Standard Deviations

Offering a new approach to narrative theory by arguing that chance is the unrepresentable Other of narrative, this book traces the theme of chance in novels by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. It also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and it provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the representation of chance in any narrative.

The author asks three central questions: Why did British novelists become intensely interested in chance in the late nineteenth century? Why and how did they thematize it in their fiction? How did the novelistic treatment of chance contribute to innovations in narrative form

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Beginning with Eliot, and with Middlemarch (1871-72) in particular, a new and distinctive interest in chance emerged in English fiction, and later novelists continued explicitly to pursue it in their work. Conrad's Chance (1913) clearly illustrates the textual and theoretical problems involved in the paradoxical attempt to depict chance in a narrative form that gives order and design to novelistic experience.

It is not until Joyce's Ulysses (1911) that a narrative mode manages to approximate a kind of chance that is not altogether effaced by the novel's narrative construction. The author asserts that Joyce's work marks and defines a structural limit to the representation of chance in narrative, a limit that subsequent literary efforts do not, and probably cannot, go beyond