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Treatment 2: Raoul and Marguerite love each other, but are mutually jealous. Each of them receives a letter announcing that his/her partner will meet his/her lover. Both manage to catch the other in the act. The letter(s) was (were) lying. |
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As a mattter of fact, the end of Drame does not prove or disprove either hypothesis. Better, it verifies both (and neither). It depends on the type of cooperation implemented by the reader. But the text leads the reader to cooperate in either way. |
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To do so, Drame plots, at the level of discursive structures, a trick concerning the narrative structures whose reasons lie at a more profound level. |
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It is impossible to explain what happens at the level of the reconstruction of the narrative structures (fabula) without resorting to deeper structures, that is, world structures (systems of individuals along with their properties and mutual relations) with different imputed truth values. These world structures do not exclude a logic of actions (such as is realized at the level of narrative structures in the format of state changes), these changes being nothing other than possible transformation between world structures. The peculiarity of Drame is that it strongly encourages mistakes at the levels of fabula while being unequivocal at the level of world structures. |
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As the discursive structures are duly disambiguated and reduced to a more abstract world structure, one will realize that the text never lies. But at the intermediate level of narrative structures, the text ambiguously entitles one to conceive contradictory world structures. |
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In order to single out this very peculiar textual strategy, let us begin from an analysis of those aspects of discursive structures that are clearly envisaged to encourage the construction of two alternative fabulae. |
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Two alternative fabulae are two narrative isotopies. Drame is specially devised to produce contradictory narrative isotopies. It succeeds in doing so by manipulating the reader's attitude to operating semantic disclosures and by establishing two topicsor two fundative questionsat the discursive level. |
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Drame establishes its discursive topics by reiterating a series of sememes belonging to the same semantic field. The first topic concerns «sex» while the second concerns «logical coherence» or «facts vs. beliefs». |
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The reader is, however, led to emphasize the first topic so that his quest for a denouement is dominated by the question, Who or where are the unknown intruders that are depriving Raoul and Marguerite of their reciprocal marital rights? (or Where is the sexual menace coming from?or even, Will Raoul and Marguerite succeed in catching each other in the act?). He will discover too late that the true question is, How many individuals are really involved? |
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