influence the construction of later parts, which in turn influence the audi-
ence’s responses to those parts, and so on and so on.
These conclusions influence my reading of “The Psychological Implica-
tions of Generic Distinctions.” In that essay, Sacks poses the problem of how
to explain an audience’s confident interpretations of potentially ambiguous
events as unambiguous parts of unfolding genres. He notes, for example, that
at the beginning of chapter 2 of Pride and Prejudice, the narrator reports that
“Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He
had always intended to visit him, though to the last assuring his wife that he
should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid, she had no knowl-
edge of it.” Sacks argues that
in theory it would be possible to interpret the information conveyed to us in
the stylistically neutral sentences as evidence that we are to regard Mr. Ben-
net with horror since, in one sense, the information is final proof that the
first chapter had revealed an intelligent and ironic man pointlessly torment-
ing his ignorant and vulgar wife. (107)Sacks contends that this theoretical possibility is so rarely actualized by read-
ers because, by the end of chapter 1, they have intuited that the novel is a
comedy and that intuition governs their reading of those stylistically neutral
sentences.
But why should readers coming to the novel for the first time intuit a
comic genre, since there is no one-to-one correspondence between any set
of textual signals and the inference of comedy? Sacks’s answer consists of two
main moves: (1) He posits the assumption that “a finite—perhaps even a very
limited—number of formal aesthetic ends are known in advance by any reader
capable of reading a comedy as a comedy, or, indeed, by any writer capable
of writing one” (110). With a limited number of options, the reader can more
easily make correct choices with exposure to just a few signals of the generic
pattern. (2) Sacks deduces an account of how readers and writers acquire their
knowledge of this finite number of artistic ends by developing an analogy
with language acquisition, especially as understood through Noam Chom-
sky’s work on generative grammar. Chomsky’s work indicates that linguists
cannot explain the human ability to construct and understand new sentences
unless they conceive of the mind as having some innate disposition to learn
the grammar of a language. The actual acquisition of the grammar, of course,
depends on some combination of “innate ideas and external experience” (111).
So, too, says Sacks, does the acquisition of generic distinctions. We are not
born with generic patterns imprinted on our minds, but we are born with a
42 • CHAPTER 2