Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction 9780367441418, 9781003007968

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Reading Contingency

In Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction, David Wylot constructs an innovative study of the relationship between plotted accidents in twenty-first-century British and American fiction, the phenomenology of reading, and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood to be contingent and accidental. A synthesis of literary and cultural analysis, narratology, critical theories of time and the philosophy of contingency, the book explores the accident’s imagination of contemporary time and the relationship between reading and living in novels by writers including A. M. Homes, Nicola Barker, Noah Hawley, J. M. Coetzee, J. G. Ballard, Jesmyn Ward, Jennifer Egan, and Tom McCarthy. Dr. David Wylot is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

34 The Humanist (Re)Turn Reclaiming the Self in Literature Michael Bryson 35 Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat Edited by Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin Hobson, and Danny Hoey 36 Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction Literature Beyond Fordism Roberto del Valle Alcalá 37 Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties Matthew T. Pifer 38 Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English Art of Crisis Wojciech Drąg 39 Patrick McGrath and his Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan 40 The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Phil O’Brien 41 Reading Contingency The Accident in Contemporary Fiction David Wylot For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Reading Contingency The Accident in Contemporary Fiction

David Wylot

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of David Wylot to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-44141-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00796-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Accident and Contingency 1 PART 1

Time

35

1 Forwards: Accident, Event, and Picaresque 37 2 Backwards: Accident, Coincidence, and Teleological Retrospection 64 PART 2

Narrative

93

3 Forwards and Backwards: Reading Contingency 95 PART 3

Accident Narratives

127

4 Radical Contingency 129 5 Unassimilable Contingency Coda Bibliography Index

159 187 193 207

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement from my colleagues, mentors, and friends. Ideas for it began at the University of York in Jane Elliott’s classroom, and without Jane’s early and continued intellectual involvement this project would not exist. I was then lucky to gain the mentorship of my PhD supervisors at Queen Mary, Mark Currie and Shahidha Bari. Mark’s stewardship has had a profound impact on my intellectual development, and much of what is of value in this project undoubtedly comes from him. Shahidha’s advice has always pushed me to consider the bigger picture both of the project and of academic life, and this book is a testament to her rigorous readings. I am also extremely grateful to my viva examiners for encouraging me to continue to develop the project’s ideas and ambition. Patricia Waugh’s mentorship and questioning of the study’s fundamental arguments and Caroline Edwards’s indispensable guidance on refining and positioning its claims have both continually provided me with the motivation and intellectual push needed to complete this project. Furthermore, Reading Contingency’s development would not have been possible without the brilliant guidance and support of Jennifer Abbott and Mitchell Manners at Routledge. And finally, I am extremely grateful to Julia Jordan and James Fisher for their meticulous feedback and extensive reader commentary on early versions of this manuscript. Much of what is of value in this book exists because of the intellectual contributions made by many of my colleagues at Queen Mary between 2012 and 2019: James Dunkerley, Alexandra Effe, Katherine Fleming, Niall Gildea, Helena Goodwyn, Joel Grossman, Suzanne Hobson, Matt Ingleby, David James, Ellen Jones, Ivan Juritz, Rosie Langridge, Jacob McGuinn, and Helen Tyson. I want to thank, in particular, Hetta Howes and Clare Whitehead for the coffee and mutual encouragement during our shared research days. I am also extremely grateful to the readers of early and late versions of the chapters in this study, without whom a great deal of clarity, rigour, and argument would be missing: Huw Marsh, Emily Hogg, Sam McBean, Zara Dinnen, and Charlotte Terrell. I am also very thankful to the School of English at the University of Leeds for providing me with a welcoming environment in which to

viii Acknowledgements complete the final stages of this manuscript, and I am particularly grateful to Stuart Murray, John McLeod, and Ian Fairley for their mentoring and support. My sincerest thanks also extend to the numerous intellectual contributions made by colleagues at other institutions, including Alexander Beaumont, Amy De’Ath, Seb Franklin, George Legg, Rafael Lubner, Christine Okoth, Karina Lickorish Quinn, Charlotte Terrell, and countless other colleagues and friends. I am particularly thankful to have early versions of this work receive detailed feedback at a variety of conferences and workshops, including ‘BAMS: Modernism Now!’ at the University of London, ‘Time, Freedom, and Narrative’ at the University of Manchester, ‘Post-45’ at King’s College London, and ‘BACLS: What Happens Now?’ at Loughborough University. I also wouldn’t be writing this without the generous support of the various institutions in which I have studied and worked. Thank you to the University of Kent, in particular, Alex Padamsee and David Stirrup, for helping to kick-start my journey in this industry, and also to staff at the University of York. None of this would have been possible also without the brilliant School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, in particular, Faisal Abul, Jonathan Boffey, Rob Ellis, and Suzi Lewis. Much of the initial writing for this study was completed during my evening shifts in the peaceful Whitechapel Library, and for that I am very grateful to the Queen Mary Library Services team. I am also grateful to the generous staff at Hult International Business School. My thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous support funded the PhD thesis on which this study is based. Lastly, I couldn’t have done any of this without the vast support from friends and family. Thank you to Tadhg Caffrey, Kyle Canning, Harry Cockburn, David George, Jane Elliott, Debbie Hannan, Hetta Howes, Charlie Martin, Kate Mason, John Nugent, Maxim Whenray-Hughes, Clare Whitehead, and Alex Whiteman. Thank you also to my family, Claire and Chris Wylot, Rose and Tom, and my grandparents. And, of course, to my partner Arcadia, whose mixture of friendship and impatience at academia couldn’t have made for better support. Sorry we haven’t done much this summer. A portion of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Everywhere and All the Time: Accident, Radical Contingency, and Crash’ in Textual Practice (published online: 15 February 2019). My thanks to Taylor & Francis Group for permission to reprint it here.

Introduction Accident and Contingency

What happens when an accident happens? One tends to say that the event that happens happens by chance. It is not answerable to anyone’s (or any thing’s) intention, but rather simply occurs, as if out of the blue, unforeseeably. An accident’s happening invites a difficult kind of retrospective interpretation, a thinking back to the causes, significances, and intentions that precede the event. As philosopher Jean-François Lyotard suggests, what is at issue with an unexpected event like an accident is both the thing happening and the belated question that asks what is happening: ‘Before asking questions about what it is and about its significance, before the quid, it must “first” so to speak “happen”, quod. That it happens “precedes”, so to speak, the question pertaining to what happens’ (1991, 90). Because interpretation happens when a thing happens, accidents are sensitive to perspective and to context, and their existence is continually up for debate. Accidents are therefore fraught with uncertainty, for it often seems that the final word on an event’s accidental nature is susceptible to interpretative difference. When an accident happens, interpretation happens; and yet, it is interpretation that judges an event to be accidental. The accident’s interpretative uncertainty is further complicated if we read one happen in a novel or watch one happen in a film. Plotted events in narrative are destined to happen. Their ultimate cause is artistic design. The chance of an accidental event is intimately troubled when the events of a narrative, no matter how seemingly chanceful, are destined to occur and unfold within the terms of a fictional future that is already in place. But despite this fundamental difference between accidental events in narrative fiction and accidental events in real life, there is still a sense that we can read plotted accidents as accidents if we view them as taking place in the world of the story in which they occur. Permitting this similarity, is it possible to analyse plotted accidents in narrative fiction in order to yield insight into how we experience things happening in real life? Are reading and living alike? This study examines the temporality of the accident in relation to both reading contingency and living contingency. It considers accidental events to be partly constitutive of a particular experience of time, and it argues that narrative is fundamental to the experience of accidents in life. The temporal ‘doubleness’ of

2  Introduction: Accident and Contingency chance and fate experienced when reading narrative accidents, I suggest, can instruct in the experience of what it is like to be subject to and cognise a contingent event. Reading Contingency offers cultural, literary, and narratological insight into a series of accidents in a range of British and North American fictions. It synthesises narratology and philosophical descriptions of temporal experience to point to narrative as a mediating structure for both. In doing so, this study argues that philosophical accounts of contingency can tell us something about life and about narrative, but also that the experience of reading plotted accidents models the accident’s multivalent temporality in these philosophical discussions. Through combined analysis of fiction, narrative theory, the phenomenology of reading, and critical theories of time, Reading Contingency seeks to offer a new perspective on Anglophone contemporary literature centred on this multivalent temporality, in which the plotted accident models a particular relationship to time organised around contingency and futurity. Contingency, in the instances outlined in this study, furnishes a paradigm of temporal experience shaped in relation to the future, and specifically in relation to contingency’s conceptual association with futurity and the future that might be otherwise. However, this is not to homogenise the present nor to reduce different expressions of accident and contingency to a single account of time. History invariably mediates the ways in which the fictions and critical theories under study imagine time through accident. Reading Contingency therefore explores the intersection between fictional representations of accident and a broad nexus of historical, ideological, and political coordinates that shape and determine chance incidence. In doing so, the study analyses the accident’s significance for a contemporary experience of time marked by accident, but it does so by mapping contingency’s differential social and historical manifestations onto those fictional representations. In 1994 Adam Phillips would describe contingency to be a ‘once philosophically fashionable word’ (1995, 9). This hardly seems the case today. Although drawn from ‘old-fashioned’ sources (from antiquity through to early modern theology and Enlightenment natural philosophy), contingency and its synonyms arguably preoccupy a dominant thread in contemporary continental philosophy.1 Contingency is a philosophical term to describe the existence of something as non-necessary and concerns the issue of modality. When something is necessary, it is indispensable, fixed, and immutable, and the term often arises in discussions of natural law and logic. If one extrapolates necessity to think about things that happen, then a necessary event is a thing that was always going to happen and could not have happened differently. A contingent event, by contrast, is something that can happen, but that does not have to happen; if it does happen, then it could have happened differently, or not at all. Much of the interest in contingency in contemporary philosophy and

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  3 critical theory lies in its capacity to conceptualise time to be essentially open, and the future as objectively opaque and unforeseeable. Whatever happens, these discourses suggest, could always have happened differently. This is a conceptualisation of contingency that can serve many theoretical and conceptual ends depending on context. Because accidental events refer to a specific event or occurrence, their demarcation is always subject to interpretation; what I see as an accident, another may not. An accident’s denomination, in other words, reveals a time and place’s causal epistemology. This study suggests that the accident as event, narrative trope, and conceptual metaphor provides a lens through which to examine a contemporary experience of time that is marked by contingency. Seeking to respond to the specifically written nature of fictional temporality, the study argues that the predominance of accidental events in some contemporary Anglophone fictions models contingency’s diverse array of contexts and narrates a contemporary experience of time predisposed to what I term ‘contingent futurity’, an imaginative and conceptual association between contingency and the open future. But in doing so, written narrative also structures contingent events according to a dynamic of end-orientation that feeds back into and shapes the experience of contingency in life. Acknowledging the diverse histories of the present, this project seeks to map out what the prevalence of plotted accidental events in contemporary fiction says about the historical and cultural contexts of chance incidence and the unforeseeable future in contemporary accounts of time.

A Very Brief History of Chance Chance means different things in different contexts. 2 Despite the assumption today that it is an influential player in the world, acknowledgement of its presence has not always been the case.3 Although histories of chance rarely posit a specific historical time frame for when it takes imaginative hold on artists, philosophers, and scientists, chance’s prominence (and its paradoxical taming) is often said to coincide with modernity.4 Three specific narratives often narrate chance’s imaginative ascendance: scientific understandings of a hyper-complex, chance-ridden universe; the metropolitan city as a cipher for the increasing randomness of everyday life; and globalisation’s economic and environmental production of risk. Ian Hacking’s influential account of the ‘taming’ and simultaneous production of chance through an ‘avalanche of printed numbers’, and the rise of theories of statistical probability in the early and mid-­nineteenth century, sets much of the tone of scientific accounts of chance’s ‘invention’ (2002, 3). On the one hand, statistical science held out for chance’s eventual prediction and was often supported by discourses of determinism. This model of scientific determinism portrayed itself as a machine

4  Introduction: Accident and Contingency for the explanation of every event; what one does not know now is only due to a lack of sufficient knowledge.5 But simultaneously, chance’s taming by statistical probability also leads to its codification as a seemingly unavoidable and unquantifiable agent in the world’s unfolding. Hacking suggests that in contrast to probability’s reach for divine knowledge, the quantification of unforeseeable events with statistics also disseminated chance as a constitutive category of temporal experience. The ‘taming of chance’, then, signals chance’s simultaneous reduction in modernity to statistical prediction and its explosion as an inescapable factor in modern life. This narrative of chance’s codification verges later into the territory of sciences of complexity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. Each of these, in its own way, introduces chance as an objective force in the world. Chaos theory in particular swaps out deterministic natural law for complex and unpredictable systems replete in complex causation and unforeseeable emergence, only inferable as following a particular causal pattern after the fact.6 Chaos theory therefore finds cultural appeal in its capacity to explain the world as indeterminate, but an indeterminate world that nonetheless succumbs to a posteriori narrative explanation.7 There are many ways of thinking about what this ‘taming’ might mean for literary history, ranging from nineteenth-century fiction’s reliance on providential or moral purpose guiding plotted chance events, to aleatory composition’s giddy embrace of chance as co-conspirator in aesthetic creation.8 For alternate histories of chance, however, the novel’s role in the mapping of the metropolitan city also paves the way for a uniquely modern experience of chance. The city in this light, as Raymond ­Williams puts it, suggests a contradiction at the heart of modernity, between ‘the coexistence of variation and apparent randomness with what had in the end to be seen as a determining system’ (2011, 154). The creation of the modern city ‘systematises’, in Williams’ words, the experience of chance because it is the sum ‘of so many lives colliding, jostling, disrupting, colliding, recognising, [and] settling’ (2011, 164).9 One arguably cannot think about modernism’s ‘shock’ aesthetics without considering the influence of the city on the flâneur’s chance collisions, and equally, this account of the city’s production of chance also impacts later in the twentieth-century on discussions of globalisation, which theorise global capitalism’s dream of a financially borderless world. For David Harvey, economic globalisation intensifies urban randomness by expanding the idea of a city beyond its traditional limits, collapsing the world’s multiple times and spaces into a single, shared spatiotemporal coordinate. The world’s increased exposure, trade, connectivity, and informational circulation result in an almost dizzying uncertainty, with multiple spaces and multiple times infracting on one another in often arbitrary and random patterns (1995, 284–307).10 The unexpected increasingly erupts into perception without warning in a

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  5 world of economic globalisation and space–time compression.11 Such production of chance and uncertainty, then, is historically coterminous with the emergence of environmental, industrial, and financial risk. Risk is, according to Anthony Giddens, a lens through which to measure and assess the world, referring to ‘hazards that are actively assessed in relation to future possibilities’ (2002, 22). In sociological parlance, this is the domain of ‘risk society’, a ‘reflexive’ stage of late modernity in which globalisation’s various entanglements result in an uncontrollable and unpredictable environment. Globalisation produces risk, creating what sociologist Ulrich Beck terms ‘world risk society’, which depicts a global ‘conditio[n] of manufactured uncertainty, [where] more and better knowledge often means uncertainty’ (1997, 6). Although risk society ostensibly seeks the management and prevention of risk, its obverse effect is to position chance, accident, and uncertainty as irreducible aspects of the world. This leads philosopher of speed Paul Virilio to argue that the accident provides a key hermeneutic tool for describing late capitalist modernity’s systematic production of risk. In doing so, Virilio formulates an historical account of the accident that describes contemporary life to be perpetually subjected to contingent events that are, from a broader perspective, the necessary ‘blowback’ of that same system. Describing this contradictory modality through the logic of inevitable accidents, Virilio argues that modernity invents its own catastrophes: To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway. (2007, 10) Accidents, he says, are ‘an invention in the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen’ (2007, 9). Virilio therefore historicises the accident to depict modernity as increasingly uncertain and subject to accident in various domains, from technological disaster to finance capitalism’s deterritorialised circuits of data flow and labour.12 His eschatological sociology underwrites the event’s contingency with a systemic view of its statistical regularity and technological necessity. No longer the spanner in the works of Fordist rationalisation, the accident is rather an inevitable, socially distributed outcome of late capitalist modernity. To consider contingency the signature of risk, then, is also to consider contingency’s uneven distribution. This is in turn to combine Beck’s and Virilio’s mainly sociological accounts of technological and industrial risk with more recent accounts of financialised risk which, as Randy Martin suggests, re-describe subjectivity in terms of one’s capacity to wager on the uncertain future. Chance may be philosophically all encompassing, but risk’s social distribution, which often discriminates along racialised

6  Introduction: Accident and Contingency and gendered lines, discursively separates those who are ‘risk capable’ from those who are ‘at risk’ or unable to live by the increased uncertainty of risk (Martin 2007).13 But whether financialised or industrial and environmental uncertainty, contingency – risk’s signature – comes to be seen to be historically and socially distributed. A longer, systemic view of the accident’s contingent appearance, then, shows that despite chance’s apparently non-discriminatory nature, its manifestations and effects can be understood to be socially determined, which can worry away at the denomination of an event as accident. The history of chance, then, is also the history of its distribution. For this reason, a definition of accident is needed.

Accident The two oft-cited definitions of an accident come from Aristotle’s distinction between accident and substance and in its Latin origins in accidere. Aristotle categorised the being of something into either its substance or its accidental properties. The substance of a thing was for him its essence, the unchangeable root that fundamentally shapes its form and identity, whereas its accidental qualities are mutable, are subject to change, and differ depending on context. As Ross Hamilton puts it in his expansive account of this philosophical history, to ‘address the problem of change and transformation, Aristotle proposed that a quality that is neither a common occurrence nor necessary to the existence of some thing over time should be called accidental’ (2007, 13). The accidental, therefore, is an irregular quality of something that depends upon a particular time and place, rather than an essential property of that thing. This influences an Aristotelian idea of change and causation in which accidental events name forms of unexpected change that are unanticipated by a thing’s substance. Accidere, on the other hand, means to happen, or to befall, and takes its meaning from cadere, the distant origins for ‘chance’, which similarly means ‘to fall’. This double association with falling is clear in the image of the falling dice, often held up as a quintessential figure for chance. Chance’s state of falling and being unforeseeable seem to presuppose one another, too, which is philosopher Jacques Derrida’s insight. The falling of chance, he suggests, has to do with its constitutively unforeseeable nature. Derrida considers how anticipation is often thought about metaphorically as a ‘horizon’, in which one can see the coming of an event in the distance. But if chance is to be completely unforeseeable, then it short-circuits this horizontal axis, and instead has to be thought about vertically: To attempt to think chance would be in the first place to interest oneself in the experience […] of what happens unforeseeably. […]

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  7 So, one might say: no horizon for the event or the encounter, only the unforeseeable on a vertical axis. (2007a, 349) The fall of chance etymologically ensures its unforeseeable nature. It follows that if we can foresee a particular chance event, then we reduce it to an anticipatory horizon that strips the event of its chance. Derrida considers multiple types of chance incidence, from the aleatory to the coincidental, but in everyday usage, the category chance tends to signify an abstract possibility in the world (things can happen by chance), whereas an accident refers more directly to a specific event or occurrence. If accidents are a subset of the broader category of chance, then it follows that they are also contingent, because they are not inevitable and could have happened differently. Contingency and chance, then, are parent categories of the accidental event, which conforms to one type of incidence within a larger array of events. Accidents are actualisations of contingency and chance, but contingency and chance are qualities of existential possibility, pertaining less to specific events than to the issue of modality, and appeal to frameworks for what is possible. Accidents in everyday usage, however, typically describe surprising events that are notable for the lack of intention, responsibility, planning, and clear causal sequence that precedes them. But like chance, the category ‘accident’ is a socially sensitive judgement. Accidents tend to be seen as unintended consequences of an action. As Hamilton suggests, pace Aristotle, ‘determining whether or not to call the event an accident involves interpreting the relation between intent and outcome’ (2007, 16). If one’s intent is to dig a hole for a plant, then stumbling across buried treasure is accidental because of the intentional sequence leading to this, just as an industrial injury can be seen as an accident if the injury is the outcome of a process either unintended by the machinery’s design or the victim’s actions. However, the mixture of causality and intention is an uneasy one with accidents. It is often said that accidents stem from causes, but that they also seem to exceed those causes. It is not easy, for instance, to directly ascribe an immediate cause to an event that seems to emerge from a multitude of factors and elements in combination, or to tiny and seemingly irrelevant conditions that have dramatic, unforeseen effects. In an early essay, Roland Barthes writes that an accident’s rule of ‘minor causes, great effects’ means that ‘the causal relation is peculiar’, producing ‘a “deranged” causality [that] can be everywhere’ (1972, 190). Accidents, then, regularly frustrate simplistic notions of individual agents of cause and effect. An accident’s relationship with causality is often uncertain, and ‘under suspicion, dubious, absurd, since in some sense the effect frustrates the cause’ (Barthes 1972, 194). I will not jettison notions of causality entirely in this study but will often point to the uncertain, or fuzzy, causality that accidents interpretatively entail.

8  Introduction: Accident and Contingency Intention and cause ultimately lead to moral questions of blame and responsibility. The word ‘accident’ is used, after all, to partially absolve blame. Critic David Rudrum draws attention to the ethical questions involved in accidents. While a mistake suggests that the event is attributable to a partially responsible party or cause, an accident is far more inexplicable, ethically emptying out the blame that we might usually attach to an event’s interpretation (2013, 425). And yet, demonstrating the interpretative uncertainty of an accident, Rudrum nevertheless acknowledges that it is increasingly rare for an accident to be accounted for as no one’s responsibility. In these litigious times, after all, if one looks far enough, one can ascribe a responsible party to almost any accident. While such contextual evidence no doubt troubles the accident’s association with responsibility today, I also argue that this uncertainty over whether accidents are really accidents also arises because of the accident’s dependency on interpretation and perspective in any context. Accidents invite interpretation. They catalyse a hermeneutic endeavour that seeks out causes, intentions, and responsibilities, even if these are complex, difficult to pick apart, and uncertain. Despite the accident’s ethical absolution of blame, the possibility of ascribing some responsibility always remains possible when accidents depend on the interpretation of a sequence of events to exist in the first place. This uncertainty can extend from ascribing a direct responsibility on behalf of the victim to pointing to a complex social apparatus’ systemic responsibility for an accidental event. Therefore, although accidents tend to absolve responsibility, the complex web of causes involved in an accident often means that if one digs deep enough, responsibility (whether correctly, incorrectly, or ambiguously determined), like causality, is not a long time coming. It is this kind of complementarity between accident and cause, contingency and necessity, even chance and fate, which will reverberate throughout this study.

Narrative Accidents Accidents involve scrutiny into the sequence of events that precede them, inviting interpretative stands in which causal epistemologies collide with one another in hermeneutical activity. This is also a good way of describing the cognitive processes involved in reading for causality in narrative fiction. Indeed, the effort to understand an accidental event through causal interpretation involves the same interpretative dynamics involved in making sense of events in fictional worlds. Narrative theorist Brian Richardson puts it helpfully by suggesting that the ‘hermeneutical challenge’ posed by chance events involves a form of interpretation that pieces together information into a mental narrative of events, and that this imagined narrative helps to explain or understand the event inside a causal sequence both in fiction and in everyday experience (1997, 13). It follows, then, that if narrative underwrites the experience of everyday

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  9 life, and that both text and world are interpreted through similar strategies, then we can analyse the dynamics of reading accidents in order to say something more generally about experiencing accidents in life. But this study would not be complete without the qualification that accidents in fictional texts aren’t really accidents.14 They are subject to prior planning, authorial will, and are determined in advance in a way that accidents are not in real life. It’s no accident that Karl Popper draws on the recorded film, a narrative-based example, to describe an ultimate, deterministic universe, in which ‘the future co-exists with the past; and the future is fixed, in exactly the same sense as the past’ (1982, 5). The same pertains to a novel: its future exists in the same sense that its past does, even if, from our perspective in the story, it appears also open and unforeseeable. No matter how compelling or surprising an accident might be in our imaginative appreciation of the narrative’s fictional world, a perspective that takes account of the written text’s prior completion as predetermined acknowledges that a plotted accident is hardly contingent, but rather determined in advance.15 One of Reading Contingency’s aims is to explore what the experience of reading a plotted accidental event can tell us about the experience of an accident in everyday experience, and vice versa, if philosophical discussions of contingency can inform a narratological approach to the dynamics of reading a plotted accident. If accidents in everyday experience invoke a hermeneutical question that catalyses interpretation, and if that interpretation involves the configuration of an event into narrative through the dynamics of anticipation and retrospection, then one of the results of this process of narrative configuration, I will suggest, is narrative’s capacity to make accidents and contingent events seem far from accidental or contingent. Causal interpretation in this light has the potential to reduce the chance of an event to an interpretative coherence that does not appear chanceful in retrospect, because of its ordering of the event into a precariously organised albeit mental narrative that ensconces the event inside of a beginning, middle, and end. I will trace this kind of retrospective conversion of chance into narrative throughout this study, with specific reference to narrative’s retrospective conversion of chance into the appearance of causal necessity and inevitability after the fact. Although my discussion will mainly concern narrative’s structural mediation of life, it is worth remembering that this kind of configuration of chance into an explanatory order, or even fate, is also familiar to a common-sense understanding of chance. After all, as Valerie Rohy points out, we hear this in pop music all the time: Perhaps love always carries an element of contingency (‘How did I randomly met this person who is now essential to my happiness?’), as well as the retroactive revision of contingency into necessity (as the song says, ‘it had to be you.’). (2015, 178)

10  Introduction: Accident and Contingency Narrative has the potential to confer the effect of necessity onto what at first seemed contingent. In this moment of hindsight, we read chance ‘backward’ into its conditions. This risks retrospectively projecting the contingent event onto what precedes it, positing the event as the fulfilment of an outcome that was already implied in its conditions and as something that we could have foreseen with the right knowledge. In a mental narrative of this causal sequence, one’s knowledge of the end imaginatively imposes momentum and direction onto its beginning; causal interpretation reduces the vast array of possible causal factors for an accident to a selective few, and it reads the accident into its causes as if these causes could not have resulted in any other outcome. In other words, this form of interpretation can reduce the accident to the status of a goal implicit in its own conditions, as if those conditions were in fact already set in motion towards it. Retrospection can therefore cast the illusion that the event was always going to happen onto an experience of something that by definition did not have to happen. This is a teleological process that stems, I argue, from the structure of narrative temporality. If this is the case, then the experience of reading plotted accidents, which condense chance and fate, models the phenomenological process by which hindsight subjects accidents both to contesting causal explanations and to fateful interpretation. The study of narrative illuminates such cognitive processes. Narrative theorist Emma Kafalenos argues that temporal experience involves the application of narrative to life, so much so that ‘we experience the world […] as if it were a narrative that we were reading’ (2006, 130). But moreover, the experience of life as if a story implies a particular temporal position for the observer. It is not that we live life as if we are following an incomplete story, but rather that we live life as if we are following a story that we imagine we are looking back on from the end. The reasons for this are complex and will occupy a large part of this study. But to summarise briefly in relation to causal interpretation, the logic runs that if we can only interpret events by imaginatively understanding them in a causal sequence, then it follows that we can only understand an event’s full significance in hindsight, when seen in its ‘complete’ sequence, rather than in its provisional form in the present.16 For this reason, Kafalenos makes the striking remark that life is lived as narrative not just through retrospection but through the anticipation of retrospection: ‘We interpret events retrospectively, as if they had occurred […] as if retrospectively, in relation to the configuration in which we perceive them’ (2006, 132). Kafalenos’s point is that in order to causally interpret events, one must imagine events inside of a completed sequence, in relation to their anticipated effects as well as to their causes. This involves an anticipatory form of hindsight, in which one grasps the provisional present as already complete through an imagined position of future hindsight.

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  11 Although unmentioned by Kafalenos, there exists a school of narrative theory that says something very similar about the temporality of reading. Peter Brooks, for instance, argues that the pull of narrative’s strange logic comes from its encouragement of our anticipation of retrospection, and so too do Paul Ricoeur and Mark Currie.17 Recognising this complementarity between reading narrative and narrative experience, I suggest that we can study the dynamics of reading narrative accidents in order to explore the hermeneutical questions that the experience of an accident in real life provokes. Plotted accidents are fated because they exist in narrative, but accidents in real life can appear to be the result of teleological momentum because we understand them in terms of a completed narrative that we are looking back on from the end. Reading Contingency’s embrace of this complementarity is one of its significant contributions to previous surveys of narrative chance.18 Prior studies also carefully distinguish real chance from plotted chance, but this distinction often leads to either one of two arguments. On the one hand, some bracket ‘absolute’ chance in favour of a discussion of the historical and thematic implications at play in a particular text’s representation of a chance event.19 On the other hand, the accounts of chance that focus on the fundamental difference between chance and narrative look for ways in which texts can approach the representation of chance through experimental form. 20 By contrast, Reading Contingency restricts itself to analysis of plotted accidents as story events in narrative to consider the ways in which reading these accidents and living accidents can often be thought about together. My argument is that reading contingency can tell us something about living contingency, just as living contingency can tell us something about reading contingency, and that accidents are a privileged lens through which to explore this complementarity, because of the seeming incommensurability between chance in narrative and chance in life. In summary, accidents, unlike any other trope, draw attention to the difference between the open future of real life, the closed future of a novel or film, and the entwinement of these two futures when reading contingency or watching contingency.

Epochal Temporality The intersection between reading and living does not just have to be a purely technical discussion of narrative and temporal experience. This study also seeks to explore cultural production’s socially symbolic meaning by offering an account of the role narrative accidents play in the cultural imagination of time, specifically with regard to contemporary Anglophone fiction. Designations of the ‘contemporary’ are themselves always problematic, due in part to the term’s referentially doubled nature. On the one hand, the ‘contemporary’ in the phrase ‘contemporary Anglophone culture’ refers to

12  Introduction: Accident and Contingency the idea that the present moment, ‘now’, is a coeval and shared time. This is fraught with issues, from the transience of the ‘now’ to the conceptually dangerous totalisation of a ‘shared’ time when the present, as many suppose, is non-synchronous and multiple. 21 On the other hand, the ‘contemporary’ in ‘contemporary Anglophone culture’ also refers to an epochally particular historical moment in literary history, in which themes and critical theories associated with prior cultural moments, most notably postmodernism, have lost their explanatory edge. There is a sense in this latter formulation that the sensibility of the present moment is qualitatively unique. Statements like ‘contemporary fiction’ often straddle the dual meaning of the word ‘contemporary’, then, drawing attention both to their now-ness and to the fact that they share in a growing set of intellectual, historical, and aesthetic concerns. We might say that ‘contemporary’ as it is used in contemporary literary studies of British and North American fiction is doubly deictic: it refers both to a temporal notion of coeval presence and to a qualitative, historically specific judgement about the set of concerns that are particular to that imagined common time.22 As philosopher Peter Osborne suggests, designations of the contemporary are therefore narrative judgements, which involve grasping of the unending present in a temporal and spatial totality: ‘it is a productive act of imagination to the extent to which it performatively projects a non-existent unity of present times, all constructions of the contemporary are fictional, in the sense of fiction as a narrative mode’ (2013, 23). 23 The process of making a claim for a contemporary moment and demarcating it, then, involves an arbitrary collation of different, disjunctive times into an imaginatively shared one, a ‘disjunctive unity’ as Osborne calls it, thereby enabling the fiction of the claim of a shared or common moment that is qualitatively particular. Contemporary periodisation, in other words, involves a strange kind of extrication from time in order to talk about it, an imaginative act of stepping outside of or of stilling the present’s movement in order to periodise and analyse it (Osborne 2013, 25).24 This insistence on a narrative operation invites a question: whose contemporary? There are as many different versions of the contemporary in British and American culture as there are dates for when postmodernism ‘ends’. 25 From numerous special journal editions on contemporary literature after postmodern aesthetics to accounts by postmodernism’s early popularisers announcing its wane, versions of the contemporary are multiple and numerous. 26 In an influential manifesto, for instance, Amy Hungerford calls for ‘Post-45’ literary studies to adopt a notion of the long contemporary, in an effort to avoid the necessarily arbitrary determination of beginnings and endings (2008, 419). Nevertheless, accounts of the contemporary epoch’s succession of postmodernism have remained resiliently influential in recent scholarship, from discussions of the shift away from postmodern strategies of irony and metafiction

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  13 to considerations of new forms of materialism and even a rejuvenated modernism. 27 The risk, however, in a method of periodisation that seeks to quantify the contemporary by way of the perceived absence of something present or presence of something absent in postmodern aesthetics lies in its potential for depending on caricatured accounts of the postmodern and for minimising the plurality and non-synchronicity of the contemporary. 28 Acknowledging these pitfalls, this study considers the explanatory limits of postmodern cultural theories of time for contemporary Anglophone production, but with the continued qualification that these texts and critical accounts of temporality form only one account of a particular relation to time in Anglophone aesthetics, rather than the dominant or univocal thread. At the very least, to claim that the present moment presents a clean break or rupture from postmodernism itself ignores that epoch’s intellectual intervention into historiography more generally, which sought to disrupt the totalising gesture of periodisation and successive identification of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the first place. 29 But similarly, to avoid any consideration at all of differences between contemporary Anglophone aesthetics and postmodernism would be to ignore the numerous announcements of the latter’s explanatory finitude as well as its historical particularity. One can discuss the present as particular in perspective, sensibility, and temporality, then, and invite a continued engagement with postmodernism’s influence rather than simply abnegating its relevance.30 In the light of this, this study’s method implies that we might consider qualitative differences between historical moments, aesthetic movements, and sociocultural contexts on the basis of distinctions over the experience of time. This is to think about time through the lens of ‘epochal temporality’, which, as Susannah Radstone suggests, provides a means of periodisation based on different forms of temporal experience, from modernity’s sense of linear, future-driven temporality to postmodernism’s flattening out of the present. However, warning about the rigidity of this periodising process, she argues that [e]pochal temporality constitutes only one line, or part, however, in what might be conceived of as the symphonic score of time – a figure that may be loosened from the reductiveness of linear and progressive models of time if we remember that scores, or parts of a score, may fold back upon themselves through infinite repetitions and reprises. (2007a, 9) Epochal temporality therefore rests on precarious foundations. Determining the present according to a single, rigidly defined epochal temporality risks totalising an irreducible present, and equally butts into the problem met by theories of the contemporary, which face the issue

14  Introduction: Accident and Contingency of organising an infinitely large unit of time into a coherent narrative. Nevertheless, I would suggest that one advantage to the notion of epochal temporality, as long as we acknowledge these conceptual issues, is that it can provide us with a means of considering possible differences between aesthetic moments without necessarily forgetting the multiple, non-­synchronous scores of time that attend any one moment. In a practical sense, this would mean acknowledging the continued influence of postmodern aesthetics (along with many histories, geographies, and temporalities) on contemporary Anglophone cultural production without the need for a discourse of epochal rupture. Therefore, one of the temporal notes in the present’s symphony of time, I suggest, is a relationship to time shaped around the future, and specifically to contingency’s association with futurity. But first, in order to argue that accidents figure a version of this aesthetic relationship to time and futurity, it’s necessary to consider how discourses of futurity and contingency in postmodern aesthetics make more recent accounts of contingency meaningful.

Blocked Futurity Writing in 1989, David Wood concludes his book on the deconstruction of time with the statement that ‘postmodernism allows the idea of the future to wither away’ (1989, 363). He qualifies this statement with a distinction between the future as an inescapable modality of temporal experience (what he calls the ‘hermeneutical importance’ of the future) and the future as indicative of a form of historical thinking that knits futurity to ideas of progress and teleology (1989, 364). I argue that a dominant strand of postmodern culture’s and theory’s epochal temporality is a particular distrust towards the future, which I organise around the notion of ‘blocked futurity’. To describe this temporality, what follows are two related accounts of postmodernism’s imaginative relation to time that both, in different ways, problematise the notions of the future and futurity. These comprise a simultaneous pessimism over one’s incapacity to imagine a radically different future with a culturally specific intensification of the phenomenological present. The main sense of Wood’s suspicion towards the future stems from postmodernism’s general philosophical attack on ‘the future as telos, as end, as fulfilment’ (1989, 367). Wood’s argument here essentially summarises a long-standing, anti-metaphysical critique of ‘history’, articulated in postmodernism’s famed suspicion towards ‘grand narratives’ and teleological historiography.31 Versions of this self-legitimising narrative of ‘history’ abound, from ‘progress’ to metaphysical ideas of ‘origin’, and each arguably depends on a goal-oriented projection of future completion.32 The first sense in which postmodernism is suspicious about the future, therefore, manifests in its debunking of the idea of the ‘future’ as a legitimising project for a more systemic understanding of history as

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  15 something the present progressively works towards. In the 1990s, critiques of this understanding of the future formed the discourse of the ‘end of history’, which would comprise a systemic and shared attack on teleological and metaphysically informed notions of the future. 33 In this way, postmodern theory’s initial wariness towards the future stems less from a concern that time has stopped, than with a critique of the grand narratives of teleological progress that set the future as a projected goal or outcome implicit in the present and past. Nevertheless, this critique of ‘history’ interleaves a strain of pessimism. Although debunking accounts of history and the future, the present would also appear, for these discourses, to be nonetheless overwhelmed by the overbearing flux of capital, to the point where no other kind of future except that of the market’s seemed possible. This simultaneous critique of the ‘future’ and the future’s totalisation by capital may appear to be two separate arguments, but they are often entwined and evocative of a deeply engrained ambivalence at the heart of postmodern theories of history and attacks on grand narratives.34 With political theorist Wendy Brown, [t]wo seemingly opposite effects attend the emancipation of history (and the present) from a progressive narrative[.] […] On the one hand, there is certain to be a wash of insecurity, anxiety, and hopelessness across a political landscape formerly kept dry by the floodgates of foundationalism and metaphysics. On the other hand, out of the breakup of this seamless historiography and ground of settled principles, new political and epistemological possibilities emerge. (2001, 5) The above suspicion of the future as a projected goal or outcome of historical progress paves the way for new discursive formations of time and history and makes available, as Elizabeth Ermarth puts it, ‘more starting points and more alternative routes’ (1997, 61).35 But this revitalisation of the present through critique of ‘history’ also coincides with insecurity and anxiety over an incapacity to think historically at all.36 Such pessimism constitutes the second way in which the future appears blocked in one account of postmodernity, which is often framed as a belief that the agencies of late capitalism and global media have contradictorily brought about something very much like ‘the Hegelian end of history’ through their unsurpassable limit (Anderson 1992, 331). The connection between the ‘end of history’ and late capitalism is nowhere clearer than in Fredric Jameson’s famous 1984 essay ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Jameson’s delineation of postmodernism’s ‘crisis of historicity’ attributes the waning of narratives about the future to late capitalism’s own bloated expansion and explosion of the commodity form, which paradoxically overwhelms

16  Introduction: Accident and Contingency the subject, insofar as it becomes impossible to escape reproductive mediation (1996, 25). This pessimistic view of commodification’s totalisation often appears in Jameson’s writing to forbid the idea of a future different to that of the ever-intensifying status quo, which conditions a further, more profound epistemological blockage that has to do with the temporal question of the ‘present’. As Jameson suggests, If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience of psychic life […] the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents ‘in time’. (1996, 27) The schizophrenic is a figure for Jameson who is emblematic of this temporal closure, someone epistemologically trapped in the present. The schizophrenic, according to Jameson, is unable to make any kind of narrative unity out of their temporal experience, and instead, all experience for them is reduced to an insistent but fleeting presentness. Now, in some senses, being stuck in the ‘present’ is a familiar phenomenological problem for any account of time. But for postmodern theory, this philosophical issue collides with cultural and historical questions about late capitalism’s totalisation. Living in the present for postmodern cultural theory, as Steven Connor writes, loses ‘all of its forward impulsion. The past is abandoned, without the vocation towards a future. The flattened, or decompressed condition of the present is an effect, it seems, of amnesia combined with acedia, or future-fatigue’ (1999, 21). The re-framing of ‘end of history’ discourses in the epistemological problem of being trapped in an extended present, then, yields an epochal temporality not just critically suspicious of discourses about the future but also preoccupied with the phenomenological experience of the inescapable present, which produces a felt inability to think about futurity at all, either in its teleological or in its hermeneutical formation. This second account of blocked futurity is often discussed in terms of the epoch’s ‘extended present’, in which modalities of past and future are caught up in a nigh-hegemonic and inescapable present instant.37 With Jameson once more, capitalist totality overwhelms the weary subject, who has ‘lost its capacity actively to extend its protentions and retentions across the temporal manifold and to organise its past and future into coherent experience’ (1996, 25). The many analogues for postmodernism’s ‘extended present’ testify to a general sense of the present’s foreclosure of both the past and the future.38 I want to suggest that one profound result of this epistemological blockade on the future is the way in which postmodern theory and culture seems to foreclose the possibility of contingency, or at least, a

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  17 particular idea of contingency. Contingency and necessity traditionally describe two ways of thinking about history, but they also, by association, equally describe two ways of thinking about the future. A contingent event’s possible occurrence suggests that the future is open and not determined in advance. If contingency and accident do emerge as tropes in postmodern theory, then it is often due to, rather than in spite of, postmodernity’s association with the temporality of blocked futurity. Specifically, contingency for this version of postmodern cultural theory tends to represent either a meaningless and arbitrary occurrence reflective of the individual’s incapacity to think historically or an event that is simultaneously foreclosed and predicated by the extended present. In the first case, the phenomenology of Jameson’ schizophrenic jettisons a meaningful experience of past, present, and future for the instantaneous experience of a chaotic and heterogeneous ‘now’, subject to diffuse stimuli and arbitrary contingency. In this respect, contingency speaks to the distinctly modern sense of the word as one associated with the random, transitory, and uncertain impact of events, a definition that Jean-François Lyotard claims to be constitutive of modernity more generally (1991, 68). For Jameson, the failure of the imagination to grasp this arbitrary contingency in a meaningful way is a failure of the collective imagination and the future-oriented political project of modernity more generally, but it also stems, as critics such as Ursula K. Heise have observed, from dramatic technological, scientific, and political changes of the twentieth century (1997). The second case of contingency’s bearing on postmodern theories of time involves a more complex engagement with the relation between the extended present and the new, in which the present is suggested to recycle, co-opt, or foreclose contingent occurrence. This often stems from discussions of postmodern discourse’s account of a sped-up commodity culture in which the past, present, and future appear always already mediated, unsettling the distinction between original and copy.39 Folding back into the extended present, this leads to a notion of cyclical or repetitious time, evocative, as John Frow suggests, of the temporality of fashion: Within a postmodernist paradigm time is a closed circle. It leads nowhere, it cannot be broken. The novelty that seems to puncture it is a pointless movement of change which merely reinforces closure. (1997, 56) Frow suggests that the experience of change in postmodernism reinforces temporal closure. Unlike Jameson’s meaningless contingency, Frow alludes to contingent occurrence’s implication of futurity or, as he puts it, ‘novelty’ or ‘change’, but then suggests that the paradigm of cyclical time assimilates it in a way that merely reinforces the present’s closure. In this

18  Introduction: Accident and Contingency way, Frow draws on the influential work of philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who, in repeated polemics against postmodernism’s descent into a state of simulation and mediation, renders the idea of a contingent event almost impossible. For Baudrillard, late capital’s mediation of society gives history the taste of the ‘indefinitely recyclable’ (1994, 27). Things that happen ‘have no more significance than their anticipated meaning, their programming and their broadcasting’ (1994, 21). In conditions where real and copy are indecipherable, contingency has ‘the strange aftertaste of something that has already happened before, something unfolding retrospectively – an aftertaste which does not bode well for a meaningful future’ (Baudrillard 1994, 19). The various crises that produce postmodernism’s sense of totalisation, then, from global capitalism to the spread of computer networks, telecommunications, and the commodity form, all produce an experience of time where things feel contradictorily arbitrary but also, significantly, pre-programmed, reinforcing rather than pushing to breaking point the present’s temporal closure. There is a sense, then, that postmodern time strips futurity out of the present and contingency out of the future. The notable aesthetic response to this mood of the extended present is a push and pull between the representation of meaningless chance and a comprehension of the present as conspiratorial web. In many ways, conspiracy and contingency are two sides of the same coin in postmodern cultural theory. For Skip Williams, a postmodern emphasis on contingency foregrounds the complexity of the social system. However, this emphasis on social complexity tends to produce an acceptance of the social and spatial confusion accompanying multinational capitalism. The ideological component of contingency theory does not necessarily lie in the recognition of the role of chance and randomness in our lives, but rather in the foreclosure of social relations from its vision of history. (2002, 33) The experience of contingency here is twofold. On the one hand, everything seems random because of the reduction of phenomenological experience to the present. On the other, very real social relations are hidden from the subject because of the expansiveness of those systems. Williams implies, however, that this experience produces an aesthetic and imaginative response that resorts to conspiracy, which envisions the social relations behind the apparently random to be orchestrated by malevolent agencies. ‘Multi-national capitalism’, he suggests, ‘is constantly reshaping the social terrain, and conspiracy theory merely attempts to make sense of these changes’ (2002, 36). So while, on the one hand, contingency’s irruption indicates the impossibility of grasping the totality

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  19 of the global present in postmodernity, on the other hand, the mode of conspiracy reads the present to be formed and shaped by external social relations out of the individual’s control. In this way, conspiracy is one imaginary response to the epochal temporality of blocked futurity, because it imagines the future to be always already foreclosed by the agencies of totalisation. Anything that happens, even contingency, appears to be planned for and manipulated by existing systems, rather than being indicative of a future different to that same, extended present. Theories of postmodern time thus strip away futurity from contingency. When it manifests, contingency rarely indicates that the future can or will be different to the present’s temporal closure. Time is comprehended, as Paul Ricoeur suggests, by its articulation ‘through a narrative mode’ (1990a, 52). Narrative makes time thinkable. In one way, blocked futurity’s matrix of associations finds vivid thematisation in a range of British and North American postmodern fictions, which reflect on the experience of temporal closure. From the predominance of the conspiracy genre in fiction and cinema to an aesthetic focus on mass media’s simulation and production of unexpected events, and even to increased metafictional concerns over the already written nature of the real, Anglophone postmodern culture finds in the foregrounding of the contingent event’s simultaneous pre-determination and meaninglessness an evocative aesthetic signature for this account of time.40 To take one example focussed on the accident, we might consider this twofold response to contingency to register on the level of form, theme, and affect in Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened, which posits the accident’s temporal foreclosure in a novel of motionless suburban anxiety. On the surface, Something Happened is a story of the personal insecurity, suburban drama, and the workplace politics of its protagonist Bob Slocum. Slocum is metaphorically stuck in time and in place. The novel tracks his paranoid and minutely fearful interactions with his colleagues, all of whom plot ‘sneakily behind each other’s back’, while his unhappy wife, his daughter, and his ever-worrying son grow distant (1975, 47).41 The novel is about repetition and frustration without reprieve, and it represents through genre familiar anxieties of postmodern culture, from depersonalisation and a loss of the sense of an autonomous subject to informational overload, Cold War paranoia, and the phenomenology of the extended present.42 Borrowing the momentum of confessional narration, in which internal refection leads to psychic growth or realisation, Slocum seeks to avoid the dissolution of the self by way of his contemplation of his insecurities, childhood, and relationship with his family. He surmises at the start that ‘Something must have happened to me sometime’ (9) to make him who he is. However, his recursive and seemingly endless reflections repeatedly stifle the developmental, future-oriented narrative of improvement he seeks to obtain from them. Instead, Slocum’s increasingly failed efforts to qualify

20  Introduction: Accident and Contingency his unhappiness, psychically unearth past traumas, gain power at work, and improve his relationship with family succumbs to existential despair at his inability to satisfactorily resolve these conundrums, resulting in a narration of cyclic repetition in which his very efforts to rationalise his situation mire him further in a felt sense of stasis.43 Enacting this formally, Slocum’s first-person narration unfolds through a rhetorical structure replete in circumlocution, parenthesis, asides, parataxis, logical reversals, and qualifications. The form’s temporality, or lack thereof, arises in what Andre Furlani describes as Slocum’s Socratic method of address (1995, 253). But instead of drawing out logical resolution through this rhetoric, Slocum’s narration is shown to frequently collapse into a kind of experiential stasis of rhetorical circularity and a stifled narrative of progressive fulfilment. The only thing Slocum is sure of is his aversion towards the unexpected: ‘I dislike everything sudden. I am angered and hurt by surprises of every sort’ (14). The novel’s irony, however, is that the ‘something’ that happened to Slocum, which he seeks in his past, strikes instead from the future, in the form of a surprising car accident. After another petty argument between Slocum and his son, it finally happens: I want my little boy back too. I don’t want to lose him. I do. ‘Something happened!’ a youth in his early teens calls excitedly to a friend and goes running ahead to look. A crowd is collecting at the shopping centre. A car has gone out of control and mounted the sidewalk. A plate glass window has been smashed. My boy is lying on the ground. (He has not been decapitated.) He is screaming in agony and horror, with legs and arms twisted brokenly[.] […] I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze. (551–2) The car accident’s immediacy in the midst of Slocum’s self-reflection is striking. But in contrast to this narrative interruption, the novel also appears to inoculate the book against the potential for this accident to divert the course of its often circular and repetitive narration. The youth’s shout, first of all, repeats the novel’s title, transforming the title into an allusion or anticipation towards the event. The novel’s title’s doubled reference to a possible event in Slocum’s past and to an event that is about to happen pointedly brackets, in turn, the accident’s occurrence with Slocum’s confessional consideration of his past, and by doing so, it folds a strange kind of temporality into the accident, one that simultaneously presents the event to be an arbitrary interruption of his rhetorical circumlocutions and also something that recapitulates to

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  21 the same temporal stasis of his motionless psychic searching. That the youth’s shout (and novel’s title) tenses the accident as something already past only exacerbates this effect. Slocum’s own strange, parenthetical recognition of what has not happened, ‘(He has not been decapitated)’, further captures the event in the recursive narrational paralysis essential to the novel’s narrative form. Moreover, Slocum is told shortly after that the accident did not kill Bobby, but rather he did, by asphyxiating him when he squeezed him. Another accident. On realising this, Slocum asks the doctor not to tell his wife. ‘Nobody knows what I’ve done’ (555), he conspires to the reader, as he returns to work. Suddenly, his fortunes begin to improve. He tells his wife that he loves her, buys his daughter a car, acts decisively at work, and improves his golf swing: ‘Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command’ (559). The novel’s irony lies in the fact that the car accident is the thing that propels Slocum out of his lassitude. But simultaneously, Slocum’s apparent escape from his circumlocutory mode is hardly in line with the ending’s effect, which, by parodying that desired improvement with his exaggerated indifference and callous calculation, reinforces Slocum’s myopic concerns with work, family, and golf in a way that smothers the accident with the same logic of priorities that produce Slocum’s temporal paralysis in the first place.44 While Slocum’s narration may attest to his belief in a marked future difference to what has gone previously according to his internal logic, this narration still carries the shell of its parenthetical and circumlocutory shape. To extrapolate this reading to postmodern cultural theory’s bearing on the contingent event, the accident in Something Happened may unloose its protagonist’s felt stasis, but the event also reinforces Slocum’s enclosure in his own suffocating system of priorities. That this happens in coordination with a concluding note of conspiracy, a mixture of accident and intention in relation to Slocum’s suffocation of Bobby, results in a novel that cannot, or refuses to, think outside of temporal stasis. In this way, blocked futurity folds into and around its minimisation of the accident’s contingency. The accident is that form of meaningless occurrence for Slocum that punctures the present only for it to be captured by and to simultaneously affirm that present’s enclosure, a hallmark of postmodern cultures theories of time. Although not seeking to homogenise postmodern aesthetics, then, nor to reduce postmodern cultural production’s complex working through of this matrix of associations around the present, future, and contingency, Something Happened recuperates the contingency of its accident to the ubiquitous present and foreclosed future. By contrast, the following chapter will turn to a more recent North American suburban drama, A. M. Homes’s 2013 May We Be Forgiven, which cites Something Happened as an influence but also reverses its structure, foregrounding a different conceptual relation between

22  Introduction: Accident and Contingency accident, contingency, and temporality.45 In what follows, I argue that a collection of contemporary Anglophone fictions and cultural theories draws on contingency as a site for thinking through a range of temporalities that reconsider the terms of blocked futurity. Specifically, this corpus of texts pivot on the accident in a way that attributes to contingency a subtly different relation to the future: accidents in these texts refer less to the predetermined future, or to the arbitrary repetition of the temporally closed present, than to the future as difference, and to the future that might be otherwise. The deviation of this critical and aesthetic focus on contingency from accounts of blocked futurity, then, looks to the conceptual, aesthetic, and historical constellation of contingency and futurity, or what I term ‘contingent futurity’.

