"When a reader follows the passage into a fictional world, the realm of possibilities is recentered around her. For the duration of her immersion, she accepts the sphere created by the narrator as the actual world in the same way that the interlocutor will try to imagine the other as an Inca and the children will take the bucket for a pie. For Ryan, this fictional recentering presupposes three modal systems and three actual worlds. The first is our native system with the actual world (actually actual world) at its center. Textual fiction provides a passage to a second universe with the world projected by the text at its center (textual actual world). The third, then, is the system to which the text refers , a system that contains everything projected by the text, but also everything that is not mentioned and is filled in by the reader (textual reference world). While in fiction the world described by the text is always different from the actual world (as opposed to non–fiction), it will generally be indistinguishable from the world to which it refers (the third system). Only when a narrator lies and this can be inferred, the reader will know that what is described by the text is not what the world it refers to is like. Since this is a marginal case and insignificant for this study, I will focus on two systems when dealing with recentering: the actual world on the one hand, and the textual world on the other. Moreover, I tend to take the poststructuralist stance that the actual world is equally a cultural construct. It should be seen as a representation conforming to the reader's image of the world, not as something that exists anywhere outside of representation. This perspective permits to install a symmetry between two representations: the representation of the actual world present in the head of the reader, and the representation of the textual world built from the text, and it explains why the reader can slip from one world into another so seamlessly."
(Jan Van Looy, August 2005)
Issue 12. Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative – ISSN 1780–678X