Do you ever pause a streaming movie and inadvertently see how long is left? Do you make assumptions about how the story will end, given that information? When the couple is already happily together but there’s 70 minutes left. Or when the heroes are still stuck somewhere with time for a cliffhanger and the credits?
Story-telling demands resolution. But does life?
I think about the aesthetics of coincidences, in both life and art, a lot. How some coincidences can be poetic and beautiful while others feel… ugly. When a couple finds out they went to the same summer camp as kids, and look, there’s even a group photo that both of them are in, versus when two people at a bar hit it off but they have the same first name. We can easily imagine the former happening in a film or novel, but a rom-com with two characters named Jamie?
Should everything in a novel be meaningful, or is there room for arbitrariness?
What was going on in Soviet literature in the 1930s? Richard Pevear explains:
And in October 1932, Stalin defined “socialist realism” as the single artistic method acceptable for Soviet literature. The Writers’ Union drew up a statue at its first congress in 1934 defining socialist realism as a method that “demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of communism.
This last sentence may raise some eyebrows: This socialist realism isn’t actual realism as we would think of it now. It’s propagandist toward the goals of Communist Russia, romanticizing the revolution and workers. (I like to think that this move from Stalin was also an attempt to simplify things for his legions of censors – I thought I read this somewhere, but now I can’t find where.)
A decade later, Boris Pasternak started writing his masterpiece: Doctor Zhivago. Perhaps Pasternak was thinking something along the lines: “Oh, they want realism? I’ll give them realism.” Here’s what realism meant to Pasternak around this time:
[Living,] moving reality… 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 characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality. (xiv)
I like that Pasternak anticipates that counter that these “coincidences” are just a writer’s convenient plot devices. This is not a protagonist bumping into the love interest some years later on a crowded bus and striking up conversation. These coincidences seem to be closer to true results of chance, as if the author rolled dice across his writing desk.
In this world of literature, maybe you could have two characters with the same first name. Maybe you even should.
In the novel itself, by way of a character introduction, we get more less literary but more philosophical about chance and spontaneity, with a twist of atheist optimism maybe:
Separately, all the movements of the world were calculatedly sober, but as a sum total they were unconsciously drunk with the general current of life that united them. People toiled and bustled, set in motion by the mechanism of their own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked if their chief regulator had not been a sense of supreme and fundamental carefreeness. This carefreeness came from a sense of the cohesion of human existences, a confidence in their passing from one into another, a sense of happiness owing to the fact the everything that happens takes place not only on earth, in which the dead are buried, but somewhere else, in what some call the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others something else. (14)
One of the ways that Pasternak makes his novel feel more real is that he has many characters, some of whom feel major but never re-emerge after their single chapter, others are introduced quietly and then come back in a significant way hundreds of pages later.
For this reason (and the many names that Russians use for each other) I ended up hand-writing not one but seven pages of notes, mostly trying to keep track of various characters, their names, and their inter-relationships. Some pages were filled with characters who never reappeared. Other characters who seemed so safely marginal that I didn’t make note of came back hundreds of pages later with larger roles to play. Such is life.
Thus, I think it’s realistic (and hilarious) when, a bit further in the novel, a character intends revenge on a lawyer named Komarovsky, but misses and hits a different man at the same party: a lawyer named Kornakov.
What Sam's Reading 