The Shape of the Real | Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form (2024)

Emily Allen,

Dino Franco Felluga

As if conjuring life out of the void, novels create new worlds out of the stuff of this one. Novels do not make something out of nothing; they refer outside of themselves to places, people, things, structures, ideas, and facts that are already familiar to us—or if not quite familiar, then understandable, believable. The world of the novel registers with us as partly but not entirely real. The gap between the fictive and the real is the space of representation, ideology, and form, and it is the peculiar province of the literary, as scholars before us have discussed.1 We bring it up again here, now, because it bears remembering: the literary is the realm of the counterfactual. This is information that literary critics have occasionally been accused of forgetting—sometimes by historians, but most frequently by other literary critics—in our rush to demonstrate the cultural and political applications of our work.2 But how could we really forget? What draws us to literature is its unreality, its uncanny magic to shape reality as if it were other than itself.

We wish to argue for the power of the otherwise, the ability to see things as they are not (but could be) and to reframe reality by thickening the field of possibilities that has been thinned out on the way to the actual. What the counterfactual shows us is not how inevitable the actual is, but how fragile and dicey. As Wai Chee Dimock writes, following Wittgenstein,

That arbitrariness undercuts the solidity of fact, surrounds it by what Dimock calls the “teeming world of the unpurged, unsorted, and unrealized” (243), a world “resting just below the threshold of actualization” (242) that is both other than and more than the fraction of the universe occupied by the actual. Dimock tracks the counterfactual into what she calls the “syntactic underground” of the subjunctive, the shadowy grammatical realm that surrounds the indicative and helps to produce the “time-warping and world-multiplying fictiveness peculiar to the constitution of literature” (244). She writes of the subjunctive,

Indeed, Dimock claims that “What the subjunctive offers would seem to be an alternative grammar of time, a pre-processed latitude, not granted by empirical reality but honored by the morphology of syntax. We can think of this alternative grammar as a ‘counterfactual realism,’ stretching the empirical to its limits and describing the world beyond those limits” (244, emphasis ours).

While there are, appropriately, different paths to the counterfactual—and these have been taken by colleagues looking at counterfactual histories, the optative, the virtual grammar of the subjunctive, the formal signatures with which language signals the forking of possibility, and the virtual possibilities opened by the digital realm and its reordering (disordering) of data4—the aspect that most interests us is the time-altering property of the otherwise, a time-travel device for entering the multiple, contingent, alternative timelines around and just below our own apparently singular one, timelines that look both backwards and forward, to what might have been and what might yet be. Because the fictional time of Victorian novels is bound to action (or inaction), to those events that “happen” in and through time and make up fictional plots, we experience disruptions in the standard timeline at various formal-temporal levels: the micro-grammar of such linguistic conventions as the subjunctive, the optative, and the future anterior; the cause-and-effect, subject-object syntax of plot; and the structure of subjectivity that realism constructs as accruing through time and experience.

Realist Time

We appear to be describing the workings of science fiction—time travel, alternative timelines, multiple worlds, fractional and parallel universes—but our claim is that all literature offers these counterfactual possibilities, perhaps most pressingly the realist fiction that would seem to traffic only in the actual but that in fact—in counter-fact—encodes unreal alternatives to itself. Let us begin, then, with realist time, which cannot help but offer up a theory of action and subjectivity. Realist time proceeds slowly, sequentially, in much the same way—indeed, in just the same way—as we believe reality itself to unfold. It moves relentlessly forward along a “chain of events,” in which causes are linked to effects, which in turn create new causes, and so on. As it moves forward, realist time sheds possibilities, plucking the actual moment from the stream of potential ones, which are then canceled and invalidated. The present moment is shaped by past events—by actions and choices taken in the past—as it in turn shapes the future, transforming the malleable, amorphous material of possibility into the hard facts of the real. While it would seem, then, that the realist future is entirely open, that it is the time of possibility when anything could happen, it is already conditioned by the past to which it is irrevocably linked, its field of possibility already narrowed by the now. It is for this reason that when we consider future possibilities in real life, we often tell ourselves to “be realistic” about what can be, insofar as potential futures are tied to the real material conditions of the present, which are themselves tied—chained, even—to the past. The field of action is thus also circ*mscribed, as is subjectivity. In the realistic triumvirate of time-action-character, we act based on who we “are,” and who we are is a product of our past actions and experiences in the world around us, which offers us a limited because pre-sorted array of realistic options.

If realist time appears to be shaped in a straight line—time’s arrow, flying in only one direction and always hitting its target—it in fact requires the look back, the moment at which we can apprehend the “actual” chain of events, to create narrative out of experience. This moment is often one of closure (the end of a life, a relationship, a maturation process, a novel) and it affords us the retrospect from which to see the shape of the whole, as if viewing the arrow’s trajectory from the point of view of the target. That trajectory is never straight, of course; our favorite metaphors for the moments that give it defining shape tend toward the more geometrically complex: crossroads, junctures, pivots, curves, cruxes, and turning points. These moments of directional change are the most heavily freighted in all of realist narrative because they are the moments when things might have happened differently but did not. They are the moments at which the counterfactual becomes the factual, when the many become one. Narratively speaking, these are often moments of choice, which gives a double valence to the phrase “decisive moment.”

So foundational is what we are calling realist time to the plotting of novels and to our experience of real life that examples of it are everywhere we look, from the hard choices that forge character to the traumatic events in which, as E. M. Forster says, “character tells,” and from which there is no going backwards.5 Sometimes these moments are obvious (Jane Eyre leaves/returns to Rochester, Margaret Hale stops a mob uprising, Pip saves a convict, Sydney Carton mounts the guillotine, Gwendolyn Harleth lets Grandcourt drown, Hetty Sorrel kills her baby), but they may also be discreet, visible only in hindsight as they are gathered up into narrative shape. We find moments of both kinds in every Victorian novel—and we will explore some of them in the chapters to come.