Contingent Futurity Distinctions between ‘the future’ and ‘futurity’ are a complex issue for philosophies of time. ‘The future’ tends to be aligned either with an implicit belief in an extended anticipation of the present into the future or, more critically, with teleological historiography. Futurity, however, has two meanings. In its most general sense, futurity refers to the quality of or the extent to which a thing relates to the future. But futurity also refers to a more specific engagement with the unforeseeable future as something that is untimely and that can interrupt, unhinge, or disturb anticipation and teleological projection. Futurity therefore is less a projection into the future than it is a concept that theorises how the future’s constitutive opacity conditions the present’s unfolding, grounding temporal becoming on the possibility for disruption, interruption, and unforeseeable difference. But this concept also culturally implies, in its gesture to future time, a qualitatively different future from the present, or from those cyclic futures forecast by discourses of ‘blocked futurity’. Jean-Paul Martinon’s expansive account of futurity is foundational in this regard. Unlike ‘the future’, which, for Martinon, ‘always ends up being (re)appropriated within the wider scheme of chronology and progress’, futurity signals a more abstracted structure of experience in which temporal unfolding is continually open to and conditioned by the capacity for the unforeseeable (2007, 15). Futurity instead speaks to the inescapabilty of an unforeseeable future ‘to come’: However much it is difficult to identify its meaning, however much it is unstable and unhinging, [futurity] is still a sign that gives us to think beyond the closure of metaphysics. [Futurity] signals that something is afoot, that something might be coming, and yet, this signal can only be made in a manner unthinkable. (2007, 3–4).46

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  23 Futurity combines a non- or anti-metaphysical conception of the future’s objective opacity with the unthinkable nature of a future that can circumvent anticipation. Therefore, the notion of futurity couples an account of temporality at the level of ontology, in which futurity objectively conditions being, with an account of temporality on the level of a qualitative relation to time, in which futurity also provides the possibility for a radically different future, whether it be emancipatory or disastrous. This works in contrast to cultural articulations of either the impossibility of imagining the future at all, or the failure of futurity in the form of one’s capacity to reach politically progressive future goals. Of course, critiques of ‘history’ in postmodern cultural theories of time also stress that time unfolds unpredictably and unforeseeably, and they similarly establish the naturally opaque future as a base line in their conceptions of history. What does it mean, therefore, to say that postmodernism is marked by a sense of ‘blocked futurity’ if it also affirms futurity in its debunking of ‘history’ and ‘the future’? It would be to suggest, I argue, that ‘blocked futurity’ provides a particular imagination of time that acknowledges a conditional openness to the unforeseeable future, but envisions that openness as, contradictorily, a failure of thought that prevents one from thinking about any kind of different future at all. This may seem contradictory, but to remember Wendy Brown’s account of the doubled anxiety and optimism found in postmodern cultural theory, accounts of blocked futurity often experience the debunking of ‘history’ as a form of crisis, which is perhaps not unsurprising for a critic such as Fredric Jameson, who is wedded to a particular form of Marxist historiography. This is, of course, not to reduce postmodern discourses to a single representation of time, but rather to point to a particular version of postmodern temporality drawn on and engaged with by contemporary accounts of time. By contrast, a range of contemporary critical theories and Anglophone fictions have pivoted on the conceptual, aesthetic, and ideological attachment of contingency to futurity, or what I term ‘contingent futurity’, in a way that imagines contingency’s temporality at odds with ‘blocked futurity’. Rather than remarking on a fundamental change of time, these discourses re-read the temporality of contingency in a doubled way: not only in the form of something ontologically given but also as an imperative that stakes the possibility of an alternate future to the present on contingency’s facticity. This move tends to coincide with a lessened focus on post-structuralist considerations of the contingency and historicity of meaning in favour of a tendency instead to privilege the contingent occurrence or event, a critical attention to what Emanuela Bianchi has recently termed ‘interruptivity’ (2014, 241).47 By putting primacy on the unforeseeable over the anticipated, and on the future that may not happen over the future that appears about to happen, recent philosophies of the unexpected transform an account of

24  Introduction: Accident and Contingency time and being’s conditional contingency into an apparatus for thinking about social and cultural futurity. Perhaps the most prominent theorist of contingency in recent philosophy in the continental mould is Quentin Meillassoux, whose speculative attention to object ‘in itself’ leads to an account of natural law in which the only certainty is law’s absolute contingency. Meillassoux challenges the retroactive imposition of natural necessity extrapolated by Hume and Kant, a ‘necessitarian inference’ that he claims is principled on probabilistic reasoning and posterior projection (2008, 97). Instead, Meillassoux insists on the possibility that ‘objects could actually and for no reason whatsoever behave in the most erratic fashion’, an eventuality he suggests with the thought experiment of dice imploding or changing shape once thrown (2008, 85). In this way, Meillassoux elevates contingency to necessary law, a non-­metaphysical rule for being that maintains the appearance of law in its proposed deviation of law. By arguing for the necessity of contingency, Meillassoux conceptually extrapolates contingency to the level of ontology. Drawing on Alain Badiou, who I shall discuss in the following chapter, Meillassoux’s claim pivots on a stress of the possibility for a thing happening that is ‘something other, something which […] puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable’ (2008, 108). The law of contingency for Meillassoux, then, transforms the contingent event into an apparatus for thinking about the temporality of futurity. On the one hand, contingency is constitutive of the future’s objective opacity, the fact of being’s contingent rather than necessary nature; but, on the other, and taking into account both the popularity of Meillassoux’s work and its resonances with a range of different forms of attention to the unexpected event, contingency also distils a sense of the future’s capacity for radical difference and otherness to the present.48 Nevertheless, the passage from an ontological account of contingent futurity (the future’s objective opacity) to a socio-historical account of contingent futurity (the future’s possibility for radical difference to the present) is something Meillassoux only vaguely explores, and a large part of the criticism of his and his proponents’ work concerns their inability to think historically.49 Recent strands of feminist and queer materialism, by contrast, have also theorised life and matter in terms of contingent and aleatory causality.50 Unlike for Meillassoux, who tends to neglect questions of power and domination in the service of his attack on ‘correlationism’, these critics reintroduce contingency to historical relations in a way that pairs ontological claims regarding matter and contingency to contextualised accounts of future difference in queer and feminist frameworks. Elizabeth Grosz’s work is foundational in this regard, combining the vitalism of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze with life sciences to focus on the ‘ruptures, nicks, cuts’ and events that are the outcome of ‘the unpredictable emergences of our material universe’

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  25 (2004, 5). These unpredictable forms of event, on the level of matter and life, yield a theory of time principled on contingency, matter’s indeterminacy, and the future’s objective opacity. But more than this, Grosz confronts this ontological account of contingent futurity with feminist, queer, and anti-racist discourse to suggest that political and cultural struggles are themselves ‘about inducing the untimely’ (2004, 14). If life itself is the outcome of the world’s ‘contingent forces, developed randomly, through mutation and accident’, and that these open processes determine its being, then recognition of this allows for a model of political contestation focussed around ‘the future, what is to come, what cannot be foreseen, what must be made rather than known’ (2004, 251, 259). Grosz, of course, hardly neglects the role of strategy and hegemonic articulation in feminist praxis, nor the institutional contexts of feminist and queer studies in which the notion of futurity resonates: the future must be ‘made’ and not just found.51 But her work, nonetheless, draws on the energies of life’s contingent matter in its ontological guise to make an imperative for feminist theory out of the recognition of this contingency. In this way, Grosz transposes contingency onto futurity by way of a theorisation of contingency’s enabling of a possible, radically different future.52 Grosz’s work therefore provides a constellation of futurity and contingency, as both ontological ground and socio-historical relation to time. But this does not necessarily mean that contingent futurity is restricted to philosophical materialism, and contingency’s disposition towards futurity has also taken hold in a range of approaches to the present.53 In this respect, with hermeneutical philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, insistence on contingency’s relation to futurity provides an important discursive strategy for resistance. This is not, of course, because chance automatically broaches better or different futures, but rather because contingency means the future is not inevitable. Translating this into discourses of environmental catastrophe, Dupuy’s argument for what he calls ‘enlightened doomsaying’ recovers futurity in particular from a prediction of immanent disaster. At the heart of his argument lies a conceptual issue in many kinds of environmental warning: one ‘must foretell an impending catastrophe as though it belonged to an ineluctable future, but with the purpose of ensuring that, as a result of […] doing just this, the catastrophe will not occur’ (2013, 191). For this reason, Dupuy grasps on the commonplace notion that inevitable disaster will often manifest through chance occurrence, to suggest that The way out from this paradox, I believe, is to regard the catastrophic event simultaneously as something fated to occur and as a contingent accident, one that need not occur – even if, in a completed future, it appears to be necessary. […] It consists in believing that if a memorable event occurs, such as a catastrophe, this is

26  Introduction: Accident and Contingency because it could not occur; while at the same time thinking that so long as it has not occurred, it is not inevitable. (2013, 204) A notion of the inevitable future focussed on the chance of disaster invariably carries with it its own possibility for not happening. In this way, the contingency of inevitable disaster embeds futurity into something that appears to be fated, in order to both warn against disaster and admit for the possibility of its circumvention. Accident takes pride of place in this logic: ‘an accident, unlike fate, is not inevitable. An accident can not occur’ (2013, 191). Dupuy’s argument attaches contingency to futurity by way of the fact that contingency means that things ‘can not occur’; just as disaster does not have to happen, contingency suggests that things might not stay as they are. Although on the surface somewhat sophistic, Dupuy’s writing shares with others a predisposition towards thinking about the changing political, social, and contextual temporalities made available through the trope of contingency and accident. If a particular account of postmodern cultural theory found, in contingency, either meaningless randomness or the pre-programmed event, then this diverse range of recent cultural theories and philosophies re-­contextualise contingency around the locus of futurity, which comes to signify both the objective nature of time and the possibility for future difference to the present.

The Book Dupuy gestures to the modality of reading as a possible guide for appreciating the chance of the future: ‘We must neither believe too much in fate nor too much refuse to believe in it […] exactly as one believes in a work of fiction’ (2013, 193). Fiction involves the reader in a form of belief that is also disbelief, an immersion in the openness of a story that we know to be fated in advance. In what follows, I argue that contemporary Anglophone fiction intervenes in the discourse of contingent futurity in two ways. First, by turning to the accident as a means of instantiating and precipitating plot, these texts situate contingency, futurity, and the experience of time in a variety of historical, temporal, and material contexts. This project therefore joins a broader discourse in contemporary literary studies, which argues that issues of time, unexpected event, and possibility preoccupy a particular model of Anglophone cultural production centred on the temporality of futurity.54 But second, that written and recorded fictional narrative intervenes in the discourse of contingent futurity in a formal and phenomenological way. Specifically, written and recorded narrative mediates contingency through a narrative structure that is temporally doubled, split between the impression of an open future and the already written future. The reader’s cognition

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  27 of this temporal doubleness, in which accidents are both contingent and necessary at once, in turn reflects back onto the experience of accidents in life, which are made uncertain by the retrospective ordering of contingency into narrative in hindsight. Like Dupuy, I suggest that contingency in life is best understood by way of reading fiction. The novel’s formal intervention in discourses of contingent futurity therefore points to, even heightens, the resilient problem of hindsight, narrative, and the retrospective projection of necessity that play out in philosophical discourses on the open processes of temporal becoming. The texts under discussion in this project are largely restricted to cultural production from the global North, specifically British and North American texts (and in one case, a novel by an author widely discussed in Anglophone literary criticism), but each has, nonetheless, been chosen for the diversity of their contexts and approaches to the accident. Each text has also been selected for the prominence of a plotted accidental event in its story in order to discuss accidents on the level of event rather than accidents on the level of the indeterminacy of meaning, or the chance organisation of form. My selection is not meant to exhaust the range of possibilities or differences in contemporary representations of accident, just as the above discussion of contingent futurity or blocked futurity is not intended to exhaust the variety of accounts of the contemporary or postmodern experience of time. Nevertheless, each text has received either critical or mass market popularity, and in many occasions both, in a way that makes each prominent in the field of contemporary literary studies. Each exemplifies, and in many cases models on the level of fictional form, a specific constellation of accident, contingency, and temporality. The book is split into three parts. Part 1, ‘Time’, analyses two relationships between the accident and temporality that reverberate throughout this study: futurity and retrospection. Chapter 1 explores the accident’s precipitation of contingency and futurity in A. M. Homes’s 2012 May We Be Forgiven, which the novel models through the genre of the picaresque.55 This chapter draws on the philosophy of the ‘event’, specifically Alain Badiou’s account of the interrelation between the event’s sudden occurrence and its discursive demarcation, to account for the relationship between contingency, futurity, and fictional form, gnomically intimated by the novel’s early phrase ‘The accident happens and then it happens.’ Chapter 2 turns to the retrospective interpretation implied by the accident’s futural momentum, to suggest that contingency impels retrospective causal interpretation that can endanger its very status as contingent. The chapter frames this discussion in terms of the distinction between coincidence and accident, exemplified, respectively, by Nicola Barker’s 1994 novel Reversed Forecast and Noah Hawley’s 2016 Before the Fall.56 By drawing on these two novels, this chapter argues that retrospection poses an intractable issue for contingent occurrence more

28  Introduction: Accident and Contingency generally in the philosophy of time. I demonstrate this by way of Gilles Deleuze’s account of chance, before concluding with the introduction of the notion of ‘teleological retrospection’, a process of retrospective configuration that reverberates throughout this study. The study’s second part, ‘Narrative’, consists of one chapter, which develops the implication throughout this study of the tension between a written narrative accident and an accident in life. By way of Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of the hermeneutic circle of narrative and time and an account of J. M. Coetzee’s 2006 novel Slow Man, this chapter provides the project’s central theorisation of the relationship between reading contingency and living contingency. Although narratological in scope, the chapter seeks to theorise the problem introduced by hindsight more generally in the philosophy of time, and therefore speaks to a range of disciplines from contemporary fiction studies to histories of reading and the philosophy of narrative. The chapter reframes assumptions about living contingency through the lens of reading contingency, suggesting not only that narrative mediates the experience of an actual accidental event in life but also that reading an accident in a novel models the dual modalities of contingency and necessity, chance and fate, which underwrite the experience of living an accident. The book’s final part, ‘Accident Narratives’, situates narrative accidents, contingent futurity, and reading contingency in two contexts: the philosophy of radical contingency and of trauma. Chapter 4 interrogates how the accident trope in critical theory and popular narrative has taken on dual meaning as both historically endemic and conditional for a political theory of radical resistance. After comparing the shift in the accident’s temporality from J. G. Ballard’s evocative 1973 postmodern novel Crash to Paul Haggis’s 2004 film Crash, the chapter explores and complicates the film’s attempt to steer the accidental towards a politics of possibility and ethical engagement. The chapter critiques efforts to tease out political possibility from contingency’s ontologically given nature by way of Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s theorisation of contingency as conditional for political meaning more generally. It then concludes with a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones.57 Ward’s novel historicises contingency’s social distribution in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to consider forms of uneven violence and event produced by racialised dispossession and inequality. The chapter therefore argues that despite a recent turn to the political potential of contingency, accidents are politically and ethically mobile, dependent on socio-­historical context, and differentially distributed. Chapter 5 analyses trauma’s apparent blockage of narrative’s mediation of accidental events in two novels from either side of the Atlantic, Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel Look at Me and Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder.58 The chapter draws the links between accident, trauma theory, and the event’s belated narrativisation, before turning to the speculative work of philosopher Catherine Malabou, who seeks, via neurobiological trauma,

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  29 to theorise a form of accident that severs retrospection’s entanglement to accident. In this way, Malabou’s work attempts to circumvent the complication for contingency of retrospection outlined throughout this project. The chapter suggests, however, that both novels subject the accident to memory in order to demonstrate the antipathy of narrative to Malabou’s accident. But it concludes with consideration of an amenability between Malabou’s work on reading contingency through reflection on the narrative accident’s formal characteristic as something that is simultaneously a product of material causation and dependent on that causation’s absence for comprehension. The study concludes with a brief coda, which suggests a number of points of convergence between this narratological study and recent work in book history and the sociology of the text. The plotting of an accidental event in a written narrative is, by its very nature, not accidental. But this does not mean that the following account of a range of North American and British fictions cannot illuminate the phenomenological experience of the accident nor account for a contemporary experience of time. Indeed, this is far from the case. Reading Contingency argues that written narrative accidents exemplify the imbrications of contingency, necessity, temporality, and narrative comprehension that are conditional for the experience of actual accidents. Narrative is often, it suggests, the unspoken presence in and problem for the philosophy of chance and time, which these novels model through their mediation of the accidental. By reading contingency, then, one might better understand the experience of living contingency, and through living contingency, one experiences the hermeneutic circle of time and narrative exemplified by reading contingency.

Notes 1 This includes terms related to contingency addressed throughout this study, including the event, the unexpected, the untimely, chance, futurity, and the aleatory. 2 As Judith Green argues in her sociological survey of the accident’s social construction in modernity, ‘although the kinds of misfortunes we call “accidents” (unmotivated and unpredictable chance events) may always have happened, they are not in all times and places labelled “accidents” nor understood in the ways we understand them’ (1997, 6–7). 3 For an example of early Christian approaches to chance, see the discussion of St. Augustine’s reading of chance in Hamilton (2007, 40–1). 4 Historical work on chance, contingency, and modernity is extensive. For philosophical and sociological surveys, see Green (1997), Reith (1999), Hacking (2002), and Wootton (2007). For literary histories of chance, see Monk (1993), Hamilton (2007), Jordan (2010), Fyfe (2015), and Silver (2018). 5 As Gerda Reith suggests, early theories of probability conceptualise chance as an epistemological, rather than ontological, category, insofar as ‘uncertainty, then, was fundamentally a state of mind, not a state of the world’ (1999, 29). This arguably changes, Reith suggests, in later discourses of complexity and chaos, which instead describe chance to be ‘an irreducible

30  Introduction: Accident and Contingency feature of the world’ (1999, 39). On the likeness between religious and early scientific forms of determinism, see also Popper (1982, 5). The debate over chance’s epistemological or ontological nature is a long-standing one in histories of chance, and I will return to it in Chapter 3. 6 See Prigogine and Stengers (1997, 10–12). 7 Compare Hayles (1990, 12) and Paulson (1994, 20–1). Hayles specifically suggests that the accident is the fulcrum through which this form of chaotic emergence happens (1998). 8 See, respectively, Jameson (2013, 208) and Jordan (2010, 89–113). For an account of the history of the novel from Robinson Crusoe through to modernism around the medium’s narrativisation of chance, see Monk (1993). 9 See also Paul Fyfe’s (2015) extension of Williams’s argument in the context of the Victorian novel. For further accounts of chance and the Victorian city, see Trotter (2000) and Grener (2012). 10 On Harvey’s theory of space–time compression, see also Heise (1997, 43). This extends into more recent discussions of ‘network society’, too, as Patrick Jagoda makes clear: ‘the accident [is] a fundamental method of network epistemology’ (2016, 80). 11 As Stephen Graham suggests, the utopia of a borderless world is conditioned on an extensive deployment of security in order to control and direct that uncertainty, often through the targeting of racialised, ‘risky’ populations through checkpoints, digital surveillance, and pre-emptive policing (2011, 88–152). 12 Compare Virilio’s account to Janet Harbord (2007a) on the accident’s irrational circuitry in market exchange, Melinda Cooper (2012) on the contemporary labour market’s production of contractual contingency, Joshua Ramey (2016) on neoliberalism’s weaponisation of contingency in the form of the inscrutable market, Anna McCarthy (2007) on the trauma of that experience for the individual, and also Bruce Robbins’s (2019) considerations of the accident’s bearing on individual responsibility, neoliberal governance, and the role of state power. 13 On a helpful summary of financial risk’s uneven distribution and global capitalism’s management of populations through risk and the logic of disposability, see Tadiar (2013). On the uneven production of environmental and industrial risks, see Nixon (2011). On the relationship between natural disaster and global risk, see Dimock (2009), and on uneven risk and the ‘globalisation of contingency’, see Connolly (2007, 305). Finally, on uneven risk, modernity, and the insurance industry, see Caygill (2017, 59–98). 14 This study is concerned with the phenomenological comprehension of narrative accidents and narrative contingency specifically as events staged in the plot. It does not consider accident or contingency in the form of the contingencies involved in the reader’s experiential actualisation of the text, its publication and mediation, or its compositional procedure. For accounts of these alternate methods of reading contingency, see, respectively, Wellbury (1992), Lupton (2011), and Jordan (2019). 15 This study predominantly discusses written narrative accidents in the form of the novel, but as I suggest in Chapter 3, this account of narrative temporality also pertains to recorded narrative film. 16 Louis O. Mink’s term, which Kafalenos borrows, for this is ‘configuration’: But in the configurational comprehension of a story which one has followed, the end is connected with the promise of the beginning as well as the beginning with the promise of the end, and the necessity of the backward reference cancels out, so to speak, the contingency of the forward references. (1970, 554)

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  31 17 See Chapter 3. 18 Recent work includes Belletto (2012), Caygill (2017), Dannenberg (2008), Fyfe (2015), Hamilton (2007), Horowitz (2011), Jordan (2010), Miller (2015), and Rudrum (2013), as well as a special edition on cinematic accidents in Discourse 30 (3) (2008). 19 See Belletto (2012). 20 See Monk (1993) and Jordan (2010). 21 For accounts of these issues, see, respectively, Luckhurst and Marks (1999) and Felski (2000). On the plurality of times in the global contemporary, see also Brouillette, Sauri, and Nilges (2017). 22 ‘Contemporary’ in this sense shares a similar double construction to that of the ‘modern’, which has also come to mean more than just a moment in time synonymous with the present (see North 2018). 23 Compare this to Brian McHale’s (2011) discussion of the fictionality of epochal definition. 24 Osborne’s writing on the fictional mode of periodisation contributes to accounts of imaginative disassociation and disjunction found in other prominent theories of contemporaneity, such as Giorgio Agamben’s writing, whose argument for the role of untimeliness similarly presupposes the periodiser’s imaginative anachronism, through a kind of fictionalised delimitation of the present’s finitude. This act grasps the present by thinking of the present time ‘in the form of a “too soon” that is also a “too late”’ in order to both demarcate and transform it (2009, 47). 25 For a survey of dates, see Rudrum and Stavris (2015). 26 Twentieth-Century Literature 53 (3) (2007); American Literary History 20 (1–2) (2008); Twentieth-Century Literature 57 (3–4) (2011); Postmodern Culture 21 (1) (2010); Contemporary Literature 53 (4) (2012); Modern Fiction Studies 58 (2) (2012); Textual Practice 33 (2) (2019). On postmodernism’s popularisers, see Hutcheon (2002, 165) and Connor (2015). 27 For an account of the contemporary’s succession of the postmodern in terms of ‘sincerity’ and its synonyms, for instance, see Kelly (2010) and Dubey (2011). On a survey of the work on modernism in contemporary literature studies, see Gildea and Wylot (2019). 28 Discussions of the global contemporary helpfully describe the contemporary’s definitional nature as ‘a negative totality […] by way of maintaining the visibility of the plurality of times’ (Brouillette, Sauri, and Nilges 2017, xxiii). This plurality allows for a wide range of critical concerns in contemporary Anglophone aesthetics that do not specifically define their concerns in opposition to postmodern aesthetics. This project has sought to engage with a range of contemporary concerns in Anglophone aesthetics and criticism throughout and, for the most part, has avoided the now well-rehearsed discussions of form, sincerity, affect, and late modernism. 29 See Jean-François Lyotard’s (1993) looping, circular account of the ‘post-’, and also Frow (1997, 23) and Boxall (2013, 58). 30 Mary K. Holland, for instance, argues that contemporary aesthetics witness a renewed attention to the focus on language and a sense of the breakdown of humanist metaphysics frequently articulated by postmodern cultural theory but organised for new political and recuperative means (2013). 31 My understanding of teleology draws from Étienne Balibar’s: ‘the doctrine of the historical and intellectual process as realisation of an already given end or telos, a process with a conscious or unconscious purpose’ (2009, 64). See also Bianchi (2014, 1–2). 32 The oscillation between small ‘h’ and capital ‘H’ is a famous one in postmodern historiography for this reason. For instance, see Jenkins (2006).

32  Introduction: Accident and Contingency 33 Compare, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard’s discussion of temporal closure with regard to teleological projections into the ‘future’ (1991, 65) to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s account of a shared, cultural suspicion towards the discourse of the ‘future’ in political activism (2011, 25). 34 ‘Indeed, today, when the speculative predetermination of the future as both ground and result of a totalising hermeneutic of the past is so widely discredited, both politically and methodologically, historical ‘endism’ as it has come to be known is, paradoxically, on the rise’ (Osborne 1995, 36). 35 See also Felski (2000, 147). 36 For one of the definitive accounts of postmodernism’s temporal closure and this ambivalence towards historical thinking, explored through the lens of popular fiction and feminist theory, see Elliott (2008). 37 For an account of postmodern presentism’s relation to modes of production and to historiography, see, respectively, Harvey (1995, 291) and Harootunian (2007). 38 For instance, see Paul Virilio’s account of ‘the real instant of instantaneous telecommunications’ (1997, 8–9), Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ‘real time’ (1994, 8–9), and Paolo Virno’s account of the felt sense of déjà vu in postmodern cultural theory (2015). While the terms for each differ, they all, I suggest, conform to an over-arching temporal logic that emphasises, as Ursula K. Heise argues, an epochal ‘focus on a present that is increasingly conceived as taking over both past and future, and the difficulty of envisioning temporal patterns that transcend the present and allow the observer to view it from a distance’ (1997, 30). 39 Mark Currie calls this intensification of the present’s recycling of past and future ‘accelerated recontextualisation’ (2007, 10–11). 40 On postmodern culture and conspiracy, see Jameson (1995, 5–85); on accident and its simulation by mass media, see my discussion of J. G. Ballard’s 1973 Crash in Chapter 4. 41 All subsequent references are to this edition. 42 For a nuanced account of the relationship between postmodern cultural theory, Cold War paranoia, and depersonalisation, see Melley (2000). Lois Tyson situates Slocum at the intersection of different discourses of subjectivity to suggest that he exemplifies a postmodern vision of subjectivity (1992). 43 This results in a novel saturated in ‘motionless’ and ‘redundant articulation [that] tends toward silence’ (LeClair 1981, 259). 4 4 As LeClair suggests, this ending is less an escape from Slocum’s entrapment in circularity than an intensification of that same ‘closed system’ and ‘temporal regression’ (1981, 255). 45 On the influence of Heller on Homes, see Boddy (2019). 46 Martinon uses Derrida’s term á-venir – roughly translatable into ‘to come’ – as a shorthand for a way of thinking about the notion of ‘futurity’, here. 47 Interruptivity for Bianchi draws heavily on deconstruction. But it also acknowledges a subtle shift around the discourse of contingency, from considerations of otherness and alterity towards the often either immanent or material disruption of chance. This is, of course, not to suggest that poststructuralist discourses of alterity foreclose question of the event (evident, for instance, in Attridge (2004)). But rather, recent accounts of contingent futurity privilege questions of material causation, contingency, and singular events in historical time over the more generalised ‘event’ of being and otherness. On the shift away from the discursive concerns of poststructuralism to the kind of immanent and causal ones in this kind of event-­attentive materialism, see Breu (2016). Nevertheless, this is not to say that works associated

Introduction: Accident and Contingency  33

48

49

50

51 52 53

54

with postmodern cultural theory have been simply forgotten in contemporary critical theory, far from it. We might look, for instance, to the way in which recent accounts of Jacques Derrida have focussed on questions of event, the messianic, and materiality in a similar fashion, such as in Hågglund (2008) or the inescapable influence of Gilles Deleuze on recent ‘new materialisms’. Meillassoux’s work has received significant attention since publication, no doubt in part due to the associated efforts of movements such as ‘speculative realism’ and ‘object-oriented ontology’ in the academy. See, for instance, Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman (2011). The popularity of Meillassoux’s work also converges with recent interest in materialist accounts of the unexpected, particularly with regard to the Epicurean and Lucretian notion of the clinamen, such as in Badiou (2009, 57–63), Althusser (2006, 163–208), and Royle (2011). For instance, Jordy Rosenberg (2014) considers the relation between this speculative turn in philosophy and the temporalities of primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, while Alexander R. Galloway (2013) accuses the movement of withdrawing from political critique altogether. For a survey of the various criticisms of Meillassoux and followers, see Lemke (2017). Contingency’s ontological and political relation to futurity extends to other domains of recent critical work too, perhaps most notably in literary criticism through a renewed attention on the temporality of utopianism. See, for instance, Thompson (2013) and Edwards (2019) on utopianism in contemporary fiction. Elsewhere, on the recent turn to the politics of rupture and the unexpected, see McGowan and Eisenstein (2012). Finally, for an account of contingency in relation to the global in contemporary literature, see Evans (2018). For more on the nuanced interrelations between discourse and matter, ideas and things, in feminist new materialism, see Sheldon (2015). Further examples of feminist and queer materialism also include Barad (2011), Colebrook (2009), and, with specific focus on accident and chance, Bianchi (2014, 223–42). See, for instance, Sara Ahmed’s account of queer futurity, contingency, and ‘what is kept open as the possibility of things not staying as they are’ against the discourse of reproductive futurism (2010, 196–7), and also Valerie Rohy, who argues that to ‘recognise contingency – that is, to accept that the world is full of accidents, coincidences, and unpredictable effects – […] brings with it a sense of undecidability that resonates with the fundamental ethos of queer theory’ (2015, 184). See also philosophical discourses of the ‘event’, as discussed in the following chapter. Alexander R. Galloway recognises something similar in his account of the increased turn towards the clinamen, contingency, and ontology in recent theoretical materialism (2017). For instance, a small survey of this discourse might include Boxall (2013), Eshel (2013), Edwards (2012), and Currie (2012). However, this is, of course, not to suggest that the accident, or contingency, is in some way unique to the present. Accident is, after all, as old as time. From the perspective of literary studies, accident and contingency arguably begin with the history of the novel, with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe taking momentum from Crusoe’s shipwreck and his multiple, providential interpretations of this chance. The relevance of contemporary fiction in this study then has to do with context and the way contingency and accident are put into conversation with futurity in the light of a background that reflects on the influence of postmodern cultural theory, aesthetics, and theories of narrative.

34  Introduction: Accident and Contingency 55 May We Be Forgiven received critical praise in North America and won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction in 2013 in Britain, and Homes’s work has been subject to a number of critical responses on the topic of American fiction in the wake of postmodernism. See, for instance, Holland (2012) and Knapp (2011). 56 Although Barker has received critical and mass market attention more recently for her 2017 Goldsmith’s Prize-winning book H(A)ppy, the academy has begun to address her expansive experimental writing as an important voice (demonstrated, for instance, by a forthcoming edited collection of essays in the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series). Noah Hawley’s bestselling novel has perhaps the widest mass market appeal of the texts under study, and his work also extends into television and film. 57 Haggis’s 2004 film won the 2006 Oscar for ‘Best Picture’. Ward’s novel won the 2011 National Book Award and has received significant critical attention, addressed in the chapter. 58 Although not as well known as her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me has received notable critical attention for its effort in ‘the task of responding to postmodernism’ in contemporary fiction (Kelly 2011, 393). Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is also a heavily discussed text in contemporary aesthetics, much of which I engage with in the chapter.

Part 1

Time

1 Forwards Accident, Event, and Picaresque

A. M. Homes’s 2012 novel May We Be Forgiven (hereafter referred to as MWBF) follows an accident’s dramatic disruption of the life of character Harry Silver. MWBF writes out in narrative form the conceptual link between an accident, contingency, and a particular kind of future orientation. It narrates this through the representation of a contingent event, doing so in a way that draws attention to the temporality of contingent futurity. And yet, because MWBF is a novel, narrative invariably shapes this argument about time. The text not only represents contingency’s attachment to futurity in theme but also models that temporality in narrative form through its staging of the accident as a dramatic event that precipitates a technologically directed picaresque. Homes’s novel explores what it means for the accident to incorporate futurity into its definition, and in doing so, the novel represents the accidental event to be constitutively determined by its effects and consequences, knitting contingency to futurity in a picaresque narrative by way of unsettling the reader’s easy interpretation of an accident’s finality. MWBF begins with an accident that precipitates dramatic change in protagonist Harry Silver’s life. Very early on, Harry’s brother George is involved in a car accident, killing two people and orphaning a child. A then-traumatised George catches his wife Jane in bed with Harry and attacks her with a lamp. Harry’s wife Claire leaves him because of his affair with Jane. George is admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Harry receives guardianship of George’s children, Nate and Ashley, George’s pets, bank account, house, and personal effects. This sequence of events unravels over a mere fifty pages, and the snowballing effect continues, with event precipitating event in Harry’s story of a suburban life turned upside down by a cataclysmic accident. As suggested previously, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened envisions suburbia to be a world of tedious predictability and circularity; the novel’s closure with a disastrous event might signify the threshold of its imagination of that temporal stasis, but its structural underplaying of the accident testifies to that threshold’s unsurpassable limit. MWBF reverses Heller’s structure: from tedious predictability and circularity, then, to interruption, contingency, and unforeseen future consequences.1

38 Time MWBF’s snowballing events, piled up into one another over the course of 500 pages, stem from the accident’s precipitation. Yet MWBF spends little effort tracing the accident’s causality or grounding the event in someone’s responsibility (it could, for instance, explain George’s accident as a direct result of Harry’s kiss with Jane, but only touches on this suggestion briefly (Homes 2012, 103)).2 The court case over George’s accident, too, deems it sufficiently accidental (215). Instead, the novel jettisons paranoid etiology in favour of a story of the accident’s shifting of narrative momentum towards the unexpected future. The accident opens the floodgates of Harry’s predictable life to unforeseeable change, warps the association between suburbia and the nuclear family, and imagines time to be marked by the unexpected and the contingent, which it articulates through the genre of the picaresque. In what follows, I read MWBF’s precipitation by accident to look at how narrative models the accident’s future-oriented temporality. The novel’s ordering of the accident’s futurity, a structure that constitutes the accident through its lasting effects, finds definition in philosophical discourses of the ‘event’, which constitute the philosophical analogue for thinking about the links between futurity and contingency. Like MWBF’s accident, the event is determined by its future effects, but also like MWBF’s accident, the event invites uncertainty as to the question of when it is ever truly over. MWBF translates this uncertainty into the genre of the picaresque. Harry Silver’s unwanted and often passive role as picaro locates him in a genre whose time structure can be understood as temporally ambiguous, either futural and unfolding, or temporally closed and static. The issue of the accident’s temporality in this novel, therefore, is always an issue of the relationship between narrative and contingency: Harry’s accident continually escapes closure despite his efforts to control the accident’s unfolding consequences with recourse to narrative explanation. By joining the accident to the event and to the picaresque, then, the novel describes the accident’s contingent futurity, but also models narrative organisation’s tense relationship with the open, unforeseeable, and contingent future.

‘The Accident Happens and Then It Happens’ In MWBF, an accident happens. Harry is called to the police station to find that his brother has had a bad car crash, running a red light and killing two people. George appears unrepentant and disoriented, so Harry and George’s wife, Jane, admit him to hospital. The effects of this accident begin to unwind: George’s demeanour changes, Harry’s wife Claire advises him to look after Jane, and Harry visits Jane and they begin their affair. George catches them in bed, and then attacks Jane. He is arrested, leaving Harry to pick up the pieces of his life.

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  39 In a foreshadowing of what is to follow, Harry remarks on the initial accident’s snowballing effects: The accident happens and then it happens. It doesn’t happen the night of the accident or the night we all visit. It happens the night after that, the night after Claire tells me not to leave Jane alone, the night after Claire leaves for China. Claire goes on her trip, George goes downhill, and then it happens. It’s the thing that was never supposed to happen. (12) The passage asks what it means to consider the accident an event that encodes future orientation. Strangely, the time of George’s accident is not read as the moment of the accident, even though the ‘night of the accident’ provides an explicit temporal and spatial marker for when it initially happens. Instead, the accident also seems to happen ‘the night after that’, as if the event is immanent in moments that are not really accidents at all, such as when Claire encourages Harry to stay with Jane, or in George’s deterioration. The second half of the sentence ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ therefore involves two points of reference and two different moments in time. The accident’s attachment to seemingly non-accidental events, or to after-effects of the initial event, redistributes the accident onto its future effects, ‘… and then it happens’, making those future consequences part of a larger, temporally extended ‘accident’. But the reference of ‘…and then it happens’ also repeats the initial event, as if the crash’s nomination as accident depends as much on its future consequences as it does on its isolated happening, with the initial ‘happens’ anticipating that these later ‘happens’ will constitute it as an accident. In other words, the later events retrospectively define the initial crash to be accidental through the agency of their happening. Harry’s narration therefore poses the ‘accident’ as something that refers both to an individual occurrence and to an extended vision of unravelling events that constitute the initial event’s aftermath. Only once these effects happen does it seem as if an accident has happened. The temporal logic of these two reference points is arguably circular; George’s accident precipitates unforeseeable consequences that retrospectively define George’s accident to be an accident. This temporal extension of the word ‘accident’ is why, in this paragraph, the accident keeps happening. It isn’t quite finished, even though it has supposedly ‘happened’. This is an unusual way of describing an accident because accidents are usually defined by the causes that precede them, rather than the effects that follow. One means of recuperating the novel’s futural description of the accident is to remember that an accident is an unstable and interpretative category: it is quite possible for future events to retrospectively

40 Time revoke an accident’s accidental status because accidents rely upon the knowledge we have and the knowledge that we don’t. But alternatively, we can understand this phrase in the light of contingency’s attachment to the temporality of futurity. As I have suggested, an accident or a contingent event relates to futurity insofar as it joins an account of contingency to a statement about time that pivots on the nature of the future’s objective opacity. ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ in this way pitches the accident to be an event that precipitates further, unforeseeable effects that also constitute that event, thereby exacerbating or heightening the future’s contingent becoming. But more than this, ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ supplements the accident’s future orientation with an interpretative dynamic that also posits a form of anticipatory retrospection, framing the accident in a way that relies upon the event’s anticipated aftermath to constitute it as accidental. Because of this necessary future perspective, there is a sense, as MWBF makes clear both in this description and in the way the event precipitates the novel’s surprising unfolding, that accidents actualise further unforeseeable consequences, which both partially constitute that accident in a temporally extended fashion and provide a temporal vantage point from which to look back. Given that an accident relies upon its future happening for both Harry and the reader to remark on its having happened, however, the iterative nature of the phrase ‘the accident happens and then it happens’ implicates the event in a future-oriented momentum that also lets loose a particular kind of instability at the heart of the event. That is, MWBF’s phrasing asks, When has the accident truly happened? At what point is an accident considered to be over if the consequences that retrospectively determine it seem ever unfolding, only inciting further events? As the futural distribution of the term onto supposedly non-accidental consequences recognises, the accident precipitates further events, each as unforeseeable and unanticipated as the accident that both causes and continues with them. This provisional structure means that when MWBF’s paragraph announces the accident’s final ‘happening’ after Claire’s flight and George’s downfall (‘and then it happens’.), it also invisibly supplements that statement with another ‘… and then it happens’, as if performing the novel’s own uncertainty about an accident’s future completion. If the accident is ‘the thing that was never supposed to happen’, then this censorious statement says as much about the difficulty of finally closing off the accident as it does of the horror of the family’s situation. After all, the frequency of unforeseeable events as consequences of George’s accident in the novel is striking. MWBF is structurally replete in trips, accidents, bumping intos, and even a stroke that is likened to an accident that then causes another accident. Does the accident keep happening, say, when they shut off Jane’s life support (45), or when Harry adopts­­R icardo (337), the child orphaned by the crash, or when George

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  41 becomes involved with an arms dealer (353), or during one of the many other unravelling effects precipitated by the car crash? The novel’s structure only intensifies the accident’s continual happening by asking just when its effects as a temporally extended event cease, which provides MWBF’s governing narrative logic.

Picaresque, Event, and Futurity Harry’s accident therefore depends upon an unforeseeable future from which to interpret it, but equally, the event’s unforeseeable consequences model that future’s contingency. To formalise this temporality of unending consequence and an accident’s dependence on future perspective, the novel reaches to the genre of the picaresque and conceptualises its accident through a time structure that finds philosophical analogue in the form of the ‘event’. MWBF is a contemporary picaresque. Harry, shocked and disturbed by George’s accident and murder of Jane, inherits George’s house and children when George is sent to prison and seeks to get his own life back on track after the accident, seeking the ‘possibility of repair’ (230). He is an academic historian, teaches at a university, and initially seeks that repair through his return to his work on his book on Richard Nixon. However, Harry is soon fired, unmooring him from the regularity of work, and we follow him roving from unexpected encounter to unexpected encounter, living through the consequences of George’s accident. MWBF unfolds as a series of often self-contained episodes, sometimes connected to the previous one, but sometimes arbitrarily introduced as a means of colliding Harry with a new character, plot thread, situation, relationship, or medical emergency. Harry traipses through these scenarios in the hope of keeping things together, which often translates into taking on the labour of care work for George’s family now that George is in prison and Jane has been murdered. Harry arguably acts as picaro in the novel. He seeks out friends and a love life, cares for Nate and Ashley, but also unexpectedly encounters various characters, and becomes embroiled in situations that are often framed as out of his control: he tries online dating but is kidnapped by his date’s children (87–93); he is caught up in a swinger’s party at a Laser Tag venue (270–6); he bumps into a woman by chance in a supermarket with whom he becomes romantically entwined (251); and his car is hijacked while on a trip in South Africa (429), to name but a few of these episodes. There is a constant sense of the accident’s iteration in Harry’s story, as if introduction to new and variously unexpected encounters. This episodic structure is a hallmark of the picaresque (Wicks 1989). Typically, the picaresque follows the geographical movement of the picaro/a from one episode to the next. MWBF’s form intensifies this structure: its neglect of chapters in favour of a page lineation made up of separated scenarios, marked

42 Time by paragraph breaks, contributes to an episodic organisation for an episodic genre. Episodes often begin suddenly, without connection to the last, and simple phrases or mundane phone calls take on the surprise of the accident’s haunting persistence. Even when Harry receives a postcard from George, the novel dresses the seemingly banal in surprise: ‘Out of the blue, a postcard arrives from George’ (337). Harry’s picaresque is defiantly technological, too, in a novel discretely about technological mediation insofar as, to quote Zara Dinnen, it registers how ‘networks and devices are used in everyday life’ (2018, 3). Harry’s movements are often dictated by this technology, either through messages Harry receives via his computer, such as through email or on his online dating profile, or through older forms of technological media, such as the telephone, which frequently acts as an agent for yet another unexpected encounter. Various iterations of the phrase ‘A few days later, the telephone rings’ (223) litter the novel, which are peppered throughout and are often incipit for the book’s short, unmarked chapters. Between pages 192 and 196 alone, for instance, Harry is caught by surprise by three telephone calls, each a different caller (the first is Nate encouraging him to take some responsibility for Ricardo, the second is Julie Nixon Eisenhower inviting Harry to the Nixon archives, and the third is Ashley asking Harry’s advice on puberty). If ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ incorporates an accident’s direct and indirect consequences as in some way constitutive of the initial event, then Harry’s story is full of that same event’s consequences; each discontinuous, episodic, and disjointed event in a sense reproduces the opening accident’s futural momentum. The accident’s form shapes even the most disparate event. Early in the plot, Harry is victim of a stroke, which unexpectedly hospitalises him. But the stroke itself is likened to, and folded within, a series of accidents that ensure his passive subjection to them: It happens a little while later, when I’m brushing my teeth, a creeping sensation, like water is rushing in, like I’m going under. I brush, I rinse, I look at myself in the mirror. There is a pain in my head, in my eye, and as I’m looking, my face divides, half of it falls, as if I’m about to cry. It just drops. […] I make my way out of the house and into the car. I put the car into reverse, and then realise that I don’t have the key and the engine is not running. I take my foot off the brake and get out. The car rolls down the driveway. I vomit where I am standing. The car rolls into the street and into the path of an oncoming car. An accident happens. (108) The stroke is abrupt and unforeseeable; it interrupts. The phrase ‘It happens a little while later’ syntactically echoes the novel’s opening accident

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  43 by folding the stroke back into the phrase ‘The accident happens and then it happens.’ Here, the stroke happening ‘a little while later’ manifests as an addition to the accident, a continuation of its unravelling, futural logic. But more than this, the stroke’s effect is couched in a language of verticality that is not unlike language used to describe accidents. From its etymological root on, accidents are said to befall their victims. Their axis is, as philosopher Jacques Derrida has it, one of verticality rather than horizontality; the latter spatialises and therefore foretells the event’s coming, whereas the former, he suggests, is far better equipped to articulate an accident’s thwarting of anticipation (Derrida 2007a, 28). Harry’s stroke feels as if he is ‘going under’ water; half of his face ‘falls’, imbuing the stroke with a sense of vertical descent, befalling him. When Harry realises that he cannot start his car, he gets out, and the page spacing almost literally falls, with a series of sentence-length paragraphs ‘dropping’ one after another, resulting in an accident. The stroke results in, but is also clearly folded into, a sense of continual accident. But the association of accident with falling also works to ensure a sense of passivity when it comes to the unforeseeable. The car accident is alluded to as if, under its own control, an event answerable to no one: ‘An accident happens’. The accident befalls Harry. Like the stroke, he is unable to do anything except be passive victim to it, subject to its sudden arrival. If the novel’s events appear to replicate and reproduce the accident’s future iteration, then MWBF also frames these events in terms of the genre of the picaresque. The picaresque is often said to abdicate a ­Bildungsroman-esque story of biographical or psychological maturation in favour of what has been called hero’s ‘protean change and adaptation’ (Mancing 1996, 287). In this way, the picaresque genre embeds a particular kind of temporality that is said to suspend sustained narrative development in favour of the hero’s recoil from and involvement in unpredictable scenarios that continually interrupt any kind of projected plan or anticipation. As Ulrich Wicks has it, the picaresque is ‘continually dis-continuous’ (1989, 55). The novel narrates this rhythm through Harry’s passive subjection and adaptation to disruptive events. Harry’s stroke, and the book’s folding of that stroke into its broader logic of the accident, propels Harry’s story. It is not just that Harry reacts to the picaresque’s discontinuous events and accidents, then, but that MWBF plots around them. After this stroke, Harry strikes up a brief friendship with the policeman who arrives at the accident scene and is admitted to hospital. But, as sudden as his admittance, the novel’s plot diverges yet again: ‘In the middle of the afternoon, with no warning, I am released’ (124). Harry later describes his stroke as ‘“a small event”’ (126) to George’s psychiatrist, and the book is saturated with unexpected events like this, which it plots in the spirit of the ‘plot-less’ picaresque. Indeed, MWBF’s structure continually reflects on an occurrence’s, or an event’s, capacity to interrupt, and it reinforces the discourse of the accident’s precipitation in often knowing acknowledgement.

44 Time Nevertheless, this is not to say that Harry is entirely passive in his subjection to accident. The novel shows the accident, as a discourse of unexpected occurrence and absent responsibility, to also function discursively to extricate Harry from some forms of responsibility he is clearly answerable to. He frames his desire for an affair with Jane in these terms, for instance: ‘Did you ever think you should stop yourself, but in the moment couldn’t or didn’t? Now I understand the meaning of “It just happened.” An Accident’ (23). A means of absolving blame, “It just happened” empties his actions of intention, something out of his control, and intimates a particular kind of narcissistic, self-extrication from responsibility that I will address later in relation to Harry’s blithe attachment to different kinds of care work. But in repeatedly gesturing to the different formations of unexpected event, cataloguing their benign and not-so benign effects, the novel centres its development around an accident’s varied manifestations. Even if not directly attributable to George’s originary accident, the novel pointedly frames these events, or Harry’s likening of his actions to an accident, in terms of the interruptive, precipitative, and unravelling discourse introduced by ‘The accident happens and then it happens’. It makes it clear that when an unexpected ‘event’ happens, so do unexpected consequences. The notion of the ‘event’ is an instructive one for an account of the accident’s temporality. The ‘event’, after all, holds much weight in contemporary philosophical discourses concerned with contingency and unexpected occurrence, and few concepts model the temporality of the accident’s association with the time structure of contingency and futurity better. For this reason, it’s helpful to turn to the philosophy of the unexpected event, specifically philosopher Alain Badiou’s description of the event, by way of unpacking the accident’s future constitution of itself in the phrase ‘The accident happens and then it happens’. Like MWBF’s accident, Badiou’s event similarly invites uncertainty as to both its constitution and its finitude. But also, Badiou’s event draws in clearer detail narrative’s role in an understanding of contingency. Indeed, MWBF not only thematically explores the accident’s futural temporality but also shows the interrelations between accident and retrospection, the event and narrative structure, which occupy a large part of this study. For Badiou, events are unforeseeable irruptions of forces that have been refused representation in a particular social organisation, or agents of excess that burst into the present order, which disrupt, dismantle, or break apart that order.3 An event’s surprise and contingency is essential to its constitution. Unlike accidents, events are neither absolved of responsibility nor happen wholly without intervention, but their conceptualisation of a model of unexpected occurrence is, nonetheless, indispensable for MWBF’s writing of accident. One of the ways that Badiou secures an event’s unforeseeable nature is through the suggestion

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  45 that nothing prior to the event could’ve given insight into its occurrence. Events, then, exceed narrative or representational capture prior to their emergence, and Badiou labours in great detail over their constitution, as well as over how one can imagine such radical contingency without rendering it impotent through prior representation. Badiou metaphorises the arrival of an event with reference to Mallarmé’s dice throw: Why is the event […] a cast of the dice here? Because this gesture symbolises the event in general; that is, that which is purely hazardous, and which cannot be inferred from the situation, yet which is nevertheless a fixed multiple, a number, that nothing can modify once it had laid out the sum […] of its visible faces. A cast of the dice joins the emblem of chance to that of necessity, the erratic multiple of the event to the legible retroaction of the count. (2012, 193) Like the result of a dice throw, the event is unforeseeable and unknowable until it has ‘laid out’ its sum and happened. The event cannot be inferred from the situation it cleaves open prior to its happening, but it is retrospectively interpretable as part of that historical situation – ­becoming a ‘number’ – once it has happened. What this suggests, then, is that the event does not actually exist until it has passed. Its transition from the virtual to the actual happens unforeseeably, but the recognition of this passage in turn depends on the ‘retroaction of the count’. When the dice fall, numbers emerge from virtual possibility. The event, so to speak, ‘happens’ in the moments of the falling dice, during which an event’s outcome cannot be determined. Yet because virtual until actual, we cannot know that an event is ever ‘happening’ until it has already surprised us and has finally happened. It is not just that the event happens but that the retrospective ‘count’ also belatedly makes the event an event by defining it as such. The retrospective recognition of the event’s happening forces the event into existence as much as its own self-­ determination does. Because an event would not be an event if it could be foreseen in advance, the event depends, therefore, on the anticipation of looking back on its occurrence in hindsight. The looking back involved in the ‘count’, here, performs a creation of the event in discourse. Given the uncertainty of this process, which seems to balance on the cusp of failure each time, Badiou’s notion of retrospective definition manifests as a ‘bet’ or ‘wager’ (2012, 198). He requires, then, a double understanding of the event as both virtual in anticipation and made actual through retrospection. The idea that the event has to happen before one can represent it in discourse, but that this representation also paradoxically creates the event, is a shared assumption in numerous event theories.4 One lives with the expectation that

46 Time events may happen, and one wagers, through intuition alone, that they have happened after the fact. Already, to think of the accident as something that ‘happens and then it happens’ reads the trope as living for its future retrospection, as if never quite knowable as a whole until its consequences have fully unravelled. The event’s occurrence is not a merely singular, punctuating happening, then, but it is rather also made up of the unforeseeable consequences that its unexpected emergence simultaneously introduces and is in turn constituted through. Badiou names this process of open-ended expectation of the event’s continual unfolding ‘fidelity’. ‘Fidelity’ is a multifarious concept for Badiou, but it can perhaps be most productively thought of as a particular kind of orientation towards and embrace of an event’s after-effects, or the uncertain future intimated by the event. Fidelity proposes the performance of a belated tracing of an event’s aftermath, both to remain open to the event’s reverberations and to help demarcate it in discourse in the first place. It dictates the spectator’s position as one who loops the event’s different consequences together under the name of that event, following ‘a rule of connection which allows one to evaluate the dependency of any particular existing multiple with respect to the event’ (2012, 234). What ‘the doctrine of the event’, Badiou insists, ‘teaches us is rather that the entire effort lies in following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence’ (2012, 210–11). Thus, fidelity constitutes a process of sticking with the event’s echoes and after-effects, in the hope of eventually drawing those effects together, and retrospectively linking them under the name of an event. Fidelity, then, combines anticipation (the event will happen and will emerge in its after-effects) with retrospection (we will know an event has fully happened only in retrospect). As Keith Robinson summarises, there is a time of the event but it is marked only by a temporality of retrospection and ‘future anteriority’, such that the abrupt discontinuity or commencement of the event will reveal itself ‘to have been’ significant to a subject who is able to show faith in that après coup. (2010, 127) There is a sense of uncertainty, however, in all of this, specifically over how or when an event actually ends. I have suggested that because an event can only be an event if it circumvents anticipation and prior representation, an event appears to have its own kind of agency, and happens before being remarkable in hindsight. But simultaneously, because of the event’s parasitical need for an interpreter’s ‘fidelity’, the event also cannot really be an event until the efforts of an interpreter have constituted it to be one. This introduces an issue into the question of an event’s constitution and also its finitude. An event has to happen before it can

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  47 be remarked on, but at the same time, an event is also paradoxically constituted as if for the first time through interpretation, and it has not effectively happened yet until an observer, through fidelity to its reverberations and consequences, can retroactively determine that event to be an event. In other words, its happening is external to discourse, but its happening is also made through discourse, specifically, through an observer’s retrospective demarcation of it through recourse to its presumed consequences and after-effects. These after-effects are logically posterior to the event’s occurrence, but due to the role of fidelity, which draws on those after-effects to retroactively constitute an event to be an event, they are in some senses temporally prior, too.5 If an event is interpretatively constituted by its after-effects as much as by its sudden irruption, then when is an event ‘fully’ constituted, and when does it end? This question in Badiou’s philosophy works through the same nexus of concerns to do with the unexpected event’s temporality that MWBF’s accident does. If an accident, like the event, depends on its future effects to be described as an accident, and if that accident immerses Harry in an unravelling picaresque that seems to spiral out of control, then when has his accident fully happened, and when does it end? The picaresque genre models Harry’s living inside of an accident that seems to just keep on happening. ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ anticipates this. After all, ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ can’t quite seem to stop itself. One can always supplement its final ‘it happens’ with a further ‘and then it happens’, as if infinitely extending its futural logic. As such, despite the accident’s clear future orientation in this phrase, the novel also potentially likens it to a form of inertia and perpetuity. In other words, the iterative nature of the accident in MWBF, which draws together contingency and futurity in its depiction of the accident’s temporality, also and at the same time potentially reinforces a form of temporal closure marked by meaningless, arbitrary contingency without change. The novel’s employment of the picaresque, I suggest, plays out precisely this double bind, between futurity and blocked futurity, which finds clearest articulation in critical accounts of the genre. As suggested, the picaresque is often contrasted to the Bildungsroman, a genre described to include a story of a character’s organic development, gradual change over time, and teleological maturation (Felski 1989, 133–8). But the picaresque’s admission of potentially ‘endless change and mobility’ can also sound a lot like temporal inertia without qualitative difference depending on how you look at it. The genre depends on whether we see its recipe of episodic movement and lack of clear future goals as witness to a sense of futurity or a sense of perpetual stasis. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the picaro/a’s propulsion through space neglects the narrative arc of temporal development. Because of this, the genre’s ‘chronotope’ is that of ‘adventure-time’: ‘In this kind of time, nothing changes: the world remains as it was, the biographical life of the heroes

48 Time does not change, their feelings do not change, people do not even change’ (2004, 91). Picaresques may involve geographical and physical changes, but ‘deep’ change in terms of a character’s maturation, or a specific goal that drives the plot, is lacking. Bakhtin’s chronotope of the picaresque anticipates Wicks’s, for whom the genre follows a ‘Sisyphus rhythm’, miring the picaro/a in a temporality of blocked futurity, or an extended present of temporal closure in which nothing really happens (1989, 55). This critical reading of the picaresque as temporally static, however, presupposes a very particular metaphysics of time. Each reads temporal movement (as opposed to temporal inertia) as made possible only by a goal-oriented understanding of the future, where a future point is anticipated and progressively worked towards. These critics therefore theorise the picaresque’s inertia as stemming from its continual stultification of an anticipated future that imagines linear development and progressive growth to be its horizon. But ultimately, these models of the picaresque lack engagement with the relationship between contingency and futurity, the latter of which they see as dependent on progressive movement towards a developmental goal. Harry’s descriptions of his sense of living through the accident capture the picaresque’s indecision between futurity and inertia. Midway through the novel, he reflects on the relationship between accident, picaresque, time, and measurement thus: Dutiful regularity was something Clare and I actually found exciting. […] If we added something new or different, it was discussed, regarding what it meant to the routine, the schedule. But now it’s like I’m in an endless free fall, the plummeting slowed only by the interruption of being summoned to do something for someone else. If it weren’t for the children, the dog, the cat, the kittens, the plants, I would come completely undone. (261) Harry’s picaresque, catalysed by constant interruption, contrasts to the predictable regularity of his life prior to George’s accident. But the contradiction at play in Harry’s description of his state of mind also registers the temporal multivalence of the picaresque. The accident’s continual unravelling is posed as a kind of endless free fall, as if conforming to an account of temporal inertia. But in a further reflection on this, and rather than seeking to pilfer or re-establish his earlier routinised order, Harry suggests that instead it is the further interruptions catalysed by the accident that mitigate this endless free fall. In other words, the very forms of care he is thankful for – the children, the dog, the cat, the kittens, the plants – are products of the event that plummets him into free fall in the first place. It is as if Harry’s ‘fidelity’ to the accident’s after-­ effects, to borrow Badiou’s term, sees him through as the thing that

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  49 allows him to escape this sense of endless perpetuity, despite the fact that his fidelity to the event is also what instigates this endless free fall in the first place. In other words, the temporal inertia of plummeting is ‘slowed only by the interruption of being summoned to do something by someone else’, but the ‘interruption of being summoned to do something by someone else’, which indicates the different kinds of care work he is drawn towards in the story’s redemptive narrative arc, is precisely what catalyses that plummeting in the first place, because these interruptions are agents of his picaresque. MWBF therefore models the picaresque’s temporality in a way that provides insight into the accident’s double bind. On the one hand, the picaresque manifests as a form of temporal inertia, and the accident just keeps on happening, in perpetuity. But on the other, by pushing on the metaphysics of time implied in goal-oriented formulations of the future, the picaresque also subtly models the relationship between contingency and futurity. This latter account of the picaresque’s ‘chronotope’ requires an orientation away from the word ‘future’ to the word ‘futurity’. The form of this second word is anti-teleological; it avoids the way the ‘future’ attributes specific anticipatory content, and instead gestures towards the world’s contingent unfolding. But significantly, futurity in this sense also attaches the opaque future to the modality of contingency in a way that underpins it with a sense of social futurity, too. Harry’s relief at further unexpected responsibility gestures to this, coming to influence the novel’s narrative arc of forgiveness, which has contributed to its reception as one concerned with the reparative nature of Harry’s contingently driven picaresque.6 Contingency is helpful in this description of futurity because it implies that the unknowable future can also produce difference, or a qualitatively different future, from the temporal closure announced by blocked futurity, in this case Harry’s feared sense of inertia. Consideration of the picaresque through the lens of futurity, then, injects a different kind of temporality into the genre, one that refutes the homology between teleology and the future by showing how the genre similarly theorises futurity through its evocation of an unpredictable sequence of episodes that cannot be foreseen in advance. As Rowland Sherrill puts this second model of picaresque time, the genre’s tendency to be ‘[a]lways moving, and always apparently moving by coincidence, rebound, fortune and fortuity’ is as much replete with futurity as it is with temporal stagnation (2000, 36). Jane Elliott similarly summarises this framing of the picaresque’s temporality in her consideration of the genre’s multivalent politics. The picaresque’s temporal politics all depend, she argues, on whether one sees unfixed mobility and the stultification of teleological development as politically enabling in a post-structuralist, anti-foundationalist sense, or politically retrograde, because of mobility’s inability to ground a politics of universalist,

50 Time anticipatory, goal-oriented change (2008, 91–4). To rephrase Elliott’s brilliant summary, we can say something similar about the picaresque’s temporality. That is, determining the picaresque’s temporality depends on whether we see its episodic stultification of a goal-oriented anticipation of the future as witness to temporal inertia (because it provides no ground for the character’s transformation), or as indicative of a sense of contingent futurity that does not simply reduce those two modalities to a static vision of time.

