Reality, Imagination and Possible Worlds in American Postmodern

It seems it is especially postmodern literature that undermines the belief in a clear and direct relationship between the physical world and the language depicting it. Quite recently, especially the possible worlds theories and their application in literary theory have tried to explain this relationship. Analyzing the narrative techniques used by Donald Barthelme in his short story The Dragon, I will try to point out the way postmodern fiction and theories of possible worlds (Harsaw (Hrushovski), Doležel, Ronen) generate the aesthetic principles creating various levels of reality and their function in a postmodern literary work. In keeping with Lubomír Doležel’s, Benjamin Harsaw (Hrushovski)’s, and Ruth Ronen’s views, the literary fictional world is understood in this paper as a world different and separate from the real, physical, actual world. In this paper I show how various modes of representation (realistic, fantastic, postmodern) along with Barthelme’s depiction of the “transworld” identities of his characters (a dragon), metafictional elements and parody point to a new sensibility of the postmodern period and a difference between the past and contemporary forms of literary representation. Barthelme’s use of postmodern narrative techniques such as self-reflexiveness, metafiction and depiction of transgeneric and transworld identities of his characters not only aestheticize his short story, but also emphasize the difference between the real, actual and the literary fictional world. Literary works are often considered to be the representations of actual, physical reality, experience, and phenomena from the real world. Literature re-presents such experience and phenomena necessarily through language, which has various functions. While in everyday, general language the communication function dominates, it is especially the aesthetic function which must dominate in a literary work so that it can fulfill its status of a literary work. The language of literature, however, is based and works on different principles from those of the real, physical world. However mimetic and realistic the literary work is, there is never a mechanical transfer of the external data from a real life to a human mind to be further literally represented by language, but this transfer is based on the interaction between the human mind’s perception of the world, the language representing it, and the socio-historical and cultural context a perceiver of a literary work is influenced by. In Benjamin Harsaw (Hrushovski)’s view: Works of literature convey meanings and meaning complexes as well as rhetorical and aesthetic import[...]However, the experience and interpretation of literary texts are not a matter of language alone: language in literature can be understood only as imbedded in fictional constructs, no matter how partial or unstable these may be. On the other hand, the fictional constructs in literary texts are mediated through language alone [...] (Harsaw (Hrushovski) 1984:227).