Of course, realist time is already to be felt in Romantic theories of subjectivity, particularly Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” in which the deep subject knits itself together in the moment of recollecting past experience. Too many others have explored the Wordsworthian construction of subjectivity to require doing so here at any length, but we should recall that the subject is laid down along two kinds of time: the slow, historical time of development and the fleeting moment of recollection or revelation that works to process past experience.6 As Carolyn Steedman puts it,

The most famous formulation of this is perhaps Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”:

The “Child is father of the Man” appears to present us with a temporality of forward progression: our childhood memories will shape the adult we will become; however, it also loops temporally backwards (the child is the father) in such a way as to fix our subjectivity in a narrative of bildung, binding together the days and the subject in a chain forged by time and affect. Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode” further demonstrates how the coordinates of reality are plotted when we link an objective sequence of temporal actions to a subjectivity caught up in determining the significant moments of existence, beginning with those childhood experiences that form consciousness: deep subjectivity (“the Soul’s immensity,” 109) fixed by significant narrative moments (“A wedding or a festival/ A mourning or a funeral,” 93). In this way of thinking, “nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” (182), for there is no going back; and yet the shape of thought (and the poem) is ultimately recursive—indeed, conservative, in the most basic sense of the term. Wordsworth’s model would be highly influential for Victorian novelists, as in our book’s introduction we saw Kermode arguing decades before us.

By this circular logic, the future gets locked into the actual in the present moment that sets us onto a single temporal path, thus foreclosing alternative possibilities; and it is also the vantage point from which we will understand that moment as bound to the past, the end already shaped by its beginning. This version of temporality is the one that we now take as reality, one in which we are the agents of our fate: our actions will determine the future, and we must choose well because, once we act, our future will be fixed. Kermode argues that this narrative and historical mode of thinking about temporality is of relatively recent invention, a product of the early modern period.9 Hayden White similarly explores “The lateness of the invention of historical discourse,” tracking its roots to the early modern period and observing its full bloom in the nineteenth century.10 White argues that “the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.”11 By contrast, a text in the medieval annals tradition operates outside the bounds of narrative: “no well-marked beginning, middle, and end, no peripeteia.”12 He writes,

What feels natural to us now is a construction that would have made little sense to a pre-modern way of thinking. Indeed, realist time was not fully naturalized until the nineteenth century, when the genre of history was reshaped around it and the novel spoke through it.

Seeing “the end” in every beginning is a basic function of novelistic plotting, as is experiencing the full weight of the beginning—now understood as such—from the endpoint. In his work on narrative, Peter Brooks explores the complicated ways in which closure, no matter how clearly fictive and tenuous, saturates plot. Brooks is interested in narrative time’s boundedness, the ways it “demarcates, encloses, establishes limits, orders,” and he reads “plot” in the sense suggested by a grave plot: a bounded space that is intimately tied with questions of death, or at least closure. In other words, Brooks reads plot as following “the internal logic of the discourse of mortality.”14 Any forward-moving narrative, a metonymic chain of events, is both in search of and already linked to the closural burst of metaphor that will grant coherence and retrospective meaning. As Brooks puts it, “the metaphoric work of eventual totalization determines the meaning and status of the metonymic work of sequence—though it must also be claimed that the metonymies of the middle produced, gave birth to, the final metaphor. The contradiction may be in the very nature of narrative, which not only uses but is a double logic.”15 This is why Brooks can claim that “the end is a time before the beginning,” insofar as the end is not only prepared by the beginning but also shapes it; the arrow finds its target because the target shapes its flight in anticipatory reverse.16 As he writes, “Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic.”17 There is a cultural-historical logic to this version of temporality; it is no coincidence that all Brooks’ examples come from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or that his theoretical framework is derived from Sigmund Freud, who could be said to apply the logic of nineteenth-century novelistic temporality to our psyches in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.18

This anticipation of retrospection, the foreknowledge that we will in the future look back on the apparently random chaos of the now and see coherent pattern, is both the promise of narrative closure and the way we process personal and world history. We count on time to reveal meaning, or at least sense. As Brooks writes, “The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending.”19 While this promise can be comforting—”one day this will all mean something”—it can also feel claustral and limiting. As Žižek writes of the historical notion of temporality, “when we are engaged in a present historical process, we perceive it as full of possibilities, and ourselves as agents free to choose among them; while, to a retrospective view, the same process appears as fully determined and necessary, with no room for alternatives.”20 Any significant act in the present, by this way of thinking, locks us into narrative. If each present-day action forecloses the freedom of other possibilities, if each cause forever after locks the past into one bildung leading inevitably to death, what is the point of action?21 There is a two-fold paralysis that arises from the logic of realist time: all choices limit my freedom; and I must make the right choices and determine the right time for action, as these things will determine my fate. As our fates are already partly determined, finding the “right” time to do anything is a matter of anticipatory retrospection, and it is accompanied always by the fear of having misread one’s own narrative, of misrecognizing the right time. Little of this anxiety is relieved by the fact that our narrative-making is not “real”: although on some level we must understand that the target determines the arrow’s flight after the fact, that effects create their own cause and not the other way around, the alternative—there is no target—is harder to accept.

We need not look far to illustrate the pervasiveness of realist temporality to contemporary ideas about self and experience. It suffuses all aspects of our lives and is reflected back to us in multiple forms. We consume it in our popular culture, from the long-form dramatic television that takes its narrative shape from the classic novel of the nineteenth century to the shape of the weekly sitcom, which divides the long metonymic chain of the series into discrete, bounded “episodes” of time, each with their own closure. Such shows are often very knowing about narrative shape: How I Met Your Mother turns the anticipation of retrospection into a formal framing device, recounting over nine seasons the events leading up to the titular encounter, which will mark the beginning of one life (familial life, the bourgeois order) as the close of another (single life, youth), and which looms over the sequence of represented events as both a looked-for end and coming apocalypse. The terror of making the right choice is also played for laughs in Aziz Ansari’s 2013 comedy special Buried Alive, where in a long sequence he thinks through all the sundry events that had to happen to make possible—in the parking lot of a Bed, Bath and Beyond—the chance meeting of his friend with the woman he would go on to marry:

That Ansari thinks about the at once “amazing” and “terrifying” moment, as he puts it, that leads to his friend’s marriage, is significant: not only does he follow the cause-and-effect logic of realist time, he also subordinates that consequential moment to what some have termed the “reproductive futurism” of both compulsory heterosexuality and anthropocene thinking.22 The fear about missing your moment here misses the point: narratives of the consequential moment often portray change as what needs to happen so that things may stay the same, insofar as the “right” moment tends to be the one that locks us into the most traditional story-lines of self and world (e.g., the right moment to propose, marry, have a baby, invest, start a business, rise to power, etc.).

