Coincidences

Synchronicity, Verisimilitude, and Storytelling

Michael Jackson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520977013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Most people have a story to tell about a remarkable coincidence that in some instances changed the course of their lives. These uncanny occurrences have been variously interpreted as evidence of divine influence, fate, or the collective unconscious. Less common are explanations that explore the social situations and personal preoccupations of the individuals who place the most weight on coincidences. Drawing on a variety of coincidence stories, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson builds a case for seeing them as allegories of separation and loss—revealing the hope of repairing sundered lives, reconnecting estranged friends, reuniting distant kin, closing the gap between people and their gods, and achieving a sense of emotional and social connectedness with others in a fragmented world.

PLACE TO PLACE

The Relativity of Our Viewpoints

I suspect that we are intrigued by coincidences for the same reason that we are amused by puns. Synchronous events, like plays on words, reveal unexpected meanings and inspire good stories. We might, however, spare a thought for unhappy coincidences when meaning is lost or cannot be found.

In the autumn of 1922, Ernest Hemingway was living in Paris and working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. That November, he was dispatched to Switzerland to cover the Peace Conference in Geneva. Missing his wife Hadley, who had remained in Paris nursing a cold, Hemingway wrote to her, urging that she join him and that, as soon as the conference was over, they go sightseeing in the mountains. When packing for the trip, Hadley decided to bring Hemingway’s manuscripts with her, including the short stories he had been working on in Paris.

At the Gare de Lyon, she boarded her train and stowed her bags in the overhead rack. She then left the train to buy some water. When she returned to her compartment, the small overnight bag in which she had packed her husband’s manuscripts had disappeared. Despite searching the train with the conductor, the missing suitcase could not be found, and Hadley had to return to her seat and wonder how she was going to break the news to Hemingway when she met him in Lausanne, and how he would react.

Recalling this episode forty years later, Hemingway wrote, “I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We could work it out. Then, finally, she told me. I was sure she could not have brought the carbons too . . .”¹

Hemingway’s stoic attitude is admirable. He says he had learned never to discuss casualties. Besides, it was probably not a bad thing to have lost his early work, and he would write more stories. But he admits to saying these things to his wife and friends to alleviate their distress by giving the impression that he had not been devastated by the mishap.

Hemingway would connect this loss to his iceberg theory of writing, according to which the deeper meaning of a story is never evident on the surface. In The Moveable Feast he remembers a story he called “Out of Season” and his decision to omit the original ending in which the old man hangs himself. You can omit almost anything, he would say, and “the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”²

Hadley’s divorce from Hemingway in 1927 was probably not connected to the loss of his manuscripts, but did the things he omitted from his memoir of his Paris years strengthen his image?

“We live . . . lives based upon selected fictions,” Lawrence Durrell has Pursewarden say in the second volume of his almost forgotten Alexandria Quartet. “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time—not by our personalities as we like to think.”³

During the years that Hemingway and Hadley lived in Paris (1921–26) Hemingway encountered the pioneering modernist poet Blaise Cendrars.

Thirty years later, Hemingway recalls the encounter in A Moveable Feast:

The Closerie des Lilas had once been a café where poets met more or less regularly and the last principal poet had been Paul Fort whom I had never read. But the only poet I ever saw there was Blaise Cendrars, with his broken boxer’s face and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand. He was a good companion until he drank too much and, at that time, when he was lying, he was more interesting than many men telling a story truly. But he was the only poet who came to the Lilas then and I only saw him there once.⁴

A page later, Hemingway’s pettiness gets the better of him. After describing some of the veterans who used to frequent the Lilas, he says that in those days one did not trust anyone who had not been in the war . . . “and there was,” he adds, “a strong feeling that Cendrars might well be a little less flashy about his vanished arm.”

