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© 2019 AIPR, Inc. Australian Journal of Parapsychology
ISSN: 1445-2308 Volume 19, Number 1, pp. 45-75
45
Coincidence in Fiction and Literature
LAURENCE BROWNE
Abstract: A coincidence, which we can define as ‘a notable co-
occurrence of events’, is fairly common in everyday life, though
interpretations as to why coincidences occur, or what they mean, most
certainly differ. There are a number of books on coincidences and a
number of theories as well as to what they might or might not mean,
from mathematical probability to Jungian synchronicity. However, less
has been written about the use of coincidence in fiction and literature—
and ‘literature’ in this essay refers to literary fiction, to be
distinguished by its artistic or aesthetic merit from popular fiction,
though the two may overlap. There have been very different attitudes
to coincidence over time, and one can trace its evolution in literature
from the fatalism of Ancient Greece to the ‘providential tradition’ of
the Victorian era, where the good are rewarded with positive
coincidences and outcomes as visible signs of God’s providence, defined
in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as ‘the protective care of God or
Nature.’ This approach is largely dispensed with in the secularism of
the 20th century, though the use of coincidences by authors is certainly
not dispensed with, and here particular mention should be made of
Boris Pasternak and his purposeful and wide-ranging employment of
coincidences in Doctor Zhivago. A further shift takes place in the later
decades of the 20th century, with the advent of postmodernism and its
penchant for ambiguity, including when it comes to the understanding
and interpretation of coincidences.
Keywords: causality, chance, coincidence, fate, irony, hidden sympathies,
providence, synchronicity.
INTRODUCTION
At around the turn of the millennium and while staying with my
parents in Guildford, Surrey, I decided I would make a concerted effort to
read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, first published in 1880.
According to my mother, this had been her father’s favourite book. My
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grandfather had travelled on the trans-Siberian railway some 30 times to get
to and from his tea business in Shanghai, and also spoke some Russian, so I
thought I ought to give it a go. So one morning I went into Waterstones in
North Street, headed for the classical books section and began leafing
through some of the translations of The Brothers Karamazov, trying to
decide which one to select. Then, quite unexpectedly, a tall fair-haired man
addressed me from a few feet away and pointing to a particular volume said,
“Why don’t you try that one?”
So I picked it out, had a look at the front and back covers, and then
on impulse found myself asking him if he was the translator. He looked
shocked, as if caught out, and immediately turned on his heel and walked
quickly out of the bookshop. I was rather startled at this but later my
suspicions seemed to be confirmed when I saw a leaflet for a Slavonic
conference taking place at Surrey University. Perhaps it was the direct and
almost proprietorial manner in which he addressed me that made me ask
him if he was the translator. I was sorry he had left so abruptly but was
sufficiently intrigued to have a good look at the version he had
recommended. The first thing I noticed about the volume in my hands was
that it was called, uniquely among the translations, The Karamazov
Brothers (Dostoevsky, 1994). This also intrigued me, and given that I had
been directly recommended this translation, in all probability by the
translator himself, I bought it without regret and was to thoroughly enjoy
the lively and lucid rendering of this extraordinary work, Dostoevsky’s last
and perhaps his greatest novel.
Indeed, I read it twice and was very pleased with the translation skills
of Ignat Avsey, who was able unequivocally to bring the text to life in a
very direct and readable way. Although, in the back of my mind, I was on
the lookout for any other of Dostoevsky’s major novels translated by Avsey,
it was not until early 2018 that I discovered he had also translated The Idiot
(1874/2018), and on learning that I immediately ordered it. I had tried to
read The Idiot several years earlier but had given up. But now with Avsey’s
translation and perhaps also my own readiness for the book I was
immediately hooked and could definitely relate to the quote from Virginia
Woolf on the endorsements page:
The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms,
waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely
and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in,
whirled around, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy
rapture (Woolf, cited in Dostoevsky, 2018, p. i)
The seething whirlpool starts from the very first page, halfway
through which Dostoevsky plants a powerful coincidence that has an
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enormous influence on the plot. The two main protagonists of the novel,
Prince Myshkin and his nemesis Rogozhin, find themselves together in a
third class carriage of the train from Warsaw to St Petersburg and strike up
a conversation. The Prince has come all the way from Switzerland, where
he has been for five years to recuperate from a nervous ailment, while
Rogozhin is on a considerably shorter journey from much nearer St
Petersburg. Concerning this fateful encounter, Dostoevsky (1874/2018)
writes: “Had either of them been aware of what it was that united them,
they’d have wondered how it was that pure chance had brought them face to
face in a third-class compartment of the Warsaw-St Petersburg train” (p. 3).
But not only are Myshkin and Rogozhin travelling in this particular
third-class compartment, so too is another significant character in the novel,
the sly toady Lebedev, a troublemaking busybody who knows far too much
about Rogozhin’s affairs—much to the latter’s annoyance, though they have
never met. Thus, Dostoevsky provides the reader with a double coincidence
in the first few pages and does not let up with either the coincidences or the
sustained intensity as the story unfolds. In this way he by no means follows
the sentimental trajectory of a romantic novel where, for example, the
impoverished but noble heroine is suddenly found to be an heiress, as in
Jane Eyre. Dostoevsky’s use of coincidence ensures that characters of all
manner of social and emotional disposition are thrust into one another’s
company at a fast pace, more often than not resulting in outrageous scenes
that literally have to be read to be believed possible.
Coincidence Categories
In my book The Many Faces of Coincidence (2017) I have suggested
a basic fourfold categorisation of coincidences of all types. These would
range, at one extreme, from the stunning array of cosmic coincidences
underpinning the life-giving parameters of our universe and planet, to the
relatively prosaic everyday coincidences in people’s lives, which might be
interpreted as occurring quite by chance, or perhaps involving a rather more
mysterious power, as the above quote from Dostoevsky implies. Not
specifically included in this categorisation are the coincidences to be found
in fiction and literature, from fairy tales to Shakespeare to the works of
Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, all of which are saturated with
coincidences. Indeed, there is a Chinese saying, ‘no coincidence, no story’,
and one of the aims of this essay is to come to some determination as
regards the extent to which that is true.
The four broad coincidence categories outlined in Many Faces are: a)
random chance; b) natural causality; c) supernatural causality; d)
synchronicity (Browne, 2017, pp. 115-116, 176). These represent the four
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main ways in which coincidences are generally explained, be it by those
who see meaning in them or by those who do not. The categories are by no
means mutually exclusive and there is room for considerable overlap. For
instance, the coincidence described on the first page of The Idiot where the
two main protagonists meet in the same third class compartment of the
Warsaw-St Petersburg train could either be random chance or perhaps some
other force such as fate, destiny, or providence.
If the latter is the case, and Dostoevsky seems to hint that it is, then
any claim to reality outside the fictional scope of the novel is hugely
problematic from a scientific perspective as there is no way notions such as
fate or the hand of God can be empirically verified. Yet in the hands of a
skilled writer of fiction such ideas can be very convincing. They point to the
coincidence category of ‘supernatural causality’, which includes all ideas of
fate, providence, or the apparent attraction of affinities, and anecdotes
involving these sorts of interpretation are abundant in the many books in
circulation about amazing coincidences.
‘Natural causality’ as a coincidence category differs from
supernatural causality in that it can be empirically verified, as when two or
more people eat at the same restaurant on the same day and seemingly
independently come down with food poisoning. Natural causal chains are
similarly involved when two commuters from the same neighbourhood
come across one another going into work on the train. These are examples
of common cause coincidences (Reichenbach, 1991, p. 157), as are the
many simultaneous or near simultaneous discoveries and inventions in
science. A famous historical example of this is the application for a patent
for the telephone on the same day in 1876 by Alexander Bell and Elisha
Grey, though they were not the only contenders (Lander, 2017). What all
this points to, quite naturally, is that new discoveries are made when the
preconditions are there for them to be made, another famous example being
Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace and their parallel but quite separate
intellectual journeys to arrive at the theory of natural selection.
