audiences. Once audiences infer that narratives are committed to a certain
set of interests—characters in action in a world like our own (the general
realm of the mimetic); a self-reflexive look at their own responses to narrative
resources (the general realm of the synthetic, as in metafiction); a narrative’s
particular philosophical or ideological agenda (the general realm of the the-
matic); and so on—they will continue to interpret new information in light
of that dominant focus until the textual phenomena provide sufficient recal-
citrance to frustrate those efforts. The question of how much recalcitrance is
sufficient is best answered on a case-by-case basis because the application of
this Meta-Rule will depend in part on how relevant the other five Rules are
to each case. For example, this Meta-Rule combines with the Rule of Partial
Continuity to explain why breaks in the perceptual field (or vision) of the
narration are less likely to be noticed when they are not accompanied by a
shift in voice.
(7) The Meta-Rule of Value Added: Readers overlook or do not take issue
with breaks in the probability code when those breaks enhance the reading
experience. This Meta-Rule applies to probable impossibilities such as Achil-
les’ pursuit of Hector or the stenographer’s pregnancy by the account–book
keeper in “Expenses for the Month” (in Sacks’s reading). It also applies to situ-
ations in which the break in the probability code allows audiences access to
material—relevant information, events, characterizations—that would not be
available without those breaks but that also enhance the audience’s unfolding
experiences.
LET’S NOW CONSIDER a more egregious example of implausibly knowledge-
able narration (one which is a clear-cut example of what Genette would call
paralepsis) in which most readers either don’t notice or don’t mind the break
in the probability code. In chapter 8 of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
has Nick Carraway report in considerable detail how George Wilson spent
the night after his wife Myrtle’s death.^11 The Rules of Duration and Temporal
Decoding guide the judgment of this break as more egregious than the one in
- I discuss this same stretch of narration in Narrative as Rhetoric, but I return to it not
just to comment on some different passages but also because I believe the Rules and especially
the Meta-Rules shed further light on how author-reader relations affect audiences’ responses
to the break in the probability code. In Narrative as Rhetoric, I emphasized that readerly judg-
ments of mimetic probability depend in part on conventions and that “those conventions are
so mewhat elastic and the criterion ‘what is probable or possible in life’ can sometimes give way
. . . to the criterion ‘what is needed by the narrative at this point’” (110). My discussion in this
chapter seeks to provide a richer, more nuanced account of how and why the conventions of
mimetic probability can be elastic.
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 49