Neohelicon (2013) 40:431-448

DOI 10.1007/s11059-013-0202-0

Crossing the borders of fiction. Do non-existent objects

have bodies?

Françoise Lavocat

Published online: 8 August 2013

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2013

Abstract This paper is focused on travels from one world to another: from a fic-
tional-world-in-a fictional-world to a real-world-in-a-fictional-world, in a historical
and theoretical perspective, from Jacques Alluis’ Ecole d’amour ou les Héros docteurs
(1665) to Haruki Murakami’s End of the World (1985). In these works, fictional
characters overstep the limits between worlds and meet, and sometimes love onto-
logically different characters. What is at stake in these metalepsis is the concept of
fiction and the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Questioning the body of
non-existent objects in these transfictional frames help us scrutinize their status.

Keywords Possible worlds · Metalepsis · Transfiction · Ontology of characters ·

Chimera · Mythological beings · Bougeant · Alluis · Woody Allen ·
Murakami

The most appealing theories about possible worlds (at least for literary critics) have
the most radical approach to the effacement of ontological borders between worlds.
Discussed by philosophers such as David Lewis (1986), who Marie-Laure Ryan calls
upon, for example (2001, 2005, 2010), these theories suggest that real existence gives
no more credence to the world of phenomena proved by our senses than to the worlds
which we create in hypotheses, in foresight or in fiction: every possible world can be
the reference world for another possible world. With regards to characters, Saul
Kripke’s (1980) theory of rigid designation through proper names is in favour with
literary critics, as it allows them to posit the identity of a character in all possible
worlds. This theory has been a driving force behind a number of recent works about
transfictionality and metalepsis (Genette 2005; Schaeffer-Pier 2005, Montalbetti
2001, 2006; Saint-Gelais 2007, 2011; Lavocat 2007).

F. Lavocat (&)
University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, LGC- 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, France
e-mail: francoise.lavocat@univ-paris3.fr

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432 F. Lavocat

And yet, in fictional writing, the play upon the crossing of fiction’s borders
underscores the paradox of fictional characters. From the point of view of theorists
of fiction, characters are defined by their autonomy, their capacity to exist as
creations of the mind, freely inhabiting different zones of the imaginary and of the
reality. But in a more traditional view, inherited from formalism and structuralism,
characters are only paper-beings, “vivants sans entrailles” (Valéry 1943, Hamon
1972), highly dependent on the material origins of their medium.
Our intention here is to examine the way in which polycentric fictions (those
fictions including many worlds)1 handle this contradiction. We will call world 1 the
real-world-of reference-in-the-fiction and world 2, the world-of-fiction-in-the-fiction,
which is a world accessible from world 1. We will show that far from effacing the
ontological difference between these various levels, these polycentric fictions
accentuate this difference through processes which remained remarkably constant
between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Does this mean that fictions echo
some kind of ontological conservatism? In this case, the incorporation of another
possible world would only serve to confirm the superiority of a unique model world to
which our perception apparently condemns us (our “ürdoxa” as Husserl defines it),
that is to say, the insurmountable feeling of reality which is to inhabit this world.2
While nowadays fiction is frequently seen as a thought experience and a positive
opening to the possible (Murzilli 2009), how are we to understand those fictions which
include another world and systematically devalue it as an unsatisfying and incomplete
world compared to that of reality? Fiction frequently seems to acts against itself, in
novels of the eighteenth century as in contemporary fiction.
Indeed, second worlds do not have the same status as their reference worlds—
which are fictionally real. Both logically and according to the laws of physics and
physiology which govern them, these worlds seem to suffer from an ontological
deficiency, which particularly affects the bodies of their inhabitants. The passage
from one world to another does indeed manifest and call into question the nature of
the characters as existing objects (according to the definition employed by Meinong
1912, Lewis 1986, Rescher 2003) and non-existing objects. We will examine this
question in a diachronic corpus, including works from the seventeenth, eighteenth
and twentieth centuries.3 In these fictions, the second worlds share the commonality
of all being explicitly fictional and the subject matter of the passage from the real-
world-in-fiction to the fictional-world-in-fiction. This corpus does not include
metaleptic works wherein the secondary world is not represented.4 Certain other
recent works, which will not be discussed here,5 represent alternative worlds which
1
If I may refer to my own work: 2010, pp. 47–48.
2
Regarding this point, see Anne Cauquelin (2010, p. 138, sq). However, if we are to believe Aurélien
Barau and Jean-Luc Nancy (2011, p. 13), contemporary scientific and existential experience of the notion
of the “world” is null and void and has ceded its place to a pluriverse.
3
The absence of works from the nineteenth century is intriguing. Despite of our research (and that of
Charlotte Krauss, who we thank), we have found no examples of polycentred works of this type from this
period.
4
For example Sei personnagi in cerca di autore (Pirandello 1921) or Travels in the Scriptorium (Auster
2007).
5
On this point see Doležel (2010).

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are totally or partially worlds of fiction-in-fiction,6 but which present distinct

characteristics7 and are drawn from a counter-factual history. It would, however,
have been possible to integrate works from the genre of fantasy8 or that of heroic
fantasy,9 but we will only be able to make brief allusions to such texts in the limits
of this work. Nor is our intention to continue the examination of metalepsis (Genette
2004, Schaeffer and Pier 2005, Montalbetti10 2006). Rather, we will focus on the
specific ontology of fictional worlds, through the magnifying lens of these fictions
within fictions, while underlining the persistence, through several centuries and
across distant cultural spheres, of a number of features which are recurrent, and in
our opinion constitutive of the idea of fiction.

