1.

5
Jacob Haas on www.flickr.com/photos/untitled13/3908484376 (CC BY-SA
2.0)

Enactors in worlds
View906 comments
The video in the previous unit finished with two versions of the same
person on-screen at the same time, and apparently interacting with each
other. Its a camera trick, of course, but notice how easily you were able
to process this very unnatural sequence.
We do this sort of thing all the time in literary fiction. A character thread
running through a novel might have several different versions (we call
them enactors) operating at different levels. Just as in real-life, two enactors
cannot occupy the same episode of existence at the same time (apart from in
fantasy or science fiction, perhaps). In a novel, you might get an early enactor
of a character, and a later enactor (who knows different things, has lived
through different events, and has developed, all in ways that you have to keep
track of as a reader). Think of the older David Copperfield who tells the story
beginning with his younger self in Dickens novel; or the mundane Walter Mitty
who imagines daydreamy versions of himself in exciting adventures in
Thurbers novel; or the set of perceptions and beliefs of Hercule Poirot at
different points in any of Agatha Christies novels. The video example of my
two enactors is fundamentally like these situations.
How can our simple ape-minds cope with the idea of two versions of a
person? Well, it seems we have a capacity for imagining different worlds,
each of which is peopled by different enactors. So the text world of the older
David Copperfield telling the story of his life includes an earlier,
flashback switch to another world in which there is a younger enactor of David
Copperfield. Of course, though David is the apparent narrator, we know that
his words are actually composed by the novelist Charles Dickens an entity
above all the enactors of David Copperfield. Dickens shares our discourse

world though in this case it is a split discourse world because Dickens is

dead and so is inaccessible to us.
Alternatively, a character might express their own interior memories, desires,
speculations, obligations or other forms of non-real situations, either in their
reported direct speech, or as part of the narrative voice. For example, in each
of the sentences I wish I were rich, or I ought to be going, or I could have
saved his life, there are two enactors: the first I, and a second imaginary I
who is rich, who has gone, or who did save his life. As a reader, you have to
keep track of the different states of mind of each of these enactors, and
remember which are real (or at the top world level, as it were). Since such
speculations and alternativities are often introduced by modal verbs such
as might, must, could, should or modal adverbs and phrases such as is
possible that, alternatively, was able to, we call these sorts of
switches modalisations.
We similarly switch levels of existence (or world levels) whenever someone
uses a metaphor: Juliet is the sun creates a metaphorical world underneath
our actual world, in which an enactor of Juliet really is literally the sun, and the
relationship of that world to our world is a metaphorical one.
Negations do a similar thing. In a famous example, Dont think of an elephant
makes you think of an elephant but simultaneously you know that there is no
elephant. This is because you have created a negational world in which there
is an elephant, and thus an elephant-shaped hole in your top-level world.
Negations, in fact, draw attention to the negated thing.
We can summarise the triggers for these world-switches as follows:
flashback / flashforward
direct speech and thought
modalisation
metaphor
negation
We can present these text worlds and world-switches like this:

Where a character has different enactors, each enactor exists within a

particular switched world. Your job as a reader is to keep track of the many
different enactors that make up a single character, remember which worldlevel they are attached to, and keep a sense of what each enactor knows,
thinks and believes. Fortunately, you do this hundreds of times a day in your
everyday life, so you are very good at it.
For example, I bet when you got to the end of the last video, and you saw
both Peters pointing at the cameraman, you were almost certainly imagining
one man behind the camera. Now you think about it, of course, there must
have been two enactors of the cameraman (both of whom are called Alec), for
the earlier and later filming of the trick sequence. What you have just done is
perform a compression on the passing of time. Such compressions are very
common in our ability to use language to talk about everything that is not
immediately and concretely here-and-now. But when we read a novel and

come across lots of enactors at different points with different sets of

knowledge and belief, we compress them into our notion of a single character.
All of that process takes cognitive and emotional effort. There is a personal
investment involved. No wonder we do it only in the hope that there is the
payoff of a rich relationship with a fictional person whom we have just mindmodelled.
Think of the different enactors that are making up you right now, and the
different conceptual worlds in which each one of them exists. Describe them
in the Comments below.
Except for third party materials and where otherwise indicated, the
copyright in the content provided in this course is owned by The University of
Nottingham and licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike UK 2.0 Licence