torical theory on “textual dynamics” but is silent about its work on “readerly
dynamics” (“Time, Plot, Progression” 78). For the unnatural narratologists,
textual phenomena are more significant than audiences, whereas for rhetori-
cal theorists, that hierarchy is reversed. Consequently, where I emphasize the
“probable” side of a “probable impossibility,” the unnatural narratologists
would emphasize the “impossibility.” Thus, when presented with the cases I
have looked at so far, I believe that an unnatural narratologist would highlight
the impossibilities or implausibilities and then thematize them. That is the
procedure Richardson uses, for example, in his analysis of the “impossible”
temporality in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. While this approach has its virtues—
it explains the link between techniques and their signification in a way that
narratological interpretation has long valued—the approach does not address
rhetorical theory’s concern with how the interaction between readerly and
textual dynamics illuminates the experience of reading. Furthermore, this dif-
ference means that rhetorical theory’s concerns cut across the mimetic/anti-
mimetic divide. Nick’s narration remains within the realm of the mimetic—as
do the passages from Stitches and “The Third and Final Continent”—even as
all these cases break with the probability codes set up by the textual dynam-
ics. To put this point another way, rhetorical poetics cuts across unnatural
narratology because it roots its judgments of unnaturalness not just in anti-
mimetic textual phenomena but also in the ways that the trajectory of readerly
dynamics establishes its own set of expectations and even requirements about
the boundaries of the mimetic in a given narrative.
CROSSOVER PHENOMENA: DAVID SMALL’S STITCHES
With Stitches, I turn to probability in nonfiction memoir and I move from the
affordances of wholly verbal print to those of the graphic medium, even as I
return to an instance of a probable impossibility. As I noted earlier, the domi-
nant cause-and-effect logic of memoir allows for the expression of subjective
truths within a representation ultimately bound by reference to actual people
and events. Thus, Small’s depiction of Dr. Davidson as the White Rabbit is not
an impossibility because it is not a break in the dominant logic. Instead it is
a clearly signaled move to local fictionality (Small knows that his audience
knows that the psychiatrist is not the White Rabbit), and it is designed to cap-
ture the experiencing-David’s sense of having escaped from the grim reality
of everyday life in his dysfunctional family into the alternate reality consti-
tuted by the Wonderland of Dr. Davidson’s office. The probable impossibility
52 • CHAPTER 2