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in. But there is also the opposite moral: Drame has shown how much stories request a cooperative intrusion and cannot live without it.
8.10. Conclusions
At this point we can leave the fabula and come back to the text in all its complexity.
The disgrace of this fabula, its final contradictory nature, told the reader that there are different types of fictional texts. Some ask for a maximum of intrusion, and not only at the level of the fabula, and are called 'open' works. Some others are mealymouthed and, while pretending to elicit our cooperation, in fact want us to think their way and are very 'closed' and repressive. Drame seems to stay half-way: it lures its Model Reader into an excess of cooperation and then punishes him for having overdone it.
In this sense Drame is neither open nor closed: it belongs to a third category of works, to an exclusive club whose chairman is probably Tristram Shandy. These works tell stories about the way stories are built up. 20 In doing so these texts are much less innocuous than they seem: their deep theme is the functioning of that basic cultural machinery which, through the manipulation of our beliefs (which sublimate our wishes), produces ideologies, contradictory world visions, self-delusion. Instead of describing this process from an uncontaminated critical point of view, these texts reproduce the process in their own rhetorical and logical structures (thus becoming the first victim of themselves).
But perhaps we are going too far away. Drame is only a metatext speaking about the cooperative principle in narrativity and at the same time challenging our yearning for cooperation by gracefully punishing our pushiness. It asks usto prove our penitenceto extrapolate from it the rules of the textual discipline it suggests.
Which I humbly did. And so should you, and maybe further, gentle reader.
Notes
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1. The essay has been prepared through a series of seminars in which I have been variously helped by the suggestions of my students and colleagues. Alphonse Allais' story was brought to my notice by Paolo Fabbri. A first approach to the analysis of the story emerged during a seminar conducted at the University of California, San Diego, in 1975; Fredric Jameson and Alain Cohen took active parts in the discussions. A second approach developed during a seminar conducted at the University of Bologna in 1976; Ettore

 
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