Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency, Complexity and Narrative

ABSTRACT:This essay seizes upon the tension between two senses of “eventuality,” as concerning the staple of narrative, events, and as concerning the kind of contingency that remains unassimilated by narrative sense. Contingency is a manifestation of the gap between the systemic complexity of temporal phenomena and the reductive heuristic of narrative as a mode of cognition. Sophisticated forms of narrative, however, may choose to confront this gap rather than merely exhibit it, as part of their continual effort to refine narrative and finesse its limitations. The possibility of doing so arises because of two features inherent in narrative form itself, which are its latent reflexiveness and its dependence upon the implicit. “One of the Missing,” by Ambrose Bierce, serves as the means through which these ideas are elaborated in more concrete terms, exhibiting as it does both a self-conscious concern with contingency and narrative, and an implicit potentiality beyond its imposition of narrative logic.