Endings With the event and the picaresque in tow, we might return to a question that opened this chapter: when has an accident finally ceased happening if its after-effects reverberate endlessly? MWBF necessitates a particular response: conclusion must be arbitrarily imposed. So far, I have suggested that Alain Badiou’s event and the genre of the picaresque guide an understanding of the temporality of ‘the accident happens and then it happens’. What follows reverses this use of philosophical analogue as explanatory aid. MWBF’s privilege as a novel is that, in turn, it models the solution to the problem of the event, and of a genre, that never seems to quite come to an end. MWBF describes the relationship between contingency, futurity, and accident, but it also represents narrative’s restructuring of contingency. MWBF’s solution to potentially endless repetition of ‘the accident happens and then it happens’, then, is a narrative solution, which arbitrarily imposes an ending on the accident by way of its last page, catalysing, as I will shortly suggest of the novel’s critical reception, a particular interpretation as a result. The accident is always going to end in MWBF in a way that endings are not guaranteed for events in real life. The bind for MWBF is that in order to do justice to the temporal structure of the accident’s continual happening, and in order to do justice to its generic picaresque, it cannot end ‘naturally’ nor follow the progressive and goal-led momentum found in accounts of the Bildungsroman. To do so would be to capitulate to a developmental plot spurned by the accident’s continual surprise throughout. This is also a thematic bind for the picaresque, which does not usually, to quote Rowland Sherrill, result in ‘unifying narrative resolutions’ (2000, 268). Resistance to a goal-led resolution is another way of saying that the picaresque strives to be anti-­teleological. And yet even Sherrill, who celebrates the picaresque’s open-ended nature, still implicitly acknowledges that there is something about an ending that imposes a unifying resolution onto even the most dissolute collection of unpredictable events. When the protagonist ‘stops being a picaro’, Sherrill argues, ‘the work of retrospective autobiographical narration [can] really begin to spy out the coherences that make this jumble of experiences into the stuff of una vida’ (2000, 19). Despite Sherrill’s insistence

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  51 on the open-ended, goalless nature of the picaresque, then, once the narrative stops, the work of hindsight begins. Hindsight, for the picaro/a, leads to the retrospective organisation of incoherence into the unity of a life. There is a strong suggestion that this notion of retrospective unification enacts some kind of teleological imposition onto what has occurred up until then. The picaro/a’s ceasing to be a picaro/a provides a temporal position around which to organise the past into a unifying perspective, seeming to transform a directionless life into a progressive, autobiographical understanding of the picaro/a’s maturation, as if capitulating the genre’s anti-narrative energies to a narrative of development and growth. Narrative endings, because of the dynamics of reading, most acutely demonstrate this kind of retrospective meaning making. It is as if the very idea of an ending introduces the problem of teleology into the picaresque’s anti-teleological design. Keeping in the spirit of the picaresque’s discontinuous and episodic nature, MWBF ends arbitrarily and suddenly. In fact, Harry seems to recognise two endings to his story: the immolation of his book project on Richard Nixon and the novel’s material conclusion a short while later. MWBF counterposes Harry’s desire for some kind of purpose or resolution to his story with its structural stultification of that desire throughout. Harry is an academic historian and a Richard Nixon specialist. Before the accident he was in the middle of a book on this subject. After the accident he reaches to it as a means of controlling his free-fall: ‘I feel instant relief at having remembered that in fact there was something, a mission – the book’ (59). He uses his book to measure how his life post-accident stacks up against before the accident; the book’s anticipated completion anchors him, giving shape to what appears a directionless journey. In a form of self-reflective narration, Harry’s search to organise his discontinuous picaresque around this project offers the foil of a coherent narrative trajectory to the genre’s and accident’s stymieing of a predictable future: a clear beginning, middle, and end. MWBF, however, responds to Harry’s desire to mould his story around the book project with continual, picaresque interruption. Exemplary of this is early in the novel, when Harry goes to the library to work on the book, in which he suddenly trips, and his manuscript spills all over the road (61). As MWBF progresses, Harry’s episodic adventures tear him further and further away from the book, often towards newly found caring responsibilities. And when it does get finished, it has nothing to do with Harry’s control, but rather happens at the hands of an improbable deus ex machina: At 5:37 a.m. on an August Thursday, a time remembered only because that particular clock permanently stopped, a bolt of lightning struck the maple tree next to the house, splitting it with an

52 Time explosive crash that only the heavens could have wrought. The tree was cleaved in a way that left one had standing as it had for the last half-century and the other half slumped against the house, one fat branch jutting through the wall of what had been George’s office, which suddenly looked like an arboretum. The concussive crash, and simultaneous smell of something burning, hurls me out of my narrow bed. (452–3) As if pushing the reader’s patience for miraculous and fortuitous events to its limit, this signal of narrative conclusion through the auspices of another kind of accident (the tree destroys the book) draws attention to the novel’s form as an agent in this intervention. The passage’s strange negotiations of tense combined with a shift in focalised perspective in the initial paragraph emphasise a sense of external imposition, of an outside coming in.7 ‘At 5:37 a.m.’ introduces a new, non-first-person narration focalised by a possibly unknown perspective. This is an unusual divergence from Harry’s relatively consistent first-person narration. The external perspective is only heightened by the paragraph’s temporal position of looking back. The time in which the strike happens is ‘a time remembered’, rather than a time experienced, just as the tree ‘was cleaved’ in the past, looked at from an undisclosed future. This past tense makes the shift to Harry’s present in the second paragraph tense jarring, highlighting the first paragraph’s unusual, external focalisation, as if a neutral, distant observer has just spoken. The lightning strike is an early form of closure for Harry. It kills off the book: ‘The book is done. Cooked. There is no more need for perfection, it has simply ended – or, more specifically, electronically exploded’ (453). The book’s abrupt end cauterises his desire to finish it. The paragraph’s external point of view suggests a sudden, outside, and arbitrary imposition onto Harry’s story. However, despite the striking arbitrariness of this event, there is a sense for Harry that, in hindsight, this random event appears to be a meaningful and natural consequence of his story up until now; he was, he guesses, always meant to give it up. This recuperation of the arbitrary into the purposeful is borne out by Harry himself, who, on the next page, acknowledges that this random event performs something meaningful for him: ‘Is this what I’ve been waiting for?’ (453) Contrary to his desire to finish the book, extant all the way throughout Harry’s narration, here the contingent event of the lightning strike retrospectively reveals a desire to Harry that he did not think he had. The lightning strike accrues meaning and purpose for him. He thinks he was working towards the book’s completion, but actually, in hindsight, this form of abrupt and arbitrary closure fulfils a hope he believes he might have entertained all along, fulfilling a now-revealed

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  53 anticipation. Clearly, Harry’s recuperation of the lightning strike into a narrative of personal destiny is at odds with both the novel’s genre and the strike’s emphatic arbitrariness. But the point is that Harry recuperates its abrupt chance into a personal autobiography in which the event answers an anticipation that he had apparently held all along. This paradoxical idea that an arbitrary and contingent event retrospectively accommodates a sense of personalised narrative growth, even a sense of personal necessity, as if it was always meant to be, is testament to the end-oriented interpretative dynamics introduced by narrative’s bearing on time and the unexpected. Harry’s personal narrativisation of the lighting strike also gets to the heart of how Badiou resolves the event’s historical demarcation. The novel’s reflection on endings in this way provides the lens through which to understand the philosophy of the event’s own reliance on an implicit understanding of retrospective, narrative assimilation. Although Badiou intimates the event’s seeming endlessness, he also introduces the notion of the ‘interpretative intervention’ to suggest that the event depends upon its retrospective demarcation by an interpreter, whose interpretation solidifies it in hindsight: The essence of the intervention consists – within the field opened up by an interpretative process […] – in naming this ‘there is’ and in unfolding the consequences of this nomination in the space of a situation to which the site belongs. (2012, 203) This process is temporally doubled. It occurs ‘during’ the event, but it also happens retrospectively. Because of the impossibility of being sure that an event is happening or not, however, an interpretative intervention is, out of necessity, a wager, or a gamble, a risky attempt to subsume ‘an aleatory exception’ into representation and structure (Badiou 2012, 202). The interpretative intervention is an operation enacted during the event, but the event’s naming also transforms the event, making it concrete and actual in hindsight. In other words, the interpreter names an event in its unfolding by saying ‘there is’. But in saying ‘there is’, the interpreter subsequently introduces the event to discourse and representation, ensuring its occurrence as well. The act of naming, then, retrospectively joins one thing – the event – into its constituent parts, such as its causes, the situation that it disturbs, its consequences, and its effects. Just as the event cannot be anticipated, the intervention cannot be subject to anticipation either. The process must be unpredictable and reactive, and therefore as open to chance as the event itself. This is Badiou’s solution to ensure that the event is not endless. But importantly, the interpretative intervention is a narrative procedure, albeit one that

54 Time proceeds by chance. It involves a form of looking back and connecting seemingly unconnected elements together, drawing them into coherence in the way his famous example of the signifier the ‘French Revolution’ creates historical continuity out of an infinite array of historical conditions.8 It is an arbitrary imposition that helps to bring the event to its outcome, but it only brings about that putative conclusion through the retrospective imposition of narrative explanation. MWBF’s narrative of the experience of living in an endless accident therefore provides insight into the interpretative reorganisation of an arbitrary intervention, modelling the interpretative dynamics produced by an arbitrary form of conclusion. It is telling, then, that the novel’s actual ending invokes a similar kind of interpretative reconfiguration of the novel’s contingent unfolding, not unlike Badiou’s interpretative intervention and the novel’s earlier lightning strike. But to justify the bearing of narrative on this procedure, it is important to recognise that the combination of arbitrariness and retrospective sense-making provides a recipe for understanding much of the narratology of endings. Endings are prone to catalysing retrospective interpretation of what precedes into some kind of end-orientation. By this two things are meant: first, that when the reader reads an ending, what has led up until that point is understood anew in terms of the ending, conferring significance onto those events in hindsight; and second, that for the reader comprehending the narrative in and over time, the sense of the ending is immanent because a reader remains aware of the work’s material finitude, encouraging the anticipation that things will make some retrospective sense once read.9 Endings project consequence onto the story’s sequence, and the illusion of end-orientation onto story events, as if beginning and middle are there for the purposes of the end. Thus, even if a novel like MWBF appears directionless, reading involves the implicit anticipation that its ending will retrospectively suffuse that which leads up to it with a sense of end-orientation, as if the seemingly random progresses towards a purposeful end that is its natural outcome. Narrative discussions of endings tend to consider questions of ‘closure’, and the distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ endings is a common one. An ending with ‘closure’ is an ending that appears to bring all of the elements of a story together, either ‘tying’ them up (as in the metaphor of a series of loose threads) or ‘untying’ them (as in the metaphor of a knot to be unravelled).10 ‘Open’ endings supposedly refuse this. The distinction between closed and open endings, however, is an essentially fruitless one, because of the futility of deciding between them. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, if ‘the ending is thought of as tying up in a careful knot, this knot could always be united again by the narrator or by further events’, to the point where it is impossible to tell if any narratives offer ‘closure’ in the sense implied (1978, 4). Similarly, while ‘open’

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  55 endings may resist ‘closure’, they, nonetheless, provide an interpretative lens through which to understand the work as a whole, for instance, as a text whose purpose is to defy ‘closure’, and in doing so, these endings invariably shape the text retrospectively in a fashion akin to the interpretative effects of closure, albeit at a less plot-driven level.11 Instead of ‘closure’, then, ‘conclusion’ is more apposite. All finished written narratives conclude, because they stop: there is always a last page or a final scene. The final page might not be the end of the story, characters, or world, but it is always in place, waiting for us to reach it. An alternate strategy for thinking about endings in the light of conclusion, rather than of openness or of closure, is to consider how the ending, by way of concluding, shapes the reader’s comprehension and expectations in the dynamics of reading, irrespective of what happens in that ending. Narrative theory often suggests that reading involves the forward momentum of progression, and that endings encourage retrospective consideration of the story once read.12 This is a familiar account of endings for approaches interested in the dynamics of reading in time. For James Phelan, readers desire progression, and thus read for the ending. That desire shapes one’s experience of the ending: When we read for the progression, we experience the ending as determined by the beginning and the middle, even as it has the potential, in providing both completeness and closure, the transform the experience of reading the beginning and the middle. (1989, 111) Ultimately, for Phelan, the anticipation of an ending shapes how readers progress through the story, and once read, endings have the capacity to confer retrospective meaning onto the text as a whole. In this sense, endings can transform one’s memory of the text, where the narrative’s known outcome retrospectively confers momentum, as if things have been leading to it, in hindsight. One reads the ending as being determined by what comes before it; the beginning and middle are subsequently ‘transformed’ by that ending.13 Even supposedly ‘open’ endings involve this temporal dynamic because all written narratives conclude. This implies an interpretative dynamic in which readers project endings backwards, reading them into what has come before as the purposeful consequence of that sequence. The reasons for this are manifold and include narrative comprehension’s treatment of sequence and consequence, the end-oriented structure of hindsight, and the hermeneutic circle found between time and narrative, each of which I address in the following chapters. But a constitutive aspect of narrative temporality, and thus one of the expectations carried forwards when reading a narrative, is the quality of teleological

56 Time coherence, in which the beginning, middle, and ending, once read, are understood together. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests, Looking back from the conclusion to the episodes leading up to it, we […] say that this ending required these sorts of events and this chain of actions. But this backward look is made possible by the teleological movement directed by our expectations when we follow the story. (1980, 174) The backward look of hindsight gathers the beginning, middle, and ending together, and folds these various temporal positions into a position of future knowledge. Hindsight then reads the ending as the direction to which the narrative sequence has inexorably led. Each event is experienced anew as part of a sequence of which we now know the end, meaning that the end colours each prior event with the dye of what happens subsequently. This grasping of the story as complete kick-starts what Ricoeur describes as the process of ‘reading the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end’, which, in turn, means that ‘we also learn to read time itself backward, as the recapitulating of the initial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences’ (1980, 80). This experience, sometimes referred to as the comprehension of backwards causation, means that after having read the ending, readers can look back on the narrative and read that ending as implicit in the various stages that have led to it. These stages, which either fall earlier in the chronology of story events or are presented earlier in the narrative discourse, subsequently gain significance as conditions for a later effect, in this case the ending; but simultaneously, because knowledge of a known end latterly interprets this earlier sequence’s presence to be conditional for that end, one can also interpret the ending to be, paradoxically, the cause or reason for the narration of the sequence that leads up to it. With this, whatever happens before is understood to be as much the effect of the ending’s presence as it is the cause for that ending. With this experience of backwards causation, then, the semantic impact of earlier events shifts ever so slightly; instead of the body of the narrative merely representing an open-ended sequence that could lead anywhere, retrospective projection of the ending backwards installs this later eventuality to be cause and justification for that which leads to it. This, in turn, produces an interpretative dynamic in which earlier events subsequently appear to be in some sense purposefully working towards a determinate conclusion that precedes them, justifying the organisation of this sequence in a particular way, as if, as Gary Saul Morson puts it, ‘pulled’ by that ending (1994, 42–81). It is important here to remember that this backward glance experientially and interpretatively imposes teleological direction onto the story. After all, one can never say for sure if the story events are implicitly connected in this

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  57 way, and comprehension of the novel’s plot and event structure is only one facet to narrative cognition. But what is clear is that this form of comprehension makes it possible to read the ending into beginning in a way that capitulates the beginning’s initial conditions to the story’s terminal consequences. Reading narrative, or experiencing the world through narrative, as I will discuss in the following chapters, involves a general anticipation that later events encourage the retrospective interpretation of what has passed in the light of what is newly known. This is significant for both MWBF’s lightning strike and Badiou’s interpretative intervention, because both involve a similar mixture of arbitrariness and retrospective sense-making shared by the experience of reading the ending of a story. Both attempt to offer an ending to their seemingly endless structures – either Harry’s accidental picaresque or Badiou’s unfolding event – with what appear to be random or wagered impositions of closure. But the randomness of these endings retrospectively introduces the connective tissue of meaning onto both, shaping an accident’s and event’s provisional conclusion. This process makes it possible, in Harry’s case, to wonder if the lightning strike isn’t what he was waiting for all along and, in Badiou’s case, to offer a historical threshold for the event, where disparate historical moments meld together into a coherent beginning and ending. MWBF’s actual ending combines arbitrariness and retrospective restructuring in a way that both reflects on this interpretative dynamic and asks a question of contingent futurity and the picaresque genre. It asks how written narrative fiction can model contingency’s association with futurity, and if the picaresque can persist in a directionless fashion, when all narrative, once read, partially involves the retrospective projection of end-oriented significance on what initially seems open-ended. MWBF’s ending couples its contingent, persistently unforeseeable plotting with a sense of developmental necessity. It poses the idea that Harry’s seemingly arbitrary journey through accident and chance had actually been working towards an until now realised purpose, in the form of Harry’s reparative narrative. The novel concludes as follows: It is three hundred sixty-five days since the warning, three hundred and sixty-five days since Jane pressed against me in the kitchen: me with my fingers deep in the bird; our wet, greasy kiss. It has been a year in full, and still the thought of Jane fills me with heat. I feel myself rise to the occasion. May we be forgiven; it is a prayer, an incantation. May We Be Forgiven. (480) MWBF ends repeating both title and its beginning lines: ‘“May we be forgiven,” an incantation, a prayer’ (1). It doesn’t say that Harry has

58 Time been forgiven, and it doesn’t say that he hasn’t. And yet, the repetition of its own title in capitals, and its singular quotation at the end, suggests that this forgiveness is to be held out as possible. What makes this a possibility in the first place is Harry’s reflection on a year’s passing. The year marks off the novel: ‘It is three hundred and sixty-five days since the warning.’ In doing so, the year offers a provisional ending for Harry’s story. This marker draws Harry’s past into his present, connecting it to the ‘warning’ a year ago to where he is now, thereby creating a satisfyingly rounded period of time. But because his point of remembering in the present conditions his remembrance, the two cannot be separated: ‘still the thought of Jane’ fills him with heat. In other words, the passage moves between Harry’s present moment and his attempt to look back on and evaluate the year that he has marked off as its conclusion. This kind of hindsight involves the mixture of Harry’s present with his memory: Harry evaluates the year in full, but his ‘wet, greasy kiss’ with Jane still lingers. Harry’s backward glance appears to transform an otherwise directionless story. The novel ends on ‘May We Be Forgiven’. This repetition introduces the reparative narrative arc to Harry’s story in coordination with his efforts to grasp together of the ‘year in full’. By positing this, the novel makes the story appear to be about Harry’s forgiveness. His commentary on the year in full, in other words, introduces purpose onto a series of events that have up until now seemed arbitrarily and contingently plotted. This belated imposition of purpose is not unfamiliar to many of Homes’s other novels, either. As Mary K. Holland suggests of Music for Torching (1999) and This Book Will Change Your Life (2009), both of which end with similarly unexpected conclusions, MWBF’s ending offers the kind of conclusion that retrospectively organises its seemingly directionless and meaningless picaresque into a purposeful narrative: like those two other novels, ‘it renders readable and meaningful a narrative that […] seemed pointless and episodic,’ which, in turn, re-inscribes a moral certitude that appeared, up until that point, missing (2012, 222). Harry’s ending retrospectively provides a position from which to look back and read things anew. We read his subjection to unforeseeable accidents as oriented towards this ending, purposeful in the sense that Harry’s capacity to embrace his role as picaro may actually have been the condition of possibility for what turns out to be the novel’s narrative arc of forgiveness. But what is significant about this is less the novel’s instruction in any kind of moral lesson, than it is that the novel’s reflection on its arbitrary ending makes clear the work of narrative comprehension – on behalf of both the reader and Harry – in teasing out this moral lesson or developmental goal from the accident. In a mirroring of the novel’s opening scene, Harry sits around his dinner table for Thanksgiving. But unlike the opening scene, which involves his immediate family, Harry is

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  59 now surrounded by his various adoptees and friends: Nate and Ashley (George’s children), Ricardo (the child orphaned by the accident), Ricardo’s aunt and uncle, Cy and Madeline (the parents of Amanda, a woman Harry bumps into in a supermarket), Mr and Mrs Gao (owners of local Chinese restaurant), Harry’s aunt Lillian, Ching Lan (Harry’s typist), and Ching Lan’s parents. Almost literalising the accident’s after-effects, those sitting round the table are consequences of the novel’s accidental plotting and, thus, of Harry’s capacity to follow where the accident and picaresque take him. Pointedly, they are the outcome of his willingness to take on the work of care. This image, in combination with the final page’s conclusive incantation, installs, in hindsight, a purpose to Harry’s directionless story, having accidentally met his new family arrangement. Openness to this accidentally met family, it transpires, appears to be conditional for that forgiveness. This effect of revelation in the novel’s final moments is clearly in contrast to the seemingly arbitrary nature of that ending. While not as explicitly signposted as the earlier deus ex machina, the spatiotemporal marker of ‘three hundred sixty-five days since’ suggests that the novel has only come to an end because of a time limit. There is nothing significant about this period of a year beyond its function as a convenient historical marker of when Harry first kissed Jane. The accident, when it happens, is not given a year’s expiry date, nor is there a reason for why it has to end here. On the contrary, the novel’s blunt conclusion draws attention to its convenient but arbitrary nature. Harry’s narrative arc of forgiveness and repair therefore seems to be the retrospective product of the year’s mark, rather than something intimately linked to, or somehow a natural result of, a year’s passing. This mixture of arbitrariness and retrospective restructuring puts strain on the novel’s genre and on its knitting of contingency to futurity. On the one hand, MWBF concludes in the spirit of its picaresque, finishing in an appropriately arbitrary manner. But the ending also deviates from the intentions of the picaresque, since in spying out a possible purpose to Harry’s contingent story, it capitulates the genre’s goal-less organisation to an ending that confers purpose onto that open-ended plotting, and to a form of retrospective autobiography that reads Harry’s role as picaro into a story of personal growth. This, as I have suggested, is not the novel’s failure to follow through with presenting an idealised version of the genre, but rather an issue extant with any narrative representation of the picaresque that concludes. Genre and narrative form appear confusedly mixed in Harry’s ending, re-inscribing a developmental plot onto what has passed. The accident finally stops happening. But just as with Badiou’s interpretative intervention, MWBF is drawn between two opposing demands: the need to do justice to the contingent consequences of the accident, coupled with the need to prevent the accident from becoming seemingly endless. Reading MWBF’s ending therefore

60 Time involves a double recognition. On the one hand, the novel emphasises its interruptive and abrupt ending. On the other, MWBF’s ending retrospectively projects a narrative goal of personal redemption onto a seemingly discontinuous and apparently directionless trajectory. MWBF thus concludes with an arbitrary but reflective conclusion on the interpretative dynamics of reading endings and on looking back at an accident in hindsight. Badiou’s discussion of holding fidelity to the event provides a rigorous temporal structure that guides a reading of the novel’s key insight about the accident: namely, its capacity to field future, unforeseeable consequences, and its conceptual relation to the future’s opacity. With the novel’s arbitrary end, it further represents the accident to be an event that, through its contingent irruption and Harry’s fidelity, envisions a qualitatively different future for Harry, yielding meaningful, albeit retrospectively interpreted, significance behind his earlier experience of the free fall of temporal inertia. ‘The accident happens and then it happens’ is therefore MWBF’s recognition of both the accident’s entanglement with futurity and narrative’s mediation of contingency and the philosophy of the event. Although this account of MWBF has mostly engaged with the novel’s formal representation of accident, I suggest that consideration of narrative’s bearing on the temporality of contingency, picaresque, and event helps to, in turn, complicate some of the ways in which the novel has been critically received, as a text that eventually recovers from entirely dissolving into irony by way of its conclusion. In other words, MWBF’s seeming recognition of the way in which narrative conclusion appears to introduce purposeful momentum to Harry’s passage through the novel may help to articulate the reason for why accounts of the novel that seek to diagnose the catalyst for Harry’s repair seem to only paint a partial picture. As suggested, Harry’s gesture towards forgiveness by the novel’s end appears to intimate, retrospectively, a particular kind of ethics: only by staying open to the accidental, through generosity to what Harry calls ‘the openness, the sense of possibility’ (435) of taking care of the novel’s variety of accidentally met characters, does he deserve the book’s redemptive narrative arc. This is an ethics that retrospectively appears to shape, as Kasia Boddy suggests, the novel into a story ‘about atonement and “reparations”’, one that, although self-conscious in nature, holds out the possibility for Harry’s forgiveness with an ultimately partial utopian ethics that rebuilds his community (2019, 327–8).14 However, in the light of the way in which the novel arbitrarily enforces conclusion, an ethical, reparative reading of MWBF seems too reliant on the book’s concluding gesture to retrospectively realise this partially utopian ethics. This kind of reading, in the light of the above, both downplays the novel’s sometimes narcissistic presentation of Harry’s redemptive narrative arc and treats the ending as an otherwise sincere affirmation of purposeful momentum. But the novel is saturated in irony, from Harry’s

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  61 visit to the colonial fantasy of Nateville, a village in South Africa named after Nate, to the story’s gesture, through the character of Amanda, to the fact that Harry’s ultimately benign picaresque across the territories of care and housework is the daily, iterative, non-benign labour of what Marxist feminism would call the social reproduction foisted onto others in the service of steadying the ship of capitalist relations (Bhattacharya 2017). When Harry offers to take responsibility for Amanda’s parents for the evening so that she can ‘do an errand or two’ (402), for instance, she lets him have them for good. Like much of the traditionally gendered labour foisted on him after George’s accident, Harry takes to this care work like a duck to water, but he seems unable to recognize that for Amanda, it has left, she says, ‘“almost nothing of me – I have to preserve what I can”’ (403). Harry never quite learns the lesson of the burden of this kind of work on others. After all, Ricardo’s aunt, who is forced to care for Ricardo after George kills his parents in the opening car accident, tells Harry in an earlier section of the novel that ‘“What do you have to cry about? You are a big white guy with a big house”’ (337). In response, Harry immunises himself against recognising this privilege by describing himself as ‘really just a college professor who sometimes gets dragged in over my head’ (364), and so it is no surprise when he takes Amanda’s desire to be left alone as a personal, irresponsible affront (467).15 Indeed, suggestion that the novel finds, through its ending, a suddenly unearthed communal morality, thereby refiguring as earnest what was until that moment ironic (Holland 2012), too easily detaches the novel’s otherwise persistent, undercutting irony from its conclusion. By contrast, it seems clear that just as MWBF narrates Harry’s journey with tongue firmly in cheek, so too does it draw attention, both in its representation of the lightning strike and in its seemingly sudden conclusion, to the process by which endings arbitrarily catalyse interpretations of retrospective meaning and purpose where there seemingly was none. It is not so much that MWBF finally capitulates to moral purpose, then. Instead, what attention to narrative’s mediation of contingency points towards is the way in which Homes’s novel both enacts and undercuts the process by which the reader uncovers teleological purpose where there initially did not seem to be any. The novel’s gesture to the dynamic of narrative comprehension enacted by the ending through its earlier account of the lightning strike, after all, in which Harry reads the strike as a form of quasi-divine purpose set out to free him of his Nixon book, in part emphasises his narcissism throughout. In this way, the ending’s capture of the seemingly directionless picaresque in a story of personal redemption reiterates that narcissism threaded throughout and hints at the kinds of exclusions that condition the family dinner table: no Jane, no Amanda. In other words, Homes’s novel gestures to the arbitrary nature of its ending in order to ironise the process by which the novel’s

62 Time conclusion supposedly unearths meaning and purpose. Not only does Harry’s narration perform this activity, then, but the novel also, through its reflection on the arbitrariness of endings and the temporality of the picaresque, shows how this interpretative process works on the level of reading, which is then reproduced in its critical reception. Exhibiting the importance of thinking about narrative, accident, and contingency together, MWBF draws its seemingly endless accident to an inevitable end, and in doing so, the novel models for the reader both the accident’s constitutive relation to the unknowable future and the experience of interpreting a contingent event in hindsight. MWBF therefore considers the accident’s temporality to be one that encodes future momentum, modelling through both the genre of the picaresque and the philosophical analogue of the event the way in which narrative endings arbitrarily mould open temporality around teleological momentum. But in order to interpret an accident as accidental, one need also think backwards and question the causality that precedes it. If MWBF shows teleological projection to be encoded in the experience of reading an ending, then I will now turn to how this same projection afflicts retrospection and causal interpretation more generally.

Notes 1 On the suburban novel, its generic temporality of predictability and closure, and Homes’s difference to it, see Knapp (2011). 2 All subsequent references are to this edition. 3 In Badiou’s application of mathematical set theory, reality consists of an infinite number of what he calls ‘multiples’, which constitute the ontological root of his philosophy. ‘Multiples’ are, in Peter Hallward’s words, the ‘stuff’ of Badiou’s ontology because their collection into a grouping of multiples (whether into an organised (consistent) form of totality or a naturally messy (inconsistent) form) in essence determines Badiou’s account of how the ‘State’ (a synonym for all those forces that homogenise being) organises the world (2004, 5). The most important aspect of linking the inconsistent multiple to the event is that the former can only appear through the exegencies of the latter, and yet the latter is impossible without the pressure of the former’s sudden appearance. The two, when entangled, unforeseeably breach the ‘State’. 4 See, for instance, Lyotard (1991, 90) and Derrida (2007b, 446). 5 For a rigorous consideration of Badiou’s ethics in the light of the event’s difficult constitution through fidelity, see Laclau (2004). 6 Kasia Boddy, for instance, suggests that one of MWBF’s core differences to Heller’s Something Happened, of which Homes cites as an influence, is the reparative nature of Harry’s narrative through the structure of atonement and a reconfiguration of the family unit. The novel, she argues, both presents this reconfiguration to be partially utopian and also partially ironised by the discourse of the self-help novel (2019, 327). However, I am less concerned with the politics of possibility in Harry’s story than I am with how the novel formally reflects on the arbitrary projection of this redemptive narrative arc, which is the outcome of its narrative mediation of the iterative spiralling of the accident’s continual happening and will address ethical accounts of novel shortly.

Accident, Event, and Picaresque  63 7 Marie-Laure Ryan (2009, 64) discusses how the deus ex machina is often understood through the logic of an external imposition. 8 ‘[T]he Revolution is a central term of the Revolution itself; that is, the manner in which the conscience of the times – and the retroactive intervention of our own – filters the entire site through the one of its eventual qualification’ (Badiou 2012, 180). 9 Much of the narratology on the relationship between endings, narrative, and sense-making is indebted to Frank Kermode’s (2000) famous study The Sense of an Ending. 10 On endings and closure, see Miller (1981), Torgovnick (1981), and Carroll (2007). 11 ‘It is important to realise that such lack of closure does not mean lack of conclusion. By the rule of conclusive endings, the authorial audience will take these open endings and assume that open-ness itself is part of the point of the conclusion’ (Rabinowitz 1987, 166). See also Ricoeur (1990b, 22). 12 For a useful survey of the narrative theory on endings, see Richardson (2002). 13 For consideration of this interpretative dynamic in contemporary fiction, see Bennett (2012, 22–43). 14 We might also read Badiou’s account of ethics into this openness, which encourages the moral principle of following through with the event’s disruption of the ordinary and predictable: ‘To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking […] the situation “according to” the event’ (2001, 41). But again, a reading of what those ethics are is to underplay the novel’s self-conscious production of the possibility of that reading. 15 It is telling that Amanda’s final conversation with Harry is about Amanda not wanting to be told ‘When “something” happens’ to her parents (467). Harry’s question, here, implicitly echoes the language of happening kickstarted earlier by the accident, and in doing so, it connects the accident’s iterative unravelling to his continual introduction to traditionally gendered labour throughout. Amanda’s desire not to be told about things happening, in this light, is unsurprising. Indeed, her refusal to cooperate with ­Harry’s happy picture in the novel’s conclusion, then, makes most sense in the light of her revulsion at the care work he so blithely takes up, forms of traditionally domestic labour, that, as Melinda Cooper suggests, are reproduced through ever-increasing contingent and precarious forms of contract in post-Fordist economies (2012). Amanda’s reaction is testament to the enduring normalcy of this kind of work for predominantly gendered and racialised populations.

2 Backwards Accident, Coincidence, and Teleological Retrospection

In a late essay on Henry James, Gertrude Stein distinguishes the accident from the coincidence according to their different time structures: What is the difference between accident and coincidence. An accident is when a thing happens. A coincidence is when a thing is going to happen and does. (1969, 119) Stein attributes to the accident an absence of meaning. Her pared back phrasing shears the event of demonstrable causality to represent it instead as an inexplicable and unexpected occurrence. Nothing precedes its happening, in her account; it just happens. The accident is a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’. It is something unexpected that resists causal explanation, but that is as regular as happening itself. Accidents, then, are contingent occurrences. They assume the possibility that any ‘thing’ could have happened differently. Coincidences in Stein’s words, however, are full of meaning. The coincidence is an event through which two or more things coincide through the apparent agency of chance. Stein suggests that there is something in this notion of things coinciding, at the right time or in the right place, which implicates the event in a suggestiveness exceeding plain chance. Unlike the accident, which is not ordinarily used to describe this kind of confluence, the coincidence’s capacity for the convergence of two or more things in ways that strike a relationship between them (or reveals a prior relationship between them) structures the event according to two temporal referents: a pattern, relationship, or significance that anticipates the event’s happening (‘when a thing is going to happen’) and its occurrence (‘and does’). Because of the suggestive nature by which coincidences converge things, the coincidence invites consideration of the reason behind its occurrence. The coincidence’s apparent reason, Stein’s enigmatic phrasing suggests, can make the event seem far from chanceful. In this way coincidences take on the sense that they are implied in advance by the connection or relationship that appears to cause them. This is in contrast to the accident’s temporality, which is one of

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  65 unexpected interruption and contingent occurrence. Unlike accidents, interpretations of the coincidence’s temporality are far more suggestive, in Stein’s words, of fateful sequence and necessary outcome.1 Stein’s account of the coincidence’s inevitability differs as to how coincidences are sometimes referred to in common usage, in which they are used to dismiss suggestive interconnections as pure chance. But in what follows, I analyse Nicola Barker’s 1994 novel Reversed Forecast to argue that the coincidence in narrative fiction provides a trope that conceptualises the future as foreclosed. This is in contrast to the accident, an event notable less for its suggestive convergence of two or more things than for its contingent occurrence, but an event, nonetheless, that invites retrospective interpretation because of its apparent causal uncertainty. For this latter consideration of the accident, I turn to Noah Hawley’s 2016 novel Before the Fall, in which an apparent aviation accident begins an investigation into the event’s causes, to account for the ways in which the accident’s invitation of backwards inference produces a novel mired in conflicting interpretations. The distinction between coincidence and accident, therefore, provides a helpful conceptual distinction for two different modalities: the necessary and the contingent. However, this chapter will also work to demonstrate the unease of that separation. In Before the Fall, the crash’s investigation thematises the mechanics of causal interpretation in a way that unsettles the easy distinction between coincidence and accident because the latter’s causal absence invites renewed interpretations of its relationship to other events. Through pursual of the slipperiness of this distinction, the chapter turns to the key interpretative dynamic of teleological retrospection, which I argue cognitively facilitates and shapes causal interpretation by making it possible to interpret an event in the light of its causes. This interpretative dynamic, I will suggest, risks reducing contingency to the contradictory modality of causal necessity. If accidents depend on backwards interpretation, then the dynamic of teleological retrospection suggests that hindsight proves problematic for the interpretation of an accidental event.

Coincidence The coincidence’s backward reference to a prior relationship that can appear to foretell its chance intersection models a time structure of forecasted occurrence. With the coincidence, that which happens appears to have always been going to happen. Nicola Barker’s Reversed Forecast is a text that singularly organises according to plotted coincidences. Through preoccupation with a collection of metaphors that reflect on its suggestively deterministic plot, Barker’s novel qualifies the coincidence’s temporality as one attuned to a story of fate, backwards causation, and temporal closure. The novel is narrated from a series of different perspectives, moving from Ruby, a betting shop employee who envisions

66 Time all life as a gamble, to Steven, a musical promoter; Vincent, a con-artist who Ruby helps out; and Sam, a teenage pub singer, and her sister Sylvia, a reclusive bird lover whose narration culminates in a vision of narrative omniscience. Each narrator finds herself or himself embroiled in the other’s fortunes through a repeatedly unlikely network of coincidences. These characters are, as Sylvia’s visions will later suggest, inexplicably linked by a pattern that exceeds them. One such pattern is their geographical relationship to one another, with the plot taking place in 1990s London, between the betting shops of Soho, a housing estate in Hackney, and a nearby greyhound racing track in Hackney Wick. Reversed Forecast takes its title from this latter location, a reversed forecast being a bet that gambles on the success of two racers coming first and second in a race, in whichever order.2 Gambling is, therefore, a thematic preoccupation for the novel, but especially in the light of Ruby’s focalisation, a protagonist who repeatedly frames the narrative as a gamble on winning and losing. This metaphor soon becomes a very literal trope when she inherits a racing greyhound. Gambling is also, as Gerda Reith (1999) argues, a system of thought that historically renders chance statistical, managing it through probabilistic calculation. The novel’s structure around a series of unlikely chance encounters takes on this epistemological frame as the story of a race between different characters in an environment in which chance runs rife. But it is in the novel’s excess of coincidence and its suggestions that the race may not be as open as its competitors think that Reversed Forecast models the structural difference between accident and coincidence, making legible the latter event’s time structure as one that formalises temporal closure. Reversed Forecast begins with a short juxtaposition of Ruby’s dream about a bird with an image of Sylvia covered in a flock of birds. At this point they do not know each other, but they will meet later in the novel, through an unlikely series of chance circumstances. Early on, Steven, a music manager and Ruby’s only friend in London, discusses representation with pub singers Brera and her daughter Sam. Sylvia, Brera’s other daughter, is also there but dislikes Steven. She then argues with her mother and runs out. When Sylvia returns, she has a severe allergic attack. Brera panics and looks for the telephone number for Sam’s boyfriend but by chance instead picks up Steven’s, seeing ‘a number written down in Sam’s hand and diall[ing] it’ (2011, 78).3 Steven rushes over, takes them to hospital, and suggests that Ruby look after Sylvia while Sam and Brera go on tour, which leads to their meeting. The novel’s chance structure is ostensibly no different from any other text in this study, in that it presents an environment especially rich with contingent and unexpected encounters. For the realist novel, after all, coincidences go some way to representing the world, because they historicise the probability of surprising interrelation made possible by the criss-crossing of

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  67 local population networks in dense urban space (Grener 2012, 323–4). However, this reading would miss out on Sylvia’s and Ruby’s reactions to their meeting. Both suspect they are improbably linked by destiny. When Ruby arrives, Sylvia transfixes on Ruby’s tattoo of a bird. Sylvie’s flat confuses Ruby, who struggles to recall why she is there: ‘She couldn’t focus. She struggled to remember’ (120). Ruby’s confusion arises because of the immediate mugginess of her new surroundings, but her suggestive lack of focus also raises the question of design, with her forgetfulness representing a strange absence of will. This sense of design assumes greater significance once Ruby remembers that meeting Sylvia was ‘Like something I saw in a dream […] that girl, this smell, that feeling’ (122). On realising this, Ruby thinks backwards, to the dream she had in the beginning of the novel. It is helpful to summarise this dream in order to approach Reversed Forecast’s use of foreshadowing as a means of thematising coincidence. In the dream, Ruby sees a bird outside of her window. She reaches to push it away, but ‘this rapid movement, the whiteness of motion from her bleached hair, her pale skin, made the bird – if indeed it was a bird – fall from the sill, as though shot by an arrow of whiteness, a white lightning’ (1). Ruby’s dream combines the prophetic significance of the dream with the gesture towards augury intimated by the presence of a bird, an animal frequently associated with Sylvia throughout the novel.4 But what’s more, the dream’s description of the bird through the mixture of an arrow and a lightning strike combines two familiar but very different metaphors for time and the unexpected that describe Ruby’s and Sylvia’s later coincidental meeting. The bird is in part associated with the exigencies of an unexpected event and likened to lightning, which, as explored in Chapter 1, dresses the bird’s appearance in the language of verticality and surprise. The bird also disappears as if being struck by an arrow. On the one hand, the arrow – often used in the phrase ‘the arrow of time’ – is a familiar metaphor for time’s asymmetry (Davies 1995, 196–218). But this usage underplays the dream’s foreshadowing effects and conceals the arrow’s spatialisation of time as something that the novel also reverses. After Ruby’s dream, the novel jumps to Sylvia standing alone, covered in a flock of birds. When the final one rests on her shoulder, she greets it: ‘“Hello,” she said quietly, her voice low and rasping. “I could see you coming from miles away”’ (2). Birds and Sylvia function metonymically in the novel, the one often representing the other, with Sylvia even living in a bedroom full of pigeons. In Ruby’s dream, the bird speaks across the page to Sylvie; Sylvie, in turn, watches a bird land on her ‘from miles away’, which spatially refers across the page to Ruby, dreaming of birds on the same night, presumably at the same time, but geographically apart. This is why, when Ruby finally meets Sylvia through the chance of knowing Steven and the chance of Brera telephoning Steven,

68 Time the two recognise one another. Ruby registers Sylvia from her dream, and Sylvia notices Ruby’s tattoo, also a bird, as if this was the bird Sylvie witnessed coming from miles away earlier. Their convergence suggests that they have been drawn together from the beginning. The arrow shooting the bird in Ruby’s dream in this sense is multi-directional, because the novel’s foreshadowing of their encounter incorporates backwards, as well as forwards, time into the novel’s thematisation of chance. Foreshadowing has been long considered a technique in narrative’s arsenal for drawing readers and watchers into the interpretative dynamic of anticipated significance. Narrative theorist Gérard Genette describes foreshadowing to be an act of ‘advance mention’, which is ‘at its place in the text, only an “insignificant seed”, and even an imperceptible one, whose importance as a seed will not be recognised until later, and retrospectively’ (1983, 76–7). Genette distinguishes foreshadowing from prolepsis (which he terms ‘advance notice’) on the principle that foreshadowing is imperceptible until later recognised retrospectively, whereas prolepsis is an actual excursion into future events. Foreshadowing’s imperceptibility, importantly, implies that an event may indicate foreshadowing to the reader on their first pass of the text, but confirmation of this foreshadowing depends upon reaching the end. In other words, there is nothing grammatically or syntactically different about a foreshadowing event from any other event in the story, precisely because nothing can confirm a foreshadowing effect in advance except the reader’s knowledge of the text once finished. The interpretation of an event to be an act of foreshadowing therefore depends on the dynamic of the anticipation of retrospective coherence and interpretation when reading.5 In the light of this dynamic, the reader, on interpreting an event to be foreshadowing, cognises the earlier event to be in some way foretelling the later event to which it gestures. The earlier event appears, in the reader’s cognition of the text, to allude to, or ‘know’, what is to follow. For this reason, critic Gary Saul Morson argues that actual or verifiable foreshadowing is ontologically absent from life (1994, 45). Foreshadowing, he suggests, is possible in fiction because the future of a written narrative lies in wait, unlike the objectively open actual future, which remains virtual until actual. Morson takes the use of ‘shadow’ in foreshadowing then to suggest that the shadow cast by a foreshadowing event is less the cause for a future event, as if a shadow cast forward in time, affirming the asymmetry of time, but rather the ‘effect of that future […] visible in temporal advance, much as a shadow of an object may be visible in spatial advance’ (1994, 46). Foreshadowing draws attention to the ontologically extant, albeit unknown until reached, future that lies in wait for the reader, a shadow of a future event cast backward from the future into the present. Foreshadowing, in other words, shows that future to be ‘not just an inevitability but a substantial actuality […] it has already happened, and we are in its shadow’ (1994, 47). A perception of foreshadowing in a text, therefore, involves the reader

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  69 in an interpretation that disturbs asymmetrical time. When an event is interpreted to be a case of foreshadowing, that interpretation emphasises time and causality running backwards, with the future event being a suggestive and possible cause for an effect that occurs chronologically prior to that later, future event. Ruby’s dream of birds and Sylvia’s view of the horizon invite, on second reading, anticipation of something to follow. Their eventual encounter, one that happens through recognition of Ruby’s bird tattoo, answers this earlier foreshadowing. What initially appears to be a chanceful confluence of characters reappears as an event that precedes them. Once interpreted to be foreshadowing, their future meeting casts its shadow backwards onto these narrative inferences. The meeting of these characters later in the narrative discourse appears to mutually determine their narration at the start. Ruby’s and Sylvia’s narratives, then, implicate both in a story of the future’s substantiality prior to its occurrence. If the time structure of foreshadowing indicates backward causality, then it brings an account of the novel full circle back to the fact that their eventual encounter better describes a coincidence than an accident. As suggested, Gertrude Stein’s definition of a coincidence – ‘when a thing is going to happen and does’ – implicates the event in a two-stage structure: first, the forecasting of the event’s occurrence, then the event itself. In this definition of the coincidence, foreshadowing is central to the plotted event. With narratologist Hillary Dannenberg’s account of the poetics of the coincidence, the event’s capacity to imply an ‘uncanny or striking connection’ comes into focus (2008, 93). Dannenberg provides two models of the coincidence plot. The traditional coincidence plot is the most common and unfolds according to a three-phase structure: A The previous relationship (prehistory). B The coincidental encounter (intersection) of the characters in the time and space of the narrative world. C A cognitive process involving the characters’ recognition (discovery) of each other’s identity. (2008, 94) The traditional coincidence plot is mainly character-based and involves the intersection of two or more characters who are previously related (for instance, a familial relationship, a kinship relation, and so on) in a chanceful way who then subsequently recognise one another’s position in that relationship. As Dannenberg stresses, while phases B and C generate much of the coincidence’s power, it is phase A that conditions the coincidence’s existence, and without it the traditional coincidence plot cannot occur. It is also this prior relationship of the two actors or objects that makes for what is generally considered to be the coincidence’s suspiciously meaningful and suggestive nature. Because a coincidence

70 Time involves an intersection of two or more previously connected things, the chance of the event does not appear entirely random, and indeed, this subsequent repetition of a prior relationship in a later event provokes what Dannenberg calls the ‘cognitive desire to explain the remarkable in the coincidence’ (2008, 92). Even Dannenberg’s use of the metaphor of a ticking ‘bomb under the table’ to describe the suspense and curiosity produced by the expectation of phases B and C couches the coincidence in a sense of inevitability (2008, 39). The traditional coincidence’s phase A, then, can encourage a reading of the event not unlike that of Stein’s, insofar as the chance intersection of phase B and characters’ recognition in phase C can appear to be already anticipated in or foreshadowed by phase A’s relationship. When chance is so often accounted for as inexplicable and without reason or meaning, the coincidence’s mobilisation of chance to reveal a prior relationship reduces chance to an agent in a seemingly inevitable realisation of this prior relationship. Dannenberg’s second coincidence plot is the analogical coincidence. This involves the chance confluence of two or more events in time or in space that are not previously related to one another, but nonetheless display similarity. The analogous coincidence plot follows ‘an indirect or figurative system of connection,’ which is ‘cognitively constructed through the perception of correspondences’ (2008, 105). While this chance confluence provokes the same process of explanation that seeks to cognise a reason as to why these two events occurred at the same time, the analogical coincidence invites the reader or experiencer to retrospectively imagine a relationship between the events. Like the traditional coincidence, the analogical coincidence inspires an interpretation in which the uncanny timing of two or more events implicates its interpretation in a sense of mutual determination by a previous, but perhaps hidden, relationship. For Dannenberg, the striking and unlikely nature of coincidences means that they provoke especially suggestive interpretations of a paranoid or fatalistic nature.6 Reversed Forecast’s plotting of coincidence, like its use of foreshadowing, mobilises the trope’s especial relation to fate and determinism throughout the narrative in order to represent the novel’s future as substantially actual for its characters in a way that it is not for real life. Ruby’s and Sylvia’s coincidence involves, then, a doubled sense of backwards time. Their chance encounter encourages a mutual backwards look to spy out why they recognise one another. But their coincidental meeting also implies a form of backwards causation in which their future appears to precede them, casting its shadow back onto an earlier, foreshadowed experience. The novel uses the trope of the coincidence less to represent their futures as open than to think through the temporality of a future predetermined. Reversed Forecast encloses this foretold encounter inside a narrative of fixed contingencies. The book shows events for its different narrators

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  71 appearing to run to a pre-given course and mobilises the coincidence’s temporality in order to imagine lives encapsulated by narrative and ideological registers that exceed them. This is especially the case for Sylvia who experiences a moment of metafictional awareness during the story. Her narration, in turn, acts as a kind of conduit for the novel’s multiple, coalescing characters, as if given privileged insight into other characters’ lives. Sylvia develops this awareness before she meets Ruby. While under care after falling ill, she begins to experience visions that exceed her own limited perspective. She sees herself ‘in a place full of bright lights and a bright girl with white hair […] saying something about ideas’ (98) and hears an indistinct conversation. These visions loosely report what has just transpired four pages prior, in which Sam and Sarah discuss philosophy and astrology in a nightclub. While the novel does not verify that these visions are of Sam and Sarah, their likeness suggests a form of non-realist access to other events that is likened to an authorial omniscience, appearing to traverse across the space and time of the page. This access propels her into a dazed concern with the future’s pre-destination: Ideas flooded the room and she floated on them. One idea was that every story was one story, everything boiled down into one single narrative. Every thought, idea, commentary, fiction was travelling towards a single meaning. She tried to find this meaning but it was hopeless. It was too big. It was nothing. That one meaning might have to be God, she decided, which would be like a defeat. (100) Sylvia’s intimation of her world’s compression into one meaning is teleological. This view reduces the novel’s multiple perspectives and narrators to a singular narrative that draws each to one another, in the direction of a unitary ending they are ‘travelling towards’. It is only possible for these stories to travel towards the same ending if that ending is given in advance, predetermining their course. Sylvia’s suggestion that this consequential vision of a unitary meaning stems from, indeed necessitates, God feeds that awareness into a familiar metaphor for the author’s extradiegetic control. Albeit only a partial glimpse of totality, Reversed Forecast frames Sylvie’s deistic realisation as an encounter with the novel itself, a structure in which the future has already happened and lies in wait. The contingencies encountered along the way by characters and readers alike are, from a perspective of the novel’s totality, always already necessary, always going to happen. Coincidences in the novel therefore refract this singular meaning on the level of plot, because they present story events to be suggestive of things that are going to and do happen. That this happens in parallel with Sylvia’s non-realist omniscience, in which she appears to visualise the novel’s extradiegetic frame,

72 Time incorporates the novel’s plotting of the coincidence into a time structure of pre-given occurrence. In this way, the novel’s title, Reversed Forecast, has a doubled meaning that can describe the temporality of the coincidence. On the one hand, the term’s relation to betting depends, like all bets, on anticipating an unknown outcome based on knowledge of the present. But from the perspective of the novel’s reflection on the temporality of the coincidence, in which multiple characters draw towards events determined in advance, the reversed forecast also carries a further meaning: a backwards forecast from a known end. In this form, a reversed forecast involves knowing what will happen and thinking backwards to anticipate how events lead to it.7 The events forecasted in reverse, here, signify as products of backwards causation, occurring as effects of an already known cause that temporally proceeds them. A coincidence is in this respect a form of reversed forecast, in terms of an event that is always going to happen that does. If the novel’s foreshadowing of Ruby’s and Sylvia’s prior relation implicates them in an uncanny sense of fate, then that fateful interpretation incorporates their meeting into a model of time in which the future already appears to exist before it has happened. Just as the notion of the reversed forecast in Barker’s novel doubly involves the gambler’s prediction of chance coupled with knowledge of the ending in its metafictional form, so too does the coincidence, which incorporates the chance of the encounter with the deterministic outline precipitating its occurrence. One strong effect of Sylvia’s omniscience is that it immerses her in an excess of meaning that produces paranoid affect. Echoing the paranoiac’s conviction in hyperconnectivity and overdetermination, she considers that ‘Everything has meaning. I’m in a sea of it. Swimming in it, drowning’ (100). Sylvia’s narrative suggests that the coincidence of two previously related things coming together at just the right time inspires this paranoia, and Ruby’s encounter with her shortly after these visions embeds that mood. But paranoia in the novel also reflects the coincidence’s social form, which the novel explores through the gradual shrinking of chance in Ruby’s narrative and its allusions to the conspiracy genre. Ruby’s narration frequently portrays the story as a race in which the odds are even and the outcomes down to chance. Her narration frequently relies on the view that life is ‘a gamble’. Gambling saturates the novel. Ruby works in a gambling shop and volunteers as a ‘kennel maid’ in the local dog track. Ruby’s sport is dog racing. When she inherits her own greyhound, Buttercup, to race, the novel literalises the metaphor that Ruby’s story is a gamble. The novel’s structural parallel of a six-dog race with its form, which comprises of a handful of ‘competing’ narrators, emphasises Ruby’s epistemological frame, which draws a tight equivalence between life and dog racing.8 Both give rise to or are themselves gambles.