The world of fiction as a biotope

Atmosphere and food

It is the atmosphere of a world that makes it more or less habitable. Since Ancient
times, it has been thought that climate affects both bodies and customs. Arcadia, a land
which was very soon identified with fiction,11 is justly characterised by a particularly
clement temperature, which is often associated with just one season: spring. From the
moment that fictional worlds began being envisaged as lands, they were bestowed with
not only a chronotope (as already shown by Bakhtin) but with a particular biotope.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century works an eternal, typical, stereotypical
spring reigns in the fictions-in-fictions. Indeed, during this period many imaginary
worlds bear resemblances to Arcadia: the country named “Romancie”12 in
Bougeant’s novel Le voyage merveilleux du prince Fan Feredin dans la Romancie,
6
Such as Man in the Dark (Auster 2008) and 1Q84 (Murakami 2009–2010).
7
Ontological lightening does not characterise these seconds universes, which are alternatives to the real
world and to the real-world-in-the-fiction because of a historical event which had taken place previously,
or which had not taken place: for example, characters eat in the same way in the two worlds. On the
contrary, in IQ84, the generational laws are greatly disturbed, in such a way that relations between a man
and a (probably supernatural) creature lead to another woman falling pregnant.
8
Die unendliche Geschichte (Ende 1979); The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis 1950–1958).
9
In the genre of “fantasy novels”, the world of The Chronicles of Narnia (C. S. Lewis 1950–1958) has a
complex status: it is an alternative to the real world, but also a copy of a supernatural world, a mental
creation generated by a belief, an artefact partially constructed by a magician. Michael Ende’s novel (Die
Unendliche Geschichte, 1979) can also be referenced here. The cycle of Roger Zelazny’s Amber princes
and those of his continuators (1970–1991), for example, presents a pluriverse wherein all of the worlds
(including Earth) are reflections of just one real world, called Amber. The symbol of Amber is a unicorn.
Apart from Amber, all of the worlds are modifiable through the power of desire and dreams.
10
Montalbetti cites many works which show a character’s intrusion into the world of fiction: Sherlock
Junior by Buster Keaton (1924), Last Action Hero by John Mc Tierman (1993), and a novella by
Marguerite Yourcenar: «Comment Wang-Fô fut sauvé».
11
Literature on this subject abounds (see Lavocat 2011a).
12
‘Romancie’, ‘Romantie’ or ‘Romanie’ is a word used in France in the middle of the seventeenth
century (in Italia, ‘Romanzia’) meaning ‘the land of Romances’ (Furetière explains the term in a footnote
in the Nouvelle allégorique ou Histoire des derniers troubles arrivés au Royaume d’Éloquence,1658). See
Lavocat (2011c).

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434 F. Lavocat

1735 is called the “Country of Arcadia” in the English translation, published in 1789
(The Wonderful Travels of Prince Fan-Feredin, in the Country of Arcadia).
In Alluis’ short novel (L’école d’amour ou les héros docteurs, 1667),13 Alidor and
Dorise, two querulous lovers, go to the land of romances (“le pays des romans”)
because they want to learn to love by consulting the novel heroes (“transfictional”
characters, emigrated from other romances). This land is also based on Arcadia and
it is the “pastoralisation” of the atmosphere (which becomes more temperate) which
leads Alidor and Dorise to guess that they have nearly reached their destination:
As they continued on their way, they felt the warmth intensify, either because
the Sun was gathering its strength, or because they warmed up as they walked;
however, they felt such a gentle, pleasant coolness, so extraordinary for the
season, that they were deeply surprised by it». (my translation)14
In Le voyage merveilleux du prince Fan Feredin dans la Romancie, the air in the
novel’s land is “the most pure, the most serene, the mots salubrious, and the most
invariable ever breathed”15 (1789, p. 23). The irony in this metafictional weather is
perceptible (“invariability” qualifies the air positively and the novelistic style
negatively, according to Bougeant).
The air in the novel lands is not only good, it has palpable effects. It has all sorts
of beneficial virtues. In Alluis’ work, he bathes the lovers in an atmosphere which
favours peaceful relations. This air is not only temperate, but also tempers, softens
and eases excess. The weather of this land is in harmony with the lessons on the art
of loving that the novel heroes will share with the novel’s characters (Alidor and
Dorise).
In Bougeant’s satirical perspective, the air in the Romancie is enriching (the
narrator attributes his own metamorphosis to it)16 and nutritional.17 The incompat-
ibility between food and the novelistic universe has been a topos, at least since Don

13
On this little known novel see: Camille Esmein (2005), and myself, 2011b, c.
14
«Au lieu qu’à mesure qu’ils cheminoient ils devoient sentir redoubler la chaleur, soit parce que le
Soleil prenoit de nouvelles forces, ou bien à cause qu’ils s’eschauffoient toujours, plus en marchant; ils
sentirent au contraire une fraicheur si douce, si agreable, & si extraordinaire en cette saison, qu’ils en
furent estonnez.» L’Ecole d’Amour…, 1667, pp. 5–7.
15
«l’air le plus pur, le plus serein, le plus sain et le plus invariable qu’on puisse respirer» (Le voyage
merveilleux…, 1735, ch. 2, 13).
16
“But what was my astonishment, to behold so great a change that I no more knew myself ! My hair,
which before was almost red, now wave on my shoulders, a most beautiful flaxen; my forehead was
raised; my eyes; now bright and lively […] I comprehended in a moment, that it was the air of the contry
to which I was indebetd for so fortunate a change” (Marvelous Travels… 1789, ch. 5, pp. 48–49). «Mais
quel fut mon étonnement de me voir changé au point que je ne me reconnoissois plus moi-même ! Mes
cheveux qui étoient presque roux, étoient du plus beau blond ; mon front s’étroit agrandi, mes yeux
devenus vifs et brillans […] je compris tout d’un coup que c’étoit à l’air du pays que j’étois redevable
d’un si heureux changement» (Ibid.,, ch. 5, p. 24).
17
“But what I ought not to forget in speaking is the admirable advantages of its climate. I had never
comprehended, in the reading of romances, how the princes and princesses, heroes and heroines, their
domestics and all their suite, passed their all life, without any mention being made of food […]. But true it
is that my ideas are changed since I breathe the air of Arcadia. […]. This atmosphere has, above all, a
most singular property, which is to hold place of food to all who breath it,” The Wonderful Travels…
(1789), pp. 23–24.

