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0217-001.gif
Figure 8.2
then red comes. It is a pretty fair game; you play it just in order to check whether your expectations will be verified or not. But you play according to the rules of that game. In chapter 6 Drame becomes instead a game where you bet, let us say, on 17, and the croupier announces Royal Flush. If you try to react, he asks innocently, "What seventeen? What kind of game did you think you were playing?"
When one imagines a set of individuals (and of relations among them) that the text cannot finally admit, one in fact resorts to opposing to the world of the text a possible world not accessible to it.
8.4. Possible Worlds
8.4.1. The Notion of Possible Worlds in Text Semiotics
The concept of the possible world is indispensable when we wish to speak of inferential walks. Returning to chapter 2 and to the gesture of Raoul, inference (i) concerning the wishes of Raoul deals with the possible world depending on Raoul's propositional attitude; inference (ii) concerning the course of events deals with the possible world of the reader's expectation apropos of the further course of the fabula.
We see in chapter 2 that the possible world of Raoul's wishes is contradicted, so to speak, by the 'real' world of the fabula (Raoul will not beat Marguerite); and the same happens with the possible world of the reader's expectations. Both worlds are in the last analysis proved to be nonactual by the very fact that the further and the final states of the fabula outline a different course of events. Both remain as the sketches of another story, the story that the actual one could have been had things gone differently (that is, had the fictional world, assumed as the 'real' one, been differently organized).
Without the notion of possible worlds, inferential walks could not be distinguished from semantic disclosures, that is, the procedures of actualization of discursive structures. Both activities depend on references to encyclopedic information (various systems of codes and overcoded correlations in the case of semantic disclosure, and intertextual frames in the case of narrative structures), but they are modally different.
Semantic disclosures (when, for instance, actualizing the virtual semantic property «human» when a /man/ is named) concern individuals and properties within the world given by the text as the 'actual' one (and

 
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