The above examples of common cause coincidences are to be
distinguished not only from chance coincidences but also from those that
result from direct cause and effect, as when one person steals another’s
invention, which is what Grey accused Bell of doing, or when someone
wins the lottery twice, not by chance, but because the outcome has been
fixed. A more recent accusation of invention and patent theft concerns
mobile phone technology, in particular the dispute between Apple and
Samsung, with the latter ordered by a California court in May 2018 to pay
more than $500 million for copying iPhone design patents (Elyachar, 2018).
But there is a grey area between natural and supernatural causality,
and this concerns the disputed field of parapsychology, which includes
telepathy, precognition, and other forms of extra-sensory perception. There
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have been a considerable number of double-blind experiments within the
sub-disciplines of parapsychology, with statistically significant results that
are unequivocal and consistent (e.g., Tart, 2009; Radin, 2013). Be that as it
may, the field is still very much off-limits for the scientific establishment
and this is presumably for ideological rather than strictly scientific reasons.
So for the time being at least, until the results of parapsychological research
are accepted within the scientific mainstream, coincidences with a possible
parapsychological origin must be considered a borderline phenomenon
operating at the intersection of the natural and supernatural causal
categories. Though very different from notions of fate or providence, they
do not adhere to a conventional explanation and therefore can to some
extent be considered ‘supernatural’, though proponents of parapsychology
would certainly query this (e.g., Dossey, 2019; Sheldrake, 2012).
Returning to the coincidence in the third class carriage and how it
might be categorised: it clearly cannot be due to common cause factors, as
with commuters travelling into town from the same suburb, for the Prince
has come all the way from Switzerland after an absence of five years.
Similarly, their meeting would not come under the fourth category of
'synchronicity’, the term coined by the psychologist C. G. Jung for a
specific class of coincidences that are characterised by the numinosity and
meaning they hold for the experiencer. Jung (1991) refers to an equivalence
of meaning between an external circumstance and the psychic state of an
individual that occurs during a synchronistic event, alongside a flash of
immediate insight that he called absolute knowledge (pp. 51, 124). There
may have been hints of some sort of affinity in their encounter but for
neither Prince Myshkin nor Rogozhin did it involve a meaningful
coincidence of the calibre outlined above. We are left therefore with
supernatural causality, and very likely Dostoevsky himself, particularly
given his strong religious beliefs, would have had no difficulty agreeing
with this assessment.
Coincidence and the Mythical Mind
It might be thought that for all forms of fictional composition, from
the Greek tragedies to South American magical realism, the author has a
built-in bird’s eye view of the direction of the story and therefore, like
Dostoevsky, can come to a decision whether to include a sense of fate,
destiny, or providence in the narrative. But this is certainly not the case. For
example, it would have been inconceivable in 5th century BCE Greece for a
tragedy not to have a predetermined and fatal outcome, the seeds of which
are sown at the start of the story. The tragedies were always the acting out
of myths well known to the audience who by watching them dramatised
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would presumably have a much greater cathartic experience than simply
listening to a storyteller. The playwrights could make adjustments for
dramatic effect, especially with the dialogue, but they could not veer from
the core elements of the myth. And when in a Greek tragedy the mores are
transgressed, especially within families, the fates are inexorable in their
punishment, as is graphically portrayed in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, a
very brief summary of which follows:
At the birth of Oedipus, his father Laius consults an oracle and is told
that because of his own transgressions he would be killed by his son who
would then marry his mother. Laius orders his wife, Jocasta, to kill their
baby but she cannot and asks a servant to do so. The servant leaves the
infant exposed at the top of a mountain, where by chance he is found by a
shepherd who gives him to another shepherd who in turn brings the baby to
his master, the childless king of Corinth. Oedipus is duly adopted and
brought up as a prince. Then one fateful incident follows another until
Oedipus unwittingly kills his own father and then goes on after further
twists of fate to marry his mother. All is revealed at the end. Jocasta hangs
herself and Oedipus uses the pins from her gown to gouge out his eyes
(Sophocles, 1912/2018).
Apparent chance coincidences are very much the modus operandi of
fate in mythical literature, as well as in fairy tales. Take Briar Rose, for
example, of which there are many variations. In the Grimm Brothers’
(1909-1914/2001) version, a king and queen have longed for a child for
many years and when a beautiful daughter is born there is great rejoicing. A
celebratory feast is announced and 12 wise women are invited, though there
are 13 in the kingdom. Only twelve are invited because the king only has 12
golden plates. The feast is held and afterwards each of the 12 bestows a
blessing on the child. But just when the 11th has bestowed her gift, there is
a disturbance at the door and in comes the uninvited and furious 13th wise
woman who pronounces that in her 15th year the princess will prick her
finger on a spindle and fall down dead. Straight after that, she turns round
and storms out. The 12th wise woman then steps forward and says she
cannot negate the curse but can soften it, declaring that the princess will
indeed prick her finger on a spindle but will not die. Instead she will sleep
for 100 years.
Already in this first part of the story we have two crucial
coincidences. Firstly, there are 13 wise women but the king only has 12
golden plates. Clearly he lacks imagination because instead of finding a way
around this discrepancy, he decides to leave out one of the wise women, a
faux pas of hospitality of which he should surely have been aware. But then,
as we shall see, he seems not to have been the wisest of kings. The second
coincidence is absolutely essential for the progression of the story, and it is
that the entry of the 13th wise woman comes precisely after the 11th has
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given her blessing. This means that only the 12th is left to try to mitigate the
curse. Had she arrived any earlier, the combined wishes of the remaining
wise women would probably have been enough to outweigh the evil wish of
their sister, and had she arrived any later, there could have been no
softening of the curse and the princess would have died. For in fairy tales as
in myths, like that of Oedipus, when a prophecy is uttered its outcome is
certain, unless there is the sort of mitigation provided by another prophetic
figure like the 12th wise woman.
The king’s response to protect his daughter from the curse is to order
all spindles in the kingdom destroyed. But on the day of her 15th birthday,
the princess goes wandering through the castle and comes to a tower she has
never visited before. Now you would think that the king and queen would
take extra care to protect their daughter on that particular day but for a
reason not given in the story they are away from the castle, and the princess
is left alone to roam around by herself. So she goes up the tower, and at the
top of the stairs there is a small door with a key in the lock, which she
opens. She sees an old lady spinning flax on a spindle. The princess is
curious as she has never seen a spindle, and the old woman offers to show
her how to use it. But as soon as she starts to spin, she feels a prick in her
finger and falls into a deep sleep. At that moment, the king and queen return
from their outing and they also fall asleep, as does everyone else in the
palace, including all the animals and birds.
There are four main coincidences in this part of the story: the first
being that the king and queen are absent and allow their daughter to roam
around at will on her 15th birthday. It almost seems as if they want the
prophecy to be fulfilled, either that or they are just very unaware. The
second coincidence is that exactly on her 15th birthday the princess comes
across the tower for the first time, even though she has lived in the palace
all her life. Naturally enough she climbs up to the top, where her fate
awaits. The third coincidence is that the king and queen return at the exact
moment she pricks her finger, which means that they are back in time to fall
into the 100 year sleep along with the rest of the court. Had they returned
earlier, they may have wondered where the princess was and found her
before she could climb up to the little room. And had they come back later,
they might have avoided the spell, but for the completeness of the story they
need to be there when the princess awakens.
Another little anomaly is that the princess has to unlock the door at
the top of the tower to get in. But so fascinated is she with the spindle that
she does not stop to wonder how the old lady was able to enter in spite of
the locked door. Perhaps the old lady levitated and came through the
window or was able to appear out of the blue like Mary Poppins or, more
seriously, like Padre Pio, the remarkable Italian priest who died in 1968.
This is the fourth coincidence in this section and has a little more to it than
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simply fate masquerading as chance, as with the 13th wise woman coming
into the banquet hall when she does. Even if no explanations are given in
the Grimm Brothers’ version, parapsychological abilities are involved, as
they are in so many fairy tales. And because they are fairy tales, they are
never a surprise to the reader.
