The Business of Coincidence

Coincidentally, in the recent past I've run across a number of references to the subject of coincidence in fact and fiction. But perhaps it's no coincidence. I'm probably extra-sensitive to the issue because of my own use of the device in a novel I'm currently writing. Here are some of the comments I've seen:

The narrator in Raul Ruiz's film Mysteries of Lisbon observes that "in life, there are events and coincidences of such extravagance that no novelist would ever dare to invent them." Ruiz (or, one should say, the novelist who wrote the book on which Ruiz's movie is based) does of course dare to invent precisely such extravagant coincidences.

W.G Sebald, in an interview at Queens College in 2001, wondered about the function of coincidence-- how he/we use it to make sense out of nonsense:

"I think it's this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it's not obtrusive. But, you know, it does come up in the first book, in "Vertigo," a good deal. I don't particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more . . . and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn't, as we all know." (from The New Yorker, August 30, 2001)

Julian Barnes is not averse to using coincidence in his fiction. Or to wryly commenting on it. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot may or may not speak for Barnes. Braithwaite, who is full of snap opinions about life and literature, "doesn't much care for coincidences" in either. "There's something spooky about them; you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan... I prefer to feel that things are chaotic..." But what snappish Braithwaite finds particularly annoying is that "in the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, 'It's just like Anthony Powell.'"

As for coincidences in books, Braithwaite calls them a lazy stratagem. "There's something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can't help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack." Examples he cites: the troubador who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers-- in other words, all the staples of old romance fiction.

But, as Braithwaite does not mention, coincidence is also central to the even older traditional kinship reunion plot-- what some critics have called the most powerful use of coincidence, as in the Oedipus story.

For modernists, and post-modernists, Braithwaite does have a way of making coincidences acceptable: call them ironies, he says. The modern mode. In that form, who could be against it? "And yet," he continues, "I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn't just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence." Which is presumably Barnes's own ironic opinion on the subject.