Babble, , On the defining "emsean paracosm"
I opened up this babble and, as is becoming habit, gave it some name in the form of, "On some topic or another."
In this case, it was "On the emsean paracosm"
Like that's any sort of real thing, the emsean paracosm.
Well, it is now that I've made that node, so I can link to it.
But it doesn't have meaning until we give it some intension, and for that we need to do some conceptual analysis.
Let me break the term up into its adjective and noun: emsean and paracosm.
Emsean is a neologism, an adjective that means its target is, in some way, of or from me, emsenn. I made it as a term because emsenn's felt too possessive, and emsennian just looks silly. Emsean is in line with other Latinate forms of some names, i.e. Linnaeus, Epicurus, Augustine, and just… looks cool.
I think it'll also make a lot of my more personal philosophical writing easier to read, for me, and easier to understand and separate out when I'm talking about possession-related things from inheritance-related things, or more general related things.
So, em-senn for me, and em-see-en for things coming from me, like my writing. And I guess, seeing the writing on the wall, let me go ahead and coin the term emsiverse, for referring to the fictional multiverse I'm about to explain as my paracosm.
Which leads wonderfully into letting me explain what the difference is between the emsiverse and the emsean paracosm: the paracosm makes the 'verse.
I like that because that mechanic is generally true in fiction. Now, though, I do want to babble more on the word paracosm.
- In the early 20th Century, psychologists and pedagologists started studying playing.
- Of note, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky looked at fantasy play and imaginary companions.
- The term paracosm was coined in the late 1970s by Robert Silvey and Stephen A. MacKeith, two British child psychiatrists.
- It's from Greek for "alongside the world"
- It's used to describe complex imaginary worlds:
- that some children develop
- and sustain over long periods of time,
- often into adulthood
- often involving more than just narrative:
- fictional geographies, governments, languages
- functionally, mythopoesis.
- fictional geographies, governments, languages
That's what I did! My earlier records and memories show I had named Ack before I was seven.
The concept of paracosm precedes the term, as does public interest in them. For example the Brontë siblings created Angria and Gondal as children.
It's worth highlighting that a lot of things that begin as paracosms transform into what is known as secondary world, coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in On Fairy-Stories.
The difference between the two terms can be murky, given their origins in different fields (child psychology and philosophy of imagination), but Tolkien's concept of secondary belief is critical for differentiating them, to me.
Secondary belief is when a non-primary world, that is, a world that isn't our real actual world we habit, is coherent enough that it can be felt as true without suspension of disbelief.
Tolkien's philosophy was tightly coupled with his Catholicism, it might be worth mentioning, which influenced this hierarchy his structuring has.
But the key here is that the condition of relating believability of fiction to coherence (implicitly, with Christian or at least Aristotlean logics), not suspension of disbelief makes a secondary world differentiated by how it functions in relationship to an audience.
It's this introduction of an audience that, to me, helps distinguish a paracosm from a secondary world, when both otherwise meet the criteria of paracosm.
For example, Tolkien's Middle Earth and C.S. Lewis' Narnia both started as paracosms, but were developed into secondary worlds.
For my own paracosm, the line feels trickier, because so much of it was developed to test the justifications I received for the world I was experiencing: that is, treating the metaphysics of the primary world as a secondary world, to induce a paracosm…
…While at the same time, in a way, building the paracosm by chasing the edge of relation between itself and the primary world, making it a secondary world, itself.
The thing, the underlying thing, is still primarily a place for me to explore, and only properly stabilized elements become part of the "canon," which is useful for helping draw a line, and helps me see a different way of differentiating between paracosm and secondary world:
Method or product. That is, paracosm may refer to the whole method that's used to create the secondary world: not just in-universe information that makes it coherent, but…
I'm thinking of an example, like how in a secondary world perspective, the city of Gnalens makes sense because of a lineage of exploration and settlement.
