him there, to dissuade him from it; they sketched abominably the frame of that other body it was necessary to destroy. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazard, possible mistakes. It was beginning to get dark. (64)

As a fabrication, the fictional world is perfectly planned: "nothing has been forgotten." Yet as a reality, it is full of "unforeseen hazards." The virtual mode of narration emphasizes this dual perspective through its unique ability to filter the reflected world through the reflecting medium. In the last paragraph, however, the narration reverts to the real mode, and the reader-character loses sight of the text as textuality. The screen of his mind is now entirely occupied by the characters and their actions: "Not looking at one another now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail to the north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying" (65). As the future murderer enters an estate and sees a man in an armchair, the man reading the novel has become so deeply absorbed in his reading that the world of the novel becomes the only reality: the two-level ontology of Cortazar's story has collapsed into a single level. This collapse becomes evident when the last sentence ends the story rather abruptly: "The door of the salon, and then, the knife in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man reading the novel" (65). Why is not the murder narrated? Because the reflecting object is the consciousness of the man in the armchair, and consciousness is terminated by death. Virtual realities - be they text created or computer generated - are normally safe environments for the experiencer. But perhaps when lived fully, they are no longer protected from death. The disappearance of ontological boundaries in "Continuity of Parks" allegorizes in its most extreme form an experience fundamental to the phenomenology of reading: the experience of immersion in a fictional world.

VIRTUAL NARRATION AS ALLEGORY OF READING (II): CALVINO

Anybody who has ever waded into a relatively cold ocean knows how painful immersion can be; but once the whole body has taken a dive into the surf, the water becomes a warm, hospitable environment. In Cortazar's story, immersion is an easy process: it is like entering a warm tropical sea. For an account of the struggle and resistance of the reader, let us turn to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. There cannot be any better introduction to this work than quoting a virtual narration that constitutes a mise-en-abyme of the whole plot. Toward the end of the novel, one of the characters, the writer Silas Flannery, describes a literary project:

I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he cannot go beyond the beginning.... He returns to the bookstore to have the volume exchanged....

I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader.... (198)

The same scenario is repeated throughout the novel, generating a tale of frustrated immersion: as soon as a fictional world begins to solidify around the reader, he is expelled from it and must start all over again with a new book. The common denominator of the beginnings-of-novel that make up every other chapter is that their fictional world is extremely difficult to penetrate (while the world of the main plot is easily accessible). Immersion is delayed by such antinarrative devices as lack of exposition; withheld background information; a largely non-communicative, self-addressed first-person narration; a presentation of the narrator's mind focusing on ideas, opinions, and sensorial perceptions rather than on events; a sketchy, unsystematic representation of goals, plans, and other information that would allow the rationalization of actions; and finally a beginning in medias res without flashbacks, so that we never learn about the stories that precede and would explain the action framed in the narrative window. In the first of the embedded novels, whose title is the same as that of the main book, the disorientation of the reader and his efforts to find his way in a strange world are reflected within the fictional world itself through virtual narration. We see the fictional world take shape as the text inscribes it in the mind of the reader. But unlike the situation of Cortazar's story, the reader is not merely a character in a primary fictional world, reading a text about a secondary reality. Rather, he or she is a "you" involving what David Herman calls a "double deixis." On one hand, this "you" refers to a character in the main plot reading the book (he will turn out to be male and have a love affair with a female reader, Ludmilla); but on the other hand, the deixis extends to the real reader outside the fictional world. You - and I - are made witnesses of the mental operation through which we form the mental representation of a fictional world. We get to know this world as we are told how to construct it:

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter.... All these signs converge to inform us that this is a little provincial station, where anyone is immediately noticed. Stations are all alike; it doesn't matter if the lights cannot illuminate beyond their blurred halo, all of this is a setting you know by heart.... (Calvino 10-11)

The process of world construction involves the activation of familiar frames of knowledge and the import of real-world experience: despite the text's reluctance to yield information, the reader should be able to form a representation of the setting because "stations are all alike," and this is a typical station. But the text does its best to frustrate the process: "The lights of the station and the sentences you are reading seem to have the job of dissolving more than of indicating the things that surface from a veil of darkness and fog" (11). Ironically, by tracing step by step the emergence of the fictional world in the mind of the reader, the text prevents this emergence. The fictional world remains partially hidden behind the activity that constructs it.

