redundant telling, an implied author will have a character narrator improba-
bly tell a narratee something that the narratee already knows in order to com-
municate it to the authorial audience. The Meta-Rules of Dominant Focus and
Value Added can explain why some redundant narration is effective. When
Robert Browning in line 49 of “My Last Duchess” has the Duke of Ferrara say
to the envoy from the father of his next duchess that “the Count your mas-
t e r ’s known munificence” (emphasis mine) allows the Duke to be confident
about settling her dowry, the possessive phrase is redundant telling: the envoy
knows very well that the Count is his master, and the Duke’s story about what
he did to his last duchess is ample warrant that no inference about the envoy’s
heightened awareness of his own subordinate position should be disallowed.
But the unobtrusive reference does not disturb the dominant focus on Brown-
ing’s revelation of the Duke’s character, even as it adds enormous value to
that revelation: it reveals to Browning’s audience the identity of the Duke’s
narratee, a revelation that enables rhetorical readers to more fully grasp the
outrageousness of the Duke’s act of telling to this person on this occasion.^14
In one common version of paradoxical paralipsis, an author will have
a naïve character narrator retrospectively tell a story about the loss of her
naïveté without the new knowledge informing the narration. This improbable
withholding is typically not noticed—or if noticed, not deemed objection-
able—by the audience because it becomes apparent only after the audience has
experienced the naïve telling about the events that led to the loss of naïveté.^15
Plausible paralepses are instances of implausibly knowledgeable narration
that audiences welcome, such as we have examined in chapter 8 of The Great
Gatsby. And the previous section of this chapter seeks to explain the logic of
crossover phenomena. Figure 2.4 is a sketch of the spectrum, with the arrow
pointing in the direction of increasing power of the readerly dynamics to
shape the construction of the textual dynamics.
- Sarah Copland has also pointed out to me that the second half of the first line of
Browning’s poem, “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall” is an instance of redundant
telling, since the envoy knows he is looking at paint on a wall, but Browning needs to impart
that information to his audience. In this case, the redundancy is necessary for establishing the
dominant focus on the Duke and his storytelling about his last duchess. Like other techniques,
redundant telling can have a range of effects, depending on how it is deployed and how it inter-
acts with other aspects of a narrative. Browning does his best to keep the redundancy hidden;
other authors will call attention to it for different effects. In Living to Tell about It, I compare and
contrast Browning’s practice with that of Sandra Cisneros in “Barbie-Q.” Cisneros, I contend,
flaunts her redundant telling (1–30). - See my discussion of Hemingway’s use of this technique in “My Old Man” in chapter
4 of Narrative as Rhetoric.
58 • CHAPTER 2