Victorian novels are riddled with the anxiety that is born of the closed loop of narrative shape. Locked in by actions and choices, the shape of which will only become clear retroactively, characters endure the terrible burden of waiting for the right moment, which could be right now, but most likely is not. (We might think here of the anxiety attendant on the self-made man, waiting for his big “break” in the world, or the common device of the marriage proposal that is made twice—once at the wrong time and then at the right one—to structure character transformation as something that happens between two “momentous” events.23) Realist narrative plotting suggests that there is a right time, right place, and right person for every action, a time that might well be missed or misrecognized. Indeed, the tremendous specificity of the actual—our sense that of all the possible present moments, we are experiencing this one and no other—paradoxically underscores not the rightness or inevitability of the actual but its vulnerability. We marvel at the staggering odds that the universe has produced this moment and not millions of others, and we perhaps remark upon the fragility of the consequential moment: it might so easily have been otherwise.

It is critical to understand that the realist novel here presses the counterfactual into service of the actual: rather than undercutting any sense of reality, the represented existence of the counterfactual—all of those many alternatives that might have been but are not—helps support the singularity of the actual, made real by its denied alternatives. Andrew H. Miller explores this phenomenon in his work on the optative mode in realist fiction. Starting from the Kierkegaardian image of being “nailed to ourselves,” Miller considers how realism constructs the solitary subject as bounded within itself, separate and unique, a product of the “peculiar contingency of modern experience.”24 The subject comes into crisp focus in comparison to others, those “defining mirror existences” (119) that represent viable alternatives to the life being led, a process that is often accompanied by the yearning for what might have been that Miller terms “optative regret” (121). Miller argues that, far from undoing the reality effects of the novel, “such counterfactual imaginings were built into the realistic novel as part of its very structure” (120), leading him to declare that “Realism is intrinsically optative” (122). He writes,

Miller posits the writing of Henry James as “the furthest refinement of counterfactual experiments in British realism,” and considers “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) to be “an infinite representation of the optative mode” (128). We would add that the circular story of John Marcher—who spends his life in patient expectation of the catastrophic event that he is convinced lies in wait for him like the titular beast, only to find that this event is the revelation that he has missed his own life in the waiting for it—is not only the ne plus ultra of optative regret, as Miller argues, but also the purest example of the paralysis and terror that set in when we await the right moment. Marcher may through his delay manage to resist heteronormative marital closure, as he does in Eve Sedgwick’s famous reading of the story, but he nonetheless squanders his life waiting for a consequential moment that is “not yet.”25

What might have been—the lives we might have led, the choices we might have made—can thus be said to prop up the remorseless singularity of the actual, which puts the “real” in realism, for all that we know fiction to be counterfactual. Indeed, the counterfact of fiction goes further, surrounding the reader’s actual life with fictional others, lives we may enter more fully and imaginatively than we do the real lives of those around us, but which we may nonetheless never live. The poignancy and partiality of our curtailed knowledge of others is the topic of Jonathan Farina’s exploration of realism’s use of the counterfactual, where he focuses on the Victorian’s favorite conditional analogy, “as if.” The gateway to the subjunctive, “as if” is also the privileged grammar of the otherwise, and Farina demonstrates how realist fiction avails itself of the subjunctive to signal depths of reality outside knowledge of characters or representation.26 As he puts it, “recurrent ‘as ifs’ present the narrative in which they occur as a conjectural history of some real story that purportedly precedes, exceeds, or otherwise eludes its narrator’s perspective,” thus constructing the illusion of reality—deep time and deep character—with the help of the doubly unreal (unreal in life, unreal in the fiction that purports to life).27 This is similar to, if more pointedly Victorian than, the work of realism described by Michel Riffaterre in Fictional Truth, where he demonstrates how fiction gestures outside itself to establish its claim to reality, paradoxically violating its own boundaries in the setting of them. The shared point of these accounts of realism’s relationship to the counterfactual is that the limitless realm of the otherwise is used to shape the limits of the fictional real. In other words, realist fiction sees the counterfactual coming and knows exactly what to do with it.

While this approach to reality and its representation now feels natural to us—not only how things are, but also how they should be—it is important to underscore the limitations of this model. Indeed, the most significant downside to realist temporality is limitation: it limits our ability to enact change and to better the world. However much the architects of Victorian realism might see themselves as committed to positive change (and we are particularly thinking here of Dickens and Eliot), the diegetic rules of the novel by which we now live hamstring us in several crucial ways. First, we wait for the right moment to act, knowing that timing is everything and that everything has its right time. Second, we wait for a hero, someone to save us, someone whose time and story it is. We often configure that hero as someone who has yet to be, the future child or generation who will one day change the world and on which we place the burden of our hope. Third, we lock ourselves into one cause-and-effect sequence bounded by death, a sequence that becomes ever more constricting as it moves toward the mortal closure that will retroactively impose meaning and narrative shape. Because it operates in anticipation of death and sheds options as it goes, this unidirectional sequence prematurely forecloses on the possibilities of age, which is one reason we overvalue youth and place our hopes for change on the next generation who “have their whole lives in front of them.” (In fact, we all have our lives in front of us; only when conceived narratively can we say that someone’s life is behind them.) On the other hand, because we assume that change is a thing that belongs to youth, we dismiss idealism as an adolescent fantasy that we must grow out of on our way to maturity. Finally, this locked sequence makes it incredibly difficult to imagine a future that is radically different from the present, from the perspective of which we would be able to see the inadequacy of the present and the necessity of acting now to change it. While climate disaster can be referenced as the limit-case phenomenon that most clearly illustrates the problems of what we are calling realist thinking—we know that crisis looms but feel incapable to act to change it, waiting instead for the next generation or the next president or a technological deus ex machina—we might look to any of the apparently intractable problems that face us, from global-scale social injustice to personal-scale crises, and consider how we hamper our own response when we consider ourselves locked into sequential narratives and, indeed, into ourselves. Surely, there must be a more strategically effective approach to change—something less strictly realist and “factual.”

