some media, such as cinema or comic books, have been arbitrarily excluded from “literature”
and are still to be considered as canonically eligible material. The unifying concept of parallel
dimensions allows us to progress towards a better understanding of "literature” - in all its forms
- as a narrative production of the imaginary, and hence helps not only to define our object of
study, but to better evaluate its influence upon our collective consciousness: if we are to
consider the bible as work of literature - just as we consider Greek and Roman mythologies as
fictitious narrations - then the influence of parallel dimensions over our culture becomes an
undeniable fact, which makes literary studies suddenly all the more crucial. Entire genres, such
as the marvelous and science fiction, are based upon and determined by the concept of
parallel dimensions; it could even be argued that the most realistic novel constitutes a parallel
dimension for it organizes realistically a necessarily non-existent reality.19
The fantastic appears to be the only mode devoted to representing the transition
between our reality and a parallel dimension, and “A World of Difference" as well as "A World
of His Own" are in this sense very significant, for they both tell of the encounter between our
world and another, directly related to our capacity of imagination - in the words of Rod Serling
himself, “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension (...).”
In the case of Matheson, this encounter between reality and a parallel dimension often
becomes a transition from one to the other, echoing the structure of two other episodes, one
based on his short story “Third from the Sun” and the other directly scripted by him, “The
Invaders,” which prove difficult to categorize, although they might fall into science fiction,
especially the latter. In “Third from the Sun,” two families decide to leave what appears to be
earth aboard an experimental spaceship in order to escape atomic doom, and we discover at
the very end, once they have already departed, that they are actually heading towards Earth,
the “third planet from the sun.” In “The Invaders," a terrified woman is chased around her
house by a mysterious albeit rather small flying saucer that she eventually destroys hysterically
with a hatchet; we then hear a desperate radio message emanating from the saucer in which
an alarmed officer informs “Central Control” that the ship is destroyed, that a member of the
crew is dead and that this place is populated by “giant creatures.” As the woman starts to
19 T he case of Trum an Capote's In Cold Blood remains a very unique and isolated case of non-fiction novel;
however, when w e consider the semiotic weight of any intentionally aesthetic treatment of language, w e may
conclude that, for all its lack of imagination, In Cold Blood is a parallel dimension, or at least has become one now
that the original historical context in which the crimes took place is no longer.
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