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narrator) who at every step reiterates the fact that someone is reporting (tongue in cheek) events that are not necessarily to be believed; in other words, these interventions of the first grammatical person are stipulating a mutual contract of fair distrust: "You do not believe me and I know that you are not believing me; nevertheless, let us accept everything said in this text as if it were true." |
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Many overcoded expressions are used to make evident such a situation: /à l'époque où commence cette histoire/ is a fictional indicator not dissimilar from /once upon a time/; /un joli nom pour les amours/ sends the reader back to various literary overcoded conventions, operating particularly in the Symbolist period; /Bien entendu/ stresses the fact that the contract concerns a love story (with the whole of its intertextual frames); /Raoul, dis-je . . ./ rivets the presence of the narrator; /c'était à croire que . . ./ entitles the reader to make his own suppositions, to anticipate the conclusions, to go beyond the surface of discoursive structures in order to find out and to check narrative schemas, as is usually requested of a reader of fiction. |
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The text carefully designs its naive reader as the typical consumer of adultery stories such as the market of comédie de boulevard had created. This sort of reader is called into play through a series of allusions to his yearning for satisfactory coups de théâtre. An expression such as /simple episode qui donnera à la clientèle/ recalls the opening sentences of Tom Jones: "An author ought to consider himself not as a gentleman who gives a private elemosinary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary at which all persons are welcome for their money. . . ." These customers (or this readership) are members of a paying audience eager to enjoy narrativity according to current recipes. Notice that the epigraph of chapter 1 (quotation from Rabelais) mentions a /challan/, that is, a «customer». |
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An expression such as /vous qui faites vos malins/ holds up to ridicule the supposed readers, and at the same time recognizes these "smart-alecks" as those who usually expect from a story what the encyclopedia of narrativity has made them eager to expect. It is just for this sort of audience that the text is full of ready-made sentences of the type /la pauvrette s'enfuit, furtive et rapide comme fait la biche en les grands bois/ or /ces billets ne tombèrent pas dans l'oreille de deux sourds/ which reiterate the standard characteristics of the story. |
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The readership here summoned is the one accustomed to the most credited pieces of discursive stylistical overcoding. For the same reasons it ought to be the one accustomed to the most credited pieces of narrative overcoding. |
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However, the text does not renounce arousing the suspicions of a possible critical reader. Expressions such as /c'était à croire/, /un jour, |
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