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Quixote18: for the sad-looking knight, the imitation of heroic knights, the pleasure of
the immersion in fiction19 and the amorous melancholy come together to eliminate
food. Unsurprisingly, in Alluis’ land of Romances, the food is bad and the heroes
prefer listening to stories to the pleasure of eating:
First they lay the table, and it is true that this was no great effort, both because
there was very little with which to make a good meal and because the pleasure
they were sampling prevented them from eating and reduced their appetite».
(my translation).20
This dismissal of food, or even its elimination entirely, is both pertinent and
intriguing, particularly if we are to consider the antithetic motif of the banquet,
which, during the Renaissance, aligns the pleasure of the table and conversation
(Jeanneret 1987). It is surely the access to another, non-existent21 world that the
Classical Age features in the form of privation and an illusion. In Bougeant’s work,
Romancie’s air provokes an epidemic of yawning,22 despite all its virtues (or as a
result of them23).
Three and a half centuries later, the Arcadian dream has dissipated. However,
Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1987) reveals that the biotope of the
fictional world has barely changed in two or three centuries. Cecilia, the heroine
who goes from one (real) world to another (artificial) world, soon discovers that in
the film world the champagne is really just Canada Dry. A pleasing allusion to the
real circumstances of the film’s production can be observed here. But the soda
masquerading as champagne primarily evokes the idea of fake money, of pretence,
or tricks of the eye, eventually deceiving the senses.24 The quality of the air is also

18
For more on this problematic, see Peyrebonne (2007).
19
“ ‘But I’ll pass,’ said Sancho, ‘because I’m going down to that little stream this meat pie, and I’ll stay
there and stuff myself for the next three days […]’ ‘That absolutely right, Sancho,’ said Don Quichotte,
‘You go where you want to, and eat as much as you can, for I have eaten all I need and the only food I
require, now, is for my soul, which this good man’s story will provide’.” [1605, 1999], Vol I, ch. 50,
p. 342.
20
«Ils s’allèrent mettre à table d’abord, il est vray qu’il n’y firent pas grand dépense: tant parce qu’il n’y
avoit guerre dequoi faire bonne chère, qu’à cause du plaisir qu’ils goutaient les empeschoit de manger &
leur ôtoit l’appetit», L’Ecole d’amour… p. 12.
21
Consider also the fact that on Cyrano de Bergerac’s moon nothing but smoke is consumed (Etats et
empires de la lune, 1657).
22
L’Ecole d’amour…, ch. 7.
23
There is, however, no question of avoiding them. In chapter 6, “la basse-romancie” is mentioned early
on and described as a land of novelty and picaresque novels, where one seems to get less bored, but which
cannot be frequented. Prince Fan Feredin does not visit it. The same distrust of the “canton de nouvelles”
is expressed in Alluis’ work.
24
The character of the film-in-the-film, who has immigrated to reality, unambiguously brags about the
benefits, all of which are linked to sensory satisfaction (which carries a sting given as these comments are
made in front of prostitutes): “The finality of death and how almost magical it seems in the real world […]
as opposed to the world of celluloid and flickering shadows. Do you share my sense of wonderment at the
very fabric of being? The smell of a rose. Real food. Sensuous music…”

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436 F. Lavocat

questioned. When Cecilia goes from the other side of the cinema screen to the film
world she feels weightless25:
– I feel so light. Like I’m floating on air.
– It upsets the balance.
The body’s lightness26 produces a feeling of imbalance which would suggest an
interstellar voyage, to which contemporary theorists eagerly compare fictional
immersion (Ryan 1991).
These three works share a certain number of topoï which are part of an ancient,
an undoubtedly Western, conception of fiction.
We do however find certain of these features in Murakami’s novel, Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World (世界の終りとハードボイルド・ ワンダー
ランド 1985), even though the status of the second world and the ways of accessing
it are very different in this text.
Indeed, in the Japanese novel access to the second world is much more dramatic
than in the three other works. In the Japanese edition it is signalled iconographically
by a black door, which features alternately at the top of the page with a silhouette of
Bob Dylan.27 Access is gained by jumping from one cerebral circuit to another in
the brain of the unknowing (at least at the start of the novel) hero-narrator of the
story, who finds himself alternately confronted with the real world and immersed in
another world which he does not initially know is born of his own imagination.
However, it is not too much of a stretch to compare this second world (which goes
by the name “End of the world”) to the ancient Romancies. Indeed, “End of the
World” is the name of the unconscious narrator’s mental data, which was extracted
by a savant who was a film editing assistant in his youth. The savant put this data
into order like a film before re-implanting it into the brain of the narrator.
Furthermore, the second world has the ambivalent status of a work of art (as a result
of the editing) and of a product of imagination.
Time and weather almost stopped in the country called “End of the World”. It is
not an eternal spring which prevails, but an endless winter.28 While there, the
narrator, who is unwillingly lightened29 by the cruel deprivation of his shadow, eats
some food with a strange taste, to which he does eventually become accustomed.30
According to the girl who prepares the food for him:

