Reading Contingency

The Accident in Contemporary Fiction

David Wylot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000763324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

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.

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

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.

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 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 adopts Ricardo (337), the child orphaned by the crash, or when George 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 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 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, where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Accident and Contingency
• Part 1 Time
• Part 2 Narrative
• Part 3 Accident Narratives
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index