Imagine a chance encounter in a London pub, a meeting with a stranger at the bar and the subsequent discovery that you are the descendent of a well-known aristocrat. Alternatively, imagine that you are on your way to work one day and you encounter a woman about to throw herself off the bridge and into the river. Whether these encounters will change your life or not is an open question. But a writer like Thomas Hardy might turn the first chance encounter above into a novel like Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Another writer, Pascal Mercier, might turn the encounter on the bridge into Night Train to Lisbon.
It may well be that despite efforts to control our lives, we fall off a ladder or fall in love and our lives are never the same again. And it is not just our personal lives that can be influenced this way. History, for example, may not be as deterministic as we might like it to be. We may know what happened but it is not so easy to explain why it happened, especially if chance and/or coincidence were involved. For example, we don't know why Constantine adopted Christianity as the main religion of the Roman Empire. There were other candidates. Was his decision a whim? Was his decision due to the fact that his mother was a convert to Christianity? We cannot be sure.
Similarly, think how different the 20th century would have been if Hitler had decided not to leave the beer hall early. Which beer hall? The one in Munich in which he planned to give a speech. Had he not left early, it is highly likely that he would have been killed along with 8 other people or badly injured like 62 others.
Sudden death - or miraculous escape from it - has been a preoccupation of Paul Auster’s since his own summer-camp days. At the age of fourteen, while hiking during a storm, he was part of a line of boys crawling under barbed wire when lightning struck the fence, killing the boy in front of him. Chance, understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction.
Chance also plays a huge role in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. For example, a character we are getting to know, suddenly gets a bullet in the head. And there are many random acts of kindness. The old woman who picks up a stone to hurl at a captured German soldier and, for reasons she will never understand, replaces it with a piece of bread.
There is nothing knew about the random wheel of fortune and its ability to control human lives. Some lose and suffer while others win. But for writers, fate will, I guess, continue to be an inspiration for a long time to come.
I agree that being born English is like winning first prize - a feeling that grows with time
Posted by: Christopher Goddard | 03/14/2018 at 11:47 AM