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  73 But if gambling both depends on chance to cohere and calculates chance through probabilistic calculation, then it is telling that chance appears surprisingly absent in Ruby’s story of coincidence. As the novel unfolds, the odds stack against her and the race, it appears, is a fix. Ruby’s adoption of Buttercup traces the development of this realisation. When first invited to meet Donald ‘Don’ Sheldon, who sells her Buttercup, Ruby is thrown into uncertainty as to why she’s invited to buy the dog: ‘When had she spoken to him at the track? […] Had she expressed an interest?’ (62). She remembers meeting Don a month before, but not expressing an interest. Once adopted, she trains Buttercup with Vincent who, conveniently, is experienced in the practice. They eventually enter her into a race. Buttercup trains well but is placed into the wrong starting position. On release, she crashes into another dog, the favourite to win, and comes third. Vincent and Ruby are perplexed as to why Buttercup was put there. In the aftermath, Ruby learns from Stan, the kennel owner, however, that Don Sheldon was in gambling debt. To recoup costs, he sold two dogs, Buttercup and a faster runner. Stan acknowledges that it is strange that Ruby hasn’t yet been asked for the money (134). The novel leaves it up to the reader to parse this enigmatic sequence of events. One could interpret the mystery that surrounds Ruby’s payment and Buttercup’s wrong positioning as a plan by Don Sheldon to scupper the fortunes of the race favourite, implied to be the good dog he sells to a competitor. Alternatively, one might also see Stan’s meaningful response, ‘“Exactly”’ (134), to Ruby’s acknowledgement that she hasn’t yet paid as gesturing to the gendered nature of their transaction in which Ruby is expected to recompense sexually. Ruby is frequently nervous that something else is expected of her with Sheldon: she remembers ‘how he’d put his hand on her arm as he’d spoken to her’ (19) when they first met, and she is uneasy later when she meets him, thinking that he ‘sincerely thought he was doing her a favour. If he’d employed her, if he’d fucked her, he would’ve worn that same expression’ (61). The reason for Buttercup’s starting position in the novel, however, is less important than the fact that it produces multiple interpretations that each conform to a similar structural form: that of an abstracted and unknown narrative underpinning a known one. In both, Ruby feels she acts according to her own will, and whatever happens appears to happen on the principle of fair chance, but another narrative all the while structurally subtends this one, implying a degree of powerlessness and determination of which she is unaware. This combination of perceived unfreedom, coincidence, and structural determination finds form in the novel’s use of the conspiracy genre. Conspiracies involve the active collusion and control of events by two or more agents; conspiracy theories are proposals about conspiracies that may or may not be true (Olmsted 2009, 3). The conspiracy theory as a form of knowledge is always contextual, as much suited to racism as

74 Time it is to political critique.9 A recent focus in cultural and literary studies on the conspiracy genre in US culture in particular has suggested that conspiracies find fertile ground in fiction because they hold significant power for the articulation of contemporary crises in individual agency and the structural determination of populations by global capital. For Timothy Melley, conspiracies feed into the paranoia of ‘agency panic’, a fear of the determination of one’s personhood and ‘the conviction that that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been “constructed”’ by impossible to comprehend forms of knowledge, discourse, and power (2000, 12). The protagonist’s piecing together of the conspiracy narrative doubly recovers a sense of agency in the face of its dissolution and reinforces that powerlessness through recognition. Ruby is hardly the paranoid detective in Reversed Forecast, having little in common with the typical conspiracy genre protagonist, who is, as Sianne Ngai suggests, often conspicuously gendered (2001, 2). But the novel does signpost elements of the conspiracy genre by portraying Ruby as thrown into a crisis over her free will at opportune moments to reflect on the coincidence’s social form. Don Sheldon’s potential fixing of the race alludes to a power that structures the initially even field of the dog race. Sheldon’s involvement re-signifies the metaphor of the dog race from one that gestures to an open field in which chance rules into a closed and predetermined one. From this moment on, Ruby finds herself entangled in a series of events in which she is at the losing end of coincidences that appear planned from the start. These are often sexualised and repeatedly stem from her entanglement with Vincent, whom she visualises as a ‘big soggy dog’ (145) dragging her under water. Ruby’s suspicion culminates in her discovery of his involvement in a conspiracy plot. After the race, Ruby agrees to help Vincent scalp money from the betting shop cashier till. This comes out of their growing relationship, which begins with a chance encounter. Earlier in the novel, Vincent crashes into the glass counter of Ruby’s betting shop after she refuses to serve a drunken man, who ends up outside of the shop. Vincent appears with all the force of a violent event, but claims he doesn’t know the man she threw out. And yet, when Vincent sends his friend to pick up the money for their later swindle, it turns out to be the drunken man from the very beginning, the one who Ruby kicks out, leading to Vincent’s angry entry into the book. In other words, it’s a set-up. Ruby’s new knowledge shifts the terms of their engagement. Her local vision of a quick ruse expands to take account of what appears to be a possible plot to manipulate her financially, and possibly sexually, from the start. The revelation forces Ruby into a state of resigned paranoia; she begins to reflect on the narratives that appear to underwrite and undercut her own story and worries away at her own understanding of her free will. When Ruby lies down to reflect on the various stories encountered in London,

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  75 it is difficult not to read this also as Ruby’s resignation to the strange agency and determination of the story’s many coincidences: She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. When she’d closed them, she remembered a dream: a bird at her window and the red sky. A thought floated into her head. All these things go on, and you don’t even notice, but they go on anyway. (182) Ruby’s belief that things happen without one noticing or knowing occurs in response to her memory of her dream of the bird in the beginning of the book, the first node in the complex series of events that lead to her encounter with Sylvie. This sense of coincidental causality then opens up to a broader picture of a variety of unknown narratives, all of which, in the light of her paranoia, replicate the conspiracy genre’s combination of unfreedom and a dizzying sense of a totalising system. It shows Ruby’s character to be victim of numerous plots and, resultantly, upends her vision of life as a fair gamble on chance. In her case, this realisation metonymically reflects on the coincidence’s formalisation of a more systemic, but partially invisible, patriarchy that appears to contort events around her.10 Jane Elliott describes how, for the individual’s perception of ideological or patriarchal manipulation, paranoia provides an epistemological model for recovering intention and sinister perpetration from the complexity of historical power (2008, 55). In this way, paranoia and conspiracy provide Reversed Forecast with a ‘political imaginary’, as Humeira Iqtidar puts it, that offers a structural explanation of ‘historically layered experience’ in the form of narrativising the coordinates of gendered power that, only vaguely and often in shadow, shape Ruby’s narration (2016, 212). The coincidence is pivotal in this imaginary. Although rarely forthcoming on the ideological vectors that shape Ruby’s story, the novel genders the coincidence through implication that Ruby is victim to the manipulative control of both Vincent and Don Sheldon. In this way it borrows the epistemological frame of the conspiracy theory to represent enigmatic forms of sexualised power; like the male stalker novel, which Timothy Melley suggests uses paranoia to both individualise power and think through sexual violence’s cause ‘in social relations extending well beyond’ the individual, Reversed Forecast uses coincidence to visualise forms of gendered power that act on the periphery of Ruby’s story, threatening her sense of individual will (2000, 217). Whereas Sylvia’s brief omniscience provides her with metafictional insight into the book’s formal enclosure, Ruby’s growing paranoia provides her with a framework for articulating chance’s manipulation. Life may be a gamble, but Ruby’s suspicion of its repeatedly fixed outcomes suggests an imaginary recourse to the conspiracy genre as a means of

76 Time understanding her subject position within its fixed contingencies. In this way, the coincidence, like the conspiracy, metaphorically plots Ruby’s anxiety over her free will in the context of a novel that genders the coincidence, representing Ruby’s belief in life’s gamble to be less than open, but rather historically and structurally determined.11 Reversed Forecast therefore presents the coincidence to both reflect the novel’s time structure of forecasted occurrence and provide a trope for the conspiracy genre’s anxiety over free will and the future’s determination by vectors of power and history. In this way, the novel shows how paranoid affect emerges from and in part constitutes the coincidence’s temporality. The coincidence, as narrative trope, thinks through a reversed temporality in which the future appears foreclosed, and that which happens is always going to happen and does. It’s telling, then, that Ruby’s effort to extricate herself from the fixed contingencies of the coincidence’s coordinates at the end of the novel finds relief and support in the chance of something much more like an accident. Ruby catches a bus through Hackney with Buttercup, and during the journey she considers her immediate future: ‘I’ll take the dog back, I’ll leave her there. I’ll return to Soho. I won’t see Vincent again’ (192). She imagines events happening like this, but she also imagines them happening otherwise, or even not at all: ‘She could imagine, just as easily, these same things not happening’ (192). Just then, the bus stops abruptly and Ruby crashes into Buttercup. The unexpected swerve of the bus literalises her reflections on the possibility of something unexpected happening that changes the course of events from a moment before. Ruby recovers thinking that this sudden braking ‘could be the beginning of something immaculate’ (193). The contingency of this suggestive beginning pointedly occurs at the novel’s end. By concluding in this way, Reversed Forecast draws attention less to what Ruby’s beginning may be than the fact that the accident resists or to some extent strains against the book’s material confines, something that, as David Wellbury might suggest, ‘exceeds narrative programicity’ (1992, 239). Not only does Reversed Forecast stage this accident in a moment in which Ruby seeks to extricate herself from the characters, relations, and geographies that constitute its plot, but it also resists recuperating the chance of the buses’ emergency stop into the entangled interrelations of coincidence that precede it. Its strategy for avoiding such recuperation, then, is to cauterise the book and plot. In this way, Reversed Forecast intimates for the possibility of contingency that refuses collaboration with the novel’s sticky coincidences, but it can only do so by way of exceeding the novel’s grasp itself. This concluding gesture pitches the accident’s temporality to be opposed to the coincidence’s, but it simultaneously asks a question of narrative’s mediating role of the accident’s contingency by exceeding the book. In what follows, I suggest that Noah Hawley’s popular thriller Before the Fall picks up on both of these questions around the accident. In Hawley’s

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  77 novel, the accident explicitly contrasts to the coincidence on the basis of the modality of contingency; but equally, the accident in Before the Fall also succumbs to the weight of contested causal explanations in a way that pits the narrative dynamics of causal interpretation at odds with the contingency of the event.

Backwards In Before the Fall, protagonist Scott Burroughs miraculously survives an apparent aviation accident. Afterwards, he is told that the duration of his doomed flight happened for exactly the same amount of time, and at the same time, as a baseball batting session that would become the longest baseball batting session in history. The timing of both unnerves Scott: Now, though, hearing the story – the coincidence of it – he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand. Two things happen at the same time. By mentioning them together they become connected. Convergence. It’s one of those things that feels meaningful, but isn’t. […] How many millions of other activities begin and end at the same time? How many other ‘facts’ converge in just the right way, creating symbolic connectivity? (2017, 98)12 Scott is a reflective and often suspicious narrator. He resists the many paranoid explanations offered by other characters of the crash in the novel and is prone to insisting on the accidental occurrences of everyday life. The coincidence nevertheless makes him uneasy. The flight’s duration and this baseball batting session’s convergence leave him with a ‘feeling’ of significance, as if the two happened together for a reason. But a coincidence, he insists, could be made retrospectively through the selection of any two or more events. As far as Scott is concerned, the crash was meaningless: an inexplicable accident. Before the Fall plots around the various interpretations catalysed by this apparent accident. Scott’s narrative suggests that the accident, like the coincidence, similarly invites retrospective interpretation, but unlike the coincidence, its meaning comes less from the convergence of two or more things than from its singular occurrence, which partially resists or exceeds causal explanation. The accident’s difference to the coincidence, then, is significant for this chapter in two ways. First, unlike the coincidence, which emphasises a paranoid or suspicious imagination of the foreclosed future, the accident more clearly articulates contingent occurrence, partially resisting linear causal explanation and indicative of futurity’s constitution of temporal becoming. Second, the interpretation of coincidence and accident implies different kinds of focus in causal

78 Time interpretation. Accidents may be the products of various, converging causal sequences, but unlike coincidences, an accident’s interpretation puts less stress on its convergence with another event than on its singular and causally oblique or inexplicable occurrence. Before the Fall explores how different subject positions, from investigator Gus Franklin’s desire to find a mechanical fault with the plane to Bill Milligan’s conspiracy theory that Scott himself caused the crash, diversely cognise the event in retrospect in accordance with competing causal epistemologies. In doing so, it represents the contrasting modalities of coincidence and accident: the former producing sensations of paranoia, conspiracy, and the future’s determination, while the latter evocative of meaningless contingency and the future’s natural opacity. Nevertheless, although Before the Fall dramatises the different kinds of interpretative focus and associated modal implications involved in the distinction between accident and coincidence, it also shows how the former can slip into the latter. The accident’s resistance to narrative explanation (its traditionally fuzzy relation to causality and responsibility) is precisely what also compels the event’s narrativisation, inspiring narrative cognition’s backwards look in response to the event’s sudden and inexplicable occurrence. The accident once happened therefore invites backwards interpretation to determine its causation and responsibility. This retrospective process can, it transpires in the novel, unsteady the demarcation between accident and coincidence. As Scott shows above, retrospect has the potential to impose suggestive correspondences onto an event irrespective of the verifiability of that interpretation, which can make a chance event appear far from accidental. This interpretative assimilation of accident into coincidence therefore invites a consideration of the impact of hindsight, narrative, and interpretation on the differing modalities of contingency and necessity. Before the Fall’s plotting around different characters’ interpretations, I suggest, draws out one of the key reasons for why the accident’s invitation of backwards interpretation unsteadies its own definition.13 This is through the book’s representation of hindsight as a process that is always involved in causal interpretation, specifically according to a logic that cognises sequence into consequence and imposes future knowledge onto that which leads up to the event. In what follows, I suggest that this process, which I term ‘teleological retrospection’, presents an enduring difficulty for the accident’s interpretation, because of its employment of forms of causal cognition that risk reducing the apparent aviation accident’s chance to causal necessity. Hawley’s novel exploits this logic for the purposes of a plot that stages different interpretations of the apparent accident against one another in order to spotlight the selective process of causal interpretation more generally. The novel follows Scott’s recovery after the crash and his subsequent escape from the right-wing media’s accusations that he caused the crash.

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  79 Scott’s memory of the crash is disoriented, like ‘a movie negative that has been cut and reassembled at random’, resisting ‘a coherent narrative’ (48). The novel’s climax will reveal the crash to be an intentional act of the co-pilot, but until that revelation it has all the appearance of an accidental event, which Scott’s continued resistance to explaining the event supports. In contrast to Scott’s interpretation, Bill Milligan, arch-conspiracy theorist and television host, calls for a terrorist investigation and accuses Scott of conspiracy and murder. As Milligan says in a live report, ‘you and I know – there are no accidents’ (70). A third plot runs alongside Scott’s and Milligan’s reactions to the crash, which involves Gus Franklin, investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, who seeks the cause for the crash and questions those involved as well as commissioning a search for the plane’s black box recorder. Gus’s investigation introduces the novel’s genre of the detective thriller. After Gus interviews Scott early on, Before the Fall splits into two parallel time frames, alternating between analeptic accounts of each victim’s life leading up to the crash and Gus’s investigation in the present. Through this alternating movement between analepsis and the investigation in the story’s present, the novel establishes a reading dynamic that is like that of the detective’s position in the plot. In order to move the investigation forward in the story’s present, the novel’s sequential procession from one page to the next continually doubles back in its chronology of events, seeking to uncover, through analepsis, a possible cause for the event. This dual temporal movement, in which the plot’s forward momentum depends on the investigation’s backwards movement through time, is a hallmark of the detective genre. As narratologist Tzvetan Todorov describes it, the detective genre’s temporal reference constitutes both ‘the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, a doubling that generates much of the genre’s suspense due to its inversion of cause and effect in the narrative discourse (1997, 44).14 The genre proceeds ‘from effect to cause: starting from a certain effect (a corpse and certain clues) we must find its cause (the culprit and his motive)’ (1997, 47). In this respect, the detective genre narrativises the apparent accident’s retrospective pull. The reader’s forward and linear movement through the story’s discourse happens in coordination with the book’s frequent backtracking in the story’s chronology, directing the reading experience to be one that works backwards from the crash’s effect to uncover its cause in the past. Likewise with the accident, the crash’s inexplicable occurrence presents an effect for a cause not yet known. The narrative’s first foray into the past prior to the crash recounts the final days of the plane’s owner, ‘David Bateman: April 12, 1959– August 23, 2015’ (52); the next jumps to his two friends, ‘Ben Kipling: ­February 10, 1963–August 23, 2015 [and] Sarah Kipling: March 1, 1964–­August 23, 2015’ (122). By enclosing these short narratives inside of the date of death, the novel presents each of them to be conditioned

80 Time on the knowledge of the crash. This encourages the reader to cognise these prior events, focalised through the eponymous characters, through the lens of that known outcome. It primes the reader to act as detective, in other words, divining an earlier cause from this later known effect. Generating considerable interpretative intrigue in this way on the back of the apparent accident, the novel foregrounds the kinds of hermeneutic activity catalysed by the crash’s causal uncertainty, frequently inviting consideration of the crash’s possible causes in these flashbacks. But more than this, the narrative structure also frames retrospection, here foregrounded as catalysed by the investigation, to be a perspectival mode in which memory is conditioned upon and shaped by future knowledge. Ben and Sarah Kipling’s story, which is reported in one of these flashbacks, for instance, doubly tells the story of the couple leading up to the crash and invites the reader to a search for possible clues to its cause, drawing attention to the difficulty of separating knowledge of what happens after from this narration of an earlier moment in time. Ben is an investor and banker who is visited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation over his firm’s money laundering. Later, he is threatened by a mysterious man who is connected to his international investors. In the light of the novel’s generic inversion of cause and effect, the reader is invited to interpret these threats as potential cause for an already known crash. Could it be sabotage? The novel pointedly chooses to narrate information about Ben and Sarah that is suggestive in relation to the later crash, thereby drawing the reader into an interpretative dynamic in which one looks for the event’s cause in that narration. Frequently exploiting this analeptic plotting, Before the Fall accumulates many possible causes through its use of narrative flashback to create a reading dynamic organised around the reconstruction of the causes of an apparent accident. These also include the suggestion of a plot against David’s family, gleaned from his daughter Rachel’s past kidnapping (218), to a possible mechanical failure, intimated by pilot Captain Melody’s concern over the starboard motion control (292). In each case, the novel spotlights the apparent accident’s vivid invitation of causal interpretation by drawing the reader backwards in time, providing insight into prior events that continually generate possible causes for a known effect. The novel uses the detective genre, then, to foreground the fact that foreknowledge conditions this backwards reference. Prior events become burdened with suggestive causation in the novel precisely because the reader has knowledge of what comes after, and the novel’s narration of events for the purposes of the investigation appears to know and exacerbate this dynamic through its continued peppering of the story with mainstays of the genre, such as red herrings and false leads. By staging different, conflicting interpretations of the crash but withholding its actual cause until the novel’s penultimate chapter, Before the Fall models not just the retrospective pull of the accident but also the

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  81 role of selection in causal interpretation. Scott, after all, remarks on just this in his dismissal of the crash’s convergence with the baseball game: we can make a coincidence out of any two events. Gus’s investigation, as if repeating Scott’s suspicion towards causal interpretation, suggests that all interpretative selection is epistemologically relative. Ten days after the crash, Gus meets with a range of other investigators, each of whom interprets it differently: To O’Brien [FBI] this crash is part of a larger story – terrorist threats and splinter cell attacks targeting American interests. To Hex [Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)] the crash is the latest piece in a war story about the US economy and the millionaires and billionaires who devote massive capital to the breaking of rules and laws. Gus is the only one in the room thinking about the crash as a singularity. (185) The novel folds each interpreter’s causal epistemology, here represented by their institutional positions, into their interpretation of the crash. Importantly, O’Brien and Hex interpret the crash to be coincidental. Their interpretations of the crash’s suspicious timing with other meaningful events transform it into a deliberately caused and motivated event, either caused by the War on Terror or shady international investments. Gus veers closer to deeming the event accidental. It may result from a convergence of factors, such as a possible mechanical fault (184–5), but his view of its ‘singularity’ reproduces an accident’s different focus in interpretation, less an event remarkable for the relationships it converges than its singular and inexplicable occurrence. The novel’s repeated contextualisation of interpretation therefore foregrounds the relationship between causal interpretation and causal epistemology. By causal epistemology, I mean the way in which ideological, historical, discursive, and contextual factors bear upon any interpreter’s view of what is and isn’t causally possible. These factors, in turn, influence how the interpreter conceives of the information they do and do not have about the event. In doing so, it represents each interpretation to be shaped by context. Even Gus’s insistence on the event’s singular, accidental occurrence is framed by the novel’s earlier narration of his past, raised by a ‘trash collector’ and trained as an engineer (91). For him, we are told, everything is mechanical; ‘every problem on earth could be fixed by repairing or replacing a part’ (91). In his own way, Gus seeks to reduce the unclear causality of the apparent accident to a clear-cut causal narrative, removing the crash from geopolitical context to reduce it to something more akin to mechanical determinism. For narratologist Werner Wolf, causal epistemology constitutes the interpreter’s ‘implied worldview’, of which chance is a helpful indicator (2005, 179).15 Implied

82 Time worldview crosses across the many levels of narrative. It furnishes a text with a means of characterisation through diegetic representation of different worldviews, as in the case of Before the Fall, but it also influences narrative cognition’s interpretation of chance events in real life. Because of an implied worldview’s involvement in causal interpretation, causal interpretation is prospective as well as retrospective, guiding, as Marina Grishakova puts it, both ‘“forward-looking” causality of experiencing or expectation and “backward-looking” causality of description or explanation’ (2011, 131). The notion of causal epistemology is therefore implicit in the many historical accounts of chance raised in this study’s introduction; chance’s passage from a sacred sign of divine intent in the classical age to ‘an explanatory force in its own right’ in the twentieth century, for instance, is also a history of causal epistemology (Reith 1999, 39). Before the Fall continually puts different causal interpretations into conflict with one another to stress causal interpretation’s dependence on these varying epistemologies. Gus is sure that, once the facts are uncovered, the stories will stop: ‘In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories’ (187). But it does not take a narrative theorist to recognise that Gus’s surety relies, in part, on an uneasy distinction between the facts of an event and the story made of its causation if, as the novel frequently shows, causal interpretation involves the retrospective selection of information according to one’s causal epistemology. In other words, the apparent accident’s provision of a kind of hermeneutic puzzle for different characters spotlights causal interpretation’s narrativity. It does not deny the existence of facts surrounding the crash, but it does represent each interpretation to involve a selection of information according to the criteria of relevance dictated by causal epistemology. That is, one’s person’s facts may be another’s false lead. This causes, for instance, much of the suspicion towards Scott, an artist who, before the crash, painted what his agent terms ‘Disaster paintings’ (179). These paintings, which all feature a woman looking on various kinds of catastrophic events, are chosen by many of the novel’s accusers to be relevant facts in the apparent accident. Suspicion grows as people begin to think that Scott may have had a hand in causing the crash; perhaps he was looking for another ‘disaster to paint’ (179). For Scott, however, the paintings are irrelevant. The apparent accident’s invitation of backwards interpretation draws characters into an active, often conflicting, selection of facts according to categories of relevance appropriate to their causal epistemology. Much like the reader’s own involvement in reading for clues to the crash by following the investigation, the novel creates the crash’s hermeneutic vacuum to reflect on causal interpretation as a process of selection in which the interpreter constructs a narrative according to principles of relevance and feasibility.

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  83 Yet despite the multiple investigations, interrogations, conspiracy theories, and flashbacks, the apparent accident’s causality remains uncertain for most of the novel. Scott, its most reliable witness, remains continually unclear about the crash. Whenever pressured by investigators, he tries to recollect what happened, but cannot; when asked to draw a likeness to something else, he comes up with only absence, ‘“I’d supposed I’d have to say it was like nothing”’ (240). Or at least, the novel resists explanation until its penultimate chapter, with its reveal that co-pilot Charles Busch deliberately crashed the plane in an act of suicidal revenge. Scott’s opening belief in the crash’s accidental nature succumbs to a causal explanation that reveals it to be far from accidental. In the concluding section of this chapter, I consider what this fictional capitulation to explaining the crash away as not accidental suggests about an accident’s more general relationship to causal interpretation. On the one hand, the event provokes a multitude of interpretations because its contingent occurrence appears to resist a singular cause. On the other hand, however, this absence draws causal interpretation towards it, as if narrative explanation cannot resist such absence’s magnetism. In this latter case, the resilience of causal interpretation’s assimilation of the apparent accident, witnessed through multiple characters’ attempts to explain the crash’s causation, worries away at the event’s constitution as accidental. This resilience produces a novel that ultimately capitulates to a dramatic twist, in the form of the revelation that the crash was intended. I suggest that this capitulation is symptomatic of both the novel’s thematisation of the resilience of causal interpretation and of the accident’s structural susceptibility to narrative explanation in hindsight. Before the Fall is not just a novel that reflects on causal interpretation on the level of theme, then. Rather, it is as if the novel’s plot dispenses with this carefully staged ambiguity less by choice than because of the accidental event’s tangled relationship with hindsight. This susceptibility, which stems from the retrospective imposition of the event’s outcome onto its apparent conditions of possibility, introduces a key topic for both this study and Hawley’s novel: that of teleological retrospection.

Teleological Retrospection Teleological retrospection describes the process by which the time of recollection conditions the time recalled in retrospect. In other words, one’s position of later knowledge invariably shapes the content of hindsight itself. Mark Currie suggests that teleology and retrospect are inseparable if we understand hindsight in this way. As a result, teleological retrospection involves a particular interpretative dynamic in which hindsight imposes new significance onto past events: ‘To look back on an event

84 Time is to give it a significance it did not possess at the time of its occurrence’ (2007, 33). Significance could be, as Before the Fall narrates, an attribution of cause or reason to an event that initially resisted causal explanation. The mysterious man’s threat to Ben, or Rachel’s kidnapping, accrues an especial significance in relation to the apparent accident in hindsight that they will not have initially possessed; foreknowledge of the crash attributes causal significance to them. But significance can also be the much simpler acknowledgement that a specific past event is important enough to single out for recollection in the first place. This is because recollection’s process of selection and exclusion betrays a criterion of value and relevance principled on one’s present position.16 ‘Teleological’ is the relevant quality for this dynamic, then, because it suggests that the time recollected is shaped by a certain kind of end-­ orientation: the known end shapes the significance one attributes to the past being recollected. But ‘teleological’ also implies a particular kind of metaphysics in which the future in some senses pre-exists or determines the present. This is what narratologist Jens Brockmeier argues populates autobiographical writing, in which the narrator’s temporal locus of narration gives momentum to the narration: one’s life, once shaped and sequentially ordered as a narrative event, appears as a kind of development towards a certain goal – as if the end (that is, the present of the narrative event) were the destination of one’s journey, an objective from which from the very beginning had to be reached. (2001, 251)17 Thus, the telling of a life in retrospect implicitly involves what he calls an ‘odd metaphysics’ in which ‘the flux of life’, in the process of being narrated, ‘seems to be transformed into a flux of necessity’ (2001, 253). If we cannot excise the temporal locus of the act of retrospection from the temporal locus of that which is recalled, then retrospect invariably and unavoidably smuggles knowledge of the future into the time recollected. Both Currie’s sense of retrospective significance and Brockmeier’s account of the imposition of end-oriented momentum onto the flux of life fold into one another in the act of causal interpretation. In this light, causal explanation involves a form of hindsight that processes what comes after as the effect of what comes before. In the register of causal interpretation, this guides the explanatory transformation of sequence into consequence. Roland Barthes describes this process as a central property of narrativity: ‘the mainspring of the narrative activity is to be traced to that very confusion between consecutiveness and consequence, what-comes-after being read in a narrative as what-is-caused-by’ (1975, 248). Barthes’s fascinating commentary challenges the common assumption that we know the cause before we know the effect. Rather, causality

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  85 is retrospectively made. This form of interpretation depends upon reaching the provisional end of the causal chain in order to constitute that chain.18 In other words, in causal interpretation, the effect ‘causes’ the cause, so to speak, because it propels us to look backwards for the cause, and to interpret what comes before anew, as shaped by knowledge of what it effects.19 This temporally circular process therefore describes the interpretative dynamic of ‘after this, therefore because of this’, a hermeneutic strategy of narrative that cognises sequence into consequence (Pier 2008). Teleological retrospection means that knowledge of the effect both catalyses and shapes the cause’s interpretation according to the logic of ‘after this, therefore because of this’. Causal interpretation in this light therefore less involves uncovering an event’s final cause than it does retrospectively organising a sequence of events around an explanatory narrative that views that sequence to be causally related: one’s experience of what comes after transposes itself onto what comes before. But it also means, keeping the metaphysics of teleology in mind, that retrospection can additionally read end-oriented determinacy into interpreted causation. Through hindsight, effects are projected backwards onto what the interpreter deems their cause. This can risk creating an interpretative illusion that smuggles future knowledge into recollection, thereby producing the impression that one could have inferred the future event (the effect) from its past conditions (the cause), precisely because knowledge of the effect conditions the cause’s interpretation. This process risks an interpretation of causality that views the future to be possibly foreseeable from its causal conditions, which reduces the modality of an event to that of causal necessity and inevitability through implication that the future was always going to happen in the way that it eventually did, thereby reducing the causality of any event to a singular and deterministic chain of events. For these reasons, teleological retrospection impacts on the accident’s causal interpretation and presents a profound problem for contingency. Before the Fall narrates multiple accounts of the same event, each distinguished by what these interpretations deem significant, but each enabled by their reading of the event’s occurrence into what preceded it. Despite the novel’s capitulation to the crash’s final cause, it defers that revelation in order to stage characters’ competing causal epistemologies, thereby modelling the process by which each reads the crash’s occurrence backwards into its causal conditions. That is to say, each reads teleologically. It is for this reason that despite their conceptual distinction, accidents can succumb to coincidental interpretation. Scott’s opening anxiety over the crash’s timing with the baseball game evidences this. In his memory of the flight, he remembers the baseball game being televised and recalls conversation about it, but he also remembers not really paying attention. The game’s significance, however, arrives in hindsight,

86 Time produced from the perspective of the crash’s occurrence: ‘Now, though, hearing the story – the coincidence of it – he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand.’ Of all the possible causes for the crash, Scott selects the duration of the plane’s flight as a significant factor in the crash and projects this knowledge backwards onto another sequence of events that gain retrospective causal relevance. Scott then shapes his understanding of the crash’s causal conditions around this analogous equivalence. This coincidence’s ‘meaningful[ness]’ reads causation into that which was not understood to be significant prior to the event. From this, the coincidence’s convergent nature takes hold, substituting the accident’s singular chance for the coincidence’s fateful parameters. The imbrication of retrospection, teleology, and causal interpretation therefore suggests that narrative’s translation of sequence into consequence reduces the multiple and complex vectors involved in contingent occurrence into a linear and progressive causal narrative. As Before the Fall insists, each interpretation of the crash proceeds through the rearrangement of past events around that which is newly known. In doing so, the novel shows that teleological retrospection in the sense of the present’s shaping of past knowledge is not particular to a specific causal epistemology but rather subtends all forms of retrospective interpretation.20 It operates on a phenomenological level and determines each interpretation. What is more, the novel’s exploration of teleological retrospection’s involvement in causal interpretation, and what that means for the interpretation of an apparently accidental event, feeds into connected concerns in the philosophy of chance over causal interpretation’s capacity to reduce contingency to causal determination, and therefore to a mechanistic and necessary account of advance causal inference. Contingent events, after all, depend on the possibility that they can happen differently or not at all; they issue from the future’s objectively non-­ actual nature. For this reason, philosophers of chance often put importance on the impossibility of being able to completely infer the outcome of a chance event solely from its causal conditions. If one could do so, the event’s contingency succumbs to a form of a causal necessity that reduces incidence to a mechanistic and determinate universe. 21 This leads Slavoj Žižek, for example, to suggest that the contingent event exceeds, or somehow separates itself from, its causes (2014, 3). There is something about contingent occurrence, in other words, that despite coming from somewhere, and happening in particular conditions, is more than just a collection of its causes. This anxiety towards causation stems, as philosophers of science Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers suggest, from a belief in the ‘laws of nature’ that is deeply rooted in the philosophy of causality, which proposes that ‘[o]nce we know the initial conditions, we can calculate all subsequent states as well as preceding ones’, thus ‘bringing human knowledge closer to the divine, atemporal view’ (1997, 12). This is, they argue, an inaccurate portrayal of the objectively unstable,

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  87 indeterminate, and contingent nature of causation; no human observation or theoretical knowledge can foresee the event from ‘initial conditions with infinite precision’ (1997, 38). But even so, anxiety towards causal determinism’s metaphysical baggage is a special concern in the light of retrospection’s teleological qualities. This structure of hindsight, which moulds recollection of the past around future knowledge, projects a contingent event’s occurrence backwards onto that which preceded it in a way that both reveals and imaginatively creates its causal conditions. Such backwards projection produces an interpretative dynamic in which the event can then be inferred in advance from those causal conditions and either subjected to probabilistic prediction or, more problematically, deemed a necessary outcome. Hindsight’s potential for the event’s retrospective inference can reduce the past to a linear and necessary sequence that threatens the event’s contingency. In order to articulate the anxiety surrounding causation and teleological retrospection, it is helpful, I suggest, to turn to one of the more radical theories of chance in continental philosophy. Gilles Deleuze, philosopher of difference, becoming, and chance, responds to such anxieties by suggesting that the theorisation of chance necessitates a temporal distinction between chance’s occurrence and chance’s outcome. Deleuze’s philosophy rigorously insists on chance’s irreducibility to causal inference. For him, the future is primed to actualise through sudden, unpredictable divergence, and his critiques of the metaphysical notions of being and essence yield an account of the future that objectively exceeds advance inference.22 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze draws on the dice throw to compress this difficult logic: What does it mean, therefore, to affirm the whole of chance, every time, in a single time? This affirmation takes place to the degree that the disparates which emanate from a throw begin to resonate, thereby forming a problem. The whole of chance is then indeed in each throw, even though this be partial, and it is there in a single time even though the combination produced is the object of a progressive determination. (1994, 198) Nothing determines the outcome of the dice except for chance, which is the prime agent of indeterminacy. A single throw of the dice interacts with the ‘whole’ of chance because the ‘whole’ of chance informs each and every dice throw. The ‘whole’ of chance is not a discrete or graspable entity but rather draws on Deleuze’s notion of the virtual. Virtuality describes the infinite array of actual and non-actual factors that influence temporal becoming. The virtual therefore represents a kind of non-actual morass of potentiality, drawn as much from the ‘pure’ past as the immanent future,

88 Time that is full to bursting with unforeseeable avenues for the future’s actualisation. 23 The virtual therefore is an engine of ‘difference’, as Clare Colebrook describes it, incorporating into time ‘the power to become in unforeseen ways, always more than this actual world, and not limited by its already present forms’ (2002, 96). The dice throw’s affirmation of the whole of chance in each throw, therefore, needs to be understood in the context of the virtual. Each throw condenses a field of virtuality greater than itself into its singular throw. But whatever happens does not simply replicate its causal conditions. Rather, chance objectively diverges from its conditions in a way that means it is not inferable in advance, and the virtual’s actualisation further ‘produces the virtual’ (Smith 2012, 253). Chance therefore holds special importance for thinking about indeterminate causation, because the throw of the dice, by actualising an outcome from the ‘whole’ of chance, produces an objectively unforeseeable outcome. Nevertheless, Deleuze differentiates between the dice throw, which affirms virtual potentiality, and its outcome, which is the ‘object of a progressive determination’. He phrases this elsewhere as the difference between chance and necessity: the ‘dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity’ (1983, 26). 24 One reading of the dice throw’s necessity would be that Deleuze inverts contingency and necessity to suggest that chance is a necessary fact of the world’s contingency.25 However, I suggest that teleological retrospection can further unpack this difference between the dice throw’s two states. According to this logic, the dice throw provides a temporal metaphor for the passage from causal indeterminacy (the virtual) to the appearance of causal determinacy (the actual). The dice throw, which is contingent, objectively unpredictable, and not inferable in advance, actualises certain virtual multiplicities. Once fallen, however, it is possible to read the dice’s chance outcome backwards and posit a retrospective, probabilistic chain of cause and effect based upon that chance actualisation. 26 Hindsight therefore projects knowledge of the causally indeterminate, impossible-to-foresee event onto the past. This then allows one to read the event’s causal conditions into that past. Because of the nature of causal interpretation, which translates sequence into consequence, one can then retrospectively infer the appearance of a linear and determinate causation for an event that was objectively contingent and produced by an infinite array of virtual and actual conditions. As Deleuze’s philosophy of virtuality and difference insists, this process of hindsight whittles down the ‘whole’ of chance – and therefore an infinite array of virtual factors – into a limited selection of factors once actual. Causal explanation, therefore, involves the assimilation of difference into consequential order and pattern, a process that Deleuze alludes to throughout in

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  89 Difference and Repetition.27 Just as the dice throw represents a twostage process, chance invites us to look back on it and map its scattered causes in hindsight. This causal interpretation allows for the possibility of its retrospective inference in advance, because it can reappear in the form of something that could have been anticipated from its causes, as if already fully formed and awaiting its realisation. This, however, is an interpretative illusion produced at the core of teleological retrospection, precisely because the observer knows what happens. 28 When Bill Milligan poses one of his conspiracy theories to Scott in a television interview, Scott, the ever-reflective narrator, waives him away by insisting on the narrative artifice of Milligan’s causal explanation: ‘Just because two things happen in sequence, doesn’t mean there’s a causal relationship’ (352). Scott’s suspicion towards causal interpretation might lead one to expect a novel in which the apparent accident ultimately resists causal explanation, subverting the retrospective assimilation of contingency into causal determination. But instead, the grip of teleological retrospection persists until the end. The novel concludes with capitulation to the apparent accident’s causal explanation rather than resistance to it, inadvertently reproducing on the level of plot the compulsion to reduce contingency to causal necessity, a compulsion found everywhere from other characters’ narratives in Before the Fall to Gilles Deleuze’s concern over the dice throw’s causal determination in life. In the novel’s final chapter, Gus retrieves information from the flight’s black box, which his team finally retrieves. The audio recording reveals the apparent accident to be an act of motivated revenge by the hands of co-pilot Charles Bausch. By sinking this recording in the sea and tasking Gus’s team with its recovery, Before the Fall substitutes its earlier stress on the interpretative and epistemologically relative dynamics of causal interpretation, which produces rather than discovers causation, for a presentation of causation as something literally waiting to be uncovered, as if sunk, in this case, in the ocean. The black box may not answer every question, and indeed, it provokes more for Gus, who is unable to comprehend the tragedy or motivations by that act of revenge (373). But in finishing like this, the novel’s ending reproduces one of the key interpretative effects of teleological retrospection, represented in its characters’ many interpretations of the event, each of whom seek linear and causally determinate explanations for what appears to be a contingent, accidental occurrence. That is to say, the crash’s multiple interpretations in the novel signify hindsight’s and causal interpretation’s antipathy towards contingency’s indeterminate conditions. Before the Fall therefore represents characters’ interpretations to be imaginary backwards imputations of future knowledge onto what precedes the event, and it draws the reader into this act of interpretation through its

90 Time detective plot, making visible the way in which interpretation involves reading causal significance into the past that may not have initially been there. If contingency’s susceptibility to advance inference and necessary explanation in hindsight proceeds from this dynamic, however, then the novel arguably capitulates and succumbs to its thematic narration of this process, by relinquishing the apparent accident to a deliberated and motivated cause. The crash is not accidental. Scott’s surprise is vivid: ‘If this wasn’t an accident, then it means someone tried to kill him. That instead of an act of fate, he and the boy were victims of an attack’ (306). I began this chapter distinguishing between a coincidence’s common usage as a term to dismiss the uncanny resemblance of two or more occurrences and the coincidence trope as an event that foregrounds suspicion of the foreclosed future. I conclude with a similar consideration of the multiple meanings behind Scott’s statement that his accident, as he initially thought, was ‘an act of fate’. Likening an accident to an act of fate emphasises the victim’s passive subjugation to unknowable chance. The phrase’s deistic coordinates affirm the accident’s complex and uncertain causality by locating its origin in an objectively inexplicable domain, and it reiterates the event’s etymological root in the spatiality of a vertical fall. In this way, Scott’s use of fate describes an accident’s contingency. But fate and accident are also entirely antagonistic. Interpretations of fate regard events to be predestined and often make recourse to providential determination. Fate implies that because events are predestined, they happen according to design and therefore for a reason. In this sense, fate offers a teleological account of time and history, in which events work towards a goal or purpose that precedes them in advance. Fate is hardly accident, then. The reason for this strange collision of fate and accident in Scott’s phrase, I suggest, hints at the process by which narrative mediates accident in hindsight. As suggested, the teleological qualities of retrospection imply a metaphysics in which the contingent event assumes an air of inevitability after the fact, a problem introduced by hindsight that afflicts even the most resolute theories of chance. This is because hindsight reads an event’s outcome into its causal conditions in a way that understands the chance event to be in some senses the outcome towards which those casual conditions were always already unfurling. With ‘an act of fate’, Scott does not immediately assume the accident’s predetermined nature, like the novel’s many characters do. But this common phrase’s mixture of two contrasting modalities reflects unease over contingency’s mediation in temporal experience. It suggests that because of teleological retrospection, the experience of an accident is to some extent doubled, stretched taught between contingent occurrence and necessary, fateful interpretation. It is to this interpretative doubleness that I will now turn.

Accident, Coincidence, and Retrospection  91

Notes 1 See also Sharon Shaw (1974) for an account of Stein’s distinction in relation to different models of author intentionality. 2 This is in distinction to a straight forecast bet, which gambles upon two competitors coming first and second in a specific order. 3 All subsequent references are to this edition. 4 Augury, or the study of birds for divine sign and portent, goes back to antiquity (Green 2009). 5 See also Mark Currie’s discussion of prolepsis as a form of verified foreshadowing (2007, 29–50). 6 As Roland Barthes suggests, ‘the relation of coincidence implies a certain idea of Fate’ (1972, 193). 7 In this respect, its temporality is very much like that of prolepsis, which transforms narrative dynamics from the expectation of ‘what’ will happen to the consideration of ‘why’ and ‘how’ it happens (Herman 2002, 217). 8 Anthropomorphic descriptions of Ruby as a greyhound and Buttercup, Ruby’s greyhound, as a human emphasise this parallelism throughout. For example, Ruby is described early on as having a prominent ‘sagging tongue [that] spill[s] out copious quantities of saliva on to her pillow’ (1) and is followed by Buttercup when she adopts her; Buttercup herself is later described as sitting ‘to Ruby like another person, upright on her seat’ (192). 9 The mode of paranoid suspicion that underwrites conspiracy theories is ‘neither inherently left nor right wing, and has the capacity to be claimed for political purposes by both’ (Ngai 2001, 6). 10 As Melley suggests, conspiracy rhetoric can be helpful as a means of articulating the theoretical proposition that individuals are in some senses ‘“constructed” by powerful systems of knowledge or discourse’ (2000, 36). See also Ngai (2001, 5) and Grewal (2016). 11 A variety of characters in the novel go through similar recognitions of, to pursue the gambling metaphor, stacked odds in a means similar to Ruby’s recognition of conspiracy. For instance, Sylvia’s sister Sam, a young black woman and pub singer, suddenly sees, during her final performance with her mother Brera, the leering eyes of white men, embedding her in a patriarchal and racialised nexus that exceeds her, which throws ‘everything that she had previously established’ about her relationship with her mother and performance into question: ‘But who was her world? What was she? She was different’ (187). 12 All subsequent references are to this edition. 13 In this way, the novel’s organisation draws on a rich literary history of novels that gain narrative momentum from the characters’ or protagonists’ interpretation of chance, from the gradual assimilation of Crusoe’s shipwreck into providential design in Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which pivots on a monk’s divination of intent from the accidental collapse of a bridge. 14 For a recent discussion of the temporal movement from effect to cause in narrative more generally, see Brooks (2017). 15 See also Richardson (1997, 35–60) and Rudrum (2013). 16 This notion that the ‘choice’ to select one thing and exclude another in retrospect borrows much from postmodern historiographers, such as Hayden White’s (1980) account of selection in historical documentation. 17 For a psychoanalytic account of this process of the retroactive revision of the past according to posterior circumstance, see Gammage (2016).

92 Time 18 See also Kafalenos (2006, 126–56). 19 Indeed, this insight was something of a staple for post-structuralist narratologies of the 1980s and 1990s, because of its capacity to challenge the metaphysics of causation in which cause temporally precedes effect (Brooks 2002, 29; Culler 1980). 20 There is a sense, in this, that all retrospection follows the structure of teleological retrospection and that there is no need for the term ‘teleological retrospection’. I keep the term, however, in order to draw attention to its operation. 21 For further discussions of causality’s conceptual relation to determinism, see Popper (1982) and Jordan (2010, 1–33). 22 For a detailed account of Deleuze’s philosophy of the new, see Smith (2012, 235–55). 23 Deleuze’s stresses ‘potentiality’ rather than ‘possibility’ because whereas the former privileges creation and novelty, ‘the process undergone by the possible is therefore “realisation” (1994, 211). 24 For further discussion of Deleuze’s use of the dice metaphor, see Conway (1998). 25 As Ray Brassier has it, ‘Chance itself [i]s the ineluctable necessity of what occurs’ (2000, 202). 26 In this way, Deleuze stays close to Henri Bergson’s influence. For Bergson, radical novelty also resists advance inference. But like Deleuze, Bergson argues that retrospection, nonetheless, folds seemingly cause-less events back into their causal conditions, against which he warns: we ‘can always, to be sure,’ he suggests, ‘link up reality once it is accomplished, to the events which preceded it and to the circumstances in which it occurred’ (Bergson 2007, 10). On Deleuze’s mobilisation of Bergson’s distinction between the possible and the virtual in the service of resisting the idea that radical novelty in some way pre-exists its appearance, see Grosz (1998, 50–3). 27 For instance, see Deleuze’s discussion of the retrospective persistence of notions of being and unity onto originary difference (1994, 126). 28 As Deleuzean critic Eugene Holland suggests, ‘the determination of any and every actual being by the virtual past in its entirety remains contingent for Deleuze: it only has determinacy when read retroactively; it could always have happened otherwise’ (2012, 23).

Part 2

Narrative

3 Forwards and Backwards Reading Contingency

Chance and the accident pose a double bind for narrative. A novel’s plot may abound in chanceful events which aim to give the appearance of chance’s abundance in life, but the authorial determination of those events contradicts their chancefulness. Narratologist Brian Richardson understands the issue to be inescapable: chance’s ‘absence indicates specious causalism that posits a seamless and unreal chain of cause and effect; its presence, however, invariably reveals authorial intervention, since chance in fiction is never a chance occurrence’ (1997, 166).1 This is chance’s double bind, a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. Its absence lacks truthfulness to life, but its presence reveals the text’s extradiegetic collusion, dampening the very ‘reality effect’ it contributes to (Barthes 1989). This double bind speaks to the broader issue of how texts immerse readers and of how novels preserve the illusion of their imaginative worlds at the expense of authorial construction (Wang 2015). Chance events in narrative exacerbate these interpretative issues because of their burden on causal interpretation. The solution to this bind in post-classical narrative theory has been to bracket diegetic causation from the extradiegetic causation of its authorial ordering, that is, to separate and emphasise the event’s causes in the world created by the story over the author’s artificial creation of that story. However, this chapter will suggest that what is lost by such bracketing is precisely that doubleness experienced when reading an accident, in which fictional world and artifice, past and future, and contingency and necessity collide in the reader’s decoding of events on the page. In what follows, I offer an alternative to a school of narrative theory that prioritises the storyworld’s ontological discreteness, by suggesting that the experience of reading accidental events is better treated as necessarily doubled, grounded in terms of chance’s double bind. To do so, this chapter minimises the importance of chance’s dual causal reference to focus instead on chance’s dual temporal reference. In other words, it seeks to consider how the comprehension of chance depends on questions of modality and temporality, just as much as it does on causality. This alternative focus specifically suggests that the doubled reading experience of the accident as both accidental and not accidental arises

96 Narrative because of the reader’s orientation towards two different futures at once. The reader anticipates what will happen, and imaginatively identifies with the storyworld’s apparently open future; but the reader also measures that identification against what they know to be the closed and already written future evidenced by the book’s material completion. This phenomenological approach to reading and temporality shifts the terms of chance’s double bind by substituting the accident’s causation for the accident’s contingency. This chapter therefore formulates a theory of reading accidental events in written narrative that exploits, rather than seeks to resolve, the contradictory modalities involved in the experience of reading contingency. Crucially, I argue that temporal perspective determines whether a contingent event appears contingent in the experience of reading. I conceptualise this reliance on time with reference to the term ‘contingent effect’. From this account of reading, the chapter will draw on Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological account of narrative and time to argue that this same temporal doubleness, which theorises contingency to be an effect of temporal perspective, underwrites an experience of the accidental in life. Extending the discussion of retrospection’s teleological qualities in the philosophy of chance, I reach for the phenomenology of time and narrative to address the ways in which the dynamic conversion of contingency into necessity operates on the level of temporal experience just as it does on the level of reading. This chapter therefore questions the commonplace assumption that real-life accidents are contingent, whereas written accidents are not, ultimately concluding that the phenomenological experience of reading an accident reflects back onto the lived experience of contingency. Reading contingency in a novel, in other words, models contingency’s narrative mediation in temporal experience. To demonstrate this, the chapter concludes with a discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s metafictional novel Slow Man. In Slow Man, main character Paul Rayment is victim of a surprising accident but is later urged to recognise that his event happened because his (surrogate) author willed it. In this way, the novel situates the reader of the novel in a position similar to that of Paul: forced to recognise the narrative accident’s necessary nature despite the effect of contingency in the process of its comprehension. But more than this, Slow Man concludes by likening being a character in a story to living outside of a story. Closing the loop between narrative and life, Slow Man thereby suggests that much like the experience of reading a narrative accident, living an accident appears to encompass a similar imbrication of contingency and necessity due to the mediating position of narrative in the phenomenology of time. Through a synthesis of narratology, the philosophy of time, and phenomenology, this chapter argues, then, that reading contingency both models and informs the process of living contingency, because an accident in life similarly relies on a form of sense-making that is doubled, split between the contradictory

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  97 modalities of temporal openness and temporal closure, chance and fate, contingency and necessity.

Narrative Causality While not necessarily reducible to causal interpretation, a big part of the sense-making strategies of reading involves causal interpretation. 2 Indeed, for some narratologists, a crucial quality of narrative (or ‘narrativity’) is the relationship between sequence and cause. 3 However, the similarities between the hermeneutical strategies involved in interpreting an event’s causality in temporal experience and interpreting the causality of plotted events also produces much literary critical insistence on the incompatibility between chance events and written narrative. Extradiegetic causality – that is, authorial design – underwrites and undermines a plotted accident’s accidental nature. One narratological solution to narrative chance’s causal contradiction is to draw on the cognitive model of a mentally constructed storyworld.4 This solution depends on the assumption that readers mentally structure and comprehend narratives through imagined worlds that imply particular models of causality, which operate at a discrete and imaginative remove from extradiegetic causality. This process involves the reader identifying with a specific perspective that mediates that storyworld, whether explicit, implicit, or hypothetical.5 The reader’s identification with this perspective inside of that mental construction of events enables the reader to cognise the accident as accidental in the confines of that world, despite the reader’s knowledge of the event’s external causation.6 This elegant solution allows the reader to bracket off their knowledge of the text’s artifice and interpret events on the basis of their status in the storyworld. Such mental constructions of a storyworld partially protect plotted accidents from extratextual knowledge of the accident’s artifice, allowing the accident to appear accidental. In this respect, the reader’s identification with a focalised perspective provides a form of deictic identification. To draw on David Herman’s influential account of storyworlds, the reader’s mental construction of a perspectivally mediated storyworld transport[s] interpreters from the here and now of face-to-face interaction, or the space-time coordinates of an encounter with a printed text or a cinematic narrative, to the here and now that constitute the deictic centre of the world being told about. (2002, 14) This world construction entails identification with the perspective mediating that world, which then immerses the reader in both spatial (‘here’) and temporal (‘now’) coordinates. Significantly, the reader’s deictic

98 Narrative identification with a ‘here’ and a ‘now’ brackets, as Herman puts it, the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the reader’s extratextual, spatiotemporal coordinates, coordinates that may hamper the reader’s interpretation of an accident because they foreground the storyworld’s extradiegetic causation. Both spatial and temporal forms of identification help us think about the interpretation of an accidental event in a written narrative. Although we as readers know an accident in a narrative isn’t really an accident at all, we nonetheless identify with a mentally constructed storyworld through a character’s or a hypothetical perspective in a way that makes the accident believable, because of the storyworld’s implied causal system. However, this elegant solution to the doubled nature of reading an accident can risk, I suggest, downplaying aspects of the reading experience that it purportedly solves, precisely because it lessens focus on the contradictory impossibility of written chance. For Herman, the construction of the storyworld necessitates the substitution of one ‘now’ (the reader’s ‘space-time coordinates of an encounter with a printed text’) for another ‘now’ (‘the story’s deictic centre’). He focusses, in other words, on the ‘transportation’ of the reader from one discrete ‘now’ to another. Although Herman does not suggest that we can treat these independently, priority is clearly given to the mentally constructed ‘now’ of the storyworld over the reader’s coordinates in time when reading. This is significant when the latter, from a phenomenological perspective of the experience of reading in time and in space, underwrites the former with knowledge of the event’s extradiegetic causation. Herman’s notion of ‘storyworlds’ is influential in much post-­classical narratology, and the principle that reading for causality involves the mental construction of imaginary worlds finds support in many prominent narrative theories of chance, including Brian Richardson’s study of ‘causal worlds’ and Hillary Dannenberg’s account of ‘ontological plotting’, addressed shortly. But as in the case of Herman, both Richardson and Dannenberg veer towards formulations that risk cleaving the storyworld’s ‘now’ from the reader’s ‘now’. It is the reader’s ‘now’, I suggest, that foregrounds the event in terms of extradiegetic knowledge. In doing so, these models too severely bracket off one from the other, resulting in an approach that says little about how the reader’s material and phenomenological experience of the written text shapes the contradictory experience of reading a written narrative accident. As I will soon suggest, this contradictory experience proves fundamental in an account of chance and contingency in the phenomenology of time. Brian Richardson’s influential study of narrative causality leans heavily on the reader’s mental reliance on a version of a ‘storyworld’ in their interpretation of causation. He suggests that all fictional narratives construct fictional worlds that imply specific causal systems, and that these unfold dialectically between text and reader. Richardson details four systems of fictional causation: supernatural (in which supernatural and divine entities shape what happens), naturalistic (‘recognisable and repeatable

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  99 actions and events engender plausible consequences’), chance (‘coincidences proliferate uncannily, statistically unlikely events abound’), and metafictional (a ‘causal fourth dimension appearing whenever the narrator or implied author tampers with the causal laws already established’) (1997, 67, 74, 62). In his ordering of these four systems, Richardson repeatedly describes metafictional causation to be something all novels hold in reserve but not something that all novels enact. In this way, metafictional causation is the odd one out. His purpose for theorising metafictional causation in this way is to suggest that it can ‘undermine the internal consistency of a naturalistic world’ by drawing attention to the text’s extradiegetic causation (1997, 83). As he formulates it, though, metafictional causation results from an explicit diegetic intervention into the text by an implied author, character, or narrator. In other words, metafictional causation draws attention to those moments when the narrative acknowledges its own extradiegetic causation, and thus the impossibility of narrative chance. But this means, by implication, that the text’s extradiegetic causation constitutes a belated rather than an originary process in the reader’s comprehension of the text, disrupting what he terms to be the ‘already established’ alternate causal systems. The implication of this is that for all of Richardson’s focus on explicit acts of metafictional narration, his study rarely speaks of the reader’s knowledge of the text’s extradiegetic causation as anything except something belatedly introduced into an ontologically prior causal system. In other words, he limits the importance of metafictional causation by not considering it to also issue from the reader’s phenomenological and material relation to the text, as something that one acknowledges to ground any and every causal world. Thus, the discrete ‘integrity of the created universe’ is frequently pointed out to be cognitively primary and prior to the reader’s extradiegetic knowledge. But this means that, because of his treatment of metafictional causation as something that a novel diegetically enacts, Richardson’s approach neglects to consider narrative chance’s extradiegetic causation as something that underwrites and conditions any fictional world. As a result, Richardson’s methodological bias towards the logical integrity of a fictional world’s causality means that he has little to say about the reader’s doubled experience of narrative chance, in which extradiegetic causation and diegetic causation uneasily entwine. Hillary Dannenberg’s cognitive theory of ‘ontological plotting’, which further combines narratological focus on chance causality with a view of the discrete persistence of storyworlds, also yields an approach primarily attuned to bracketing the storyworld’s causal system away from extradiegetic knowledge. Her account of immersion is emblematic of this: Narrative fiction uses a repertoire of sense-making operations to establish (or, in antirealist texts, sometimes to undermine) the autonomy of the narrative world and thus create an environment for

100 Narrative immersion. Put most simply, realist texts (and semirealist texts, such as the genre of science fiction) attempt to camouflage the ultimate, extradiegetic causal level of the author (who actually writes the text and thus causally manipulates all events within it) by constructing a narrative world with its own intradiegetic connective systems. If these are convincing, the reader is encouraged to believe in the internal logic and autonomy of the narrative world. (2008, 25) Although much more attentive to the double bind of narrative chance, Dannenberg’s interest in the internal logic of a storyworld at the expense of its extradiegetic causation shows in the language of ‘autonomy’. Autonomy implies the possibility of self-consistency, as if the storyworld’s spatiotemporal coordinates can exist irrespective of, or external to, the reader’s actualisation of them in time. This point appears to depict the reader as one who partially excises the ‘narrative world’ from the text’s ‘extradiegetic causal level of the author’. Although Dannenberg recognises the impossibility of this, her account of immersion still relies on the importance afforded to the reader’s cognition of narrative events (the reader is ‘encouraged to believe in the logic and autonomy of the narrative world’) over an appreciation of the reader’s capacity to interpretatively balance a view of the storyworld’s causality with its extradiegetic causality. True, the affective power of fiction in part rests on its capacity for immersing the reader in the storyworld, and this immersion can appear almost self-consistent. But her gesture to the term ‘autonomy’ as a conceptual if not pragmatic possibility is symptomatic of the kinds of focus causal theories of narrative chance place on the storyworld’s imaginative independence from its material conditions in the reader’s cognition. Dannenberg’s model of narrative comprehension prioritises the storyworld’s apparent integrity and consistency over its communicative context and material causation. Although Dannenberg’s approach offers a rich account of how readers bracket off their extratextual knowledge in order to comprehend narrative causality, it has little to say about what I shortly describe to be the doubled nature of the reader’s comprehension of narrative chance, recognised by many more literary-minded critical accounts. In order to address this doubleness, I turn to an alternate narratological tradition that more explicitly considers the impossibility of bracketing off the storyworld’s ‘now’ from the act of reading in time.

