A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction

A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction
Hilary P. Dannenberg
Poetics Today, Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 399-436 (Article)
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A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction
Hilary P. Dannenberg
English, Leipzig
Abstract In the major form of the traditional coincidence plot, estranged relatives
meet in remarkable circumstances. In complex representations, the central aspect is
cognitive and involves a recognition scene in which the estranged characters discover
each other’s identity. An analysis of this narrative core of the coincidence plot centers
on the depiction of the characters’ cognitive processes and the suspense generated
by the reader’s anticipation of a recognition scene. Beyond this, the narrative expla-
nation of coincidence is a key feature: a variety of explanatory patterns, frequently
involving causality, are invoked to naturalize the narrative strategy and conceal the
authorial manipulation that lies behind it. The traditional coincidence plot is a key
plot feature in varying manifestations from the Renaissance to the postmodernist
novel; however, modernist and postmodernist fictions also developed their own spe-
cific forms of coincidence involving analogical relationships of correspondence. Both
in the question of recognition and explanation, this new form of literary coincidence
differs substantially from traditional coincidence, notably because of its subversion of
the causal explanatory systems and of linear patterns of origin which form a central
part of the traditional coincidence plot.
1. The Historical Ubiquity of the Coincidence Plot
The coincidence plot is a literary strategy occurring in a variety of forms which

can be traced from the Renaissance romance right down to the contem-
porary novel. The traditional and most powerful form of the coincidence
plot goes back at least as far as the Oedipus story. It achieves its power
through its central component of kinship reunion. A thumbnail sketch of this
plot is as follows: the paths of estranged relatives (characters with a biological con-
Poetics Today 25:3 (Fall 2004). Copyright © 2004 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
Semiotics.
400 Poetics Today 25:3
nection) intersect in the space and time of the narrative world, in apparently random
and remarkable circumstances, and through no causal intent of the characters involved.
In the coincidence plot, narrative space and time are subject to remarkable
conjunctions (or, to expose the device: they are radically manipulated by the
author). For example, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1966 [1847]), when
Jane leaves Rochester after his attempt to marry her bigamously, she sets
off on a random coach journey across England. Her point of alightment
from the coach is determined only by the amount of money she happens to
have in her purse; yet in this unknown territory, she just happens to end up
collapsing exhausted and hungry on the doorstep of her own relatives, the
Rivers, whose existence she has up till now not even been aware of.
The coincidence plot is widely prevalent in both narrative fiction (the
focus of this article) and drama. It can be used to generate a comic or
euphoric plot involving ecstatic scenes of kinship reunion: such texts as
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (ca. 1601), Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), or Oscar
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) all use variants of this form.
The tragic or dysphoric form, in which kinship reunion is calamitous—par-
ticularly if a delay in recognition has led to incest between unsuspecting
relatives—is equally well represented: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Daniel
Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), or Paul Aus-
ter’s Moon Palace (1989) all use variants of this form. A tragicomic variant is
also widespread, in which a potentially disastrous reunion of estranged kin
is averted, as, for example, in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Old Arcadia (ca. 1580),
Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Ann
Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791).
The above generic sketch, however, as yet gives little indication of the full
diversity and analytic potential involved in the coincidence plot. Not only
do many other forms exist; the realization of the coincidence plot within the
discourse of each text is subject to a number of key variables which produce
substantial differences in its actual presentation. These are, most notably:
the depiction of characters’ cognitive processes and emotional states dur-
ing the recognition scene; suspense management prior to recognition; the
narrative explanation or naturalization of the coincidence itself. Moreover,
the diachronic ubiquity of the coincidence plot means that it can be used
as a kind of transhistorical laboratory to observe the evolution of specific
narrative strategies in fiction as a whole.
While a number of articles have focused on coincidence in the work of
individual authors and occasionally whole periods, up till now there has
been no systematic poetics of coincidence, either in terms of a compre-
hensive definition and theoretical model or in terms of a full comparative
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
historical survey. The following article will provide a brief survey of previ-
Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 401
ous work on coincidence before going on to present the cornerstones of a

theoretical model backed up by illustrative examples.1
2. Coincidence: A Brief Research History
2.1. Literary Research

Despite the existence of a large body of individual contributions on coinci-
dence in narrative fiction, there still remains a striking lack of consensus
about what it actually is. Some literary discussions of coincidence assume
that the term is self-explanatory and offer no explicit definition (Goldknopf
1972 [1969]; Forsyth 1985; Lodge 1992; Ickstadt 1994).2 Other contribu-
tions have provided various ad hoc definitions without reference to exist-
ing research, presenting a fascinating semantic spectrum. Coincidence is thus
(among other things): ‘‘the violent connection of the unconnected’’ (Van
Ghent 1961 [1950]: 223); ‘‘a convergence through contiguity or similarity of
causally unconnected events’’ (Hannay 1988: 89); ‘‘a convergence of several
elements: agent(s) and/or object(s), time and/or space’’ (Yacobi 1991: 464);
‘‘the coinciding of events and of the physical presence of persons at the same
point of time and space’’ (Dessner 1992: 162).3 Such definitions emphasize
the interconnective function of coincidence, centering either on the bring-
ing together of characters or on the creation of chains of relationship.4 The
term is also sometimes used loosely as a synonym for chance and not to
refer to a specific narrative plot (Hornback 1971; Bell 1993; Monk 1993).
Thus, Bert Hornback’s (1971: 6) definition, using the example of Hardy,
1. A comprehensive study is in Dannenberg 2001.

2. David Goldknopf (1972 [1969]: 159) simply appeals to the reader’s own experience by way
of bypassing a literary definition: ‘‘It [coincidence] is, after all, a fact of life, and most of us
can call to mind remarkable instances of it from our own lives.’’
3. Lawrence Dessner’s definition covers any intersection of characters within a narrative
world and thus, like most definitions, neglects the essential question of the previous relation-
ship between characters which elevates a random intersection into a coincidental encounter.
The phenomenon of one-off ‘‘chance encounters’’ is dealt with by J. D. Biard (1988) and
David Bell (1993).
4. Likewise, Walter McDonald (1968: 373) paraphrases coincidence simply as ‘‘coincidental
connections’’ (a phrase also used by Harvey [1965: 140]); Robert Caserio (1979: 105) defines
coincidence implictly in terms of connecting relationships when discussing its significance
in Dickens and George Eliot: ‘‘Both novelists seem to make use of coincidence to argue that
human connection and interrelation are life’s most important facts.’’ Neil Forsyth (1985) uses
the title of his article, ‘‘Wonderful Chains’’ (a quotation from Dickens himself ), to express the
essential connecting nature of coincidence, without offering a clearer definition within the
article itself. Elliott (1966: 58) defines coincidence (in Hardy) as ‘‘noticeable or surprising
concurrences of events . . . [which] have usually proved links in a concatenation of incidents
tending toward evil.’’ In examining coincidence in Isak Dinesen’s ‘‘plots of space,’’ Tamar
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
Yacobi (1991: 465) foregrounds the spatial element of ‘‘multiple convergence.’’

treats coincidence as an umbrella term which allows any accident or twist

of chance or fate to qualify:
Coincidences come about either as chance occurrences or through the operation
of causal relationships. An example of the first is Tess’ placing a note under the
door and Angel’s failing to find it because it has slipped—by accident—under
the carpet. . . . More interesting, however, is such coincidence as that of the
height of Michael Henchard’s ambitions being crossed by the return of the wife
he sold to realize those ambitions.
In a comprehensive poetics of coincidence (see Dannenberg 2001), the

forms cited by Hornback can be distinguished. The first example (from
Tess of the d’Urbervilles [1891]) concerns nonconvergence or negative coinci-
dence: this plot device is used extensively in Hardy’s novels and in other
tragedies of circumstance, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (ca. 1593),
where the intended intersection of objects in the narrative world (frequently
a letter from one character to another) is randomly thwarted. Hornback’s
second example (from The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886]) concerns the tradi-
tional coincidence plot itself and involves a complex case of kinship reunion
with an extended and ultimately tragic recognition plot (the daughter with
whom Henchard believes himself to be reunited ultimately turns out to be
another man’s child).
Exceptionally, a definition proposed by Thomas Vargish (1985: 7, 9) in
his study of Providence in the Victorian novel offers a more substantial
framework:
A coincidence in its basic meaning is merely the concurrence or juxtaposition in
time and space of two or more events or circumstances. Pip and Estella hap-
pen to meet at the end of Great Expectations . . . . But coincidence in its common
and most important literary use carried with it an element of surprise or aston-
ishment that derives from the lack of apparent causal connection. . . . In the
providential aesthetic, then, coincidence is not necessarily a failure in realism or
(as is sometimes implied) a cheap way out of difficulties in plot and structure—
though of course it can be both in a bad novel. Instead, coincidence is a symbol
of providence.
Vargish thus not only highlights the fact that fictional coincidence plots and
coincidence in real life are not automatically equatable with each other; he
also stresses the coincidence plot’s cognitive effect on the reader in stimulat-
ing the desire for explanation—a phenomenon we will see manifested in the
scientific literature on coincidence to be considered below. In the context
of Vargish’s own study, the explanatory model focused on is that of divine
Providence in the Victorian novel.
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
To date no attempt has been made to study coincidence in an exten-