But from a paracosmic perspective, it makes sense because I needed a way to simulate things like New Orleans.
That feels like as fully as I can explore that direction. I want to instead look at the ideas of paracosm and secondary world as they developed past their creation.
So, the first studies into paracosms showed that many children who made them were socially isolated or had experienced traumatic loss, which indicated paracosms could serve a compensatory or therapeutic role. There hasn't been much study on the concept, though, and that idea was based mostly on biographies from the Brontes and similar. What studies there have been indicate that roughly 17% of children between 8 to 12 years old have a paracosm.
While the available doesn't literature doesn't use this prevalence to diminish the correlation to trauma, to me, it seems worth reconsidering.
What is also notable from study is children with a paracosm did not differ in any tested metrics except having higher-than-average creativity scores on a storytelling-task, and more difficulty with inhibitory control.
(I would jokingly add the fact the largest section of my research notes is for my babbling endlessly as evidence there.)
But, unfortunately, clincal psychological study into paracosms is limited.
On the other hand, Tolkien's ideas of the primary and secondary world have continued to evolve, recently intersecting with ideas from sociology and psychology.
Before moving on, though, just to map to concepts I've been dealing with recently: two-dimensionalist conceptual analysis.
A secondary world, as Tolkien defined it, functions like a primary intension: it, and its parts, describe some way things could be. But a secondary world is one that's "credible," and Tolkien says: "if he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: ‘inner consistency of reality,’ it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality."
Which seems to me to say that Tolkien believes that if a secondary world can generate secondary belief, it has demonstrated secondary intension, a means of referencing the metaphysics of the primary world.
This idea is further explained by Tolkien in relation to his faith, connecting secondary worlds to subcreation, a belief that art is the human form of Godly creation. Mark J.P. Wolf really explores this idea in Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012ce).
I gotta mention here The Fantastic, written by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970ce, that does a structuralist analysis of the fantasy genre, which is useful for understanding the terms under which genre was coming to be understood by the 1970s. But it doesn't, to my memory, talk about secondary worlds.
But Kathryn Hume, in Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984ce), did, as part of analysis of literature as a dialectic between two impulses: fantasy and mimesis.
Mimesis is the drive to imitate or represent - in this case, imitate the primary world.
And fantasy is the drive to alter, in this case, create the secondary world.
Brian Attebery with Strategies of Fantasy (1992ce) holds the secondary world as a key marker of the fantasy literary genre, and Farah Mendlesohn makes it part of a taxonomy of relations between reader and secondary world, in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008ce).
And Mark Wolf takes that even further with Building Imaginary Worlds, which looks at literary narrative as an emergent phenomenon of the secondary world.
This is pretty in line with how I feel about my own secondary world and its stories - and is why I think I've been so able to use the world as a source of not just static stories, but tabletop role-playing game session material too.
Mendlesohn and Edward James clarified that as the contemporary definition of the fantasy genre in Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, also in 2012:
Following Tolkien, we may say that fantasy is the literature of the secondary world: a self-consistent realm in which the impossible becomes normal.
Given those definitions, it seems most precise to say that there are secondary worlds and paracosmic secondary worlds, and that makes it clear that perhaps rather than "emsean paracosm," it shuold be "emsean worlds," but I am concerned that makes it sound like it is specific planets and not… worlds in the more modern critical theory sense. Which moves me back to toward paracosm, so it stands out as a concept. And, the world is still very much grounded in my own personal experiences and beliefs, including my ongoing ones, so the term does fit, even if my appraoch to paracosmosis is so heavily influenced by my research methodology that it cannot help but also be a secondary world.
So the emsean paracosm is my paracosm, and the emsiverse is the literary material, the secondary world, that is produced by selectively curating my paracosm.
And all those terms have been pretty decently described.
Somehow I've managed to almost completely avoid discussing the content of the emsean paracosm, though, except for a passing mention to "Ack."
That'll have to be for another time, though.