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it were a series of events constituting the only 'actual' world the reader is concerned with, we can say that a fabula encompasses the following: |
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(i) The possible world WN imagined and asserted by the author. WN is an abstraction: it is not the text as a semantico-pragmatic device, since it refers only to the level of fabula; it is not a simple state of affairs, since it starts from a given state of affairs s1 and through lapses of time t1 . . . tn undergoes successive changes of state, so as to reach a final state sn, each state shifting into the next one through a lapse of time. |
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Therefore I shall represent a fabula WN as a succession WNsi (where i = 1 . . . n), that is, as a succession of textual states. A WN can at most be described as the final state of such a succession WNsn. Intuitively, we define Madame Bovary as a novel telling the story of a bourgeois lady who commits adultery and then dies, and not as the story of a lady quietly living with her husband, as the fabula in fact says at its first states. |
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Notice that these textual states are not possible worlds in respect to WN. They are, rather, actual states of WN. Once taken that there exists a possible world WN inhabited by two individuals called Raoul and Marguerite, Raoul going to the theater and Raoul receiving a letter are always the same individual of the same world undergoing two different states, just as the individual who has begun to write this paper is the same individual who is presently continuing to write it, living in the same world even though in two different states of it. |
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(ii) The possible subworlds WNc (where c = any of the characters of WN) that are imagined, believed, wished, and so on, by the characters of the fabula. Therefore a given WNcsi depicts the possible course of events as imagined (believed, wished, and so on) by a given character within a given state of the fabula. |
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(iii) The possible subworlds WR that, at every disjunction of probability displayed by the fabula, the Model Reader imagines, believes, wishes, and so on, and that further states of the fabula in WN must either approve or disapprove. |
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A WRc can also be outlined where the reader imagines, believes, wishes, and so on, that a given character believes, imagines, wishes certain things. |
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To conclude, one can say that the fabula is a possible world WN which encompasses its successive states. It also encompasses the possible worlds WNc of the characters of the fabula, representing beliefs, wishes, and projects of its characters. |
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The strategy of discoursive structures step by step elicits the setting up on the part of the reader of possible worlds WR which picture future possible states of WN. Since characters, WNc and the reader's WR can also |
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