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Page 242
ticularly when applying to novels the criteria of a strictly realistic aesthetics). Thus our previous experiment seems to be preposterous.
But frequently we do use a fictional possible world to judge our own for instance, when saying with Aristotle that poetry is more philosophical than life, since in poetry nothing happens by chance as happens in life (history), and in poetry everything appears strictly necessary (Poetics, 1451b,1452a). So do we when, for instance, we observe that a certain fictional character is more 'true' than its 'real' prototype or that fiction is more 'rational' than life and its characters more 'universally' or 'typically' real than their illusory empirical prototypes. Probably Don Quixote did so. 17
To conclude: The world of the fabula WN is accessible to W0, but this relation is not symmetric.
8.8.2. Relations of Accessibility Among the Subworlds of the Characters and the States of the Fabula
The comparison between a WN (with the globality of its states) and a W0 is always synchronic. Our reference world can be compared to the entire course of events represented by the whole fabula or can be compared step by step to its states, each of them taken as a possible state of affairs. On the contrary, a given possible subworld imagined by a character at a given state of the fabula (let it be WNcsn) can be compared either to a previous or to a further state of the fabula, that is, to a WNs1 or to a WNs3.
A character can imagine or believe or wish either in the course of discursive structures or in the course of the fabula. Let us call the first series of propositional attitudes 'events of the plot'intending by 'plot' the whole series of events which take place in the course of the discursive development, but which are not strictly essential to the development of the fabula. The plot is thus a series of micropropositions which carry on the basic macronarrative propositions to be abduced by the reader when trying to single out the fabula. So the fact that in chapter 2 Raoul wants to beat Marguerite concerns the plot, but is unessential to the course of the fabula.
Normally, propositional attitudes displayed in the course of the plot concern both essential and accidental properties of the individuals in play, whereas the propositional attitudes displayed in the course of the fabula basically concern S-necessary properties.
In the course of the plot, characters set up various imaginary courses of events: one believes that a given person will arrive, whereas this person in fact does not; one thinks that a given person is lying while he or she is telling the truth; and so on. These propositional attitudes are set up by the plot to outline the psychology of the different characters and are frequently rapidly disproved (maybe in the course of the same

 
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