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novel, but at this point the text collapsesit has been burned out, just as a 'joint' is burned out to produce a private euphoric state. |
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The 'ideal reader' of Finnegans Wake cannot be a Greek reader of the second century B.C. or an illiterate man of Aran. The reader is strictly defined by the lexical and the syntactical organization of the text: the text is nothing else but the semantic-pragmatic production of its own Model Reader. |
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We shall see in the last essay of this book (Chapter 8) how a story by Alphonse Allais, Un drame bien parisien, can be read in two different ways, a naive way and a critical way, but both types of readers are inscribed within the textual strategy. The naive reader will be unable to enjoy the story (he will suffer a final uneasiness), but the critical reader will succeed only by enjoying the defeat of the former. In both cases anywayit will be only the text itselfsuch as it is madethat tells us which kind of reader it postulates. The exactness of the textual project makes for the freedom of its Model Reader. If there is a "jouissance du texte" (Barthes, 1973), it cannot be aroused and implemented except by a text producing all the paths of its 'good' reading (no matter how many, no matter how much determined in advance). |
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0.2.4. Author and Reader as Textual Strategies |
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In a communicative process there are a sender, a message, and an addressee. Frequently, both sender and addressee are grammatically manifested by the message: "I tell you that. . . ." |
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Dealing with messages with a specific indexical purpose, the addressee is supposed to use the grammatical clues as referential indices (/I/ must designate the empirical subject of that precise instance of utterance, and so on). The same can happen even with very long texts, such as a letter or a private diary, read to get information about the writer. |
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But as far as a text is focused qua text, and especially in cases of texts conceived for a general audience (such as novels, political speeches, scientific instructions, and so on), the sender and the addressee are present in the text, not as mentioned poles of the utterance, but as 'actantial roles' of the sentence (not as sujet de l'énonciation, but as sujet de l'énoncé) (see Jakobson, 1957). |
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In these cases the author is textually manifested only (i) as a recognizable style or textual idiolectthis idiolect frequently distinguishing not an individual but a genre, a social group, a historical period (Theory, 3.7.6); (ii) as mere actantial roles (/I/ = «the subject of the present sentence»); (iii) as an illocutionary signal (/I swear that/) or as a perlocutionary operator (/suddenly something horrible happened . . ./). Usually this conjuring up of the 'ghost' of the sender is ordered to a symmetrical conjuring up of the 'ghost' of the addressee (Kristeva, 1970). |
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