For his part, Eddie plays good defense, and indeed, his skill suggests that
he has at least some awareness of Foley’s purposes. Eddie’s remark, “I wouldn’t
be surprised [about others] . . . [but] I just found out” both makes the infor-
mation potentially more valuable and allows him to back off from promising
too much. His “I’m right on the button with this one” is as good a play as he
can make, given how little he knows, and given that earlier in the conversation
Foley had chided him for delivering information too late to be useful. Finally,
his “I need a good leaving alone” is an even better play, since it gives him the
room to maneuver that he wants.
Since Foley and Eddie exhibit this awareness of each other’s purposes,
the conversational and authorial disclosures overlap to a large degree. But
again, reading across the conversations adds a layer to the authorial disclo-
sure. While Eddie puts his request for a good leaving alone in terms of “this
detail,” we know from chapter 1 that he wants to keep doing his other business
with Jackie. Foley, as Higgins’s audience soon learns, is smart enough to know
that Eddie has additional reasons for wanting to be left alone, but, unlike
those readers, Foley does not know what they are. This authorial disclosure
has the additional important consequence of adding another complication
to the developing instabilities: can Eddie simultaneously succeed in his new
criminal operation and escape the impending jail sentence by cozying up to
law enforcement? In other words, the instabilities now include whether Eddie
will be able to successfully juggle his relationships in these different networks.
By establishing significant parallels between chapter 1 and chapter 2—in
each, Eddie negotiates a deal with one other person outside his own immedi-
ate network—Higgins’s authorial disclosure across the chapters guides rhetori-
cal readers to additional aspects of configuration and reconfiguration. First,
those readers can recognize the rough equivalence between the commodities
of exchange in each deal: guns and money, on the one hand, and information
and influence, on the other. Second, with regard to affect and ethics, rhetori-
cal readers recognize that in this world, interpersonal relationships are built
primarily on self-interest. At best, the ethics governing interpersonal relation-
ships are those referred to in the phrase “It ain’t personal, it’s just business.”
Eddie needs guns, Jackie needs buyers, they negotiate a price. Eddie needs a
break, Foley needs information, they negotiate a deal. But at worst, the inter-
personal relationships are ones in which self-interest is so strong that other
people get reduced to objects that can be used for one’s own benefit. The most
obvious example is Eddie’s eagerness to use Jackie to stay out of jail. Although
Eddie and Foley are not exploiting each other in this way, each is less inter-
ested in what he can do for the other than in what the other can do for him.
Eddie is not a good citizen out to help law enforcement, but rather a crook
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 179