In 1973 I was fully persuaded by Sacks’s reasoning. Now I’m still persuaded
by his conclusion but want to revise his reasoning to some degree. While I
agree with reasons 1 and 3, I worry that Sacks’s assigning the story to a par-
ticular genre involves some a priori thinking on his part: the inference about
genre seems to control Sacks’s consideration of the alternative. More than that,
I think that Sacks’s reliance on the significance of genre obscures something
more fundamental to the feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phe-
nomena, and readerly response in the story: the role of the audience’s unfold-
ing responses to the progression on the very construction of that progression.
Let’s look more closely at the hypothesis that the textual signals of the story
should lead us to reinterpret it.
We might justify the reinterpretation (that the stenographer was already
pregnant) by arguing that it is well-grounded in Anonymous’s use of tem-
porality as a communicative resource. In this account, Anonymous follows
external probability and uses the temporality as a signal to prompt our recon-
figuration of character and events and our understanding of the story’s genre.
Rather than being a joke built on the genre of punitive comedy, the story
would become a more serio-comic tale in which Anonymous, while appropri-
ately punishing the record keeper, also gives significant covert agency to the
stenographer and puts some affective and ethical weight on her experiences.
Note that reasons 1 and 3 for preferring the “probable impossibility” reading
don’t work against this hypothesis, and thus, at this point, appealing to genre
isn’t sufficient for adjudicating between the hypotheses.
What does work against the reinterpretation, however, is something prior
to the inference about genre, the more detailed and textured unfolding of
readerly experience, which, I suggest, follows what I shall call the Rule of
Dominant Focus: once an author shapes the textual dynamics to establish a
dominant focus for the audience, the author relies on that focus in the con-
struction of new elements of the progression—even if those new elements
lead the audience to reinterpret the dominant focus. (I will return to this rule
later in the chapter.) Let me explain by briefly shifting away from the story’s
ending to the entry for Oct. 22: “Mary’s salary 75.00.” In the course of our
discussion, Sacks asked, “Who is Mary?” and we confidently and promptly
answered, “The stenographer.” But when Sacks then asked, “How do you know
that Mary is not some other employee?,” we realized that we could not cite any
definitive textual evidence. Instead, as Sacks pointed out, both the answer and
the conviction with which we gave it arise from the interplay between the tex-
tual patterning, our inferencing about it, and the effects that follow from that
inferencing. More generally, inferring that Mary is the stenographer involves
privileging the text-internal system of probability (which “of course” indicates
40 • CHAPTER 2