While all the living beings in the palace are in deepest slumber, a
hedge full of sharp thorns grows around the castle walls and in time covers
the whole castle so that it is invisible from outside. From time to time a
brave young man, spurred by the story of a beautiful princess asleep for 100
years within the castle, tries to cut his way through the hedge. However,
none of them get very far and perish in their attempts, impaled by the thorns
that will not allow them to progress.
Then one day, many years later, a young prince gets wind of the
legend of the sleeping beauty and decides he must get through the hedge
and find the princess. He refuses to be put off by what has happened to
those who have gone before. So he takes his sword and ventures forth. But
as he approaches the hedge it opens freely before him, closing behind as he
passes; he does not know it but on that very day the 100 years are up. When
he gets to the castle, he sees everyone fast asleep, including the princess
who he finds in the room at the top of the tower. Enraptured by her beauty,
he kisses her on the lips. She opens her eyes and smiles, and then all the
court as well as the birds and animals awaken. The king and queen are
overjoyed, and in due course the prince and princess get married and live
happily ever after (Grimm, 1909-1914/2001; Pullman, 2013, pp. 200-205).
This last section only has one major coincidence and that, of course,
is the prince arriving at the castle through a welcoming hedge on the exact
day the 100 years is complete. Clearly, it is his destiny to break the spell
and marry the princess, just as it was the fate of all the other brave young
men to die in the attempt to get through the hedge. And there we have the
difference between destiny and fate, with destiny much more of a positive
notion than fate, though the two terms are often used interchangeably. As
far as categorisation is concerned, all the coincidences that occur can really
only be understood as fate (or destiny) masquerading as chance
coincidences. Expressions such as ‘It so happened that on that day ...’ are
common and without such occurrences, the stories would not carry their
magical charge and would in effect be lifeless. Certainly, as far as myths,
legends and fairy tales go, ‘no coincidence, no story’ is absolutely par for
the course.
Providence in Literature
Just as fate can be differentiated from destiny so too can it from the
idea of providence, which essentially means a benevolent divine plan, a pre-
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Christian concept that was later adopted and strongly endorsed by Christian
theologians, including the highly influential St Augustine. Augustine
rejected “the concepts of both chance and fate,” and held that “divine
providence operates in all things, no matter how mundane and obscure”
(cited in Vargish, 1985, p. 18). Unlike fate, providence is not capricious,
though it may appear to be to those suffering, like Hamlet, from “the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Just before his death at the end of the
play, when Hamlet is offered a way of avoiding what is to be a fatal duel, he
includes in his refusal the idea that providence is fixed and that free will
cannot fight against it, whatever various fortune-telling systems might say,
be it the runes, astrology or palm reading. Hence Hamlet’s defiance of
augury in the following quote, and his conviction that all that can really be
achieved is readiness for what will come:
Horatio: If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair
hither, and say you are not fit.
Hamlet: Not a whit. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall
of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will
be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all
(Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2; pp. 210-215).
It was not until the modern era that the idea of God’s providence
holding sway over human affairs was seriously questioned in literature.
According to Thomas Vargish, author of The Providential Aesthetic in
Victorian Literature (1985), the first novelist in the English language to
overturn the ‘providential tradition’ of English literature was George Eliot,
and Vargish goes into great detail to show, novel by novel, how she moved
increasingly away from a providential perspective. Not entirely
unsurprisingly, one of the most important elements of the providential
tradition was the use of coincidences as an integral element of the plot. The
Victorian literary scholar Barbara Hardy puts it very simply: “Coincidence
is a symbol of providence” (cited in Vargish, 1985, p. 6). This is not so far
removed from how fairy tales operate and one only has to look at the
coincidences that are an essential part of the fabric of Charlotte Brontë’s
immensely popular Jane Eyre to see how fairy-tale like the book is.
Brontë’s use of coincidences in Jane Eyre (1847/1999), in terms of
the categorisation described earlier, is actually quite varied, and goes
beyond the usual mythological method of fate or destiny masquerading as
chance, or in this case the guiding hand of providence. There are,
nevertheless, a good number of these types of coincidences. For example,
when a distraught Jane decides to get away from Rochester after nearly
falling into a bigamous marriage, she makes her escape before dawn taking
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only 20 shillings and a small parcel of her belongings. She reaches the road
and hails the first coach that comes her way. Its destination is quite a
distance away, the cost is 30 shillings and Jane only has 20. The coachman
takes her as far as her money will allow and perhaps rather cruelly, though
Brontë makes no such aspersion, lets her out at a desolate moorland
crossroads where the nearest town is ten miles away.
This is the first coincidence, though Jane would not yet be aware of
it. The second is that she leaves her parcel on the coach and so is unable to
barter her belongings for food and shelter, and is therefore completely
destitute. After two nights on the moors and wandering around a nearby
hamlet becoming increasingly hungry but finding little sympathy amongst
the locals, she reaches the end of her tether. It is evening and has been
raining, and she dreads another night in the open air. She cries out loud:
Shall I be an outcast again this night? While the rain descends so, must I lay
my head on the cold, drenched ground? I fear I cannot do otherwise: for who
will receive me? But it will be very dreadful, with this feeling of hunger,
faintness, chill, and this sense of desolation – this total prostration of
hope.… Oh Providence! sustain me a little longer! Aid! – direct me!
(Brontë, 1847/1999, p. 291)
Jane has called out to ‘Providence’ and thereby to God. She has
spontaneously uttered a prayer in her misery with no expectation of it being
answered. She is outside the village and goes up a hill, looking for a hollow
to lie down in. But then she sees the flickering of a light in the distance. She
makes her weary way in its direction. The light comes from a solitary house
and she peeps through the window to see two graceful young women
discussing a German text. She is so taken with them that she forgets her
predicament until they are about to leave the room. Then she takes her
courage in her hands and knocks at the door. The door is answered by a
housekeeper who refuses to let Jane talk to her mistresses and shuts the door
on her, causing Jane to collapse on the doorstep in even greater anguish.
But unbeknownst to Jane, the master of the house and elder brother
of the two young women, St John Rivers, has arrived home at the same time
as Jane knocks on the door and waits and watches in the shadows. He
decides that Jane’s situation is genuinely unusual, that she is more than a
beggarwoman, and he allows her in over the objections of the housekeeper.
It is a clearly a major coincidence that Rivers arrives just at this moment. It
is also a speedy answer to Jane’s prayer and as such is completely
consonant with the providential tradition. The relationship between prayer
and coincidence is an interesting and subtle one, with sceptics dismissing
claims of answered prayer in terms of selection bias. Yet it has a long and
venerable tradition, with passages from the Bible to support it, as in James
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5:16 which includes this sentence: “The effectual fervent prayer of a
righteous man availeth much.” Then there is the famous saying of
Archbishop William Temple, which very much summarises the attitude of
those who believe that there is a very real connection between coincidence
and prayer: “When I pray, coincidences happen; when I do not, they don’t”
(cited in Inglis, 1990, p. 150).
From a providential perspective it is undoubtedly right that Jane’s
prayer should be answered, and this coincidence can be readily placed
within the coincidence category of supernatural causality. But this is only
one possible explanation, always apart from pure chance, though that would
certainly not have been Brontë’s intention. The other possible explanation is
that it is a synchronistic event, in other words a deeply experienced
meaningful coincidence. There is nothing specific in the text that suggests
this, however, and Jane herself would doubtless have seen it as a miraculous
and personally tailored answer to her prayer.
