Conclusion

We are now in a position to summarize the discourse articulated in the foregoing text. Literature is an “act of systemization” in which we recognize two simultaneously occurring activities: “systematic actualization” and “original modelization”—(closed and definite or open and suggestive). Further, the distinctive feature which sets literature apart from other “systemizations” and “modelizations” (for example, those of standard language and the sciences) is that it actuates the introjection of the three exponents of the ordinary communication model. This phenomenon permits the literary text to be “autosufficient,” that is, to constitute a source of communication even without the contextual conditions that are indispensable to ordinary communication. In addition, we can also synthesize our response to Di Girolamo’s skepticism with which we initiated the parabola of our discourse.

With regard to “literature,” the receiver assumes an attitude characterized by acceptance of the introjection of referents. A reader knows that the text in hand has been conceived in observance of this convention; or, even with regard to a text that originally had a different orientation, s/he may wish to treat it as though it were “literary” and therefore decide in any case to observe the rules of the convention.

Said convention is articulated—from the reader’s perspective—in the essential points recapitulated below:

a) The receiver knows that the elocutive act is decontextualized, and therefore not to be received directly, but obliquely (since the empirical author is “absent” and therefore cannot establish interlocutory practices with the reader, and since the internal addressee is a preconstituted imaginary subject with whom the reader can, as like as not, identify). Consequently, s/he knows that one cannot use the text as direct signification, and that in its “signified” one is constrained to find a “sense.”

b) The receiver does not evaluate the text’s referentiality on the basis of a direct verifiability, knowing that fiction and truth are materials to be submitted to another verification, that of “metaphoric referentiality.” And s/he does not evaluate the text for its referential power only but also, and contemporaneously, for the way in which it actuates the reference that is, itself, a given of the communication.

c) The receiver knows that the text’s language can be an arbitrary actualization of langue. In such case s/he accepts the arbitrary as norm.

Therefore, the “convention” of “literariness” consists in the particular attitude shared by both producer and receiver of the text or by the receiver of a text not intentionally conventionalized but which nevertheless can be treated as such.

Given that it is lost in the darkness of time, we would not be able to establish the beginning of this convention in our cultural tradition; therefore, while recognizing its historicity, neither would we be able to consider it a cultural variable.