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The spiral is another variation of the series. In the stories of Charlie Brown, apparently nothing happens; each character is obsessively repeating his/her standard performance. And yet in every strip the character of Charlie Brown or Snoopy is enriched and deepened. This does not happen either with Nero Wolfe, or with Starsky and Hutch: we are always interested in their new adventures, but we already know all we need to know about their psychologies, their habits, their capacities, their ethical standpoints.
I would add finally that form of seriality which in cinema and television is motivated less by the narrative structure than by the nature of the actor himself: the mere presence of John Wayne or Jerry Lewis (when either is not directed by a great director, and even in that case) succeeds in making, always, the same film. The author tries to invent different stories, but the public recognizes (with satisfaction) always and ever the same story, under superficial disguises.
2.4. The Saga
The saga is different from the series insofar as it concerns the story of a family and is interested in the "historical" lapse of time. It is genealogical. In the saga, the actors do age; the saga is a history of aging of individuals, families, people, groups. The saga can have a continuous lineage (the character is followed from birth to death; the same is then done for his son, his grandson, and so on and on, potentially forever), or it can be treelike (there is a patriarch, then the various narrative branches that concern not only his direct descendants but also the collateral lines and the kin, all branching out infinitely. The most familiar (and recent) instance of saga is certainly Dallas.
The saga is a series in disguise. It differs from the series in that the characters change (they change also because the actors age); but in reality the saga repeats, despite its historicized form, celebrating in appearance the passage of time, the same story. As with ancient sagas, the deeds of the gallant ancestors are the same as the deeds of their descendants. In Dallas, grandfathers and grandsons undergo more or less the same ordeals: struggle for wealth and for power, life, death, defeat, victory, adultery, love, hate, envy, illusion, and delusion.
2.5. Intertextual Dialogue
By intertextual dialogue I mean the phenomenon by which a given text echoes previous texts. Many forms of intertextuality are outside my present concerns. I am not interested, for example, in stylistic quotation, in those cases in which a text quotes, in a more or less explicit way,

 
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