25
In another relatively contemporary other land of romance, in an Italian novel from the end of the
seventeenth century, the hero also floats, but this time he is ballooned by the winds of vanity (Lo
Scoprimento del mondo umano di Lucio Agatone Prisco, Angelo Seravalli, 1696, book II, see Lavocat
2011c).
26
It is also illustrated in a more euphoric way at the end of the film, in the dance with Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers, ecstatically watched by Cecilia in the movie theatre.
27
Every other chapter is about the real-world-in-the-fiction and the imaginary-world-in-the-fiction. Bob
Dylan and the black door are the symbols of the respective worlds in a certain way.
28
This could be compared to the world of Narnia under the witch’s control (Lewis 1957).
29
Literally, since the guardian who separates the narrator from his shadow (who is an autonomous
character), affirms that the shadow is too heavy.
30
The contrast with the food in the real world is all the more gripping since the food, which is abundant
and often described as delicious, plays a large role there.

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The food here is different than elsewhere. We use only a few basic ingredients.
What resembles meat is not. What resembles eggs is not. What resembles
coffee only resembles coffee. Everything is made in the image of something”
([1985]; 1991, p. 224)
This substitute food in the world called “End of the World” evokes the evening
Canada Dry from the second world in The Purple Rose of Cairo.31 But in the
Japanese novel we do not know what the world’s edible material is made of32 and
the issue of the ontological status of this world is, accordingly, more disquieting.

Temporality and corporality in novel lands

When passing from the first to the second world, the characters become more
beautiful and less vulnerable (for example in Bougeant’s work). They may become
immortal, as is the case in Alluis and Murakami’s novels. Passing from the second
world to the first world, the fictional characters are confronted with something that
is presented as being unique to real life: sometimes ugliness and poverty, but always
love and sexuality. Is the corporal nature of the characters modified by the crossings
between the borders of the first and second world? And if so, what is the meaning of
this metamorphosis, which calls the very essence of fiction into question?
In Jacques Alluis’ Romancie, immortality does not prevent aging, which leads to
certain paradoxes. This land’s inhabitants are in effect all heroes from other novels
who only arrived in this land when their own adventures finished (that is to say
when the book where they come from was published). Afterwards, they seem both
unable to die, and, in principle, to experience new adventures. Honoré d’Urfé’s
heroes are therefore about fifty years old, while Heliodor’s are about fourteen
hundred years old, which calls their very nature into question: they are neither
human beings, nor gods. Furthermore, the problem of unfinished novels reveals
these strange creatures’ lack of liberty: the land is partly populated by unmarried
people, characters from romances which are interrupted before the conclusion of the
heroes’ marriage. There can be no end to these stories, because it has not been
written. This anaesthesia of the possible endings to the narratives makes the
Romancie seem like a sort of literary hereafter.33
However, this impossibility is only relative. Just as the novel characters age, so
Alidor and Dorise meet “autonomous” novel characters and the sons and daughters
of “immigrant” characters, to use Parson’s definition (1980). These are the children

31
It is noteworthy that in both cases the title of the work either being or including the name of the second
world creates a voluntary ambiguity in the hierarchy of the worlds. The title IQ84 has the same effect.
32
In The Matrix (1999) the topos is inversed since it is the simulated food in the virtual matrix world
which is delicious (as is revealed in the episode when Cypher betrays his companions in a restaurant),
while the food consumed by the rebels in reality is an unappetizing energy drink (“single celled protein
combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals”). This raises a range of philosophical questions
(what constitutes humanity?) and suggests that life in the illusion of the matrix could be more humane
than life in the real world.
33
As is the case in Boileau’s Dialogue des héros de Roman (1688). It is furthermore traditional to
represent Hell as a metaleptic place where characters converse amongst themselves or with authors. On
this subject see Rabau (2012).