Up to this point the virtual narration could be read as the representation of the reading of a novel from a point of view external to the world of this novel as was the case in the Cortazar story. The third-person narrator of Cortazar's "Continuity of Parks" is located in the same world as the man in the armchair - namely, the primary level of reality within the global fictional universe - and he represents the mind of the reading character by making use of narratorial omniscience. If the you of Calvino's text designates the actual reader, then the implied "I" who describes the text as text should normally refer to the author of the novel. On the other hand, if the you is read as a character you, the I should be read as referring to a narrator individuated as author-persona. Communication presupposes that sender and receiver be members of the same world. But as a fiction, Calvino's text is free to challenge the ontological basis of communication. The speaker is neither the author nor an author-character, but the protagonist of the novel:

I have landed in this station tonight for the first time in my life.... I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather, this man is called I and you know nothing about him. (11)

The description of the reflection of the fictional world in the reader's mind thus originates in the fictional world itself. The narrator's ability to read the reader's mind creates an ontological paradox, not so much because it transgresses ontological boundaries (after all, authors have access to the mind of their characters), but because it transgresses them in the wrong direction: characters are not supposed to be aware of readers. If the real world is level zero and the primary fictional world level 1, then we have a narrator at level 1 who describes the reflection of the world of level 1 in the mind of a member of level 0. (Actually, since "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" is an embedded novel within the book by the same name, we can say that a narrator of level 2, skipping one level, describes the contents of a mind of level 0.) In Cortazar's story, by contrast, level 0 is not involved. A narrator on level 1 describes the mind of a reader of level 1 that reflects a fictional world of level 2.(7)

When the first-person pronoun appears in the text, its referent has neither properties nor name; yet by creating a character, the "I" immediately stands apart from the crowd and provides an object to focus on for the reader:

If you, reader, couldn't help picking me out among the people getting off the train and continued following me in my to-and-fro between bar and telephone, this is simply because I am called "I" and this is the only thing you know about me, but this alone is reason enough for you to invest a part of yourself in the stranger "I". (14-15)

From the moment the "I" is introduced, most of the reader "you"'s mental operations consist of hypotheses concerning the properties, knowledge, and goals of the narrator. The ontological paradox of a character "I" representing how the reader forms a mental image of this character creates a pragmatic situation that makes normally impossible statements suddenly acceptable. Who would say, "It is obvious that I am a subordinate" (14), without ironic intent? But there is no irony if this statement represents, as it does here, the reader's deduction. Unless people suffer from amnesia or other mental disturbances, we can assume that they are aware of some basic facts about themselves: their name, age, sex, profession, where they are, and for what purpose. But since the reader who opens a novel knows nothing about the narrator's identity, the adoption by the narrator of the reader's point of view justifies this kind of statement: "Something must have gone wrong for me: some misinformation, a delay, a missed connection" (13). In same-world communication this statement would transgress the Gricean maxim of quantity: be as informative as required; for who would need a hypothesis, when definitive information is available to the speaker? Since the narrator regards himself as character, however, there could be another explanation for this lack of information about himself: "perhaps the author has not made up his mind" (12). If a character is aware of the reader, then it is only logical within this paradox that he should be aware of the author.

As the text progresses, the passages of virtual narration become sparser, until they are totally displaced by real narration. This should come as no surprise: as the text yields more information about the setting and characters, whether in the real or the virtual mode, the fictional world becomes less puzzling and the characters better profiled. Finally at home in the fictional world, the reader can follow the action without asking new questions with every new sentence. The fog has been lifted, immersion is complete, reading from now on will become easy, but the challenge may be over. For, as Ludmilla, Calvino's Dream Reader, states in the main plot: "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be. The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder" (72). "If the first effect is fog, I'm afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too" (30). Thanks to the defect occurring in the material copy of all the embedded novels, however, the pleasure of the story arriving never yields to the disappointment of the story arrived. But can there still be pleasure if the reader knows in advance that no story will ever get there?