sive diachronic framework. Its ubiquity in narrative has largely been back-
grounded, and discussions have focused on coincidence in the nineteenth
century.5 As a result, far from being approached as a fundamental phe-
nomenon of plot and narrativity, coincidence has sometimes been treated
as an example of Victorian excess, even accompanied by critical indigna-
tion at some authors’ barefaced persistence in using the device.6 John Reed’s
(1975) wide reading in the Victorian era and his examples of coincidence in
the form of plot summaries from numerous Victorian novels underline the
sheer copiousness of the device in that period. The continuing use of the
coincidence plot in the novel right up to the present (for example, in Don
DeLillo’s Libra [1988] or Louis Sachar’s Holes [1998]) also proves the falla-
ciousness of Ian Watt’s (1987 [1957]: 22) oversimplistic generic distinction
between the romance and the novel, which allegedly ‘‘replaces the reliance
of earlier narratives on . . . coincidences’’ with ‘‘a causal connection oper-
ating through time.’’ In fact, far from being a disused plot remnant from
the romance, this prerealist plot form was carried to new heights in the
nineteenth century—the purported age of realism.7 Equally fallacious is the
idea (Burkhart 1983 [1963]: 282) that coincidence is a fundamentally pre-
modernist narrative device and that the modernist rejection of Victorian
literary conventions heralded its demise as a narrative strategy.
5. Exceptionally, McDonald (1968: 381) offers a broader perspective: his insight that ‘‘coinci-
dence, in short, is simply a way of happening which is indigenous to fiction and which defines
a novelist’s fictive world’’ is borne out by examples from Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, and
E. M. Forster; this breadth is in part due to McDonald’s broad definition of coincidence,
which extends it to all chance events. David Lodge’s (1992: 149–53) brief discussion of coinci-
dence, in a collection of essays, The Art of Fiction, also acknowledges it to be a widespread
phenomenon.
6. Reed (1975: 130) speaks of coincidence being used ‘‘unashamedly in what were suppos-
edly matter-of-fact tales.’’ Goldknopf (1972 [1969]: 160) exclaims of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre: ‘‘One almost expects Miss Brontë to be ashamed of her handiwork . . . . Far from being
ashamed, the author is proud!’’
7. For discussions of nineteenth-century coincidence (above all in Dickens and Hardy and
sometimes only in the form of a passing reference to the device) see: Van Ghent 1961 (1950):
222–23; Harvey 1962; Hardy 1964: 62–63; Caserio 1979: 105–22; Brown 1982: 57; Forsyth
1985; Frazee 1985: 235; Vargish 1985: 7–10, 209–11, 230–33; Jones 1970: 46–47; Elliott 1966:
57–70; Hornback 1971; Dessner 1992; Wolf 1993: 163–64; and Nakano 1991. The phenome-
non has received less attention in the field of twentieth-century literature: Joyce’s Ulysses has
attracted attention for its use of coincidence (Hannay 1983, 1988; and Ackerley 1997); Yacobi
(1991: 463–66) discusses coincidence in the works of Isak Dinesen; Heinz Ickstadt (1994)
examines coincidence in DeLillo’s Libra. The varied nature of approaches to and definitions
of coincidence can of course also be attributed to the fact that in examinations restricted to
single authors, they are molded to the practice of the novelist concerned.
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
2.2. Scientific Research

The scientific analysis of real-life coincidence, notably the work of Alice
Johnson, Paul Kammerer, and Carl Jung, offers a number of useful parame-
ters for the definition of coincidence neglected by literary research. Scien-
tific research has considered coincidence as a real-life narrative plot involv-
ing a sequence or constellation of events and has in particular focused on
the deep human need to make sense of the bizarre and miraculous constel-
lations involved.
Johnson (1899: 159) defines a coincidence as ‘‘any conjunction of circum-
stances that would primarily be regarded as accidental, but in which a spe-
cial aspect is involved, suggesting a causal relation.’’ Her definition empha-
sizes the fact that coincidence, although ostensibly a random occurrence,
is so striking and special that, cognitively, it produces a strong desire in the
human mind for an explanation, one using the connecting patterns of cau-
sality. In her full investigation, she then subdivides ‘‘coincidences’’ in terms
of three different explicative models: ‘‘Causation,’’ ‘‘Design,’’ and ‘‘Chance.’’
Kammerer’s Das Gesetz der Serie (The law of series) (1919) investigates
striking series of chance repetitions in everyday life, for example, the bizarre
recurrence of numbers or names. Kammerer defines seriality as the repeti-
tion of the same or similar things and events in time and space which can-
not be linked by a mutual causal factor.8 The concept of seriality highlights
coincidence as a double (or ‘‘serial’’) relationship stretching across time (in
effect, although he does not use this term, along a narrative sequence).
In his system of classification, Kammerer focuses on different types of
repetition (Wiederholung) or clustering (Häufung) within the series due, vari-
ously, to phenomena such as similarity, affinity, and analogy (ibid.: 71–
75). While Kammerer’s approach is narrative-sequential, his evaluation of
coincidence in terms of various governing principles of repetition moves
away from the search for larger orchestrating systems that characterized
Johnson’s model.
Later in the twentieth century, Jung’s (1985 [1952]) definition and analysis
of coincidence (a configuration he calls both ‘‘synchronicity’’ and ‘‘mean-
ingful coincidence’’) goes one step further: it circumvents both the con-
struction of causal connections and sequentiality. Jung (1985 [1952]: 36)
understands the phenomenon not as a narrative-sequential plot at all, but
as ‘‘the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally con-
8. ‘‘Im Lichte der gegebenen Beispiele und Beispielgruppen stellt sich die Serie (Multiplizität
der Fälle) dar als eine gesetzmäßige Wiederholung gleicher oder ähnlicher Dinge und Ereig-
nisse—eine Wiederholung (Häufung) in der Zeit oder im Raume, deren Einzelfälle, soweit
es nur sorgsame Untersuchung zu offenbaren vermag, nicht durch dieselbe, gemeinsam fort-
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
wirkende Ursache verknüpft sein können’’ (Kammerer 1919: 36).

nected events.’’ His consideration of ‘‘synchronicity’’ focuses precisely on

modes of understanding which transcend previous temporal-linear forms
of thought. Accordingly, Jung proposes that an acausal principle under-
lies the phenomenon. Indeed, for Jung the concept of objective time is not
relevant to synchronicity precisely because the unconscious mind functions
outside the physical framework of space-time (ibid.: 42). In taking it out of
the traditional sequential-narrative framework postulated by Johnson and
Kammerer, Jung’s understanding of coincidence mirrors developments in
the specifically modernist and postmodernist forms of the coincidence plot
which likewise undermine narrative sequentiality.
3. The Coincidence Plot in Narrative Fiction
3.1. Traditional Coincidence

A basic definition of coincidence which incorporates these scientific defini-
tions can be formulated as follows: coincidence is a constellation of two or more
apparently random events in space and time with an uncanny or striking connection.
Thus, in the traditional coincidence plot, the uncanny connection is one
of a previous relationship between the characters intersecting in the space
and time of the narrative world. As already indicated above, the link of
kinship features predominantly in the complex narrative configuration of
the coincidence plot—here the uncanny connection is a biological one.
However, other links also feature in variants of the traditional coincidence
plot: the chance reunion of romantically connected characters, as in Aphra
Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), or E. M. Forster’s A
Room with a View (1908), is a relatively frequent practice, albeit not with the
narrative power of kinship reunion. The renewed encounter of estranged
friends and former foes are two further variants: they feature particularly
in the episodic structure of the picaresque mode, as in Fielding’s Tom Jones
(1749) and many novels by Charles Dickens, for example, Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–44), although they can also be formed into an overarching plot, as in
Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987). In contrast to the kinship reunion
plot, however, the reunion of former acquaintances is more frequently used
to structure individual narrative episodes or to catalyze the development
of the plot, as opposed to providing a denouemental or culminatory plot
structure.
The timing of the recognition scene is crucial in determining whether coinci-
dence is part of a negative or positive plot.The type of relationship between
the coinciding characters and the timing of recognition, that is, whether it
is instantaneous or delayed, can make the difference between the euphoric
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
and the tragic versions that have been used in narrative fiction. Delayed
recognition between close relatives can result in unintentional incest or lead

to other serious misunderstandings and family tragedies. Variants of this
essentially oedipal form of the coincidence plot produce a catalog of family
disasters or near misses in prose fiction from the Renaissance up to the
eighteenth century. In Greene’s Pandosto, father-daughter incest plus rape
is only just averted; in Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the eponymous heroine mar-
ries her own half brother without realizing it; in Lewis’s Gothic fiction, The
Monk, the protagonist unwittingly murders his mother and rapes his sister;
Fielding’s Tom Jones comically reworks the dysphoric form, using a plot of
mistaken identity in which Tom is temporarily led to believe that he has
coincidentally encountered and slept with his own mother.
While eighteenth-century texts thus exploit the tragic configurations of
the coincidence plot in various ways, nineteenth-century fiction, as repre-
sented by Jane Eyre, widely practices the euphoric form of kinship reunion.
In terms of cultural history, this paradigm shift can be seen as the result
both of the Victorian cult of the family and of the influence of Roman-
ticism’s utopian urge to create harmonious interconnected networks. The
use of coincidence in Victorian fiction is thus symptomatic of that highly
productive paradox which fuels Victorian fiction, in which the depiction
of the ‘‘real’’ interacts with the continuing deep influence of Romanticism
(Stone 1980).The work of Charles Dickens represents the most consummate
and multifarious manifestation of convergent coincidence plotting in Vic-
torian fiction. Dickens uses plots of deferred recognition and ultimate kin-
ship reunion, both with happy endings like that of Oliver Twist (1837–38) but
also in sombre, tragic form, for example, in the case of Lady Dedlock and
her daughter Esther Summerson in Bleak House (1852–53). He also widely
implements a different form in which former acquaintances are brought
together without the deeper emotional turbulence of kinship recognition.
In Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, coincidence is used as a major network-
ing strategy to interlink the novel’s characters as the narrative progresses;
this is achieved through a strategy of convergence, in which episodic coinci-
dental meetings function progressively to link the diverse cast of charac-
ters into an interconnecting group of friends and acquaintances which con-
stitutes a positive and celebratory Victorian megafamily. From it, in the
novel’s comic resolution, evil figures like Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit
are excluded.
The status of the kinship reunion plot as a major literary convention with
roots in both ancient drama and romance certainly accounts for its notable
avoidance by modernism, as part of that movement’s rejection of the liter-
ary baggage of previous epochs. Prior to modernism, however, the kinship
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
reunion plot is also avoided by other authors whose narrative worlds are
constructed on more naturalistic or quotidian criteria, such as Jane Austen

or Thomas Hardy. These two authors make widespread use of the coinci-
dence plot but largely only in order to bring friends or lovers together. By
contrast, the renewed and often playfully self-conscious dialogue with the
literary past in postmodernist fiction has led to kinship reunion being widely
revived as a narrative strategy—in neorealistic forms, such as Margaret
Drabble’s The Realms of Gold (1975) or Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, but also
in overt parody, as in David Lodge’s Small World (1984). In addition, post-
modernism’s postrealistic, nonmimetic attitude to fictional depiction has
meant that narrative no longer has any compunctions about the improba-
bilities of temporal and spatial manipulation involved in the coincidence
plot. This has led to a general resurgence of the coincidence plot beyond
the kinship reunion form, such as the construction of a triangular plot of
reunited foes and lovers stretching across the fictional space of Napoleonic
Europe in Winterson’s The Passion or the use of coincidence as a major struc-
tural principle in the historiographically metafictional representation of
Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in the Kennedy assassination plot depicted in
DeLillo’s Libra.
3.2. New Forms of Coincidence in Twentieth-Century Fiction