Answered prayer is not something explored in great detail by Jung in
his monograph (1991) on synchronicity. However, he does say that
synchronistic phenomena are involved (p. 141). From a Jungian perspective,
when prayer emanates from a depth of the psyche not normally accessed, an
archetype may be stimulated and while that does not cause synchronistic
events, it may render them more likely. An archetype in the Jungian (as
opposed to Platonic) sense refers to a pattern of unconscious content that
can have a profound impact on an individual when it rises to the surface
(Browne, 2017, pp. 17-18). This includes synchronistic experiences, as
Jung’s associate Marie-Louise von Franz (1990) explains:
It is in the moments when an emotion-charged archetypal content is
influencing consciousness with unusual force that so-called synchronistic
events often tend to occur; concrete events take place in the individual’s
outer environment that have a meaningful connection with the inner psychic
contents that are constellated at about the same time. (p. 91)
More Coincidences in Jane Eyre
Jane’s association with the Rivers siblings could be described as a
protracted synchronicity which culminates in what even for Victorians
would have been an outrageous coincidence. After her appearance on their
doorstep, the Rivers family takes Jane to their heart, to the extent that she is
considered a younger sister. So close does she feel to Diana and Mary that
she says of her interaction with them: “Thought fitted thought; opinion met
opinion: we coincided, in short, perfectly” (Brontë, 1847/1999, p. 309).
Despite this closeness, Jane does not reveal her true surname for fear of
discovery and goes by the name of Jane Elliott. Nevertheless, St John has
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his suspicions that her surname is in fact Eyre and this is confirmed when he
sees that Jane has written her name on a blank sheet of paper in a moment
of abstraction. He then informs her that with the death of her uncle, John
Eyre, she has come into a fortune of £20,000, a considerable sum in those
days.
Jane’s reaction is one of stunned silence as she considers the
ramifications of so great a windfall. And then she wonders why St John
knows about this and he reveals that they are in fact first cousins, and that
the uncle who made Jane his heir had cut St John and his sisters out of his
will because of an estrangement between himself and their father. St John’s
middle name is Eyre and his mother was Jane’s father’s sister and also the
sister of John Eyre. This is the mega-coincidence that is so crucial to the
overall plot: that Jane in her utter destitution should have landed on the
doorstep of her first cousins! And no wonder, in retrospect, that she felt so
closely identified with Diana and Mary. Unlike her muted reaction to the
news of her inheritance, when Jane discovers that the Rivers siblings are her
cousins she is overjoyed:
Glorious discovery to a lonely wretch! This was wealth indeed! – wealth to
the heart! – a mine of pure, genial affections. This was a blessing, bright,
vivid, and exhilarating; – not like the ponderous gift of gold: rich and
welcome enough in its way, but sobering from its weight. I now clapped my
hands in sudden joy – my pulse bounded, my veins thrilled. (Brontë,
1847/1999, p. 341)
There is no doubt that for Jane this is a deeply meaningful
coincidence, even more so when she realises that the sum she has inherited
can be easily divided into four, one part for herself and three for her
cousins: “Twenty thousand pounds shared equally would be five thousand
each, justice – enough and to spare: justice would be done, – mutual
happiness secured. Now the wealth did not weigh on me: now it was not a
mere bequest of coin, – it was a legacy of life, hope, enjoyment” (p. 341).
As Hilary Dannenberg points out in her book Coincidence and
Counterfactuality (2008), this is a classic example of kinship recognition,
hints of which we have seen in Jane’s relations with Diana and Mary.
Kinship recognition is an age-old device for creating a compelling storyline
and we can see it, as already referred to, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, as well
as in his intensely dramatic tragedy Electra. Shakespeare uses this device in
both Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night, and it is a key element in Daniel
Defoe’s Moll Flanders, first published in 1722.
Kinship recognition is a well-worn but powerful technique which
works because of the visceral impact it naturally has on the reader or
audience. In Dannenberg’s (2008) words: “… the kinship recognition
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scenario is so basic in human experience that, when activated in narrative
fiction, it has the power to override the potentially reality-destroying signals
of implausibility in the coincidence plot” (p. 32). Dannenberg (2008) also
points out that Brontë veers away from a straightforward providential
explanation for this coincidence (p. 154). In an earlier chapter she makes
reference, through Jane, to hidden sympathies that could well be behind the
occurrence of otherwise unlikely coincidences, including the coming
together of estranged family members:
Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent,
wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the
unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle
mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the
sympathies of Nature with man. (Brontë, 1847/1999, p. 193)
This is a pre-Christian view that was not entirely extinguished with
the ascendency of the Church and indeed ran parallel to it, especially in the
thinking of the medieval alchemists and natural philosophers. Jung (1991)
refers to it as a possible background explanation for synchronicity, citing in
his monograph this quote from Hippocrates, who lived in the 5th century
BCE: “There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in
sympathy. The whole organism and each of its parts are working in
conjunction for the same purpose” (p. 101). In Jung’s (1991) opinion this
sort of thinking was still very much alive in the Europe of the mid-20th
century (p. 101), so how much more so in Brontë’s time, despite the
providential perspective so dominant before the ascendency of secularism.
A few months after the kinship discovery and the distribution of
funds, St John asks Jane to accompany him to India. He plans to become a
missionary there and feels that Jane would make an ideal wife. Jane recoils
at this idea but finds herself weakening in the face of his insistence.
Finally she says to him, “… were I but convinced that it is God’s will
I should marry you, I could vow to marry you here and now” (Brontë,
1847/1999, p. 371). St John is overjoyed for he believes it is indeed God’s
will that this should happen. Jane prays to Heaven for direction and is
almost immediately answered with the thrill of an intense feeling, followed
by a distinct voice calling her name. St John hears it too, and Jane knows
with certainty it is the voice of Edward Rochester and that he desperately
needs her. From this moment it is all over with St John Rivers and nothing
else needs to be said. The next day Jane goes to the crossroads and takes the
same coach she came on so she can be with Rochester. On arrival she
discovers that there has been a fire which has left Rochester blind and in
which his deranged wife has died. There is a silver lining, however, in that
now Jane is free to marry him without committing bigamy.
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At their reunion Rochester reveals to Jane that at a particular time
four days earlier he was in such desperate straits and longed for Jane so
much that he cried out loud for her, repeating her name a number of times.
Jane does not tell him but the timing tallies exactly with when she heard his
voice calling her. This is the final coincidence of the book and one that
Dannenberg (2008) describes as not following “the normal patterns of the
traditional coincidental encounter but borders on Jungian synchronicity” (p.
154). However the coincidence might be categorised, whether as a
synchronistic event, or what seems most likely, a straightforward and direct
case of heart-felt telepathy at a moment of profound need, it certainly
provides a dramatic and satisfying finale for the enthralled reader. There is a
further providential touch as well, for Rochester regains partial sight in one
eye, allowing him to be able to see both Jane and their newborn son.
Coincidences in the Modern Era
Before leaving the 19th century, it is worth mentioning that when a
particular author’s name is entered into an Internet search along with
‘coincidence’, the name that comes up with by far the most entries is that of
Charles Dickens. Unfortunately, there is insufficient space in this essay to
explore the many ways in which Dickens used coincidence to augment his
plots. The same applies for Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. The late 19th
century, very much as a consequence of Darwin’s Origin of the Species,
was a time of increasing secularism, which not unsurprisingly resulted in a
widespread rejection of the notion of providence. George Eliot, for
example, while she did not believe in providence herself, created characters
like Silas Marner who did. She used all the techniques of the providential
tradition, including obvious coincidences, but did not subscribe to its
premises (Vargish, 1985, pp. 164-165). A contemporary reviewer, W. H.
Mallock, made the following observation about Eliot towards the end of her
life: “She is the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in
England” (cited in Vargish, 1985, p. 165).
Moving into the 20th century, there is little let-up, despite the
increasing secularisation of society, in the use of coincidences by novelists.
A wonderfully blatant example is to be found in Agatha Christie’s
(1934/2007) Murder on the Orient Express, which first came out in 1934.
The murder of a particularly unpleasant American millionaire has been
meticulously planned beforehand by twelve people who have all suffered
profoundly because of a vicious murder he committed a few years earlier.
They book sleeping cabins on the Orient Express from Istanbul to Paris
alongside the millionaire, filling up all the first class compartments, except
for one, which fortuitously becomes occupied at the 11th hour by none
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other than the world famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. According to
Isaac Anderson (1934), writing in the New York Times Book Review:
The great Belgian detective’s guesses are more than shrewd; they are
positively miraculous. Although both the murder plot and the solution verge
upon the impossible, Agatha Christie has contrived to make them appear
quite convincing for the time being, and what more than that can a mystery
addict desire?