Counterfactual Time

What, then, would a counterfactual temporality look like, as opposed to the realist temporality of cause-and-effect, of the singular now and its optative regrets? We suppose the best answer to be, “like more things than we could possibly imagine,” given the limitless potential of the counterfactual, but we will imagine at least one, which would begin by decoupling cause and effect, allowing that causes do not line up symmetrically with effects, or at least do not have narrowly deterministic effects that we can predict and apprehend. Even in realist time, this is true, for the target draws the arrow: effects construct their own causes, creating the circ*mstances of their own becoming so that the end might be a time before the beginning. But this forced realist symmetry takes shape invisibly, naturalized as forward, progressive movement, not as recursive circuit. In realistic plotting, that is, effects appear to follow upon the causes which are seen in retrospect to add up to the effects, to equal effects. Because there is no surplus, we do not question the accounting. But what happens when effects exceed their causes, when there is a surplus that cannot be tidily explained or absorbed into the symmetry of narrative?

When effects exceed causes, we have what philosophers term “an event.” Žižek defines event as “something shocking, out of joint that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes.”28 It appears to emerge out of nowhere, but of course it does not; an event is not a miracle. But an event seems like a miracle because of the way it reorders our reality, radically altering our frame of perception. “At its most elementary,” Žižek writes, “event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it” (Event, 12). An event cleaves time into a “before” and “after”: before an event, we cannot fully predict its effects; after an event, we cannot see anything but the new world it has produced. Žižek asks, “is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or is it a shattering transformation of reality itself?” (Event, 7) The answer, clearly, is that an event is both: the reframing of reality that shatters and remakes it. Revolution is the classic example of an event, the sudden turmoil that overthrows the political status quo and reorients our sense of the world, allowing us to see and think things (about class relations, injustice, agency, etc.) that were unthinkable under the previous framework but come to appear obvious under the new one. Love is another example favored by philosophers of the event, in whose work love appears as its own kind of virtual time travel. “Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always-already loved you, our love was destined” (Žižek, Event, 99). As Žižek observes, “We never fall in love in present time: after a (usually long) process of subconscious gestation, we all of a sudden become aware that we (already) are in love. The Fall (into love) never happens at a certain moment, it has always-already happened” (Event, 133). Because an event changes its own past, creates the conditions of its own becoming, it can never be seen in the present moment. It is, as Badiou writes, a “vanishing mediator.”29 Indeed, the evental sine qua non is nothing less than the symbolic order, the frame by which we see the world itself, but which we can never see:

What the event changes is not the actual past but rather the virtual past, insofar as it creates its own possibility—even its own necessity.

We again have a circular structure, a circuit, in which the effect determines its own causes. As Dupuy observes, “The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place. . . . It is thus the event’s actualization—the fact that it takes place—which retroactively creates its necessity.”30 As much as the event appears as a machine for (virtual) time travel, then, it is also a machine for turning accident into destiny. Within the paradoxical circuit of the event “resides the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, i.e., the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity: things retroactively ‘will have been’ necessary” (Žižek, Event, 129). The temporal signature of the event, its grammar of being, is therefore the future anterior, the “will have been” that marks the peculiar time-warping effects of the event. Essentially, the event is always temporally out of step with itself: when an event happens, it will appear already to have happened; it will place itself within the virtual past created by its occurrence.

We seem to have trespassed onto the territory of science fiction yet again. And, indeed, many of the purest structural examples of the event can be drawn from the pages and frames of alternative reality and time-travel narratives, for obvious reasons. In an “alt-reality” narrative, an event occurs that creates an alternative timeline, but no one in that new timeline perceives anything to be “wrong”: the event has produced a new reality that appears as though it has always existed. While such a narrative most often works to reinstate the “right” reality, destroying the optative world in the process of recuperating the “actual,” the multiverse allows these realities to persist side by side, viable optative versions of one another. The time-loop narrative, on the other hand, shuts down optative possibility altogether, turning apparent contingency into historical necessity. Let us take as our example the perfect time-loop of Chris Marker’s experimental film La jetée (1962), in which a grand-scale apocalyptic event that has destroyed the planet and sent humans underground is leveraged by a smaller, personal event witnessed by the main character as a child, in the days before World War III and its attendant apocalypse. This event, “the violent scene which upset him,” occurs on the jetty at Paris’s Orly airport, where the boy sees a man’s body crumple and observes the look on a woman’s face. Only after the fact does the boy realize that he has seen a man die. But it is the woman’s face that sticks with him: “Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars. That face which was to be a unique image of peacetime to carry with him through the whole wartime, he often wondered if he had ever seen it. Or if he had dreamed a lovely moment to catch up with the crazy moment that came next.” Because of this strong mental image, the man whom the boy becomes is later chosen for an experiment in time travel by scientists at a post-apocalyptic prison. Bound to the past by the moment that has so marked him, the prisoner is sent back to search for the woman whose face he remembers. He finds her; they fall in love over a sequence of visits, a series of moments strung out across the pre-war past. Satisfied with the success of their experiment’s first phase, scientists send the prisoner to the future, where he is to deliver a message: “since humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its own survival.” He succeeds. “This sophism was taken for Fate in disguise,” and the citizens of the future return the prisoner to his own time with the resources to repower the world. His job complete, the prisoner awaits execution. But the inhabitants of the future are also time-travelers, and they offer him escape to their own time; he refuses, asking instead to return to the past, “and this woman who was perhaps waiting for him.” He finds her on the jetty at Orly, where she watches as he is gunned down by the executioner who has followed him from the prison; his childhood self looks on, too, marked by the image now revealed to be the scene of his own death.