The traditional coincidence plot, which involves the bringing together of
characters with different degrees of previous relationship (of family, love,
friendship, or even emnity) is thus a narrative strategy that can be charted
from the Renaissance romance down to the contemporary novel. However,
new forms have also developed to supplement these traditional ones. In the
modernist period, a different type of coincidence emerges which is based
not on the literal kinship of blood links or the connections of friendship
between characters, but on a connecting principle of analogous relationships.
Analogical coincidence involves a striking correspondence between fictional enti-
ties or events, as opposed to a previous relationship established by a pre-
history within the plot. A further crucial difference between the new, ana-
logical form of the coincidence plot and the traditional form involves the
aspect of recognition: in the form practiced in modernist narratives, a char-
acter recognizes an uncanny analogical relationship within the narrative
world. In Joseph Conrad’s Chance (1913), for example, the crucial coinci-
dence at the beginning of the narrative concerns the intersection of two men
who are not linked by a ‘‘real’’ previous relationship in the sense of the tra-
ditional coincidence plot, but only by an ostensible one: the same surname
(Powell). By contrast, in what can be designated as a specifically postmod-
ernist form of the coincidence plot, networks of analogical coincidences
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
link multiple temporal levels in the narrative, such as the different character
constellations in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century England

represented in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987) or the two narratives set on
the separate time levels of colonial and postcolonial India in Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975). The difference here springs from the dense
matrix of links and correspondences between characters across different
ontological and temporal levels. Because of their density, these relation-
ships are generally only recognizable by the reader and not by a character,
whose perceptional field is limited to a single time level. Some texts even
(as in Ackroyd’s Chatterton and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot [1984]) play-
fully top this strategy with additional metanarrative commentaries on the
device of coincidence itself. The postmodernist form thus transfers the act
of recognition within the coincidence plot from a process depicted on the
actantial level within the narrative world to a perceptional act on the part
of the reader.
4. The Narrative Dynamics of Recognition in the Coincidence Plot
4.1. The Role of Recognition in the Coincidence Plot

Having sketched the overall historical/formal development of the coinci-
dence plot, I would now like to focus on some key aspects of the presentation
of the traditional coincidence plot in narrative discourse. An event frame-
work is the prerequisite for this form of the coincidence plot—characters
with a previous relationship intersecting in the space and time of the narra-
tive world—but the most crucial component in its realization is a cognitive
one. The crux of the coincidence plot is the discovery of the previous rela-
tionship by the coinciding characters—the recognition of identity. The staging
of the act of recognition often involves the portrayal of intense emotional
states which, in the overarching (as opposed to episodic) configuration of
the coincidence plot, constitute a climax in the narrative. Moreover, prior
to the actual recognition scene, the mere prospect of recognition can be
used as a narrative strategy to provoke intense suspense in the reader: if the
reader becomes aware of the previous relationship but the coinciding char-
acters remain ignorant, then a narrative time bomb is activated in which
the reader anticipates a future recognition scene.
The event sequence represented in the traditional coincidence plot is
thus constituted by three key phases:
1. that establishing the previous relationship (phase A);
2. that in which the actual coincidence or intersection of the characters in
apparently random circumstances takes place (phase B); and
3. recognition by the characters of the previous relationship and thus the
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
discovery of each other’s identity (phase C).

Each individual narrative constitutes a different realization and combina-

tion of these basic parameters. In Jane Eyre, for example, phase A is only
revealed retrospectively: the reader is not aware of the relationship with the
Rivers until Jane discovers it herself some time after phase B (intersection at
the Rivers’ house) has occurred; in doing so, Brontë sacrifices the suspense
potential that would have been activated if the reader had known about the
previous relationship before the characters, and she instead concentrates
the narrative on the depiction of surprise and emotion in the actual recog-
nition scene.
It is therefore the events occurring between phases B and C that con-
stitute the narrative force of the coincidence plot. But phase A, the pre-
vious relationship between the characters, however sketchily portrayed in
the actual narrative discourse, remains the sine qua non of the traditional
coincidence plot: without it, the narratively powerful phase of recognition
cannot occur. Moreover, phase A can in no way give rise to phase B in a
direct, causal fashion. The essential uncanniness of the coincidence is con-
stituted by the fact that phases A and B are in themselves random and
unconnected, notwithstanding the fact that the characters involved in these
events are deeply connected.
Recognition within the coincidence plot is a manifestation of what Aris-
totle calls anagnorisis, and it is indeed notable that in discussing anagnorisis
in the Poetics (52a30–52b6), Aristotle (1996: 18–19) mentions Oedipus, the
most consummately disastrous version of the traditional coincidence plot
in literature. Oedipus is caught up in a double set of the B phase: in sepa-
rate incidents he is coincidentally reunited with both his father and mother,
whom he unwittingly kills and marries respectively, leading subsequently
to the most horrendous C phase conceivable.
The mediated nature of the genre of narrative fiction, in which events
and relationships, and also the characters’ internal emotional and cogni-
tive processes both prior to and during recognition, can be described by a
narrator (as opposed to being presented only externally and in the form of
dialogue by the characters on stage in drama), make the dynamics of recog-
nition within the coincidence plot a particularly complex and multifaceted
phenomenon.Thus, as Meir Sternberg (1992: 508) emphasizes in discussing
the manifestations of surprise within the dynamics of recognition, surprise
for the fictional character and surprise for the reader are two distinct pro-
cesses: ‘‘The two may, but need not, run parallel: theirs derives from the
living, ours from the telling about their living.’’ 9
9. See Frye 1971 (1957): esp. 170 and 212–14 for a consideration of key differences between
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
anagnorisis in comedy and tragedy; for other discussions of recognition in drama, see Walsh
1966; Herzel 1974; Cave 1980, 1988; Black 1988; Boitani 1990; Salingar 1992; and Simon 1994.
In the Poetics, Aristotle’s discussion of anagnorisis does not foreground the

coincidence plot, but it still formulates some important analytical parame-
ters, especially as he discusses Oedipus in this context. The most relevant
passage is the following:
Recognition . . . is a change from ignorance to knowledge, disclosing either a close
relationship or enmity . . . . Recognition is best when it occurs simultaneously
with a reversal, like in the Oedipus. There are indeed other kinds of recogni-
tion. . . . Since the recognition is a recognition of some person or persons, some
involve the recognition of one person only on the part of the other, when it is clear
who the other is; but sometimes there must be a recognition on both sides . . . .
(Poetics 52a30–52b6; Aristotle 1996: 18–19)
Aristotle’s observations on the possibility of unilateral or bilateral recogni-

tion on the character level are central to the recognition process in the
coincidence plot. As will be seen below, the power of phase B to create
suspense regarding a future recognition scene is increased if recognition is
staggered, that is, if one character discovers the previous relationship before
the other does.
In focusing on Oedipus, Aristotle highlights recognition as part of the cul-
mination of a tragic plot in conjunction with peripeteia, which he considers
to be the most effective form of recognition plot. Recognition in the narra-
tive use of coincidence can occupy this culminatory position and thus involve
a denouemental insight. In narrative fiction, however, as a form of the epic
genre, which, as Aristotle observes ‘‘contains a multiplicity of stories’’ (Poet-
ics 56a13; Aristotle 1996: 30), recognition can occur in all phases of the
story, to all manner of characters, and at all levels of emotional and cogni-
tive intensity. Thus, minor episodic scenes depicting coincidental encoun-
ters do not involve the kind of monumental form of recognition that Sister
Mary Brian Walsh (1966: 35) calls ‘‘illumination’’ (to be found in protracted
plots using coincidence, like the stages of recognition undergone by Pip in
Dickens’s Great Expectations [see Forsyth 1985] or by Henchard in Hardy’s
The Mayor of Casterbridge). Rather, these scenes are ad hoc encounters involv-
R. S. Crane (1952), Wolfgang Harms (1966), and Terence Cave (1988) discuss recognition
in narrative fiction but not in the specific context of coincidence. In coincidence research,
only Forsyth (1985) and Werner Wolf (1993) have noted the role of recognition in coincidence.
Discussing coincidence in Dickens, Forsyth (1985: 159) shows how progressively the ‘‘recog-
nition scenes become the discovery of the plot by the central character’’; he even equates
Pip’s ‘‘discoveries’’ with ‘‘Oedipus’s discovery of the implausible coincidences which shaped
his destiny’’ (ibid.: 164) but nevertheless does not actually draw a connection between Aris-
totelian dramatic theory, notably the concept of anagnorisis. This connection is, however,
made by Wolf (1993: 162) in his discussion of what he calls ‘‘anaphorischer Zufall’’ (‘‘anaphoric
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
chance’’).
ing the instantaneous perception of another character’s identity, not a com-

plex act of discovery.
It is above all in the narrative preparation of the moment of recognition
that key differences and degrees in the sophistication of the coincidence plot
in individual texts come to light. Two separate aspects are here of foremost
interest:
1. How the consciousness of the possibility of recognition creates a state
of narrative suspense in the reader.
2. How the actual process of recognition is represented in the character-
cognitive processes.
If skillfully presented, these two aspects within recognition are capable of
eliciting powerful emotional responses in the reader. It is precisely because
of its power to evoke intense emotional experiences of readerly pleasure,
fascination, and in the case of incestuous versions such as Oedipus, horror,
that the coincidence plot has been so recurrently successful.
4.2. Readerly Suspense and Recognition

In his typology of detective fiction, Tzvetan Todorov (1977: 42–52) distin-
guishes between two key types of narrative interest: curiosity about gaps
of information in the past proceeding ‘‘from effect to cause’’ and suspense
about what will happen in the future which ‘‘proceeds from cause to effect’’
(ibid.: 47). Sternberg (1978) expands this distinction by illustrating in detail
how Homer’s Odyssey intricately harnesses the dynamics of both curiosity
and suspense. In analyzing suspense, Sternberg pinpoints three essential
features of this form of narrative interest:
1. the essential emotional dynamics of the suspense experience, in which
the reader experiences alternate states of hope and fear regarding a
positive or negative outcome (ibid.: 56–89);
2. the text’s stimulation in the reader’s mind of ‘‘hypotheses . . . about
the outcome’’ (ibid.: 65); and
3. the fundamental distinction between ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘how’’ hypotheses in
the structuring of suspense (ibid.: 89)—that is, the difference between
outcome-oriented suspense centering on alternating hope and fear
and, where a particular outcome is inevitable, suspense involving an
interest in how this outcome is to be reached.
More recent theoretical discussions have largely remained within this
framework, focusing, among other things, on the nature of the hypothetical
narrative futures that suspense engenders in the reader. Richard J. Gerrig
(1993: 77) characterizes suspense as lying in uncertainty, but this ‘‘can take
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
its toll only if readers allow themselves to consider a range of possibilities.’’

