Viriconium's Uncanny Transitions: Embodied Narratology and the Felt Sense of Rupture

This paper was given at the Science Fiction Research Association's annual conference. In 2024 the theme of the conference was TRANSITIONS. It was held in Tartu, Estonia.

Viriconium

So where to start with Viriconium! For those who don't know, the Viriconium sequence refers to a series of three short novels as well as a varying number of short stories. They can be read in any order, as long as the story ‘A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium’ comes at the end. For our purposes, however, I'll be using the order they are collected in the Del Rey edition which is more or less chronological by publication date.

Famously, throughout the sequence, presumptions that were earlier established, are challenged and revoked, so that what begins as somewhat familiar far-future fantasy, with a Knight, two warring Queens, an iron dwarf, and powerful artefacts dug up from the rust deserts, mutates and pupates into destabilised, metaphysically fragile, happenings, echoes, estrangements. In this paper, I'll be focusing especially on how the embodied narratological approach forwarded by Caracciolo and Kukkonen can provide insight into the emotional affect of Harrison’s unstable worlding.

Embodied Narratology

Embodied Narratology depends upon and foregrounds contemporary understanding of cognition as a fundamentally embodied process. In their words: “embodiment is the main act of story: our engagement with narrative representation is channelled through imaginative and affective dynamics that are embodied through and through.”¹ Three core concepts underpinning embodied narratology are: situation models, motor resonance and embodied simulation. These all point to the way that comprehension of a text is reliant upon our embodied experience as readers or listeners.

Here is the first sentence from the Viriconium cycle:

“tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Viriconium, the Pastel City, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than a swordsman, stood at early morning on the sand dunes that lay between his tall home and the grey line of surf.”

A situation model describes the way we construct a working understanding of what is happening in a text. The creation of situation models is an unconscious process that is continually being updated as we read or listen. For example, as we hear the opening sentence of Viriconium, we automatically begin to encode an enormous number of features, related to who is present – the strangely named tegeus-Cromis, his occupations, that he is standing on the dunes, that this tower is his home, and that the time of day is early morning. Importantly, “situation models are constructed from ‘experiential traces’ left by prior embodied interactions with the world.”² All of this requires subconscious memory, so that we can parse out the connotations of particular elements and the way they relate to each other, and this memory is not just a brain activity but depends upon our entire system, because it is based upon prior embodied experience.

The second connected concept is motor resonance. This is “an embodied mechanism that underlies the comprehension of verbs denoting concrete actions, so that the comprehender’s motor system can be said to facilitate language understanding.”³ Certain active verbs in any text have a direct bodily effect, almost like a small shudder, as we comprehend them. For example, in this sentence when it is said that tegeus-Cromis “stood” we know intuitively and have a felt embodied sense of what it means to stand; there is spontaneous resonance at a motor level.

Finally, embodied simulation is a development of motor resonance that happens when a character’s embodied actions are foregrounded in a narrative. So already here, we are able to simulate the experience of standing on the dunes. As this scene continues, there may be further motor resonances connected to the character of tegeus-Cromis, from which we begin to develop an embodied simulation.

Ungrounded Storyworlds

Where embodied narratology intersects most clearly with SF studies is in Caracciolo and Kukkonen’s deployment of this approach to challenge the concept of a storyworld as a singular and independently existent creation of the reader. They instead propose that through the process of reading, a dynamic stream of situation models, motor resonance, and embodied simulations, are made experientially rich or ‘thick,’ and it is this process that evokes the illusion of worldlikeness. They claim: “fictional worlds reflect an illusory feeling of experiential thickness and not an objective distinction between moving in and out of a fictional world.”⁴ They don’t dismiss the storyworld metaphor altogether, but they do contest the ontological basis.

This has an interesting resonance with Harrison’s own approach, and his infamous blog post from 2007 in which he decried worldbuilding as the “great clomping foot of nerdism,” declaring that: “Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.”⁵ Viriconium is testament to his unique kind of anti-worldbuilding, the sense of world experienced throughout is continually undercutting itself, always shifting, forcing the reader to question previous assumptions and situation models, and resisting efforts at reification.