What more indeed? And the same goes for fans of P. G. Wodehouse,
who for over a century have revelled in both his impeccable use of English
and the deft marshalling of coincidences that form the fabric of his
extremely funny stories. Like Dostoevsky, he was well aware of what he
was doing in terms of coincidental encounters, and in an early scene in
Heavy Weather, Wodehouse (1933/1966) brings in fate as part of his
narrative. Having been fired from his position as assistant editor of the
children’s paper Tiny Tots by its proprietor, a chastened Monty Bodkin
leaves Lord Tilbury’s office “erect and dignified, like some young aristocrat
of the French Revolution stepping into the tumbril” (p. 18). Fate steps in at
this point and makes a crucial decision:
A month’s salary in his pocket, chagrin in his heart, and in his soul that
urgent desire for a quick one which comes to young men at times like this,
Monty Bodkin stood hesitating in the doorway of Tilbury House. And Fate,
watching him, found itself compelled to do a bit of swift thinking.
‘Now, shall I,’ mused Fate, ‘send this sufferer to have his snort at the Bunch
of Grapes round the corner? Or shall I put him in a taxi and push him off to
the Drones Club, where he will meet his old friend, Hugo Carmody, with
momentous results?’
It was no light decision to have to make. Much depended on it. It would
affect the destinies of Ronald Fish and his betrothed, Sue Brown; of
Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, and his pig, Empress of Blandings; of
Lord Tilbury, of the Mammoth Publishing Company; of Sir Gregory
Parsloe-Parsloe, Bart, of Matchingham Hall; and of that unpleasant little
man, Percy Pilbeam, late editor of Society Spice and now proprietor of the
Argus Private Inquiry Agency.
‘H’m!’ said Fate.
‘Oh, dash it!’ said Fate. ‘Let’s make it the Drones.’ (Wodehouse, 1933/1966,
pp. 18-19)
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By playing around humorously with the idea of fate, Wodehouse at
the same time highlights its ability to set in motion a chain of events with
profound consequences for the characters involved. Light-hearted though
his stories may be, they are saturated with intended irony, largely directed at
the English upper classes, and coincidences abound. The reason why Monty
Bodkin has been fired is because the editor of Tiny Tots is away on holiday,
and as assistant editor Monty has taken charge. The timing for the editor’s
holiday is an opportunity for Monty to add a little spice to the Tiny Tots
column ‘Uncle Woggly to his Chicks’, the first paragraph of which reads:
Well, chickabiddies, how are you all? Minding what Nursie says and eating
your spinach like good little men? That’s right. I know the stuff tastes like a
motorman’s glove, but they say there’s iron in it, and that’s what puts hair
on your chest. (Wodehouse, 1933/1966, p. 13)
And this, plus the rest of the column, gives Lord Tilbury the excuse he
needs to dispense with Monty’s services, and allows fate to take over
proceedings.
If not fate so described, then certainly a distinct sense of fatalism
runs through what is generally regarded as one of the great literary
achievements of the 20th century, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard
(1958/2007), first published in its original Italian in 1958 as Il Gattopardo.
It is a historical novel and concerns the decay and gradual disintegration of
a Sicilian noble family, the Salinas, seen largely through the eyes of the
book’s central character, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina. The book begins
during the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, specifically with the
landing of Garibaldi on the west coast of Sicily in 1860 and the subsequent
fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. There are some historical
coincidences that emerge as part of the plot, including the timing of the
opening scene with Garibaldi’s landing, but these are not inappropriate.
After all, the action has to begin somewhere and part of Lampedusa’s
purpose in writing the novel was to make certain observations about the era
as well as about his family, with the figure of the Prince based on his own
great-grandfather (1958/2007, pp. xi-xii).
The Leopard was published posthumously and was the only novel
Lampedusa wrote. It is not particularly filled with coincidences, although
there are a number of interactions and fortuitous meetings the Prince has
where he is able to express his views. These interactions are important for
the reader’s understanding of the Prince’s character as well as the era, and
as with the historical coincidences are part of the fabric of the book.
However, there is a major coincidence that occurs in the second chapter,
and the rather tragic direction of the storyline flows from it.
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Briefly, there is a genuine affection developing between Concetta,
the second of the Princes’s three daughters, and Tancredi, his nephew and
ward. The family have moved for the season to their palace at Donnafugata
and the affection continues to grow between Concetta and Tancredi, to the
extent that Concetta confides to the family priest that she is sure Tancredi is
about to propose. But alas, that same evening—and it is the timing that
makes the coincidence—the rapacious, very wealthy and corrupt mayor of
Donnafugata, very much a Mafioso prototype, presents his 17-year-old
daughter Angelica at the palace. The relatively impoverished Tancredi is
duly smitten and from there it is all downhill for Concetta, who with her
two sisters remains a spinster, which in a sense is the central tragedy of the
book. Don Fabrizio prefers his nephew to any of his seven children and this
is another element of the tragedy and doubly ensures the unravelling of the
House of Salina.
There is, however, a twist to the tale in a coincidental coda that takes
place in the last chapter and which concerns the now aging Concetta,
revealing to her what might have been had she reacted to Tancredi’s initial
infatuation with Angelica with less indignation and pride. A glimpse into
the origin of that hauteur is hinted at in the penultimate chapter when, as he
nears the end of his life, Don Fabrizio reflects that “in Concetta’s beauty
and character was prolonged the true Salina strain” (Lampedusa,
1958/2007, p. 192). Certainly Lampedusa uses coincidences as elements of
the structural framework for his story. But it is the ideas and insights that
shine through, along with the descriptive excellence of the writing.
The Case of Doctor Zhivago
Like Lampedusa, Boris Pasternak only wrote one novel, though
unlike Lampedusa he was able to see its publication while he was still alive.
That might well not have happened given the antagonism of the Soviet
censors. But Pasternak refused to be deterred, and in 1956 the manuscript of
Doctor Zhivago was successfully smuggled out of the Soviet Union by an
Italian journalist. In 1957, an Italian translation was published by
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who in 1958 also published The Leopard.
Feltrinelli took a risk in both cases—political in the one and financial in the
other, The Leopard having been rejected by the major Italian publishers.
Both books were instant successes and were widely praised as well as
widely translated. The literary critic V. S. Pritchett described Doctor
Zhivago as “the first work of genius to come out of Russia since the
Revolution” (Pasternak, 1957/1996, p. ii) and The Leopard as “perhaps the
greatest novel of the century” (Lampedusa, 1958/2007, back cover).
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The focus here, though, is not any tenuous set of coincidences
between the two books, but rather on the coincidences to be found within
Doctor Zhivago, which are not only prolific but were also a deliberate
choice on the part of Pasternak. As the English poet and writer John Wain
(1968) observed: “Most novelists have been studious of probability;
Pasternak goes out of his way to introduce walloping coincidences” (p.
115). But perhaps the description “walloping coincidences” is an
understatement. The coincidences in the novel from its very outset and at
several levels are unrelenting and far too profuse even to try to enumerate.
To take just a few of the coincidences surrounding the two main characters,
Yuri Zhivago and Lara Guichard: there are the strange circumstances of
their first coming across one another in their youth; their unexpected
encounters on the battlefield during the First World War, where he is a
doctor and she a nurse; and again fortuitously meeting after the Zhivago
family moves to the Urals to get away from Moscow and the effects of the
Revolution.
Their connection starts early on, even before they are introduced to
one another, and remains throughout their lives, though they are not really
conscious of its depth until near the end of their days together. As a girl in
Moscow, Lara is seduced by her mother’s financial advisor and lover, the
lawyer Komarovsky, and to take revenge a few years later she decides to
shoot him at a Christmas party to which Yuri has also been invited.
