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lover, disguised as a Templar," and vice versa). I am therefore assuming that this kind of reading was more or less the one foreseen by Allais when he prepared his textual trap.
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The text itself is of an adamantine honesty; it never says anything to make one believe that Raoul or Marguerite plan to go to the ball; it presents the Pirogue and the Templar at the ball without adding anything to make one believe that they are Raoul and Marguerite; it never says that Raoul and Marguerite have lovers. Therefore it is the reader (as an empirical accident independent of the text) who takes the responsibility for every mistake arising during his reading, and it is only the reader who makes mischievous innuendos about the projects of Raoul and Marguerite. |
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But the text postulates the presumptuous reader as one of its constitutive elements: if not, why is it said in chapter 6 that the two masks cried out in astonishment, neither one recognizing the other? The only one to be astonished should be the reader who has made a wrong hypothesis without being authorized to do so. |
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The reader, however, has been more than authorized to make such a hypothesis. Drame takes into account his possible mistakes because it has carefully planned and provoked them. Besides, if the reader's inferences were planned and provoked, why should the text refuse and punish them as a deviancy? Why show so blantantly that they are inconsistent with the "real" story? |
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The implicit lesson of Drame is, in fact, coherently contradictory: Allais is telling us that not only Drame but every text is made of two components: the information provided by the author and that added by the Model Reader, the latter being determined by the formerwith various rates of freedom and necessity. But, in order to demonstrate this textual theorem, Allais has led the reader to fill up the text with contradictory information, thus cooperating in setting up a story that cannot stand up. The failure of the apparent story of Drame is the success of Allais' theoretical assumption and the triumph of his metatextual demonstration.4 |
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8.2. The Strategy of Discursive Structure |
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8.2.1. Speech-act Strategy |
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The building up of the Model Reader(s) as a possible interpretative strategy requires some pragmatical devices. Drame performs them, in the first instance, as a subtle interplay of perlocutionary and illocutionary signals, displayed all along the discursive surface. |
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Grammatically speaking, the text is dominated by a first person (the |
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