Understandably, La jetée has been catnip for narrative theorists, who see in its perfectly circular form and its black-and-white still photography an ur-narrative about pattern and closure, about the terminus (airport terminal/ closure/ death) that draws the story to itself and shapes it in reverse. Here, very literally, the end is a time before the beginning. The death of the prisoner, a man “marked by an image of his childhood,” follows a trajectory that loops back around to its own instantiating event, which is revealed as what philosophers and theologists call an “uncaused cause,” a cause that produces itself. In this perfectly closed narrative loop, the prisoner learns that “there was no way out of time,” which is often the lesson in time-travel narratives that draw their power from the temporal paradox of the uncaused cause: for example, The Terminator (1984), in which an adult John Connor must send his father back in time to save his mother from a post-apocalyptic killing machine and to assure his own conception, or Predestination (2014), in which an intersex time-travel agent trying to avert future disaster travels back in time to conceive himself, becoming both of his own parents and literalizing anything Wordsworth had to say about the child fathering the man. There is a reason that looped time-travel narratives take up issues of apocalypse, love, and birth, for each is an event of a sort, a violent reframing of what has gone before that turns historical and personal contingency into necessity. The earth is always-already doomed; the child is always-already the man; the beloved is always-already loved. But La jetée does more than literalize the circuitry of the event; the series of still photographs that make up this film so disrupt the narratives by which we normalize events that it deliberately plays with the “sophism” of circular narrative, even as it completes the circle. The frozen frame of the photograph—thawed only for a brief moment as lap dissolves give way to film in a moment of lyric intimacy that reverses the expected construction of the transcendent, “lyrical pause”—breaks the filmic illusion of continuous sequence and replaces diachronic movement with synchronic stasis, troubling both narrative and realistic representation. When the prisoner is first sent back into the past, for example, he sees “real children,” “real birds,” “real cats, and “real graves,” but we see fixed images of these things, the birds and cats as still as the graves, and none of them “real.” Later, when the prisoner and the woman who anchors him in the past visit “a museum filled with ageless animals,” they appear to be as lifeless—as timeless—as the taxidermic creatures around them. Indeed, the medial form of La jetée forces us to see the gap between still images—the gap our brains and our stories fill in to create the illusion of film or of life—and suggests that all moments are essentially timeless and disconnected from each other: there may in fact be a way to escape time, or at least sequence. It is this gap that most time-travel films—even those inspired by La jetée, such as its American remake, 12 Monkeys (1995), or The Terminator—fill in both medially and by focusing on the inevitability of the closed time loop and the structural permanence of the event.

In science fiction, the event literally alters or secures the past; in realistic narrative, it reframes it. The difference is critical, but the effects are often similar, as we can see if we leave the realm of speculative narrative and return to realism and to James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” which is La jetée pre-told as realist, psychological fiction. When Marcher realizes that the great destiny for which he has been waiting, the individuating event that will mark him out, is in fact the knowledge that nothing will ever happen to him, he becomes, in effect, a man who has seen himself die without recognizing it. He becomes “the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.”31 Indeed, although knowledge comes to him in a “sudden rush,” it has the characteristic evental quality of having already happened:

The event reaches into Marcher’s past and reframes his waiting as wasting, just as it retroactively alters his identity in a modal shift: “he had been the man of his time, the man to whom nothing . . . was to have happened” (540, emphasis ours). But this is no closed temporal loop, and the story achieves its poignancy by pressing on the optative nerve: Marcher realizes how easily it all might have happened otherwise. He has, in effect, killed himself—and by accident. Indeed, it is the randomness of the revelation that so disturbs and offends him:

Marcher retreats immediately into narrative, supplying himself with an optative storyline (“he had before him in sharper incision than ever the open page of his story. . . . and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed” [539–40]) and turning contingency into fate: “Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance” (540). While science fiction gives us a temporally closed narrative loop (it could not have happened differently), realism gives us painfully foreclosed optative narrative (it could have happened differently—but it did not). In this way, realism could be said to be more actively counterfactual than speculative fiction, insofar as it cherishes the flame of the optative so that it can extinguish it more decisively. We see both of these impulses—the fanning of the optative and its snuffing out—in Marcher’s reaction to his “fate.” Rather than recognize his own mistake—he was not fated, there was no right moment—Marcher doubles down on narrative destiny, assuming that he has both met his fate (“One’s doom, however, was never baffled” [540]) and missed the right moment to have averted it (“The sight . . . named to him, as in letters of quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed” [539]; “the escape would have been to love her” [540]). Marcher completes the narrative loop by reabsorbing event into narrative, allowing the new frame to snap shut tightly into place: “So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted” (540).

What we have here—the true event of “The Beast in the Jungle”—is closure at its ultra-point, closure taken for narrative. Indeed, the story is a parable of the track-erasing work of closure, which offers as narrative totality a realigned and invisibly reframed past. Marcher’s “fate” appears to him as “the answer to all the past” (540), and in one fell swoop it turns the sudden violence of revelation into long-form personal history: Marcher’s lifespan, his long years of waiting, his “vigil” alongside May. It does not appear to him as if the past has been changed, but as if the past has been illuminated and explained, as if it were there all along.

This is also how the event turns contingency into fate and anticipation into retrospection: by establishing a new reality. On either side of the event, a different reality holds sway, but only when viewed synchronically; diachronically, the reality brought into being by the event replaces what existed before. There are therefore two different time signatures for the event: “not yet” and “too late.” John Marcher’s story perfectly illustrates the invisible boundary between “not yet” and “too late” because it takes the traverse as its topic, but the same boundary can be felt structuring the realist novel throughout its course.

What, then, is at all counterfactual, radical, or contingent about the event? How can it be said to offer any temporal alternatives to realist time, since it seems to operate in the same circuitous way, retroactively constituting its own causes and erasing its own passage? Indeed, when we look at Dupuy’s graphic rendering of the future anterior (Figure 1), the “will have been” of the event, it looks suspiciously like a narrative circuit in which the end is a time before the beginning.