However, contradictory ideas exist on the degree of future-world plurality
involved in suspense: Noël Carroll (1996: 75–76) sees the number of alter-
nate future worlds involved in suspense as being limited to a binary either-or
choice:
With suspense, the question we are prompted to ask does not have an indefinite
number of possible answers, but only two. Will the heroine be sawed in half or
not? . . . we are ‘‘suspended’’ between no more than two answers.
By contrast, Victor Nell (1988: 57) cites an example from A Thousand and One
Nights, in which ‘‘in true cliffhanger style, the narrative breakpoint inter-
rupts a decisive action sequence: will the merchant slaughter the calf or
discover in time that it is his bewitched son?’’ Nell observes that ‘‘we do not
await the second night’s tale in order to discover if the calf was slaughtered
because we know the storyteller must spare its life. The listener’s need is to
know how this is achieved rather than whether it will happen’’ (ibid.). Nell’s
example shows that the how form of suspense has the power to engender
multiple alternate versions of the future world, whereas the what form of
suspense can evoke only a binary (either/or) future-world scenario.
The prospect of recognition within the coincidence plot has the power to
generate both how and what forms of suspense and can thus be used to inves-
tigate to what extent the theoretical distinction of what (binary world) versus
how (plural world) suspense holds true in actual narrative texts. In terms of
its suspense-generating potential, recognition within the coincidence plot
can be correlated with the highly suspenseful bomb-under-the-table situa-
tion described by Alfred Hitchcock. Here characters are depicted sitting
round a table, unaware that a bomb is underneath it (Truffaut 1967: 52; see
also the discussion in Brewer 1996: 114). The major point Hitchcock makes
in discussing this scenario is how suspense is generated in this scene because
the public is aware of the danger, while the characters at the table, talk-
ing about mundane topics, are not.This discrepancy of knowledge between
characters and recipient—which can be designated as cognitive stratification—
is also a key ingredient of the recognition phase in the coincidence plot.
The Hitchcock scenario is also notable because it conjoins the two forms
of suspense: the public here is in the grip of both the question of whether the
bomb will go off or not (i.e., by the what form of suspense) and also the ques-
tion of how the people sitting at the table might actually notice the bomb
(kick it accidentally/notice a ticking noise/glance under the table while
nonchalantly pulling their socks up, etc.) and in this case how they might
react to the threat (run away/defuse it/throw it out of the window, etc.).
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
Within the narrative matrix of the coincidence plot, recognition func-

tions as a kind of sophisticated time bomb. Just like the characters sitting
round the table with the bomb under it, the intersecting characters in the
coincidence plot may remain unaware of each other’s true identity. How-
ever, as soon as the reader knows of the existence of a previous relationship
between the coinciding characters (phase A), the possibility of recognition
(phase C) becomes active in the reader’s mind, evoking hypothetical sce-
narios concerning the questions of whether recognition will occur, how it will
happen, and how the characters will react emotionally to the revelation.
The mental constructions which the reader makes regarding the narrative
future during such suspenseful sequences can be referred to as liminal plot-
ting. I call these images liminal because they are only half-formed or semi-
consciously ‘‘viewed’’ in the reader’s mind as the reader mentally constructs
the potential scenarios that are implied as possible future-world extensions
of the scene depicted by a narrative, while the main focus of the reader’s
attention remains in the narrative present. These narrative futures are limi-
nal, flickering on the edge of consciousness, precisely because the reader’s
attention is riveted on the actional present of the narrative. In the case of
the bomb under the table scene, the strongest liminal image would be of
the flare and noise of a bomb exploding, but at the same time the reader’s
mind would be constructing the other how possibilities sketched above.
It is precisely this doubly transfixed and stretched attention in the narra-
tive present, supplemented by the reader’s generation of possible futures,
that creates the kind of intense state of suspense which is part of the immers-
ive power of many narrative texts (for a comprehensive poetics of immer-
sion see Ryan 2001). In this case, suspense preoccupies the reader’s mind so
forcefully and fully with the ongoing events and the future possibilities on
the diegetic level that it suppresses consciousness of his or her true ontologi-
cal location in the real world. In doing so, it intensifies the reader’s impres-
sion of the reality of the narrative world because it temporarily becomes his
or her primary concern.10 The development of suspense techniques in the
history of narrative fiction is thus also the history of the rise of ‘‘realism,’’
although, as Marie-Laure Ryan (2001: 161) suggests, ‘‘immersion’’ is a more
useful term to describe the process involved than the more vague ‘‘realism.’’
This development can also be charted by observing the evolution of the
presentation of the coincidence plot in narrative fiction.
Furthermore, suspense can be enhanced if the reader is given access to a
character’s own fears regarding the possible course of future events and thus
gains further promptings for future-world construction. In the coincidence
10. See Dannenberg forthcoming for a discussion of other ways in which the plots of coinci-
dence and counterfactuality weave an ontologically complex fabric of temporal dimensions
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
in narrative fiction.
plot, this form occurs when recognition is staggered and only one charac-
ter unilaterally discovers the identity of the other. In this case, the antici-
pations of the cognizant character regarding future bilateral recognition
can additionally fuel the reader’s liminal plottings of the future. Staggered
recognition thus represents another variant of cognitive stratification. The
narrative effect is then created by a discrepancy not between the knowl-
edge worlds on the recipient versus character levels (as in the Hitchcock
bomb under the table scenario) but between the difference in the knowledge
worlds of the two intersecting characters within the coincidence plot.
4.3. The Establishment of Origin and Location in the Kinship Network

Recognition within the kinship form of the coincidence plot establishes a
character’s biological identity, allowing the tracing of a network of blood
links and relationships in which the character can locate itself. As Stern-
berg (1990: 115) observes in discussing narrative temporality in the Bible,
‘‘there is more even to genealogy than the genealogical imperative with its
procession-like chronology.’’ The recognition scene within the coincidence
plot exemplifies this fact: the discovery of kinship involves the mapping of a
multidirectional network of relationships through time and blood. As cog-
nitive research has shown, the tracing of causal-progenerative patterns of
relationships, the establishment of origin, genealo, and genetic similarity are
fundamental and highly meaningful mental activities. The depiction of the
reunion and recognition of separated kinspeople thus represents a ‘‘mean-
ingful’’ experience of the deepest kind, with great affective potential. Mean-
ingfulness here in the cognitive sense refers to the suggestion and realiza-
tion in the reader’s mind of key patterns of connection, be they linear-causal,
spatial, or lateral-analogical in nature ( Johnson 1987; Turner 1987).
Depending on the degree and type of relationship to be revealed (sibling
versus parent relations), recognition within the coincidence plot exploits
various forms of connection. The tracing of kinship connections involves
both the networking of characters by mapping progenerative lines back to
previous generations and also analogical links involving the perception of
genetic similarities (for example, of facial characteristics). ‘‘In our mental
models of kinship, we blend the vertical, the lateral, and the hierarchi-
cal. Lateral can always suggest vertical (brothers share a parent)’’ (Turner
1987: 29).
When the narrative time bomb of recognition finally explodes and the
characters discover each other’s identity, the presentation of the cognitive
and emotional processes taking place in the characters’ consciousness is
another key measure of the degree of narrative sophistication in the coinci-
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
dence plot. Sophisticated manifestations of the coincidence plot often use

metaphors of connection in representing the characters’ cognitive processes

to intensify the emotionally charged moment of recognition. The recogni-
tion phase within the coincidence plot presents just such a quintessentially
‘‘meaningful’’ experience for the human subject, precisely because it estab-
lishes reassuring, interconnecting patterns crucial to a sense of identity and
security. Narratives which present such cognitive processes in the charac-
ters during the recognition scene—so as to enact their own perception of
the key cognitive parameters of kinship, genetic similarity, and origin—are
thus capable of creating deep vicarious states of emotional response in the
reader.
4.4. Suspense and Recognition in the Evolution of Narrative Fiction