To a certain extent the approach of critical world-building proposed by Ekman and Taylor⁶ is at odds with embodied narratology: to the degree that they take as their starting point for criticism the fictional world itself, as it is presented through the text (and separate from the author or reader’s experience). Ekman and Taylor propose two possible methodologies; the second of these, dynamic interplay, does have an intriguing relationship with embodied narratology. This is an approach that investigates imaginary worlds by examining the interplay between individual elements and the world itself. To go back to the opening of the Viriconium sequence, there are many elements that immediately contribute to our understanding of the world, for example, the unusual name – tegeus-Cromis, or the existence of a solitary tower as dwelling.

From an embodied narratology point of view, as we encounter these elements, our situation models become thicker, and the illusion of world is enhanced or refreshed. These encounters are interpretive and depend upon a reader's own individual and culturally embodied memory; through this process a felt sense of world is conjured and updated. This correlates with Ekman and Taylor’s own observation that meaning in a fictional world is created as a dynamic process, especially through shifts and changes of understanding, in which fresh aspects or possibilities of the fictional world are exposed. Ekman and Taylor use the metaphor of an iceberg to represent the story world, arguing that, depending on the interpretive lens brought to bear, large chunks of ice fall off and the whole berg rotates in the water, therefore completely transforming the relationship between individual elements as well as between those elements and the whole.

Embodied narratology is rooted in the enactive appraoch. This is a cognitive science framework that destabilises the process of cognition and therefore also the process of narrative comprehension. Briefly, the enactive approach draws on Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology to propose that the mind enacts or ‘brings forth’ the world. In this view, mind and world are dynamically coupled and arise in mutual dependence. As opposed to making a separate representation of what is external, the mind constantly “secretes a coherent reality that constitutes a world.”⁷

As Caracciolo and Kukkonen point out, this means that everyday experience and narrative comprehension are both, “patterned activities based on cyclical interactions between a subject and either the environment or a narrative artefact.” They continue: “The concept of storyworld thus turns out to be a complex, multifaceted construct, suspended as it is between the commonsense, grounded conception of world and the dynamic, groundless one developed by thinkers in the phenomenological and enactivist traditions.”⁸

The Affect of Rupture

Critical to the enactivist approach, is the understanding that the mind arises from the affective tonality that is embedded in the body. The early stages of the momentary arising of any and every mental state are rooted in an emotional tone, therefore the creation of situation models is an intrinsically emotional process. Drawing on the workings of image schemata and predictive processing, Caracciolo and Kukkonen argue that emotion is central to the embodied workings of storytelling. Readers develop “a temporally articulated understanding of narrative through the way in which predictions are paced across multiple levels of narrative.”⁹ This predictive pacing can then lead to the pleasurable experience of flow.

Even before we begin reading a book, we are already creating predictive situation models based on what we know about the book, the genre, the author and the cover, as well as other personal and cultural factors. As situation models are thickened through reading the text, our predictions and expectations are updated and developed across a number of synchronous narrative levels.

Returning to Viriconium, and considering the text as a whole, here are just some of the ways in which the initial predicted or assumed stability is ruptured throughout:

• ONE: From one novel to the next, characters and places are transfigured. A person has almost the same name but the details of their character have shifted considerably: tegeus-Cromis is perhaps Galen Hornwrack, and definitely Lord Cromis, Ardwick Crome, and Ignace Retz. It is like seeing a friend in a dream, except they look completely different. As names shift, a hero can become a coward; subtle or considerable details about a person’s past are changed.

• TWO: Story elements are also reshuffled but altered subtly. The motif of a fish-head mask recurs but different; a strange song; a simple sequence of events – the loss of a pony to quicksand, and then a man woken by the cold and moving to the embers – repeated, over three hundred pages apart.

• THREE: Throughout, the world behaves in spatially peculiar ways. In Viriconium, “As you walk… the streets create themselves around you. When you have passed, everything slips immediately back into chaos again.”

• FOUR: There are intrusions into the text of elements from our world: The first whisper comes as Venice and Blackpool are mentioned in A Storm of Wings. In In Viriconium, Egg Foo Yung and Wellington boots are spontaneously invented. Eventually, the final story – A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium (or London, as Harrison later changed the name) – is set in the north of England, and revolves around a mirror in a cafe which serves as a dysfunctional portal.