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438 F. Lavocat

from L’Astrée, who are experiencing almost the same adventures as their parents,
although in an abridged and simplified form. Alidor and Dorise are eventually
discovered to be the son and daughter of novel heroes: their parents are Mlle de
Scudery and La Calprenède’s characters—which implies the creation of a follow up
to Clélie (1654–1660) and Cléopâtre (1647–1658). After telling their Parisian
relatives about their real identity, Alidor and Dorise get married and make the land
of romances their home.34 This entertaining palinode brilliantly identifies the first
and second worlds with little regard for ontological coherence. The land of novels is
both a transfictional place with a constricting status (the characters are conditioned
by their previous life in another novel) and a stage where adventures take place—
albeit on a smaller scale and with less original stories.
Woody Allen most vividly highlighted the inherent contradictions of the life of a
character from a fiction-in-a-fiction. From the point of view of implied theoretical
autonomy in fiction, an extreme incoherence reigns. Why can the hero of the fiction-
in-a-fiction, Tom Baxter, go through the screen so easily, whereas his companions
who want to do the same bang their noses as though against a window? Contact with
Tom’s body in the real-world-in-fiction seems to be like touching a real man.
However, when a character from the film-in-the-film, Kitty Haynes, touches Cecilia,
who belongs to the first world, she loses consciousness as though she were dealing
with an extra-terrestrial. Tom Baxter’s discovery of sexuality is one of the film’s
comic devices and also calls into question his very ontological nature. Is Tom
Baxter defined by the list of characteristics of his film role: his courage, the
romanticism of his ever-perfect hair-do? In this case, if he was able to kiss Cecilia
(he is even, in his own words, a “great kisser”), he would probably still be unable to
give in to the kind of passion that Hollywood does not foresee.35 This textualist
version of the character is, however, contradicted by the fact that Tom endlessly
claims that he is able to learn, to adapt to the real world, in other words, to
“naturalise”. In this case, why would he not learn to make love and to die? The fact
that the roles of Tom Baxter and Gil Shepard (who plays the role of Tom in the film)
are played by the same actor (Jeff Daniels) makes the hypothesis that Tom has no
body, or an incomplete body, totally counterintuitive for the spectator. However,
this suspicion is comically raised when Tom fondly evokes his parents:
Dad was a card. I never met him. He died before the movie begins.
How could a paper man father flesh and bone children? Also, this hesitation raises
the theoretical debate about the constitutive incompleteness of fictional worlds
(Pavel 1983a, b; Montalbetti 2006), an incompleteness which is normally
recompensed by the process of inference, so that there is no need to specify that
a character has two eyes, two legs and sexual organs for us to assume that this is the
case. However, in the case of the doubly fictional Tom nothing is less certain.
34
The choice of the derivative world is a notable exception: the choice of the real world is most often
presented as an ethical requirement as dramatized in The Matrix (1999), in Inception, 2011, and in The
Wizard of Oz 1939 (see Nacache in the present volume). The narrator of The End of the World also
remains in a second world, but he is held prisoner there.
35
Or at least this is what is suggested by another film-in-the-film character: “I’m tired of marrying you
every night. We never get to the bedroom.”

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Crossing the borders of fiction 439

In Haruki Murakami’s novel the temporal paradox, underscored with insis-

tence,36 is related to the hybrid condition of the hero-narrator, who is unknowingly a
kind of cyborg. According to the savant who configured the narrator’s brain, the
second world known as “End of the World” is eternal, because it is a world created
by his thought, and thought is capable of infinite subdivision: movement does not
exist because you can infinitely decompose each temporal fraction of the movement
(this paradox is known as Zeno’s paradox). Indeed, the approximate correspondence
between the events in world 1 and world 2 would lead one to think that the second
world is the oneiric translation of the first world. Yet, in world 1 the fabula takes
place in three days and in world 2 it takes place in approximately one year. As such
we understand why the savant declares to the hero that he will be almost immortal37
in the “End of the World” because of the stretching and dilation of real time. This
evokes a characteristic of dream time in the Chinese traditional tale of the Dream of
the Yellow Millet and the Magic Pillow.38
This quasi-eternity in the imaginary world, a correlative of the narrator’s quasi-
inhumanity, is represented in the second world by the fact that the village clock is
broken.39 In this world of almost-stopped time the narrator, or rather his own
imaginary projection of himself (which for convenience we will call the narrator-
avatar), undergoes a slow process of depersonalization. Here, the ontological
reduction takes the form of an effacement of the affects and memories, corollaries of
the privation and the slow death of his shadow. By eventually thwarting this process
(thanks to the shadow’s escape from the world of the end of time and the narrator-
avatar’s exile to the forest, which is the rebel zone of his own world), it is suggested
that a certain fusion of the real I and the fictional I eventually occurs. The fact
remains that in this second world, which relies on a virtual world (it was created
through a technical manipulation) and on an imaginary world, the character (in
effect there is only one character as all the other characters are products of his own
inventions) suffers from an ontological deficiency expressed by a feeling of
“disintegration” (ch. 14, p. 217). It is also noteworthy that no amorous relationship
leads to a physical aspect in the second world,40 contrary to what happens in the first
world. This frozen, chaste, post-apocalyptic universe closely resembles an
afterworld.

36
As is explained to the narrator by the savant who is responsible for his brain’s transformation: “he time
paradox here’s in your mind.”([1985], 1991, ch. 27, p. 283).
37
“Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin’, not immortal, but endlessly,
asymptotically close to immortal. That’s eternal life.” ([1985], 1991, ch. 27, p. 285).
38
The Tale of the Magic Pillow by Shen Jiji was written around 825. It has been reworked on a number of
occasions in the form of tales or plays, including the famous Magic Pillow by Tang Xianzu written around
1600: a whole life, its vicissitudes included, is lived through a dream while the dreamer is only asleep for
a few minutes, long enough to cook a bowl of yellow millet.
39
On the relationship between the stopped watch and disaster in Japanese literature, particularly after
Hiroshima, see Samoyault (2004), pp. 157–158.
40
The narrator-avatar in the second world is encouraged to have sex with a girl who seems to be an
onirical counterpart of a real girl he loves in the first world. However, he rejects this relationship,
suspecting that it would quicken his depersonalisation (ch. 16, p. 247; ch. 23, p. 243).

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440 F. Lavocat

There is therefore definite continuity in the questioning of nature of fiction

between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, which reveals two contradic-
tions. The first contradiction resides in the opposition between narrativity and
fiction. The invention of another world, which itself embodies the notion of fiction,
implies alternative temporality41 in a way which is incompatible with the
development of a story. Second worlds are reduced to temporality which is
repetitive (Allen), slowed-down and accelerated (Bougeant),42 entropic (in Alluis’
work the characters’ children’s adventures in L’Astrée are insignificant copies of
their parents’), or a temporality which has an eschatological, catastrophic dimension
(Murakami). This stopped, slowed temporality is associated with the disincarnating
of bodies (lightening, lack of sustenance and lack of substance). The second
contradiction resides indeed in the nature of the doubly fictional character which is
always highly ambiguous: human and not human; simulacrum of a human, and in its
most recent version, the unconscious projection of a cyborg.

