The poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable
possibilities.
—ARISTOTLE, POETICS, CHAPTER 24
D
ESPITE THEIR obvious differences—in content, technique, and media—
these extracts from Stitches and “The Third and Final Continent,” when
viewed through ARA’s lens and its focus on reading experiences, have
three salient commonalities: (1) In each, as I will explain shortly, the implied
author violates the dominant logic governing the probability of cause-effect
relationships in the narrative. (2) In each, both the actual and authorial audi-
ences are not likely to notice the violation or to be bothered by it, if they do.
(This claim indicates that I do not regard the violation in Stitches to be Small’s
depiction of his psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Davidson, as the White Rabbit from
Alice in Wonderland, a point that I’ll return to in the next paragraph.) (3)
In each, the author’s violation increases the experiential effectiveness of the
narrative.
In the case of “The Third and Final Continent,” the dominant cause-effect
logic is that of fictional mimesis: Lahiri constructs characters who could plau-
sibly exist and events that could plausibly occur in the extratextual world.
Lahiri violates that mimetic logic by having her character, Mala, perform a
specific action (laughing) at this specific moment, because that action devi-
ates from the chain of cause and effect set up in the storyworld. In the case
of Stitches, the logic is that of memoir, a logic that allows for the expression
of subjective truths within a representation ultimately bound by reference to
actual people and events. The violation does not involve Small’s drawing of
the psychiatrist as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, since that is a
clearly marked excursion into fictionality designed to capture the subjective
truth of their relationship. The violation instead involves the probability of
the psychiatrist making these pronouncements to David on the occasion of
his first visit.
Violations such as these are as old as narrative itself, but I believe that
rhetorical theory has something new to say about them, especially about what
they reveal about the importance of audiences for the very construction of
narrative. Aristotle called out such violations in the Poetics with the famous
dictum that I have used as my third epigraph: “The poet should prefer prob-
able impossibilities to improbable possibilities” (24.10; my emphasis), and he
offers an example from the work commonly regarded as the first narrative in
the Western literary tradition: Achilles’ solo pursuit of Hector in book 22 of
the Iliad (the incident is “impossible” because Achilles’ fellow soldiers would
32 • CHAPTER 2
