Three Walks in the Fictional Woods: Literature, Political Imagination, and the Question of the Possible

This article examines the relationship between contemporary literature and political imagination in an age marked by shrinking horizons of expectation, democratic erosion, and ecological crisis. Framed through the metaphor of ‘walking in the fictional woods’, borrowed from Umberto Eco, it develops a theoretical reflection on literature’s capacity to expand and interrogate the ‘possible’, understood as the sense of what possibilities are open in a specific historical predicament and a sense of how things could be otherwise. The first section offers a sociocultural map of the present regime of historicity, characterised by a profound sense of powerlessness, disenchantment, and obstructed agency with respect to the possibility of significantly transforming the political-economic order that shapes our lives and the world itself. Drawing on narrative hermeneutics, it argues that literature can challenge these constraints by enlarging the ‘sense of the possible’ and fostering critical engagement with the cultural narratives that shape political life. The second section addresses the ambivalence of political imagination, noting that recent forms of genocidal violence and ‘end times fascism’ have also expanded the realm of the possible. Rather than treating imagination as inherently emancipatory, the article thus emphasises its ethico-political ambivalence and indeterminacy. The final section explores the specific affordances of literary fiction, arguing that literature functions both as a mode of navigating alternative worlds and as a practice of prefiguration capable of modelling new forms of collective life. Bringing together literary theory, comparative literature, and political theory, the article proposes a shift from an ethics to a politics of storytelling and outlines a framework for analysing how literature might contribute to the urgent work of rekindling the political imagination.