The imaginary, the real and death

Is it not the case that the immemorial conception of fiction as emptiness, lack, or
lacuna is being presented in these constructions? This persistent negativity, or
ontological shortfall, in the second worlds of fiction can be considered alongside the
status of the imaginary as it is posited in works cited across two recurrent themes.
The first of these themes is the association of mystical creatures with the frontier
between one world to another and with death. The second theme comes from the
dissatisfaction which results from the hero’s discovery of another fundamental
characteristic of these second worlds, which we will call their optative plasticity:
their ability to be modified by the power of thought, belief and desire.

The death of mystical creatures

The metafictional nature of these worlds, particularly Bougeant’s Romancie and the
sinisterly named “End of the World” in Murakami’s novel, is made more explicit
because of the herds of mythological and enchanted animals which roam there:
fauns, centaurs, hippogriffs and mermaids in Bougeant’s world, and unicorns in
Murakami’s novel. Yet these creatures have long symbolized the idea of fables. In
the case of the Japanese novel, the characters discuss (in the first world) the nature
of Asian and European unicorns, concluding that they are in any case fantastical or
“chimerical animals”.43 This conclusion underscores their metafictional importance.
41
The idea of alternative temporality (of the secondary world) is a common motif in much fantasy
literature. See Maria Nikolajeva (1988). But in fiction-in-fiction, manipulation of time is almost always a
deceleration.
42
Indeed, in the fourteenth and the final chapters, Fan Feredin abridges the novel’s adventures from
many thousands of pages to just 3 days and a few paragraphs.
43
“In the Est, peace and tranquillity; in the West, agression and lust. Nonetheless, the unicorn remains an
imaginary animal, an invention that can embody any value one wishes to project” ([1985], 1991, ch. 9,
p. 97).

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Crossing the borders of fiction 441

In order to characterize the second worlds of the meta-fictional fictions it is useful

to define the function of these mythical beasts.44 The chimerical creatures share the
commonality of being associated with passage between the worlds and also being
mortal—unlike the humans who inhabit the second worlds. In these two works,
which are so different in all other respects, death is inseparable from the presence of
these mythical animals.
Accessing the land of romances is particularly difficult for Prince Fan Feredin:
after a dizzying fall from a horse, into a precipice, he reaches a wild, desert-like
place, then he must slowly pick a path through a narrow corridor in the mountain.
Yet, in this intermediary space, between the mount from which he falls and that
which he must traverse, he discovers a strange ossuary:
The first object that struck my sight was a kind of cemetery, or charnel house,
composed of a heap of bones of a singular kind; there were horns of all figures,
great crooked claws; dried skins of winged dragons, and long beaks of all
kinds of birds. I immediately recollected what I had red in romances about
centaurs, hyppogriphs, flying dragons, harpies, satyrs, and other like animals,
and began to flatter myself that I was not far from the country I sought”,
Wonderful Travels… 1789, p. 9.45
The guardian of this ossuary is a rough centaur who does not answer the narrator’s
questions. The narrator notes that his literary knowledge of centaurs is of no use to
him. This is the only instance in the novel where discordance between books and
facts is highlighted.
In Romancie, Prince Fan Feredin meets a plethora of other mythical beasts which
live in cages or are ridden. The naturalisation of these imaginary creatures leads to a
reversal of the idealising principle which reigns throughout Romancie.
As such, the mythical beasts play the paradoxical role of a troubling element in
the fiction-in-the-fiction. Should the displaying of fabulous creatures’ corpses at the
limits of the land of fables be understood as a vanity which reveals vacuity? Does
Bougeant also wish to show the obsolescence of the old mythical beast? No doubt.
But the chimera’s skeleton also demonstrates a paradoxical presence of reality at the
periphery of the world of fictional-fictional land, in a slightly daunting enigmatic
way.
Haruki Marukami specifically used unicorns and their bones (in particular their
skulls) as the incarnation of passage between two worlds. The unicorns from “The
End of the World” are the only beings which are able to pass through the
hermetically sealed doors every day. From the top of a tower the narrator can see
them sleeping at night in a wooded space outside the enclosure, and the reader does
not know the status of this space (is it another imaginary region? Is it the real

44
Similar examples could also be drawn from the Chronicles of Narnia and Die unendliche Geschichte.
45
«Le premier objet qui me frappa la vûë, fût une espece de cimetiere, un charnier, ou un tas d’ossemens
d’une espece singuliere. C’étoient des cornes de toutes les figures, de grands ongles crochus, des peaux
seches de dragons ailés, et de longs becs d’oiseaux de toute espece. Je me rappellai aussi-tôt ce que
j’avois lû dans les romans, des griffons, des centaures, des hippogriffes, des dragons volans, des harpies,
des satyres, et d’autres animaux semblables, et je commençai à me flatter que je n’étois pas loin du pays
que je cherchois» (Voyage merveilleux… 1735, ch. 1, p. 7).

