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Paper short abstract

I will focus on the role played by modalities from different groups interweaved together in the trilogy. I will analyze the multimodal logic of the story starting with the relationship between perceptive modalities and volitive modalities and show how the possible is redefined in Tawada's fiction.

Paper long abstract

Tawada Yoko’s trilogy tells the story of the bizarre quest of an improbable group of people for the traces of the vanished “land of sushi” through the question of language, memory and their relationship. Tawada’s work poses various challenges to narratology including the play with focalisations, the logic of the story combining necessity and contingency, the structure of narrative sequences, the interplay between linguistic invention and the story line, etc.

In my paper I will show the key function in the structuring of the narrative played by modalities from different modal groups (alethic, deontic, boulomaic, cognitive and others), interweaved together. I will analyze the multimodal logic of the story starting with the relationship between perceptive modalities (what the main protagonists see or hear) and boulomaic modalities (i.e. modalities that have to do with desire) and proceeding to the redefinition of the possible in fiction. In this, I will follow closely the role of language invention, and not just that of the Panska langage, the language invented by Hiruko, the main protagonist, but also that of Susanoo, or of Munn and Vita in the beginning of the second volume, etc. In the final part of the paper, I will comment briefly the role intertextuality plays in the entanglement of modalities and will analyze the indexical function of modal operators.