Narrative Temporality Causation provides a significant explanatory context for accidents, but it does not exhaust the sense-making procedures by which an accident is interpreted to be accidental. When we determine an event to be accidental, we also consider whether the event was contingent or not. As

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  101 I have suggested throughout this study, the interpretation of contingency involves consideration of an event’s relation to the future and to questions of modality and possibility, just as much as it does to the event’s past causes: was its occurrence something that could have not happened, issuing from an objectively opaque future, or was its occurrence inevitable? If this is the case, then, the determination of a narrative accident has as much to do with the reader’s dynamic, interpretative relation to the future and to narrative temporality when reading as it does with causality. For this reason, I suggest that attention to a narrative accident’s contingency shifts theoretical enquiry away from a sole focus on the accident’s causation towards a consideration of narrative temporality more broadly, influenced by both phenomenological and materialist strands of narrative theory. This alternate narratological approach recommends that the temporal dynamics of reading written narrative issue from the reader’s orientation towards two ontologically distinct but interrelated futures at once. Unlike in real life, in which the actual future to come is objectively unknowable, for written fictional narrative the future is given in advance, already waiting ahead for the reader. In other words, events are contingent from the perspective of the storyworld’s actualisation in time, but necessary from a perspective of their material inscription. Contingency, then, is an ‘effect’ of the reader’s perspective in time. Narrative theorist Peter Brooks describes written narrative’s temporal reference to be paradoxically doubled. He suggests that readers sequentially comprehend story events according to a ‘curious present’: If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative. (2002, 23) This present is curious because it is contradictory. The reader knows it to be past from a perspective of the book’s material completion. Two assumptions qualify this contradiction. First, the reader’s passage through a narrative is a form of progressive decoding, in which the storyworld’s focalised perspective urges the reader to construct its deictic coordinates as a kind of ‘present’. In this respect, Brooks rephrases Herman’s discussion of deictic identification. This ‘present’s’ future, from a perspective of the reader’s identification with the storyworld, remains unknown and has the appearance that anything could happen. But second, readers orient towards two futures at once: both the storyworld’s unknown future and their knowledge of this future’s prior completion, already ahead and lying in wait. The reader’s perspective is split between their sequential movement across the page, which coincides with their mental

102 Narrative construction of a storyworld’s spatiotemporal coordinates, and an extratextual awareness of their own spatiotemporal coordinates, which acknowledge that the narrative’s future lies ahead of them, already fixed in advance. Brooks’ key inference from this doubled temporality is his well-known account of the interpretative dynamics of ‘the anticipation of retrospection’, which positions the reader as someone who seeks to comprehend a narrative’s provisional meanings with a fuller knowledge of significance in retrospect. But his suggestion that the reader moves towards a closed future when reading also depends on the assumption that reading a narrative in time is analogous to temporal experience, in that the reader’s movement across the page is comparable to one’s experience of the present in lived time. For this reason, Brooks’ model of reading draws implicitly on phenomenological accounts of reading, in particular Wolfgang Iser’s. Iser argues that reading’s time flow can be likened to temporal experience because the reader occupies a ‘wandering viewpoint’ that moves through the text (1978, 109). The reader’s wandering viewpoint is analogous to one’s experience of the present in real life: every moment of reading is a dialectic of protention and retention, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading) horizon already filled; the wandering viewpoint carves its passage through both at the same time and leaves them to merge together in its wake. (1978, 112) The reader’s sequential movement across the page mirrors one’s occupation of the present in temporal experience, split between anticipation and retrospection and oriented towards a future yet to be occupied. This analogy between reading and living, however, also recognises the ontological difference between the future of a written narrative, which is given in advance and necessary, and the future of temporal experience, which is objectively unknowable and contingent. Unlike in actual life, future events are already encoded on the page, lying in wait for the moving horizon to catch up. The objection here may be that a linguistic sequence cannot exist without the reader’s actualisation of it in time, and so surely a written narrative’s future is just as non-actual as the actual future. This may be the case to the extent that the reader has not yet comprehended that sequence, but the objection downplays the material and phenomenological experience of reading that introduces the ontological difference of reading and living in the first place. This difference in part stems from those concerns over extradiegetic causality that stress a plot’s premeditation and authorship, but it also issues from the technology of the written page, inspiring in readers what Christina Lupton terms the reader’s

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  103 ‘non-agentive presence in relation to the novel as narrative’s physical medium’ (2011, 41).7 For my discussion here, the ‘written’ nature of written narrative, rather than its narrative or fictional nature, is the key quality that makes a novel’s future objectively given in advance. The ‘written’ text provides the reader with a different kind of access to the future when reading to that which they would have in life. Being able to skip a few pages in order to visit the narrative future out of order in a way that is never possible in life testifies to this quality. In reading one may anticipate multiple futures for the storyworld, but the novel’s actual future will always unfold in the same way, in the same order. As Mark Currie suggests, In the written text, the future lies there to the right, awaiting its actualisation by the reading, so that the written text can be said to offer a block view of time which is never offered to us in lived experience. (2007, 18) Folding this all back into Brooks, reading narrative involves the reader’s mental construction of a present out of the inert material of the written page. But the inert nature of the written page suggests that the present we actualise in reading is as much ontologically past, as Brooks puts it, or lies in wait, as Currie has it. By ‘past’, Brooks does not necessarily mean the preterite tense, although the fact that we read the past tense as if it were present is in part what his argument is about.8 Rather, he means that the written narrative’s future is past before our encounter with it, because it is already in place. The future that lies ahead of the reading ‘now’ is a materially fixed and pre-existent one. This alternate, phenomenological account of narrative temporality goes some way to supplementing the cognitivist and post-classical accounts of narrative chance that too strongly bracket off the storyworld’s deictic coordinates from the reader’s. If the experience of reading a written narrative is roughly analogous to the experience of living in time, then the reader passes from one word to the next in a kind of experiential present, making the meaning of the text’s words actual and mentally constructing a storyworld in and over time. The experiential present of reading is thus like temporal experience in real life: bookended by a past that has happened and a future to come. But as a result of this coincidence, one cannot downplay the entanglement of the reader’s mental construction of the storyworld’s ‘now’ with their knowledge of the narrative future’s prior completion, knowledge that phenomenological accounts of reading state to be ever-present in the dynamics of reading. The advantage of this phenomenological strain in narrative theory is that it describes, from a perspective of the reader’s relation to a novel’s temporal reference, the actualisation of the ‘present’ of the narrative to

104 Narrative be something that is always already underwritten by its prior completion. In other words, the storyworld’s mental construction of a ‘now’ (that which facilitates our immersion in the story’s events) temporally coincides with and is conditioned by the ‘now’ of the reader’s actualisation of the words on the page in time (that which draws our attention to the text’s material future). Simply put, these two ‘now’s are inseparable. Because reading’s temporal reference is doubled, the immersive potential of the storyworld’s perspectival ‘now’ is always meaningfully shot through with its materially past nature. This is what Mark Currie elsewhere calls the ‘doubleness of identification and foreknowledge’ at play in reading written narrative, a process in which even ‘when we know nothing of what is to come, we nevertheless know that what is to come has already taken place, that it is already there, and that the reading process will reveal it’ (2012, 15). Reading’s temporality therefore involves the entangled experience of an open and contingent future with knowledge of that future’s necessity and closure in the same moment. We actualise something past, from a closed future, as if it were present, and are resultantly gripped by an open and unforeseeable future that we know to have already taken place.9 It is not a huge leap to appreciate the implications of this account of the doubled time structure of written narrative for an account of reading the accident. If an accident’s comprehension depends on its appearance of being contingent, then narrative’s doubled temporality is both the accident’s prosecution and its defence. This doubled temporality is the accident’s prosecution because the reader’s awareness of written narrative’s predetermined future reduces any event to the modal horizon of necessity; the written narrative accident is and always was going to happen, and this modality folds into the accident’s comprehension, becoming something inevitable and necessary. But narrative’s doubled temporality also acts in the accident’s defence. This phenomenological account of comprehension describes reading in time to function through the dynamics of progressive decoding, which cognises the story’s events into a ‘curious’ present from the perspective of the storyworld. This progressive decoding imparts the interpretative effect of contingency onto the moment-to-moment movement according to the text’s actualisation in time, following the ‘moving now’ of reading, as if the narrative’s future is open, despite its material closure. In this respect, contingency is an interpretative effect produced by the reader’s temporal passage through the text. The coincidence between the reader’s spatiotemporal coordinates and the ‘now’ of the storyworld’s deixis conditions and produces a contingent effect. To understand contingency to be an effect of temporal perspective – something that depends on the reader’s position in time rather than a grammatically identifiable modality – better articulates, I argue, the doubled temporal reference of reading, because it understands contingency

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  105 to be always already underwritten by its material necessity. The reader’s decoding of the text in time, then, which produces a deictic identification with the storyworld in the ‘now’ of reading, produces the contingent effect, itself an unstable modality contradictorily underwritten by its opposite. But what is more, the contingent effect goes some way, I suggest, to outlining the relationship between reading contingency and living contingency. For Brooks, the phenomenology of reading a foreclosed future as if it were open and contingent supports and produces his ‘chief tool’ for making sense of narrative, the anticipation of retrospection. This process describes reading to happen ‘in the spirit of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read’ (2002, 23). It follows then that not only is a chance event in narrative complicated by its imbrication in an already closed future, but also that readers anticipate interpreting events with new understanding once completed. This anticipation of retrospective interpretation is a familiar conversation for end-oriented discussions of narrative dynamics, as discussed in Chapter 1, but it also crosses into issues of contingency’s interpretation in life. As I argue in Chapter 2, retrospection yields a form of teleological significance. In the light of this, anticipated retrospection implies that the experience of lived time involves anticipating an equivalent form of significance in hindsight. Many critics have argued for the significance of this dynamic of anticipated retrospection in everything from understanding narrative causality to one’s relationship to the present, and this dynamic, I suggest, invites consideration of the relationship between reading in time and living in time.10 Although the future is closed for a written narrative in a way that it is not for life, Brooks’ model of reading suggests that the reader’s anticipation of significance models one’s relation to phenomenological experience more generally, involving a future-oriented anticipation of conferring retrospective significance onto events. As Mark Currie elaborates on Brooks’ argument, it ‘becomes difficult to distinguish what remains to be read from what remains to be lived, or the already-there future of narrative from the open future of life’ when both experiences doubly refer to imaginative projections into an unknown future and to the expectation that the future, once reached, will restructure the present’s provisional meanings (2009, 354). With this relationship between the reader’s movement across the page in time and temporal experience more generally in mind, then, we can consider the reasons for why retrospective interpretation threatens the contingent status of accidental occurrence not just in reading but also in living, and we might appreciate the value of the notion of the contingent effect for lived experience also. Reading’s applicability to living is best formulated, I argue, in Paul Ricoeur’s extensive account of what he calls the hermeneutic circle of time and narrative. My suggestion is

106 Narrative that although narrative accidents differ from accidents in life because of the written future’s ontological difference, the dynamics of comprehension involved in interpreting the doubled time structure of a narrative accident nonetheless inform and model the experience of an accident in temporal experience. Taking the relationship between reading in time and living in time into account, I argue that the narrative accident’s doubleness and its dependence on temporal perspective equally shape the experience of an accident in life precisely because of the interpretative dynamic of anticipated retrospection. The strange temporal doubleness experienced when reading a narrative accident therefore equally underwrites the phenomenological experience of a real-life accident. In this respect, reading contingency goes some way to describing the experience of living contingency.

Reading Contingency To outline the relationship between reading contingency and living contingency, we need to unpick the wholesale distinction between narrative contingency and actual contingency. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek considers the problem of this distinction in detail. He argues that contingency structurally anticipates its conversion into necessity in hindsight. This anticipatory assimilation poses a central problem for the philosophy of modality, which resides in contingency’s uncertain status: is it ontological, i.e., are things in themselves contingent, or is it epistemological, i.e., is contingency merely an expression of the fact that we do not know the complete chain of causes which brought about the allegedly ‘contingent’ phenomenon? (1993, 153) Turning to a consideration of contingency’s ontological or epistemological status, a persistent question for the philosophy of chance, Žižek argues that an ontologically contingent event, here, would resist satisfactory causal explanation in the final instance. It would not, Žižek argues, be possible to predict in advance, no matter our knowledge of prior conditions, but would rather ‘somehow happen out of nowhere’ (2014, 4). To describe contingency as epistemological, however, suggests the impression of contingency is rather a misperception of something of which we lack full knowledge. There is a chance that contingency is not really contingent, and that the future, as mechanical determinists would suggest, was actually always going to happen in this way, but we just didn’t know it at the time.11 Crucially for Žižek, it is nigh impossible to determine whether contingency is ontological or merely epistemological. This creates, he suggests, ‘the ontological scandal of the ultimate undecidability between

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  107 the two choices’ (1993, 155). Such undecidability arises because of temporal perspective. When a chance event irrupts, it urges a cognitively delayed form of retrospection that situates the contingent arrival within the context of its possible, and therefore for Žižek possibly necessary, causes and conditions once passed. This undecidability, then, rests on the impossibility of knowing whether the perceived determinants for a chance event merely accrue the modality of necessity after the fact, or are themselves actually necessary. Žižek thus obsesses over the idea that contingency’s intelligibility depends on a form of hindsight that itself threatens to shatter the event’s appearance of contingency. He terms this procedure the ‘retroactive glance’, an act of hindsight that both looks back on something and in doing so transforms the past. There lies, he suggests, an uncertainty as to whether the retroactive glance invents and imposes precarious causal explanation after the fact onto contingency, or whether, in fact, it reveals a deterministic causality already implicit in the event, meaning that it would have been possible, with the right knowledge, to foresee the contingent event prior to its emergence. Although Žižek insists that we cannot allow this retrospective logic to lull us into thinking that the world is predetermined, contingency is nonetheless locked into a perpetual struggle with necessity, because contingency structurally anticipates its retrospective configuration.12 Therein: resides the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, i.e., the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity: things retroactively ‘will have been’ necessary. (2014, 146) This dialectical reversal has a large bearing on the judgement of an accident: ‘if – accidentally – an event takes place’, for Žižek, ‘it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable’ (ibid.). Contingency is therefore undecidable, because of the way in which the retroactive glance composes a chain of correspondence and cause leading up to the event that can appear irreversible and teleological. The open future undergoes a process of conversion into a closed and inevitable one, bound by ‘the abrupt reversal of the “not yet” into the “always already”’ (ibid.). In this sense, on the level of phenomenological experience, contingency depends on temporal perspective, and that dependence unsettles contingency’s ontological verifiability. Contingency, then, appears to be an effect produced in the present that anticipates retrospective conversion into its structural opposite. This reversal implies contingency’s interpretative transformation over time, from that which does not have to happen into that which was always going to happen. This transformation, Žižek insists, renders contingent modality uncertain and undecidable.

108 Narrative Žižek’s discussion helpfully demonstrates contingency’s uncertainty in temporal experience, emphasising the bearing of retrospection on multiple accounts of contingency throughout this study. But furthermore, his work intimates, I suggest, one means for thinking about the complementarity between reading contingency and living contingency. After all, the thing that goes unmentioned in Žižek’s account is a consideration that the problem of contingency’s retroactive conversion stems precisely from the logic of narrative, and specifically the circular relationship between narrative and time. The structure of narrative is the missing term in his account. I suggest, by contrast, that narrative’s mediation of temporal experience provides the interpretative and seemingly inescapable structure by which hindsight transfers the outline of necessity onto the appearance of contingency. For that reason, I turn to hermeneutical philosopher Paul Ricoeur to offer a model of narrative comprehension that sketches out the relation between the cognition of accidents in written narrative and accidents in temporal experience more generally. After all, the possible similarities between an accident in reading and an accident in life raises a more general question about the relation between written fictional narrative and the real. It raises, in other words, the question of mimesis. Mimesis has a multitude of meanings in narrative theory. Aristotle’s definition as the ‘imitation of action’ stresses narrative’s secondary and supplementary relation to real life, whereas cognitive narratologists such as Monika Fludernik make the term foundational in the process of real life’s ‘narrativisation’ (2005, 26–40). Narrative has the capacity to represent the world in particular ways. But narrative also has an additional bearing on temporal experience, in which the structures of end-orientation, temporal closure, and the future’s apparent completion thrown up by reading mediate temporal experience. Paul Ricoeur’s three-stage mimesis outlined in his expansive study Time and Narrative is arguably the most detailed account of this feedback loop between temporal experience and narrative. For Ricoeur, the hermeneutic circle of time and narrative means that time is made legible through narrative, and that narrative is, in turn, sustained through its structuring of temporal sequence. Ricoeur describes the process by which narrative structures time to constitute mimesis, and in doing so, he moves away from a notion that mimesis is a supplementary imitation of the real, to instead define it in terms of a progressive and adaptive ‘emplotting’ of action. For Ricoeur, mimesis ‘emplots’ disordered temporal experience into a precarious order according to the temporally unifying logic of ‘plot’. Ricoeur lays out a three-stage process for mimesis, which leans heavily on the equivalence between reading contingency and living contingency. Mimesis1 – or ‘prefiguration’ – consists of our presuppositions about the world, the things that help us ‘preunderstand what human acting is’ (1990a, 64). Because of Ricoeur’s circular logic, this pre-understanding

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  109 is always already mediated by narrative, and the changing nature of assumptions about the world means that this is always in flux and open to continual revision. Mimesis2 – or ‘configuration’ – is the process in which one ‘configures’ the disorder of temporal experience into a precarious order. Mimesis2, as configuration, ‘emplots’ temporal experience in a way that superimposes narrativity onto the contingent and temporally disordered experience of real life. ‘Plot’ governs this process of configuration and guides the narrative act, which performs a mediating function: ‘the configurational arrangement transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole which is the correlate of the act of assembling events together and which makes the story followable’ (1990a, 66). In other words, temporal experience compels the human agent to ‘configure’ ‘discordant’ experience into a ‘concordant’ narrative. ‘Configuration’ grasps the events of experience into an interpretable whole governed by narrative structure’s specific temporality, one that is very much like the temporality of a novel in which ending and beginning constitute a ‘whole’ unit. Mimesis3 – or ‘refiguration’ – represents the stage in which one integrates the configured and narrativised organisation of mimesis2 (which has made a ‘plot’ out of disorder) into temporal experience, thereby incorporating configuration into lived experience. In other words, refiguration describes the process through which we adapt to the imagined narrative order made by configuration in our understanding of the world, shaping identity and our comprehension of events. Refiguration therefore stages the moment when we view ourselves as the actor or protagonist in the narrative ‘plot’ of mimesis2’s construction. Kick-starting the feedback loop of the circular relationship between narrative and the real, refiguration’s adoption of the dynamics of ‘plot’ into one’s own experience folds back into and updates prefiguration, thereby shaping one’s pre-understanding of the world and providing momentum for mimesis’s iterative, three-stage dynamic. Time continues to offer more raw data for configuration, around which narrative comprehension continually adapts provisional and always incomplete structures of coherence. Crucially, Ricoeur likens refiguration to the phenomenology of reading. It marks, he argues, ‘the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader’, meaning that it initiates the moment when we comprehend lived experience through the semantic effect of narrative, and therefore through plot (1990a, 71). The complex but illuminating implication behind refiguration’s likeness to reading suggests that understanding life in terms of narrative is in some way equivalent to the phenomenological experience of reading’s doubled temporality. Narrative comprehension, Ricoeur argues, organises the phenomenological experience of time into a structure of coherence that is similar to the progressive structure of novel, one governed by the dynamics of a beginning, middle, and end. One significant semantic effect of

110 Narrative narrative comprehension, therefore, is that it imposes a precarious form of teleological coherence onto the raw data of life. This is the reason for Ricoeur’s use of the term ‘emplotment’ in his description of mimesis2, because it suggests that narrative grasps unconnected events into a closed and end-oriented sequence. The meanings imposed onto time by this interpretative act are relative and draw on the subject’s ideological, historical, and epistemological contexts. Ricoeur’s point, rather, is that configuration describes the minimal operation by which the open process of time is subject to the dynamic of a narrative coherence that draws a chain of association between past, present, and anticipated future. This ‘configurational arrangement’ of emplotment, he argues, ‘transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole’ (1990a, 67). One of the ways to understand mimesis2’s establishment of a meaningful whole is to see it as the imposition of end-orientation onto the open flux of temporality. Emplotment organises the raw data of life around an imaginatively imposed beginning, middle, and end. This precarious and imaginatively constructed ending in turn subsequently becomes the ‘goal’, justification, or ‘backward’ cause for its imagined beginning, a teleological dynamic made possible by the configurational aspect of mimesis. As Ricoeur suggests, the configuration of temporal experience in this way imposes imaginative temporal closure onto the objectively open nature of time in life, such as we might find in the temporal closure of the already written future of the novel. In doing so, narrative configuration recapitulates ‘the initial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences’, reading time backwards through a form of end-oriented interpretation that reads the later outcome into its initial conditions (Ricoeur 1980, 180). Ricoeur likens refiguration to the phenomenology of reading, then, because the phenomenology of one’s relation to narrative’s mediation of time is analogous to the reader’s progressive movement through a novel. ‘Reading’, to quote Ricoeur, ‘is precisely the act that brings about the transition between the effect of closure for the first perspective [mimesis2] and the effect of openness for the second [mimesis3]’ (1990b, 20). In this case, Ricoeur’s account of reading provides some of the foundational ground for Peter Brooks’s and Mark Currie’s descriptions of reading. On the one hand, the reader comprehends narrative as a whole, or single, unit in which time flows backwards and forwards, enclosed by the effect of necessity. But on the other, the reader’s sequential actualisation of linguistic sequence in time comprehends events to be episodic and envisions the storyworld’s future to be open and unforeseeable. The tension for Ricoeur, as it is for Brooks and Currie, lies in the reader’s doubled knowledge of the effect of contingency and one’s anticipation of teleological coherence: ‘To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfilment in the “conclusion” of the story’ (1990a, 66).

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  111 Thus one’s awareness of future events’s foreclosure brackets the effect of an episodic and contingent sequence of events from the perspective of the storyworld. Reading involves the collision of two temporalities at once: the ‘closed’ temporality of an already structured plot and the ‘open’ temporality of the reader’s passage through the text, who experiences the narrative events as if they were present. As Ricoeur puts it elsewhere, the interplay ‘between pure succession and the unity of temporal form’ is essential to this phenomenology of reading because of reading’s doubled play of identification and foreknowledge (1992, 142). The reader’s ‘now’ marks the transition from the text’s closed and configured structure into an experientially present temporality that has the effect of openness, a transition from the effect of necessity to the effect of contingency. Adding all of this up, reading best describes the process of refiguration because when we relate to the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of lived experience, we do something like ‘read’ them. By ‘reading’ these narratives, we transform the inert temporality of the story we imagine ourselves to be the protagonist in into something open and lived, and therefore subject to the unknown future once more. If narrative’s configuration of experience, and the stories we tell ourselves, shape and influence how we relate to the world, then refiguration suggests that these narratives are continually open for reassessment, and that just as with the phenomenology of reading, which transforms the closed structure of a novel into an experientially open temporality, Ricoeur’s threestage mimesis suggests that we similarly re-mediate and revise narrative’s mediation of time with reference to new experience. If mimesis2 configures temporal disorder into a precarious narrative order, then mimesis3 shows how the ‘reading’ of the narratives we tell ourselves shapes and informs phenomenological experience, and continually adapts configuration to new experience. We relate to these narratives by ‘reading’ them, meaning that we comprehend our movement into an unknown future through reference to the anticipated virtual futures of imagined plots, which are then subject to change and alteration. In this way, the hermeneutic circle of time and narrative suggests that the experience of time, because of narrative, involves the collision of two temporalities at once: events appear not only enclosed by the strategy of making something coherent in terms of an imagined ‘plot’ but also open to revision and to the objectively opaque future. Refiguration suggests that narrative’s mediation of time is continually remade by new experience, which in turn closes the loop of mimesis by folding configuration back into prefiguration. This leads to the anticipation that mimesis2 will retrospectively structure the open future around the logic of plot once experienced. The possible analogies between reading and narrative’s mediation of time are numerous. Ricoeur suggests that living life through narrative is analogous to living as if a character in a story, and that the construction of identity is a narrative procedure.13 However, what is especially

112 Narrative important is the impact Ricoeur’s account of mimesis has on contingency. If we anticipate the configuration of future events through the lens of narrative, then we anticipate that we will retrospectively read contingency in terms of narrative and of plot. If that is the case, then this anticipation of retrospective emplotment potentially threatens the chance of an accident, because emplotment organises the time of life into narrative time. The conversion of contingency into narrative necessity fuels the engine of Ricoeur’s three-stage mimesis. It is vital to stress that for Ricoeur, the quality of narrativity imposed onto the flux of time through mimesis is one that applies continuity, causality, closure, and end-orientation onto the open unfolding of time. In a related account of temporal experience, Ricoeur likens identity’s narrative construction to the experience of following a character in a story. In this discussion, mimesis describes a dialectic that continually captures and assimilates the raw data of life into a precarious narrative order. This dialectic is conditioned, he suggests, by the absorption of contingency into necessity: The dialectic consists in the fact that, following the line of concordance, the character draws his or her singularity from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished from all others. […] Because of the concordant-discordant synthesis, the contingency of the event contributes to the necessity, retroactive so to speak, of the history of a life, to which is equated the identity of the character. Thus chance is transmuted into fate. (1992, 147) The ‘concordant–discordant synthesis’ is Ricoeur’s term for the narrative operation, a precarious act that inserts the disordered temporality of life into an insecurely coherent structure of plot. Self-understanding and identity arise because of emplotment, a reactive structure that feeds unanticipated events into narrative order after the fact. The contingency of the event interrupts and diverges from the ‘temporal totality’ of narrative identity imagined up until that point, but is then retrospectively assimilated into the ‘history of a life’ and recuperated as an indispensable coordinate in that history’s imagination. The effect of contingency retroactively transforms into the effect of necessity. In terms of narrative identity, Ricoeur suggests that this then creates the interpretative process by which mimesis’s concordant–discordant synthesis transforms chance into fate. Fate, in this context, refers to a sense of essentialised or personal inevitability. An infinite array of factors contribute to the ‘history of a life’, but when subject to the concordant-discordant synthesis, narrative structures this contingent array of factors to be essential and necessary by configuring them into a narrative of the self. One looks back over a history of a life and recasts prior events in the light of future

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  113 knowledge. This process of teleological retrospection means that certain events, through that imposition of end-orientation, accrue the mark of fatefulness. Narrative identity incorporates the contingency of selfhood into a precarious narrative coherence that presents the history of a life to be an essential and inevitable form that could not have been otherwise. The core of mimesis’s concordant–discordant synthesis, then, is necessity’s retroactive capture of contingency. If this is the case, then Ricoeur’s account of narrative’s mediation of phenomenological experience points to narrativity as the key player for contingency’s undecidability in the philosophy of chance. Mimesis makes contingency undecidable, stretching it between the interpretative effect of contingency and necessity: the paradox of emplotment is that it inverts the effect of contingency, in the sense of that which could have happened differently […] by incorporating it in some way into the effect of necessity or probability exerted by the configuring act. (1992, 142) We can look back at an unexpected accident and interpretatively impose a trail of causes retrospectively, giving the impression that it could have been foreseen if only with the right knowledge. But retrospective emplotment also introduces a profound philosophical problem that has to do with contingency’s constancy in temporal experience. Narrative transforms contingency into necessity and chance into fate. Narrative configuration grasps the contingent event inside of a narrative structure, and in doing so enfolds it into narrative time, thus connecting the event to an imagined beginning and an imagined end. This mode of comprehension assimilates contingency into the end-oriented structure of a narrative ‘plot’, thus retrospectively imposing teleological momentum onto an event that issues from an open and unforeseeable future. A contingent event does not have to happen. And yet, once imaginatively emplotted, contingency melts into the necessary. The accident’s modality in life remains uncertain precisely because it invites emplotment. Mimesis’s concordant–discordant synthesis makes it possible to read an event’s contingent outcome into its beginning conditions. Because of emplotment’s teleological dynamic, which allows one to read time backwards from the outcome as well as forwards from the causal condition, Ricoeur’s account of mimesis suggests that teleological momentum always dovetails with causal explanation, as if an event’s outcome is already immanent in its conditions. Again, a nigh-infinite array of factors contribute to any contingent event, but narrative explanation can reduce those factors to a singular sequence that succumbs to the effect of necessity because of its imposition of the dynamic of plot. Through this, the contingent event is seen anew as necessary, as if it could have been possible to foresee the outcome all along just by looking into its causal

114 Narrative conditions, precisely because of the interpretative position of knowledge afforded by hindsight. As Ricoeur frequently suggests, emplotment paradoxically configures contingency into a precarious order, and the process of configuration transforms the effect of contingency into the effect of necessity by allowing us to read time backwards. Hindsight makes it possible to see that what did not have to happen was perhaps always going to happen; thus ‘chance’, he says, ‘is transmuted into fate’. With this, we return to the notion of the ‘contingent effect’, intimated by Ricoeur’s phrase, the ‘effect of contingency’, above. If contingency’s occurrence coincides with its narrative mediation, then contingency is hostage to temporal perspective. It follows, then, that because of narrative’s mediation of phenomenological experience, living contingency and reading contingency share more in common than we might initially think. This relation between living contingency and reading is, after all, certainly not lost on Ricoeur, who likens the phenomenology of reading to one’s experience of time. Reading a book involves the doubled comprehension of a sequentially actualised contingent and episodic storyworld, bracketed by a necessary future that has already happened. These dual modalities persist for the duration of the reading process. Living in time involves the comprehension of time through the structure of narrative, but this comes with the understanding that the unknowable future, the engine of discordance, will open up and refigure that narrative structure accordingly, before its further retrospective assimilation into narrative order. This means, then, that living in time also involves a twofold assumption about the future: both its objectively contingent nature and an anticipation of this future’s retrospective configuration into necessity once experienced. In other words, according to this phenomenological account of time, we become familiar with contingency as something that is similarly double-sided, like the reading experience, both comprehended to be contingent and necessary at once, due to the structuring logic of narrative. This, of course, is not to argue that history unfolds according to any kind of necessary or teleological pattern. But it does suggest that Ricoeur’s dense account of narrative offers the minimal logic for the conversion of contingency into necessity, and chance into fate, that dogs the philosophy of chance and renders the experience of contingency uncertain. Rather than strengthening the borders between living contingency and reading contingency, a study of written narrative accidents benefits from emphasising their commonality. Accidents may appear retrospectively inevitable in life, but in a novel an accident is literally inevitable. But rather than simply separating narrative off from life, the doubled temporality of contingency and necessity experienced when reading an accident can, I argue, instruct the reader in the dynamics of comprehension involved in the phenomenological experience of an actual accident in lived experience. By drawing reading contingency and

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  115 living contingency closer together rather than further apart, reading the accident models the experience of an actual accident, stretched as it is between contingency and necessity, the objectively open future and the closed future of narrative configuration.

Reading Contingency and Living Contingency: Slow Man The reader of a narrative accident occupies two epistemological domains at once: a limited perspective inside of the storyworld and a wider perspective knowledgeable of the book’s material completion. One of the ways that a narrative can impart the effect of contingency when reading, as Richardson and Dannenberg might suggest above, is through diegetic concealment of the second domain of knowledge from the first. J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man makes explicit this interdependence between narrative accidents, the narrative’s perspectival storyworld, and a novel’s control of knowledge. Through its generic employment of metafiction, the novel draws attention to the various interpretative dynamics employed in the interpretation of a narrative accident. However, I will also argue that the novel does so for two reasons: first, to emphasise the inescapable entanglement of perspectival identification and foreknowledge in the phenomenology of reading, something insurmountable due to the written text’s material presence, and second, to liken that entanglement to the experience of an actual accident in lived experience through its representation of a character’s slow realisation that he exists inside of a book. The novel opens in medias res, with a car colliding into central protagonist Paul Rayment: The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. (2006, 1)14 Slow Man narrates its opening accident through a mixture of Paul’s third-person narration and an interior, italicised monologue that reports his reflections on the accident in the moment of the event.15 Paul’s perspective grounds his accident in a deictic ‘here and now’. The opening paragraph’s present tense and sudden irruption of a dramatic event (‘The blow…’ inaugurates the text) is abrupt and immediate, drawing the reader into the storyworld’s perspectival control. Despite the speed of the crash, however, its narration is detailed and slow. The passage’s use of perspective, tense, and language juxtaposes the shock of the crash against the vivid and tangible details of its experience for Paul.16 It asks

116 Narrative the reader to mentally construct Paul’s metaphorically embodied perspective in the ‘now’ of reading through this detail and narration, drawing us into Paul’s experience of the event. The plot follows Paul’s slow convalescence. Soon after the crash, Paul meets Wayne Blight, the driver who struck him. Wayne apologises and blames the accident on ‘Real bad luck’ (20). ‘Real bad luck’ suggests a lack of agency behind Paul’s accident, as if it just happened by chance, collaborating with the opening page’s attempts to immerse the reader in Paul’s accident. But ‘real bad luck’, as cause of Paul’s accident, also echoes that most unlucky of figures, the number thirteen. It’s surely no accident, then, that the thirteenth chapter of Slow Man introduces the character Elizabeth Costello, who really is the cause of Paul’s accident. In not the first, but certainly the most explicit, metafictional gesture up until this point in the novel, Costello claims that she is Paul’s author, marking the novel’s extended metaleptic turn.17 In more ways than one, Costello is Paul’s real bad luck. Costello repeats near verbatim the novel’s opening passage back to a bemused Paul: Heavily she seats herself again, squares her shoulders, and begins to recite. ‘The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he tumbles through the air, and so forth’. (81)18 This does not, of course, fully constitute an interaction between Paul and his author, because Costello is a character in the same storyworld as Paul and plays the role of an author surrogate.19 Nevertheless, what makes Costello’s intervention metaleptic is that she quotes something only recognisable to the reader, repeating back to Paul the narration of his accident, rather than merely telling him specific details of the event. ‘The blow catches him from the right…’ replicates the novel’s discourse rather than its story, and as such these words announce a paradox that threatens to collapse the storyworld into its communication. This is why it takes so long for Paul to realise his strangely parasitical relationship with Costello. Metalepsis describes a character’s or narrator’s movement between the level of what is narrated (often treated as the story’s world) and the story’s level of narration (often understood as either the world of the narrator, author, or the extratextual world); its effects, as Gérard Genette suggests, disrupt the boundary between levels of narration, ‘a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells’ (1983, 236). Genette’s term has been subject to debate and taxonomy ever since, including accounts of ‘rhetorical’ and ‘ontological’ metalepsis, ‘minimal’ metalepsis, and ‘exterior’

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  117 and ‘interior’ metalepsis, to name but a few. 20 Costello’s arrival here is perhaps the most traditionally understood form of metalepsis, a form of ‘exterior’ or ‘ontological’ metalepsis, in which Costello, who represents Coetzee as author in the fictional world, crosses over into the storyworld, transitioning between one ontological level to another. The expectation of metalepsis is one of disruption, a narrative tool for instilling a logical paradox at the heart of the storyworld that troubles its illusory consistency. As to whether Costello’s arrival profoundly disrupts Slow Man’s perspectival world through the paradox of metalepsis is, however, open to discussion. After all, Costello could just happen to be an author, with no connection to Paul, who has written a near-identical story to Paul’s. As Mark Currie points out, the difference between ‘flies’ on the opening page and ‘tumbles’ in Costello’s repetition would be one way of recovering this intervention within the confines of the storyworld’s illusory coherence (2011, 167). However, despite the various ways in which we might recuperate Costello’s disruption of the storyworld, I want to think more about how this instance of metalepsis encroaches on the reader’s interpretation of an accident and how it alters their identification with Paul’s perspective. Costello’s arrival as author surrogate contaminates the reader’s actualisation of Paul’s perspective by discursively reinforcing the novel’s material completion. It suddenly appears as if Costello has written Paul’s accident, even though, as her uncertainty as to what will happen next testifies, she may not yet have fully written Paul’s future. Slow Man, in other words, assures the reader that it knows what we already know – that this is a book – and in doing so, it draws attention to the fact that the reader’s perspectival ‘now’ is already written out on a page we are reading. Slow Man’s metafictional intervention introduces a dramatic shift in plot, moving from Paul’s convalescence and recovery after the accident to his often-antagonised relationship with Costello. The intervention also marks a shift in one’s relation to the illusory consistency of the novel’s storyworld, which it shows to be an effect of the novel’s efforts to withhold knowledge of its written artifice from our reading of Paul’s accident. And yet, I want to stress that that this knowledge is something already known. After all, it is never the case that the reader isn’t aware of the novel’s status as a novel prior to Costello’s arrival. The better distinction, rather, is that some texts and genres are more committed to asking readers to buy into the illusion of that concealed knowledge than others. Slow Man’s opening accident imparts the interpretative effect of an accident in the ‘now’ of reading, and that effect succeeds because the novel withholds from acknowledging its written status on the level of the story’s narration. Costello’s intervention, therefore, suggests that the accident’s contingent effect is a product of the novel’s epistemological control, by keeping the reader, up until Costello’s arrival, relatively close to the domain of Paul’s perspectival knowledge. The book initially

118 Narrative withholds announcing its materiality in its narration of Paul’s experience, and thus asks readers to buy into the epistemological domain of Paul’s knowledge and perspective, and therefore into the temporal domain of the open and contingent storyworld. Identification with this domain in the ‘now’ of reading actualises the storyworld’s future as if it were open and unforeseeable. Readers can therefore interpret the scene as contingent and the character as someone who has been struck by an unforeseeable event, flying towards an open and opaque future. But as I have been arguing throughout, such identification with the locus of the storyworld’s deictic ‘now’ is paradoxical, because the reader is, to some extent, already aware of the novel’s written artifice. Even when buying into the accident’s contingent effect, written accidents are not autonomous, nor actually existing, in a domain separate from Slow Man’s written materiality. The reader always holds these two domains of knowledge and of time together in the same moment: the epistemological domain of Paul’s perspective in the storyworld and the epistemological domain of the reader’s spatiotemporal coordinates, which ensconces any reading with knowledge of a novel’s written nature. The balancing of these two domains at once is a continual problem for discussions of metalepsis that seek to impart a violently disruptive agency onto the form. There is a tendency, after all, to consider metalepsis to be something that theatrically breaks apart, or radically defamiliarises, an aspect of the novel that is up until that moment concealed. For instance, Werner Wolf defines metalepsis as a ‘paradoxical transgression of, or confusion between, (onto)-logically distinct (sub)worlds’ (2005, 91). ‘Transgression’ signifies the trope’s disruptive capacity, and Wolf elsewhere makes this explicit when discussing metafiction’s capacity to use metalepsis for the disruption of fictional illusion: both are ‘comments on the fictionality of fiction within itself’, and thus ‘lay bare [fiction’s] artificiality and hence are basically always dangerous for illusion’ (1990, 292). For Debra Malina, metalepsis is violent and intrusive, and ‘its effects run the gamut from startling diversion through destabilisation and disorientation to outright violation’ (2002, 4). Metalepsis, especially in its ‘ontological’ guise, tends to be associated with, if not explicitly theorised in terms of, a strategy of defamiliarisation, especially witnessed in the language of ‘laying bare’.21 The novel’s metaleptic turn breaks the storyworld’s internal consistency and reveals its artificiality, too clearly shown up to be believable in the future. 22 In keeping with a phenomenological approach to reading written narrative, however, I would suggest that the before-and-after language invoked by ‘laying bare’ comes at the expense of a simpler, less dramatic appreciation of metalepsis that, in narratological terms, better appreciates reading’s spatiotemporal coordinates. Rather than pulling the wool away from our eyes and revealing something we had no sense of before, metalepsis discursively shows and declares self-knowledge of something

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  119 that we as readers already know. Karin Kukkonen’s communicative approach to metalepsis, for instance, stresses that the boundary between real and fictional world might not be as watertight as anti-illusionist theorists of metalepsis presume. The effect of metalepsis, she suggests, need not be purely disruptive nor ‘lay bare’ the novel’s artifice, but may rather merely highlight and draw attention to ‘the reader’s doubled awareness of fiction and reality during the reading process’ (2011, 18). Many novels may insist on holding back from metaleptic interruption or revelation in order to maintain their fictional illusion as coherent, but this does mean that readers therefore have no sense of the book’s written artifice in the process of reading. It is important, then, to revise the language of ‘laying bare’ often associated with metalepsis, and we might do so in terms of Meir Sternberg’s argument against the dominance of Formalist models of defamiliarisation. For Sternberg, Formalism’s valuation of a text’s capacity to artfully draw attention to its own conventions was caught up in a ‘very normative attitude directed against world-making’ (2012, 350). He troubles Formalism’s binary opposition between world-making and textual artifice, and argues that it is better to appreciate how the two inflect one another when reading. A direct consequence of this appreciation is a revision of the agency accorded to ‘laying bare’. The storyworld, Sternberg insists, cannot exist autonomously from its communicative context. Therefore, Sternberg counters Formalism’s either/or account with a ‘gradable distinction’ that outlines ‘the ascending order (or motivational descent) of perceptible artifice from leaving bare to laying bare’ (2012, 362). Rather than seeing the text’s artifice as hidden from or unacknowledged by the reader prior to a moment of illusion breaking, he suggests that the text’s artifice is always already ‘left bare’ for all to see. Any act of defamiliarisation, or ‘laying bare’, only enhances the visibility of what is already ‘left bare’. A revision of ‘laying bare’ unsettles the before-and-after logic found in some discussions of metalepsis, in which authorial intrusion shatters the storyworld. The above account of narrative temporality suggests that reading involves the doubled comprehension of two temporal loci: one’s foreknowledge of the text’s pre-given future in balance with one’s perspectival identification with the storyworld. Therefore, contingency and necessity coincide when reading. The reader’s identification with the storyworld’s deictic ‘now’, in other words, is bookended by an awareness of the temporally past nature of that ‘now’, and of the sense that the future is experienced both as uncertain and as having already happened at once. Slow Man’s metaleptic intrusion in particular asks us to think about Paul’s fate and freedom as a fictional character. One could probably say that Costello’s arrival ‘lays bare’ the novel’s artifice, and thus the accident’s necessity. But it would be a very gullible reader indeed to not realise that they are reading a book. Sternberg’s turn to ‘leaving bare’, I suggest, better articulates the less than watertight threshold separating extratextual knowledge from the storyworld. That threshold can clearly be thought

120 Narrative of in terms of the two temporal positions I have traced throughout this chapter. That is, both the reader’s actualisation of the story’s ‘now’ as a kind of present, and the reader’s awareness of that ‘now’ also as a kind of past, inside of a future already complete. With Costello’s intervention, what is already apparent is emphasised and shown to spill into the structures of reading comprehension employed to make sense of the accident as accident. Costello’s intervention, therefore, draws our attention to the fact that the novel’s concealment of certain kinds of knowledge sustains the accident’s contingency, but it does not suggest that prior to her arrival, the reader is ignorant of the accident’s necessity, or of the text’s predetermined future. Even though we as readers have all the right knowledge needed to assert that Paul’s opening accident was far from accidental, the novel’s epistemological control urges identification with the perspective experiencing the accident. What Slow Man’s metalepsis points towards, in other words, is the paradoxical modalities that accompany any interpretation or experience of an accident in a written narrative. Slow Man routinely raises paradoxes of this kind to the reader, in which we are asked to believe in things we know impossible. One such paradox is Paul’s freedom as a fictional character. Despite Costello’s revelation of Paul’s status as a character in a story, Slow Man thematically explores Paul’s continuing freedom inside of a written text. In particular, the novel flips Costello’s and Paul’s expected relationship on its head. Rather than determining Paul’s every whim, Costello soon reveals her impatient reliance on him. ‘“You were made for me, Paul, as I was made for you,”’ (233) she tells him. Paul depends on Costello, but she also reveals her dependency on him. Paul, it turns out, has to help her finish writing the story of his life, which she cannot do without his own free involvement: What that course of action should consist in I cannot advise, that must come from you. If I knew what came next there would be no need for me to be here, I could go back to my own life, which is a great deal more comfortable, I assure you[.] […] But until you choose to act I must wait upon you. (136) Paul’s actions initially appear circumscribed by Costello’s typewriter, but with this reversal of their relationship, Paul is told he is free, despite the novel’s insistence that he is written. After all, when Costello earlier turns up at Paul’s door, she insists that he came to her in a moment of inspiration. But she does not proceed to tell him how his future will play out. She says she has only written so much, up until the moment when she has arrived. From there, she says, his future is open: ‘“That was where it started. Where we go from there I have no idea. Have you any proposal?”’ (85) The novel insists on Paul’s fictional status, and his own slow realisation of being written is often metaphorised as like being in the afterlife. 23 But, in apparent contradiction to this insistence, Slow

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  121 Man reverses the relationship between character and author surrogate, and Costello paradoxically insists on Paul’s freedom in a world that has been set out in advance. Slow Man reflects on how Paul’s future is ensconced in a future long since determined, but it simultaneously insists, through Costello’s strange reliance on Paul to act, that he is free to do so and that his future is unknown. I argue that Slow Man explores Paul’s freedom inside of a clearly fated world in order to draw attention to a dynamic at play in the act of reading and following a story in written narrative. Namely, it throws up in theme the experiential twinning of contingency and necessity, freedom and fate, in the same moment when reading. But this twinned experience grounds the reading of any written narrative. Despite Costello’s announcement of Paul’s closed off future in the book’s material confines, his future in the storyworld remains oddly uncertain. Costello insists on this uncertainty. Indeed, she goes so far as to reverse the temporal precedence expected from an author surrogate’s relation to their character, saying “His is the power of leading, mine of following; his of acting, mine of writing” (233). Costello’s insistence on Paul’s freedom replicates the issue of the reader’s capacity to identify with Paul’s relation to an unforeseeable future, despite the novel’s metaleptic indication towards the closure of that future in advance. Again, this is another deviation from an expectation of metalepsis. The thematic revelation of Paul’s pre-written future does not hand his future to him on a scripted plate, pre-written by the whim of a despotic author, but rather opens the question of his freedom to act once more. Critical approaches to Slow Man read this thematic insistence on Paul’s freedom as indicative of the novel’s dialogic exploration of a fictional character’s ethical demand on authorship (Marais 2009). But the novel is also a privileged lens through which to consider the experience of reading an accident in a narrative, both because it represents an accident and because, as metafiction, it usefully draws attention to the dynamics of interpretation at play in reading. Despite the text’s apparent dissolution of Paul’s agential freedom, Costello tells Paul that his future remains open, despite its earlier dissolution. Slow Man thus reclaims Paul’s open future contrary to the expectation of its dissolution, and this reclamation says something more generally about the reader’s capacity to identify with a character’s perspectival position inside of an unforeseeable future, despite the reader’s awareness of that future’s material closure. As if recognising the interpretative persistence of the contingent effect despite the novel’s metafictional acknowledgement of its material necessity, Slow Man stages a second, seemingly improbable, accident near the end of the book. In this scene, Paul trips in the shower: He spends the afternoon tidying his study, putting things where they used to be; then he takes a shower. In the shower he by accident drops the flask of shampoo. As he bends to pick it up, the Zimmer frame,

122 Narrative which he always brings into the cubicle with him, slips sideways. He loses his footing and falls, slamming his head against the wall. Let nothing be broken: that is his first prayer. Tangled in the frame, he tries to move his limbs. A flicker of exquisite pain runs from his back down to his good leg. He takes a slow, deep breath. Be calm, he tells himself. (205–6) Paul’s second accident leads to a long struggle to stand up. The third-­ person free indirect discourse intersperses flickers of an interior thought process that traces his response to the accident. The scene, drawn out over two pages, narrates his struggle with an immense amount of detail and specificity, before he finally telephones his helper, Marijana, with whom he falls in love, to help him. Just as Paul’s and Costello’s relationship asks the reader to hold Paul’s sense of an open future together with the novel’s insistence on his materially closed future, this second accident asks for a similar experiential twinning. It is difficult to read Paul’s accident in the shower and not think of Costello’s earlier conveyance that his future is predetermined. But equally, the passage clearly engages with the same effort to overturn an expectation we might draw from the book’s metalepsis. Paul’s second accident unfolds over two pages of excessive detail in which he labours to stand up. The book narrates the accident in the present tense, just as it does in his first accident, and similarly narrates his immediately painful response to the accident. This second accident is narrated with just the same immediacy and detail as his first, which is strange when the novel so consciously reflects on the written nature of Paul’s initial accident throughout. The second accident, then, continues to ask the reader to identify with Paul’s perspective in a mentally constructed storyworld, one actualised in the ‘now’ of reading. This continued possibility of making sense of Paul’s second accident as an accident might appear to deviate from a critical expectation that sees Slow Man’s metalepsis preventing another accident’s interpretation as accident. But if we think of reading written narrative as a temporal process that always holds the experiential present of the perspectival world in tense partnership with its material completion on the page, then the possibility of reading Paul’s second accident as accidental can still hold. Our identification with Paul’s spatiotemporal coordinates in the apparently contingent storyworld contrasts with the narrative’s written completion, but because this contrast grounds even the most illusorily ‘realistic’ written narrative, Paul’s second accident still has the capacity to draw the reader into its interpretation as accident. It is the persistence of a possible identification with Paul’s perspective that makes for the continued believability of this second accident. This is the reason for describing contingency to be an effect of temporal perspective in both

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  123 reading and lived experience. The reader’s identification with a focalised perspective is also dependent on temporal perspective, because the reader’s sequential movement through a narrative actualises, and therefore coincides with, a deictic ‘now’ in the mentally constructed storyworld. One’s sequential actualisation of the novel’s linguistic sequence, in other words, draws the reader into a mode of perspectival identification with the deictic ‘now’ of Paul’s focalised storyworld. This imparts the effect of contingency. His accident is experienced as contingent, despite the fact that this identification struggles against an implicit foreknowledge of the novel’s pre-determination of his future. If one acknowledges that the experience of reading any written narrative always involves this temporal doubleness in the ‘now’ of reading, then the novel’s strange insistence on narrating another very detailed accident despite its earlier metafictional intervention speaks to the persistence of the contingent effect in the dynamics of reading. Slow Man makes clear that the experience of reading the accident involves the doubled modalities of contingency and necessity, both of which underwrite the ‘now’ of the reader’s sequential actualisation of the story. This is true of all written narrative but is heightened by the novel’s metafictional frame. With Costello’s pushing Paul to realise that he himself is a character in a story, however, it goes a step further and considers in theme the bearing that reading the accident has on living the accident. After Paul’s second major accident, he meets Marijana. When he sees her, he has an epiphany and tells her that he loves her. In the ecstasy of this realisation, he considers whether the accident was not indeed fated to bring about just this moment: And there? What comes next? And therefore it does indeed all cohere! Therefore behind the chaos of appearance a divine logic is indeed at work! Wayne Blight comes out of nowhere to smash his leg to a pulp, therefore months later he collapses in the shower, therefore this scene becomes possible. (211) Paul’s rhapsody subjects his experience to the logic of narrativity discussed in Chapter 2, a dynamic of ‘after this, therefore because of this’, and similarly enacts Ricoeur’s thesis of capitulating the open process of time into a coherent narrative that finds purposeful momentum in its ending. What begins as a desire to anticipate the future quickly transforms into a form of teleological retrospection, in which Paul comprehends a specific selection of events around an interpretation of purposeful coherence, drawn from his position of hindsight. Retrospection reveals to him that behind the ‘chaos of appearance’ a teleological logic of necessity is at work. One reading of Paul’s revelation would be that he finally realises his role as an artificial character, and the divine logic

124 Narrative he recognises is really the novel’s way of gesturing to the author’s, or the author surrogate’s, hand. But another, which puts less significance on the novel’s metafictional frame, represents Paul’s experience of an accident to be inextricably bound up in a form of narrative comprehension that retrospectively reads necessity into contingency. More so, this second reading benefits from the additional layer of the first, because the pairing of these two readings stakes a relationship between the experience of contingency in lived experience, here thematically explored as if Paul was a real person, and the experience of contingency as an artificial character in a novel. The point, drawn from Ricoeur, is that even a simple interpretation of events inside of a retrospective narrative can look a lot like a recognition that one is living inside of a story, following a specific, pre-written order that is structured in the same way as a plot. Hindsight projects a teleological end-point onto what leads up to it, and narrative retrospection has the capacity to retroactively refigure an event’s contingency, seeing the event anew in a narrative structure in which the end is promised in the beginning’s conditions. Paul’s ‘therefore’ is not merely an unwitting reflection of his own place in a written narrative, then, but also a gesture to the difficulty of extricating narrative comprehension from the phenomenology of time. Slow Man emphasises the artificiality of Paul’s position in order to liken being in time to being a character in a story, just as Ricoeur likens the narrative comprehension of lived experience to the phenomenology of reading. In this way, the novel’s metafictional frame points to and makes explicit the relation between narrative and time that is true for temporal experience more generally. For the philosophy of chance, contingency appears to structurally anticipate retrospective organisation and even necessity, which in turn renders the very notion of chance undecidable. I argue that a turn to the hermeneutic circle of narrative and time, specifically Paul Ricoeur’s account of mimesis, theorises this problem on the level of phenomenological experience. Study of narrative, therefore, articulates the problematic, structuring process of the retroactive glance, to use Žižek’s term. In hindsight, in other words, chance can seem like a lot like fate, and contingency like necessity. One doesn’t have to tease out a divine order from the chaos of appearance to understand that contingency’s dependence on temporal perspective, and the way in which Ricoeur’s three-stage mimesis processes the raw data of life acts as the minimal foundation for Paul’s narcissistic ordering of chaos into divine, necessary order. The phenomenology of reading therefore offers a privileged insight into the paradox of contingency’s coincidence with necessity. Reading an accident instructs the reader in the doubled modalities of contingency and necessity that also drive the accident’s comprehension in lived experience, in which contingency yields to retrospective comprehension into narrative necessity once happened. Reading contingency, then, models

Forwards & Backwards: Reading Contingency  125 the experience of living contingency. Lived experience might be like reading a story, according to Ricoeur, but reading a story can instruct us in the interpretative dynamics of anticipated retrospection, and of the dual modalities of chance and fate, at play in temporal experience. The reader’s movement in time heightens the tension between chance and fate, between the ‘chaos of appearance’ and ‘divine logic’, also found in the narrative comprehension of lived experience. In reading, the open future continuously collides with its material closure. It is only when we see how this tension plays out in an experience of an actual accident that we approach in some small way the circular relationship between narrative and time. The accident is not an accident when written out in fictional narrative. But equally, the above framing of temporal experience through the lens of narrative asks that we pay attention to Paul’s solipsistic conversion of chance into fate, because it centres the phenomenology of time and narrative around contingency’s conversion into necessity in lived experience, a movement from the ‘not yet’ into the ‘always already’.

