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Page 28
be reformulated by a very analytical paraphrasis. Because of all these uncertainties, I have not recorded the phase of actualization of plot by a special 'box'.
What is certain is that, through an imprecise series of mediatory abstractions, the reader comes to elaborate a more precise series of macro-propositions that constitute a possible fabula.
It is a common naiveté of many current text theories to believe that these macropropositions must constitute a synthesis of micropropositions expressed at the level of discursive structures. This is true in many cases (the whole of Oedipus Rex can be summarized as «find out the guilty!» ), but there are a number of narrative situations where the macropropositions must expand the discursive structures. To give only a few examples, what is the fabula carried on by the first two verses of Dante's Divine Comedy? According to the medieval theory of four senses, there are at least four fabulae, each of them expanded beyond the first surface level. The narrative structure of /Dieu invisible crea le monde visible/ isas every linguist knows very well«There is a God. God is invisible. God created the world. The world is visible». Take also Corneille's /qu'il mourût!/ and try to expand the fabula expressed by this short speech act.
I referred to "a possible" fabula since this concept (at least in the form traditionally accepted) is a problematic one. According to the power of abstraction that the reader is able to manage, the fabula can be established and recognized at different levels. Fabulae are narrative isotopies. Ivanhoe can be both the story of what happens to Cedric, Rowena, Rebecca, and so on, and the story of the clash between Normans and Anglo-Saxons. It depends upon whether one has to reduce the novel for a screenplay, to write book-jacket copy, or to find three lines for an appealing advertisement to be placed in a quarterly of Marxist studies.
Is Oedipus Rex the story of detection, incest, or parricide? I think that (while there is a traditional story concerning parricide and incest) Sophocles' tragedy is the story of a detection concerning another story, namely, the traditional story of parricide and incest. However, one can decide that the basic 'stuff' one is interested in is the traditional story that the plot reveals step by step through the various phases of the detection. Therefore Oedipus Rex has a first-level story (detection) and a second-level one. Obviously, as far as the process of further abstraction goes, the reader is approaching the deepest intensional levels (box 8). A first intermediate level before entry to box 8 is the reduction of the fabula into a series of narrative structures à la Propp. A shallower level is the assimilation of the fabula to the binary disjunctions proposed by Bremond (1973) or a first reduction to standard themes or motives.
0.7.1.2.
It seems that there are texts without a narrative level, such as questions, commands, minimal conversation pieces. In fact, if one is

 
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