The Conniving Stenographer and Other Stories: A Response to "Authors, Resources, Audiences"

My thinking about narrative is deeply indebted to the rhetorical approach that Jim Phelan has theorized in vital scholarship published over the last four decades. From his work I have learned to appreciate that authors design texts "to affect audiences in certain ways," that those designs are communicated through authors' deployments of "the resources of textuality," and that readers' responses are "a function, guide, and test" of those designs' textual realization (Implausibilities 169). That said, my response to his stimulating essay will focus on a factor that might not receive its due when narrative communication is understood as a feedback loop involving authors, texts, and readers. Not a fourth point in the loop, this factor is instead its context. It is the ever-changing field of play in which all rhetorical acts occur. While the most encompassing term for this factor is "culture," we evoke it as well when referring to socially learned rules, scripts, codes, and conventions and, not least, to genre.

Here, I will explore what greater attention to culture (including genre) might add to Phelan's consideration of audience responses in "Authors, Resources, Audiences" by focusing on his treatment of the text headed "Expenses for the Month."¹ Phelan recalls that when he and his classmates discussed this text with their teacher Sheldon Sacks in 1973, their discussion "led to a consensus" that the record keeper (having had an affair with his newly hired stenographer Mary and gotten her pregnant) paid for her abortion, bought his wife a mink stole to appease his guilt, and placed an ad for a male stenographer so as to avoid future temptation. Phelan recalls Sacks telling the class that "we had intuitively grasped the genre of the story: it's a joke that takes the form of a punitive comedy designed to provoke laughter." But, one may ask, where is the joke in a married man hiring a female employee, immediately wooing her and getting her pregnant, seeing that she has an abortion, apparently firing her, and replacing her with a male worker? We will return to this point after attending to a "glitch in the story" noted by Sacks: there is no way that Mary, having been hired by the record keeper after October 1, could know by October 25 that her boss had impregnated her. Given this challenge to the consensus interpretation, how should "Expenses" be read?

Phelan recalls that "Sacks identified two options with an additional choice accompanying the first one"—which is odd, given that the two choices under option one are so unalike. The options are (1a) fix the story as written so that the events take place "over a time span long enough for the stenographer to know that her employer was the father of her unborn child"; (1b) interpret it differently, comprehending the stenographer as an already-pregnant woman who "got involved with the record keeper in order to entrap him into paying for her abortion"; and (2) accept the too-short time span as "a minor flaw necessary for the story to deliver the effect appropriate to its genre of punitive comedy." Presumably Sacks grouped (1a) and (1b) together because they seek to remedy the glitch, whereas (2) accepts it as what Phelan calls a "justified error." A problem with this grouping is that it hides what (1a) and (2) share in common: they locate the "glitch in the story" in the text, whereas (1b) locates it in the story that readers (mis)construe from the text. In other words, (1b) alone conflicts with Sacks's belief that the timeframe of events constitutes an error on Anonymous's part. I imagine this is why Sacks gave this choice short shrift, adjoining it to option (1a): he could not imagine that the conniving stenographer interpretation might be credible.

As Phelan recalls, Sacks objected to that interpretation on the grounds that "flipping the relationship between victim and victimizer," so that the stenographer gains power over her philandering boss, "goes against the grain of our intuitive apprehension of the punitive comedy underlying the joke" and thus conflicts with...