Notes 1 As Georg Lukács puts it, ‘Without chance at all all narration is dead and abstract. No writer can portray life if he eliminates the fortuitous. On the other hand, in his representation of life he must go beyond crass accident and elevate chance to the inevitable’ (1971, 112). 2 For recent work on narrative and causality, see Richardson (1997), Kafalenos (2006), Gregory Currie (2007), Dannenberg (2008), and Grishakova (2011). 3 This is, of course, not the only definition of ‘narrativity’. As Marie Laure-­Ryan puts it, narrative has many qualities and is better understood as a ‘fuzzy set allowing for variable degrees of membership’ (2007, 28). While I acknowledge the various aspects of ‘narrativity’, this project will mostly discuss narrative in the light of the interpretative dynamics of sequence and cause, as well as the temporal dynamics involved in an understanding of ‘plot’. 4 Storyworld embraces what Herman calls ‘the ecology of narrative interpretation. In trying to make sense of a narrative, interpreters attempt to reconstruct not just what happened – who did what to or with whom, for how long, how often and in what order – but also the surrounding context or environment embedding existents, their attributes, and the actions and events in which they are more or less centrally involved’ (2002, 13–14). 5 For a discussion of storyworlds and focalisation, see Herman (2002, 301–30). 6 On focalisation and narrative, see Fludernik (2001). 7 Lupton’s study of self-conscious novels in the eighteenth century brilliantly suggests that the novel historically has been understood as a technological medium that continually reminds its readership of its material constraints, an account of literary history at odds with other accounts of the rise of fiction ‘that assume it is more pleasurable to forget than to remember the technology of print’ (45). This chapter is predominantly about novels, but this question of the future in written narrative also metaphorically extends to a consideration of narrative film. In a film, the future of the story is objectively accessible out of order by skipping scenes on a DVD or moving along the film reel. Recall Karl Popper’s discussion of film as deterministic (1982, 5).

126 Narrative 8 For a discussion of how Peter Brooks’s description of narrative temporality relates to tense, see Currie (2009). 9 See also Morson for an account of this ‘double experience’ of time when reading (1994, 43). This doubleness has also informed recent work on the eighteenth-century novel and material culture, with Emily Rohrbach arguing that a novel’s plot often encourages the reader into a counterfactual imagination (2018) and Christina Lupton suggesting that the book’s material closure enables the reader to appreciate the way things could have been otherwise, in the book and in life, which is especially demonstrated by accounts of random access reading (2018, 92–122). 10 I will shortly suggest that Paul Ricoeur’s study Time and Narrative provides the clearest account of the relation between reading and living in time, but it is also shared by recent narratological accounts of causality (Kafalenos 2006, 130). 11 Contingency’s uncertainty, particularly with regard to its epistemological form and the role narrative plays in contingency’s retrospective and causal mediation, is a longer problem for the history and philosophy of chance. See, in particular, Reith (1999) and Silver (2018). 12 In particular, see Žižek (2012, 213–18). 13 ‘It is precisely because of the elusive nature of real life that we need the help of fiction to organise life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and open to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from fiction or from history’ (Ricoeur 1992, 162). 14 All subsequent references are to this edition. 15 Paul’s interior monologue, here, is already noted to be intertextual, with the italicised words echoing the refrain of the popular song, ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze’. 16 So much so that C. K. Pellow suggests that ‘[n]ot only is everything clearly tangible in the first pages […] but it is all highly certain’ (2009, 541–2). 17 There are moments prior to Costello’s arrival that hint at Paul’s fictionality, but they are in no way as explicit as Costello’s dramatic intervention. For instance, at one point Paul is referred to being in a chapter: ‘From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Magill Road to the present, he has not behaved well’ (14–15). 18 Costello’s quotation substitutes the original ‘flies’ for ‘tumbles’. I will comment on this shortly. 19 On the need for author surrogacy in metalepsis, see Ryan (2004, 442–4). 20 Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) distinguishes between Genette’s ‘rhetorical metalepsis’ (in which a narrator briefly acknowledges their narration) and the more familiar ‘ontological metalepsis’, which represents the crossing of the boundary separating the fictional world from the authorial or extra-textual world. Compare this to Fludernik (2003) and Pier (2009, 191). 21 Defamiliarisation is a word traditionally associated with Russian formalism. For more on the relationship between Russian formalism and metalepsis, see Pier (2009, 198). 22 We see this kind of account of metalepsis, for instance, in Brian Richardson’s discussion of metafictional causality above. 23 Paul’s ‘Copernican’ moment is to ask if he was killed in the accident: ‘Is this what it is like to be translated to what at present he can only call the other side?’ (122)

Part 3

Accident Narratives

4 Radical Contingency

When accident is conceptualised through contingency, which is, in turn, understood to signify futurity, a question is raised over the accident’s political and ethical dimensions. This is especially the case when we consider that futurity concerns both the future’s natural opacity and contingency’s predisposition towards uncertain, possible futures distinct from those either anticipated or supposedly inescapable. This chapter therefore considers how far the trope of the accident intersects with contemporary critical accounts of contingency’s radical and resistant form. In other words, what are the politics and ethics of the accident? To approach this question, we need to consider the role contingency plays in a theory of political and ethical decision. Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Haggis’s 2004 Hollywood film Crash asks this question in as direct a way as any recent plotting of the accident, exploring in popular form issues of the accident’s political potential that have also occupied recent debates in critical theory. Crash represents the accident to be at once historically endemic, a product of unequal stratifications of risk, and an event primed to reflect contingency’s constitutive relation to time and the open future. But furthermore, the film draws on its rich literary and cinematic history to represent the accident as a politically productive event, pivoting its politics on the accident’s contingent irruption. The film questions the accident’s politics and ethics in its first scene, in which two police detectives, who have just been in a car accident, discuss their crash: GRAHAM:  It’s the sense of touch. RIA:  … what? GRAHAM: In any real city, you walk,

you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something. […] RIA:  Graham, I think we got rear-ended, I think we spun around twice, and somewhere in there, one of us lost our frame of reference. (Haggis, 2004)

130  Accident Narratives Both Graham (Don Cheadle) and Ria (Jennifer Esposito) judge the significance of the accident differently. For Ria, accidents are simply things that happen, meaningless chance events epiphenomenal to contemporary life. In a statement that has partly defined the film’s reception, however, Graham suggests that accidents are instead productive events, catalysts for affective encounters in a socially alienated Los Angeles that engineer unexpected ethical relations between oneself and another. Missing a sense of ‘touch’, accident victims strangely desire accidental contact in order to feel something. People, according to Graham, will an exposure to the chance of this connection, which, paradoxically, comes about through the agency of unwillable and unexpected events. ‘Touch’ therefore depends on the contingency of an accident to circumvent the city’s anticipatory shielding of connection. To question the politics of the accident, Ria’s and Graham’s conversation suggests, one must consider contingency’s historical, political, and modal contexts. This chapter argues that through the film’s combination of these different contexts, Crash represents the trope of the accident to provide an opening for ethical interaction and political possibility for characters and viewer alike. In doing so, the film presents an ethical and political stance towards the accident that follows a pattern of politicising contingency, albeit in an aesthetic and representational sense, which is also discernible in theoretical discourses concerned with the idea of a radical contingency. But more importantly, this chapter argues that in doing so, Crash makes legible in narrative form the limitations of such accounts of politicised and ethicised contingency that, I suggest, afflict its various manifestations, from recent valuations of the contingent event in critical theory to Crash’s representational politics. Crash’s much-maligned Hollywood liberalism, its reduction of race and class to a series of personal grievances, and its over-reliance on acts of personal heroism are not all the direct result of the film’s attempt to politicise and ethicise the accident (Jensen and Wosnitzer 2006; Hsu 2006; Giroux and Giroux 2007). But the narrative’s centrifugal employment of the accident within this milieu presents a limit case of what discourses of radical contingency can be made to do in popular aesthetic form. By reducing political decision and ethical demand to a vague embrace of accidental encounters, which repeatedly nullifies structural critique, Crash’s narrative emptily concludes by evacuating the accident of any criteria for judging ethical interaction or political decision, and instead makes the trope synonymous with time. In doing so, the film’s representation of the accident points towards limitations in the account of contingency it appears to share with theoretical discourses that seek a politically and ethically radical contingency. To nuance and complicate this account of contingency’s politically and ethically radical potential, I conclude by turning to Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones to consider contingency’s irruption in an

Radical Contingency  131 environment of racialised economic dispossession. Ward’s novel, which follows the Batiste family’s survival in the build-up to Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, considers what the experience of enduring contingency is like for those who are victim to an almost daily onslaught of accidents out of their control. Specifically, the novel contrasts the apparent contingent causation of these events with the structural violence and economic inequality that precipitates both their occurrence and effects, and, in doing so, thinks through contingency’s socially uneven distribution. Through this, Salvage the Bones responds indirectly to Crash’s politicisation and ethicisation of the accident. At stake in Ward’s focus on Hurricane Katrina’s violence and the novel’s rendition of the storm’s mixture of contingency and necessity is the insistence on the historical contingency of radical contingency’s politics and ethics. The notion of ‘radical’ contingency therefore takes a number of related forms in this chapter. In its first meaning, radical contingency describes contingency to be an existential structure or unsurpassable horizon for objectivity and meaning.1 In its second meaning, radical contingency theorises contingency to be a politically radical form that, when embraced, prescribes specific political and ethical outcomes. This chapter concerns the translation from this first meaning into the second, the latter of which I argue flattens social and historical contexts in its effort to make contingency guarantee a radical politics and ethics. This chapter therefore combines the analysis of Crash’s exploration of urban alienation, the film’s view of racism in contemporary Los Angeles through the lens of individualised prejudice, and its trivialisation of contingency’s social distribution with a reading of Salvage the Bones’s contrasting narrative of contingent but structurally caused violence and the uneven effects of a supposedly universal modality. In doing so, it argues that accidents are neither resistant nor good in themselves, and that the politics and ethics of the accident are always historical and contextual. To develop this account of radical contingency, I turn to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s work on contingency’s constitutive relation to politics. Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist political philosophy instead positions contingency to be a ground for any and every political and ethical decision. Both Crash and Salvage the Bones therefore put strain on the theorisation of a politically radical and ethically productive accident: Crash inadvertently collapses contingency into meaninglessness, whereas Salvage the Bones insists that the outcomes and effects of contingency, even if universally ubiquitous, cannot circumvent history, but are rather thoroughly determined by it.

Crash Crash shows lives in a tense, racially divided Los Angeles repeatedly subject to accident. Many characters are at one point victim to either

132  Accident Narratives an accident or an unexpected encounter, and the film orchestrates these events with an unwavering fidelity to its genre, variously called the ‘network’, ‘ensemble’, or ‘fractal’ film (Everett 2005; Bordwell 2008, 132–56). This genre involves a wide assemblage of intersecting plotlines, which often come together through chance encounters. It functions through the viewer’s cognisance of a character’s place in the film’s whole, which is often only partially glimpsed, taking the shape of what Caroline Levine would call a ‘network’ structure, a complex organisation of ‘connectedness’ (2015, 122). Crash’s plots link up according to this diffuse structure, unfolding through a series of events, encounters, and entangled relations. Crash formalises these intersecting storylines through non-linear narrative organisation. It begins with Graham’s and Ria’s arrival at a murder investigation, before cutting to Dorri (Bahar Soomekh) and her father Farhad (Shaun Toub) the day earlier buying a gun. After Farhad, the film cuts to Anthony (Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate), the latter of whom we later discover to be the body visited by Graham and Ria. Graham and Ria, Farhad and Dorri, and Anthony and Peter thus each interconnect in both a formal and a thematic sense – formal, insofar as they occupy the same world, and thematic, because of each character’s similar imbrication in an environment ubiquitously subject to accident. This non-linear organisation thematically insists on Crash’s main rule of plotting: small decisions and minute fluctuations produce large and unexpected outcomes. If not for Dorri mistakenly choosing blanks for Farhad’s gun, Farhad, later angry, would’ve killed, by further accident, Daniel’s (Michael Peña) daughter, in an attempt to shoot Daniel himself. Crash’s plotting of these interrelations through chance, in which a character’s small decisions can produce dramatically unexpected outcomes, suits the accident, an event structure that follows the rule of ‘minor causes, great effects’ (Barthes 1972, 190). This makes for a film that presents accidents, chance encounters, and miscommunication to model an historical present of networked complexity rife in accident. 2 Crash’s representation of a complex, networked environment frequently subject to unintended consequence and contingent encounter adds to the rich cinematic and literary heritage of the speeding automobile crash, a trope that has historically signified cultural anxieties of modernity (Schnapp 1999; Daly 2009, 110–35). The history of cinema also holds a unique relation to this representation, being a medium that is often theorised as preoccupied with the accident’s representation and rationalisation (Doane 2002; Harbord 2007b, 118–45; Beckman 2010). One significant difference between Crash and some of this heritage, however, is the way in which Haggis’s film folds the accident into a broader concern with contingency, temporality, and ethical encounter. Specifically, Crash surprisingly deviates from the novel and film of which it shares its name, but is otherwise not related: J. G. Ballard’s

Radical Contingency  133 1973 Crash and David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation. Both Ballard’s novel and Cronenberg’s film provide well-known evocations of technological modernity’s systemic production of the car accident. Yet, unlike in Haggis’s Crash, which, as I will suggest, values the car accident for its affective interruption of social alienation, both Ballard’s Crash and Cronenberg’s Crash depict accidents to have been anticipated, prepared for, and mediated by consumer society. Ballard’s Crash in particular points to the mass media’s interpellation of protagonist James Ballard into sexual fantasies of vehicular crashes, fantasies of which worry away at the contingency of the novel’s many accidents. James’s world is one overwhelmed by ‘road safety propaganda’, from television enactments of accidents to the ‘Road Research Laboratory’, an institution dedicated to the simulation of the car crash (1995, 39). Cronenberg’s adaptation relocates the novel’s obsessions from Surrey to an unnamed North American city, but continues to follow the story of James and his cohort of car crash addicts who, to quote ringleader Vaughan in the film, desire the ‘fertilising rather than […] destructive event’ of the car accident (Cronenberg 2000). Like the novel, Cronenberg’s adaptation is replete in deliberately willed car crashes and a shared attention towards the accident’s technological mediation. This shared focus frequently puts strain on both the book’s and film’s representations of unmediated contingency: both portray characters’ desires for the vehicular crash to partially allegorise technological modernity’s production of the necessary and inevitable car accident.3 In both novel and film, that systemic production specifically manifests in characters’s efforts to bring about their own crashes. James Ballard’s anxiety in the novel in particular figures the accident’s inevitable production through a paranoia over its premeditation; it is as if society’s mass mediation of the car accident rehearses his life’s gruesome climax ‘years in advance, and would take place on some highway or road junction known only to the makers of these [road safety] films’ (Ballard 1995, 39). The novel might imply a form of ‘utopian yearning’ outside of its ubiquitous representation of accident simulation with Vaughn’s accidental death (Vaughn plans to crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine but instead swerves into a bus), but it concludes gloomily with James planning and scheduling the ‘elements of [his] own car-crash’, folding the accident back into its planned and already anticipated nature (Ballard 1995, 224). 4 In this way, both novel and film imagine the accidental event’s scheduled and deliberated nature, evocatively drawing on the temporal closure and blocked futurity caused by the technologies of mediation and simulation of the midto late twentieth century. In contrast to this, Haggis’s Crash treats the accident and its contingency very differently. This latter Crash may historicise the accident to be ubiquitous in a similar fashion, but it simultaneously transposes the trope onto a narrative of social alienation, with specific focus on racial and class discord. The accident’s contingency

134  Accident Narratives becomes essential in the film’s attempt to address this story of alienation in contemporary Los Angeles. This representation of accident functions in a number of ways in Crash: it provides a method of showing complex connections between characters, reflects on modernity’s systemic production of risk to accident, and also offers a narrative tool for mapping the links between individuals, institutions, and government as they cross over and through economic and racial inequalities. This does not mean that the film always maps institutional and individual interconnection through accident, however. In the case of police officer Graham’s deliberate withholding of evidence under the demand of District Attorney Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser), the film traces a direct causal link from Rick’s political desire to appeal to ‘the black vote’ all the way to Graham’s manipulation of evidence for the sake of his brother’s criminal record. But direct causal relationships like this are a rare occurrence in the film’s representation of complex arrangements of race and class colliding through often unexpected and unforeseeable events. Such collisions are none clearer than the scene in which white police officer Tom Hanson (Ryan Phillipe) murders Peter, a young African-­ American man. The scene demonstrates the accident’s political ambiguity, here at odds with Graham’s idealised contingent ‘touch’, by layering Crash’s racial politics of individual prejudice over what it narrates to be a personal accident. Late in the film, Hanson offers a hitchhiking Peter a seat in his car. Coincidentally, it was Hanson who chased Peter’s friend Anthony earlier in the day. While driving, Peter laughs at Hanson because he sees that Hanson also has a ‘lucky’ figurine of St. Christopher on his dashboard. Peter reaches into his coat pocket to show him his own figurine, but Hanson suspects Peter of reaching for a weapon and so he shoots him. Hanson’s subsequent visual disbelief at his mistake sits uneasily with the clear case that he fires on Peter because of his own racial profiling. But Crash’s narrative works to individualise Hanson’s racism. Peter’s murder, first of all, happens when Hanson is off-duty. That Peter is killed by Hanson, a new police officer who earlier complains about his racist partner Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon), individualises responsibility for Peter’s murder and echoes Ryan’s earlier warning to Hanson that ‘You think you know who you are…you have no idea.’ By also foregrounding Peter’s and Hanson’s shared superstitions through the St. Christopher figurine, the scene draws on what critics have noted to be the film’s humanistic response to race and shared personal prejudice, rather than focussing on the racialised power and privilege differentiating them.5 These details feed into an individualisation of Hanson’s actions that mutes potential consideration of institutional racism as cause for this event. The camera’s close-up zoom into Hanson’s panicked face on seeing Peter’s figurine makes an admission of personal error. It draws the viewer into a pained identification with him. His disbelief impresses on this killing a sense that it was as much the result of an

Radical Contingency  135 inexplicable mistake or accident on Hanson’s behalf as it was the direct cause of institutionally attributable racial profiling. The scene works to make the event appear accidental in order to partially reduce Peter’s murder to Hanson’s individual responsibility. I stress partially, however. After all, the film’s simultaneous gesture towards Hanson’s internalised prejudice means that the viewer will undoubtedly interpret his actions to be informed by structural and institutional racism even if Crash neglects to explore this with any real investment. This creates an interpretative difference, split between a reading of the killing as a personal accident and a reading of it as the outcome of structural racism, random and meaningless but institutionally caused and personally motivated. On the one hand, Peter’s murder represents a grim example of uneven risk and the accident’s social distribution, resulting in a young African-American man’s death at the hands of a white police officer. On the other, Crash’s representation of this murder as accidental also supports the film’s more systematic occlusion of the social histories of race and class and the institutional forms of racism that cause Peter’s death.6 By reducing the event to a personal and inexplicable mistake, Crash focusses blame on Hanson’s individual prejudice and silences structural causality. This may initially appear at odds with Crash’s efforts to present the contingent event as opening up political and ethical possibility in its story of social alienation. But the film’s narration of Peter’s murder as accidental points towards the accident’s broader role in Crash. Repeated plotted accidents underline the film’s ubiquitous presentation of contingency. However, building on Graham’s normative desire for ‘touch’, the narrative’s frequent mobilisation of that subjection for the purposes of staging painful, if ultimately positive, accidental encounters also, like in the case of Peter’s murder, mutes social and historical contexts in favour of an individualised view of personal prejudice that the film represents as possible to overcome. This feeds into how Crash structures its narrative around the plotted accident. It represents the accident making ethical demands on character and viewer alike, but this representation mutes consideration of the accident’s uneven social distribution and the different kinds of vulnerability to contingency shaped by racial and class inequalities.

Radical Contingency Sanjay Sharma argues that Crash’s incapacity to properly analyse racism invites a critical method better suited to understanding how the film’s representation of race and power ‘works’ rather than one that uncovers its ineffective critique (2010, 542). I follow a similar methodology in this account of Crash’s representation of the accident. Not to offer another critique of the film’s representation of racism, but rather to understand the operations through which the accident and, by extension, contingency are made politically emancipatory and ethically demanding. In

136  Accident Narratives coordination with its portrayal of contemporary life’s vulnerability to accident, then, Crash also figures the event as a concomitant response to racial and class inequality that can produce ethical social relations. This takes form in Graham’s normative desire for ‘touch’. Such a process, I suggest, follows, in popular aesthetic form, a pattern of politicising the accident discernible elsewhere in critical theory. Contingency puts conceptual importance on the constitutively open nature of historical processes. Contingency in this sense is radical insofar as it provides an existential condition for time and being, an unsurpassable rule that shows necessary explanations of causality, history, and natural law to be retroactive fictions (Caygill 2017, 151–80). One prominent voice for this kind of radical contingency, who I address in further detail in the following chapter, is Catherine Malabou, whose theory of ‘plasticity’, a combination of neurobiological rupture and deconstruction, provides a materialist model for the capacity of unexpected occurrence in everything from the brain to the present. For Malabou, the accident represents the plastic nature of being and sketches out the beginnings of an ontological law, but a law ‘that does not allow us to anticipate its instances […] [a] law surprised by its own instances’ (2012a, 30). The accident is a rule of unpredictable possibility. It puts primacy on the unforeseen as opposed to the predictable, the opaque future as opposed to the anticipated one, and the contradictory necessity of contingency. Malabou’s work is often ambivalent about the accident’s political and ethical qualities, moving between the event’s productive modelling of a relation of ‘recognition, of non-domination, and of liberty’ to its destructive and violent nature (2008, 31).7 Critical theorist Todd McGowan, however, suggests that the ‘philosophically difficult task’ of describing an accident implicates the event’s invitation of narration in the language of ethical demand, which bears upon political decision in the present. In this respect, McGowan’s work provides an illustrative shorthand for a kind of theorisation of radical contingency that stresses the concept’s politically radical nature. For McGowan, an accident’s or contingent event’s occurrence throws the subject into a dearth of possible signification as to the cause and reason of the event. What this dearth of signification shows, however, is the falsity of necessary explanation. This is because these events indicate ‘the incompleteness of every structure [that] marks the limit of structural necessity’ (2008, 408). Accidents are thus epistemological fulcra that provide insight into an ontologically conditional contingency. ­McGowan then proceeds to align necessity with discourses principally opposed to a radical, emancipatory politics. The latter can only precipitate, he suggests, from recognising existential incompletion: In the space of this absence [of the real Other], one finds a contingent moment that takes one by surprise and remains fundamentally

Radical Contingency  137 inexplicable. Rather than reducing contingency to a deeper necessity in the way of the believer (in God, in the War on Terror, in progress, in Nature), we might avow the contingent, believe in it as our unsurpassable limit, and place it at the centre of our conceptual universe. The politicised subject exists in a universe structured around contingency. (2008, 415–16) The subject’s avowal of contingency opens them to a horizon of resistant possibility and provides them with a kind of best ethical attitude, one that ‘offers the subject the opportunity to act’ (2008, 409). Avowal of contingency therefore furnishes the politicised subject with ‘an opening through which a genuine relationship outside of clearly structured positions’ is possible (2008, 413). Exposure to contingency can be an anxious experience, but it also ‘represents the only possibility for connection’ with otherness as long as we ‘avoid reducing the contingent event to an underlying necessity’ (2008, 414, 415). McGowan therefore stakes two important assertions on the contingent event’s – and the ­accident’s – politics. On the one hand, quite simply, contingency is life’s unsurpassable limit. On the other, contingency’s proper recognition as unsurpassable limit provides an opening for a politics of resistance and a model of ethical practice if embraced. Because of the contrast between this attitude of recognition and a clearly conservative necessity, it is as if contingency guarantees a specific politics and ethical interrelation if acknowledged properly.8 Radical political decisions issue from an acknowledgement of this constitutive contingency that makes a demand on the subject, which can happen from exposure to an accidental event. McGowan’s argument therefore demonstrates the subtle travelling of contingency from an abstract principle of time (radical contingency in its first sense) to something that is in its essence emancipatory (radical contingency in its second sense). Accidents indicate the contradictory law of contingency, but contingency’s proper acknowledgement, in turn, can provide an opening for radical politics and ethics that are implicit in and issue from that avowal. But despite McGowan’s description of the contingent event’s oppositional capacity, there remains the more tangled hermeneutical issue of whether or not contingency’s recognition is not just conditional for a specific kind of politics, but can rather also ground any and every political form. My question is, if accidents both manifest in socially differentiated ways and express time’s constitutive contingency, then why can’t contingency also condition other political and ethical outcomes, including conservative and non-ethical relations? If this is the case, then as a consequence, it would trouble McGowan’s efforts to build contingency’s politically radical and ethical essence from the foundation of contingency’s ontological status. In other words, and as this chapter will suggest,

138  Accident Narratives contingency may not be essentially emancipatory or ethical if acknowledged, but rather curiously contentless, and the inescapable ground from which any and every political outcome stems. Crash’s narration of a series of ethically charged encounters arguably gives critics of politically radical contingency what they want. But the film’s superimposition of the accident’s political and ethical demand onto its representation of racial and class inequality produces an irresolvable tension, in which incidents that evidence the accident’s historically and socially uneven distribution persist, albeit barely visibly, as a remainder of the politically productive accident. In order for radical contingency to cohere, in other words, Crash has to flatten the accident’s historical particularity, resulting in a curiously contentless representation of the trope that becomes, by the film’s end, synonymous with time. Crash urges character and viewer alike to be open to the hopeful capacities of contingent events, but by representing an equivalence between accidents and temporality itself, the film shows accidents to also be the opposite, a trope that encompasses any and every political horizon and that is not essentially politically radical. Early on, Crash strikes a series of equivalences between racism, anticipation, and affect in order to position the accident in a way that shifts it from an historical phenomenon to an event prized for its capacity to circumvent race and class formations. Eight minutes in, Anthony and Peter, two young African-American men, the latter of whom Hanson later kills, debate their stereotyping and treatment when in a restaurant. This early, reflexive framing of the film as predominantly occupied with race then shows white couple Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock) and husband Rick walking past Anthony and Peter and physically recoiling from them. Anthony notices: ‘She got colder as soon as she saw us.’ Jean’s withdrawal projects an expectation onto Anthony. Her recoil suggests that Anthony and Peter can touch her even without physical contact. After all, physical recoil from another’s body can still imply contact, as Sara Ahmed suggests, even if invisible: ‘to withdraw from a relation of physical proximity to bodies recognised as strange is precisely to be touched by those bodies, in such a way that the subject is moved from its place’ (2000, 49). Anthony and Peter touch Jean despite their lack of physical contact; in turn, she touches them by withdrawing, policing their bodies according to an anticipatory racism that acts non-physically. Jean’s recoil shows ‘touch’ functioning socially, differentiating as much as it ethically relates. She determines Anthony and Peter’s presence in this social space through expectations she projects onto them. Crash uses this scene to establish a structural equivalence between racism and anticipation. However, almost as if in response to this, Crash proceeds to unpick the kernel of Graham’s idealised ‘touch’ from Jean’s demonstration of touch’s racist operation through the help of the contingent encounter. The film’s use of accidents, and especially car accidents, is

Radical Contingency  139 central for this representation, which it presents to be in some way circumventive of racism’s anticipatory measures and an opening for ethical recognition. The film stages four car accidents. The first happens off-screen, prior to Ria and Graham’s opening discussion. The second involves Anthony and Peter in a collision with Park (Daniel Dae Kim), whom they take to hospital. The third is a serious car accident involving Christine (Thandie Newton), an African-American woman coping with the trauma of her sexual assault earlier at the hands of white police officer Ryan. The film doubles down on its insistent plotting of chance interconnection here, however, by ensuring that Ryan discovers her car. A final accident in the film involves a rear-end collision between insurance administrator Shaniqua Johnson (Loretta Devine) and an unnamed character, and most forcibly synonymises the accident with time. Christine’s accident is an iconic instance of the film’s investment in contingently encountered ‘touch’. Crash narrates her accident in the cut. After cutting away from her argument with her husband, Cameron (Terrence Howard), to a scene in which Farhad considers his revenge on Daniel, the camera cuts back to her overturned car, focalised through Ryan’s perspective. Christine’s accident happens in the time of this cut, forcing the viewer to reconstruct it.9 Ryan rushes over to the car to find a concussed Christine. The film’s discursive indifference to the actual accidental event, replaced by its attention to the accident’s reintroduction of Ryan and Christine, emphasises their purposeful convergence. Because of his earlier sexual assault, Christine reacts with horror. She refuses rescue, but he urges her to let him help her. When Christine realises the significance of the accident, however, she allows Ryan to approach her. The film pointedly focusses on his handling of her body. Ryan is at one point only inches away from Christine, but rather than the physical and racist violence of his earlier sexual assault, Crash stresses Christine’s invitation for Ryan to help her, and Ryan handles her in a way that reconfigures ‘touch’ between them. Tarja Laine reads this scene as one that represents an ethically productive form of ‘touch’ in which Ryan is forced to engage with his earlier racist policing, and which initiates the possibility for an ‘unmediated’ and ethically reciprocal ‘touch’ (2007, 41). Such reconfiguration is made possible through their contingent and unexpected encounter. ‘The accident,’ Laine suggests, ‘becomes a moment of reciprocity’, the condition of possibility for this idealised and reciprocal ‘touch’, because it circumvents both characters’ anticipatory measures and opens ‘a possibility for reaching out to the other’ (2007, 41). When Ryan wrenches Christine out of her car, he pulls her to him. The scene’s lurid cinematography, combining a centre shot of their embrace against a blue sky accompanied by the overpowering musical score, intimates a reconfigured kind of ‘touch’ as pined for by Graham. The film heroises Ryan, here, and emotively

140  Accident Narratives draws the two together. Their reckoning of one another hinges, crucially, on their accidental convergence. To recall the above theoretical contextualisation, contingency confers an ethical and political demand on those subject to it. If one doesn’t reduce the contingent event to the structure of a pre-given, presumably conservative necessity, contingency can provide ‘an opening through which a genuine relationship outside of clearly structured positions is possible’ (McGowan 2008, 413). Crash shows what this logic can be made to do in the context of ‘touch’. The film collides Ryan and Christine together through accident in order to circumvent their ‘structured positions’, demanding their recognition of one another. Crash’s plotting of the accident in this way, however, reveals some of the shortcomings of this theorisation of the contingent encounter. ­Ryan’s and Christine’s reconnection through the accident is remarkably slight on race’s socially and institutionally specific formations, peddling individual heroism and flattening Christine’s warranted grievances in favour of an overly sentimental encounter.10 Indeed, the film’s focus on this kind of dramatic encounter is clearly at odds with other contingent events in its narrative that it does not choose to lavish with the same kind of attention, and which do not always produce such redemptive outcomes. A later scene in the film, in which middle-class white housewife Jean falls down her staircase to be saved by her housekeeper, Maria (Yomi Perry), evidences this difference. Throughout the film, Jean subjects Maria to a range of aggressions, but she has a sudden change of heart due to an accidental fall. Ninety minutes in, Jean walks towards her staircase while on the phone. We see a close-up of her foot, and suddenly she slips. Unlike Christine’s accident, which the film situates in its cut, the camera languishes on the detail of Jean’s slipping foot at half speed. The camera then cuts to Jean, at the bottom of the stairs, and pans over her twisted leg before fading out. Crash returns to Jean’s storyline ten minutes later, with Jean sitting in a hospital bed. Maria then arrives. It turns out that Maria discovered Jean after the accident and drove her to hospital. As Maria leans over Jean, Jean embraces her and whispers ‘You’re the best friend I’ve got.’ The film’s visual organisation of Jean’s slip lavishes attention on her accident and injury in a way that foregrounds the event as cause for her change of heart. The shot of their embrace then frames Jean’s face as central, obscuring the back of Maria’s head. Its meaning is simple: Jean ‘touches’ Maria, finally able to acknowledge her. Jean, who used to abuse Maria, is forced into a moment of ethical recognition, which makes Maria’s labour visible to her. But Maria, whose face is hidden, is nothing but a prop for Jean’s narrative redemption. Crash’s focus on Jean’s slip and the absence of Maria’s reaction to Jean’s change of heart implicates the film in an economy of attention that privileges particular scales of contingent event above others. The film has a blind spot in particular for what Elizabeth Povinelli terms

Radical Contingency  141 ‘quasi-events’ (2011, 133). Such events equally characterise the world’s constitutive subjection to contingency. They are widespread, a general condition of life, but they do not garner the attention reserved for the kinds of spectacular accident seen in Crash. The ‘quasi-event’ is the barely noticed corollary of the catastrophic, a catalyst for endurance rather than a window into ethical encounter, occurring ‘within a socially differentiated world’ that distributes events differently according to race, class, and gender (Povinelli 2011, 144). Maria is also subject to contingency, but in the form of Jean’s arbitrary attacks, aggressive and unexpected addresses that Maria has to endure in multiple scenes. While not accidents necessarily, Maria’s subjection to an almost invisible accumulation of quasi-events is structurally metonymic of the film’s broader fascination with the onslaught of contingency. But like Maria’s face in the shot of Jean’s embrace, Crash renders these contingent events invisible at the expense of spectacular accidents, the latter of which seem only able to provide Crash with its means of foregrounding ‘the ethical dictates of empathic identification’ most clearly articulated by Graham’s formulation of ‘touch’ (Povinelli 2011, 153). Contingency may not be as flatly generative as Crash proposes therefore when subjection to it can equally produce unnoticed suffering. This is not contingency embraced ‘wrongly’, as a critic of radical contingency might have it, then, but another manifestation of contingency, free of any kind of necessary interpretation, directed at someone who has no choice but to avow and endure it. The film’s focus on the spectacular accident at the expense of these invisible manifestations of contingency is symptomatic, I argue, of its broader attempt to pose contingency as politically productive and ethically demanding. To emphasise Jean’s recognition of Maria through accident, the film has to minimise Maria’s own endurance in the face of a different kind of contingency, which presents the unbalanced contextual effects of a constitutive condition that, supposedly, is generative in and of itself; in a similar fashion, in order for Christine’s and Ryan’s accidental meeting to generate contingent ‘touch’, it has to put away or quickly ‘resolve’ Christine’s trauma. This process is indicative of the film at large. Crash minimises context, a sense of the accident’s historical distribution, and the vectors of race and class in those moments precisely when the accident is most valued for its politically and ethically normative qualities. In this way, Crash inadvertently offers an aesthetic redress to theorisations of radical contingency. It represents in plot a stance towards the accident that shares a particular way of presenting contingent events also discernible in these discourses. But Crash also points to and problematises, on an aesthetic level, the argumentative conditions that ground the logic of this kind of politicised and ethicised contingency in critical theory. This logic, I suggest, suffers from an under-­examination of its own presumed relationship between political subjectivity and what it purports as ontological ground. Crash’s exclusion of the different

142  Accident Narratives social and historical forms of contingency at the expense of a politically and ethically productive accident results, I argue, in a trope that is curiously contentless, a narrative event that, by the film’s conclusion, becomes flatly synonymous with time.

Everywhere and All the Time Before turning to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones to explore this novel’s narration of the different social and historical manifestations of contingency, I will offer a theoretical alternative to the notion of politically radical and ethically demanding contingency. If contingency provides a description of the world in general, something to which everything is always already subjected, then the only way to acknowledge the different historical forms of contingency, as registered by Crash’s telling exclusions, would be to suggest that this constitutive subjection to accident is conditional for any and every political horizon or ethical demand. The issue over this double implication of contingency finds clearest discussion in the work of political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, writers who have not, as of yet, been put into conversation with critical theory’s recent turn to contingent events. For Laclau and Mouffe, the world is also constituted by an irreducible contingency, and they argue for ‘the ultimately contingent nature of all objectivity’ (Laclau 1990, 18). Forms of excess always exceed imagined totalities, universality always implies antagonism, and events always deviate from proposed laws. Contingency in Laclau and Mouffe does not explicitly refer to the unexpected future, but rather describes the structural relations between things and meaning’s essential historicity; it indicates that everything from discursive formations to political decisions is never fixed nor fully constituted or positively given from the beginning, but is rather the result of its outside relations. Like the linguistic sign whose meaning depends on its relation to other signs, nothing has positive political meaning in itself, but rather depends on historical context, and is discursively made. Laclau and Mouffe repeatedly critique theories of political meaning that view political attachments as given from the outset, accusing these approaches of a metaphysics that views ‘history and society as intelligible totalities around conceptually explicable laws’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 3). This critique and assertion of the absolute historicity of meaning yields their key ontological postulate: the world’s ‘radical contingency’ (Laclau 1990, 20). Laclau and Mouffe address the politicisation of accidents in a crucial way. Both insist that radical contingency alone only provides a conditional description of the historicity of politics in general. Contingency is the ground on which any political decision builds, but the concept does not in itself legislate for a particular norm. Laclau often makes this point with reference to the meaninglessness of contingency absent from

Radical Contingency  143 context, where ‘the assertion of the contingent nature of all objectivity’ would merely provide ‘nothing but indeterminacy and the impossibility of any coherent discourse’ (1990, 26). ‘Pure’ contingency is ultimately meaningless. It cannot intrinsically precipitate a specific politicised horizon, then, nor offer ethical recognition of the other if embraced properly, because it is without content and is a general description of the world’s constitutive unfolding. Of course, a purely necessary world would forfeit freedom and the possibility of future difference. But radical contingency in Laclau and Mouffe’s terms is a description of what one is always already subject to: a ground for any and every political decision that can produce both ethical and non-ethical relations. It is, as Laclau puts it elsewhere, ‘constitutive of all experience’ (Laclau 1995, 93). Laclau and Mouffe’s work pinpoints the problem of reaching for a description of the world to offer a specific kind of political and ethical content if recognised in the right way. Contingency cannot alone prescribe a rule for how to ethically relate to another, nor does it guarantee a particular kind of political future if one was to embrace this state of affairs.11 Rather, contingency’s recognition provides a descriptive understanding of time’s constitutive relationship to the unforeseeable future. Laclau and Mouffe’s account of the relationship between contingency and specific political and ethical decisions therefore helps to explain Crash’s minimisation of the accident’s historically uneven distribution and its exclusion of racial and class formations in the service of a simplistic account of ethically charged, politically productive encounters. These are the direct result of its effort to transform a concept that is ground for any and every decision into an implicitly political and ethical opening, which can only cohere through a focus on the accident’s ‘positive’ manifestations at the expense of its ‘negative’ ones – in other words, by inuring itself to structural critique. The film’s socially reductive logic loops back into a theory of the politically and ethically productive accident, to show, through popular aesthetic form, the theoretical inadequacy of staking a specific politics to contingency. This results in a curiously meaningless portrayal of accidents by the end of the film. Its final scene, following on from a lengthy montage of various characters, begins with Anthony, who releases victims of a smuggling operation from a stolen vehicle before driving off. The camera tracks his van in a panning shot to the left. Two cars then emerge in the left foreground of the frame, interrupting the pan. The shot readjusts, following these vehicles as they move to the right. The car in front position of this right pan brakes suddenly and the second car behind crashes into it. The collision is almost centre frame in this arrested shot. The two drivers get out and argue with each other. After a short while, we cut to an aerial shot of their argument. The aerial shot rises above them and gradually expands its field of vision, incorporating the crossroad and other, interconnected roads. After some time, the

144  Accident Narratives camera stops and angles 90° up to the Los Angeles highway, offering an expansive vision of hundreds of cars on a busy spaghetti junction, before closing to the credits. The scene’s expansive cinematography redistributes an isolated accident onto the entire city at large, re-populating this final crash across the city. The slow and steady presence of passing traffic in the bottom half of the shot smothers the abrupt shock of the earlier accident. But the pointed juxtaposition of these two images, the sudden accident and the moving traffic, also asks the audience to view the singular accident as immanent in these other vehicles. The cinematography transposes the accident onto this busy highway and, in doing so, temporalises it. In other words, the closing scene transforms the final accident into a synecdoche for a more systemic contingency, with the promise of accident elsewhere in the city. The accident becomes a principle of unexpected divergence immanent in passing time. Despite the film’s previous effort to politicise accidents, and to use contingency to circumvent characters’s anticipations of one another, there is something remarkably empty about the film’s final evocation of accident. It is as if, ultimately, Crash stretches the trope to include any and every contingent event and, in doing so, evacuates it of meaning. The film’s eventual reduction of the accident to a kind of ubiquitous meaninglessness results from its pining for a specific political and ethical meaning from a trope that is representative of the world’s constitutive subjection to contingency. In this way, the film’s stance towards accidents reflects a related attitude to politicised contingency in discourses of radical contingency. In both cases, however, the travelling of contingency from an ontological ground to an opening for political decision and ethical relation collapses in on itself, and looks instead like a vague embrace of empty temporality. Treating the contingent event’s ontological immanence as sufficient ground for specific political and ethical decisions inadvertently excises accident and contingency from their social and historical contexts. This produces a narrative manoeuvre found throughout Crash, in which the film treats the accident as politically and ethically productive in those moments when it also absents itself from structural critique. As a result, Crash’s urge for an embrace of accidents in this final scene comes to look less like something that implies a specific ethics or politics, and much more like an empty temporality to which character and viewer alike are passive subjects. Such openness to contingency may precede political and ethical decision, but the film’s expansion of the accident to the point of being indissociable from time suggests that it cannot alone and in itself prescribe a particular ethics of interaction nor guarantee, when embraced, a specific political horizon. If everything is contingent, then contingency cannot be in itself essentially emancipatory, nor a shortcut for ethical relation. Contingency does not automatically breach into and broach other, better futures. It

Radical Contingency  145 is more appropriate to see contingency as the ground from which political decisions and ethical (and non-ethical) engagements proceed, rather than something that one seeks out, like Graham, hoping for the ultimately productive to emerge from the unforeseeable. Not, that is, when accidents happen everywhere and all the time.

Salvage the Bones Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones asks what the experience of enduring contingency is like for those not afforded its supposedly radical manifestations. Set in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage, Ward’s novel is a first-person narrative concentrated on fifteen-year-old Esch Batiste and her family over the course of eleven days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. The novel’s often-claustrophobic focalisation of Esch and her family’s subsistence in and around their house and land, named the Pit, centres on their struggle to prepare for and survive the storm’s coming violence. By making the family’s destitution front and centre, Ward’s novel insists on the structurally causal relationship between the extent of the storm’s violence and the Gulf Coast’s history of economic and racial dispossession. In this respect, Bones draws on the inevitability of this at-one-point avoidable devastation for mostly poor, mostly black communities, to consider the uneven effects of a supposedly indiscriminate contingent event. But even in its story of the Batiste’s daily survival, Bones presents a family for whom contingency, accident, and unintended injury are normalised. From the almost unnoticed ‘quasi-­event’ of a sinking clothes line to incapacitating, accidental injuries, Bones foregrounds the uneven, socially stratified effects of a universal contingency in a way that determines economic destitution and neglect to be the cause for this social stratification, querying Crash’s benign narrative of ethical, contingent encounter. In what follows, I argue that the novel’s story of survival in the face of Hurricane Katrina explains the storm’s violence with causal reference to both the inexplicable variables of contingent occurrence and the necessary and inevitable outcome of structural violence. Significantly, however, Bones points to this structural violence by way of a narrative focussed on subsistence living and survival, which it most vividly draws attention to by way of the family’s numerous accidents and mishaps. One of the earliest accounts of accident in the novel is also one of its most illustrative. During one of their few journeys to neighbouring town St. Catherine, Esch, with brother Skeetah and friend Big Henry, comes across a roadside car accident. Esch sees a woman on the road, an overturned car, and a man covered in blood pacing beside. Big Henry and Esch move to help him. With this sudden interruption of their journey back to the Pit, the book appears to echo the grammar of Crash’s insistence on mutual vulnerability to accident, as if anticipating the potential

146  Accident Narratives for a sudden, subject position-shattering encounter. However, the novel pulls against this very grammar, resulting in a strange and muted interaction between the two parties. The man ignores Big Henry when he tries to help him, and instead holds out his bloodied phone to Skeetah. The man then tries to get Skeetah’s attention: ‘Hey, man.’ I hear the crank; Skeetah is rolling up the window. ‘I think I’ve seen you before.’ Skeetah stops mid-roll. ‘Don’t you cut grass?’ ‘Can you please get away from the car?’ I squeak. ‘At the graveyard?’ Skeetah rolls up the window so that it seals. Instantly it is five degrees hotter. ‘This asshole,’ Skeetah mutters. […] ‘He don’t know me. He don’t even live in Bois Sauvage.’ ‘Maybe he live in one of them big houses back out on the bayou’. (2011, 34)12 The scene, a relatively minor one in terms of plot that is not referred to again, is notable not only for its staging of an unexplained accident in a novel that thinks through the social distribution of contingent occurrence but also for its combination of muted threat and inexplicable vagueness. Almost everything is narrated in a half-glimpsed manner. The novel lacks explanation of what happened in the crash, says nothing about the state of the woman’s health, and neglects to inform the reader if Skeetah did indeed work in the graveyard. Part of the reason for this vagueness is Esch’s focalisation as a restricted witness, but the scene’s abrupt shifts in social relation between each character also contribute to that effect. The man’s transformation from victim to aggressor and then back to indifference, Big Henry’s strange deference to the ambulance crew over the phone despite thanklessly helping the couple, and Esch’s revulsion all produce a sense that something underpins this scene, as if each is an actor speaking an unseen a script. Indeed, the man’s eyes are described to ‘twitch from side to side like he’s reading a book we can’t see’ (35). Perhaps the biggest descriptive absence, however, is race. Bones partially alludes to the man’s whiteness through repeated reference to his white shirt and white buttons (31), but this is far from explicit. One has to piece this together with Esch’s guess that he lives in a big house on the bayou, recalling her earlier reference to old plantation mansions ‘with their slave galleys turned guesthouses’ (4). The ‘big houses’ embed the man in a racial history of the South that traces the movement from slavery through to Jim Crow and, finally, in the transformation of slave galley to guesthouse, a tourism boom built on the historical exploitation of black labour.

Radical Contingency  147 The man’s implied whiteness, his aggressive effort to place Skeetah, his thanklessness, and the teenagers’ mixture of diffidence and revulsion all speak to an interaction charged with the scene’s invisible determinant: the historical inequality of the Gulf Coast that will soon result in unequal violence and suffering meted on mostly poor, mostly African-­ American citizens in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. When Esch acknowledges the skeleton of Greek myth in this encounter, saying that there ‘is never a meeting in the middle’ (32), her allusion both acknowledges the scene’s power differential and infers that a long view of time and history is the only explanation for why this interaction plays out the way it does. In this way, Bones’s narration of a car accident in the novel’s beginning represents a contingent event’s repetition, rather than interruption, of racialised, economic, and social inequality between three poor, African-American teenagers and a white man. Far from shattering subject positions or instigating a moment of ethical recognition, the partial and muted narration of this accident encourages the reader to consider the invisible social determinations that condition the event’s strange outcome. Partiality is, as Jane Elliott describes, a key component in the novel’s representation of Esch and her family’s relation to the South.13 This history is largely kept off stage but is conditional for the Batiste’s poverty and resource-stretched living. Their house and minimal land were cleared and built by Esch’s grandfather but then excavated for clay by developers and left to decay. On this land, the family scrape together a living and prepare for the storm: Esch’s father boards up the house, Esch collects food, and Skeetah nurses his pit bull China’s puppies and salvages wood from neighbouring houses. That the ‘Pit’ has been left by white developers situates the Batiste’s deprivation in a clear history of exploitation. This historical dispossession and neglect speak to the disposability of their lives in the eyes of neoliberal governance, an artificially created economic destitution that is frequently attributed to be a significant cause for the disproportionate violence wreaked by the floodwaters of Katrina after the failure of the levees and Gulf-wide infrastructures for disaster prevention.14 This history is repeatedly inferred but rarely made explicit in Bones. The novel almost entirely occurs in the Pit, its surrounding woods, and Bois Sauvage, and references to the rest of the Gulf Coast often only arise in echoes of television broadcasts. History of the Pit, such as how old family friends Papa Joseph and Mama Lizbeth helped Esch’s grandfather build the house, similarly emerges in snatches of Esch’s reflection, while the town’s broader socio-economic history is repeatedly foregrounded through metonym and metaphor rather than explicitly addressed. When Esch and Randall scout for food at a white farmer’s house, they meet with boarded-up windows. The house’s protective shell makes their own ‘patch-up boards of different sizes’ look ridiculous compared to the farmhouse’s ‘more even, more secure’ ones,

148  Accident Narratives which close over the windows ‘smooth and tight as eyelids’ (208). The visible economic difference between the two houses couples with the metaphor of a white-owned house blind to the Batiste’s destitution. The novel’s repeatedly partial narration of this socio-economic history functions throughout as a means for describing inequality’s historical and temporally extended causality. That is to say, Bones uses this inferred history to show the Batiste’s destitution to be the product of a long accumulation of economic policy, juridical and governmental decision, and human action rather than just pure chance, a natural state of affairs, or the immediately clear result of an individual’s action. The novel’s plotting around the eleven days leading up to Katrina condenses much of this history in its representation of the often-unavoidable violence that afflicts Esch and her family, both in time prior to the storm and as a result of the storm itself. If Crash presented mutual subjection to accident in order to radically ethicise and politicise contingency, then Bones’s focus on the suffering caused by a large-scale unexpected storm instead spotlights contingency’s uneven, socially determined distribution. The storm itself, after all, was contingent insofar as any weather event is a product of a complex arrangement of variables. Forecasts can predict weather formation, but the actual events can, and ultimately often do, deviate with objectively unforeseeable results, testified to by Esch’s initial dismissal of Katrina when she first hears of it. Nevertheless, the novel insists that the storm’s violence, including the unpredictable flooding that followed, was less the result of contingency or chance than a necessary and inevitable result of the area’s historical inequality. The early car accident presents this unevenness in microcosm: contingent events can occur with a very different frequency and can produce different outcomes in an environment shaped by economic neglect and racialised dispossession. The state of deprivation in which the family lives means that much of the Pit itself is in disrepair. A case in point is the steady persistence of injury and accident that afflicts many of the family members. A bottle shatters in Esch’s hand when she is cleaning it (11); Esch catches her foot on barbed wire of the perimeter of a fence (69); Esch remembers her father accidentally snagging her mother’s hand with a fishing hook (86); the clothes line sags, dropping laundry into dirt (108); a wood panel falls off of the house’s window (109); and Esch’s father catches his hand in chicken wire and loses his fingers (129). Each of these moments of injury and dilapidation resemble ‘quasi-events’ in Povinelli’s above formulation, forms of unexpected, contingent occurrence that are also agents of suffering and endurance, often heaped upon populations that are disposable in the eyes of governance. Such events point to different historical and social forms that contingency can take, posing a challenge to the more celebratory accounts of the contingent encounter. This is because ‘quasi-events’ draw attention to the structural and economic conditions

Radical Contingency  149 that underlie their causation and distribution and thus, in a paradoxical sense, to their necessity or inevitability for some and not others.15 Esch’s father’s injury in particular draws on the narration’s careful absenting of context from event precisely in order to implicate his accident in a long history of institutional and structural causation. It is night, and Esch’s father plans to knock down one of the chicken coop’s walls with his tractor. This is to recover materials to board up the house. Randall helps, driving the tractor, but chicken wire gets caught in the grille. Esch’s father attempts to wrestle the wire free, but Randall eases the vehicle forward and doesn’t hear his father shouting to stop. The wire then severs Esch’s father’s fingers. Esch’s father’s injury is clearly accidental to the extent that no individual meant for it to happen. It is also contingent to the extent that it happens by chance and could have been avoided if Randall had heard him. But the circumstances that lead to his accidental injury are far from accidental. Poverty forces Esch’s father into this situation. Lacking any institutional or governmental support to help prepare for the storm, he is forced to recover boards from the chicken coop. The Pit’s destitution is itself the result of economic neglect, which the novel’s infrequent gestures to the history of the Gulf Coast, in turn, knits to a more systemic history of racial and economic exploitation. In turn, even if Esch’s father’s accident is on the surface unmotivated and contingent, the novel’s situation of the injury in his partial history suggests that Esch’s father’s excessive vulnerability to accidental injury violence was a necessary and inevitable consequence of human decision. The combination of punctured violence and lengthy determination, of synchrony and diachrony, in the novel’s description of Esch’s father’s accident, comes in part from the novel’s narrative technique of partiality, which foregrounds the present’s condition in a welter of history. But unlike in Crash, which evacuates history in those moments when it draws on the accident’s emancipatory potential, Bones refuses to unpick history from the events to which Esch’s family frequently succumb and purposefully represents that history as partial in order to attribute structural cause to contingency’s social distribution. In the case of Esch’s father’s accident, the novel does not point to a deliberate or purposeful motivation behind his injury. Instead, its partial focalisation deems the event the contingent outcome of structural violence that necessarily forces him into an inevitable exposure to injury. Consider, for instance, Johan Galtung’s early account of structural violence, which he describes through the mixture of synchronic and diachronic time. Galtung insists on the synonymous relation between structural violence and social inequality. The difficulty of representing structural violence, he argues, has to do with its creation of a violence that ‘hits [human beings] indirectly because repressive structures […] are upheld by the summated and concerted action of human beings’; this is in distinction to a form of violence that is the clear and ‘direct result of […] actions of others’ (1969, 178).

