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which should bring us from the point of departure to a point of arrival where we would never have dreamed of arriving); the distraction consists in the refutation of a development of events, in a withdrawal from the tension of past-present-future to the focus on an instant, which is loved because it is recurrent.
4.7. The Iterative Scheme as a Redundant Message
It is certain that mechanisms of this kind proliferate more widely in the popular narrative of today than in the eighteenth-century romantic feuilleton, where, as we have seen, the event was founded upon a development and where the character was required to 'consume' himself through to death. Perhaps one of the first inexhaustible characters during the decline of the feuilleton and bridging the two centuries at the close of la belle époque is Fantomas. (Each episode of Fantomas closes with a kind of 'unsuccessful catharsis'; Juve and Fandor finally come to get their hands on the elusive one when he, with an unforeseeable move, foils the arrest. Another singular fact: Fantomasresponsible for blackmail and sensational kidnappingsat the beginning of each episode finds himself inexplicably poor and in need of money and, therefore, also of new 'action'. In this way the cycle can keep going.) With him the epoch ends. It remains to be asked if modern iterative mechanisms do not answer some profound need in contemporary man and, therefore, do not seem more justifiable and better motivated than we are inclined to admit at first glance.
If we examine the iterative scheme from a structural point of view, we realize that we are in the presence of a typical high-redundance message. A novel by Souvestre and Allain or by Rex Stout is a message which informs us very little and which, on the contrary, thanks to the use of redundant elements, keeps hammering away at the same meaning which we have peacefully acquired upon reading the first work of the series (in the case in point, the meaning is a certain mechanism of the action, due to the intervention of 'topical' characters). The taste for the iterative scheme is presented then as a taste for redundance. The hunger for entertaining narrative based on these mechanisms is a hunger for redundance. From this viewpoint, the greater part of popular narrative is a narrative of redundance.
Paradoxically, the same detective story that one is tempted to ascribe to the products that satisfy the taste for the unforeseen or the sensational is, in fact, read for exactly the opposite reason, as an invitation to that which is taken for granted, familiar, expected. Not knowing who the guilty party is becomes an accessory element, almost a pretext; certainly, it is true that in the action detective story (where the iteration of the

 
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