The varied presentation of recognition, both with and without suspense,
can be illustrated with examples from the traditional coincidence plot. As
seen above, the timing of the recognition scene (phase C) between charac-
ters is central to the ultimate narrative configuration of the coincidence plot
and to whether the coincidental reunion results in a euphoric or dysphoric
scenario. Delayed recognition when estranged relatives meet coincidentally
can at worst lead to unwitting incest and thus to variations of the archetypal
Oedipus plot. This worst-case scenario is narrowly averted in Greene’s Pan-
dosto, a pastoral prose romance (and the source of Shakespeare’s The Win-
ter’s Tale). Here, in the culminating phase of the narrative, King Pandosto
of Bohemia feels strongly attracted to the newly arrived stranger, Fawnia,
who, having eloped with Prince Dorastus of Sicily, seeks haven at his court.
Pandosto desires to take Fawnia as his concubine, unaware that she is in
fact his long-lost daughter.
While the characters are not aware of their true relationship, the reader
is, since the prior text has narrated Pandosto’s earlier cruel casting out of
the baby Fawnia to sea and her subsequent rescue on the Sicilian coast by
a shepherd. Thus in the final section considerable suspense is generated
about whether recognition will take place. The likelihood of recognition is
reduced by the discourse’s suggestion of two other possible scenarios for
the reader to plot liminally. Pandosto may force himself on Fawnia, thus
committing incest and rape at the same time, a scenario triggered in the
reader’s mind by Pandosto’s threat to Fawnia, ‘‘my power is such that I may
compel by force’’ (Greene 1987 [1588]: 200), or he may have Fawnia put to
death (‘‘assure thyself thou shalt die’’ [ibid.: 202]). Either of these outcomes
seems more likely than recognition, until at the last minute Fawnia’s shep-
herd stepfather reveals her true identity, and the third possibility is actu-
alized. Greene’s plotting of coincidence thus provides a suspenseful narra-
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
tive through the implication of multiple possible alternatives. This would

seem to indicate that Carroll’s (1996) positing of a basic binary structure of

narrative possibilities in what suspense is not borne out in narrative prac-
tice as early as that of the Renaissance. What suspense is engendered here
through the suggestion of multiple alternatives. Pandosto shows that Renais-
sance fiction is already adept at handling plot-oriented what forms of antici-
patory suspense, which are constructed as a tripartite set of future possibili-
ties (rape, death, or recognition).
Pandosto is, however, largely deficient on the character-cognitive level
of suspense enhancement. For example, the text gives no insight into
Fawnia’s emotional state concerning her treatment by Pandosto, a strategy
which would fuel readerly fears concerning the possibility of a negative
future outcome.11 Pandosto is equally underdeveloped in its representation of
the process of recognition itself. When the father/daughter relationship is
finally revealed, we are merely given brief reports of the characters’ actions
and simple descriptions rather monotonously reporting their experience
of ‘‘joy’’:
Pandosto . . . suddenly leaped from his seat and kissed Fawnia, wetting her ten-
der cheeks with his tears, and crying ‘‘My daughter Fawnia, ah sweet Fawnia, I
am thy father, Fawnia.’’ This sudden passion of the King drave them all into a
maze, especially Fawnia and Dorastus. But when the King had breathed himself
awhile in this new joy, he rehearsed before the ambassadors the whole matter . . .
Fawnia was not more joyful that she had found such a father than Dorastus was
glad he should get such a wife. (Greene 1987 [1588]: 203; my emphasis)
This recognition scene, therefore, communicates hardly any informa-

tion about the cognitive and emotional processes accompanying kinship
reunion.
The reader of Pandosto thus experiences suspense about the story outcome
but little vicarious emotional involvement in connection with recognition
itself. In the history of narrative fiction, Defoe’s Moll Flanders provides an
innovative example of suspense generation within the coincidence plot, in
which staggered recognition and a long deferral between partial and full
recognition creates suspense on both the character-cognitive and the read-
erly levels.
From the unwitting revelations of her ostensible mother-in-law, Moll dis-
covers that she has coincidentally encountered and actually married her
own half brother (Defoe 1978 [1722]: 101). The narration of this discovery
11. For contrastive purposes, Pandosto is cited here as a negative example of low cognitive real-
ization. Not all Renaissance texts, however, are completely deficient in this aspect: Lodge’s
Rosalynde (1971 [1590]) is notable because it uses cognitive stratification and rudimentary
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
character-cognitive depiction to substantially enhance the anticipation of recognition.

is followed by weeks of story time (and many pages of discourse time),

in which Moll, and with her the reader, anticipate the possible form and
consequences of full cognizance on the part of her mother and her half
brother/husband. The reader’s suspense regarding the possibly approach-
ing recognition scene is in particular fueled by Moll’s own feverish fears
that her brother/husband will not be able to stand the mental shock of the
discovery of their true identity and relationship to one another.
The reader’s liminal plotting of a catastrophic version of a future recog-
nition scene between Moll and her brother is in particular intensified by a
passage in which Moll reports the intensity of her brother’s actual reaction
when, in attempting to prepare for the full revelation, she only hints that
he is not her lawful husband:
He turned pale as death, and stood mute as one thunderstruck, and once or twice
I thought he would have fainted; in short, it put him in a fit something like an
apoplex; he trembled, a sweat or dew ran off his face, and yet he was cold as
a clod, so that I was forced to run and fetch something for him to keep life in
him. When he recovered of that, he grew sick and vomited, and in a little after
was put to bed, and the next morning was, as he had been indeed all night, in a
violent fever. (Ibid.: 106)
Since this scene seems to prefigure a subsequent recognition scene, it fuels

the reader’s liminal conception of the intensely dramatic form that full rec-
ognition will take in the future and thus excites prerecognitional suspense
to a fevered pitch. In fact, it remains a virtual future world, since, due to
Moll’s skillful management of the full revelation, her brother receives the
knowledge with relative calm.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which narrates a euphoric kinship reunion,
follows a different strategy. The novel dispenses with suspense elements
and cognitive stratification prior to the recognition scene and concentrates
instead on the portrayal of recognition itself.12 The emotional experience of
recognition—centering on the discovery of shared genealogy—is described
in a passage combining Jane’s inner response and a report of her dialogue
with St. John Rivers:
Circumstances knit themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order: the chain that
had been lying hitherto a formless lump of links was drawn out straight—every
ring was perfect, the connexion complete. I knew, by instinct, how the matter
stood, before St John had said another word . . . .
‘‘Your mother was my father’s sister?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
12. Other notable representations of the character-cognitive experience of recognition can

Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
be found prior to Jane Eyre, for example in Behn’s Oroonoko and in Austen’s Persuasion.
‘‘My aunt, consequently?’’

He bowed.
‘‘My uncle John was your uncle John? You, Diana, and Mary are his sister’s
children, as I am his brother’s child?’’
‘‘Undeniably.’’
‘‘You three, then, are my cousins; half our blood on each side flows from the
same source?’’
. . . Glorious discovery to a lonely wretch! (Brontë 1966 [1847]: 410–11)
Jane’s initial commentary on the experience of recognition is notable be-

cause it uses metaphors of connection to describe the sense-making pro-
cess going on in her mind as she intuitively feels that St. John is her cousin
before he has fully revealed the truth. The metaphor of the chain reinforces
the sense of the interlinking of seemingly random characters into a kin-
ship system that is central to the recognition process. Jane’s words to St.
John then trace these human components in the genealogical chain before
coming to the key word ‘‘source,’’ which establishes the additional sense
of origin and biological lineage. The passage is quintessentially Roman-
tic because of its celebration of the interconnectedness of things, and this
also applies to the novel’s internal explanation system for the occurrence
of coincidence (see below). All these factors contribute substantially to the
novel’s intensely emotional representation of an archetypal ‘‘coming home’’
or ‘‘root-finding’’ experience that euphoric versions of the traditional co-
incidence plot capitalize on.
Notwithstanding the intensity of its use in the nineteenth century, the
traditional coincidence plot is still an enduring feature in twentieth-century
fiction. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace represents the current state of the art of
the traditional coincidence plot. Moon Palace is notable for its technical con-
solidation of areas which each of the aforementioned texts only master in
part: it plays advanced games of suspense both prior to recognition and
within the recognition scene itself, and it represents notable cognitive and
perceptual processes at the moment of recognition.
A summary of the (fairly complex) story of the novel is as follows: The
narrator Marco Stanley Fogg (an orphan) has been working for an eccentric
old man, taking dictation of his memoirs. After the old man’s death, Fogg
seeks out his employer’s estranged son, a man called Barber, to hand over
the memoirs. When he meets Barber, the strange truth is gradually discov-
ered: Barber, who was not aware he even had a son, is in fact Fogg’s own
father (and so the old man, now dead, was in fact Fogg’s own grandfather).
Auster’s management of recognition is particularly subtle in its creation
of suspense. The reader knows recognition is coming because the narrator
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
foreshadows this event by proleptically mentioning that at a later point he

discovered that Barber was his father. However, Fogg combines these antici-
pations with cryptic references to a future accident. The reader therefore
knows recognition is coming—there is thus no what suspense at all—but the
knowledge that it will occur in some unspecified calamitous form intensifies
the how suspense considerably. However, after it has set this suspense time
bomb ticking, the narrative does not move any further forward in story time
but instead turns backward for a lengthy retrospect, leaving the reader to
wait for over fifty pages for the narration of the actual recognition scene,
in which Fogg’s father sustains a fatal injury.
When it finally comes, recognition in Moon Palace involves a power-
ful description of Fogg’s emotional and cognitive processes. The narra-
tion traces the dramatic shift in worldview that takes place in the human
mind when a character’s identity is reconstituted and a stranger becomes a
kinsman:
I listened to him as though the earth had begun to speak to me, as though I
were listening to the dead from inside their graves. Barber had loved my mother.
From this single, incontestable fact, everything else began to move, to totter, to
fall apart—the whole world began to rearrange itself before my eyes. He hadn’t
come out and said it, but all of a sudden I knew. I knew who he was, all of a sud-
den I knew everything. . . . I found myself studying the contours of his eyelids,
concentrating on the space between the brows and the lashes, and all of a sud-
den I realized that I was looking at myself. Barber had the same eyes I did. . . .
We looked like each other, and the similarity was unmistakable. . . . I was Bar-
ber’s son, and I knew it now beyond a shadow of a doubt. (Auster 1990 [1989]:
292–96)
Here kinship, causation (father-son procreation), and similarity (genetic

resemblance) are all bound up in one extremely powerful moment of rec-
ognition. The recognition process taking place on the level of the story in
the mind of the character is vicariously, and hence immersively, shared by
the reader. This passage is particularly identifiable as a twentieth-century
rendering of the kinship recognition scene, precisely because of its detailed
mapping of facial characteristics and the emphasis on minute genetic simi-
larities.While Jane Eyre asserts the vaguer, more Romantic idea of ‘‘source,’’
Moon Palace frames recognition within the context of genetic resemblance.
The previous examples focused on the handling of recognition in tradi-