150  Accident Narratives Structural violence, because of its conditions in structural inequality, ‘is silent, it does not show – it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters’ (1969, 174).16 Esch’s father’s accident is clearly more puncturing and immediate than Galtung’s suggestion of typical structural violence. But the tractor accident also acts, to carry Galtung’s metaphor, as a kind of dousing rod that points to the undercurrent of structural violence and intended inequality that, in an ordinary and enduring way, invariably directs his injury.17 In this sense, Bones thinks through the social distribution of accident by representing this injury, and many of the book’s other ‘quasi-events’, to be the often inevitable outcome of a deeper, temporally extended structural violence that conditions the family’s life. In this respect, events are contingent and indiscriminate in one sense, but the result of purposeful inequality and dispossession on the other. Esch’s father’s maiming and the various, seemingly incidental moments of injury throughout are the result of human decision and an economics that treats certain communities as disposable. Bones’s critique of neglect both prior to and after the storm comes to the boil with the novel’s climatic contrast between the contingent and undifferentiated violence of Hurricane Katrina and the necessary and structurally determined violence of its effects. But it is first of all helpful to see how Bones entwines this contrast with a discourse of animal life that works through and complicates radical contingency’s strange mixture of universal subjection and socially stratified distribution, which the novel frequently reaches for as a means of formalising the distance between these polarities. As has been frequently commented on, Esch’s narration employs an arsenal of metaphors and similes that entangle multiple forms of life. Esch, her friends, her family, buildings, and plants are all shown to metaphorically collide with different forms of life, having the effect of making life continuously recombine. Manny’s muscles jabber like chickens (11); Skeetah’s step has ‘the wagging thump of a meaty tail’ (33); Mama Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s house ‘is a drying animal skeleton’ (58); Big Henry’s hands move like the ‘sheaves of palm trees’ (143); Manny’s skin feels like a ‘cat’s tongue’ (145); and Junior’s back is like a turtle shell (197). The novel avoids drawing analogies between specific characters and animals or objects, but instead transfers and mutates each through different forms of life over its course. Almost everything in the book succumbs to these descriptive mutations: a skinned squirrel looks like ‘two pork chops laid together’ (48), and the family’s chickens scatter before Esch like ‘crape myrtles blown loose by summer rain’ (66). When Esch bites into a prepared squirrel, the experience transfers the memory of the squirrel onto her, and she sees herself ‘eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees’ (49). Commentary on these metaphorical mutations in the text is as numerous as the life that populates the book. The book’s ‘creatureliness’, on the one hand, provides an analogy for the South’s

Radical Contingency  151 biopolitical management of life in the wake of Katrina, in which ‘humans and nonhuman animals were simultaneously stripped of security, defences, and bodily stability’ (Lloyd 2016, 248). On the other hand, the mutability of human and non-human life opens the reader to a field of becoming that resists biopolitical governance.18 Alternatively still, this mutability critiques that same governance through a presentation of life that is subtractive and violent (Elliott 2018, 162–3). Undoubtedly, life’s thin boundary yields an ethics of care as noted by many commentators. Through its duplication of multiple forms of entwining life, the novel also produces a generality or universality of life that resists narrow, taxonomic containment. Echoing discourses of posthumanism, the book suggests that life is not a stable quality but rather mutable, in which human and non-human forever entwine, and that to live is to be universally subject to this ontology. Human and non-human merge throughout, meaning that Skeetah’s pit bull China is as much ‘a woman approaching her partner on the floor of the Oaks, the first lick of the blues guitar’ (101) as Esch is China when she attacks Manny (203).19 What receives less commentary, however, with regard to this universalised assemblage of life is that as the storm nears and desperation increases, the novel gradually shifts attention from all forms of life to an increasing representational focus on unevenness within that same field of becoming. Or, to put it in another way, the novel becomes increasingly focussed on the strain of the particular against the claim of the universal. By claim of the universal, here, I mean the way in which the novel’s duplication of human and non-human interrelations represents a field of becoming that flattens hierarchies of life in order to think of both humans and non-humans in terms of a universal ontology. The novel joins dogs to leaves to humans to animal wings to chopped wood to squirrels in order to insist on life’s shared equivalence. The particular in this formulation, then, consists of the novel’s attention to ‘individual’ forms of life within that shared assemblage. What is striking, however, is that contrary to the novel’s early insistence on life’s equivalence, in which each mutates into each, the storm’s approach unsteadies this interrelation, leading to a shift in the novel’s focus away from the flattening entwinement of all life towards the particular forms of violence meted out on some. Skeetah’s return from a shopping trip to purchase food for the family in particular represents a marked turning point in this shift in focus. Much to his family’s annoyance, Skeetah spends most of the family’s money on dog food for China. Skeetah tells his bemused siblings that they could just eat it too. Randall responds, ‘“We ain’t no dogs”’ (193). Randall’s comment kicks back against the notion of the equivalence between all forms of life by denying his resemblance to a dog. However, rather than insisting on a natural hierarchy of life in which his survival has greater importance than China’s, it’s crucial to see “We ain’t

152  Accident Narratives no dogs” as a response to what is essentially a moment of resource allocation. Skeetah chooses to distribute resources unequally, principled on his own assumed hierarchy in which China’s life is greater than his family’s. Skeetah’s decision to excessively prioritise resources for China over the family suggests, contrary to his earlier insistence, that even within the universality of life, not everyone and everything is as equal as every other in his eyes. 20 Skeetah’s choice to distribute resources unequally mimics, as if in microcosm, a form of biopolitical governance, led by human and institutional decision, that prioritises the lives of some over the lives of others through resource allocation. Randall’s response, then, tenses against the novel’s representation of the universality of interpenetrating life because he recognises, in Skeetah’s decision, the choice to preserve the lives of some at the expense of others. Life’s interrelated becoming may be a universal condition, but this does not mean that all forms of life are equal from the perspective of the governance of the Gulf Coast. Despite one’s universal relation to other forms of life, the novel seems to say, Randall recognises the social, historical, and human decisions involved in ensuring his deprivation as opposed to another’s. As suggested, Randall’s response marks a turning point in the novel’s representation of life. Esch’s narration still continues to present human and non-human melting into one another, but the oncoming storm also leads to a greater description of both life’s dramatic evacuation from the Pit and Esch’s increased attention to the differences within life’s assemblage. When Randall and Esch trek to a nearby white farmer’s house, the sudden depopulation of life contrasts dramatically with their earlier approach a few days before: There are no chattering squirrels, no haunted rabbits, no wading turtles in the woods. I don’t know where they have gone, but there are none here. When I look up into the sky, the grey of it shaking as I run, I see birds in great flocks that would darken the sun if we could see it through the thickening clouds. They are all flying away, all flying north. The flocks break and dip and soar, and they are Randall’s hand on a basketball, Skeet’s on a leash, my legs in a chase. I watch them until they vanish past the threes, and then there is only us, the woods, the leaves rattling underfoot. (206–7) The absence of life is shocking. Esch watches the birds, who initially dip and soar like Randall’s hand and Esch’s legs, disappear, leaving only the woods. When they arrive at the farmhouse shortly after, Esch’s narration syntactically likens the disappeared squirrels, rabbits, and turtles to the flight of the house’s wealthier white residents: ‘There is no blue truck, no white man or woman, no chasing dog’ (207). The repeated syntax of this threefold absence draws the flight of some animals from

Radical Contingency  153 the wood into its critique of economic inequality. The wealthier, white residents board up their house and escape the storm, leaving Esch and her family behind in the Pit, just as the birds, which form a part of the novel’s ontology of life, uncouple themselves from their likeness to Esch, Randall, and Skeetah, and disappear. Shortly after, Esch considers this flight to conform to other patterns among animals. She realises that the ‘bigger’ animals, such as deer and foxes, are the ones that can escape from an oncoming storm; but despite not being able to hear them the day before, Esch guesses that the smaller ones, such as squirrels and rabbits, do not, and instead ‘prepare like us’ (215). In contrast to the subtle indistinguishability of life earlier, Esch, on the morning of the storm, considers life’s different capacity for escape and survival. The comparison of this divide between animals repeats the divide on the Gulf Coast represented by the white farmhouse, and, in doing so, Bones transposes Esch’s acknowledgement of how particular forms of life survive or suffer differently onto her family’s relation to power and governance in the South. By substituting biological difference (birds can fly, rabbits cannot) with historical and socio-economic difference (the white farmer can afford to escape and board up his house, the Batistes cannot), the novel threads its critique of governance and economic dispossession through the terms of its collapsing of the human–non-human divide, but does so in order to find that the latter’s universalising frame, by the novel’s end, fails to articulate Esch’s concern over the inequality of particular forms of life in that shared ontology. In other words, Bones shows inequality to seep into and through its presentation of life, and in doing so, the novel suggests that despite a universal vision of shared life, particular forms of life experience that shared subjection very differently. For the Bois Sauvage community, then, populated by what Neferti X. M. Tadiar would term ‘remaindered life’, a flattened conceptualisation of universalised life ignores the ‘qualitative gradations and divisions of “life” that obtain as crucial aspects of contemporary processes of value extraction’ and governance (2012, 787).21 It is not, then, that the novel disavows its narrative attention to life’s shared involvement, but rather that the novel’s shift in attention from universal life to the uneven suffering of particular forms of life elevates its posthuman discourse to the level of a metaphor for universality more generally, before puncturing this metaphor with the acknowledgement that life’s equivalence risks obscuring the socio-­ economically produced unevenness within that field of becoming. I want to stress that this is not to suggest that some lives have greater value or are more worthy of survival than others, nor to claim that the novel, through this metaphor, naturalises inequality. Rather, it is precisely the opposite. Bones shifts its concentration as the storm encroaches from a universally shared equivalence of life to the particularity of lives who are left to suffer and endure, but does so by insisting on the social, historical, and institutional decisions that ensure such unevenness.

154  Accident Narratives In this way the novel’s discourse of shared life folds back into its representation of contingency’s social distribution, by pointing to the different, historically informed effects of a universally shared experience. Bones focusses on the dull ache of contingency rather than Crash’s subject position-shattering events, on the quasi-event rather than the spectacular ethical encounter. Its presentation of contingency’s relationship to structural violence, in terms of both the family’s increased vulnerability to risk and the violence of these events’ outcomes, reconsiders the parameters of politically and ethically radical contingency. But what is more, the novel uses its posthumanist discourse to think through the unevenness and particularity within a universal condition, here the idea of mutually shared life, and therefore, by proximity, through the notion of radical contingency in its first, ontological sense as employed in this chapter. The novel’s subtle shift in attention towards the neglect of some particular forms of life in the midst of the storm does not, then, challenge life’s universal subjection to contingency, nor deny this shared ontology. But what the novel’s shifted focus does do is refuse to flatten history and social particularity to an empty vision of shared life, and, for that matter, ubiquitously experienced contingency, simply happening everywhere and all the time, through its focus on how specific histories of race, class, and structural violence in the South shape the Batiste’s experience of this subjection. In this respect, it offers a twofold response to Crash’s envisioning of the politics of the accident. The novel critiques any normative ideal attached to contingency in its insistence on the importance of considering the socially specific distribution and effects of contingency’s universal horizon. The novel’s representation of life and its narrative of contingently caused but structurally determined violence combine in Esch’s climactic account of Hurricane Katrina. When Katrina arrives at the Pit and floods Bois Sauvage, Esch sees the storm less as a natural and indifferent event than as a purposeful force: Katrina ‘screams, I have been waiting for you’ (230). A day later, looking over Katrina’s aftermath, Esch reflects on that scream and understands Katrina to be an active, embodied force: ‘Katrina surprised everyone with her uncompromising strength, her forcefulness, the way she lingered; she made things happen that had never happened before’ (248). Ultimately, Esch concludes that Katrina was ‘the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered’ (255). Esch’s description of the storm as a purposeful, living force attributes to the event an uneasy mixture of natural, unmotivated destruction with purposeful and deliberate violence. The storm is, clearly, the contingent outcome of a complex interrelation of environmental variables and, because of this, makes irrelevant questions of motivation or intent. Esch’s layering of purposeful violence onto the event’s contingency, then, may at first appear contradictory. Unless, that is, we read it in relation to the novel’s sustained exploration of the uneven effects of contingency caused

Radical Contingency  155 by the structural conditions and violence that make certain communities unevenly vulnerable. While the storm may have indiscriminately devastated the Gulf Coast, it is no accident, Esch’s description suggests, that the residents of Bois Sauvage bare its full force. To look at why is to consider the novel’s partially narrated history of exploitation and structural violence. Esch’s personification of Katrina’s purposeful violence in the light of this consideration is in this case the novel’s means of gesturing to the way in which social and historical contexts expose some, more than others, to an especial risk to ‘quasi-event’ and debilitating accident. But it is also a means of figuring that this context of inequality ultimately dictates the uneven violence of Hurricane Katrina’s outcome. This violence is structural, insofar as its causes reach far back in history, and also necessary, insofar as this devastation was an inevitable consequence of that structural violence and directly caused by it. To articulate the difficult combination of contingent event and necessary outcome, then, Bones superimposes purposefulness and deliberation over the storm’s natural resistance to motivation. The storm may have happened contingently, but its effects are the inevitable outcome of systemic exploitation, or, in Esch’s terms, Katrina was both indiscriminate storm and slaughtering, purposeful mother. This is not to say that accidents, or the storm, are a peculiar menace for some communities and not others: the storm attacked the whole of the Gulf Coast, just as contingency is synonymous with time. Rather, Esch’s description suggests that the experience and effects of contingency manifest very differently depending on historical circumstance. Only by joining the modalities of contingency and necessity together in its account of the storm can the novel understand the social conditions that produce and direct contingency’s, in Bois Sauvage’s case, seemingly inevitable outcome. 22 In this way, Esch’s concluding reflections on salvage provide the novel with its critique of the essential meaninglessness of a politically radical and ethically productive contingency, echoing Laclau and Mouffe’s position. After the storm, Esch walks through the ruins, witnessing Bois Sauvage’s devastation. She looks for something in the wreckage that she can take back, ‘something that will help me tell him the story of what we found’ (254). She palms a piece of glass: ‘This was a liquor bottle, I will say. And this, this was a window. This, a building’ (254). To salvage is both to rescue something from a wreckage and in turn to preserve, through memory, the wreckage itself. For Esch, salvage is an act that pulls something from the devastation of the town in order to tell its history. Such telling of history is central to the novel’s portrayal of contingency’s uneven and imbalanced effects, because it is only through this history that one can describe the long historical processes of inequality and dispossession which mean that Katrina can be, for Esch, both indiscriminate force of contingency and purposeful mother of inevitable violence. Bones therefore considers radical contingency from

156  Accident Narratives the perspective of the social particularity of the effects of its supposedly universal condition. By focussing on the contingently caused but structurally determined violence that pervasively afflicts Bois Sauvage, Bones’s story of a mostly poor, mostly black Gulf Coast community insists on the historicity of contingency’s meaning, politics, and ethical import. The urge to salvage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is also the urge to think historically about the accident and contingent event, to consider the storm’s structural determination, the uneveness of its potential violence, and the historical contingency of radical contingency. Crash stakes its narrative on the possibility of politically and ethically productive accidents before inadvertently rendering that politicisation and ethicisation meaningless; Salvage the Bones, by contrast, insists that even if contingency did imply the kernel of radical political potential or ethical opening, it would not be something experienced by everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Notes 1 Recent forms of philosophical realism and materialism have pivoted on contingency in this first sense, such as in the work of Quentin Meillassoux (2008). However, Meillassoux’s argument against Kant and natural necessity says little of politics, and so for this reason I will later turn to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-structuralist account of the universal contingency of meaning more generally. This latter formulation of contingency allows me to bridge the question of modality with the question of politics. 2 As Patrick Jagoda suggests, the network film avoids paranoid conspiracy narratives and favours representing systemically produced but still contingent accidents (2016, 73–102). 3 For a survey of accounts of the novel’s simulation of the accident, see Luckhurst (1997). 4 On the novel’s utopian yearning, see Durham (1996, 168). 5 Giroux and Giroux phrase this as the film’s simplistic belief in ‘democratically shared racist disposition’ (2007, 755). 6 See Hsu (2006) and Jensen and Wosnitzer (2002) on the film’s incapacity to recognise the social and institutional histories of race and power. 7 On the potential politics of Malabou’s theorisation of plasticity, see Salisbury (2010). 8 McGowan confirms this summation in his work on ‘rupture’, another model for unexpected possibility. In this, he and his co-author make the remark that ‘there is no such thing as a conservative rupture’ (McGowan and Eisenstein 2012, 36). This is especially striking when, in their conclusion, they downplay the pertinence of socio-historical analysis for natural disasters, which, they claim, ‘deni[ies] the rupture heralded by the natural disaster its proper ontological status’ (225). 9 On the filmic cut and the accident, see Bruckner (2008). 10 In this respect, the film’s liberal individualist story of personal prejudice echoes Lauren Berlant’s account of sentimental political rhetoric, which produces narratives of universalist feeling that elevate claims of shared ‘vigilant sensibility, virtue, and conscience’ to obscure ‘the fundamental terms that organise power’ (2008, 35).

Radical Contingency  157 11 I stress that I am not advocating a naïve divide between ontology and politics. Any and every theory of being is itself caught up in and influenced by its historical enunciation. 12 All subsequent references are to this edition. 13 For Elliott, Bones’s partiality both describes Esch’s focalisation and the novel’s critique of the ‘macroeconomic mode’, a form of subtractive and violent political subjectivity that imagines human agency through the contours of ‘life-interest’. Partial fictions focus on the way in which ‘life-interest comes to be partially activated for one part of a divided field of humanity’ (2018, 136). 14 See, for instance, Clyde Woods’ (2009) history of value extraction and the underfunding of the African-American communities of New Orleans, Henry Giroux (2016) on neoliberalism’s biopolitical creation of disposable life, and William Paul Simmons and Monica J. Casper (2012) on the institutional and structural violence of storm both before and after. For two surveys of public underfunding, damage to flood protections, and property development, see Dimock (2009) and Rozario (2007, 209–18). 15 This suggestion of universal but uneven risk to contingency also shapes much of Howard Caygill’s discussion of the inevitability of accident in terms of the calculations made by insurance industries, for whom ‘a relatively stable number of a population of immigrant workers ha[ve] to die accidentally’ due to modernity’s production of risk (2017, 72). Compare this to the governmentality school of sociologists, who argue that neoliberal governance hands the responsibility of managing risk in all its forms onto the calculating, self-responsible individual, subsequently dividing populations into those who can manage risk and those are ‘at risk’ (O’Malley 1996; Rose 1996) and to Randy Martin’s (2007) account of neoliberalism’s separation of individuals according to the logic of financial risk capability. 16 Galtung’s account of the long temporality of structural violence is a familiar one to similarly concerned discussions, such as in Farmer (2003, 40–50) and Nixon (2011). 17 It is telling that while Esch and her siblings remain relatively unconcerned about the storm until it reaches them, their father is far more anxious throughout, who says he can ‘“feel [storms] coming”’ (7) and generally agitates for the family to prepare. In this respect, the novel implies that because of their father’s historical knowledge of prior dispossession, he realises that the storm may be bad, hence linking Katrina’s inevitable violence to structural and historical inequality. 18 As Erica Edwards suggests, the novel’s ‘evisceration of the distinction between human and nonhuman life opens its ethic of subsistence and sustenance to a field of being […] that doesn’t reject but exist in parallel relationship to the biopolitical operations of the state.’ For Edwards, one point of contact for Esch to this ethic is her sexuality, which purposefully draws on but also resists the cultural employment of black women’s sexual productivity by ‘depicting an avaricious young black female sexuality at the centre of a radical ethic of black survival’ (2015, 157, 161–2). See also Richard Crownshaw (2016), who argues that the mutability of life figures an innovative form of agency and resistance in the novel. 19 The novel’s presentation, in particular, of Skeetah’s intimacy with China, his pit bull dog, in which the two seem combined through their description, pointedly draws on what Harlan Weaver describes as ‘the troubling and troubled connections between representations of pit bulls and other dogs deemed dangerous and processes of racialisation’ (2015, 345).

158  Accident Narratives 20 As Jane Elliott brilliantly points out, critical celebrations of Skeetah’s evocative call for the equality of life (‘“Everything deserve to live”’ (213)) often miss out on the chilling detail that when he repeats this, he looks not at but ‘through’ Esch (2018, 163). Skeetah’s comment could easily be taken for the book’s message or statement of ethics, but to do so is to ignore its narrative context. 21 Tadiar’s critique here concerns Antonio Negri’s valorisation of life as potentially resistant to biopolitical governance, whereas her reading of ‘remaindered’ life points to the way in which financialised capitalism’s extraction of value from life discriminates between entrepreneurial, valorised forms of productive citizenship and life that is deemed disposable and superfluous, still appropriated for value by way of the creation of technologies for its management, but nevertheless left in a state of bare subsistence. It is telling that Tadiar further suggests that living for those deem remaindered life in turn represents a kind of gamble, in which one’s life seems entirely out of one’s own grasp or control. See also Elizabeth Povinelli’s discussion of the universal flattening of life in recent philosophical materialisms which, she argues, neglect to consider the ‘causes for the differential distribution of kinds of entanglements’ of life (2016, 91). Salvage the Bones, like Povinelli’s theoretical method, draws the reader’s attention to the forms of economic violence and human decision involved in creating the Batiste’s particular organisation of life. 22 Compare this attribution of contingency and necessity in Katrina to Wai Chee Dimock’s account of global, environmental causality (2009, 152).

5 Unassimilable Contingency

The experience of an accident coincides with its retrospective recuperation into narrative. Retrospection allows for the interpretation of a sudden and unexpected event to be an accident. But retrospection also, to remember Paul Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis, orders disordered experience into narrative concordance. Contingency appears to ‘live’ for its retrospective interpretation, a process of adapting the event into its perceived historical and causal conditions according to the logic of teleological retrospection. When the contingent event is viewed through the lens of its later effects, it can be retrospectively configured into projections of necessity, causality, and teleology, all of which result in a murky coincidence between chance and fate. However, retrospection’s modelling of contingency into causal necessity in part depends on a notion of memory’s implied persistence for whomever remarks on the accident in hindsight. In the light of a psychic trauma that destabilises memory’s continuity, the event may not be as easily assimilated into narrative coherence as the model of teleological retrospection suggests. This final chapter turns to two novels centred on the legibility of an accident due to physical and psychic trauma: Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel Look at Me and Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder. Both Egan’s and ­McCarthy’s novels organise around the difficulty of narrating a physically and psychically traumatic accident, and both focus on how those accidents exist in a state of privation for their protagonists, compelling their narration. Each therefore reflects on the difficulty of narrating that which seems to resist narration. By way of querying previous chapters’ accounts of the tangling of contingency and necessity produced through teleological retrospection, this chapter considers the intersection between trauma, accident, and retrospection. It will address the privation of memory caused by accidents in both Look at Me and Remainder through the lens of psychic trauma, both of which stage in their narratives the question of how one remembers and narrates an event that seems to efface to its own material trace. Through analysis of how these two novels theorise traumatic memory, the chapter will suggest that despite trauma theory’s gravitation towards belated or irretrievable memory, the field remains

160  Accident Narratives constitutively tied to narrative recuperation in a way that refuses to let go of the possibility for the unexpected event’s future narration. In response, I turn to Catherine Malabou’s speculative philosophy of accidents and ‘plasticity’. Malabou’s stress on the theoretical kinship between accidentality and post-traumatic subjectivity offers a philosophical outlook that seeks to disrupt the hegemony of the retrospective glance, but does so in a way that pitches trauma entirely at odds with narration. In this respect, both Look at Me and Remainder provide aesthetic analogues that throw into relief Malabou’s consideration of narrative’s antithetical relation to her speculative accidents by way of dramatising narrative’s insistent pull on post-traumatic subjectivity. However, although the novels ultimately capitulate to the pressure of narrating the traumatic absence, they both, in different thematic and generic registers, invite a conceptual approach to trauma that shifts attention away from the temporalities of delay or recuperation, those familiar to classical trauma theory, to the traumatic event’s qualities of contingency and futurity, which Malabou’s corpus addresses. By way of conclusion, the chapter then returns to the model of reading contingency outlined in this study, to suggest that despite Malabou’s resistance to the narrative recuperation of her speculative accidents, her anti-narrative account of traumatic causality finds surprising relief in and demonstration through the act of reading the accident in a written narrative.

Remembering Look at Me and Remainder begin just after accidents befall both of their narrators. Neither Look at Me’s Charlotte Swenson nor Remainder’s unnamed narrator can recollect their accidents because of the physical and psychic trauma they subsequently experience. Look at Me begins abruptly with Charlotte trying to remember her life-changing event: After the accident, I became less visible. I don’t mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see. In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through space like being on the Tilt-A-Whirl […], feeling my body move faster than, and counter to the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the windshield into the open air, bloody and frightened and incomprehending. The truth is that I don’t remember anything. The accident happened at night during an August downpour on a deserted stretch of

Unassimilable Contingency  161 highway through corn and soybean fields, a few miles outside Rockford, Illinois, my hometown. I hit the brakes and my face collided with the windshield, knocking me out instantly. (2011, 3)1 The first page’s shifts in tense and in register formalise an accident that both evades narration and is saturated by it. Charlotte’s narration perspectivally yokes us to a position of hindsight after the accident, rooting the reader to her perspective looking back on an event that seems to resist recollection. Her memory of the accident, however, quickly folds in on itself. Layers of mediating remembrance complicate what seems like a simple recollection of the event. She initially claims to remember her ‘body move faster than’ her car, followed by an explosion of pain she can only partially describe. But her narration then qualifies these memories by disregarding them: ‘The truth is I don’t remember anything.’ Charlotte appears, subsequently, to substitute this impressionistic memory of the feeling of the event for a more factual and granular memory of the event’s details. It happened on ‘a night during an August downpour’, ‘a few miles outside of Rockford’, she was immediately concussed after ‘hit[ting] the brakes’. But unlike her earlier, blurred memories of the event’s affect, Charlotte’s latter recollection reads like a factual report gleaned from doctors and insurers, rather than anything actually recalled. That Charlotte points out that she ‘has acquired’ these memories suggests that over the course of her attempt to remember something, she has gradually supplemented the accident with the granular details collected after the crash to aid her failed recollection. 2 In this way, the accident traumatises by impacting on her in such a way as to create an absence of memory. But importantly, this absence, nonetheless, compels Charlotte to try and remember it, to fill in the gap it creates. Remainder similarly reflects on memory’s slippery cognitive processes. Beginning in medias res, it starts: About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That’s it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know. It’s not that I’m being shy. It’s just that – well, for one, I don’t even remember the event. It’s a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been – or, more precisely, being about to be – hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who’s to say that these are genuine memories? Who’s to say my traumatised mind didn’t just make them up from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap – the crater – that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. (2006, 5)3

162  Accident Narratives Remainder pushes Look at Me’s reflection on the accident’s disruption of memory and subsequent absence it to its extreme. The accident is not nothing but ‘Almost nothing’. It only exists as the outline of a memory that is missing, as lack itself. The narrator says he both can and cannot remember the event. It is ‘a white slate’ and a ‘black hole’, two conflicting metaphors whose combined paucity exacerbates, when drawn into a grey smudge, the narrator’s vague memory. The passage’s narration of his retrospection is rich with attempted recollection, but it also struggles under the various incompatibilities implicit in the contrasted imagery. This plethora of images rub antagonistically against his claim that he doesn’t ‘even remember the event’. In doing so, Remainder theorises Look at Me’s exacerbation of the difficulty of separating the remembered from the imagined. As the narrator asks, are these contradictory memories of the accident even actual memories at all? ‘But who’s to say that these are genuine memories? Who’s to say my traumatised mind didn’t just make them up from somewhere else, some other slot’? Putting stress on the relation between memory and posterior knowledge, the narrator suggests that his most ‘precise’ memory is of ‘being about to be’ hit. Along with the simple sense that he remembers looking up at the falling fuselage, this formulation of memory also implies that his recollection has been coloured by the dye of posterior knowledge; his later knowledge of the event’s occurrence becomes partially inseparable from his recollection of the event itself, by way of his recollection of being about to be struck by an unforeseeable accident, a scene of memory that combines the moments prior to the crash with a sense of it being about to happen. By enfolding past, present, and future into recollection, Remainder spotlights the temporal processes involved in remembering an unexpected accident and portrays the possible psychic trauma of the accident to exacerbate the difficulty of its recollection, producing an absence in memory. But the trauma of the event also subtly incites memory’s attempt to recover the event, as if psychic encouragement for the narration of an absence that it simultaneously produces. Trauma For a classical model of trauma theory in literary studies, shocking or unexpected events partially resist narrative sense-making.4 Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma’s temporal delay is path-breaking in this regard. The pathology of trauma consists, for Caruth, ‘solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’ (1995, 4). Even if recent work has sought to challenge the hegemony of Caruth’s punctuating event, which she often describes in relation to trauma’s accidentality, discourses on traumatic experience as an experience that resists memory, simultaneously insisting and resisting narrativisation, continue.5

Unassimilable Contingency  163 The notion of delay and belatedness in memory also suggests that the absence of perspicuous memory can also paradoxically incite memory’s retrospective narrativisation. As Remainder’s narrator suggests, memory seems to work to ‘plug the gap’ that ‘the accident had blown.’ Roger Luckhurst’s expansive survey usefully considers trauma’s spur to narrative possibility. Luckhurst agrees that trauma is ‘a problem of narrative experience’ (2008, 79). But rather than cauterising memory completely, Luckhurst cites Paul Ricoeur to suggest that such blockage simultaneously engenders emplotment, insofar as ‘traumatic discordance is the constant spur to innovations in narrative concordance’, because narrative ‘heals “aporia”’ (2008, 85).6 Luckhurst’s commentary suggests that Ricoeur’s general description of narrative in terms of concordant discordance also describes narrative’s process of configuring trauma into psychic and semiotic signification. Retrospective narrativisation of traumatic memory may be only partially successful, of course, since the traumatic memory is, at its heart, a privative one, but the point is that trauma’s impact on memory continues to impel retrospection, albeit in a temporally delayed and belated way, because of the post-traumatic subject’s conscious or unconscious recognition of that gap. Luckhurst’s reading, then, makes the point that trauma should be viewed as a disturbance in the process of the retrospective configuration of temporal experience, but a disturbance that nonetheless encourages that configuration. Narrative knows of the gap it is supposed to plot, and continually works on it. Both Look at Me and Remainder model trauma’s belatedness in their narrators’ reflections on scraps of memory. But, nevertheless, while both novels clearly model a particular kind of psychic trauma for their narrators, neither novel wholly conforms to the cultural or conventional associations of trauma as a literary genre. Trauma theory is distinct from the literary genre of the trauma novel, but the two can often, as Luckhurst suggests, coincide around a ‘highly conventionalised’ signature (2008, 89). This signature has a particular style, which often ‘plac[es] emphasis on difficulty, rupture and impossibility, consistently privileging aesthetic experimentation’ (2008, 83). To quote Alan Gibbs, these stylistic features work to formalise characters who struggle with a haunting past, often subject to ‘involuntary flashbacks, nightmares, and cycles of repetitive, often self-destructive behaviour, without having access to memories of the originating cause’ (2014, 17). In terms of literary trauma studies, these generic signatures of delay and belatedness in part arise due to classical trauma theory’s positioning of trauma to also constitute something of a historical relation to language and reality more generally. In this respect for these critics, classical trauma theory does not just describe an aspect of memory but also codifies a particular historical condition in which the sign, totality, and the ‘real’, like the past, are violently non-present. Postmodernity’s ‘crisis of historicity’, then, can

164  Accident Narratives often lend itself to a theory of trauma that describes the traumatic event to be inaccessible directly, only manifesting in its belated effects. Even if psychic trauma partly transcends its historical circumstances in terms of providing an account of a psychic condition, classical trauma studies has often been noted to speak to a particular formulation of historicity that is itself apparently in crisis (Caruth 1996, 18; Elsaesser 2001; Elias 2005; Crosthwaite 2009, 12). The theoretical coincidence between classical trauma studies and accounts of postmodern historiography in turn folds back into the temporalities of the trauma genre to depict an aesthetic mode hinged upon delay, belatedness, and a sense of blocked futurity, in which the past’s traumatic grip continually loops the post-traumatic subject’s experience of the present back into an unreachable past and foreclosed future.7 Whether or not trauma’s association with postmodern discourses of historicity holds any kind of conceptual or theoretical basis beyond their historical coincidence, it is clear that the trauma novel’s generic signatures initially run up against both Look at Me and Remainder. Charlotte Swenson is for the most part indifferent towards her hazily remembered accident, to the extent that the novel initially explicitly distances her experience from the kind of recursive narrative of pained recollection one might expect. Midway through, Charlotte becomes entangled in a social media experiment that employs a ghostwriter to narrate her recovery from the accident for a website. She begins to refer to versions of what this hired narrator might say in her narration, but the typographic juxtapositions that represent her ghostwriter’s text jar with Charlotte’s indifference, with Charlotte distancing herself from the more predictable trauma narrative foisted upon her by the ghostwriter: It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt on returning to the scene, the anguish of seeing those same fields scarred by terrible memories…and as she spewed this dreck, tilting her face for the overhead camera, I felt not just unable to speak, but unable to feel. ‘Like nothing,’ I said. ‘I could be absolutely anywhere’. (391) Charlotte’s ghostwriter is exaggerated and ironic. The voice ominously narrates her return to a crash that is refused a name, circling around the accident as ‘the devastating event,’ an apostrophic ‘oh’ that reduces her memories to haunted affect. Charlotte imagines this narrator, who by this stage in the novel has ‘taken up a pampered existence in one lobe of’ Charlotte’s brain (390), through narrative distance, imagining them looking mawkishly into the camera for an MTV-style documentary interview. However, despite her vivid imagining of this narrative interloper, Charlotte insists that she is indifferent to the story this narrator

Unassimilable Contingency  165 seeks to foist on her, showing a character for whom these tropes, until the very end of the novel, say little. She feels ‘nothing’ by comparison, indifferent not only to the site of the accident but also to the trauma genre’s particular markers of the past’s belated return through the inexpressible event. I have no wish to suggest that trauma can manifest in only one way, or that Look at Me cannot be read as a novel about trauma’s debilitating effect on memory, because of course it can, and as I will shortly suggest, Charlotte eventually succumbs to this narrative foisted on her. But Charlotte’s initial indifference to the event in part stems from the novel’s plot which, although at first beginning with her pained recollection of the event, is less concerned with Charlotte’s passage through the pain of witnessing or testimony than it is with Charlotte’s belief that the accident facilitates an escape from a stifling New York life. As the plot unfolds, we learn of Charlotte’s boredom prior to the crash and her sense that she was waiting ‘for a new discovery to refashion [her] life’ (174). The accident in Look at Me precipitates this desired metamorphosis, meaning that it is as if Charlotte beseeches a traumatic but unforeseeable event. The novel’s juxtaposition of a recognisable genre narrative of the belated recollection of the past with Charlotte’s own, strange desire for the accident’s capacity to cauterise her present and future from her past invites a consideration of trauma’s temporal signature that is at odds with its more familiar temporalities of delay and recursive looping. Remainder’s narrator presents an equal indifference to his traumatic accident. Indeed, McCarthy’s novel not only appears to cite a certain kind of trauma narrative but also eschews the genre’s analytical usefulness. The narrator’s repetitious and affectless narration echoes what Pieter Vermeulen terms the trauma genre’s ‘narrative grammar of compulsive repetition’ but, at the same time, similarly resists a mode of belated testimony in favour of a surreal and monomaniacal narrative of the narrator’s nascent sense of ‘authenticity’ following the accident (2012, 562). Following his compensation of £8,500,000, the narrator decides to ‘re-enact’ a déjà vu he experiences while at a party, an ‘event that, the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life’ (60). These grand re-enactments, which involve hiring actors and staging tightly orchestrated movements, both appear to reference the conventions of trauma fiction and to resist it. As they proceed, the re-enactments become less concerned with the narrator’s efforts to recuperate the event itself into a form of psychic and semiotic significance, than they are with recreating a particular kind of disposition or orientation towards contingent occurrence. As the narrator suggests, he seeks to recreate not the accident itself but his sense of positionality towards chance occurrence that put him in the situation of being struck by the accident in the first place, ‘standing on grass, exposed, just like a counter on a roulette

166  Accident Narratives table’s velvet grid’  (59). The narrator soon learns that any general arrangement of actors, bodies, or environments implies some predisposition towards chance occurrence, and so with his insurance payout, he works to arrange impeccably regulated and well-rehearsed systems to yield this contingent occurrence, re-enacting everything from the experience of walking down the staircase in a block of flats to repeating, ad infinitum, the servicing of a car. He becomes obsessed, in other words, with what his finance advisor Raz describes to be a system’s ‘small degree of randomness – a capricious element that likes to occasionally buck expectations, throw a spanner in the works’ (116). The narrator’s efforts to recreate specific sequences, and then rerun them at half-speed, at double-­speed, and in reverse, will an effort to control time and, in turn, systematise the unexpected. Thus, the narrator’s obsession with the control of these scenarios in different forms of elaborateness seeks that control only in order to produce the eventual materialisation of the unexpected from these complex systems, the ‘remainder’ that always appears to both issue from and exceed control. If the novel is about the narrator’s muted indifference to his traumatic event, then it is also a story of his efforts to systematise contingency in service of his sense of the ‘authentic’.8 Authenticity, he quickly learns, is slippery and elusive, and for that reason, it finds a reluctant analogue in the unforeseeable and interruptive impermanence of chance and accident. In this way, Remainder begins with trauma and echoes the signature of the trauma novel with the narrator’s elaborate ‘re-enactments’ intended to recapture the initial chance of his accident, but it quickly moves to a narrative obsession with systemising environments of control and contingency.9 In either case, the novel’s distance from the classical trauma genre of belated testimony, coupled with the narrator’s indifference to his memory prior to the accident and affectless attempt to model chance following a pattern set out by the accident, has the effect of producing a narrator who strangely beseeches, rather than defends against or seeks to re-figure into psychic signification, the traumatic event’s contingency. There is a sense, then, that both novels associate a different kind of temporality with trauma, one that is more about trauma’s capacity to interrupt or radically sever the post-traumatic subject off from the past, rather than immersing them in narratives of this past’s pained recovery. To make an important clarification, I have no wish to reconceptualise the relationship between memory and trauma, nor to suggest that temporalities beyond belatedness or repetition do not figure in classical trauma theory. But I do want to suggest that in contrast to classical trauma theory’s coincidence with discourses of the crisis of historicity and its analytical gravitation towards a set of conventionalised literary and generic tropes, Look at Me’s and Remainder’s seeking out of the traumatic accident ask for a conceptual approach that shifts attention away from the temporality of recursive delay to the qualities, perhaps

Unassimilable Contingency  167 strangely, of contingency and futurity. With this intersection between contingency, futurity, and trauma, we arrive at Catherine Malabou’s recent philosophy of the accident. Malabou’s work draws continental philosophy and deconstruction into conversation with neurobiology, psychoanalysis, and trauma. For Malabou, the brain’s matter (its ‘plasticity’, her neurobiological explanatory model) provides an ontology grounded in the logic of transformation, fluidity, and the radical break, which flatly refuse a metaphysics of presence.10 Important for this chapter, however, is Malabou’s interest in forms of post-traumatic subjectivity that have emerged out of accidents that exceed the logic of retrospective narration. Is it possible, Malabou asks, for an accident to obliterate all etiological trace? As a result of serious trauma, she suggests, or sometimes for no reason at all, the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room. An unrecognisable persona whose present comes from no past, whose future harbours nothing to come, an absolute existential improvisation. A form born of the accident, born by the accident, a kind of accident. (2012a, 1–2) This ‘unprecedented persona’, ‘whose present comes from no past’, is one that is fundamentally at odds with Malabou’s account of psychoanalysis. Malabou names these personas the ‘new wounded’. The ‘new wounded’ are post-traumatic subjects of extreme brain trauma who have been transformed so completely that their present subjectivity is utterly different to and discontinuous from their prior subjectivity. For Malabou, psychoanalysis would deny the possibility of this total transformation. It would suggest, she argues, that the psyche is fundamentally indestructible: ‘Within the psyche, nothing is forgotten; traces have an indestructible character. Imprints can be modified, deformed, and reformed – but they persist’ (2012b, 19). Freud’s sexual drive, then, persists in the aftermath of even the most destructive traumatic event and can retrospectively assimilate the unexpected into a form of psychic causality and persistent identity.11 Trauma’s Caruthian ‘gap’ in memory, which always propels narrative assimilation, Malabou would suggest, presupposes a continuous psyche that seeks to mould itself around the absent event’s re-­ narration. The subject of psychoanalytic trauma, in other words, remains sovereign and persistent over time, always capable of retroactively figuring the traumatic irruption into psychic order after the fact. Malabou’s turn to neurobiology, by contrast, proposes that in certain extreme cases, a traumatic event can completely sever its victim from all ties to the past, creating an entirely new identity in the process. Malabou’s most extreme examples of the ‘new wounded’ circumvent psychic

168  Accident Narratives integration and are subjects whose ex nihilo post-traumatic subjectivity bears no etiological resemblance to a subjectivity prior. In a crucial passage, Malabou suggests that this kind trauma designates the risk of brutal and sudden disappearance of the trace resulting in the formation of an identity without origin and without memory; an identity […] that is not interested or only falsely interested in itself. (2012b, 152–3) This new identity has no origin and no memory, seemingly coming from nowhere. Despite its causation by the accident (whether that be an ‘internal’ brain haemorrhage or an exterior event) such post-traumatic subjectivity has, in the last instance, no knowledge of their change and therefore no capacity to retrospectively recuperate either the accident or their new subjectivity into a causal narrative continuous with their pre-traumatic subjectivity. It is as if, for these new subjects, the accident never existed, because the psyche that would have recognised the gap to belatedly recover is itself missing. Malabou’s psychically acausal vision of the new wounded, in other words, gives us a striking image of ‘suffering caused by an absence of suffering […] a stranger to the one before’ (2012a, 18). Malabou’s work on the ‘new wounded’ speaks to two particular intellectual traditions: to a psychoanalytic tradition of analyst and analysand, and to post-metaphysical philosophies of contingency and event. But through combination of these, Malabou’s reading of trauma theorises an unexpected accident that appears to defy retrospective interpretation. Malabou navigates the complex of cause, effect, and metamorphosis thus: once the metamorphosis took place, however explicable its causes […], its effects were absolutely unexpected, and it became incomprehensible, displacing its cause, breaking all etiological links. (2012a, 13) The new, post-traumatic subjectivity is so unexpected, so etiologically other to pre-traumatic subjectivity, that for the perspective of the victim, the event’s causes have been ‘displaced’. The accident erases its own causes by destroying the psyche completely. The accident thus has no meaning for post-traumatic subjectivity, resiliently resisting meaning and signification. Malabou’s post-traumatic subjectivity is unthinkable without the unassimilable accident. This is an accident that breaks all etiological links both with its cause and through its creation of a post-traumatic subjectivity. For Malabou the ‘new wounded’ ‘rehabilitat[e] the event’

Unassimilable Contingency  169 (2012b, 153). This is how Malabou mobilises trauma and accident to specifically think about contingency’s temporality of futurity and radical rupture. By theorising an accident that owes nothing to psychic etiology, or to the idea of the event’s retrospective assimilation into a history of its causation, she proposes an accident that breaks with the logic of teleological retrospection, a familiar problem for the philosophy of chance that she suggests reduces contingency to ‘the call of an identity which, in a sense, is only waiting for it to unfurl’ (2012a, 90). Malabou’s accident instead simultaneously retains and emphasises its constitutive contingency by circumventing retrospective assimilation, extrapolating a model of neurobiological trauma to intervene in post-metaphysical discussions of the event. This capacity gives insight, through the theoretical locus of accidents, into a strange form of contingent futurity unimagined by theories of trauma’s recursive, repressive, and belated mapping, or by previous models of the ‘event’ that rely upon contingency’s becoming through retrospection. With this we arrive at the question of narration. How does one narrate the experience of an event that seems to efface its material trace? ‘How to do justice’, Malabou asks, ‘in the very writing of the cases, to the rupture of narrativity that ultimately characterises each’ event (2012b, 53)? Narrative appears to be at odds with this vision of post-traumatic rupture, created by accident. Malabou’s curious efforts to rehabilitate the contingent event through neurobiological trauma point to a model of trauma theory that registers both novels’ handling of the traumatising accident as an event that both circumvents retrospective recuperation and moulds a different kind of temporality to the traumatising event. But ultimately, both Look at Me and Remainder recognise, in response to this theorisation, a particular ill-fit between Malabou’s accidents and their own, precisely because of the enmeshment of narrativity in both protagonists’ recollections. Look at Me’s story of Charlotte’s reluctant and unwilling subjection of her story to narrative results in capitulation to a more traditional trauma narrative that she initially repudiates, focalised around the phrase ‘After the accident’. Remainder, on the other hand, joins the accident’s narration to the structural qualities of written narrative more generally, to suggest that unlike Malabou’s writing of an accident that erases its own trace, every event leaves a mark.

‘After the Accident’ Look at Me frames its accident as a transformative interruption of Charlotte Swenson’s unsatisfying and predictable modelling career in New York at the turn of the twenty-first century. Charlotte’s reflections on her life before the accident are of indifference. As she happily tells the administrators of Ordinary Lives, a social media group that asks her for the story of her life, the ‘past was up for sale’ (262).

170  Accident Narratives Charlotte reflects on her life prior to the accident as repetitious and temporally static, a time in which the years fold into one another and are absent of surprise: time started running together – there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it. The years began passing in clumps, so that one day I was twenty-three (to the world) […] and the next, ten years had passed and I was twenty-eight and a professional beauty, by which I mean a person in possession of phone numbers of sumptuous homes around the world where she (or he) will be welcome. (173) Charlotte lists a life of dull and depersonalised excess marked by her incapacity to pick apart past, present, and future, all of which meld into indefinite ‘clumps’ of time. Her failure to coherently ‘measure’ these clumps results in an experience not unlike an extended present: years pass as if in the space of a day. Charlotte’s modelling career exacerbates this experiential disorientation because of the industry’s overbearing confusion between the simulated and the real, which, when put into conversation with her sense of temporal stagnation, grounds Charlotte’s earlier life in a way not unfamiliar to postmodern theories of temporal closure (Kelly 2011, 402). When Charlotte reflects on this life prior to the crash, her memory is riven with doubles that do not seem to be her: her modelling age confusedly mixes with her actual age and her memories of opulence shift from first person (‘I’) to third person (‘she (or he)’), melting Charlotte’s memories into a depersonalised vision of someone else. But Charlotte feels that amidst all of these memories, she was waiting or urging for something to break her out of it. She later reflects, in the midst of this stifling New York life, that ‘I was waiting. Waiting and watching for a new discovery to refashion my life’ (174–5). The accident is not just an unpleasant disruption of a life to be recovered then but, perversely, an event that unexpectedly and retrospectively accommodates Charlotte’s hopeful anticipation for metamorphosis. The accident is the thing that ‘answers’ her anticipation after the fact, and frees her, as she says later, ‘from an onerous existence’ (498). In this way, Charlotte’s accident bears out a contrast between an anticipated future event (she expects to come across something that will change her life) and an unforeseeable event that is only retrospectively accountable for producing this change (the accident). Charlotte’s crash retrospectively disturbs a world of immeasurable repetition by introducing something unexpected and contingent into it. Charlotte’s recuperation of her accident in this story of personal transformation, however, simultaneously recognises that despite the event’s interruptive and radically disruptive capacity, narration can and still does model traumatic experience into a structure of signification

Unassimilable Contingency  171 with a before and an after that recuperates even the most seemingly unassimilable event. The reader is given insight into this with the novel’s first three words: ‘After the accident’. ‘After the accident’ betrays a recollective process that, through the temporal anchoring of ‘after’, immediately recognises that something has happened and intimates a persistent biography over time. This narrative capture subsequently implicates the accident in its possible retrospective recuperation and narration. After all, the novel’s organisation around Charlotte’s convalescence from the accident in her hometown of Rockford, and during her recovery, speaks to this self-resemblance over time, just as she acknowledges that boredom impels her ‘to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped up in an old house will’ (11). Working tensely against the logic of Malabou’s pure ‘break’, then, and despite the novel’s mobilisation of a traumatic accident’s metamorphosing capacity, Look at Me also steeps Charlotte’s physical recovery in the past’s recovery. In this sense, at odds with Charlotte’s desire for the traumatic event to institute a kind of break in her life, the novel also narrates Charlotte’s story of recovery to be one that is also pulled towards a recuperation of traumatic experience in retrospect. Her narrative, in other words, appears split between Malabou’s speculative psychic rupture and classical trauma theory’s belated testimony. If we consider temporal experience to be mediated by narrative experience, then Charlotte’s comment ‘After the accident’ is a kind of writing. It is literally writing, of course, for the reader, but it is also, from Charlotte’s perspective, a self-address that organises her experience in a way that is akin to the ordering of a plot.12 The novel is full of moments of self-address and self-narration like this. In a scene that closes out Charlotte’s convalescence at home, Charlotte addresses her ‘monstrous reflection’ for the first time: ‘This is your Charlotte, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. This is your Charlotte, and you must take good care of her so she’ll grow up to be a beautiful girl, and live an extraordinary life’ (35). ‘Your Charlotte’ posits a reluctant ownership over her physical appearance, having undergone plastic surgery since the crash. She warily acknowledges this appearance to be her own, but equally distances herself from it, addressing herself as ‘you’ and the reflection as ‘her’. This distance soon becomes ‘myself’, however, and quickly Charlotte moves from reluctant identification to an anticipation of who she will become in time: ‘she’ll grow up to be a beautiful girl, live an extraordinary life.’ Charlotte’s anticipation is couched in retrospection, since she anticipates a future in which she will look back on herself as this person, and it is difficult not to read a thinly veiled Lacanianism in this putative ‘mirror stage’.13 Charlotte’s identification overpowers the rupture of her physical difference, and she reactively folds the accident and her new appearance into her pre-traumatic subjectivity, connecting the two together over time. Just as with ‘After the accident’, then, Charlotte retrospectively

172  Accident Narratives assimilates rupture into narrative continuity through self-address in the form of imagined speech, linguistically recuperating physical difference into selfhood. With ‘After the accident’, then, we go some way to understanding Malabou’s circular notion of the relation between the unassimilable accident and the post-traumatic subjectivity. ‘After the accident’ implies that the accident lingers in Charlotte’s memory without trauma’s wholesale effacement. This residual recollection implies the resilience of a trace of the event and the trace of Charlotte’s pre-traumatic psyche, and this continuation both conditions and is, in turn, conditioned by Charlotte’s narrative recuperation of the accident into a before and an after. If this is the case, then we understand, I think, Malabou’s hesitancy over narrating either the radical break of an accident or the post-traumatic subjectivity’s relation to a past it has supposedly broken off from. Unleashing a butterfly effect in Malabou’s theoretical system, Look at Me shows what unfolds from the initial flex of narrative muscle in Charlotte’s statement, ‘After the accident’. This twitch of hindsight motivates a struggle for narrative recuperation, a means of thinking backwards that implies both accident and Charlotte’s pre-traumatic subjectivity to be recoverable, yielding to psychic re-signification. As the novel progresses, Charlotte begins to crack under the pressure of various stories that people force onto her recovery from the traumatic event. Charlotte’s initial indifference towards the event and to her past changes as she begins to capitulate to the pressure exerted on her by others, all of whom urge her to remember it in more detail. Her friends hound her at the start of the novel (11), and her ghostwriter Irene pushes her to remember what it felt like to be in an accident for the sake of her story (391). The pressure on Charlotte to recollect and write her accident, however, and the effects of writing when imposed onto the traumatic accident are no more apparent than in Charlotte’s involvement with Thomas Keene, owner of social media experiment Ordinary Lives, who contracts her to write about her life story for his website. Thomas’s desire to write the accident testifies to the much broader issue of the kinds of teleological direction superimposed in the process of an accident’s narrativization accounted for throughout this study. As Keene impatiently tells Charlotte, ‘”How to put this? An accident’s an accident, shit happens and all that. But, see, we don’t want shit happens, we want shit happens for a reason”’ (317). Thomas transforms the accident’s narration from a problem lodged in the novel’s formal structure to a thematic issue discussed in fictional form. An ‘accident’s an accident’: it is an unforeseeable irruption, surprising Charlotte, simply ‘happening’ in Thomas’ words. But when ‘shit happens for a reason’, the accident is threaded into an end-oriented and purposeful story. If the accident is the outcome of a ‘reason’, then it is embedded in a meaning that simultaneously precedes it, anticipates it, and plots it. It is not that Thomas spins the accident into something materially

Unassimilable Contingency  173 inevitable in his proposed story, but rather that he sees the process of writing out Charlotte’s accident as one that inadvertently inserts it into a ‘purpose’ and a story that unfolds at the behest of a specific end. To say that an accident happens for a reason, then, is to suggest that the accident is a result of a purpose that both exceeds the event’s contingency and determines its occurrence. The novel repeatedly thinks through the effects of writing and narration on traumatic memory. But, in particular, the novel pushes Charlotte further and further into identifying with the stories others write about her accident for her. She ‘reads’ these guesses at what happened and makes them present as memory. After all, there is a sense that when Charlotte reflects on her accident in the very first page she has really only gleaned her memory of the August downpour from secondary sources, rather than reflecting on her own ‘authentic’ memory of the event. This assimilation of other’s stories finds its most cogent working through in Charlotte’s employment of Irene, a ghostwriter who writes an account of Charlotte’s life for the website Personal Space, an off-shoot of Keene’s project. Irene’s first-person narration of Charlotte’s story is a ‘hybrid’ voice, ‘an unholy creature’ of her own creation (302). Charlotte’s reflections on Irene’s ventriloquism, and the uneasy mixture of Irene’s approximation of her own voice, gradually unsettle her, because of the forms of identification produced: It began, like so many disasters, with something very small. So small that I don’t remember what it was. Or when it happened, exactly. […] I found it disorienting to read my own words, or something like my words – not my words at all, actually, but a ventriloquism of Irene’s that for some reason even I believed. (456) Irene’s voice is disorientating, but ‘for some reason’ Charlotte believes it.14 The typography’s formal effect draws attention to the intrusion of Irene’s narrative voice in Charlotte’s story. But equally, as Charlotte’s reluctant belief suggests, it is also difficult for the reader to not in some way treat Irene’s ventriloquised story as filling out the gaps Charlotte misses from her narration. Despite its typographical bracketing, the novel asks the reader to hold together two perspectivally mediated accounts of Charlotte’s accident at once: Irene’s (which Charlotte herself acknowledges is strangely believable) and Charlotte’s own (which barely addresses the accident). In the novel’s penultimate chapter, however, these two perspectival levels collapse for Charlotte, who appears captured by Irene’s narration, as if it finally expresses her own memory of the event. In this chapter, Charlotte agrees to film a staged rendition of her accident,

174  Accident Narratives because her story has gone viral. However, the novel narrates Charlotte’s awkward re-staging of this accident in alternation with Irene’s typographically distinct (and fictionalised) story of the night of the accident itself. While one paragraph details Irene’s ventriloquism of Charlotte’s memory of getting into the car with mysterious character Z, driving, and then hitting the brakes, the next follows Charlotte, in the story’s present, watching a camera crew film the crash with a body double. The formal effect between these two sections is one of abrupt transition, from Charlotte’s uncomfortable re-staging of the accident on film to Irene’s tense, ventriloquised first-person narration of Charlotte’s journey on the night of the accident, and back again. It is worth quoting this effect in full: I hit the brake and yanked up the emergency brake at the same time. In retrospect, that wind looks like Self Preservation. A squall of hope. Memory. An o ­bstinate will to live that rushes in when we least expect, saving us. Drawing us back. But in fact, it was the wind from his [Z’s] open door. He had already jumped. We crashed through the corn, little Charlotte [her friend’s daughter] and I, my useless eyes squeezed shut, my mouth a gigantic O that dredged up from within me a sound unlike any I had ever made before, or even heard. (502) Irene’s fictionalisation of Charlotte’s memory coincides with Charlotte witnessing of the re-staging of her crash, producing two diegetically separate mediations of the same sequence of events. Irene’s narration builds up to the moment when Charlotte crashes the car; Charlotte’s narration then follows her witnessing the reconstruction of the accident. But in this transition from one mediation to another, the novel’s form models the bridging of the two through its formal juxtaposition of both sequences next to one another on the page, which it connects together by having the filmed accident carry on with the chronology of events that Irene’s written narrative concludes with. ‘We crashed through the corn’ picks up where Irene’s story leaves off, where the car is about to tumble through the cornfield. By providing two forms of fictional mediation of Charlotte’s memory, which both pick up on and tell the story of the same imagined sequence of events, the narrative transitions from one scene to the other in a way that metes out authority to both, irrespective of their typographical frames. By handing authority to Irene’s ventriloquism through this parallel narrative form, the novel invites the reader to perspectivally identify with both Irene’s ventriloquised story and then Charlotte’s first-person narration of witnessing the crash. Because of their alternation, the typographical frame distancing Irene’s narrative

Unassimilable Contingency  175 from Charlotte’s fades, despite both focussing on explicitly fictionalised accounts of a memory Charlotte does not have. This is important, because Irene’s ventriloquism of Charlotte’s voice is the only narration in the novel of the night of Charlotte’s accident. The formal contiguity of these two voices, and the story’s chronological continuation from Irene’s narrative to Charlotte’s, asks the reader to treat Irene not just as a fictional interloper but as an actual authority of Charlotte’s memory of the traumatic accident. In doing so, the novel provides an uneasy hybrid of Irene’s ventriloquism and Charlotte’s witnessing of a staged car crash to provide the novel’s main form of witnessing of Charlotte’s traumatic accident in the moment that it happens. Charlotte’s continuation of Irene’s ventriloquism in terms of the events being re-enacted muddies the secondary status of Irene’s version of Charlotte’s story as well as the simulated nature of the crash’s reconstruction by the camera team. Because of this coming together of the two voices, the novel asks the reader to perspectivally identify with Irene’s ventriloquised voice, just as much as Charlotte says she does herself. We read the two passages as merging together, accounting for the same event. This merging of voice on the formal level of reading is then reduplicated on the level of story, too, because Charlotte subsequently appears to internalise Irene’s writing through its raising of her traumatised memory. What is most striking about this scene is that Charlotte doesn’t just continue on from Irene’s narrative, as if it speaks for her, but that she also acts outs the experience of remembering expected of her from it. Charlotte’s mouth, in the moment of the staged crash, becomes ‘a gigantic O’, and her ‘eyes squeez[e] shut’. This ‘gigantic O’ echoes Irene’s earlier, apostrophic account of Charlotte’s visitation to the site of the accident: ‘It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt.’ In contrast to this earlier indifference, Charlotte now, having witnessed the car crash, doubles over, witnessing the traumatic event in a way that answers Irene’s expectations and, arguably, the belated temporality of the trauma genre: ‘“Charlotte can’t stop screaming,” Ellen said’ (503). Charlotte, in other words, appears to perspectivally identify with the trauma narrative foisted onto her by Irene’s ventriloquism. In this respect, Charlotte’s gradual identification with Irene’s story of her own memory places her in a position analogous to the reader reading a story. Just as the reader makes Charlotte’s accident present in the experience of reading, so too does Charlotte who, in reading others’ writing about her accident, appears to live the event, internalising and succumbing to the story written about her. Look at Me therefore represents Charlotte here to be a reader of the stories being written about her own memory of the accident and to be a reader of another’s writing of her memory. In this way, Look at Me eventually succumbs to the painful difficulty Charlotte experiences at recalling a traumatic accident, capitulating to the signature of pained recollection of the past that she initially resists. In doing so, the novel

176  Accident Narratives reflects on the kinds of temporal structures imposed onto an accident when it is recuperated into narrative and then subsequently ‘read’. In its exploration of the potency of the writing of memory, and its thinking about the transference enabled by that writing through the process of reading, Look at Me represents Charlotte to be a reader of stories others have written about her. In this respect, the novel cannot but capitulate to narration’s attempt to recuperate traumatic absence into memory. While not seeking to categorise Look at Me into a particular kind of trauma narrative, Charlotte’s eventual capitulation to the accident’s pained memory suggests some distance between Charlotte’s post-traumatic subjectivity and Catherine Malabou’s model of post-traumatic subjectivity, testifying to the resilience of narrative’s belated narration of traumatic absence familiar to classical trauma theories. Charlotte’s growing concerns for the recovery of her memory over the course of the novel show the speculative difficulty of Malabou’s accident, and they throw into consideration the ways in which each novel both thematises post-traumatic subjectivity and the bearing of memory and narrative on post-traumatic subjectivity more generally. In some senses, we already encounter the resilience of narrative on traumatic absence in Look at Me’s opening three words, ‘After the accident’, which anticipate this resilience. In doing so, ‘After the accident’ leaves this chapter with a conceptual question. If the only appropriate narration of Malabou’s accident is the complete absence of its narration, then how can Malabou’s work remark on the issue of the accident’s capacity for change or transformation at all? The new, after all, is only remarkable in relation to the old, which surely necessitates some kind of narrativity to mark this dividing line, some kind of ‘After the accident’ to remark on post-traumatic subjectivity’s radical difference.15 Malabou’s solution to this is to suggest that when remarking on the accident’s dramatic rupture of subjectivity, one must hold two epistemological domains together. On the one hand, from a perspective of the post-­ traumatic subject, the originary accident effaces itself: it has no cause, just as the ex nihilo persona emerges from nowhere. But, on the other hand, Malabou supplements this with a theory of material causation. Something must happen to leave its decisive mark and create these moments of dramatic rupture, albeit a thing that effaces itself in the perspective of the post-traumatic subject. Because of Malabou’s wariness over narrativity’s capacity for the capture of the traumatic accident into some form of retrospective, psychic recuperation, a form of material self-effacement like this is necessary. There is a sense, then, that Malabou’s philosophical challenge to retrospective narration through traumatic rupture depends on establishing the combination of two epistemological domains at once. After all, the material cause for the post-traumatic subject’s invention, even though unnarratable from the perspective of that victim, persists in a perspective external to that post-traumatic subjectivity. From this latter epistemological domain, such as the position of an analyst, one could

Unassimilable Contingency  177 differentiate the victim’s new personality to their prior subjectivity. In her efforts to describe a kind of self-effacing material causation, then, Malabou combines these two domains: the event’s effacement of itself through the creation of an entirely new subjectivity, coupled with an exterior perspective of that transformation that can remark on the post-traumatic subjectivity’s material transformation through accident. In other words, the accident’s occurrence both effaces its material trace and succumbs to etiological explanation from a perspective external to that post-traumatic subjectivity. The accident, then, like post-traumatic subjectivity, comes from both nowhere and somewhere. Malabou’s work invites a more detailed study with regard to its contact with psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and trauma studies.16 But her subtle account of the accident’s causality through post-traumatic subjectivity, which theorises a notion of the dramatic event that doubly stems from material causes and implies its own etiological self-erasure through reference to post-traumatic subjectivity, draws on trauma and memory to engage with the philosophical problem of teleological retrospection. Malabou’s focus on post-traumatic subjectivity clearly represents a mismatch with a fictional narration of the event that presupposes something prior to the accident, as in the case of Look at Me. But what written narrative can do, I suggest, is hold the tension of the self-effacing accident’s doubled temporality together, to model the process by which the two epistemological domains of material causation and post-traumatic effacement function on the level of the dynamics of reading. Reading the accident invokes Malabou’s subtle entangling of these two domains, then, because the accident’s interpretation invokes the doubled knowledge of the event’s material causation on the level of the book’s material completion alongside the event’s unimpeded contingency on the level of one’s identification with the storyworld’s present. In this way, the concluding section of this chapter will consider if reading contingency can in part illustrate the interaction between the doubled epistemological domains of Malabou’s self-effacing accident.

