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stitute important components of modern stories. Sometimes, even when the expected step is made explicit, the fact that it was expected by inferential walks is part of the textual strategy: we enjoy the final identification of Oliver Twist just because we were supposed to yearn passionately for it during the intermediate steps of the story. |
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In Les Mystères de Paris are infinite points, from beginning to end, in which the Model Reader is allowed to take inferential walks so as to suppose that Fleur-de-Marie is the daughter of Rodolphe. From the Greek comedy on, he has at his disposal an intertextual frame which fits the situation perfectly. Sue is so convinced that his reader has taken such an inferential walk that at a certain point he is unable to defend his position, and he candidly confesses that he knows that the readers know the truth (which should be revealed only at the end of his immense novel). The fact that he anticipates such a solution before the middle of the novel is a curious case of narrative impotence, due to extratextual determinations (the commercial and technical constraints of the feuilleton genre that he was experiencing for the first time in human history). Thus Les Mystères de Paris has a good fabula but a bad plot. But Sue's unfortunate accident tells us to what extent foreseen inferential walks are encompassed by the generative project (see Chapter 6 of this book). Chapter 8 deals expressly with this problem. |
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0.7.3. Open and Closed Fabulae |
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Not every choice made by the reader at the various disjunctions of probability has the same value. In a novel such as Sue's, the more advanced choices are less equiprobable than are the first ones (the narration being a Markovian chain like the tonal musical process). In a novel such as Fleming's, the contrary happens: it is easy to hazard what Bond will do as a first move and hard to guess how he will succeed in getting out of a scrape. This difficulty is, however, reduced by the constancy of the same narrative scheme throughout the various novels. So the probabilities are different for the naive reader and for the 'smart' one, whose competence encompasses the intertextual frames established by Fleming. The analysis of the iterative scheme made in the essay (Chapter 4) on Superman (a genre rule governing most popular stories) suggests that probably the Model Reader such popular texts require is a 'smart' one. |
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On the contrary, there are texts aiming at giving the Model Reader the solutions he does not expect, challenging every overcoded intertextual frame as well as the reader's predictive indolence. |
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The type of cooperation requested of the reader, the flexibility of the text in validating (or at least in not contradicting) the widest possible range of interpretative proposalsall this characterizes narrative structures as more or less 'open'. |
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