• FIVE: Most impactful perhaps, is the metaphysical buckling in A Storm of Wings caused by the incredible collision between two realities, that of an alien race of insects, and that of the world of Viriconium. The collective umwelt of the insects crashes into the collective umwelt of the beings of Viriconium and cause things to disintegrate or reintegrate in a strange and mysterious way. Also, an honourable mention for the plague in In Viriconium – a kind of thinness or transparency which spreads across the city and within which entropic processes have sped up, causing bad luck as well as the degradation of the arts, people and buildings.

It's clear then, with Viriconium, the situation models that naturally thicken as you read, and the implicit predictions concealed within, are repeatedly undermined. As new predictions are made, expanding the notion of what is possible within the world-logic, these too are challenged. Recalling the enactive view, the whole of this process arises from the affective tonality that is embedded in the body – the construction and destruction of situation models and predictions is completely emotional.

These shifts in narrative comprehension then can be strange and disorienting, or even shocking. Each time we must reappraise the whole in the light of new information gathered. Our attachment to the worldlikeness of our thickened situation models is challenged and then recalibrated. If we persevere despite this continual destabilisation, we are likely either to be irritated or to be provoked into a stance of negative capability; to gloss Keats: the capacity to be in uncertainty, mystery and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Discussing improvisation in jazz and dance, Gallagher argues that performers are enabled by their training to “move beyond controlled engagement to the point of not-knowing (embracing a kind of uncertainty or surprise) about what precisely will happen – letting the system (brain-body-environment) move in unpredictable, surprising ways – without a prediction of what happens next. What happens next is that brain-body-environment couple in a novel way – they join forces to enact something unpredictable – they create cortical patterns, and behaviors, and new affordances that are unique to each event.”¹⁰  

This process of “a letting happen of whatever happens,” for the experienced performer is invariably also highly pleasurable. It has a lot in common, I think, with Harrison’s statement: “This is one of Viriconium’s many jigsawed messages to the reader. You can’t hope to control things. Learn to love the vertigo of experience instead.”¹¹ I would argue then that Viriconium is itself a kind of training ground for negative capability, and that, as we develop faculty in this, we will be rewarded with intense and probably pleasurable experiences of moving beyond controlled engagement to the point of not-knowing.

Ghostly Repetitions

We started with tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Viriconium, standing on the dunes that divide his tower from the sea. But really this is just one iteration of Lord tegeus-Cromis, and indeed just one iteration of Viriconium. We are told as much by the old man (as an aside – isn’t that Cellur the Birdmaker from some other fold of time? Or perhaps SELLER, with a S and all in capitals?), when the old man says to Ignace Retz: “There have been many Viriconiums… Watch the tapestry.”

In Viriconium, things do not recur in a neat and ordered way, cause and effect does not work as it should, and yet somehow, as we try to re-orient ourselves, we discover new things we can trust (and thereby use as basis for prediction), until they also disappoint. We cannot trust the recurrence of particular characters or places in an ordinary logical way, and yet there is something deeper that does recur. How can tegeus-Cromis be all versions of tegeus-Cromis and yet none of them? How can our felt sense of Viriconium be both all and none of the many Viriconiums we have met?

Perhaps the most obvious metaphor to reach for, since it is a recurrent theme on multiple textual levels, is that of a tarot deck being reshuffled and redealt. The same cards or archetypal themes occur but in different combinations, or sometimes reversed. Here tegues-Cromis is an opportunist; here the tower is inverted – those bodies are not falling through space, but rising. In the gap created by not irritably reaching after fact, a deeper truth can be revealed. Despite, and because of, the ruptures and inconsistencies, there is something beguiling about Viriconium that is also so very close to our own enacted existence. Perpetually we seek solidity – through situation models, motor resonance, prediction and embodied simulation – and yet both the book and the world are groundless, and they cannot be grasped.

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¹ With Bodies

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Harrison blog post "very afraid"

⁶ Notes Toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building

⁷ Steps to a Science of Interbeing, F J Varela

⁸ With Bodies

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Surprise! Why enactivism and predictive processing are parting ways

¹¹ Harrison blog post "What it might be like to live in Viriconium"