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442 F. Lavocat

world?). In either case, the transitory unicorns die in large numbers during the
winter. A guardian (who is as large as, and even more troubling than, the centaur in
Bougeant’s work) incessantly burns the beasts’ corpses, while the smoke from this
pyre permeates the wintery landscape of “The End of the World”.46 The unicorns’
skulls are then displayed in a library and the narrator is given the mission of
deciphering the “old dreams” locked inside them. There is another way in which the
mythical beasts are able to cross frontiers: a unicorn skull is found to be in the
narrator’s possession in the first world. It transpires that it is in fact a false skull
(created by the savant who is also in part the creator of the second world) but the
supernatural light that enshrouds it at the end of the novel reveals the connection
between the two worlds, a connection which is actually neuronal.
The novel aligns and contrasts the laws of the second world and the symbolic
power of both the living and (particularly) the dead unicorns. This relationship is
more clearly exemplified in Bougeant’s novel, in which it also has a different
meaning. Bougeant’s Romancie is an artificial world which is deadly boring because
it is so agreeable. The chimera carcasses are perhaps representative of the wear and
tear and the obsolete character of perpetually recycled topoï. Murakami’s second
world (made from a snapshot of the hero’s unconscious which was reconstituted by
a computer programme and re-implanted in his brain) is a world of loss: loss of
memories, of shadow and of heart. The unicorns are a particularly explicit
incarnation of this precarious subjective reality.47 They embody the part of
humanity that this world of immortals eradicates.48
In both cases, chimerical creatures both symbolise and contradict the world they
belong to. As beings from the frontier and the passage between the two worlds, they
embody both reality (that is to say death, the self) and fictionality (they come from the
bestiary of fables; they symbolise fables). The sacrifice of the hybrids mysteriously
represents the danger or the limits of fictional worlds (such as boredom, artificiality
and inhumanity), but also, especially in Murakami’s work, their virtues and benefits:
beauty, multiple meanings and memory—intertextual, historical49 and personal.

Sadness of the demiurge

The fate of the mythical beasts is indicative of the ambivalent nature of the relationship
between the first world characters and the second world of fiction in fiction.
The question of choosing between the two worlds is recurrent in all of the works.
Generally the real-world-in-the-fiction is chosen. Alluis’ novel is an exception:

46
Chapter 22 is entitled: “Gray smoke”.
47
The hero undergoes a process of depersonalisation comparable to that undergone by the young hero of
Die unendliche Geschichte (1979).
48
In chapter 32, the rebel shadow explains to the narrator that the unicorns carry the hearts and egos of
people (the narrator included) out of the perfect, icy world. It is in the interest of the weak, the shadows
and the unicorn that he urges the narrator to reject this world, and in so doing to conserve his heart, or his
ego.
49
In the first world the narrator believes to have in his hands a real skull of a unicorn, which would have
been found during the first world war in Russia, and vanished during the second world war, after multiple
trials and tribulations (ch. 9).

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Crossing the borders of fiction 443

when the heroes discover they are characters in a novel they remain (without any
doubts) in the land of Romancie with its cloudless, endless delights. Conversely,
Prince Fan Feredin leaves Romancie in order to wed just before M. de la Brosse
awakes. De la Brosse is his sleeping counterpart of Fan Feredin in the first world,
and he is also on the point of marrying. The choice of the real-in-the-fiction
character coincides with that of his fictional, oneiric counterpart, which confirms the
higher status of reality. This privilege of reality is reaffirmed by the successful
consummation of the marriage. A similar existential and ontological assumption is
at play when Cecilia abandons the adorable Tom for the disappointing Gil, as the
contradicting advice of the actors from the film-in-the-film would seem to suggest:
– Go with the real guy. We’re limited.
– Go with Tom. He’s got no flaws.
The supposed inherent limits of the fictional character also effect marriage.
Marriage here is seen as an institution, and what is the worth of a legal act
performed by a fictional character?50:
– Father Donnelly can marry us right here.
– That won’t stand up. The priest has to be human.
– The Bible never says a priest can’t be on film.
Even though Cecilia’s choice ended in disaster—the real man immediately
revealed his moral limits—everything would seem to suggest that she was right to
do it, just as Thomas Anderson was right to choose the red pill, and Cobb (the hero
of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, 2010) and Amoamé (the heroine of Murakami’s
IQ84, 2011) were right to return to, or try to return to, their initial worlds, the real-
world-in-the-fiction.
Does The End of the World confirm this ontological conservatism? The hero
remains in the second world, both because he has to (after the destruction of the
neuronal network through which he accesses reality) and also because in world 2 he
does not choose to accompany his shadow when it flees—an act comparable to
suicide. This choice, or the acceptance of the world imposed upon him (in a singular
position of opponent and pariah) is a corollary of his discovery that he is the creator
of this world. This voluntary marginality in his own world is attributable to his
attachment to his self. A hybridisation between the real-I-in-the-fiction and the
narrator-avatar is produced. The strange eventual compromise is one of a possible
life in an imaginary world, but in the discomfort and pain of a preserved identity.
Murakami’s character is the only one who makes the Aristotelian choice of poiesis
by opting to see the second world as a creation, rather than as simulacrum.
Everything happens as though he himself were returning to the platonic cavern,
including the fact that he makes the images projected on the wall himself. It is
nonetheless important to reiterate that while the optative plasticity is total51 in all

50
The question is recurrent and applies to all ritual acts (such as marriage) performed in a virtual space
(Hillis 2009).
51
The imagined world fulfils all the desires all too well. As Cecilia remarks when giving up Tom: “In
your world, things have a way of always working out right”.

