Within the internal logic of the progression, then, the probable implau-
sibility is amply justified. But this analysis raises questions about nonfiction’s
responsibility to extratextual referentiality. Does such an implausibility rep-
resent an abdication of that responsibility, an abandonment of the implicit
promise to tell the truth? Does the analysis expose a huge problem in the
ethics of Small’s telling? Have I used rhetorical theory to do for Stitches what
TheSmokingGun.com did for James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces—that is,
reveal its deviation from the truth in a way that undercuts the audience’s trust
in the author to tell it like it was?
No, no, and no. The difference between Small and Frey is that Small’s rep-
resentation of what happened between him and Dr. Davidson refers to actual
events that occurred in their sessions, while Frey invented events that never
happened. If there were no Dr. Davidson, or if he did not warrant Small’s
gratitude in the acknowledgments (“my special thanks to Dr. Harold David-
son for pulling me to my feet and placing me on the road to the examined life”
[331]), then Small would be guilty of the ethical breaches Frey has admitted to.
What matters for Small’s story is not the strict referential accuracy of what he
and Dr. Davidson said to each other during their first session but that David’s
therapy generated the insights that helped him change the direction of his life.
The departure from the standard script and the deployment of the probable
implausibility via the crossover allows Small to communicate in an especially
effective manner just how powerfully transformative his experience with Dr.
Davidson was. It’s hard to imagine any reader who would prefer a representa-
tion of their first meeting that eschewed the probable implausibility for the
predictable probability of script following. I shall return to the ethical issues
related to probability in the next chapter.
A SPECTRUM OF (IM)PROBABILITY
The work of this chapter, along with some previous work on breaks in the
probability code in character narration in Narrative as Rhetoric and Living
to Tell about It, leads me to propose a spectrum of (im)probability, as seen
through the lens of rhetorical theory. At one end is the default case in which
the implied author constructs the textual dynamics so that they consistently
follow the narrative’s dominant system of probability (whether it is mimetic
or anti-mimetic) and the audience responds accordingly. At the other end is
the case of a strong crossover from readerly dynamics to textual dynamics,
such as we see in Stitches. In the middle of the spectrum are such phenom-
ena as redundant telling, paradoxical paralipsis, and plausible paralepsis. In
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 57