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tions, mainly temporal shifts in and out (embragages and débrayages, according to Greimas's terminology) and a planned confusion between the subject of the speech act and the subject of the narrative utterance (the instance de l'énonciation suddenly intruding the course of l'énoncé). Moreover, as we shall see, the fabula concerns not only the world of events but also the epistemic worlds (or the propositional attitudes) of the characters, and these epistemic worlds continually overlap with the supposed epistemic world of the Model Reader (different propositional attitudes are thus focalized at the same moment). The final result is that the reader does not understand (provided he or she does not perform a metatextual analysis) who is speaking in a given moment (for such a dialectics of voices, see also Genette 1972). |
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2. A Portrait of the Young Pliny as an Old Reporter |
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At the beginning of the letter (§1) there is an implicit Ego (the subject of scribam) which clearly refers to an individual, Pliny the Younger, author of that letter, presumably in 104 A.D. Let us define this Pliny as P1, writing at a time-moment t0 in a world W0 conventionally taken as the real world. This oversimplification is due to the fact that we assume that the letter is not a piece of fiction but of ''natural" narrativity (like a newspaper article). If it were a piece of fiction (like the letters of Clarissa or of Les liaisons dangereuses), we would assume that there is another subject (a P0), the empirical producer of the speech act, while the Ego of the discourse is a fictive subject, not to be identified with the author. In other cases (fiction written in the third person), the subject of the speech act can interfere with the discourse as a semifictive subject, an Ego who comments on the facts and who can or cannot be identified with the empirical author (see, for instance, the comments provided in the first person by Fielding or by Manzoni throughout Tom Jones or The Betrothed). |
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In our case we can assume that the "historical" Pliny and the Ego speaking from §1 to §3 can be taken as the same entity, the Sender of the letter whose Addressee is Tacitus. |
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However, from §2 onward, P1 tells Tacitus a story concerning P2, that is, what happened to himself twenty-five years before, at Misenum, in A.D. 79, on August 24. Thus we have a letter written in to which tells about another time, or a given series of temporal states that we shall register as follows: |
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t-3 = August 24, afternoon, when the cloud appears and the Elder decides to sail; |
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