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444 F. Lavocat

the works which disqualify the imaginary, it is not in the case of the “End of the
World” since its only inhabitant is persecuted by his own creatures and must
therefore fight against himself. Perhaps this should be seen as an allegory for the
author’s condition: several elements of the novel support this hypothesis.
All the heroes who cross the frontiers of fiction physically experience the
difference between worlds. David Lewis’ theses, which affirm the perfect
ontological equality of possible worlds and accord no privilege to the fact of
existing in the actual world contradict what fictions say about fiction. Characters
generally manifest a robust realism. It is even curious to note that the (perhaps too
easy) reversal, which features in Alluis’ work (in a fiction, everybody is fictional) is
not employed more often.52
Furthemore, the character’s binary nature is in line with the apparently naı̈ve
processes which mark the separation between the real-world-in the-fiction and the
fictional-world-in-the-fiction: second world in black and white, first world in colour
in Woody Allen’s film53; printing in red for reality and in blue for the fiction in
Michael Ende’s novel; even chapters for one world and uneven for the other with
running heads and distinct logos in Murakami’s novel.

In conclusion, we will outline four hypotheses regarding the persistence of

reflexive fictions which are unfavourable to fiction in many works which entail the
communication of a first world and a derived secondary world.
The first hypothesis is the longevity of the Platonist accusation that fiction is
deficient compared to what is real and true.54 In Alluis’ work the newlyweds of the
Land of Romances are given false pearls, in Woody Allen’s film the characters in the
film drink Canada Dry instead of champagne and pay with fake money. As the
shadow of Murakami’s character so eloquently puts it, the artificial world he finds
himself in is “wrong” (ch. 6, p. 96). The allegorical world of Narnia has some
ontological dignity, but it is through the reflection of another supernatural world,
which can only be accessed after death. It is only as a copy of a religious world that the
fictional world can legitimate. The essential role of belief as a creation principle in
many of these worlds (especially those written for a child audience) underlines the
contiguity between religious and fictional worlds (as shown by Thomas Pavel 1986).
But most of the fictional-worlds-in-fiction, inhabited by beautiful, chaste and more or
less immortal beings, seem to be imperfect substitutes of supernatural worlds.
Secondly, it should also be highlighted that there is a concordance between the
autonomous theories of fiction which can be inferred from the structure of the
second worlds and some of Wolfgang Iser’s theses which offer a Hegelian version
of the aforementioned ontological deficiency. Iser defines fiction through the
crossing of boundaries and doubling of worlds ([1991], 1993, p. 46). According to
Iser, negativity is an integral part of the fictional text and the lacuna and gaps in the
text are a condition of its effectiveness (1978). Is this why the eternal springs of the

52
In Paul Auster’s novel, Travels in the Scriptorium, the author discovers that even he is a character
(2007).
53
This chromatism is the opposite of that found in the Wizard of Oz. See J. Nacache in this volume.
54
On the persistence of this opposition to fiction see Goody (1997).

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Crossing the borders of fiction 445

classical era have been replaced by winters, and why the second worlds are often
rather empty and plain? The way in which Iser defines fiction has something to do
with the way fiction is defined by itself.
However, this could also be considered part of a “ruse of fiction”, which is our
third hypothesis. The first world forcefully usurps the status of the real world
because it is used as a reference world for another possible world which, despite its
clearly explored and exploited charms, is discarded in favour of an equally fictional
pseudo-reality. The fictional characters’ choice in favour of realism perhaps has an
existential, or even educational, importance, but it is also deceptive: it has the effect
of bestowing an exorbitant ontological privilege on the real world, to the extent that
the real world in The Matrix is called Zion, the Promised Land. The “ruse of fiction”
is to inspire a utopian desire for reality, to pick up on a theme which is dear to
Baudrillard (1981),55 which is eventually put to the service of fiction itself.
Our last hypothesis is cognitive. When, in the nineteenth century, Coleridge
spoke of (the now famous maxim of) “willing suspension of disbelief” to evoke the
entry into fiction he accurately captured the phenomenon of fictional immersion,
specifically through the notion of “suspension”. According to many studies in
neuroscience (Simons et al. 2008; Turner et al. 2008), it appears that in the case of
confabulation (that is to say when stimuli are generated by the imagination) certain
medial regions of prefrontal cortex, which are areas attributed to control tasks, are
not activated. Other studies, such as Abraham (2008, 2009), conclude that exposure
to fictional scenarios activates specific areas of the brain (45 and 47) which are
linked to semantic memory while exposure to real scenarios activates areas linked to
episodic memory, to auto-referential processes and to evaluative judgements.
Finally, the process of simulation triggered by reading or watching a show of
fictional actions evokes sensations and emotions while inhibiting processes leading
to action.
To use a computing metaphor borrowed from Gregory Currie (1986), the
neuronal simulations triggered by exposure to fiction are “off-line”. The emotions
produced by fiction are “paler” than those produced by reality: Kendall Walton
(1990) refers to “quasi-emotions”.
Could we not therefore formulate a hypothesis whereby those fictions which
fictionally represent an entry into fiction have depicted this cognitive phenomenon
for a number of centuries? The pleasure that is overturning the imaginary can surely
be likened to putting a hold on, pausing, or provisionally deactivating certain
functions which are essential to our survival, and also our relationship with the
world and our self. How surprising is it, in this case, if people do not eat (or eat
poorly) in these fictional worlds, or if the bodies are floating while there? Entering
into a fiction means using our sensory and emotional faculties in a very particular,
disconnected, empty way. The dematerialisation and the vertigo are perhaps
fictional translations of the disengagement which happens to our neuronal processes.
This may explain why going from one world to another, from reality to fiction, is so

55
Baudrillard has inspired, to his great displeasure, the first film of the Wachowski brothers’ trilogy.

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446 F. Lavocat

often presented as being delicious and perilous, liberating for the mind and the body,
disappointing for the senses and threatening for the integrity of the self.

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