The two narrative isotopies are mutually exclusive, but they are not at all denotatively alternative: in both cases, the narration is about Nerva and Domitian, except that different actions and intentions are attributed to them. The individuals remain extensionally the same but change some of their intensional features. Different possible worlds are devel-oped.
The topic intervenes to orient the structuralization of these narrative worlds.
6.6. Narrative isotopies connected with isotopic discursive dis-junctions that generate complementary stories
That is the case of the medieval theory of the four senses of the Scrip-tural verses, also cited by Dante (Epistula XIII). Given the text
(5) In exitu Israel de Aegypto — domus Jacob de populo barbaro — facta est Judea sanctificatio ejus — Israel potestas ejus
Dante says that “if we look only at the letter it means the exodus of the sons of Israel from Egypt in Moses’ time; if we look at the allegory it means our redemption through Christ; if we look at the moral sense it means the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the state of grace; and if we look at the mystical sense it means the depar-ture of the Holy Spirit from the servitude of this corruption to the free-dom of eternal glory.” Let us consider, in order to simplify matters, just the literal and moral senses. Once again, everything depends on the topic hypothesis: is the statement about Israel or about the human soul? The decision on this affects the discursive actualization: in the first case, Israel will be understood as a proper name of a people, and Egypt as a proper name of an African country; in the second case, Israel will be the human spirit, but then, by interpretive coherence, Egypt will have to be sin (the reading levels cannot be mixed).
Here, however, alternative senses of a componential spectrum will not be chosen, because we must foresee that, in as rich an encyclopedia as the medieval one, Israel denoted the Chosen People and connoted the soul. Thus it is not like the case of /toilette/, Vhich has the sense of either «x» or «y»; here the expression connotes the sense «y» precisely because it denotes «x». The relationship and implication is not one of disjunction. Consequently, isotopic disjunction exists; however, it is not based on disjunction but, rather, on implication.
Once the preferred reading at the discursive level is decided, various stories can be inferred from the actualized discursive structures; the moral story will derive from the moral discursive actualization just as the literal one will from the literal discursive actualization. But the two stories (and we know in reality there are four) are not mutually exclusive;
they are, rather, complementary, in the sense that the text can be read simultaneously in two or more ways, and one way reinforces the other rather than eliminates it.
Thus narrative isotopies are connected with discursive isotopies but are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are denotatively alter-native; the subject is either the Chosen People, or it is the soul (and, in fact, the option is between various denotations and connotations). By virtue of this choice, various possible worlds developed.
The topic (both the discursive and the narrative) intervenes to choose between denotative and connotative semes and to orient the structure of the narrative worlds.
6.7. Narrative isotopies connected with discursive isotopic dis-junctions that generate complementary stories in each case
In his analysis of the Bororo myth of the aras, Greimas (1970) speaks of another type of narrative isotopy. The myth in effect contains two stories, one about the search for water, and the other about the problem of diet. So we have a ‘natural’ isotopy vs. an ‘alimentary’ one. But in both cases we perceive that whatever the story (or the fabula) we actu-alize, there is no change on the discursive level. The stories always tell of certain people and certain events. At the most, according to the narrative isotopy, we select certain actions as more pertinent than others, but the actions and people doing them remain the same, even if there is a change in the value we attribute to them in the narrative arrangement. It is a matter of elaborating a hypothesis with a narrative theme and relying on key terms or sentences without, however, paradigmatic disjunctions as to the sense of the lexemes or syntagmatic disjunctions as to the sense of the co-references.
The persistence of a single discursive coherence results in this case in the two narrative isotopies’ not annulling each other, the relation between them not being exclusive or alternative, but complementary. Although Greimas chooses the alimentary isotopy as best, this does not mean that the story cannot be read through the natural isotopy as well. In fact, the two isotopies reinforce each other.
The toilettes story is characterized by two opposing readings, of which one is clearly inferior, and, if the first speaker had really wanted to speak of bathrooms, his utterance would have been conversationally inept be-cause it violated the rule of relevance. That cannot be said about the myth of the aras. Thus we have here narrative isotopies unconnected with discursive disjunctions.
The two or more narrative isotopies are not mutually exclusive. They are not even denotatively alternative; at most, different features are at-tributed to different individuals (cf. Eco 1979), 8.7).
The topic intervenes only to orient the evaluation of the narratively pertinent features.
6.8. Extensional isotopies
Some of the isotopies examined in the preceding sections also deal with the choice between possible worlds. Typical is the case of the text (3) in 6.1.3, where, in order to actualize the anaphoric power of so, the in-terpreter has to decide whether he is considering a world furnished with four individuals (characterized as performing a ‘legal’ sexual activity) or a world furnished with three individuals (who have the property of behav-ing as adulterers). Nevertheless, these two worlds are mutually accessi-ble, and there is no difficulty in imagining the individuals of the first world as changing some of their accidental properties, thus behaving as the individuals of the second one.
There are, on the contrary, cases where the choice between two or more worlds involves a radical characterization of the individuals, irre-spective of the fact that they can bear the same name. Such is the case of Allais’ “Un drame bien parisien” analyzed in Eco 1979.
Let us consider the following well known paradoxical dialogue;
(6) A: I believed that your boat was bigger than it really is. . . . B: Oh no. My boat is not bigger than it really is.
The conversation is certainly comic and the second speaker is certainly a fool. Like the second speaker of the toilettes dialogue, he is a fool be-cause he shifts from one isotopy to another, without realizing it. In the case of the toilettes, the shift took place at the semic level. Here the mistake is ontologically more puzzling.
The first speaker, A, is putting into play two worlds, one (wjt,1) which is the epistemic world of his beliefs at a previous time, and the other (woto) which is the world of his actual experience at the time of the utterance. He is saying: “In wjt,1 there was an individual x, which I supposed to be your boat and which was endowed with the property of being big; in woto I am experiencing the actual existence of an individualy, your real boat, endowed with the property of being small. Since in the present universe of discourse the only properties that x and у have are to be your boat and to have a certain size, if I compare these two individu-als of two different worlds, I notice that they have different properties. Maybe these properties are only accidental (in the sense outlined in Eco 1979» 8.6.2), so that x and y are potential variants of the same individual in two different possible worlds; however, they are certainly not the same individual in the same world.” Speaker A is avoiding such a com-plicated metalinguistic series of precisions, since he thinks that В will
understand very well what he is in fact doing. On the contrary, В is devoided of metalinguistical ability, so that his answers sound as “The y which is the only individual of the world of my experience (the only one I can conceive of) has not the property of being different from itself.” Such a remark is so tautological as to result in being silly. Moreover, В does not accept the implicit request of A, that is, of comparing A’s former beliefs with A’s subsequent knowledge. Thus В refuses to ac-knowledge that in A’s discourse there were two extensional isotopies, to be kept carefully separated one from another, and that A requests, at a certain moment, to make a comparison between them.
6.9.Provisional conclusions
According to what has been said, it is permissible to assert that isotopy is an umbrella term covering various phenomena. Like all umbrella terms (such as iconism, presupposition, code), this one shows that the diversity conceals some unity. Indeed, isotopy refers almost always to constancy in going in a direction that a text exhibits when submitted to rules of interpretive coherence, even if the rules of coherence change according to whether what is wanted is to individuate discursive or narrative isotopies, to disambiguate definite descriptions or sentences and produce co-references, to decide what things certain individuals do, or to estab-lish how many different stories the same deed by the same individuals can generate.
What should be clear in any case is that the identification of the topic is a cooperative (pragmatic) movement guiding the reader to individuate the isotopies as semantic features of a text.
[7] MIRRORS
7.1.