There is no denying narrative closure’s proximal relation to the event. Narratively speaking, closure is even the event, insofar as it presents us with the crucial frame, the enframing mechanism through which to read the entire narrative.32 (Examples of this are everywhere, but we can find them most readily in the narratives of detection and mystery that narratologists treat as the very pattern for realist representation.33) But narrative closure does something very different from what theorists like Dupuy, Badiou, and Žižek hope for when they describe the radical potential of the event, for closure settles the narrative into symmetry with itself, reconciling causes and effects. Closure (for the most part) narrates away any surplus of effect and normalizes disruption; in its push for the actual, and as the necessary muscle behind that push, it forecloses on counterfactual possibilities. Victorian novels are full of such closural and peripetal events, events which are explained away and absorbed into developmental, realist narrative, their force blunted as it is amortized over long time. We might think here of revolutions and disasters—the fires, floods, and train wrecks that spin and sometimes complete Victorian plots—but we need look no further than love, which is perhaps the most important and regular event in the Victorian novel. As we have seen, love is an event in which the effects exceed the cause. Love reorders the known; it is as if I have always loved you. Novels call upon the mystery of love to put it into narrative, where it is freighted with the actual, bound to marriage, to children, to the production of the future, and to the symmetrical rhythms of life: love becomes another form of change so that the world can stay the same. But this normalization is only possible to the extent that event turns possibility into inevitability, which in amorous narrative usually means finding the “right” one at the “right” time and locking into the proper closure—while locking out the world of optative possibilities, which can then only be resuscitated as relief or regret. Which is to say that the radicalism of the event can quickly disappear into narrative. Insofar as it reframes reality and hides its tracks, lining up causes to explain its effects, a narrativized event takes its place within the smooth, balanced contours of developmental history, or appears as a violent and yet inevitable turning point in that history.

If narrative tames the event by encasing it in a closed loop that reinforces order and coherence, it is the real-world potential of the event to disrupt the current order that has enthralled philosophers and political theorists. For, as we have seen, the event is not part of a closed loop: it leaps ahead of itself and gives the lie to both perfect continuity and inevitability. As Žižek puts it, “the space of an event is that which opens up the gap that separates an effect from its causes” (Event, 5). This gap is the space of the contingent and the otherwise, and to the extent that it can be made visible it unveils and destabilizes the symmetrical logic of realist time. Of course, reality (the symbolic order by which we make sense of the world around us) immediately rushes to restabilize itself, to strip the event of its surprise and to return itself to equilibrium. Reality abhors a gap—and so does realism, which we often judge by the extent to which it is able to achieve a symmetrical shape and a polished finish. But when that gap is wedged open, when we experience time out of joint with itself, we see reality not as a chain of events or a closed narrative loop but as a realm of radical contingency.

There Is No Right Time to Act

The difference between these two models—event as closure, event as disruption—is a matter of reframing, which is also what events themselves do. When viewed from one angle, the event reframes reality in such a seamless way as to appear as the circuit of realist plot, the closed loop that flattens itself out to look like linear development. From another angle, we can see that the loop is not closed at all and that the event constructs the past from which it appears to flow; in other words, we see the frame itself made visible. This is the radical potential of the event: to expose the mechanism of reality as such. What appears as the smooth flow of time and events is in fact disjointed; what appears as the singular actual is in fact rich with counterfactual possibilities that are not permanently foreclosed. From this view, not only is the future not locked into place by choices already made, but neither is the past; indeed, we can see that the past is as tenuous as the future. We can see, to recall Dimock’s phrase, that “the morphology of time is anything but a single, unified clock” (“Subjunctive Time,” 244).

Before we go on to suggest some of the vantage points from which we might best appreciate this radical potential—as well as some spots that most fully occlude it from view—it seems important to attend to the mechanism of the clock itself, and to be clear about how the temporality of the event distinguishes itself from “the moment.” As Sue Zemka has demonstrated in her work on Victorian time, the clock became an increasingly critical device over the course of the nineteenth century, which witnessed not only the embrace of abstract time (quantifiable and standardized time) but also its acceleration, as industrial capitalism divided time into ever-smaller increments and caused the hands of the clock to whir ever more rapidly. Spurred on by new technologies—like the photographic image—that appeared to capture time in its very tracks, this process both created a new concept of the “instant” and saturated it with hidden meaning. The ephemeral moment became supercharged, immanent, promising both rapid change and fleeting access to the transcendent, as in the moment of revelation or epiphany. We see both valences yoked together in the classical concept of kairos, meaning both the opportune time for action (the “right time”) and eternal time (“the appointed time”). For the Victorians, the moment was both an agent of terrestrial change (tied to momentum) and of the divine, an instant of ecstatic truth. Belief in the power of the brief interval produced what Zemka describes as a sort of cult of the moment, a cult into which the twentieth century was born: “From the mid nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, the trope of the moment has proceeded on a largely unbroken path of ascent in Western art and critical discourse.”34

Zemka is highly suspicious of the critical cult of the moment, and she is right to be. This way of thinking puts its emphasis on sudden rupture and violent change, misrecognizing its historical antecedents in the very forms of technological and economic power it seeks to overturn: “the rhetorical appropriation of a moment that explodes is an imaginative concession to violent technologies as enviously effective agents of social change.”35 As she puts it, “our critical investment in moments of rupture has become an epistemological failure, a retreat behind a type of mystification that in uncertain ways connects our critical practices to precisely those historical forces that are often objects of critical suspicion—technological shock, economic commodification, and sacralized violence.”36 But it is important to see that this “moment of rupture” is contradictory neither to “slow” Victorian theories of scientific or social progress, which allowed for catastrophic eruptions within a gradualist timeline, nor to the logic of what we have been calling realist time.37 Indeed, the significant moment—the “right time”—is not only compatible with realism but essential to its cause-and-effect sequences, for it is in the decisive moment that the singular real is produced at the expense of the optative. Without the charged, symbolic moment (kairos), the metonymic chain of narrative (chronos) cannot produce its full, round meaning, to put this process in the narratological terms we have been using. Indeed, Zemka sees the Victorian novel as poised between long duration and the reification of the powerful, sudden moment, when long plots and long reads come together in a burst of recognition, change, or closure—a tension that critics have often seen as structurally and thematically essential to realism.38

As we have seen, one key difficulty with the overfreighted, “right” moment is that, while it seems to promise freedom and agency, it leads to paralysis: when will my moment arrive? what if I’m missing my moment? Zemka identifies the same problem: our overreliance on “a moment of rupture, kairos, miracle, or messianism as the vehicle of liberation from a damaged social reality or from ideological and epistemological limitations” means that “catastrophic change” is always “located somewhere in the distant future.”39 This idea of change as historical rupture is actually a variant of linear, realist time, one that imagines the flow of time as interrupted but nonetheless moving irreversibly in one direction, something like what we represent in Figure 2.

