Popular Culture Review Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 2013 | Page 35

Introduction to Parallel Dimensions Studies 31 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