Ficţiunea ca lume posibilă în Abu Hassan de I.L. Caragiale
Fiction as Possible World in Abu Hassan by I.L. Caragiale

Summary/Abstract: The following paper is a metafictional reading of Caragiale’s Abu Hassan, a tale usually neglected by many critical voices. The game that the Calif, an authorial figure, initiates makes his victim, the young Abu Hassan, whom we may see as the intended reader of the text, aware of the illusionary nature of the world that he thought he lived in. Because he wished to be a calif for one day, he was abducted and made the ruler of Bagdad, while the actual Calif watched his every move from a window above. When Abu Hassan returned to his actual life, he refused to acknowledge it and got mad. After a long period of suffering his sanity came back, but he was abducted once again. This time, the Calif revealed to him the game he was playing all along. Thus, his story may be interpreted as a meditation on the concept of fiction. His abduction is similar to a relocation from the actual world to the possible world initiated by the game of the Calif. What he failed to understand in the first place is the ontological status of the world he got to live in temporarily: a textual one, an illusion, an artefact. Thus, the calif, as an authorial figure, shares his reader the knowledge necessary for him to finally understand the dual nature of the world he is reading: as narrative and as text.

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