Submitted by Anne Dalke on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 12:33am.
I was raised on a farm, and I like to say that the reason I became an academic was to get out of the garden. I found I much preferred spending my summers in an air-conditioned library, manipulating words on a page, to spending them in 100-degree heat, picking beetles off the beans. In the terms of this current conversation, I might say that I chose control over chance (or what, in the perverse language of the rural South, was known as "providence"): I liked being able to order and see the end of my work, rather than feeling subject to the bad luck of weather and infestation.
All of which is to say that I find this argument, about developing our abilities to make meaning from randomness, a stretch; it's a hard one for me to swallow. I'm getting some assistance in digestion, however, from a good book of literary criticism I'm reading now, called Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel, by Leland Monk. Monk's argument is that the history of thinking about chance is in general a history of its marginalization. He suggests that--since we can't bear unpredictable--what we do is turn it into a narrative: make it into "providence," or fate, or the plot line of a novel, where what appears to be random turns out (think: Dickens) to exhibit a logic, to make perfect sense. Monk demonstrates this by looking @ the way in which George Eliot purges chance from her novel Middlemarch, @ the way Joseph Conrad calls established notions of causality into question in his novel Chance, and @ the way in which James Joyce's novel Ulysses marks a limit to the representation of chance in narrative.
What I'm realizing, from reading this text, is why I so like narratives with strong endings: they represent, for me, a way to get out of the hail--or whatever else might unexpectedly befall us. Chance is what cannot be represented in narrative, and defines the fundamental limit to its workings.
Taking Chance Seriously
I was raised on a farm, and I like to say that the reason I became an academic was to get out of the garden. I found I much preferred spending my summers in an air-conditioned library, manipulating words on a page, to spending them in 100-degree heat, picking beetles off the beans. In the terms of this current conversation, I might say that I chose control over chance (or what, in the perverse language of the rural South, was known as "providence"): I liked being able to order and see the end of my work, rather than feeling subject to the bad luck of weather and infestation.
All of which is to say that I find this argument, about developing our abilities to make meaning from randomness, a stretch; it's a hard one for me to swallow. I'm getting some assistance in digestion, however, from a good book of literary criticism I'm reading now, called Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel, by Leland Monk. Monk's argument is that the history of thinking about chance is in general a history of its marginalization. He suggests that--since we can't bear unpredictable--what we do is turn it into a narrative: make it into "providence," or fate, or the plot line of a novel, where what appears to be random turns out (think: Dickens) to exhibit a logic, to make perfect sense. Monk demonstrates this by looking @ the way in which George Eliot purges chance from her novel Middlemarch, @ the way Joseph Conrad calls established notions of causality into question in his novel Chance, and @ the way in which James Joyce's novel Ulysses marks a limit to the representation of chance in narrative.
What I'm realizing, from reading this text, is why I so like narratives with strong endings: they represent, for me, a way to get out of the hail--or whatever else might unexpectedly befall us. Chance is what cannot be represented in narrative, and defines the fundamental limit to its workings.
Emerging Genres: Form and Transformation