Introduction to Parallel Dimensions Studies
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are entitled to consider Quentin Tarantino’s films, Jim Moffat’s telefilms,
Warren Ellis’ comic books and Jim Morrison’s lyrics as works of “literature,”
for they share the same fundamental intentionality, that of creating a polysemic
and pleasurable message, rather than expressing purely functional, essentially
monosemic information.19 From a diachronic perspective, this is hardly new, and
one could be left wondering why “literary studies,” regardless of their
theoretical Orientation, have never addressed the issue before: if we do not
generally deplore that, as the level of literacy grew steadily in Europe
throughout the 1901 Century, reading fiction became an alternative to going to
the theatre, we should equally accept that, as technology made the distribution of
visual information increasingly available over the last five or six decades,
cinema has progressively replaced text as the privileged medium for the
transmission of pleasurable, polysemic messages. This is not to say that written
literature is condemned to disappear but only to point out that the privileged
vehicle for the creation and transmission of pleasurable messages has changed
over the course of history; just as written fiction or cinema did not eliminate
theatre ffom our cultural landscape, written fiction has indeed survived to
cinema and TV shows, albeit losing its privileged Status within the collective
exchange.
From orality to performance, ffom the written to the visual, the goal of
“literature” has always been to serve the pleasure principle by creating
imaginary worlds, which, contrary to common opinion, far from being useless
artifacts, have helped structure the manner in which we conceive reality.
2.1. The Literary Multiverse
The main intentionality of a literary work, either written or not, is the
creation of a parallel dimension whose relationship to reality is aleatory,
uncertain, variable and unpredictable. Whereas the signification of other
common textual and visual products—instructional booklets, phone books, legal
documents, programs, menus, advertisements, commercials, marketing and
political Slogans, and so on—is established in direct relationship to reality,
“literary” objects produce coherent semiotic structures whose ties to reality are
essentially, fundamentally indirect: poetry, either written or recited, creates a
imaginary parallel chain of referents, hence creating another linguistic reality,
while narrative fiction, either textual or visual, creates an imaginary parallel
chain of events, hence structuring another reality.20
The fundamental weight of the parallel dimension concept in our
collective consciousness21 can be feit historically as well as culturally simply by
observing the influence that religious narrations have had upon the construction
of our reality. All human collectivities have generated a metaphysical narrative
which speaks of a parallel dimension, be it Mount Olympus, Asgard or the
Kingdom of Heaven, and have transmitted it either orally, visually and/or
textually, depending on the available medium or media; the importance that such
narrations have had upon our understanding of reality and the construction of