Irreal world

The Irreal world is the world a reader enters through a novel: neither the perceived world of immediate experience nor a succession of mental images, but a coherent realm apprehended through verbal signs. Its reality is irreal rather than perceptual. The reader’s words and knowledge guide syntheses that make characters, places, and even unnamed background figures present as objects, giving a novel’s signification the depth of a world.

Definition and distinction

Reading does not depend on a continuous stream of mental pictures. Images may be sparse and incomplete, and may arise when reading stops or attention breaks; yet the reader can still be absorbed in a novel and respond strongly to what happens. The force of such responses indicates that the imaging element is not simply absent. As in the theatre, the reader is present to a world and attributes to it a complete existence within the irreal.

This account distinguishes the Irreal world both from perception and from private imagery. A novel prepares the reader to encounter a whole world, but not one apprehended as the immediate surroundings are. Nor is reading merely the contemplation of mental images. The signs instead provide a point of contact with the world they disclose. The theory therefore retains the reader’s imaginative engagement without treating that engagement as a hidden gallery of pictures.

Signs and the reading attitude

The kind of consciousness involved depends on what is being read. An isolated phrase or poster can be taken as a sign, while scholarly reading directs thought toward signification and may treat knowledge as an objective property of the words. Across words, sentences, and pages, their meanings form an objective sphere of signification. In a novel, however, that sphere changes character: it becomes an irreal world.

The contrast with theatre makes the change in medium clear. A spectator apprehends characters through actors and the forest of As You Like It through cardboard trees. The reader encounters the corresponding world through signs. In both cases there is a world to which consciousness is directed, but the route of access differs: staged objects support the theatrical encounter, while words sustain the novel’s.

How a novel’s world takes shape

The reader’s knowledge does more than restate the words’ explicit meanings. It connects and localizes what a phrase leaves unsaid, allowing successive details to be understood as features of objects and places. For example, the statement that people entered Pierre’s office can orient the later account of their dispute; when one person leaves by slamming the door, the reader understands it as the office door. Knowledge supplied by earlier chapters can further situate that office on the third floor of a new building in the suburbs of Paris, although the sentence about the door contains none of those details.

Such knowledge is not operating only as an abstract rule or definition. In reading a novel, the reader thinks of the office, floors, and building as objects, with their relations helping constitute those objects. The example of a report about a Paris property owners’ syndicate contrasts this mode with one in which the relevant content is aimed at as a rule. A sentence about descending the three floors of a building instead directs attention first to the building as an object. The content may concern the same kind of knowledge, but the reading attitude changes how it is apprehended.

The world extends beyond what the narrative explicitly names. Its plants, animals, fields, towns, and people include not only those mentioned but also beings left in the background, whose presence gives the described setting depth. A chapter about a ball, for instance, can imply guests who receive no individual mention but are there as part of the gathering. These imagined beings are not additions to a literal inventory of the words; they are objects correlated with the reader’s word-guided syntheses, which proceed in a manner likened to perceptual synthesis rather than to the linking of meanings alone.

Knowledge, emotion, and latent images

The account acknowledges the apparent tension between sparse imagery and the vivid involvement of reading. Readers follow a hero’s danger, take sides, become indignant, and may even cry, although they need not form detailed mental pictures as they read. A proposed explanation in terms of latent images is rejected if it means unconscious images: an image is itself a consciousness, so a latent consciousness would be contradictory. Imaging knowledge, however, can perform the role attributed to such images without making the novel’s world a store of concealed pictures.

This distinction explains how signs can open onto a world without ceasing to be signs. In a novel, knowledge guided by verbal notation organizes places, relations, and beings into objects and supplies what the text leaves in the background. The Irreal world is thus neither reducible to the printed phrases nor independent of the reader’s engagement with them: it is the coherent world made present through that engagement.