tional coincidence plots where character reunion takes a pivotal or denoue-
mental position. Recognition portrayal can, however, also be observed in
numerous forms in minor instances of the coincidental encounter where
temporality is not ‘‘strategic’’ but ‘‘episodic’’ (Sternberg 1990: 92), that is,
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
where the coincidence constitutes a brief narrative episode rather than an

overarching plot. Such episodic forms of coincidence generally concern the
reunion of acquaintance, rather than kin, and can be designated as ad hoc
coincidental encounters. The following examples from Martin Chuzzlewit show
how Dickens in particular developed this form both in its individual real-
ization and as a larger structuring principle in his multiple-plot novels.
In chapter 37, shortly after his arrival in London (following his ejection
from Pecksniff ’s house), Tom Pinch encounters Charity Pecksniff outside
the Monument:
‘‘My gracious!’’ cried a well-known voice behind Mr Pinch. ‘‘Why, to be sure
it is!’’
At the same time he was poked in the back by a parasol. Turning round
to inquire into this salute, he beheld the eldest daughter of his late patron.
(Dickens 1968 [1843–44]: 652)
Although brief, this scene nevertheless provokes suspense in the reader

when Pinch is addressed by an as yet unrevealed but ‘‘well-known’’ voice,
intensified by the potentially threatening poke in the back. The narrator
remains on the borderline of Pinch’s consciousness, sharing his space but
not communicating his knowledge world (i.e., whose ‘‘well-known voice’’ it
is). Like so many minor coincidental encounters in the novel, this scene has
no major role in the narrative but functions collectively with many others to
integrate the novel’s teeming cast of characters, parallel events, and loca-
tions. Such ad hoc coincidences form structurally vital nodal points in the
narrative, where characters come together and are progressively knitted
together.
In the following scene from chapter 35, Martin and Mark Tapley catch
sight of Pecksniff passing in the street from a concealed vantage point in a
tavern:
They were raising their glasses to their lips, when their hands stopped midway,
and their gaze was arrested by a figure which slowly, very slowly, and reflectively,
passed the window at that moment. (Ibid.: 622)
The spatial components of this scene are notable: the window is used
to engineer unilateral recognition, providing a portal between inside and
outside perspectives.13 Additionally, in keeping with the comic spirit of
the novel, Mark and Martin’s recognition of Pecksniff is represented in a
13. The analysis of the spatial representation of the recognition scene according to the use
of cognitive schemata for human orientation in real-world space (Johnson 1987) is a further
major avenue of investigation. Beyond the scope of this article, it is dealt with comprehen-
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
sively in Dannenberg 2001.

Dickensianly exaggerated and highly theatrical or even cartoon-like man-

ner, as the absolute freezing of bodily action, comically intensified through
the doubling of the same reaction in the two characters.
A final example shows how, even in the ad hoc form, Dickens can
stretch suspense through the clever use of spatial containment and stag-
gered recognition. In this scene, young Martin Chuzzlewit coincidentally
reencounters an old and unloved acquaintance, Montague Tigg, at a Lon-
don pawnbroker’s. Full recognition is delayed because the two characters
are confined within separate booths. So, at first, recognition is unilateral
and only acoustic:
Entering by a side-door in a court . . . [Martin] passed into one of a series of
little closets, or private boxes, erected for the accommodation of the more bash-
ful and uninitiated customers. He bolted himself in; pulled out his watch; and
laid it on the counter.
‘‘Upon my life and soul!’’ said a low voice in the next box . . . . Martin drew
back involuntarily, for he knew the voice at once. (Ibid.: 280)
A long section of dialogue between the pawnbroker and Tigg follows, dur-
ing which suspense develops as to whether Martin will manage to evade
Tigg and thus avoid bilateral recognition. Finally, though,Tigg’s act of rec-
ognition is staged through the grotesque intrusion of his body into Martin’s
own space:
The shopman was so highly entertained . . . that Mr Tigg himself could not
repress some little show of exultation. It vented itself, in part, in a desire to see
how the occupant of the next box received his pleasantry; to ascertain which
he glanced round the partition, and immediately, by the gaslight, recognised
Martin.
‘‘I wish I may die,’’ said Mr Tigg, stretching out his body so far that his head
was as much in Martin’s little cell as Martin’s own head was, ‘‘but this is one of
the most tremendous meetings in Ancient or Modern History!’’ (Ibid.: 281–82)
This is a mild example of a different presentational style of coincidence

developed by Dickens elsewhere: encounters between antagonistic charac-
ters. Moving away from the comic form, Dickens uses such situations to
create an atmosphere of dread and menace. Great Expectations, for example,
contains several notable examples, in which Pip coincidentally encounters
figures from the novel’s criminal underworld and dreads that in turn they
will recognize him.
So far the argument has highlighted how narrative suspense, the cogni-
tive and emotional depiction of recognition, and the causal-progenerative
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
tracing of origins and genealogy are major features of recognition in the

traditional coincidence plot. Some brief examples from the genre of histo-
riographic metafiction show how, by contrast, the postmodernist form of
coincidence, using analogical relationships, overturns and subverts these
traditionally realist or immersive parameters.
Whereas the traditional coincidence plot centers on the characters’ rec-
ognition of identity and, in the case of kinship reunion, of origins and biological
lineage, analogical coincidence, particularly the form used in postmodernist
fiction, involves an act of recognition taking place primarily on the reader-
cognitive level. In these novels, a frequent form of analogical coincidence
is an uncanny constellational resemblance in which groups of characters repeat
themselves across different levels. For example, in Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust
the two time levels (the 1920s and 1970s) repeat the constellation of a cen-
tral female protagonist who has a relationship with one Indian and one
Englishman; while in Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot there is a correspondence
between the narrator (a doctor), his wife, and her extramarital relationships
and the main characters of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Another ana-
logical component is that of repeated story patterns. Thus, in Heat and Dust,
both the narrator and her alter ego on the 1923 time level become pregnant
by their Indian lover in the same location and subsequently contemplate
abortion.
The traditional coincidence plot is plot-oriented in a traditional sense:
the narrative moves toward and culminates in an event on the story level,
namely, the act of recognition between characters and their construction of
a mutual lineage story. By contrast, in terms of recognition, postmodernist
coincidence can be designated as an antiplot: by and large, the characters
remain unaware of their role in a network of uncanny links; it is only the
reader outside the story world who is capable of constructing a ‘‘signifi-
cant’’ network of relationships through the perception of these correspon-
dences, but there is no meaningful, plot-driven interconnection on the die-
getic level. Thus, in Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust it is the reader who recognizes
the uncanny similarities and repetitions between the different character
constellations on the 1923 and 1970s time levels, while these resemblances
go unremarked by the narrator herself (a character on the 1970s level).
Moreover, recognition in the traditional coincidence plot, in particular
the kinship variant, concerns the discovery of linear patterns of connec-
tion that trace relationships back to a causal-progenerative point of ori-
gin. Analogical coincidence, by contrast, particularly in its postmodernist
form, actually undermines any potential construction of narrative sequen-
tiality. It does this by frustrating the reader’s desire to construct causal-
progenerative relationships leading back to an original version, so that only
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
a cognitively bewildering set of laterally perceived similarities obtain. This

thwarts the reader’s urge to construct the typical realist explanatory pattern
of causation and brings us to the other major analytical parameter of the
coincidence plot—the explanation of the strange or miraculous junctures
of coincidence.
5. The Explicative Urge of the Coincidence Plot
5.1. Key Explanatory Systems: Causality, Kinship, and Similarity

It is the overwhelming desire for explanation provoked by the astounding or
marvellous conjunctions of coincidence that makes the coincidence plot a
particularly significant narrative phenomenon. Just as the striking configu-
rations of real-life coincidence have stimulated scientists to advance various
theories to explain the causes or principles acting behind it (from theories
based on the powers of the human unconscious, for example, extrasensory
perception [ESP], to the possibility of divine intervention 14), so does narra-
tive fiction present a diverse spectrum of models to explain the remarkable
conjunctions of space and time in the coincidence plot.
In the previous section we saw how suspense strategies and scenes of
cognitive and emotional intensity within the recognition phase of the co-
incidence plot can be highly immersive. The immersive experience sup-
presses—at least temporarily—the reader’s consciousness of the construct-
edness of the coincidence plot. However, narrative fiction also uses a more
overt strategy to naturalize coincidence in the narrative world: fictional
systems of explanation are used to convince the reader that the fictional
world is an autonomous one by simulating cognitive patterns, above all cau-
sality, familiar from the real world. Such a strategy suggests that whatever
happens in the narrative world is the product of forces within that world,
be they conceived of as coming from a divine force located in a metaworld
beyond the site of the action or as being the result of processes or human
relationships within the narrative world. As Sternberg (1985: 99) observes
in his discussion of the ‘‘Omnipotence Effect,’’ the ‘‘narrated world [can]
figure as a creation or a re-creation.’’ Where coincidence is naturalized, the
narrative world is clearly the latter. Just as causal patterns of explanation
form a central basis in the scientific research ( Johnson 1899; Inglis 1990),
so do realist narratives use key explanatory patterns which simulate causal
sequences. An analysis of the explicative systems operating within each nar-
rative world to justify the coincidence plot thus provides insights into the
conceptual-cultural climate underlying the specific narrative’s generation.
14. See Johnson 1899 and Kammerer 1919 for different classification systems based on expla-
nation. See Inglis 1990 for a general survey of explanations proposed by research into real-
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
world coincidence.
The construction of causal connections has indeed been seen as intrinsic

to the creation of plot, as, for example, in E. M. Forster’s much-cited defini-
tion of plot versus story.15 Aristotle (1996: 17) too emphasizes the enhanced
effect of plots creating causal connections upon the audience of drama:
Fear and pity . . . occur above all when things come about contrary to expectation
but because of one another.This will be more astonishing than if they come about
spontaneously or by chance, since even chance events are found most astonish-
ing when they appear to have happened as if for a purpose—as, for example, the
statue of Mitys in Argos killed the man who was responsible for Mitys’ death by
falling on top of him as he was looking at it. Things like this are not thought to
occur at random. So inevitably plots of this kind will be better. (Poetics 52a2–11)
Patterns of causality thus underlie realist or conventional narrative, and in

