{"id":1085,"date":"2002-10-25T10:47:34","date_gmt":"2002-10-25T17:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/i81.a52.mywebsitetransfer.com\/?p=1085"},"modified":"2010-03-29T13:05:35","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T20:05:35","slug":"josip-novokovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dactylfoundation.org\/?p=1085","title":{"rendered":"Josip Novakovich, reading with introduction by Victoria N. Alexander"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday Oct. 25, 2002<\/strong><\/p>\n

Croatian-born Novakovich has published numerous works of fiction, including, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters. He received the Whiting Writer’s Award (1997), Guggenheim Fellowship (1999), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1991 and 2002), and a fellowship at The New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers in 2001\/02. Novakovich also teaches in the English Department at Penn State University.
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\nIntroduction by Victoria N. Alexander<\/p>\n

Despite the fact that Novakovich may write about what he knows, immigrant life or life in Croatia, I consider what he writes, “stories” (not fantasy) but not so-called slice of life fiction. I think his stories are concerned with an artfulness in a way that much of contemporary fiction is not. They may remind you myths. I want to make a comparison to one myth in particular, Oedipus Rex, not in terms of content but in terms of plot structure.
\nIt has to do with the way he uses chance and coincidence. It’s something he does in many stories, but I want to focus on one called, “Crimson.” In that story, a man named Milan is forced to join the Serbian army. He takes part in a siege of a Croatian town. Finally, they take the town, and his captain makes him shoot an unarmed man to prove his loyalty to Serbia. He pulls the trigger for reasons that have more to do with lack of courage than anything else. Later that day, Milan sees his captain raping a Croatian woman, whom he mistakes for his first love, Svetlana because of some slight resemblance. He had been recalling her earlier that day, remembering painful unrequited love, and his lack of courage then too.
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\nNow, if it were she, it would be quite a coincidence! As if fate had contrived this chance for Milan to act courageously and to right one of his previous failures.
\nMilan acts on this misrecognition. He kills the captain. He revives the woman, who, it turns out, is a stranger named Olga. Milan then flees the army.<\/p>\n

Then, many weeks later, he happens to meet Olga in another town, by chance, as she is on her way to an abortion clinic. She says she’s pregnant from the rape. Milan convinces her to marry him and they raise the child together. Time passes. Olga finds a photograph of her dead father and shows it to Milan. Milan recognizes her father as the unarmed the man whom his captain had made him kill. Milan confesses to the killing, and then confesses that he had raped her while she was unconscious. The child is actually his.<\/p>\n

It can’t be easy to come to terms with what one does in a time of war, especially if your victims do not remain strangers. Novakovich is good at complicating matters.
\nNow how is this a “story” like Oedipus Rex? It would be complicated to discover that you had killed your future father-in-law or been raped by your future husband. Just as it would be complicated to discover that you had killed your father or married your son.
\nWhat are the chances that a random crime will turn out to be extremely meaningful? When Milan discovers that the first and only man he ever killed in war turned out to be his father in law, he says to Olga:<\/p>\n

That’s amazing bad luck. How many people lived in Vukovar? Thirty thousand? Two thousand men in their fifties? And to chance upon your father … But not to chance upon anybody would have been even more likely.
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\nNow what is so special about coincidences in narratives? I’m going to discuss three ways of looking at this question. First, Why are they so important in myths? How do they function there? Second, in the age of postmodernism, Why were they used ironically? And Third, Why do coincidences function differently now? In order to answer to this third question, which is of course the one we’re interested in, I will have to introduce some recent science that has revised our notions of chance and determinism. And which, I argue, provide a new context for the interpretation of art. When I’m done I hope you will understand why I chose to have Novakovich read tonight and I hope you will also understand more what Dactyl is all about.<\/p>\n