Fortunately she misses. Yuri witnesses what happens but does not stay, and
the incident is smoothed over by Komarovsky. This is the same
Komarovsky who is to blame for a once wealthy businessman leaping to his
death from a train. The action takes place in the first chapter, across the
fields from where a twelve-year-old Yuri happens to be staying with his
uncle. Also on that train is Misha Gordon who is later to become a close
friend of Yuri and on whom the suicide had bestowed much affection before
he jumped, affection that was clearly meant for his own son of the same
age, whom he had abandoned.
A few years pass, and one day, while still schoolboys, Yuri and
Misha accompany a doctor to a hotel where a woman has tried to poison
herself. The situation is not dangerous but before they leave, they observe a
man emerge from behind the partition where the woman is recovering. On
his way out, he gives a powerfully controlling glance of complicity to a girl
sitting in the room. Though unaware of who she is, this is Yuri’s first
glimpse of Lara. She lives in the hotel room with her mother, who has
already been jilted in favour of her daughter:
‘Do you know who that man is?’ said Misha when they came out onto the
street. Yura, busy with his thoughts, did not reply.
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‘He’s the one who made your father drink and caused his death. The lawyer
who was in the train with him – you remember, I told you.’
Yura was thinking about the girl and the future, not about his father and the
past. At first he could not even understand what he was talking about, and
anyway it was too cold to talk. (Pasternak, 1996, p. 65)
Many years later, when they are living together in the Ural town of
Yuryatin, Yuri recounts these details to Lara. She remembers Yuri being
there on that day but had not realised Komarovsky had been the bane of his
life as well as hers. Her immediate response is: “It isn’t possible! How
extraordinary! Can it really be true? So he was a tragic influence in your life
too! It brings us even closer, doesn’t it! It’s as if it were all predestined!” (p.
360). Predestined it all may have been but the concept itself, that everything
is fixed and preordained, is far too restrictive an explanation for the
fecundity of coincidences and significant interactions that take place in Dr
Zhivago. Perhaps a more satisfactory explanation is that mentioned earlier
in connection with Jane Eyre, the idea of hidden sympathies and the coming
together of affinities; the principle of correspondentia that Jung (1991) sees,
quoting Hippocrates, as a possible explanation for synchronistic events:
“There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in
sympathy” (p. 101).
Indeed, there are coincidences in the novel that only the reader is
aware of—not the characters—that strongly suggest hidden sympathies.
One of the most significant of these is the burning candle Yuri sees in a
window as he and Tonya, his wife-to-be, are driven in a sleigh to the
Christmas party at which Lara will attempt to shoot Komarovsky. Yuri has
no way of knowing that an agitated and determined Lara is in the room with
Pasha, her husband-to-be, and has asked him to turn off the electric lights so
that they can talk with just a candle glowing. In the text the effect of the
candle is thus described: “Its light seemed to fall on the street as
deliberately as a glance, as if its flame were keeping watch on the passing of
carriages and waiting for someone” (Pasternak, 1957/1996, p. 81). Yuri is
moved by the candlelight and the stirrings of a poem arise within him: “ ‘A
candle burned on the table, a candle burned …’ he whispered to himself –
the confused formless beginning of a poem” (p. 81), which later becomes
Winter Night and is included at the end of the novel as one of Zhivago’s
poems.
After the publication of Doctor Zhivago, in a letter he wrote in reply
to an English schoolteacher, Pasternak provided the following insight into
both his method and his understanding of reality:
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The objective world in my habitual, natural grasping, is a vast infinite
inspiration, that sketches, erases, chooses, compares and describes and
composes itself … living, moving reality in such a rendering must have a
touch of spontaneous subjectivity, even of arbitrariness, wavering, tarrying,
doubting, joining and disjoining elements.… Over and above the times,
events and persons there is a nature, a spirit of their very succession. The
frequent coincidences in the plot are (in this case) not the secret, trick
expedients of the novelist. They are traits to characterise the somewhat
wilful, free, fanciful flow of reality. (Letter in English to John Harris,
February 8, 1959; Pasternak, 2011, p. xiii)
In the above passage there is the sentence, “Over and above the times,
events and persons there is a nature, a spirit of their very succession.” In the
last part of the book, when their relationship is developing into its full
flowering, Yuri explains to Lara what his actual experience was when he
first saw her in the hotel, held by Komarovsky’s glance. From that moment
she became embedded in his being, to such a depth that even his beautiful
and devoted Tonya could not approach it. The second time Yuri saw Lara
was when she tried to shoot Komarovsky, very soon after the strangely
telepathic moment occasioned by the candle in the window. It would almost
certainly have been a profoundly meaningful coincidence for him: “Yura
was dumbfounded. – This girl again! And again in such extraordinary
circumstances! And again that grey-haired man was near her” (Pasternak,
1957/1996, p. 85). When Yuri much later expresses to Lara the extent of his
feeling, one that he is able to trace to their very first encounter, the timeless
quality of their love is revealed in its fullness:
‘That night, as a schoolgirl in your coffee-coloured uniform, in the shadow
of the room at your hotel, you were already as you are now, you were just as
overwhelmingly lovely.
‘Later, I have often tried to name and to define the enchantment of which
you sowed the seeds in me – that gradually fading light and dying sound
which have spread throughout the whole of my being and have become to
me the means of understanding everything else in the world through you.
‘When you – a shadow in a schoolgirl’s dress – arose out of the shadows of
that room, I – a boy, ignorant of you – with all the torment of the strength of
my response, at once understood: this scraggy little girl was charged, as with
electrical waves, with all the femininity in the world. Had I touched you at
that moment with so much as the tip of my finger, a spark would have lit up
the room and either killed me on the spot or filled me for the rest of my life
with a magnetic flow of plaintive longing and sorrow. I was full to the brim
with tears, I wept and blazed inwardly.…’
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Lara lay dressed on the edge of her bed.… Sometimes she raised herself on
her elbow, propped her chin on her hand and gazed at him open mouthed. At
other times she buried her head in his shoulder and cried silently with joy,
without noticing her tears. At last she leaned out of bed, put her arms around
him and whispered happily:
‘Yuri, my darling, how you know everything, how you guess everything.
Yuri darling, you are my strength and my refuge, God forgive me the
blasphemy. Oh, I am so happy.’ (p. 383)
No Coincidence, No Story?
An internet search on using coincidences in fiction comes up with
consistent advice to the budding writer to be wary of them though not
necessarily to dismiss them out of hand, and in some cases quite the
contrary. According to the contemporary novelist Alice Mattison (2016),
clearly a proponent of an intelligent use of coincidences in fiction:
“Coincidence is often what gives fiction its chance to mean something.
When two things come together, improbably or not, a spark is struck.
Making those things happen simultaneously suggests that meaning is just
beyond the surface.” This is very much the position adopted by Pasternak.
In contrast, the writer Michael Kurland (2017), author of 30 novels, is of the
opinion that too many coincidences spoil the plot and are generally to be
avoided. He recommends one or two at the most in order to avoid a ‘yeah,
right’ response from readers: “We’re all entitled to one whizz-bang
coincidence that either starts our story or turns it into a new and unexpected
direction.… But put too many coincidences in a story, or make them too
blatant, and you’re asking for that ‘yeah, right’ response” (Kurland, 2017).
Although Mattison and Kurland clearly have different approaches to
the use of coincidences in fiction, they both accept that coincidences have a
place in stories, and in that determination they are completely in accord
with the historical record. One of the aims of this essay, as mentioned
earlier, is to determine whether it is possible to write fiction without
recourse to coincidence. A small caveat is necessary here for, to quote
another contemporary writer, Steven James (2018): “We don’t typically
think of it this way, but really all stories start with a coincidence. Stories
begin when the author dips into the stream of cause and effect and pulls out
a moment that initiates all that will follow.” And he has this advice for
aspiring authors: “Use the story’s opening sequence to justify incidents that
would otherwise seem too convenient. This is where coincidences will fly
under your readers’ radar” (James, 2018).
