Having explored three distinct fictional worlds — Wonderland, Gormenghast, and Prospero’s Books — we can now draw out the lessons they offer about systemic world-making, constraints, and intelligibility. This synthesis situates fictional worlds as illustrative laboratories for relational ontology, revealing how diverse constraint architectures sustain phenomena and meaning.
Three modes of world-making
Wonderland — Flexible, paradoxical constraints: stability emerges from relational consistency within mutable, context-dependent rules. Phenomena are intelligible relative to perspective and position, showing that worlds can hold even under shifting logic.
Gormenghast — Architectural, ritualised constraints: stability is enforced through dense, layered, and repeated patterns. Hierarchy and ritual produce coherence, depth, and expectation management, illustrating how rigid structure can sustain complex intelligibility.
Prospero’s Books — Performative, codified constraints: stability and intelligibility arise from enacted, layered, and symbolic rules. Coordination between performers, participants, and observers ensures phenomena are realised consistently, demonstrating the relational enactment of worlds.
Lessons for relational ontology
Constraint precedes perception: in all three worlds, phenomena emerge because constraints define what can appear and how it can be interpreted.
Multiplicity of intelligibility: each world sustains a distinct form of coherence, showing that stability and intelligibility are contextually grounded.
Coordination and coupling: the worlds highlight how alignment between participants, perspective, and enacted rules produces intelligibility.
Emergence through system-specific rules: worlds are held in place not by external foundations, but by internal constraints and the interplay of their components.
Fictional worlds as analytic tools
By treating fictional worlds as systems, we can explore world-making dynamics in a vivid, accessible register. They act as mirrors for natural, linguistic, and symbolic worlds, allowing insight into: constraint enforcement, world stability, perspective-dependence, and systemic collisions or misalignments.
Connecting back to Worlds After Meaning
The fictional worlds series extends the previous analysis by showing that:
Systems — whether living, physical, linguistic, or fictional — all operate through constraints.
Intelligibility and phenomena are actualised relationally within systems.
Variations in constraint architectures produce different modes of world-holding, coherence, and experience.
Fictional worlds therefore serve as relational laboratories: spaces where we can observe how constraints, cuts, and systemic rules produce worlds that hold, collide, and interrelate. They illuminate the principles of world-making in an imaginative register, enriching our understanding of the dynamics explored in Worlds After Meaning.
Conclusion
Wonderland, Gormenghast, and Prospero’s Books are not merely entertaining or illustrative. They are systems in miniature, teaching us how worlds are enacted, maintained, and rendered intelligible. Through them, relational ontology becomes tangible: worlds are made, held, and understood through the constraints and couplings of the systems that enact them.
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