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Page 255
matically astonished was the fabula 'in person', since it represents the infelicitous result of an unsuccessful pragmatic cooperation.
At a second, critical reading, one is tempted to rationalize the story. There are many ways to do that. For example, the two maskers are the two lovers of our heroes, each of them expecting to meet his or her adulterous partner. But this is a kind of supposition one can make only in the world of our everyday experience, where there are many individuals at large that one still does not know. This, however, does not hold in WN, where only the individuals explicitly named and described exist. In WN the supposed lovers have never been singled out as such (we still do not know who the Pirogue and the Templar really are; however, there is no evidence that they are the lovers of our heroes).
Furthermore, to think this way one should imagine that two adulterous couples had devised to use the same pair of masks. This sounds repugnant to our sense of narrative etiquette (and to the most credited inter-textual frames): the text should have given some previous clues to suggest this outcome, and it did not. By a sort of narrative implicature, we decide that no author can so blatantly violate intertextual frames and that, consequently, he wanted to suggest something elsealso because every rational explanation is challengedin any caseby chapter 7.
To learn from what happened means to be informed about everything that happened in chapter 6, including the propositional attitudes of the still mysterious Templar and Pirogue. It is true that someone could have told everything to our heroes. But this hypothesis is excluded through stylistical overcoding. To say that /cette petite mésaventure servit de leçon à Raoul et Marguerite/ means, according to common linguistic usages, that Allais is speaking of their unlucky accident and of their misunderstanding.
Moreover, chapter 7 is mixing up the textual world of chapter 6 more and more with the possible subworlds of the ghost chapters. Raoul and Marguerite are here behaving as if they had read all the preceding chapters, including the ghost ones. Otherwise, why the title of chapter 7 Happy denouement for everyone except the others? Semantic incoherence comes to support and to reinforce the fictional one. No semantic analysis of /tout le monde/ (everyone) can allow one to consider someone as left out. This title is really a challenge not only to semantically good intensional habits but also to commonsensical extensionality. It is a sort of epitome of the whole story, a sort of condensed allegory of incoherence and inconsistencyunless /tout le monde/ (everyone) were all the individuals in WN and /les autres/ were the readers, unfortunately belonging to a W0 called the 'real' world, where the laws of a well-mannered logic still hold. Which seems a nice moral to the story. Do not intrude upon a story's privacy. It is a crazy universe you can feel uneasy

 
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