Creating and Interpreting Fictional Worlds

One main functional aspect of integrating literary theory into literature is the reflection about the interpretation and creation of fictional worlds. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum deals with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ interpretations of texts. The various interpretations performed in the novel are gradually extended to a theory of interpretation in general. The elements of theory in the novel contribute to a critical reflection on theory and to a metaization of the interpretive procedures performed. The interpretive procedures, ‘simple’ and ‘hermetic’ ones, are substantiated in Eco’s theory on The Limits of Interpretation, offering a concrete form of an extrapolation of theory. Juli Zeh’s Dark Matter has its protagonists trying to create a parallel world within their own, a world whose norms they control—just as every fictional work creates norms and conditions of its own. In contrast to life, though, fiction is able to present both the order and—on a self-reflexive level—the ordering principle, something that, turned into a theoretical concept, might be extrapolated from Zeh’s novel as theory. Moreover, fiction can show what an ordered world looks like—and how other orders (or observers would form the world differently. Zeh’s elaboration of fiction theory may thus serve to sharpen the ‘sense of possibility’ in general—and it presents a metaization of literary theory within literature.