Postmodern play with worlds : the case of at swim-two-birds

• Main Author: Wang, Michelle W.
• Other Authors: Alice Bell
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: University of Nebraska Press 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature; Postmodernist Fiction; Possible Worlds Model
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148313
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Postmodern fiction typically instantiates an aesthetics of play in which ontological questions about the sort of worlds characters inhabit and the ways in which readers orient to these worlds, constitute a central readerly concern (McHale; Ryan; Doležel). Using Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) as my case study, I explain how the possible worlds model serves as a useful apparatus for capturing readers’ cognitive attempts at managing the complexities of postmodern fiction’s disorienting, playful textual worlds. I propose that three types of textual cues determine if the “principle of minimal” (Ryan) or “maximal departure” (Pavel) is likely to be in play when readers approach textual worlds: (1) At which point or how far into the narrative do departures take place? (2) How frequently do we encounter departures? (3) What is the qualitative nature of these departures? (I use the term departures in relation to Marie-Laure Ryan’s nine categories of “accessibility relations.”) By considering the position, frequency, and nature of such deviations from the reference world, I explain how readers handle At Swim-Two-Birds’ ontological challenges by explicating the novel’s “transuniverse” (actual world [AW}-textual actual world [TAW]) and “intrauniverse” (TAW-textual alternate possible world [TAPWs]) relations (Ryan). At Swim-Two-Birds poses numerous interpretive difficulties, one of which includes determining if and when “fictional recentering” (Ryan) is supposed to be taking place—a challenge compounded by the stylistic incongruities that characterize the same textual world and the stylistic continuities that characterize different textual worlds in the novel. Readerly confusion is further perpetuated by O’Brien’s playful use of naming functions, including the use of “transworld identity” (Ryan; Eco; Mackie and Jago). By attending to the three types of textual cues that mediate accessibility relations, I explicate the imaginative range of O’Brien’s tangled textual worlds and explain the functional purposes of some of these interpretive difficulties. Possible worlds theory, I suggest, offers a model for understanding how readers participate in postmodern fiction’s gameplay, in our co-construction of its textual universe as we read.