that Mary has to be the stenographer) over the text-external system (which
gives rise to the question of whether Mary is another employee).
I want to extend Sacks’s point to what I now see as a more radical one:
Anonymous relies on his audience’s unfolding responses as he writes this min-
imalist entry. In other words, Anonymous knows that the audience will infer
that Mary is the stenographer rather than some other employee because he
infers that the audience will have intuited the pattern of growing intimacy
between employer and employee and will therefore infer that his switching
from referring to her by her job title to referring to her by her name per-
fectly fits that pattern. Furthermore, Anonymous relies on these inferences
to heighten the audience’s negative ethical judgments of the record keeper’s
character, which are in turn crucial to the audience’s laughter at and satisfac-
tion in the reversal of fortune that occurs at the end of the month. Note that
all of these responses to the entry are distinct from any definitive conclusion
about the story’s genre.
Furthermore, this inferencing is all about the playing out of the stereo-
typical triangle of the record keeper, his female employee, and his unnamed
wife—indeed, an additional inference is about the significance of the record
keeper naming the employee but not his wife. In other words, the Dominant
Focus of the story is on (a) the ethical character of the record keeper and (b)
the rapid playing out—and the twist—of the stereotypical narrative. For bet-
ter and worse, the focus of the story is not on the ethical character of either
the wife or the stenographer. Reinterpreting the story entails piling up infer-
ences about the ethical character of the stenographer rooted not in the Domi-
nant Focus but only in the need to keep the story within the bounds of the
possible: she astutely assesses her boss’s ethical character and his relationship
with his wife in order to manipulate him into paying for her abortion, and so
on. In this respect, the reinterpretation, while still, of course, possible, looks
more and more like an overreading of the recalcitrant detail. To put this point
another way, paying attention to the Dominant Focus of the textual and read-
erly dynamics means that the “probable impossibility” reading of the story is
more probable (!) than the reinterpretation.^7
Extrapolating from this discussion of “Expenses for the Month,” I find
additional confirmation for the conclusion that the text-internal system is a
synthesis of two progressions, that of the representation of the events and that
of the audience’s responses to that representation. Furthermore, the synthesis
makes the system recursive: the audience’s responses to early parts of the text
- For a related argument about probability, albeit one grounded in a historicist analysis
of the mode of sentimentality, see Chandler.
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 41