This view not only puts the emphasis on the unique moment, the kairotic “right” moment for action, but also on the heroic actor, the individual (or individuals) operating at the right time for action. That time is almost always “not now,” and the individual is almost always “not me.” This form of the moment is aligned with the aevum that Kermode calls the “time-order of novels” (72) and that we discuss in this book’s Introduction.

The event works quite differently from this. While Zemka is right to say that for Badiou and others the event “recuperates the possibility of randomness in a positivist world order,” it does not do so because it is either momentary or miraculous.40 Indeed, the event draws its counterfactual power from its resistance to the cult of the “right” moment. The event is not a precise moment at all, but rather an invisible tipping point, a perspectival shift from one reality to another one. Insofar as it could be called a moment, it is one that will have passed us by before we register (which is to say, assign) its significance. Like the sorites paradox that we explore in Chapter Eight, the event can never be looked at directly. The event occurs not in a decisive present moment but, as we have seen, in the future anterior, the time-bent past of the future; it is not a momentary rupture in a unidirectional timeline, for it operates in both temporal directions. This has significant ramifications for action, for if there is no right time to act—and how could there be if the action itself will determine in retrospect its proper set of circ*mstances?—then the only acceptable option is to act right now, however blindly and riskily. As Žižek puts it, “the ‘premature’ attempts transform the very space/measure of temporality: the subject ‘jumps ahead’ and takes a risk making a move before its conditions are fully met” (Event, 100). Successful actions create their own possibilities—but most, undoubtedly, will fail. In fact, it is success that is the accident: “If—accidentally—an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable” (Event, 130).

A large-scale social event—like revolution, which is Badiou’s prime example of the event and which we take up in future chapters—requires multiple actors taking risks, leaping ahead into a future that is “not yet” and knowing full well that they will likely not succeed. Revolution seems sudden and miraculous only because it appears to arrive “out of the blue” from outside the system, but it is in fact the product of many failures to jump forward in time. This is essentially different from a gradualist theory of history, in which one action leads incrementally to the next one, building bit by bit, progressively and sequentially through time—a process that gives us both a right time to act and a hero to do so. We can see both approaches to the act-event in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a novel we take up in the next chapter. Charles Darnay, the benevolent but ineffectual French aristocrat whose attempts to intervene heroically during the Reign of Terror go spectacularly wrong for him and his family, is a true believer in the “right time” who (naturally) misses his moment: “he had watched the times for a time of action, and . . . they had shifted and struggled until the time had gone by.”41 It is Madame Defarge, the bloodthirsty revolutionary, who articulates a position much closer to the future anterior. When her husband complains that “We shall not see the triumph,” she replies that, “We shall have helped it” (172, emphasis ours). “Nothing that we do,” she says, “is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I would—” (172).42 Dickens takes a dim view of her revolutionary violence, but we see in her fervor the call to action that accepts the probability of failure and acts nevertheless to bring about a future event.43

The leap into the future is not rational—it is in fact idealistic and speculative. We might say that it is a way of acting counterfactually: acting as if the conditions for the event have already been (will have been) met; acting as if the future were already here, arriving along with our actions. The imperative to act as if the future has arrived closes the endlessly deferred space between the present and the future—which is also the time of delay, insofar as action is held off until an appointed time “in the future.” This restructuring of time also restructures space, for it prohibits the idea that the most important events will happen somewhere else, to someone else, and that they will be sorted out by them/over there/then. It is impossible, in other words, to be in the right place at the right time.44

It is vital to acknowledge how anti-realist this model is; indeed, how anti-realistic. Literary realism operates as if time were sequential, its chronology punctuated by kairotic moments that are the exceptions that prove the chronological rule. Realism relies upon its depicted sense of specificity, of this character doing this thing in that place. The realistic subject is individual, singular—if not the right person for the job, at least the right one for our narrative attention. Although it can certainly resist and undercut ideas of heroism, novelistic realism is at base a heroic narrative model that sets us on a sequential track toward a closure that is, more obviously or not, destined—which is to say designed, as we will see clearly in the next chapter. Realism leaves little room for accident, for the knowledge that, as Dimock puts it, “what prevails as reality often does so haphazardly” (242).45 To the extent that realism dives into the counterfactual, it does so to pluck the real from a stream of optative regrets. The world it portrays can be harsh and unrelenting, but it nonetheless makes sense, woven together in proper symmetry, its effects in proportion to its causes. The counterfactual model we have been pursuing does none of that. It embraces the contingent and the accidental, allowing for possibilities not available to strict sequence. Opening the gap between cause and effect, it exposes the very thing that realistic narrative veils: the true lack of symmetry or predictability in reality itself. Indeed, it allows us to see “reality itself” as one frame among many. To follow an event as it reframes reality in its wake, supplying its own past conditions and reshaping the “real” around (or behind) itself, is to see what must remain invisible for reality to function, the transparent fantasy frame that, as Žižek writes, “enables us to experience the real of our lives as a meaningful Whole” (Event, 24). The event gives us distance on that frame, allows us to see it as frame. It shows us that it is not only fiction but also reality that is counterfactual.

From which point can we achieve this disorienting view? As both a counterfactual zone and a representational method for framing experience, novelistic narrative would seem a prime perch. But, as we have already seen and will continue to see in the chapters to come, realist plotting normalizes events, supplying them with equivalent histories and chaining them to developmental, cause-and-effect sequences. We know why this is: classic novels operate largely diachronically and understand the world as sequence, which is exactly how events get smoothed out and over. But what if we pulled against the grain of time and sequence? Then we might be better placed to observe the disruptive effects of the event, their accidental quality. This is in part what we aim to do in Part Three, where we focus on the verse-novel’s estranging ability to position us both within novelistic chronology and outside of it. By straddling the divide between verse and novel—a divide that is often (mistakenly) reified as one between narrative movement and lyric stasis—the verse-novel is peculiarly positioned to expose the framing assumptions of both forms, and it provides us a marvelously self-aware critique of both realistic chronology and the ecstatic, lyric “moment.” We argue there for the importance to the Victorians of two different Romantic strains of thinking about the subject and its development: a Wordsworthian strain that, as we have glimpsed in this chapter, constructs the subject as historical, accrued through time and experience; and a Byronic strain that unwinds the subject, undercutting notions of truth, virtue, and realistic representation. We take this Byronic strain to be particularly influential for not only the verse-novel form but also novelistic realism, as we will illustrate in Part Two.