realist fiction’s use of the coincidence plot, various causal patterns form
the center of explanation. Causation is at the heart of the human way of
understanding the world (Piaget 1974) and thus fulfills a key role in the
authenticating practices of fiction. Mark Turner (1987: 40–42) has proposed
a detailed cognitive typology of causation in which he makes an important
and enlightening distinction, among others, between causal-manipulative
and causal-progenerative systems of explanation. (The former involves
‘‘someone directly manipulating some preexisting objects’’; the latter simply
involves a causal sequence without intent, or ‘‘paths by which things in the
world, the mind, and behaviour can spring from one another.’’) Such a
differentiated typology makes it possible to distinguish between the many
causal explanations offered in realist fiction.16
Causality, however, is not the only explanatory system operative in real-
ist narrative; other explanations assert the absence of causality, the ultimate
randomness of life, and construct a world ruled by chance in which any-
thing can happen: coincidence then becomes a ‘‘natural’’ phenomenon and
is not the result of any causal-manipulative but at most of randomly induced
causal-progenerative, processes.17 Although a major paradigm shift can be
observed from the late nineteenth century in the rise of chance as an ex-
15. ‘‘A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and
then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot’’
(Forster 1990 [1927]: 87).
16. For a range of approaches to the question of causality in literature, see Culler 1981; Flu-
dernik 1994; Adams 1996: 129–41; and Richardson 1997.
17. If we understand the term coincidence as synonymous with chance and the random, then
of course, as Sternberg (1985: 142) observes in discussing an example of the coincidence plot
from the Bible, it follows that ‘‘in a God-directed world there is no room for coincidence.’’
However, like Vargish (1985), my poetics of coincidence sees coincidence as a particular con-
stellation of characters and events which can be interpreted or explained using a variety of
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
models, including the causal-manipulative explanation of divine Providence.

planatory system in fiction (Monk 1993; Caserio 1999), chance can be ob-
served as early as Renaissance fiction as an explanatory system. Further-
more, in the transition from realism to modernism in the first half of the
twentieth century, the pluralization of systems of explanation within indi-
vidual works of fiction and the foregrounding of explanation itself within
the discourse becomes a notable pattern. Moreover, just as some twentieth-
century scientific research (Kammerer 1919; Jung 1967 [1952]) questions
causality as a dominant explanatory model, so do the specifically twentieth-
century forms of coincidence (both the modernist and postmodernist vari-
ants) through the nonlinear analogical patterns they display.
Thus, while the construction of causal relationships is a key cognitive
operation of the human mind, encouraged and cemented in both real-life
cognitive operations and realist fiction, it also interacts with other cognitive
parameters. Turner (1987) has proposed similarity and kinship as two other
key explanatory patterns, and we can indeed see these three systems inter-
acting in different ways in each fictional realization of the coincidence plot.
The examples below will show how realist texts attempt to camouflage the
ultimate, extradiegetic causal level of the author by constructing a narrative
world with its own intradiegetic causal systems. If these function convincingly,
the reader is encouraged to believe in the internal logic and autonomy of
that world and take it as ‘‘real.’’ Other explanatory systems can function to
destroy or enhance this process: blatantly repetitive interconnections based
on similarity, in which analogical relationships are constructed between tex-
tual elements due to resemblance or parallels, tend to point to the ultimate
causal level of the author as creator and thereby destroy realism; this form
is used by historiographic metafiction. By contrast, connective systems con-
structed on the intradiegetic level through the links of kinship tend to have
completely the opposite effect, since here the reader has recourse to his
or her own experiential model of family relationships and thus processes
the text as a realist one representing familiar (on top of familial) patterns.
Indeed, as we saw in the section on recognition above, the explanatory
model of kinship is at the heart of the most widely used form of the traditional
coincidence plot: the instatement of a key causal-progenerative pattern—
the tracing of lineage—which is at the heart of this plot, is another reason
why such plots have achieved narrative power and credibility despite their
blatant manipulation of narrative time and space.
5.2. The Explanation of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction

Three examples will illustrate the range of subtle versus heavy-handed
causal-providential explanations used to authenticate the coincidence plot
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
in realist fiction. In the following minor ad hoc coincidental encounter from

Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1981 [1748]: 229), an instant providential

explanation is offered for the fact that Roderick happens to be in the right
place at the right time to save his beloved Narcissa from the molestations
of Sir Timothy:
But heaven would not suffer so much goodness to be violated; and sent me, who
passing by accident near the place, was alarmed with her cries, to her succour.—
What were the emotions of my soul, when I beheld Narcissa, almost sinking
beneath the brutal force of this satyr! I flew like lightening to her rescue.
This narrative explanation substitutes another agent—God (‘‘heaven’’)—

for the real one (the author) but retains the basic causation type (manipu-
lation). The explanation is not very convincing and rather clumsily intro-
duced because it is offered in cliché fashion by Roderick simultaneously
with the narration of the event itself. Here, therefore, despite its osten-
sibly realistic framework, the extradiegetic level of the manipulating author
glimmers, or rather glares, through the diegetic construct.
Unlike this poor coincidence management, other realist narratives in-
state causal systems more subtly by separating the explanation from the
narration of the coincidence itself, so that it does not seem like a knee-
jerk reaction or the hasty operation of an author trying to camouflage his
tracks. Both Defoe and Brontë do this. In Moll Flanders, Moll’s coinciden-
tal encounter and incestuous marriage with her half brother, and also a
fortuitous coincidental encounter with her former lover Jemmy in New-
gate much later in the novel, are implicitly instated within a twofold causal
principle. The first coincidence is implied to be the result of punitive provi-
dential action for Moll’s behavior in the novel’s early scenes in Colchester
and the second a reward for Moll’s spiritual improvement later on in the
narrative. The fact that Moll’s incestuous marriage is an apt and recip-
rocal punishment for her previous life is implied by the foreshadowing of
the incest motif in her very first sexual exploits with the two brothers at
Colchester at the beginning of the novel. Here she states explicitly, that,
having married one brother but still desiring the other, ‘‘I committed adul-
tery and incest with him every day in my desires, which, without doubt,
was as effectually criminal in the nature of the guilt as if I had actually
done it’’ (Defoe 1978 [1722]: 77). This complex form of providential expla-
nation involves both causal-progenerative (Moll brings events on herself
through her actions) and causal-manipulative levels (God punishes Moll for
her actions by orchestrating the incestuous marriage and rewards her good
behavior by bringing her together with Jemmy again).
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre uses a more explicit causal explanation.
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
However, since it is inserted much earlier in the narrative, it acquires retro-

spective significance only when its applicability to the central coincidence

of family reunion becomes plain:
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 com-
prehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature
with man. (Brontë 1966 [1848]: 249)
In keeping with the Romantic traditions operating within Brontë’s narra-

tive world, humankind is here placed in an interactive network with the
spatial environment and ‘‘Nature.’’ If someone’s ‘‘sympathies’’ toward other
human beings are sufficient, then the implication is that that person will
be drawn toward those other human beings by the attraction of ‘‘the unity
of the source’’ (i.e., kinship). Brontë’s intradiegetic explanation (which is
effectively a form of ESP) is neither causal-progenerative (no single action
by Jane leads to the coincidence) nor causal-manipulative (no omnipotent
deity is implicated as orchestrator of events) but a further variant which
Turner (1987: 41) refers to as ‘‘causation as necessary and sufficient conditions’’ (ital-
ics in original). The power exerted through ‘‘source’’ and ‘‘origin’’ (the key
words in this passage also presage the subsequent recognition scene) exerts
a force of attraction which is sufficient to bring estranged relatives together.
While Jane Eyre is not without its own providential component, Brontë’s
more pluralistic and pantheistic inclinations mean that no single God is
instated as a single causal manipulator in the world of this novel. Brontë’s
explanation of coincidence in Jane Eyre is one indication of how the explana-
tory systems of nineteenth-century fiction are not rigidly providential but,
in the wake of Romanticism, are moving away from ‘‘model[s] of reality
where God exercises absolute sway over the universe [nature, culture, his-
tory] in conspicuous isolation and transcendence’’ (Sternberg 1985: 100).
While recent research has emphasized the rise of chance in a paradigm
shift away from causal explanation in the course of the nineteenth century
and the early twentieth century, randomness as an explanatory principle
can be observed operating in much earlier texts, like Greene’s Pandosto. Here
all the major events leading to coincidental encounters between characters
are represented as the product of the random forces of changeable weather
at sea, powered by the fickle whims of fortune.When Fawnia is put out to sea
as an outcast baby, she does not perish but is washed ashore on the Sicilian
coast, and years later it is a storm which forces her to return, at first unrec-
ognized, to her father’s Bohemian court. It is notable that in the narrative’s
attempt to simulate the changeability of life, these passages always describe
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
alternate phases of good and bad weather to emphasize apparent random-

ness. The principle of randomness as opposed to purposiveness is high-

lighted through the personification of fortune as an unpredictable woman:
Fortune, minding to be wanton, willing to show that as she hath wrinkles on her
brows so she hath dimples in her cheeks, thought after so many sour looks to
lend a feigned smile, and after a puffing storm to bring a pretty calm. (Greene
1987 [1588]: 173)
By contrast, Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit is notable because, in a shift

