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Page 77
are applied; on the other hand, the status of this existence is made dubious because the very foundation of the authenticating mechanism is undermined." These impossible fictional worlds include inner contradictions. Dolezel * makes the example of Robbe-Grillet's La maison de rendez-vous, where one and the same event is introduced in several conflicting versions, one and the same place is and is not the setting of the novel, events are ordered in contradictory temporal sequences, one and the same fictional entity recurs in several existential modes, and so on.
To understand better how self-disclosing metafiction works, one should consider the distinction between semantic and critical interpretation (see above, ch. 3, "Intentio lectoris"). Semantic interpretation is the result of the process by which the reader, facing a Linear Text Manifestation, fills it up with a given meaning. Critical interpretation is, on the contrary, a metalinguistic activity which aims at describing and explaining for which formal reasons a given text produces a given response.
In this sense every text is susceptible to being both semantically and critically interpreted, but only few texts consciously foresee both kinds of Model Reader. Many pieces of fiction (for instance, novels of detection) display an astute narrative strategy in order to produce a naive Model Reader eager to fall into the traps of the narrator (to feel fear or to suspect the innocent one) but usually also foresee a critical Model Reader able to enjoy, at a second reading, the brilliant narrative strategy by which the first-level naive reader has been designed (see above, ch. 3, section 4).
The same happens with self-voiding fiction. At a first interpretive level, it gives at the same time both the illusion of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility. At a second interpretive level (the critical one), the text can be understood in its self-voiding nature.
A visual instance of an impossible possible world is the famous drawing by Penrose (an archetype for many pictorial impossibilia such as Escher's engravings). At a very superficial glance this figure looks "possible," but, if we follow its lines according to their spatially oriented course, we realize that it cannot work: a world where such an object could exist is perhaps possible but surely beyond our powers of conception, however flexible and superficial we can decide to be. The pleasure we draw from impossible possible worlds is the pleasure of our logical and perceptual defeator the pleasure of a "self-disclosing" text which speaks of its own inability to describe impossibilia (on this matter, see also Danto 1988; and Régnier 1988).

 
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