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I shall try to represent two kinds of liberality in openness by the two diagrams of Figure 0.4 (where the nodes s represent states of the fabula at which a forecast is in some way elicited). In case (a) the sender leads the addressee step by step to a state of pluriprobability (many courses of events are given as equiprobable). The end of the text is not its final state, since the reader is invited to make his own free choices and to reevaluate the entire text from the point of view of his final decision. Such a situation is typical of many avant-garde texts (fictional and nonfictional) and of post-Webernian music. |
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A typical instance of such a diagram is the episode of Minucius Mandrake analyzed in Chapter 2: the episode does not end, or may end in various ways. Likewise the reader can imagine various possible outcomes after the end of the text linear manifestation of Gordon Pym (the final note of the author does not reduce, but even enhances, the openness). |
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In case (b) the sender offers his addressee continual occasions for forecasting, but at each further step he reasserts, so to speak, the rights of his own text, saying without ambiguity what has to be taken as 'true' in his fictional world. Typical from this point of view are detective novels.
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Obviously, the diagrams in Figure 0.4 represent two abstract types of cooperation, a sort of straight opposition between open and closed narrative structures. In reality the practice of generating and interpreting texts represents a graded continuum of possible interaction a . . . . . . . . . . w, where a is the offer of a maximal freedom, and w the most repressive request of conformity. A text can rank at a given position g (as far as the intentions of its author are concerned) and obtain a result d or µ according either to a failure in its strategy or to the cultural and psychological background of the addressee. |
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0.7.4. The Sememe and the Fabula |
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This dialectic of proposals and expectations rules also nonfictional texts. Consider this minimal textual stimulus: |
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(20) Robin is a bachelor, as . . . |
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which can arouse at least four possible choices (only one will be obviously authenticated by the further textual course): |
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