SITUATING VIRTUAL NARRATION WITHIN CONTEMPORARY NARRATOLOGY

A. VIRTUAL NARRATION AND GENETTE'S MODEL OF NARRATOR TYPES AND DIEGETIC LEVELS

Since the work of Gerard Genette has created a lingua franca for narratologists, it will be instructive to attempt a description of virtual narration within his paradigm. Let me say from the outset that Genette's concept of diegetic levels differs from my notion of fictional levels, or ontological levels, in that diegetic levels are created by distinct narrative acts while ontological levels correspond to different reference worlds. Genette's model relies on two oppositions: (1) heterodiegetic versus homodiegetic narrators; and (2) extradiegetic versus intradiegetic. The first opposition refers to whether or not the narrative instance functions as character: heterodiegetic narrators tell about others; homodiegetic narrators tell about themselves. The second opposition is defined in terms of diegetic level: the extradiegetic narrator is the narrator of the primary level, the one who narrates but is not himself narrated. The intradeigetic narrator is a character who becomes narrator by being introduced and "quoted," as it were, by the extradiegetic narrator (or by another intradiegetic narrator if the narrative presents more than two diegetic levels). The cross-classification of the two dichotomies yields four classes: (1) extradiegetic-heterodiegetic: the standard third-person narrator; (2) extradiegetic-homodiegetic: the standard first-person narrator; (3) intradiegetic-heterodiegetic: a character who gossips about others or tells a story as fiction (two clearly distinct situations that Genette's model fails to distinguish); and (4) intradiegetic-homodiegetic: a character who narrates his own story (Figures III 256).

In the present framework, a change of narrator does not necessarily lead to a new level of reality, nor does a move to a different reality necessarily introduce a new narrator. The switch from one ontological level to another may be gradual, blending the two levels rather than opposing them through the visible frame of a different narrative act. This is what happens in virtual narration at least in those examples where virtual narration leads into a higher level of reality and then yields to a real narration of the higher level. The same narrative instance seems to be responsible for the real narration of both levels as well as for the virtual narration that mediates between them. From an ontological point of view, it is of course impossible for a narrator to inhabit two worlds at the same time; the narrator who evokes the lower level in the real mode is thus logically distinct from the narrator who evokes the higher level in the real mode. By permitting a transition to a higher level of reality while maintaining the semblance of a narratorial continuity, virtual narration occults this ontological impossibility. Therein resides its power of deception.

Because of its failure to distinguish ontological from illocutionary levels, Genette's system cannot describe this type of transition. A switch from real to virtual narration does not involve a different narrator, but a different relation between the narrator and the reference world. To characterize virtual narration, we must take this ontological relation into consideration. I propose therefore to introduce a new dichotomy into Genette's system: intraontological versus extraontological narration. The first category describes narrators who describe the reference world of their story from the perspective of one of its members; the second category describes narrators who evoke a world from the outside without undergoing recentering into this world. According to this model, a transition from real to virtual narration is a switch from the intraontological to the extraontological mode. The four categories of Genette's system can each be split into an intra- and an extraontological manifestation, thus yielding a model with eight categories.(8) The examples of virtual narration discussed in this essay instantiate two combinations. The virtual narrations of Gibson, Robbe-Grillet, and Cortazar emerge from the background of a standard impersonal third-person narration. They are therefore extradiegetic and heterodiegetic in addition to being extraontological. I would also place the virtual narration of Borges's "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" in this category (even though the narrator of the main level uses the first person) because he is not a character in his projected story. The other combination occurs in the Calvino text. As a first-person embedded narration with virtual passages, it must be described as homodiegetic, intradiegetic, and occasionally extraontological. If the narrative belonged to the primary diegetic level, it would be a case of extradiegetic, homodiegetic, virtual narration. On the other hand, if Cortazar's "Continuity of Parks" were embedded in a main narrative, it would illustrate the combination of intradiegetic, heterodiegetic, virtual narration. (Note that the features homo- and extraontological are assigned to fleeting modes of narration rather than associated with narratorial persons for the entire text, as are Genette's features.)

While Genette's system makes no reference to virtuality, some recent additions to the narratological repertory rely either implicitly or explicitly on a contrast between the actual and the virtual. The next two sections compare virtual narration to two of these notions.