You may wonder how Novakovich could be so far ahead of the game. Novakovich himself may be wondering since he’s not a hard core fan of science so far as I know. I think to be an artist is to be ahead of this game. This game of chance and order and design. The new sciences are closest to the aesthetic form of understanding than any other form of understanding we humans have dreamt up yet, including empirical or religious forms of knowledge etc…
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\nFirst, let’s look at chance in Oedipus Rex. Oedipus meets his biological father at the crossroads and kills him. The crossroads are a conventional site for random events, as are train stations today. Crossroads allow the coincidental intersection of two distinct causal chains.
\nEspecially fortunate or unfortunate coincidences that occur when mere randomness is what you should expect, seem to be due to fate, karma, whatever. Random meetings are the only occurrences in this world that one might suppose the supernatural can affect, since all else is strictly governed by the laws of physics.<\/p>\n

Let me clarify that these divine coincidence aren’t miracles. Only in fantasies do the plots turn on miracles that defy physics. In a “story,” what I’m calling a story, the gods or spirits may seem to fiddle with the odds, but not with the laws of nature. I picked Oedipus Rex, rather than, say, Medea, to talk about myth. Sophocles was subtle about the way he merely hints at divine intervention through chance. Euripides, in contrasts, had a god in a chariot descend in the final act to resolve everything. One has to interpret Sophocles’ coincidence in order to see the hand of fate. In Euripides, the audience isn’t left to infer divine intention, they actually see it. Coincidences are interesting because they require interpretation. Inferred evidence is the only kind of evidence we have for supernatural. (So far as I know.) Exactly what it is that we infer? Purpose. Intentionality. Nothing else. Just this. No mechanisms. No causal chains. When we think we understand the meaning of coincidences we think we understand why it happened, not how.<\/p>\n

Second, let’s look at chance in postmodernism. The 20th century was a time of confusion in the humanities as far as science was concerned. While classical determinism (the idea that everything is predetermined) had ended by the late 19th century, the next era of science, characterized mostly by work in nonlinear dynamics, took its time to establish itself. (It’s still fairly unknown in the humanities.) In the interim, postmodernism declared that there is no chance and everything is due to chance. There is no divine order in the world, and yet no one has any control over his or her world either. One couldn’t be sure what chance was, so one just put quotes around the term. Despite all the postmodern fuss about quantum mechanics and relativity upsetting our notions of the way things are, I’d like to point out that both discoveries are consistent with classical determinism over appropriate time scales. Early and mid 20th Century science still supposed the future is at least theoretically predictable and prespecified from the beginning of time.<\/p>\n

Only the more recent scientific focus of nonlinear dynamics offers a theory of chance. This is why I think coincidence may come back in style in narrative. Chance is real. We now can suppose that the future is both unpredictable and malleable. Insofar as our actions are concerned, we can suppose that we can act freely and intentionally. How is this possible? According to nonlinear dynamics theorists, the way things function or interact together in a given context is often due to chance. These interactions are called “effective factors” and they influence the future behavior of systems making them unpredictable, unpredictable even if you know everything about the present velocity and position of very particle in the universe.<\/p>\n

The classical determinists used to think that you could predict the future behavior of any thing in nature by analyzing its individual parts. Now we know that the way individual parts interact in time adds something more to the mix, you might say. This new area of science is called computational mechanics: it is a theory of the way nature computes or interprets information. (It’s not to be confused with information theory, which did not deal with meaning and interpretation.) Postmodernism may have claimed that there is no intentionality in nature. And while it’s true that there is no divine intentionality, there is what you might call a morally neutral aesthetic intentionality insofar as natural processes involve interpretive contexts and constructivist interactions. In other words: according to this new way of conceiving intentionality, Nature is creative and telic insofar as it can result in spontaneous increases in structural complexity and self-organizaton.Coincidences provide the space in which human interpretation can work, alter the course of events, and bestow upon the interpreter the gift of intentionality. Artfulness has been out of style for too many years now and for too many dubious reasons. I admire Novakovich for not being squeamish about using coincidences. Historically they have been associated with intentionality and looked on with suspicion.<\/p>\n

The way we understand the laws of physics have changed since Sophocles’ time “Crismon” may be like Oedipus Rex structurally, but this structure has a different function in new environment. Meaningful coincidences don’t point to the designs of the gods anymore. (They don’t ironically point to the ultimate randomness and meaningless of reality either.) Coincidence points to the opportunity for humans to realize functions in a random environments, act on them and influence their own fates.<\/p>\n