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APPENDIX ONE
The Model Reader of Un Drame Bien Parisien: An Empirical Test
In the course of Chapter 8 of this book, the profile of the Model Reader of Alphonse Allais' Un drame bien parisien has been extrapolated from the textual strategy itself. It is interesting, however, to see whether another, more empirical approach is able to lead to the same results.
The experiment described below supports the hypotheses made previously at a purely theoretical level and thus proves that it is possible to rely upon the notion of Model Reader as a textual construct.
A sample of readers was tested in 1977, first at the Istituto di Discipline della Communicazione e dello Spettacolo (University of Bologna) and then during the summer courses at the International Center for Semiotics and Linguistics (University of Urbino). The subjects read chapters 1-5 and were then asked to summarize them. In a second phase they read chapters 6-7 and were then asked to summarize them.
In scoring the summaries we were concerned with some basic questions such as the following: (i) Are Raoul and Marguerite remembered as husband and wife obsessed by mutual jealousy? (ii) Is the basic sense of the two letters in chapter 4 correctly understood? (iii) Are both Raoul and Marguerite (or at least one of them) supposed to have the secret purpose of going to the ball? (iv) Are either or both of them planning to assume the disguise of the supposed adversary? (v) Are either or both of them identified with the Templar or with the Pirogue attending the ball? (vi) Does anybody suspect that the characters involved in chapter 5 are more than two? (vii) Does anybody expect Raoul to discover that Marguerite is the Pirogue, or vice versa? (viii) Is Raoul expected to discover that the Pirogue is not Marguerite (and/or vice versa)? (ix) Is the solution of chapter 6 in any way anticipated by some subjects before they read it?
In the second phase we tried to detect whether the mutual nonrecognition is understood literally and whether the illogical situation is in some way realized as such; whether any subjects realize that chapter 7 is inconsistent with chapter 6; what kind of reactions the subjects display (perplexity, attempt to give rational explanations, awareness of a tricking textual strategy, total inability to catch the paradoxical aspect of the story).

 
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