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not the Son of the Father does not speak about the same theological character as the Canonic Gospels. Such is the difference between the epistemic world of P1 (and of Tacitus) and the epistemic world of P2 (and of the Elder). |
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3. A Portrait of the Old Pliny the Younger as a Young Informant |
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Now we can come back to the discursive surface of the story of P2 told by P1. Notice that P1 should make it clear that P2 and the Elder shared the epistemic world WNct-3. A good narrator interested in the psychology of his or her characters and in the dialectics between reality and illusion should insist on this gap. (Think of the energy with which Sophocles shows Oedipus blinded by a set of propositional attitudes that do not correspond to the real course of past events; see Eco 1979a:243 345). |
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Which is, on the contrary, the discursive strategy of P1? In §1 the Ego who speaks in t0 reminds Tacitus of what he is supposed to know very well, namely, that the Elder perished in that catastrophe, that the catastrophe was memorable, and that because of this his name will live forever. Why such an insistence on this piece of encyclopedic information? The Younger is clearly preparing his Model Reader to think of the Elder in terms of W0t0. |
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In §2 the Younger operates a temporal shifting-out: the change of tense producesso to speaka flashback and puts the Model Reader in a previous state of the same world. But in this previous state of the same world the characters nourished propositional attitudes which cannot cope with those of the Model Reader. The Younger is prima facie very honest. He says that neither he (twenty-five years before) nor his uncle knew where the cloud was coming from. But immediately after- |
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