|
 |
|
|
|
|
Panizon, Renato Giovannoli, and Daniele Barbieri wrote a first, tentative interpretation to which I am greatly indebted (I like to refer to the title of their paper, "How to Castrate Oneself with Ockham's Razor"). A third and more substantial approach (a three-month analysis) was developed at New York University during the fall semester of 1976. Conducted for a class of graduate students in French literature, the seminar helped me to clarify many stylistic and rhetorical points of the text. Although it is impossible to mention all the participants, I want particularly to thank my colleague Christine Brooke Rose, who was one of the best auditors I have had in my academic life. Finally, the entire month of July 1977, spent with a consistent group of students and scholars at the Center of Semiotics and Linguistics in Urbino, was devoted to this analysis. Peer Age Brandt, who attended one of the seminars conducted during that period, gave an exciting personal reading of the story. An intermediary draft of this paper was widely discussed with Lucia Vaina, whose research on literary possible worlds has been revealing to me. Her criticism has greatly influenced the final draftfor which, however, she is not responsible. I have received many suggestions from my students in the course in semiotics at the University of Bologna. During the courses I taught at Yale University in 1977, Barbara Spackman wrote a paper on the second draft of this analysis, which gave me some suggestions that I have incorporated into the final draft. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
2. We shall see that to postulate such a double interpretation does not mean to exhaust the cooperative possibilities of the interpreter: what is postulated is a first naive interpreter expected to commit various alternative mistakes and a second critical reader who can make different explanatory decisions (of which the one I propose at the end of this essay is only one among the possible variants). Thus to say that it is possible to recognize the type of reader postulated by the text does not mean to assume that it is possible to completely foresee his final and definitive interpretation. The two Model Readers of Drame are two general interpretative strategies, not two definite results of these strategies. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
3. While in the course of this essay the profile of the Model Reader will be extrapolated exclusively from textual strategy, in Appendix 1 I present the results of an empirical test which validates the above extrapolation. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
4. Appendix 2 comprises a faithful and witty translation expressly made by Fredric Jameson. Since the translation is faithful, one could ask why it is not used for the purpose of analysis instead of the original. Apart from any semantic discussion about the theoretical possibility of a really 'faithful' translation, the difference has been maintained for reasons strictly related to the present research. Even though as 'faithful' as possible, a translation is still an interpretation, in Peirce's terms: it substitutes some words or groups of words with their interpretants in another language. In doing so it realizes the first condition of any interpretation: it fills up given expressions with their content (the content being witnessed by other expressions). In this process what was implied, presupposed, implicated, and suggested (I use these expressions non-technically) by the original expression comes to be disclosed. This happens with the translation of Drame, and the behavior of the translator will be used in some cases as a test as to what a 'model' interpretative behavior could be. |
|
|
|
|
|