The Rhetoric of Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Delight: A Response to James Phelan

I wish to begin by identifying what I find to be particularly useful and important in the work of James Phelan. His general framework, emphasizing the mimetic, synthetic, and thematic aspects of narrative fiction, is an excellent model that is extremely capacious, able to cover a wide range of practices including the ideological, the verisimilar, and the distinctively literary, as well as the antimimetic aspects of fiction which I have termed the "unnatural." Jim has in fact made signal contributions to unnatural narrative theory and analysis in essays like "Implausibilities, Crossovers, Impossibilities: A Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Mimetic Code of Narration." His emphasis on the dynamic interaction of reader and text over the course of the reading is extremely important. Jim's framework and approach also allow for precision and are sensitive to nuance. We see these aspects in his account of narrative beginnings and endings and perhaps even more compellingly in his impressive though unfortunately underappreciated account of narrative aesthetics. As everyone knows, this is a diabolically difficult subject that has stymied critics, critical theorists, narratologists, and philosophers of art for centuries, yet Phelan has made real contributions to what constitutes literary value in narrative in his chapter "Rhetorical Aesthetics within Rhetorical Poetics" in Experiencing Fiction (133–49).

Having commented at some length fairly recently on many of the theoretical positions set forth by Jim along with Peter Rabinowitz (in Herman et al. 235–50), I will employ a more limited focus here, largely confining my comments to the questions of probability that are raised so intriguingly in the target essay. I find it an important discussion of an elusive subject that lies between the mimetic and the avowedly fictional; represented improbabilities can easily lead to what I have called the paradox of chance in fictional narratives (Unlikely 166-67). Such a discussion may also contribute to the theory of fictionality. This is the case, I suspect, even if these forays into rhetorically effective implausibilities and impossibilities can occasionally appear in non-fiction as well, as Jim has himself explored in his study of "off-kilter" nonfiction. I would like to ask him to reflect on the difference between the two. Even if these techniques appear in both fiction and nonfiction, I would think the stakes would be quite different: such impossibilities in a biography can be called mistakes, falsehoods, or lies; certainly, their use is far more constrained.

I would also like to see Jim go further, not so much in his general framework but in the applications of that framework: more specifically, I see his practice as privileging the mimetic component to the neglect of what could be a greatly expanded conception of the synthetic. Jim writes, for example, that implausibilities and probable impossibilities are "deviations from the dominant system of probability in a narrative" (12). This begs the question of whether a realistic canon of probabilities does in fact operate in the narrative. In many cases, it does not. In a supernatural causal system, fate may determine the structure of events: there is nothing plausible about Oedipus just happening to run into Laius on the road as he is fleeing Corinth so as not to kill his father—to say nothing of the fact that he marries a woman old enough to be his mother after he had learned that his fate was to marry his mother. Real-world considerations of probability would also have us look askance at a number of other questions, not only the cunning ones raised by Sandor Goodheart concerning the conflicting accounts of Laius' death, but also more mundane explorations of the improbable (or impossible?), such as just how old Jocasta was when she gave birth to Ismene?

Questions of probability are not central to all fiction. They are largely irrelevant in the plays of Aristophanes or Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, where an entirely different logic of connecting events rules; this is equally true of many postmodern works, as is graphically enacted when we see a flipped coin come up "heads" over seventy times in a...