‘Everything Must Leave Some Kind of Mark’ Remainder’s narrator frequently reflects on memory and memorisation as processes that recuperate his traumatic accident into memory. In an extended meditation, we hear that After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually – but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones. (87)

178  Accident Narratives Rather than eradicating his earlier memories, the accident reorganises them according to a new hierarchy precipitated from his present knowledge. By narrating his changed self-awareness after the accident, he also recognises himself in a before, too. The narrator therefore theorises trauma to be stifling, but not something that completely effaces his memory, despite the novel’s generic distance to more traditional markers. As the narrator suggests elsewhere, an event ‘would be recorded somewhere in my memory […] Everything must leave some kind of mark’ (94). A little like Thomas Keene, only a fair sight more sociopathic, Remainder’s narrator similarly indulges in megalomaniac re-enactments and simulations of contingent events. The novel thus reflects on the art of simulating an accident and on representing a situation in which an accident can happen. Each re-enactment functions in part as an allegory of representation and shows us a narrator who is deep in the throes of building, designing, and reconstructing remembered events and imagined scenarios. These grand rehearsals stem from an obsessive desire for a form of one-to-one representation in which memory and mimesis entirely coincide. He imagines this desire like a ‘grid around the earth’ that weaves ‘the whole terrain into one smooth, articulated network’ before losing this image among memories of ‘disjointed escalator parts’ (36–7). This smoothly articulated network suggests temporal totality and representational completion, where the world is caught in an invasive snapshot, and its present moment is suspended and defined in representation. But like with any representational system, there will always be an excess, or a remainder, that outpaces it. With the first pass of the first re-enactment, something isn’t right about the smell coming from the woman frying liver (132). On the second run, he notices a ‘small patch of black’ that ‘was gone so quickly that I thought it must have been another optical effect’ (137). These quirks disrupt the smooth, one-to-one fidelity of his re-enactments. With these messy instances, his re-enactments repeatedly produce kinks, inconsistencies, and moments of excess. There is a reason, after all, why ‘disjointed escalator parts’ disturb his vision of the perfect network above. With each interruption, the narrator’s effort to control his imitation of the real is shown to be incomplete, with the novel self-consciously and allegorically reflecting on the unsteady nature of representation through this means. The limit of referential signification and the arbitrariness of signs means that any and all of the narrator’s attempts to totalise the world in a single representation meet their disruption with unintended consequences.17 In this way, Remainder is clearly indicative of an intellectual and aesthetic climate founded on theories of self-conscious metafiction that highlight language’s conditional excess, as well as a general philosophical suspicion towards ‘presence’. These moments of excessive contingency, seen as expressions of ‘matter’, give glancing insight into the remainders that both exceed and condition his rehearsals. He begins to see that chance cannot be controlled.

Unassimilable Contingency  179 When contingency interrupts a smooth system, this form of the contingent is far more ‘authentic’ than the system it interrupts. Indeed, as the novel progresses, the narrator’s re-enactments move from one scenario to the next, structuring, through repetition, systems open to chance interference. It is hardly necessary for the narrator to run these grand re-­ enactments when chance, he realises, happens everywhere. But it is only in moments of seeming temporal control that contingency’s irruption is most noticeable. Contingency produces, for the narrator, an almost transcendental experience in its apparent creation of something whose existence depended on the material circumstances of that unique system. Importantly, contingency is always materially produced here, the outcome of a material force that exceeds the totalising system. For the narrator, chance always coincides with the appearance of this matter. In other words, chance exhumes matter, and matter produces chance. Matter is contingency’s signature in Remainder.18 It is the uncontrollable remainder of the narrator’s sleekly designed, totalising systems of control. Contingency therefore always coincides with some kind of mark. The originary accident of the novel, which happens through the agency of an unforeseen strike of a plane’s fuselage and parts, leaves a mark or trace on the narrator’s memory, and inspires in him a desire to seek the event’s remediation. The remainder, then, is both a form of contingency made material and a material production of the contingent. Later, the narrator is transfixed by the seeming material disappearance of two litres of windscreen fluid from his car, ‘matter – these two litres of liquid – becoming un-matter’ (159), before the liquid’s sudden re-materialisation in an explosion out of the dashboard. He fixates on this disappointing failure of matter’s apparent transcendence, but his immediate decision to hire new actors and re-enact the scene, indefinitely repeating the blue liquid’s eruption, begins a process that seeks to reduce the accidental and contingent qualities of matter to systematic control in a greater variety of circumstances beyond the block of flats. The narrator’s efforts to reduce the accidental to a repeatable pattern here contribute to a feedback loop in which further systematisations produce moments of excess and contingency, which retrospectively reveal each rehearsal’s remaindered matter.19 In doing so, this persistent coincidence between matter and contingency posits a causality that balances contingency’s appearance as if out of nowhere – the inexplicable result of matter’s transmutation into another form – with contingency’s clear and vivid material causation, originating from somewhere. It takes the narrator’s re-enactment of a bank heist, however, to produce contingency as if out of nothing, witnessing the advent of an almost ex nihilo event in which matter and matter’s absence collide. After hiring a crew to repeatedly rehearse a simulated bank heist, the narrator transposes this into a real bank. In the simulated heists, the narrator instructs one of his actors – Robber Five – to feign tripping over. In the

180  Accident Narratives transposition to the real bank, due to the friction between the simulated and the real, however, Robber Five actually, accidentally, trips. The accident proceeds thus: In the rehearsals, after Five had tripped on it that one time, I’d told him to half-trip each time he passed [the kink in the carpet]. […] Five had got so used to half-tripping on it over the weeks of rehearsals  […] that the half-trip had become instinctive, second nature. Now, as we did the re-enactment itself, he applied the same force, gave it the same forward thrust, the same turn of the toes – only there was no kink. (267) The half-trip in rehearsals soon becomes familiar, to the extent that its material cause (the kink) goes unnoticed. For the actual re-enactment, however, the kink in the carpet is not materially there. But Robber Five’s accidental trip, over something that isn’t actually there, reveals both the kink’s presence and its absence. It is a temporal remainder left over from simulations in the past: absent, because it is not there, but present, because its trace in memory trips him. This latter accident, in other words, irrupts contingently, free of a determinate cause (there is no kink), but also, by happening, retroactively posits the presence of a cause that was not initially there (the kink’s absent presence). As the narrator reflects, this accident comes about due to the tension between an already-past simulation and the unfolding present of a real accident: ‘“It became real while it was going on. Thanks to the ghost kink, mainly – the kink the other kink left when we took it away”’ (273). The actual accident’s material cause does not exist until the accident happens, precisely because, at first, the kink in the carpet is not there. But when the accident does happen, the matter that isn’t there suddenly becomes the accident’s material cause. The accident’s contingent happening therefore coincides with the creation of matter by retroactively transforming matter’s absence into the accident’s material cause. Empty space becomes the ‘ghost kink’. In a reversal of the windscreen fluid’s apparent disappearance, un-matter becomes matter, with Robber Five’s trip re-materialising the kink out of absence. The ‘ghost kink’, therefore, is both not the cause of the eventual accident because it is materially absent and the event’s material cause, albeit one retroactively made. That is, the ‘ghost kink’ appears to cause the accident, but its absence from the scenario to which it contributes also appears to produce a kind of self-effacement, or dematerialisation, in which the kink’s lack means that it is also not cause for the event. In this respect, the narrator’s fascination with the ‘ghost kink’ qualifies his earlier obsession with déjà vu: both persist as splinters of time superimposed onto the present, but neither can be firmly located in that present, and instead exist only in absence. The trip happens due to the

Unassimilable Contingency  181 kink’s material causation, but the accident also appears to exceed that cause as well, as if happening due to an absence where there should be a clear cause. The causality implied by the accident in Remainder’s bank heist, which both insists on contingency’s accompanying material cause and points to an absence where that cause should be, requires the narrator to hold two epistemological domains, and two temporalities, together at once: the superimposition of the prior simulation’s determinate future (the domain associated with the accident’s cause) onto the real bank heist, which unfolds contingently to produce an actual accident (the domain in which the accident’s cause is absent). The bank heist accident, I want to suggest, couples the contradictory absence and presence of material cause theorised by Malabou in her account of accidental rupture, but does so by heightening the doubled nature of this difficult model of causality. To return to Malabou, the accident and accompanying post-traumatic subjectivity originate in a material cause; but, at the same time, the cause of the accident seems to be absent, effacing itself through its occurrence. Malabou’s notion of the accident’s radical break, in this respect, engages with many of the theories of contingent event raised in this study through the lens of post-traumatic subjectivity in order to break from the grip of teleological retrospection. Nevertheless, there is a case to be made that her model’s employment of two epistemological domains of cause and cause’s absence returns us to the kinds of looping causality implied by these other accounts, from Badiou’s event that retroactively reveals its causes to Deleuze’s dice throw that contingently actualises a determinate result. But rather than concluding this study by further unpicking the differences between these, I suggest that Malabou’s difficult challenge to the philosophy of contingency and causation finds an unexpected demonstration in the process of reading contingency. Reading contingency, I argue, helps to model the twinned domains of material causation and causal absence found in Malabou’s speculative accident, but the experience of reading also points to, through the subtle overlap of those domains, the difficulty of their separation, a difficulty picked up on precisely by psychoanalytic accounts of Malabou’s work. Reading written narrative accidents, in other words, models the productive tension of Malabou’s self-erasing accident that necessitates, for her, post-traumatic subjectivity but, in the case of written narrative, is part and parcel of the sense-making procedures of reading. While I do not intend to describe reading as itself determined by, or is akin to, post-traumatic subjectivity, reading contingency can, I suggest, provide surprising insight into the kinds of doubled knowledge proposed by Malabou’s theory of causation and also point to the kinds of overlap between cause and cause’s absence in Remainder’s narrator’s fascination with the ‘ghost kink’. This would suggest that even if narrative contradicts her account of psychic rupture, reading written

182  Accident Narratives narrative can, to some extent, occupy and throw into relief the doubled perspective required of Malabou’s philosophical challenge to models of causality, trauma, and retrospection. The reader’s comprehension of a written narrative accident is not unlike Remainder’s narrator’s puzzlement over the ‘ghost kink’. To put it more forcibly, Robber Five’s accident is the written narrative accident, precipitated by a ‘ghost kink’ that is both materially present and effaced in the activity of reading. 20 A phenomenological account of reading sustains this doubled notion of causation, which holds the temporalities of an already given future and an open and contingent present, and therefore two epistemological domains, together, to produce an event that is both contingent and necessary, happening out of nowhere but clearly determined by the book’s material completion. The written accident’s already determined qualities, then, invariably ‘ghost’ the reader’s actualisation of the storyworld’s deictic coordinates into a contingent ‘now’. If Robber Five’s trip is written into the heist’s simulation, then that trip’s prefiguration frames the eventual re-enactment. But, at the same time, the acting out of the trip ‘while it was going on’ produces a difference, in which an ‘authentic’ accident erupts in the present. Robber Five’s accident both issues from an absent cause and retroactively materialises its cause in the moment that it happens. After all, as the narrator’s mantra insists, ‘Everything must leave some kind of mark’ (11). His statement on the ineradicable nature of ‘matter’ is in part a commentary on the resilience of traumatic memory. But I suggest that ‘matter’ can also speak outwards to written fictional narrative’s unique temporal structure. Matter is, after all, also the book’s matter, its ontological status as something that has been written, encompassing a future that we can turn to out of order. The temporal structure of reading a written fictional narrative holds the matter of the text’s material completion together with an unfolding present of reading, which appears as if separate from that matter in the perspective of the storyworld. Yet the two domains remain inextricable. Every accident read is caused by and reveals the novel’s material mark, its linguistic sequencing on a page, and its existence in a pre-written future. The imbrication of these two temporal positions – the prefigured past and the unfolding ‘now’ – in Remainder’s ‘ghost kink’ inscribes in an elaborate fictional form the reader’s experience of reading an accident. In other words, the novel’s prior completion is as present in our reading as the ‘ghost kink’ is for the heist’s actual unfolding. The foreclosed future of written narrative materially conditions any and every contingent effect in the act of reading, making contingency a matter of temporal perspective. Despite this, when we read, we identify with the perspectival storyworld and experience the accident to be contingent, made present by the dynamics of reading, as if also free of that extradiegetic material cause. But just as it does with

Unassimilable Contingency  183 Remainder’s narrator, the ‘ghost kink’ reminds us that the contingent effect experienced in reading is conditioned by its past prefiguration in a necessary future that has already been written. The reader paradoxically holds these two temporalities together in the same moment. Like the ‘ghost kink’, which both stipulates an absence of cause and retroactively reveals the accident’s material cause to the narrator, reading similarly engages in a dialectic of present and past, contingency and necessity; even if one loses partial sight of the novel’s predetermined future in the ‘now’ of reading, the dynamics of anticipated retrospection suggest that one might look back on an event to be materially determined once read, bracketed by the foreclosure of the storyworld’s future. Malabou’s theory of post-traumatic subjectivity ultimately concludes that the only proper narration of the accident that effaces its cause is to not narrate it at all. But reading’s sense-making procedure of the collision of two epistemological domains can model, by analogy, Malabou’s distinction between the two levels of causal interpretation involved in her theorisation of the accident’s radical break. In doing so, Malabou’s theory of the accident offers a surprising philosophical structure for what it is like to read an accident, even if the two are not directly equivalent. When the reader identifies with Remainder’s, and any book’s, perspectival structure, the accident is experienced to be contingent, and that experience involves the partial bracketing of the book’s material foreclosure, by which I mean the book’s already written nature that determines the story in advance. As such, when reading Remainder, one actualises and comprehends the accidents in the storyworld to be accidental, a perspectival identification with a quasi-present that appears almost uninflected by the novel’s exterior causation. This identification finds analogue in Malabou’s theorisation of an accident that erases its own trace through the creation of post-traumatic subjectivity, an accidentally made subjectivity lacking any trace of its originary accident. And yet, despite the reader’s location in an experiential present that seems vividly detached from any kind authorial, material trace, the reader also remains aware of the book’s material determination, just as Malabou’s post-traumatic subjectivity precipitates from the material cause of an accident that, while effacing its causation for the perspective of the post-traumatic subject, remains apparent for the analyst. Both share the twinned epistemological domains of material cause and causal absence. This leaves the opportunity open to question if these twinned domains cannot overlap or cross over into one another, a possibility that affects each comparison differently. In an attempt to recuperate Malabou’s splitting of these two domains, Adrian Johnston, for instance, suggests that despite Malabou’s insistence on cleaving post- from pre-traumatic subjectivity, ‘analytic interpretation […] would be not without its powers to explore and illuminate the associative chains of continuity shaping

184  Accident Narratives the sociosymbolic aspects’ of the new wounded’s relation to their prior subjectivity (2013, xiv). There is the possibility, Johnston suggests, that through detailed analytical work, the two levels might have more points of contact than what Malabou suggests, with the means of determining certain continuities between pre- and post-traumatic subjectivity. For the analyst, this would require the shaping of a shared meaning, as Jennifer Gammage puts it, between analyst and analysand, in which the former can sculpt ‘a shared history through transference’ so that the past can ‘become meaningful and enter into the hermeneutic order of the interpretative discursive field’ for the latter (2016, 411). For if one can read the accident as the material cause of post-traumatic subjectivity, then one invariably locates a place of traction for the possibility of a recuperative narrative that can link the newly wounded’s subjectivity to their prior subjectivity. In doing so, post-traumatic subjectivity might be less a radical break than it first seems. For a reader of written narrative accidents, however, the slippery crossing over of these two epistemological domains – the accident’s apparent causal absence and its material determination – is far more familiar. Remainder’s narrator finds that once an actual accident happens in the bank, it retrospectively reveals a kink, albeit in ghostly form, of what was present all along, revealing to him the persistence of matter’s mark in contingency’s production and mediation. The experiential doubleness of reading a written narrative accident stems from the fact that no matter how much one seeks to excise the ‘ghost kink’ of a novel’s prior completion from the storyworld, or to cleave the predetermined future from the perspectival present, one can’t. Reading a contingent event is therefore always temporally doubled: the event is experienced to be both contingent and necessary, open and already written, unforeseeable and fated, happening out of nowhere and happening out of somewhere, at the same time. Both levels continually inflect one another in the process of reading. Perspectival contingency in the present of reading produces an accident whose outline is conditioned by an extradiegetic determination that the present of reading simultaneously effaces. Remainder’s obsession with matter and material contingency, then, reflects on and models the interpretative dynamics of sense-making involved in the experience of reading contingency. No matter how seemingly contingent from a perspective of the storyworld, the accident’s material completion contaminates the accident: we remain aware that we are reading something materially past as if it were present, and we anticipate that we will understand story events with added significance in hindsight. The novel’s matter and its materially foreclosed future, then, experientially condition the experience of its open future, meaning that the reader comprehends the temporality of any written narrative through the twinned modalities of contingency and necessity. After all, everything must leave some kind of mark.

Unassimilable Contingency  185

Notes 1 All subsequent references are to this edition. 2 This is a problem of being unable to verify whether a memory is a ‘real’ memory or a fictional construction, and the inevitably circular distinctions involved when thinking about the difference. Paul Ricoeur outlines this circular issue as a perennial problem in theories of memory, which cannot pull what it perceives of as ‘memory’ apart from what it perceives of as the ‘imagination’ (2006, 5–55). 3 All subsequent references are to this edition. 4 By classical trauma theory, I am referring to the language-oriented work on trauma from the 1990s, exemplified by Caruth (1996) and Felman and Laub (1992). 5 Compare, for instance, to ‘At the heart of the structure of the reception of trauma lies a delay – experiences that resist knowing can return belatedly’ (Greenberg 2003, xvii). For criticism of Caruth’s event-focussed trauma theory, see Leys (2000, 36–40); Radstone (2007b); Alan Gibb’s impatience with Caruthian theory’s holy trinity of belatedness, literality, and punctuality (2014, 10–18); and Silke Arnold-de Simine’s survey of the problematic hold of trauma on memory studies more generally (2019). 6 See also Martijn Meeter (2016) on cognitive psychology and interpretative ‘closure’ and Gregory Bistoen, Stijn Vanhuele, and Stef Craps’ (2014) survey on psychoanalysis and belatedness. For an account of the cognitive processes of traumatic memory in neuroscience, see Kaplan (2005, 37–40). 7 Trauma theory is, of course, concerned with issues of the future as much as the past. For instance, see Lyndsey Stonebridge on the ‘anxious anticipation’ of traumatic anxiety (1998, 35), Roger Luckhurst’s argument for trauma’s generation of ‘narrative possibility just as much as impossibility’ (2008, 83), or E. Ann Kaplan on ‘working through’ and processing the traumatic event (2005). Nevertheless, classical conceptions of trauma theory do frequently align with the temporalities of delay and repetition, an institutional if not necessarily theoretical coincidence. As the editors of The Future of Memory ask, for instance, has trauma studies’ ‘fixation on the past, inside and outside the academy, become compensation for the political failures (of utopian thought) in imagining a better future?’(Crownshaw, Kilby, and Rowland 2010, ix). 8 See also Sidney Miller’s reading of the narrator’s attempt to ‘strip the accidental of its essential stochastic quality’ (2015, 636). 9 The critical analogues for the narrator’s affectless trauma and efforts to control material space through re-enactments are numerous, in part because the novel seems so especially suited to the canonical work of postmodern theory (McGurl 2015). So much so that Seb Franklin, in his historical materialist account of the novel’s reflection on the political economy that underwrites models of sociality as networked connection, suggests that it is a novel ‘about the multivalence of theory’ (2017, 158). 10 ‘Plasticity is situated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture to plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion)’ (2008, 5). 11 See also Doherty (2013) and Gammage (2016). 12 Compare this to Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of the impact of the ‘written’ trace on the ‘cortical’ trace in the process of memorisation (2006, 440). 13 As Jane Gallop says of the temporality of the ‘mirror stage’, ‘the self is constituted through anticipating what it will become, and then this anticipatory model is used for gauging what was before’ (1985, 81).

186  Accident Narratives 14 Charlotte’s belief also feeds into the novel’s obsession, signposted by the title, with ‘looking’ and, more particularly, intersubjective mediation. On this latter thread in narratology, see Butte (2004). 15 On the necessity of a before and an after in Malabou’s work, see Williams (2013, 19). 16 See, for instance, fuller psychoanalytic and neurobiological engagements with Malabou’s work in Žižek (2011, 279–314), Johnston (2013), and Leys (2011). 17 Unintended and accidental consequences are also the result of the reader’s engagement with the text as Sydney Miller argues, meaning that we ‘as readers, are the agents of the accidental in narrative’ (2015, 652). See also C. Namwali Serpell (2014, 230–67). 18 Compare this to David Trotter’s argument for the relationship between mess, accidents, and desire (2000, 15). 19 The indefinite repetition of the petrol station re-enactment, for instance, itself produces further material traces that exceed the narrator’s control, such as actors’ familiarity with the lines altering their performance to tyre marks on the warehouse floor (167). 20 Christina Lupton similarly suggests that if anything meets the narrator’s fixation with the control and reversibility of events, it is ‘the mechanism of the codex book’ itself (2016, 509).

Coda

I’m not writing a manual for young fiction writers about how to open or close their prose works. Life will teach them that. Step accidentally on your untied shoelace, fall down, and you’ll understand a thing or two about the theory of literature. (Shklovsky 2007, 100)

Viktor Shklovsky’s aphorism for literature speaks to the contingencies involved in novelistic inspiration and to the contingencies that multiply in plots. Written narrative is replete in accident. Plots generate their energy from the impression of an open future, and accidents tell us something about narrative’s capacity to immerse the reader in the midst of events that can feel unexpected and contingent. But Shklovsky’s second comment about literature – his ‘or two’ – is that accidentally tripping over your shoelace is also nothing like reading an accident in a book. This difference tells us something about the deceptiveness of narrative’s apparently open future and about the doubled effect of reading contingency. The experience of reading a written narrative accident depends on the distinction between the accident’s indication of the story’s open future and the accident’s same enclosure inside of a predetermined and already written, narrative future. But this distinction always involves a relation of dependency. To entirely consider narrative accidents indicative of an open future would be to downplay narrative’s unique temporal structure as a form governed by temporal closure, in which time runs both backwards and forwards between events, and the reader can turn to the future out of order. But to treat everything in narrative as determined by the ‘motto of Fate’ (Monk 1993, 79) would be to neglect the affective pull of reading stories, in which the closed future is experienced as open, and the narrative made vividly present in the reading process. This relation of dependency results in a contradictory, even paradoxical, narratological understanding of accidents. It requires less a ‘harmonious synthesis’, as Jonathan Culler (1981, 187) would put it, speaking of a similar contradiction at play in the Formalist distinction between story

188  Coda and discourse, than a doubled and often conflicted approach to narrative’s dual temporality. It may be that this contradictory understanding underwrites every aspect of narrative comprehension, but it is accidents that make the forceful nature of this antagonism between a closed and an open future explicit. In this study, the relations between living contingency and reading contingency have been largely explored through the lens of narrative. In this way, Reading Contingency makes a number of points of contact with recent work in book history and the sociology of the text, which have also engaged with the notion of contingency in terms of the book’s physical medium. These alternate accounts of reading, exemplified by Christina Lupton’s recent Reading and the Making of Time, open up this study’s narratological analysis to considerations of reading in a broader media ecology. Lupton asks, for instance, what happens to the experience of reading contingency for a medium that lacks the tactile wholeness of the physical book? We cannot so easily, after all, turn to the end of the text when reading a digital novel or a serialised publication (2018, 129). A cross-media extrapolation of Reading Contingency’s account of written narrative’s necessary future might consider, then, not just the digital or serialised equivalent of turning the page (such as scrolling to the bottom of a page on a PDF copy of a novel) but also the philosophical question of the ontological status of these different mediums’ futures, which for a digital text would have to involve consideration the document’s coding and the screen’s pixellation among other medium-specific features, rather than the paper page. Furthermore, sociological strands of book history would ask what space there is for different kinds of reader in a focus on contingency’s narrative comprehension. What might we make, for instance, of what Merve Emre terms ‘bad readers’, those who are ‘socialised into the practices of readerly identification, emotion, action, and interaction’ in opposition to ‘good’, ‘literary’, or more critically suspicious readers (2017, 3)? If narrative, as this study suggests, mediates temporal experience, and if we accept the implications that stem from this – from teleological retrospection to contingency’s temporal undecidability – then I would suggest that readers of contingency differ by degree rather than by kind. It strikes me that any reading of a novel in which an accident happens, irrespective of whether I interpret the event differently to a friend, skim across the page, or put the book down half way through, actualises the text through the same doubled temporal structure: the entangled experience of an open and contingent perspectival present with awareness of that future’s foreclosure and necessity in the same moment. If this is the case for reading written narrative, how might different kinds of ‘reader’, used metaphorically here, relate to the experience of a contingent event in temporal experience? Reading Contingency has sought to suggest that despite the numerous theoretical injunctions to resist reducing

Coda  189 contingency to necessity, the possibility for this conversion persists because of narrative comprehension. Different accounts of reading contingency abound in this study, then, from the conspiracy aficionado intent on rooting out shadowy determination to those happy with the chance and accident of history. Nonetheless, I would suggest that the sticky persistence of narrative comprehension, and therefore the possibility of contingency’s retrospective configuration, subtends the experience of contingency for different kinds of reader, to at least a minimal degree. In other words, because contingency’s philosophical undecidability means that, as Žižek puts it, one cannot be entirely sure of modality’s constancy in hindsight, we might say that the model of narrative comprehension offered here that produces this undecidability persists for contingency’s many different readers. The point, then, is to be aware of the possibility for this conversion in every account of narrative’s mediation of temporal experience. In this sense, I think, we return to the foundational histories of chance and of causal interpretation that ground this study to account for different readers. If stories and narrative mediate the experience of accidents and contingency in temporal experience, then a similar dependency between an open and a seemingly closed future emerges in the experience of accidents in real life. It is not that the actual future exists as pre-written in the way that it does in fiction, but narrative comprehension dictates a phenomenological experience of time in which we anticipate that we will look back on unexpected events in the terms of stories, and thus, that accidents will be subjected to a narrative temporality once they happen. With this backward glance, accidents capitulate to a narrative structure that reads causality and end-orientation into their contingent appearance. Even if a thing appears to happen out of nowhere, we might read it inside of a progressive causal system after the fact, and even if a thing happens entirely by chance, retrospection has the capacity to remodel that event in terms of fateful comprehension. The dynamics of anticipation and retrospection, then, unsettle the easy certainty of knowing whether an accident is an accident, or whether what happened did not have to happen, because of the way in which they grasp the raw data of life into the configuring structure of narrative. In the light of this, one of the contributions Reading Contingency makes to recent work in book history is this study’s effort to unsettle the common-sense distinction between time’s contingency and the book’s necessity. To return to Christina Lupton’s brilliant work on the history of non-linear reading, material books also allow the reader both to glimpse the determinate future to come and to recognise the contingency of how things come to be. Books, far from locking readers into a linear, successive march, also uniquely enable readers ‘to skip, or focus on, or tear out pages, to access books randomly, or to mix them up’ (2018, 97; see also Rohrbach 2018). Lupton’s argument builds on an account

190  Coda of readers in the eighteenth century who resisted the book’s linear pull and progressive dynamics of reading that I have explored in this study. But in seeking to challenge plot-oriented accounts of reading by pointing to how random-access reading introduces the reader to the book’s, and life’s, contingency, there is a sense that Lupton forgoes a more nuanced account of contingency in the phenomenology of time and narrative. This is not a criticism: after all, that isn’t the project of her study. But I would suggest that this is where we might find a point of shared contact between Lupton’s work and this study. Specifically, where Lupton’s book history approach understands the book’s necessity through the lens of life’s contingency, Reading Contingency’s narratological focus understands life’s contingency through the terms of the book’s necessity. In other words, both Lupton’s study and my own describe reading to involve a doubled, irregular, and often contradictory temporality. But whereas Lupton’s book history perspective suggests that the history of reading is also the history of readers making contingency out of the book’s material necessity, and therefore understanding reading through life’s contingency, Reading Contingency complements this by suggesting that the history of living contingency is also the history of understanding living contingency through the book’s material necessity. If philosophical discussions of contingency can tell us something about the role of accident in narrative, and narratological approaches to the dynamics of reading can tell us something about the operations of narrative at play in the philosophy of contingency, then it follows that narrative and the phenomenology of reading can help to make sense of life and the phenomenology of living. Reading, then, and its doubled experience of an open and a closed future, of contingency and necessity, and of the anticipation of backwards comprehension from an ending, model and inform the interpretative dynamics involved when experiencing an accident in real life. As Shklovsky says, step accidentally on your untied shoelace, fall down, and you’ll learn something about accidents in fiction. Narrative is replete in chance, and novels and films can draw us into their perspectival worlds in ways that make the story’s events feel contingent and accidental. But this is only half of the lesson. After all, chance in life is different to chance in written narrative fiction, since a book’s or a film’s future is materially written and inevitable in a way that it is not for real life. And yet, the interpretative doubleness involved in the experience of reading or watching an accident, in which an accident is comprehended as both accidental and inevitable, or chanceful and fateful, at the same time also instructs us in the kinds of narrative comprehension involved in an experience of an actual accident in real life. The dynamics of anticipation and retrospection in life can render chance into something like fate, accident into inevitability, and contingency into necessity, through the backward glance of causal interpretation and narrative configuration, and it is in

Coda  191 the interpretative dynamics of reading or watching written narrative, I have argued, in which we find this dual experience most explicitly modeled. In written narrative, accidents are doubly chanceful and fated, and we read with the expectation of a teleological interpretation of the story’s events that we will draw in hindsight; in the narrative comprehension of accidents in real life, accidents submit to the trappings of fateful interpretation through retrospective configuration into narrative, as if experienced in terms of a provisionally completed story. Reading can therefore instruct us in the kinds of comprehension that play out in our experience of actual accidents, even if accidents in written narrative and actual accidents indicate very different futures. To the shared experience of chance’s doubled nature, this study says, through reading contingency one might also understand a thing or two about living contingency.

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Index

Agamben, Giorgio 31 Ahmed, Sara 53, 138 Althusser, Louis 33 Anderson, Perry 15 Anticipation 6–9, 18, 20, 22, 23, 39–40, 43, 45–47, 48–50, 68–70, 129, 133, 136, 138–139, 144, 170, 173, 185; anticipation of endings 54–57; see also Retrospection Aristotle 6–7, 108 Attridge, Derek 32 Augury 67, 91 Badiou, Alain 27, 33, 44–48, 50–60, 62, 63 Bakhtin, M. M. 47–48 Balibar, Étienne 31 Ballard, J. G 28, 32, 132–133 Barad, Karen 33 Barker, Nicola 27, 34, 64–77 Barthes, Roland 74, 84, 91, 95, 132 Baudrillard, Jean 18, 32 Beck, Ulrich 5, 132 Beckman, Karen 132 Belletto, Steven 31 Bennett, Alice 63 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, 32 Bergson, Henri 24, 92 Berlant, Lauren 156 Bhattacharya, Tithi 61 Bianchi, Emanuela 24, 31, 32, 33 Bildungsroman 43, 47, 50 Bistoen, Gregory 163, 185 Boddy, Kasia 32, 60, 62 Bordwell, David 132 Boxall, Peter 31, 33 Brassier, Ray 92 Breu, Christopher 32 Brockmeier, Jens 84 Brooks, Peter 11, 91–92, 101–105, 110, 126

Brouillette, Sarah 31 Brown, Wendy 15, 23 Bruckner, René Thoreau 156 Bryant, Levi 33 Butte, George 186 Carroll, Noël 63 Caruth, Cathy 162, 164, 167, 185 Casper, Monica J. 157 Causation: backwards causation 10, 55–57, 65, 68–72, 110, 187; causality and knowledge 3, 8, 29–30, 78–83, 86, 89, 106, 176, 179–184; doubled causation 86, 98–100, 168–169, 176, 179–184; narrative theory 8–10, 95–100, 125–126; structural causation 73–74, 131, 135, 147–150, 154, 156, 158; traumatic causation 159–160, 167–169, 176–177; uncertain causation 4, 7–8, 24, 64–65, 77–90, 131, 179–184 Caygill, Howard 30, 31, 136, 157 Coetzee, J. M. 28, 96, 115–125 Chance: doubled experience of chance 1–2, 10, 26, 28, 90, 95, 97–100, 184, 188–191; gambling 66, 72–73, 91; the history of chance 3–6 Class 130, 133–134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 154 Clinamen 33 Coincidence 27, 33, 49, 64–77, 78, 81, 86, 90, 91, 99 Colebrook, Clare 33, 88 Connolly, William E. 30 Connor, Steven 16, 31 Conspiracy 78, 79, 83, 89, 91, 92, 189; coincidence and conspiracy 72–76; postmodernism and conspiracy 18–19, 21, 32

208 Index Contemporaneity see Epochal Temporality Contingent futurity see Futurity Conway, Daniel W. 92 Cooper, Melinda 30, 63 Craps, Stef 163, 185 Cronenberg, David 133 Crosthwaite, Paul 164 Crownshaw, Richard 157, 185 Culler, Jonathan 92, 187 Currie, Gregory 125 Currie, Mark 11, 32, 33, 83–84, 91, 103–104, 110, 117, 125, 126 Daly, Nicholas 132 Dannenberg, Hillary 31, 69–70, 98–100, 115, 125 Davies, Paul 67 Deconstruction: 14, 32, 136, 167 Deixis: periodisation 11–14; reading 97–98, 101–103, 105, 115, 118–119, 123, 182 Déjà vu 32, 165, 180 Deleuze, Gilles 24, 26, 33, 87–89, 92, 181 Derrida, Jacques 6–7, 32, 33, 43, 62 Detective thriller 74, 79–80, 90 Determinism 3–4, 9, 17, 19, 22, 30, 32, 56, 65–72, 74, 76, 81, 84–90, 91–92, 104, 106–107, 120–123, 125, 181, 182–183, 187, 189 Deus ex machina 51, 59, 63 Dice 6, 24, 45, 87–89, 92, 181 Dimock, Wai Chee 30, 157, 158 Dinnen, Zara 42 Disaster 5, 25–26, 30, 82, 147, 156, 173 Doane, Mary Anne 132 Doherty, Melanie 185 Dubey, Madhu 31 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 25–7 Durham, Scott 156 Edwards, Caroline 33 Edwards, Erica 157 Egan, Jennifer 28, 159–177 Eisenstein, Paul 156 Elias, Amy E. 164 Elsaesser, Thomas 164 Elliott, Jane 32, 49–50, 75, 147, 151, 157, 158 Emre, Merve 188 Epochal temporality 11–14, 16, 19, 31, 32

Ermarth, Elizabeth 15 Eshel, Amir 33 Ethics 8, 28, 60, 62, 63, 121, 129–132, 135–148, 151, 154, 154, 156, 157, 158 Evans, Joel 33 Event 7, 24, 27, 29, 32–33, 38, 41, 44–47, 48, 50, 53–54, 57, 60, 62, 63, 86, 106; quasi-event 141, 145, 148–150, 154–5 Everett, Wendy 132 Farmer, Paul 157 Fate 2, 8–11, 25–26, 28, 65, 70–72, 86, 90, 91, 97, 112–114, 119–125, 159, 184, 187–191; see also Determinism; Necessity; Teleology Felman, Shoshana 185 Felski, Rita 31, 32, 47 Film/film theory 1, 9, 11, 30, 125, 129, 132, 139, 156, 190 Fludernik, Monika 10, 125, 126 Focalisation 52, 66, 80, 97, 101, 123, 125, 139, 145–146, 149, 157 Forecast 65–66, 69, 72, 76, 91, 148 Foreshadowing 39, 67–70, 72, 91 Franklin, Seb 185 Freedom/free will 73–76, 119–122, 143 Frow, John 17–18, 31 Furlani, Andre 20 Futurity 2–3, 14, 22–27, 29, 32–33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 47–50, 57, 59, 60, 77, 129, 160, 167, 169; blocked futurity 14–22, 23, 48–49, 133, 164; written narrative and the future 1–2, 9, 11, 26, 68–69, 70–71, 95–97, 100–106, 118–125, 179–184, 187–191 Fyfe, Paul 29, 30, 31 Gallop, Jane 185 Galloway, Alexander R. 33 Galtung, Johann 149–150, 157 Gammage, Jennifer O. 91, 184, 185 Genette, Gérard 68, 116, 126 Gibbs, Alan 163 Giddens, Anthony 5 Gildea, Niall 31 Giroux, Henry A. 130, 156, 157 Giroux, Susan Searls 130, 156 Globalisation 3, 4–5, 15, 18–19, 30, 74, 122 Graham, Stephen 30

Index  209 Green, Judith 29 Green, Steven J. 91 Greenberg, Judith 185 Grener, Adam 30, 67 Grewal, David Singh 91 Grishakova, Maria 82, 125 Grosz, Elizabeth 24–25, 92 Hacking, Ian 3–4, 29 Haggis, Paul 28, 34, 129–145 Hågglund, Martin 33 Hallward, Peter 62 Hamilton, Ross 6–7, 29, 31 Harbord, Janet 30, 132 Harman, Graham 33 Harootunian, Harry 32 Harvey, David 4, 30, 32 Hawley, Noah 27, 34, 65, 76–90 Hayles, Katherine N. 30 Heise, Ursula K. 17, 30, 32 Heller, Joseph 19–21, 32, 37, 62 Herman, David 91, 97–98, 101, 125 History: end of history 15–16, 32; historiography 30, 91; trauma 163–164 Holland, Eugene 92 Holland, Mary K. 31, 34, 58, 61 Homes, A. M. 21, 27, 32, 37–63 Horowitz, Evan 31 Hsu, Hsuan L. 130, 156 Hutcheon, Linda 31 Hungerford, Amy 12 Identification 96–98, 101, 104–105, 111, 115, 117–123, 134, 141, 171, 173–175, 177, 182–183, 188 Inequality 28, 131, 134–135, 136, 138, 147–150, 153, 155, 157 Intention 1, 7–8, 21, 44, 75, 79, 91 Interruption 20, 22–23, 32, 37, 42, 43–44, 48–49, 51, 60, 65, 112, 119, 133, 143, 145, 147, 166, 169–170, 178, 179 Iqtidar, Humeira 75 Iser, Wolfgang 12, 31, 102 Jagoda, Patrick 30, 156 Jameson, Fredric 15–17, 23, 30, 32 Jenkins, Keith 31 Jensen, Robert 130, 156 Johnston, Adrian 183–184, 186 Jordan, Julia 29, 30, 31, 92

Kafalenos, Emma 10–11, 30, 92, 126 Kaplan, E. Ann 185 Kelly, Adam 31, 34, 170 Kermode, Frank 63 Kern, Stephen 138, 156 Kilby, Jane 185 Knapp, Kathy 34, 62 Kukkonen, Karin 119 Labour 5, 30, 41, 61, 63, 140–141, 146 Laclau, Ernesto 28, 62, 131, 142–143, 155, 156 Laine, Tarja 139, 146 Laub, Dori 185 LeClair, Thomas 32 Lemke, Thomas 33 Levine, Caroline 132 Leys, Ruth 146, 185, 186 Life 150–154, 158 Lloyd, Christopher 151 Lupton, Christina 30, 102, 125, 126, 186–190 Luck 116, 134 Luckhurst, Roger 31, 163, 185 Lyotard, Jean-François 1, 17, 31, 32, 62 Lukács, Georg 125 Malabou, Catherine 28–29, 136, 156, 160, 167–172, 176–184, 186 Malina, Debra 118 Mancing, Howard 43 Marais, Michael 121 Marks, Peter 31 Martin, Randy 5, 157 Martinon, Jean-Paul 22–23, 32 McCarthy, Anna 30 McCarthy, Tom 28, 34, 158–162, 177–184 McGowan, Todd 33, 136–137, 140, 156 McGurl, Mark 185 McHale, Brian 31 Meeter, Martijn 185 Meillassoux, Quentin 24, 33, 156 Melley, Timothy 32, 74–75, 91 Memory 29, 55, 58, 75, 79, 80, 85, 185; traumatic memory 150, 155, 159–163, 166, 167–168, 169–177, 178–182, 185 Metalepsis 116–122, 126 Miller, D. A. 63 Miller, J. Hillis 54 Miller, Sydney 31, 185, 186

210 Index Mimesis 108, 108–115, 124, 159, 178 Mink, Louis O. 30 Modality 2, 5, 7, 28, 49, 65, 77, 78, 90, 95, 97, 101, 104–107, 113–114, 123–125, 130, 155, 156, 184, 189 Modernism 4, 13, 30, 31 Modernity 3–5, 13, 17, 29, 30, 132–134, 157 Monk, Leland 29, 30, 31, 91, 187 Morson, Gary Saul 56–57, 68, 126 Mouffe, Chantal 28, 131, 142–143, 155, 156 Narrative: closure 50–62; chronotope 47–49; endings 50–62; episodic structure 41–42, 47, 50, 51, 58, 110–111; identity 109, 111–113; narrativity 82, 84–85, 97, 109, 112–113, 123, 125, 169, 176; necessity 10, 27, 30, 78, 84–89, 95–97, 104, 104–115, 119–125, 159, 183–184, 189–190; phenomenological narratology 100–106, 108–115; post-classical narratology 95, 97–100; temporality (see Plot; Phenomenology of reading; Teleological retrospection) Necessity 2, 8, 9–10, 24, 28, 29, 45, 53, 57, 65, 78, 106–107; of contingency 5, 24, 92, 136; politics of necessity 136–7, 140; narrative (see Narrative necessity) Network 18, 30, 42, 66, 67, 132, 156, 178, 185 Neuroscience 28, 136, 167, 169, 177, 185, 186 New materialism 13, 24–25, 47, 32–33, 156, 158 Ngai, Sianne 74, 91 Nilges, Mathias 31 Nixon, Rob 30, 157 North, Michael 31 O’Malley, Pat 157 Olmsted, Kathryn S. 73 Ontology 23–25, 28, 29–30, 33, 62, 68, 106–107, 136–137, 141–142, 144, 151, 153–154, 156, 157, 167, 182; in narrative theory 95, 96–103, 106, 116–8, 126, 188; see also Storyworld/fictional world Osborne, Peter 12, 31, 32

Particularity 138, 151, 153 Patriarchy 61, 75, 91 Paulson, William 30 Pellow, C. Kenneth 126 Phelan, James 55 Phenomenology: of reading 2, 26, 30, 96, 100–106, 108–115, 118, 124–125, 181–184, 190; of time 10, 14, 16–19, 86, 106–108, 108–115, 189 Phillips, Adam 2 Picaresque 27, 37, 38, 41–43, 47–51, 57–62 Pier, John 25, 85, 126 Plot 57–59, 108–115, 125, 131–132, 163, 171–172, 187, 190 Politics of contingency 28, 33, 62, 129–131, 134–135, 136–138, 139–145, 154–156 Popper, Karl 9, 30, 92, 125 Povinelli, Elizabeth 140–141, 148, 158 Prigogine, Ilya 30, 86 Queer theory 24–25, 33 Rabinowitz, Peter 63 Radical contingency 25, 28, 45, 87, 92, 129–131, 135–138, 141–45, 148, 150, 154, 155–156, 167, 169, 170, 172, 181 Radstone, Susannah 13, 185 Ramey, Joshua 30 Reading: doubled temporality of reading: 2–3, 9–11, 68–70, 95–96, 119–125 (see also Phenomenology of reading); and mimesis 108–115; sociology of reading 188 Realism: philosophical 33, 156; literary 95–96, 122 Reith, Gerda 29, 66, 82, 126 Responsibility 7–8, 30, 38, 44, 49, 51, 61, 78, 134–135, 157 Retrospection 1, 9–11, 18, 24, 27, 28–29, 39–40, 44–47, 50–62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 77–83, 83–90, 91, 92, 96, 101–102, 105–108, 111–114, 123–125, 126, 136, 159–160, 162–163, 167–71, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181–182, 180–184, 188–191; anticipation of retrospection 10–11, 45, 55, 68, 101–102, 105, 110–115, 171, 190; teleological retrospection 28, 50–62, 65, 78,

Index  211 83–90, 92, 113, 123–125, 159, 169, 177, 181, 188 Richardson, Brian 8, 63, 91, 95, 98–99, 115, 125 Ricoeur, Paul: and memory 185; and mimesis 11, 19, 28, 96, 105, 108–115, 123–125, 126, 159, 163; and plot 56, 63 Risk/risk theory 3, 5–6, 30, 134–135, 154, 155, 157 Robbins, Bruce 30 Robinson, Keith 46 Rohrbach, Emily 126, 189 Rohy, Valerie 9–10, 33 Rose, Nikolas 157 Rosenberg, Jordy 33 Royle, Nicholas 33 Rowland, Antony 185 Rozario, Kevin 157 Rudrum, David 8, 31, 91 Ryan, Marie-Laure 63, 125, 126 Salisbury, Laura 156 Sauri, Emilio 31 Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 132 Serpell, C. Namwali 186 Sharma, Sanjay 135 Shaw, Sharon 91 Sheldon, Rebekah 51 Sherrill, Rowland 49–50 Shklovsky, Viktor 187–190 Silver, Sean 29, 126 Simine, Silke Arnold-de 185 Simmons, William Paul 157 Simulation 18–19, 32, 133, 156, 170, 175, 178, 179–182 Smith, Daniel W. 88, 92 Srnicek, Nick 33 Stavris, Nicholas 31 Stein, Gertrude 64, 69 Stengers, Isabelle 30, 86 Sternberg, Meir 119 Stonebridge, Lyndsey 185 Storyworld/fictional world 8–9, 95–100, 101–105, 110–111, 114–119, 121–123, 125, 126, 177, 182–184 Structural violence 130–131, 145, 149–150, 154–156, 157 Tadiar, Neferti X. M. 30, 153, 158 Teleology 10–11, 14–16, 22, 28, 31, 32, 47, 49–51, 55–56, 61–62, 65, 71, 78, 83–90, 92, 96, 105, 107, 110, 113–114, 123–124, 159,

169, 172, 177, 181, 188, 191; see also Determinism; Necessity; Teleological retrospection Tense 21, 52, 103, 115, 122, 126, 161 Thompson, Peter 33 Todorov, Tzvetan 79 Torgovnick, Marianna 63 Trauma theory 28, 159–160, 162–164, 165, 167–169, 172, 185 Trotter, David 30, 186 Tyson, Lois 32 Uncertainty 4–6, 17, 29, 30, 38–40, 45–46, 117–119, 121, 129; uncertainty of contingency 106–108, 113–114, 126 Unevenness 5–6, 28, 30, 131, 135, 138, 143, 145–156, 157 Unforeseeable 1, 3, 4, 6–7, 9, 22, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40–41, 42–43, 44–46, 57, 60, 62, 88, 104, 110, 113, 118, 121, 136, 143, 145, 148, 162, 165–166, 170, 172, 179, 184 Universality 131, 137, 142, 145, 150–154, 156, 157, 158 Untimely 22, 25, 29, 31 Utopianism 30, 33, 60, 62, 133, 156, 185 Vanhuele, Stijn 163, 185 Vermeulen, Pieter 185 Virilio, Paul 5, 30, 32 Virno, Paolo 32 Wang, Maria Su 95 Ward, Jesmyn 28, 34, 130–131, 145–156 Weaver, Harlan 157 Wellbury, David E. 30, 76 White, Hayden 91 Whiteness 146–147 Wicks, Ulrich 41, 43, 48 Williams, Raymond 4, 30 Williams, Skip 18 Williams, Tyler 186 Wolf, Werner 81–82, 118 Wood, David 14–15 Woods, Clyde 157 Wootton, David 29 Wosnitzer, Robert 130, 156 Žižek, Slavoj 86, 106–108, 124, 126, 186, 189