Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel by Adam Grener (review)
- Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel by Adam Grener
Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel takes up a classic question for theorists of realism: if realism is a genre defined by representational fidelity to probable, ordinary experience, then why does the realist novel so frequently rely on improbable, extraordinary events? Adam Grener’s answer, compellingly argued through readings of the novel from Jane Austen through Thomas Hardy, is that realism coheres as a genre not despite the frequent intrusion of the improbable, but rather because of it. Grener reads the development of the nineteenth-century realist novel in the context of the development of probability theory—a framework likely familiar to scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, but perhaps less so to Victorianists—to reassert the goal of the realist project as one that is fundamentally historicist. Grener locates the historicizing power of realism in its representations of chance—the irresolvable tension between the random and the orderly—which are conventionally thought to strain or even obviate the [End Page 123] boundaries of the genre: Charles Dickens’s plot-tidying encounters between characters, George Eliot’s cataclysmic flood, and Hardy’s wayward letters that seem to wind up anywhere and everywhere but in the hands of their intended recipients. The appearance of such an improbable event affirms realism’s potential to represent not necessarily the everyday, but rather a specific historical moment by calling attention to the cultural conditions that make the improbable possible.
The book is organized according to one of its main goals: charting the transition from the classical conception of probability, in which chance marks an unknown cause or epistemological gap that rationality might theoretically overcome, to its modern, frequentist articulation as that which appears unknowable and defies prediction from the perspective of the individual but which demonstrates post-hoc regularity in the aggregate. The first half of the book, focusing on Austen and Sir Walter Scott, characterizes both authors as inheritors of the classical theory of probability. Rather than uncritically perpetuating it, however, their novels derive their historicity by complicating it, albeit tentatively. The first chapter explores how Austen leverages chance to problematize probabilistic induction. Austen’s novels attest to the fact that gaps in causal knowledge cannot simply be paved over by logical extrapolation; rather, her novels continually thwart such extrapolation. Not only does she undercut her characters’ attempts to make reasoned predictions based on what they perceive as patterns in precedented experience, but she also pulls the rug out from under readers who try to do the same. The chapter on Scott continues this thread, primarily by demonstrating that Scott uses chance to diffuse the impetuses of plot events along a causal web to test the limits of probable expectation and foreground his characters’ competing, culturally inflected interpretations of those causes.
The second half of the book follows improbability into the mid- and late-nineteenth century, applying Grener’s thesis to Victorian realist novels that “construct plots that defy probability more overtly” than did those of the Regency era (98). Scale, Grener argues, becomes both the formal tool that enables this more radical experimentation and a problem with which realism must contend. This is exceptionally well-illustrated in the chapter on Dickens, a highlight of Improbability, in which Grener recuperates Dickensian coincidence as an aesthetic choice crucial to mediating the social tension between the imperative toward liberal self-actualization on the one hand and passive assimilation into the collective on the other. Grener casts the unlikely run-ins between knowing parties that help shepherd Dickens’s novels toward their conclusions as instances in which scales—provincial and transnational, individual and social—collapse into one another “in an assertion of global interconnectedness” rendered representable through the primacy of chance as plot device and formal principle (114). The chapter on Anthony Trollope fashions chance as a collision of temporal scales rather than spatial ones to present an entangled social world that can “be grasped only through disparate and potentially incommensurable points...
