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ing, reserved for the proletarians. The entire industry of the serial would exist, as in the world of Mallarmé (made to end in a Book), with its only aim being to furnish neobaroque pleasure to the happy few, reserving pity and fear to the unhappy many who remain. |
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5. Some Questions in the Guise of Conclusions |
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According to this hypothesis, we should think of a universe of new consumers uninterested in what really happens to J.R. and bent on grasping the neobaroque pleasure provided by the form of his adventures. However, one could ask whether such an outlook (even though warranting a new aesthetics) can be agreed to by an old semiotics. |
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Baroque music, as well as abstract art, is "asemantic." One can discuss, and I am the first to do so, whether it is possible to discriminate so straightforwardly between purely "syntactic" and "semantic" arts. But may we at least recognize that there are figurative arts and abstract arts? Baroque music and abstract painting are not figurative; television serials are. |
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Until what point shall we be able to enjoy as merely musical those variations that play upon "likenesses"? Can one escape from the fascination of the possible worlds that these "likenesses" outline? |
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Perhaps we are obliged to try a different hypothesis. We can say then that the neobaroque series brings to its first level of fruition (impossible to eliminate) the pure and simple myth. Myth has nothing to do with art. It is a story, always the same. It may not be the story of Atreus and it may be that of J.R. Why not? Every epoch has its mythmakers, its own sense of the sacred. Let us take for granted such a "figurative" representation and such an "orgiastic" enjoyment of the myth. Let us take for granted the intense emotional participation, the pleasure of the reiteration of a single and constant truth, and the tears, and the laughterand finally the catharsis. Then we can conceive of an audience also able to shift to an aesthetic level and to judge the art of the variations on a mythical themein the same way as one succeeds in appreciating a "beautiful funeral" even when the deceased was a dear person. |
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Are we sure that the same thing did not happen even with the classical tragedy? If we reread Aristotle's Poetics we see that it was possible to describe the model of a Greek tragedy as a serial one. From the quotations of the Stagirite we realize that the tragedies of which he had knowledge were many more than have come down to us, and they all followed (by varying it) one fixed scheme. We can suppose that those that have been saved were those that corresponded better to the canons of the |
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