“Tropological” possible worlds: Allegorical extratextual referentiality of postmodern space in Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Abstract

Through the poststructuralist interdisciplinary adaptations of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a plethora of ontological literary theories have been developed as the cognitive studies of the minds of the authors, readers and characters in terms of “state of affairs,” “game of make believe,” “cross-world identity,” and “accessibility relations.” Marie Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory suggests a “world semantics” typology of possible worlds following “the logic of parallelism” for examining the self-referentiality of the mentally constructed possible worlds of the characters in the fictional narrative universe. However, the present study examines the extra-textual referentiality of these worlds to the Lacanian “Real” in the contexts of the psychoanalytic Marxism of Fredric Jameson and his theory on the linguistic unconscious of late capitalism. Accordingly, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as a set of qualitatively parsimonious spatial entities, are Marco’s allegorical projections of the postmodern “social space,” “heterotopian sites” and “dystopian spaces” of his knowledge, obligation and wish worlds.