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Page 80
in light of the remarks above, we should say that a certain flexibility is always requested also for verisimilar and credible states of affairs.
As a matter of fact, even when invited to outline a very small world, the Model Reader is never provided with satisfactory information. Even when invited to extrapolate from an alleged experience of our actual world, such an experience is frequently simply postulated. 3
Let us start reading a novel (by a mere chance I have chosen Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794):
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On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vine, and plantations of olives.
It is doubtful whether an English reader of the late eighteenth century knew enough about Garonne, Gascony, and the corresponding landscape. However, even an uninformed reader was able to infer from the lexeme banks that Garonne is a river. Probably the Model Reader was supposed to figure out a typical southern European environment with vines and olives, but it is uncertain whether a reader living in London, who had never left Great Britain, was able to conceive of such a pale-green and blue landscape. It does not matter. The Model Reader of Radcliffe was invited to pretend to know all this. The Model Reader was and is invited to behave as if he or she were familiar with French hills. Probably the world he or she outlines is different from the one Ann Radcliffe had in mind when writing, but this does not matter. For the purposes of the story, every cliché-like conception of a French landscape can work.
Fictional worlds are the only ones in which sometimes a theory of rigid designation holds completely. If the narrator says that there was a place called Treasure Island, the Model Reader is invited to trust a mysterious baptismal chain by virtue of which someone christened a given individual island by that name. For the rest, the Reader is invited to assign to that Island all the standard properties he or she would be eager to assign to any South Seas island, and for the purposes of the narration this would be sufficient.
I have said above that in a narrative text Emma Bovary can be identified only by S-necessary properties, that is, by the fact that she was the wife of the only individual mentioned by the narrator at the beginning of the novel. But these S-properties are very feeble.
Let us analyze the following passage from Hugo's Quatrevingttreize. The Marquis de Lantenac is sending his sailor Halmalo to alert all

 
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