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pourtant . . . un soir, plutôt/, /bien entendu/, /comment l'on pourra constater/ are so blatantly ironic as to unveil their lies the very moment they assert them. |
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But all these speech-act strategies become evident only at a second reading. At a first glance the naive reader is lured by the familiar process of narrativity; he suspends his disbeliefs and wonders about the possible course of events. He brackets any extensional comparison and enters the world of Drame as if it were his own world. |
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8.2.2. From Discursive to Narrative Structures |
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At the level of its discursive structures, Drame does not posit particular problems of decoding. The individuals in play are easily recognizable, co-references are plainly evident. The reader understands without pain discursive topics and isotopies. The mode of the discourse being 'classical' and realistic, no particular problem seems to arise. The data of the reader's encyclopedia flow easily into the process of actualization of the content. The world of Raoul and Marguerite looks like the world of the reader (at least of a reader of 1890, or of a reader accepting the competence of a Gay Nineties reader). |
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The epigraphs seem to introduce some semantic complication (they are, intertextually speaking, rather puzzling), but at a first reading they can be dropped without problems. Otherwise, the text displays a clear strategy of confidential relationship between author and reader, the former being continuously present by conversational signals (/bien entendu . . . dis-je . . ./), the latter being pointed out by the author himself by means of direct appeals (/je vous souhaite . . ./). |
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The reader seems to get involved step by step in an Aristotelian process of 'pity', that is, of compassionate participation: de te fabula narratur. A perfect device, indeed, in order to arouse 'fear', that is, the expectation of some unanticipated and troubling event. |
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But this unproblematical nature of discursive level is only apparent. The syntactical mechanism of co-reference is perhaps unambiguous, but the semantic mechanism of co-indexicality is not that simple. |
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When in chapter 5 a Templar and a Pirogue appear, the reader is supposed to think that they are Raoul and Marguerite (or that at least one of them is either). The co-referential mediation is made by the two letters of chapter 4: since it is said that Raoul is going to the ball disguised as a Templar and there is a Templar attending the ball, then he must be Raoul (the same with Marguerite). |
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Logically speaking the inference is not correct, but narratively speaking it is such. The reader is resorting to a typical intertextual frame, very common in nineteenth-century narrativity: the topos of the 'pretended |
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