While the verse-novel gives us one place from which to look sidewise at the novel, we need look no further than the novel itself for an estranged view of its own temporal processes. Not only is the novel notoriously self-aware, but it also requires us to read both diachronically and synchronically—across time and outside of it. (We should be clear that all literary forms require this bifocal view, but we perhaps feel the optical strain most acutely in the novel, given its length and sequential drive.) Nathan Hensley pursues this double-timed reading in an argument that links Roland Barthes’s narratology to Badiou’s event. Drawing on Barthes’s notion that novels must be read simultaneously as sequence and total structure, “a synchronic block (akin to a database) and a diachronic process of unfolding (or narrative),” Hensley argues that “Barthes places temporality at the heart of the problem of reading and transforms the dialectic between synchrony and diachrony into the structuring dilemma for any act of textual analysis.”46 The event, as he sees it, punctuates and ruptures sequential chronology, acting as “a hinge between before and after . . . an atemporal zero point.”47 Hensley quotes S/Z on this point: the classic text “is a multivalent but incompletely reversible system.”48 Our interest in the event is precisely its ability to reverse systems, to act as a hinge not only between before and after, but also between after and before, which is a property that we can only see from outside the flow of novelistic time.

There is very little work on the event/future anterior and the realist novel—and for good reason, since realist narrative bends the event toward its own, cause-and-effect temporality. Because novels are not only sequential but also static literary artifacts—the words on the page remain the same, however much our interpretation of them may change—events represented within them prompt a rereading that is also a reframing, forcing us to go back over the text (now seen as total structure) with new eyes, new information, and to see it differently. On a second read, we are reading a different book from the first, because we are reading sequence in light of structure—it appears to be the book that was always already in front of us, we just did not know it yet. This is the event at its least disruptive, indistinguishable from closure—which puts it right in line with a long history of extant narrative theory. This is how Hensley, for example, is reading event: as closure that resets the narrative as we have already read it, forcing us to read dialectically for sequence and structure.

The problem here is that the narrative circuit is locked: the event in this closural loop can only show us what was destined to be. As readers, we are always already on the track for the end, which we cannot see until we arrive—at which point, there we are, right on time. The event is thus reinscribed into the time order of realism. What this familiar model misses is the speculative leap ahead into the future. The event should not be read as destiny revealed, the world laid bare, for it is really the world changed by accidental success, a leap against odds. But how, then, can we hope to read novels for the disjointing work of the event if the novel turns accident into narrative destiny? How can we see what the novel seems structurally incapable of showing us—even shaped to occlude? Failure appears built into the enterprise.

Indeed, failure is a likely place to look for traces of the event: both failures represented within novels and failures of realism itself, points at which the arithmetic of cause and effect does not quite add up. Represented failures pull most obviously on the narrative thread of the optative, and here we might consider failed revolutions (such as those that fail to happen in Redgauntlet, Felix Holt, North and South), failed destinies (which in realism will look like misrecognized destinies, as with John Marcher, or destinies achieved by one’s optative double, as with Sydney Carton), or failed visionaries, those characters whose speculative leaps fall flat. We might also look at accidents, at things that are not properly explained away or reabsorbed as destiny. Or, better, we could look at the type of accident that appears as if designed, the coincidence, which is often a moment when probabilistic realism “fails,” and which we will examine in the next chapter. Other failures of the “real”—points at which narrative frames fail to meet evenly, closures that fail to bring the narrative up behind them, and closures that leave more than one option behind even after the narrative structure becomes total—could also lead the way to the contingent and counterfactual realm of the event. We are not proposing here to set out to discover something that we already know—that narrative closure is a fiction, and a partial one at that—but to press on places where the known fictional universe feels the most vulnerable to the unknown, where fact-based realistic fiction yields to counterfact.

It is important to underscore that we are not telling a new story but an old one—how the novel establishes a dominant form of subjectivity and temporality that could even be said to become coupled with reality as we know it. What we explore in this book is how this story was not the only possibility for thinking about temporality, especially when we are discussing revolutionary change: how it was established in continual dialogue with those other possibilities (we concentrate on the verse-novel but Kermode also examines the religious history of kairos—there are undoubtedly others); and how it limits our ability to imagine and enact change. Looking back at the Victorian novel, what interests us most are the ways the evolution of a genre eventually impacted extra-generic concerns, for example how we structure our understanding of time and action: how did this genre affect the way we think about ourselves, the future, the possibility of acting, and the ethics of action? Can we find in superseded genres like the verse-novel more productive ways to think about subjectivity and temporality? What we want to know is, does counterfactual thinking allow us to see things any differently or more productively? Does it allow us to reframe the workings of realism—or, better yet, the shape of the real?

We want to consider the Victorian novel as existing in a parallel universe to the one created by twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism, one in which it was not altogether dominant, one in which it (and we) could all have been otherwise. This universe, an alternative reality in which poetic forms and subject formations persist alongside and within novelistic ones, might be called a multiverse. We call it the novel-verse for the way that it reminds us not only that each novel builds a universe of its own—one connected to others in formal and thematic ways—but also that some of the most radical possibilities of these worlds cluster around the verse forms that the novel both cancels and preserves in altered form, as we will explore in Part Two. The novel-verse also influences how we understand the actual universe before us, providing us with extra-generic structures for managing chaos, accident, and rupture. Before we turn to Byron and his effort to imagine a radical approach to the subject’s actions in a world of radical contingency, we explore in Chapter Two the way the novel-verse addresses chance and uncertainty. Dickens is the master of the novel’s now-familiar logic.

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