So apart from the opening scene, which readers in their suspension of
disbelief must take as a given, is it possible to write a story without any
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coincidences whatsoever? Interestingly, I came up with only one clear
articulation of this question from several attempts to scour the Internet using
a number of different search criteria. No doubt this is an instance of the
paucity of the Internet in regard to being able to find answers to questions
not commonly asked. But the articulated question is direct and to the point,
with the questioner asking on a writer’s forum: “Is it possible to write a [sic]
fiction without a coincidence?” (Writing Stack Exchange, 2018). A number
of affirmative but unconvincing answers are given, with one claiming that
the best detective stories do not need coincidences. Unfortunately, the
responder fails to provide a concrete example of even one, which rather
weakens his or her case. Nevertheless, this view has some support from no
less a mystery writer than P. D. James, who in an interview gave the
following answer to a question about what might be out of bounds for
detective stories:
I think too great a coincidence. What’s interesting to me is that coincidence
frequently happens in real life. We know in our experience that
extraordinary coincidences happen, and they do, I think, very often [happen]
in real-life investigations of murder. But somehow it isn’t right in the
mystery.
We shouldn’t rely on an extraordinary coincidence. I think that the clues
have got to arise naturally — from the circumstances of the book and the
people, the characters — and not be inserted rather artificially. (NPR Fresh
Air, 2014)
While P. D. James advises against overreliance on coincidences, she
does not repudiate them out of hand. So could there be a place for
coincidences in detective fiction? Agatha Christie was obviously not averse
to them, but can we say the same for the great French writer of the police
procedural, Georges Simenon? Taking at random two of his Maigret novels,
Liberty Bar (Simenon, 1932/2015), and Maigret and the Idle Burglar
(Simenon, 1961/2006), we can observe Simenon’s changing attitude to
coincidence over time. In Liberty Bar there is an important coincidence in
one of the early chapters that leads gradually and very cleverly to Maigret’s
being able to find the murderer. The coincidence itself is a simple one: after
making enquiries at the victim’s residence, Maigret makes the mistake of
picking up the victim’s gabardine instead of his own. He carries it out under
his arm and only realises when he gets back to his hotel. But what he finds
in one of the pockets is the clue he needs to proceed in an otherwise
perplexing case. And such is Simenon’s command of the action on the page
that this seemingly innocuous coincidence is very likely to go straight under
the reader’s radar.
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In Maigret and the Idle Burglar, Maigret is called to the scene of the
crime when procedurally he should not have been, and happens to recognise
the victim before the body is removed. Much of the early description in the
novel revolves around Maigret’s memories of the victim, the ‘idle burglar’
of the title, of whom he was very fond. In regard to the use of coincidences,
Simenon allows himself much more liberty in the later novel, which of
course is his right as an accomplished author whose craft and skill affirm
him as one of the very best, whatever the genre. According to André Gide,
he was “the greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have in literature”
(Gide, cited in Simenon, 1932/2015, p. i).
A firm proponent of the dictum ‘no coincidence, no story’ is the
English professor Walter R. McDonald, author (1968) of the journal article
‘Coincidence in the Novel: a Necessary Technique’. He writes:
“Coincidence is the stuff fiction is made of; the necessary trick of the writer
is to make the coincidence seem natural” (p. 373). McDonald gives several
examples of how coincidences are used in fiction, citing in particular
William Faulkner’s Light in August, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment, and makes the observation that novels are by their very nature
inundated with coincidences. It is the writer’s skill, he argues, to piece
various disparate occurrences together in such a way that their juxtaposition
is accepted as natural by the reader. Just because a situation in a novel may
not look to the reader like a coincidence, it does not mean it is not a
coincidence. McDonald elucidates:
Some may object to my calling ‘coincidental’ those events which are
obviously successfully related; they will say, justly, that once the events are
functionally related to what precedes and follows them, they are by
definition no longer coincidences – that is they do not lack apparent causal
connection. As true as this is, they are still arguing from the effect on the
reader; it does not analyse the writer’s technique of bringing together
disparate elements to create his coherent, suspensefully involving story. (p.
374)
And a couple of paragraphs later:
If the writer consistently pulls off his trick, letting us believe that these
events are growing out of the given story, then we read on, and the
characters take on a life independent of their creator. In other words, the
magic of literature has happened to us again. (p. 374)
Recent Developments in Literary Coincidence
There are so many examples of coincidence in 20th century literature
that could be explored here, beginning with the works of Joseph Conrad, the
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title of one of whose bestselling novels is Chance (1913) and which
involves the exploration of just that. He also wrote the short story, The
Secret Sharer (1912), which involves a doppelgänger relationship and is
almost pure coincidence from beginning to end. And then there is James
Joyce, with whom Pasternak has been compared in terms of coincidental
allusions (Cornwell, 1992, p. 62). However, both these writers are from the
early decades of the 20th century, as indeed have been most of the post-
Victorian examples discussed. So jumping ahead to the early 1980s we
encounter Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (1984), an example of what
Hillary Dannenberg identifies as a postmodern literary approach to
coincidence, where deliberate textual ambiguity pushes the reader to make
his or her own interpretations. Indeed, Dannenberg (2008) regards
Flaubert’s Parrot as representing “the zenith of the postmodernist
coincidence plot, since it provides a complex and multifarious fabric of
analogical coincidences with extensive metanarrative comments on
coincidences” (p. 170).
The narrator in the novel is a retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite,
who is fascinated with the life and writings of Gustave Flaubert and has
made a trip to Rouen ostensibly to discover whether the stuffed parrot
Flaubert wrote about still exists. But a deeper motive for his exploration, as
it gradually dawns on the reader, is Braithwaite’s need to understand his
wife’s suicide. The major analogical coincidence in Flaubert’s Parrot is
that between Emma Bovary, the protagonist of Flaubert’s most famous
novel, Madame Bovary, and Braithwaite’s wife Ellen. They are both serially
unfaithful to their loyal husbands, and both commit suicide. Like
Braithwaite, Emma’s cuckolded husband Charles is a doctor. Dannenberg
(2008) describes such coincidences as analogical because they are not
directly concerned with the plot of the story but rather are “cognitively
constructed through the perception of correspondences” (p. 105).
In this case, the perception of correspondences is not only
Braithwaite’s but also the reader’s. Are the coincidences between the
Bovarys and the Braithwaites genuinely meaningful, in other words, are
they synchronistic? Or are they for Braithwaite ironic indications of a heavy
handed fate that he does not really believe in? Or is Braithwaite’s obsession
with Flaubert in fact triggered by these correspondences? In true
postmodern style, it is up to the reader to come to his or her own
conclusions, both about the correspondences themselves and about what
they might mean to Braithwaite. An indication can be found in a chapter
appropriately titled ‘Snap!’, in which Braithwaite addresses the question of
coincidences. Much of this is in line with the rejection of coincidence in
fiction briefly discussed in the previous section:
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And as for coincidences in books – there’s something cheap and sentimental
about the device; it can’t help seeming aesthetically gimcrack. The
troubadour who passes just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow
scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat
shipwreck on the foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers. (Barnes,
1984, p. 67)
But a little further on he brings in the notion of coincidence as irony:
One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies.
That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the drinking companion for
resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if
the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated
coincidence. (p. 67)
There is no attempt by Braithwaite to explain coincidences, or even
to dismiss them as ‘mere chance’, though that seems very much to be the
attitude he would arrive at if pushed. The beginning of the book starts with
Braithwaite’s search for the Flaubert’s stuffed parrot, and he finds that both
the museums in Rouen dedicated to Flaubert have what they consider to be
the actual parrot. If this is a coincidence, it is most certainly a causally
induced one, as well as potentially a witty and resonant irony. He later
learns that Flaubert borrowed a stuffed parrot from the Museum of Rouen
and also returned it. And at the end of the book Braithwaite recounts a visit
to the natural history section of the Museum of Rouen, where he finds three
other parrots that could just as easily have been Flaubert’s, not counting any
that might be missing from the collection or had been thrown out over time
because of deterioration.