B. VIRTUAL NARRATION AND THE DISNARRATED

In what Gerald Prince calls the "disnarrated," events are evoked in the reader's mind without being part of the narrated: "the category ... that I will call disnarrated covers all the events that do not happen though they could have and are nonetheless referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text" (30). The disnarrated comes in many forms, depending on whether the unrealized possibility is considered by a character ("Emma had imagined p, but q happened"), by a narrator ("a less truthful man would have done p, but Silas did q"), or even, metafictionally, by an authorial voice ("I could make Jacques do p but I won't"). Insofar as they are evoked as not having happened, disnarrated events are expelled from the textual actual world and relegated to its virtual complement. What is worth negating is indeed what could happen with a reasonable degree of possibility. But Prince is careful to distinguish the disnarrated from the merely negated. A sentence like "Elizabeth did not answer" is not an instance of the disnarrated, because it can be paraphrased by a positive phrase yielding an actual event: "Elizabeth remained silent" (33). While a regular negative formulation remains focused on the textual actual world, the disnarrated brings so much eloquence to the representation of the nonactual that the realm of the possible becomes worth exploring for its own sake. The disnarrated thus promotes the virtual as no longer ancillary to the actual. But the (dis)narration of nonactual events remains actually performed. Virtual narration presents the opposite situation: the narrative act is virtual since the discourse describes a reflector and not events, but the reflected events usually belong to the actual world of a higher level of reality.

C. VIRTUAL NARRATION AND HYPOTHETICAL FOCALIZATION

This technique, recently described by David Herman, is defined as follows:

What I shall go on to characterize as "hypothetical focalization" (hereafter, HF) entails the use of hypotheses, framed by the narrator or a character, about what might be or have been seen or perceived - if only there were someone who could have adopted the requisite perspective on the situations and events at issue. (Herman, "Hypothetical" 231)

Hypothetical focalization is typically a device of nineteenth-century fiction. Here is an example from a postmodern parody of Victorian narrative style, the first sentence of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman: "a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis..." (9). Here again narrative discourse evokes the horizon of the possible, but the focus is on the actual world. The omniscient narrator is not an objectively existing witness of the scene since he remains a disembodied consciousness. To bring more credibility to his description, he imagines a possible world resembling the textual actual world on all counts except for the additional presence of a witness. This hypothetical human consciousness comes to the same conclusions as the omniscient narrator and reinforces the reader's faith in his authority. As a counterfactual statement, hypothetical focalization takes a detour toward a possible world in order to make a statement about reality. It either "keeps the virtual in the service of the actual" (in realistic texts) or it destabilizes the actual, "formally marking doubts about whether we can determine, in every case, where we stand in a world we only thought we knew" (Herman, "Hypothetical" 245). Even in this second case (typical of more modern texts), the focus seems to be on the nature of the real and its knowability. Like hypothetical focalization, virtual narration originates in the textual actual world, but unlike hypothetical focalization, it leads away from it. Both hypothetical focalization and virtual narration make use of a reflector, but in hypothetical focalization the reflector is a consciousness in a possible world while in virtual narration the reflector is a real object. And while the reflector of hypothetical focalization always belongs to the same narrative level as the reflected world, the reflector of virtual narration typically intercepts the real world of a higher level.

THE FUNCTION OF VIRTUAL NARRATION

Asking about the inherent functionality of a narrative technique such as virtual narration may strike the reader as a rather preposterous question: narrative techniques are not rigid instruments designed for a specific task but flexible devices constantly reinvented as individual texts put them in the service of their particular purpose. Keeping in mind the potential versatility of all techniques, we can nevertheless detect a general trend in the cases of virtual narration discussed in this paper. In all but the joke example, virtual narration is an unstable mode, doomed to surrender to the real mode, whether this surrender is a decentering to a lower level of reality as in Gibson and the second and third Borges examples or a recentering into the reflected world as in all others. Another frequent (though not obligatory) feature is the metatextual and directly or indirectly self-referential dimension of virtual narration. Self-reference is direct in the case of "Continuity of Parks," If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and the joke text and indirect in In the Labyrinth and "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero": in these last two texts virtual narration describes a work other than the main work (a painting in a room, a literary project), but this embedded work, in monopolizing the interest of the reader, becomes the raison d'etre of the text as a whole.

