could not become pregnant.” More seriously, today we’d also have discussed
the misogynistic assumptions upon which the whole story is built.) Sacks also
drew our attention to how these inferences both fit with and reconfigured the
patterns of the first twelve entries, resulting in a conclusion that this ending
was better than anything we had come up with because of its deft management
of an appropriate surprise. Most importantly, we could recognize this ending
as better because we had intuitively grasped the genre of the story: it’s a joke
that takes the form of a punitive comedy designed to provoke laughter; its
structural logic is one in which the protagonist is given a temporary license to
advance his interests by transgressing the ethical norms of his world, only to
have the license taken away and to end up appropriately and comically pun-
ished for his transgressions.
Sacks had all of us nodding, but he wasn’t finished. He called our atten-
tion to the glitch in the story, its probable impossibility (though I don’t recall
that he used the term). In 1973, let alone the unknown year further in the
past in which the story is set, it would not be possible within the time frame
of the story for the stenographer to be pregnant by the record keeper and
know it. What to do? Sacks identified two main options with an additional
choice accompanying the first one: (1) Change or reinterpret the story so that
its events remain within the realm of the possible. The change would involve
having the same events play out over a time span long enough for the stenog-
rapher to know that her employer was the father of her unborn child. The
reinterpretation would involve inferring that the stenographer got involved
with the record keeper in order to entrap him into paying for her abortion.
(2) Accept the impossibility as a “justified error,” or in Sacks’s terms, a minor
flaw necessary for the story to deliver the effect appropriate to its genre of
punitive comedy.^6
Sacks preferred the second option for several reasons: (1) The affective
punch of this punitive comedy depends on its brevity and pace; changing
the story so that it extends over a longer period of time would weaken its
appeal. (2) Reinterpreting the story would entail flipping the relationship
between victim and victimizer, and that flip goes against the grain of our
intuitive apprehension of the punitive comedy underlying the joke. (3) The
story is not otherwise greatly concerned with extratextual probability, as a
little reflection on the mix of personal and business expenses and the restric-
tion of what’s included in the ledger indicate (no phone bill or other non-
relationship matters).
- Rader opts for a version of this second option, calling the glitch “an unintended and
unavoidable negative consequence” of the execution of a “positive constructive intention”
(“Fact, Theory” 38).
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 39