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Page 12
ments (such as Petofi's *, 1975, on Le petit prince) are clearly conceived more as experiments on the applicability of the theory than as approaches to a deeper comprehension of a given text.
When trying to propose a model for an ideal text, current theories tend to represent its structure in terms of levelsvariously conceived as ideal steps of a process of generation or of a process of interpretation (or both). So shall I proceed.
In order to represent as 'ideal' a text endowed with the highest number of levels, I shall consider mainly a model for fictional narrative texts.7 This decision is due to the fact that most of the essays collected in this book deal with narrativity. However, a fictional narrative text encompasses most of the problems posited by other types of texts. In a fictional narrative text, one can find examples of conversational texts (questions, orders, descriptions, and so on) as well as instances of every kind of speech act.
Van Dijk (1974) distinguishes between natural and artificial narrative. Both are instances of action description, but, while the former is relating events supposedly experienced by human or human-like subjects living in the "real" world and traveling from an initial state of affairs to a final one, the latter concerns individuals and actions belonging to an imaginary or 'possible' world. Obviously, artificial narrative does not respect a number of pragmatic conditions to which natural narrative is, on the contrary, submitted (in fiction, for instance, the speaker is not strictly supposed to tell the truth), but even this difference is irrelevant to my present purpose. So-called artificial narrativity simply encompasses a more complex range of extensional problems (see the discussion on possible worlds in Chapter 8).
Therefore my model will concern narrative texts in general (be they artificial or natural). I presume that an idealization of textual phenomena at a higher rate of complexity will serve also for more elementary textual specimens.
Undoubtedly, a fictional text is more complex than a conversational counterfactual conditional, even though both are dealing with possible states of affairs or possible courses of events. There is a clear difference between telling a girl what might happen to her if she naively were to accept the courtship of a libertine and telling someone (possibly undifferentiated) what in eighteenth-century London definitely happened to a girl named Clarissa when she naively accepted the courtship of a libertine named Lovelace.
In this second case we are witnessing certain precise features characterizing a fictional text: (i) through a special introductory formula (implicit or explicit), the reader is invited not to wonder whether the reported facts are true (at most one is interested in recognizing them as more or less 'verisimilar', a condition in turn suspended in romance or

 
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