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it must be taken as a text telling its own unfortunate story. Since its misfortune has been carefully planned, Drame does not represent a textual failure: it represents a metatextual achievement. Drame must be read twice: it asks for both a naive and a critical reading, the latter being the interpretation of the former.
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I assume that the reader of the present essay has already read Drame without skipping to the present introductory remarks. I suppose that the reader has read Drame only once at a normal reading speed. Therefore the following pages represent a specimen of a second (or critical) reading. In other words, the present essay is not only an analysis of Drame but also an analysis of the naive reading of Drame. However, since any critical reading is at the same time the analysis of its own interpretative procedures, the present essay is also an interpretation of a possible critical (or second) reading of Drame. |
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But Drame has been assumed to be a metatext. As such it tells at least three stories: (i) the story of what happens to its dramatis personae; (ii) the story of what happens to its naive reader; (iii) the story of what happens to itself as a text (this third story being potentially the same as the story of what happens to the critical reader). Thus my present essay is not an analysis of something happening outside Drame as a text (the adventures of its readers being spurious data borrowed from a psychological or sociological enquiry about the empirical fate of a textual object): the present essay is nothing else but the story of the adventures of Drame's Model Readers.2 |
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8.1.2. A Metatextual Strategy |
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When he comes to chapter 6, Drame's reader is completely jammed. My purpose is to explain why. |
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According to our most commonsensical intuition, chapters 6 and 7 cannot be justified without assuming that the previous chapters were postulating a reader eager to make the following hypotheses: (i) At the end of chapter 4 the reader must suspect that Raoul will go to the ball disguised as a Templar to catch Marguerite in the actand that the opposite is devised by Marguerite. (ii) During the reading of chapter 5 the reader must suspect that the two maskers attending the ball are Raoul and Marguerite duly disguised (or at most he must confusedly suspect that four individuals are attending the ball). Notice that none has realized that each letter tells how the marital partners will be disguised but does not mention the disguise of the supposed lover: therefore neither Raoul nor Marguerite could decide to assume the disguise of their rivals. On the contrary, many readers (see Appendix 1) implicitly or explicitly assume that each letter is dealing with both disguises ("Raoul receives a letter where it is said that Marguerite, disguised as a Pirogue, will meet her |
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