Given the inherent self-referentiality of virtual narration, contemporary literary theory would have a ready-made answer to the question of its functionality: since virtual narration presents a world through a reflector, its purpose is to make the reader aware of the mediated nature of textual worlds. From a phenomenological perspective, a text can be apprehended in two complementary ways: as window on a world or as formal texture, as mimesis or as system of signs, as a transparent or as an opaque object. The first mode of apprehension involves imaginary recentering into the fictional world. This allows immersion, make-believe and emotional participation in the events. The second mode promotes attention to the medium, a detached contemplation of the fictional world, an active and critical stance toward both story and discourse. This attitude entails a refusal to reduce the text to a mere instrument of passage into imaginary worlds, a refusal grounded in a fear that meaning would be exhausted once the passage is allowed. Both modes of apprehension contribute to the aesthetic experience, but postmodern theory heavily favors the second mode: the first is suspected of impeding an interactive relation between text and reader and of promoting a passive subjection to authorial authority. Immersion is viewed as a shameful pleasure, and as a threat to mental health. The postmodern contempt of immersion is compounded by the phenomenon's resistance to theorization: a text regarded as a system of signs can be endlessly deconstructed and put back together again in a different configuration, but what can be said about immersion in textual worlds except that it takes place?(9)

When texts are read self-referentially by postmodern theory, they are usually interpreted as reflecting on their own textuality and as blocking participation in the mimesis. The self-referential text is supposed to decenter and destabilize any notion of a textual actual world. Along these lines, the function of virtual narration would be to reveal the artificiality of the text, to break the referential illusion, to expose the constructed nature of the fictional world, and to encourage the reader to take an active role in constructing this world. The current predominance of antiimmersive interpretations of self-referential devices is easy to understand: since immersion requires a certain transparency of the medium, it is incompatible with self-reflectivity. The text can only signify immersion by cancelling its experience.

Often less opposed to immersion than literary theorists, postmodern novelists sometimes allude to the phenomenon in metanarrative comments: that is, in comments that tear the reader away from the main level of the fictional universe and send her back to a lower level of reality. After revealing that "these characters I create never existed outside my own mind" (80), John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant's Woman, acknowledges that if the reader moves up one ontological level, she will still find a reality beckoning emotional participation: "I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken" (82). As soon as the metafictional chapter is over the reader plunges back into this reality. Introducing a level where characters are invented only highlights the wonder of their being real on another. In the passage of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler discussed above, Calvino also alludes to the two modes of reading. After describing fragments of unintelligible conversations overheard at the station, the narrator tells the reader:

These remarks form a murmuring of indistinct voices from which a word or phrase might emerge, decisive for what comes afterward. To read properly you must take in both the murmuring effect and the effect of the hidden intention, which you (and I, too) are as yet in no position to perceive. In reading, therefore, you must remain both oblivious and highly alert. (18)

Through obliviousness, the reader detaches herself from her real-world surroundings and takes in the atmosphere of the fictional world. Through alertness, she attempts to decipher the purpose of every detail, for fictional worlds are constructed by a prescient mind, not thrown together by chance. The oblivious mode of reading requires a point of view internal to the fictional world, the alert mode an external point of view. This double perspective can be related to the dichotomy of narratorial and authorial audience.(10)

As a narrative device, virtual narration clearly promotes distancing. It locates the reader on a lower level than the world focused upon, thus preventing recentering into this world. The antiillusionist, antiimmersive interpretation is justified as long as virtual narration is maintained. But as we have seen, the device hardly ever dominates a text from beginning to end. Through its very instability, virtual narration tells another story. The technique is so contrived and the tendency to revert to regular narration so strong, that the reader usually fails to notice the transition to the real mode. We can no more observe the stages of our own immersion than we can watch ourselves falling asleep. It is only retrospectively, like a person who awakens from a dream, that the reader realizes that the picture world has come to be experienced as primary reality. Immersion cannot be reflected upon from within immersion, but it can be forcefully enacted by the text from a state of distancing. In this enactment, virtual narration functions as launching pad, not as destination. Its fate is to fade into real narration, so that immersion can be lived as well as signified.

