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Page 86
new story is different from the preceding ones while in fact the narrative scheme does not change (see, for example, my analysis of the seriality of Rex Stout's and Superman stories in Eco 1979).
To the same type belong the TV serials such as All in the Family or Columbo (the same feature concerns different TV genres that range from soap opera to situation comedy to detective serial). With a series one believes one is enjoying the novelty of the story (which is always the same) while in fact one is enjoying it because of the recurrence of a narrative scheme that remains constant. The series in this sense responds to the infantile need of always hearing the same story, of being consoled by the "return of the Identical," superficially disguised.
The series consoles us (the consumers) because it rewards our ability to foresee: we are happy because we discover our own ability to guess what will happen. We are satisfied because we find again what we had expected. We do not attribute this happy result to the obviousness of the narrative structure but to our own presumed capacities to make forecasts. We do not think, "The author has constructed the story in a way that I could guess the end," but rather, "I was so smart to guess the end in spite of the efforts the author made to deceive me."
We find a variation of the series in the structure of the flashback: we see, for example, some comic-strip stories (such as Superman) in which the character is not followed along in a straight line during the course of his life, but is continually rediscovered at different moments of his life, obsessively revisited in order to find there new opportunities for new narratives. It seems as if these moments of his life have fled from the narrator out of absentmindedness, but their rediscovery does not change the psychological profile of the character, which has already been fixed, once and for all. In topological terms, this subtype of the series may be defined as a loop.
Usually the loop series comes to be devised for commercial reasons: it is a matter of considering how to keep the series alive, of obviating the natural problem of the aging of the character. Instead of having characters put up with new adventures (that would imply their inexorable march toward death), they are made continually to relive their past. The loop solution produces paradoxes that were already the target of innumerable parodies. Characters have a little future but an enormous past, and in any case, nothing of their past will ever have to change the mythological present in which they have been presented to the reader from the beginning. Ten different lives would not suffice to make Little Orphan Annie undergo what she underwent in the first (and only) ten years of her life.

 
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