Ksenia Elisseeva - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni, semiotica della ...

y an “unraveled” line that retains the order of reading cards by groups and
arranges the cards within each group in the order in which they should be read.
Here, for example, is the transcription of a distribution, showing the card of the
person whose fortune is being told (Q♥) and separating the groups within each
temporal stratum with semicolons: Q♥, on her heart 7♥, 6♣; J♠, J♣, 10♥, A♦,
what was K♠, A♥, 6♠; 7♣, 8♠; K♣, 9♦, 8♣, what is A♣, K♦; 9♥, K♥, what will be
7♦, 10♦, 8♥; 6♥, J♦; Q♠, A♠, 7♠.
Thus we can describe the plot of cartomancy conventionally and
unambiguously, as with a game of chess, so that any reader can interpret its
factual and emotional details. It is far more difficult to analyze the plots of works
of art. A writer writes down a complete text by drawing upon the enormous
reservoir of poetic vocabulary and saturates it with his ideas, emotions, and
associations. The subsequent inclusion of the reader's subjectivity is wholly
natural and analogous, though also more complex, to reading the distribution of
the cards. Here “formulization” does not entail a simple ruling of a table into four
suits by nine denominations, with inscription of the corresponding meanings of
the cards, but rather an extremely difficult examination of how to elaborate the
very principles of classification. Some principles will be needed by the
researcher interested in plot syntax, plot grammar, and the dialectics of
correlating plot elements; other principles will be needed by the historian of
plots. Special scales must be created in each instance, and we literary scholars
unfortunately do not yet possess a “Mendeleev's table” of plots. The necessity
of creating such tables during the next few years hardly needs to be
demonstrated 1 .
1 True, there are still opponents of typology in literary scholarship in general who say that it
destroys the specificity and unique individuality of artwork and writer. For some reason they do not protest
against the classification, let us say, of characters in psychology or of types in anthropology. In those
cases, systematics obviously does not suppress the distinctiveness of individuals. But why then is it
contraindicated in literary scholarship?
26