tant book about how choices of genre strongly influence the ways in which
authors of fiction embed their ethical beliefs in their narratives, and some
remarkable essays about the power of genre.^4 In his 1968 essay “The Psycho-
logical Implications of Generic Distinctions,” Sacks proposed two intriguing
hypotheses about genre: “traditional generic distinctions . . . are forms of intu-
itive knowledge actually used by readers to comprehend and writers to cre-
ate literary works” (106), and “there is at least a strong probability that more
abstract knowledge underlying [generic] distinctions are . . . innate disposi-
tions of the human psyche” (111). While I join most of Sacks’s readers in find-
ing the second hypothesis fascinating but untenable, I find the first hypothesis
fascinating, sound, and, when appropriately modified, extremely valuable for
rhetorical poetics. Let me explain by telling a story about Sacks’s teaching of a
text whose narrative turns on a probable impossibility, and then returning to
his essay on generic distinctions.
In the spring of 1973, at the end of my very difficult MA year, I took Sacks’s
course in the eighteenth-century British novel. That course turned out to be
the transformative event in my academic career because it gave me a nascent
understanding of how what readers did as they followed novels from page to
page could serve as the basis for formal academic interpretation and theory.
One way Sacks taught the thirty or so of us in that course was by emphasizing
the power of textual patterns on our readerly intuitions about genre. He illus-
trated the point throughout the course in our discussions of all the novels we
read. I can’t say I still have the syllabus because Sacks never gave us one, but
memory tells me they were Pride and Prejudice, Pamela, Tom Jones, Rasselas,
Gulliver’s Travels, Humphry Clinker, and Tristram Shandy. One day, however,
Sacks decided to step back from the intricacies of these works and use a much
simpler text to illustrate his larger points. In fact, he started by giving us only
part of the text, whose author he identified as that prodigious and diverse
figure “Anonymous.”
Expenses for the Month
Oct. 1 Ad for female stenographer 1.00
Oct. 4 Violets for new stenographer 1.50
Oct. 6 Week’s salary for new stenographer 45.0 0
Oct. 9 Roses for stenographer 5.00
Oct. 10 Candy for wife .90
Oct. 13 Lunch for stenographer 7.0 0
Oct. 15 Week’s salary for stenographer 60.0 0- For some thoughtful engagements with Sacks’s work, see Springer, Lipking, Kincaid,
and Rader, “Literary.”
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 37