from the simulation of ‘‘divine’’ to the implication of ‘‘artistic . . . stage
management’’ (Sternberg 1985: 101), it shows no sense of obligation about
offering an explanation for its use of coincidence. The novel’s comic exu-
berance leads its characters to unabashedly celebrate the narrative device.
We have already seen how, when young Martin encounters Montague Tigg
at a London pawnbroker’s, the latter declares this to be ‘‘one of the most
tremendous meetings in Ancient or Modern History!’’ (Dickens 1968 [1843–
44]: 281–82). Moreover, near the close of the novel, after the final (fairly
outrageous) coincidental meeting between old aquaintances on a London
street who were last seen dying in a North American swamp, Mark Tapley
proclaims it to be ‘‘a coincidence as never was equalled!’’ (ibid.: 910–11). In
accompanying the coincidental encounters with hyperbolic commentaries
by the characters themselves, the novel challenges the reader to accept the
Dickensian universe on its own terms and not as a copy of the real world.
The comic, softly antirealistic world of Martin Chuzzlewit does not attempt
to justify coincidence but does assert its right to its own fictional laws of
space and time.
A further development can be seen in the rise of the foregrounding or
subversion of explanatory systems, often in combination with the offering of
pluralistic systems of explanation. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1965 [1871–
72]) and Daniel Deronda (1967 [1876]) are key texts in this tradition because
they juxtapose different explanatory systems and foreground coincidence
as a perceptual and not objectively universal constellation of events.18 Mod-
ernist texts then considerably expand this aspect. E. M. Forster’s A Room
with a View contains a key scene in which two characters argue about the
explanation of a coincidence (Forster 1955 [1908]: 147), while in both James
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) the char-
acters’ own interpretations of the significance of coincidence is ironized or
relativized by the discourse.This is the tradition continued by Auster’s Moon
18. In Middlemarch, Eliot ironizes Bulstrode’s reliance on providential explanations, while in
Daniel Deronda both the narrator and various characters offer widely differing explanations,
ranging from the mundane to the romantic and even the mildly metafictional, for the plot’s
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
coincidences. In this respect, Daniel Deronda presents a relativistic range of causal models not
fully accounted for by Cynthia Chase (1978).
Palace, which, powered by postmodernist scepticism about all-inclusive sys-

tems and objective facts, emphasizes that the interpretation and explana-
tion of life’s coincidental patterns is essentially an operation of the human
mind. For example, at one particularly fortuitous juncture of events, Fogg
says, ‘‘It seemed as though fate was watching out for me, as though my life
was under the protection of benevolent spirits’’ (Auster 1990 [1989]: 53),
thereby voicing an optimistic, neoromantic spirit of a benevolent universe.
By contrast, at a later point, Fogg’s grandfather claims that coincidental
events are the result of electrical charges in human bodies and can them-
selves be influenced:
‘‘It could have been a coincidence.’’
‘‘There are no coincidences.That word is used only by ignorant people. Every-
thing in the world is made up of electricity, animate and inanimate things alike.
Even thoughts give off an electrical charge. If they’re strong enough, a man’s
thoughts can change the world around him. Don’t forget that, boy.’’ (Ibid.:
104–5)
Multiple explanations reflecting the diverse results of the human endeavor

to explain coincidence in terms of causal influence, either as an external
benevolent force or as emanating from man himself, exist side by side in
Auster’s novel. Another key passage emphasizes that interpretation itself
is a vain endeavor to make sense of random phenomena by foregrounding
how the bizarre, randomly formed shapes in a canyon landscape can be
shaped by human perception into meaningful figures:
Obelisks, minarets, palaces: everything was at once recognizable and alien, you
couldn’t help seeing familiar shapes when you looked at them, even though you
knew it was all chance, the petrified sputum of glaciers and erosion, a million
years of wind and weather. . . . It was like making pictures out of clouds. (Ibid.:
156–57)
Ultimately, therefore, in typical postmodernist fashion, Moon Palace rep-

resents both interpretation and meaning as subjective mental operations:
causal connection is only one of a number of possible patterns which can
be imposed by the human mind on essentially random phenomena. Moon
Palace thus foregrounds the human need for explanation but does not itself
provide a coherent and streamlined system of justification.
The specifically postmodernist form of analogical coincidence subverts
the construction of explanatory systems in a different way. Here the domi-
nance of analogical patterns of connection frustrates the reader’s ability to
construct the linear patterns of causality familiar from realist narrative. For
example, in Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, the reader tries in vain to detect the
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
causal-progenerative relationship between the two narratives which consti-

tute the text: that of the unnamed narrator who goes to India in the 1970s
to retrace the steps of her grandfather’s first wife Olivia and that concern-
ing Olivia herself, who is the subject of the narrator’s reconstructions of
the events of 1923 based on her reading of Olivia’s letters. The analogical
coincidences between the two narratives lead the causally motivated reader
to conclude that events on one time level have been copied by the other.The
text, however, does not offer the reader any indication of which came first in
this chicken-and-egg conundrum: whether the 1970s narrator is imitating
Olivia’s choices and actions as part of her own quest to research and under-
stand Olivia’s life in India or whether the repetitions are the result of poetic
license taken by the narrator, who uses elements from her own experience
to flesh out her own (fictionalized) reconstruction of Olivia’s life but which
did not actually occur on the 1923 time level as narrated in Olivia’s letters
(which the reader never has access to). Therefore, whereas the traditional
coincidence plot in its kinship form centers on the explanatory power of
tracing lineage back to origin and locating the characters within a causal-
progenerative framework, the postmodern coincidence plot frustrates the
construction of any definitive originality, source, or traceable linear rela-
tionships between characters (and between texts). Only in an extradiegetic
context is it possible for the reader to construct a clear causal relationship:
ultimately the uncanny analogies carry the causal-manipulative fingerprint
of the orchestrating author.
6. Conclusion
In summary, it can be said that the traditional coincidence plot is a major

recurrent feature in narrative down the ages, from Oedipus to Moon Palace.
The potentially flexible constellation of the crucial recognition scene means
that it can create both tragic denouements or euphoric recognition scenes
with harmonious closure. Furthermore, the narrative force of the coinci-
dence plot lies in the representation of the mental processes of recognition
in the characters involved and their power to affect the reader, especially in
the emotionally charged plot of family reunion. Finally, like the scientific
texts discussed, the novels mentioned document the ongoing history of the
search for systems to explain coincidence. Coincidence on this level carries
a suggestive power; the discovery of the forces working behind it seems to
promise the possibility of insight into the deeper systems underlying life. It
is this desire for kinship and explanation that the fictional coincidence plot
has long successfully tapped into.
Furthermore, in tracing the increasingly sophisticated representation of
Tseng 2004.9.16 07:15
the coincidence plot, it is possible to perceive key stages in the evolution

of the modern novel. From the rudimentary suspense and representation

of character consciousness in Renaissance fiction, we can perceive a sub-
stantial deepening of suspense technique in Defoe at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, while the depiction of recognition in Jane Eyre is rep-
resentative of a deepening of the cognitive representation of character. A
contemporary novel like Auster’s Moon Palace represents a consolidation of
all these different strands: suspense coordination, cognitive stratification,
and the representation of character-cognitive processes in the moment of
recognition all combine in the late-twentieth-century construction of the
coincidence plot.
Moreover, the fact that the coincidence plot bridges those texts desig-
nated as ‘‘romance’’ and those texts designated as ‘‘novels’’ undermines the
claims of other generic theories that have simply polarized the novel and
the romance (Congreve 1991 [1692]; Reeve 1930 [1785]; Watt 1987 [1957]).
Far from being an altogether different genre that can be defined through
its reaction against the romance, the modern novel from the eighteenth
century onward, viewed in the light of the coincidence plot, can be seen
to be repeatedly giving way to the influence of romance. It is, rather, the
novel’s innovative presentation of the coincidence plot that distinguishes
it from the romance: above all, the new genre’s development of narrative
techniques which help to create a state of immersion in the reader and
which, for the duration of the reading experience, temporarily obscure the
reader’s consciousness of the fact that she or he exists on a completely dif-
ferent ontological level to that of the characters and events of the narrative
world.
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A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction

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A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction

1. The Historical Ubiquity of the Coincidence Plot

The coincidence plot is a literary strategy occurring in a variety of forms which

400 Poetics Today 25:3

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 401

ous work on coincidence before going on to present the cornerstones of a

2. Coincidence: A Brief Research History

2.1. Literary Research

1. A comprehensive study is in Dannenberg 2001.

Yacobi (1991: 465) foregrounds the spatial element of ‘‘multiple convergence.’’

402 Poetics Today 25:3

treats coincidence as an umbrella term which allows any accident or twist

In a comprehensive poetics of coincidence (see Dannenberg 2001), the

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 403

To date no attempt has been made to study coincidence in an exten-

404 Poetics Today 25:3

2.2. Scientiﬁc Research

wirkende Ursache verknüpft sein können’’ (Kammerer 1919: 36).

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 405

nected events.’’ His consideration of ‘‘synchronicity’’ focuses precisely on

3. The Coincidence Plot in Narrative Fiction

3.1. Traditional Coincidence

406 Poetics Today 25:3

recognition between close relatives can result in unintentional incest or lead

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 407

constructed on more naturalistic or quotidian criteria, such as Jane Austen

3.2. New Forms of Coincidence in Twentieth-Century Fiction

408 Poetics Today 25:3

constellations in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century England

4. The Narrative Dynamics of Recognition in the Coincidence Plot

4.1. The Role of Recognition in the Coincidence Plot

discovery of each other’s identity (phase C).

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 409

Each individual narrative constitutes a diﬀerent realization and combina-

410 Poetics Today 25:3

In the Poetics, Aristotle’s discussion of anagnorisis does not foreground the

Aristotle’s observations on the possibility of unilateral or bilateral recogni-

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 411

ing the instantaneous perception of another character’s identity, not a com-

4.2. Readerly Suspense and Recognition

412 Poetics Today 25:3

its toll only if readers allow themselves to consider a range of possibilities.’’

Within the narrative matrix of the coincidence plot, recognition func-

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 413

414 Poetics Today 25:3

4.3. The Establishment of Origin and Location in the Kinship Network

dence plot. Sophisticated manifestations of the coincidence plot often use

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 415

metaphors of connection in representing the characters’ cognitive processes

4.4. Suspense and Recognition in the Evolution of Narrative Fiction

tive through the implication of multiple possible alternatives. This would

416 Poetics Today 25:3

seem to indicate that Carroll’s (1996) positing of a basic binary structure of

This recognition scene, therefore, communicates hardly any informa-

character-cognitive depiction to substantially enhance the anticipation of recognition.

Dannenberg • A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction 417

is followed by weeks of story time (and many pages of discourse time),

Since this scene seems to preﬁgure a subsequent recognition scene, it fuels

12. Other notable representations of the character-cognitive experience of recognition can