Notes

1 This aspect of language was brought to my attention by N. Katherine Hayles's article which argues for the impossibility of achieving absolute certainty in any area of knowledge, including science. Yet the article begins with a certainty-implying, strongly factual statement: "One of the important developments in science studies has been the increased awareness [my italics] that scientific inquiries are social and ideological constructions" (27). (Semantically, "being aware" is considered a "factual predicate" because its assertion and negation carry the same factual implicature: "she is aware that p" and "she isn't aware that p" both imply that "p is the case.")

2 For simplicity's sake I will refer to this semantic universe as "the fictional world" whenever it is not necessary to distinguish the textual actual world from the surrounding character-generated virtual worlds.

3 Some models speak of "lower and lower" narrative levels, which is consistent with the metaphor of embedding, but this approach becomes clumsy when levels need to be numbered: if the base level is 0, then lower levels would be identified by negative numbers. If the base level is 1, the system is even worse. On the advantages of the stack metaphor, see Ryan, Possible Worlds, chapter 9.

4 The description of a character's experiences in a computer-generated virtual reality - such as found in William Gibson's Neuromancer - would fall into this category of "narration of the virtual in the real mode." In the technological phenomenon of virtual reality, the computer is not a reflector but a generator whose function cannot be fulfilled until it disappears from consciousness. As Gabriel D. Ofeisch observes, "as long as you can see the screen, you're not in VR. When the screen disappears, and you can see an imaginary scene ... then you are in VR" (qtd. in Pimentel and Texeira 7). The illusory immediacy of the VR experience makes it possible for authors of science fiction to describe virtual and real events in the same narrative mode. This can lead to an experience of ontological disorientation for the less than perfectly alert reader. In William Gibson's Neuromancer, for instance, it is sometimes difficult to tell real sexual encounters from episodes of virtual sex with computer-simulated partners. On the other hand, if characters remain aware of the computer as mediating object, the evocation of a computer-generated world could be done in the mode I describe here as virtual narration.

5 This nuance disappears in the English translation. The "personnages" of the original French become "persons" or pronouns.

6 This distinction is now being challenged, as the present is developing into the privileged tense of literary narrative fiction, but popular and canonical fiction is still dominated by the "narrative" group.

7 If the referent of you is interpreted as a reader-character, the paradox occurs one level up: a narrator of level 2 records the mental operations of a reader-character of level 1.

8 In this system, a character who tells a story as fiction - such as Scheherazade narrating "Ali Baba" in the Arabian Nights - is described as intradiegetic, extraontological, and heterodiegetic within the world where she exists as character; but since fiction telling involves recentering and loss of identity (just as real-world authors become narrators in make-believe), she must be redescribed from the perspective of the world of her tale. Once the text of "Ali Baba" is cut off from its frame (a move made possible by the ontological autonomy of its world), the narrator is no longer Scheherazade: there is no counterpart of the Scheherazade of the primary level in this second-level fictional world, but an impersonal, genderless, omniscient third-person narrator who must be described as extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, and intraontological. By contrast, a narrating character who tells a story as true fact, whether his own or that of others, is only characterized once since his story refers to the same world as the embedding narrative, and the narrating character exists as the same individual in both narrative domains. This character is thus an intradiegetic, intraontological, and either homo- or heterodiegetic narrator.

9 Recently proposed concepts that could be regarded as a theorization of immersion include the philosopher Kendall Walton's notion of make-believe, the psychologist Richard J. Gerrig's notion of transportation, and my own concept of recentering.

10 See Peter Rabinowitz on this distinction (97-104).

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-----. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam, 1994.

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-----. "Textual 'You' and Double Deixis in A Pagan Place." Style 28 (1994): 378-410.

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-----. "The Disnarrated." Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. 28-38.

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-----. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

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Marie-Laure Ryan is a member of the editorial board of Style. She currently lectures on narratology and linguistics at Colorado State University. She is the author of numerous articles on narratology, as well as of a book, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, which received the 1992 MLA prize for Independent Scholars. Her current projects concern the relations between virtual reality and literary theory, as well as the problem of fictionality in contemporary culture.

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