not have let him go it alone). Aristotle goes so far as to pronounce Achilles’
pursuit as “justified,” but, unfortunately, he doesn’t offer much explanation
of that assessment beyond the general point that it renders the epic “more
striking” (25.5). Commentators on Aristotle such as Andrew Ford (more on
Ford below) regard his dictum as consistent with his emphasizing that poets
should shape their plots for maximum effect on their audiences. If the viola-
tion of probability productively adds to the effect, it can be justified. I agree
with that reading of Aristotle, but I find that there’s a lot more to unpack in
the phenomena of probable impossibilities and other implausibilities (and for
my purposes, I consider probable impossibilities and implausibilities as two
subtypes of the larger phenomenon of justified deviations from the dominant
system of probability in a narrative). I also acknowledge at the outset that
some narratives contain unjustified deviations—unconvincing improbabili-
ties and impossibilities such as the phenomena covered by the term deus ex
machina.^1 These improbabilities and impossibilities are unconvincing because
they arise out of an authorial need to have something happen rather than out
of the logic of the progression. For my purposes, these unjustified deviations
are worth noting, because they, like Dorothea Brooke’s poor dress, set in relief
the beauty of something else.
In order to begin my unpacking of probable impossibilities and related
phenomena, I will look closely at the case of Stitches—and some other cases of
implausibility that help with that unpacking. I will return to Lahiri in chapter
11 because I want to show how she integrates her handling of (im)probability
with her handling of other resources—character-character dialogue, reliable
narration, and the synergies between them—that I will discuss in more detail
between now and then. But my major claim about the phenomena associ-
ated with improbabilities applies to both cases. In them, the implied author
relies (consciously or intuitively) on the authorial audience’s unfolding responses
to the narrative progression as he or she constructs new parts of the text. In
other words, these unfolding responses in the trajectory of readerly dynamics not
only have a discernible effect on the textual dynamics but they also justify the
deviations from probability. To put this point another way, readers regard the
impossibilities or implausibilities as probable because of a “crossover effect”
between readerly and textual dynamics. Moreover, these probable deviations
are not one-off or anomalous phenomena but instructive examples that indi-
cate how tellers frequently rely on the unfolding of readerly dynamics in their
construction of textual dynamics. In other words, authors often construct nar-
rative progressions that so deeply intertwine textual and readerly dynamics
- For an illuminating discussion of such cases, see Ryan, “Cheap Plot Tricks.”
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 33