Jumping ahead another 30 years to early 2010s, we come to an
adventurous and entertaining novel that deals directly with the subject of
coincidence, J. W. Ironmonger’s (2014) The Coincidence Authority,
published in the US simply as Coincidence. There has been a considerable
amount written about coincidences over the last 20 or 30 years, very much
in line with the general increase in public interest in spiritual matters. At the
same time, a number of books have been released debunking concepts such
as synchronicity and the idea that things are ‘meant to be’ by showing how
even the most extraordinary coincidences can be explained mathematically.
All this provides a great opportunity for Ironmonger to write about
coincidences and their interpretation in a fictional scenario.
One of the two main characters in The Coincidence Authority is
Thomas Post, a lecturer in Applied Philosophy at London University’s
Institute of Philosophy. He is known as the ‘Coincidence Man’ because of
his interest in coincidences and his zeal in being able to account for them
mathematically. The other is the highly coincidence-prone Azalea Lewis,
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also at London University, teaching English literature at Birkbeck. They
first encounter one another in a serious pile up on an escalator at Euston
station, in which they are literally thrown together. Thomas breaks an arm
and Azalea a rib. They are taken to one side by paramedics and find
themselves “propped up on the cold stone floor, leaning against a wall. His
broken arm was still draped around her shoulder as if they were a couple. In
shock and pain, neither of them sought to move it” (Ironmonger, 2014, p.
44). But then they are driven to different hospital emergency units so have
no time for introductions. Notwithstanding his condition, Thomas becomes
acutely aware of Azalea and thinks of her during the next few days,
wondering how he might find her again.
With his arm in a plaster cast, Thomas is soon back at work and
during a lecture he explains the famous ‘birthday problem’ which states that
it is mathematically more than 50% likely in any group of 23 people for two
of them to share a birthday. There are 25 students in the class, which with
Thomas makes 26, and not unexpectedly two people do share a birthday,
Thomas being one of them. What is rather more unexpected, however, is
that the student he shares it with has the same surname, Post, and moreover
his arm is also in a plaster cast. Gasps of astonishment come from the class,
but all this is grist for the mill for the Coincidence Man as he tells the
students to go away and work out the probabilities. Shortly afterwards, as he
is sitting back in his office enjoying a glow of satisfaction after the success
of the lecture, Thomas gets a phone call and a woman’s voice is at the other
end of the line:
‘Are you the Coincidence Authority?’ the voice asked.
Thomas laughed. I’ve been called a lot of things but I don’t think I’ve ever
been called that.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘All the same,’ he added, ‘I think I’m probably the person you want.’
‘Oh good. I’m a colleague of yours,’ said the voice on the phone, ‘from
Birkbeck. I’ve been reading your paper on coincidence.’
‘Well you won’t believe this,’ said Thomas, ‘but not only have I just come
from delivering a lecture on coincidence, but I’m holding that very paper in
my hand. Well actually I’m not, because I have only one good hand at
present, and that one is holding the telephone. But I’m looking at that very
paper on my desk. So we have a coincidence right away.’
The woman laughed, and her laugh was like the tinkling of a wind chime.
Australian Journal of Parapsychology
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‘What I should like,’ she said, ‘is to come and talk to you about it.’
(Ironmonger, 2014, p. 48)
She arrives at his office some 20 minutes later and—no surprise to
the reader—turns out to be Azalea. The entire book is full of coincidences
of this calibre, alongside shifts backwards and forwards in time as the
multiple strands of the story unfold, with scenery changes from the Isle of
Man to northern Uganda. As anticipated, Thomas and Azalea fall in love,
though their relationship is tested by their different perceptions of the nature
of coincidences and the reasons for their occurrence. The intensity of
Azalea’s proneness to coincidence almost throws Thomas off his
convictions and mathematical explanations. But not until the very end is the
unexpected solution to Thomas’s conundrum revealed. With its
mindboggling array of coincidences and its leaps across time, The
Coincidence Authority is very much a postmodern novel, though it may
with its ending be knocking on the doors of a stage beyond the
characteristic irony and nihilism of postmodernism, exploration of which is
beyond the scope of this essay.
A Brief Coda
This essay began with a reference to my unexpected and fortuitous
encounter with the Dostoevsky translator, Ignat Avsey. When I started on
this project, I thought about getting in touch with Avsey to thank him for
our very brief interaction and for suggesting that I read his translation of
The Karamazov Brothers, also for his highly engaging translation of The
Idiot which I had only recently come across. Sadly, I discovered that he had
died of cancer in 2013 at the age of 75. The following is from Ignat Avsey’s
obituary in The Guardian, written by the publisher Antony Wood (2013):
He breathed new life into not only two of Dostoevsky’s best-known novels
(The Karamazov Brothers and The Idiot) but also two of his least-known
(The Village of Stepanchikovo and Humiliated and Insulted).... I first met
Ignat in 1982 when offered, as a publisher, his first translation, of
Dostoevsky’s black-comic novel The Village of Stepanchikovo. With his
obsessions, limitless ambition, unpredictable mood swings and
unquenchable flow of language – which I learned to stem on occasion with a
deft movement of the hand – he seemed to walk straight out of that novel.
As a small thank you to Avsey, I would like to recommend Part 2,
Chapter 5 of The Idiot, especially the last few pages. Here we have a
powerful and shocking coincidence that in one way or another involves all
the categories suggested at the start of this essay. Ideally, one should read
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the novel from the beginning, which is not so difficult with Avsey’s
translation. Dostoevsky really does bring a whirlwind of lived intensity to
the page, and he does not appear to be particularly concerned one way or
the other by the presence of coincidence in his plotting. As with all great
literature, it is the brilliance of the writing that counts, and the effect that it
has on the reader. Of course coincidences happen in everyday life, so why
should they not occur in novels? The approach to them might need to be a
little different, as P. D. James and others have suggested, but just as
coincidences are an integral part of the fabric of everyday life so too are
they an integral part of the fabric of fiction.
Their categorisation too might be a little different, and the four
coincidence categories mentioned earlier—random chance, natural
causality, supernatural causality, and synchronicity—seem to me to be
insufficient in themselves for a satisfactory classification of fictional
coincidences. For example, how can we really say that there are random
chance coincidences in fiction when nothing in a book that has been
deliberately written can possibly be random? Chance may appear to occur,
but as we have seen in early attempts at fiction through myth and fairy tales,
the hand of fate or destiny is ever lurking in the wings. In modern fiction,
where supernatural causation casts much less of a shadow, more naturally
conceived coincidences have become the norm, but we can hardly refer to
them as even approaching genuine chance coincidences.
Unlike in life, where coincidences are for the most part directly
perceived and then interpreted by those who identify them, in fiction they
are invariably conceived according to the inclinations and predispositions of
the author, and then hopefully accepted by the suspended disbelief of the
reader. On top of that, there is the advent of postmodern literature and the
enticement to the reader to make their own interpretations in regard to
coincidences and what they might signify, as in Flaubert’s Parrot (Barnes,
1984). If there is a novel that comes anywhere near to evoking genuine
chance, it would likely be Luke Rhinehart’s (1971/1999) The Dice Man, a
cult classic where the protagonist makes decisions based on the throw of a
die. Perhaps, therefore, a more complex classificatory system is needed to
cater for fictional coincidences, one that incorporates both the coincidences
on the page as well as the intentions of the author.
THE AUTHOR
Laurence Browne was awarded an M.A. in Religious Education (1987)
from London University, U.K.; an M.A. in Applied Linguistics (1995) from
Griffith University, Queensland; and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (2014) from
The University of Queensland, where he successfully defended his thesis,
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73
Examining Coincidences: Towards an Integrated Approach. This was later
turned into a book, The Many Faces of Coincidence (2017, Imprint
Academic). Laurence is currently an Honorary Research Fellow within the
School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of
Queensland.
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Laurence Browne
University of Queensland
St Lucia, Qld. 4072
AUSTRALIA
Email: l.browne1@uq.edu.au