Here is Cendrars’s more generous recollection of the same occasion:

I was drinking; he was drinking at a table next to mine. He was with an American sailor on leave. He was in uniform—probably that of a non-combatant ambulance aide, unless I’m mistaken. I had already lost my arm. It was the end of that other war, the last of the last. We talked between tables. Drunks love to talk. We talked. We drank. We drank again. I had an appointment in Montmartre with the widow of André Dupont, a poet killed at Verdun. I went there every Friday to eat bouillabaisse with Satie, Georges Auric, Paul Lombard, and, sometimes, Max Jacob. I brought my boozer American friends with me, thinking I’d give them something good de chez nous to eat. But the Americans aren’t fond of good food; they have no good food at home; they don’t know what it is. Hemingway and his sailor didn’t care for my arguments. They preferred to drink until they weren’t thirsty any more. So I planted them in a bar on the rue des Martyrs, I can’t remember which, and ran to treat myself at my friend’s widow’s house.

Henry Miller saw nothing but envy in Hemingway’s recollections. Cendrars was the authentic man of the world, the bourlinguer that Hemingway dreamed of becoming, and Miller made no bones about it. Hemingway was “a phony, a gutless coward compelled by weak nerves to turn to violence, the way others turn to drugs or madness.” Miller hated Hemingway’s “two-fisted, bravado brawling side, the pose of the aficionado—hunter of wild beasts, fisher of sharks, bandoliered soldier heading into battle.” According to Miller, Hemingway was nothing more than a bully, bolstered by media myths, and he felt no scrap of admiration for Hemingway’s “stenographic” style, in which reality is “traced by the eye alone in the absence of the brain.”⁵

Perhaps Simenon should be allowed to have the last say.

When Hemingway died, five months after Cendrars, several obituary writers spoke of the two authors in the same breath—both larger than life, legendary in their ability to mix worldliness with literature. Simenon dismisses the comparison. A parallel might be drawn between their lives, he says, but their deaths were utterly different.

While Hemingway chose to commit suicide rather than endure a painful and lingering death, Cendrars took exactly the opposite course of action.

Far from killing himself, he lived with his illness for many years, paralysed, fighting it tooth and nail, and, I’m told, refusing to take any of the medicines that would have eased his suffering, so that, despite everything, he would keep his lucidity. I believe this. This was just like him. For I knew him well.⁶

We all reflect so differently on one another that it is impossible to know where the truth lies. But one can, I think, evaluate our actions and ideas in relation to life, asking whether we increase or diminish it in the ways we choose to write about it. By life I do not mean just my life or yours, but life with a capital L, encompassing all that surrounds and outlasts us, and which we variously call history, nature, God, or tradition. I like to think of this encompassing environment as the sea, so that when one stands on some shoreline and thinks to oneself, this is the same sea Sophocles described, the same tides that washed the pebbles on Dover Beach . . . the clouds rolling, dispersing, bundled across the sky by the wind, these are the same clouds that Virginia Woolf saw on that spring day when she walked around Oxford, taking notes for her Room of One’s Own.

As Time Goes By

Umberto Eco observes that imperfect stories are sometimes more compelling than perfect ones, and that the reason Ingrid Bergman seems so mysterious in Casablanca is because, when the film was being shot, no one knew until the last moment whether Ilse would leave with Rick or Victor. Ingrid Bergman simply “did not know at which man she was to look with greater tenderness,” which is “why, in the story, she does not, in fact, choose her fate: She is Chosen.”¹

When I met Renata, she did not look like Ingrid Bergman, but she behaved like her. She didn’t seem to know at which man she was to look with greater tenderness either.

For five weeks—as long as it took for the Fairstar to sail from Melbourne to Genoa—she kept me waiting and wondering. All that time I thought Mario was waiting and wondering too, though when Renata went off with him at the end of the voyage, I consoled myself that it had been inevitable all along.

She was tall, with dark cropped hair. And she possessed that air of mysterious sadness that made Ingrid Bergman’s performance in Casablanca so memorable. Her children clung to her, pressing their faces into her skirt when you tried to talk to them. The little boy was about five, his sister a year or so younger. When they buried their faces in their mother’s skirt, she would place her hands on their heads and look questioningly at the person who had dared address them. So men learned to wait until she was alone, sunning herself by the pool or sitting at the bar before dinner. One by one they would approach her with offers to buy her a drink, invitations to deck games, sometimes direct propositions. We would observe her pained expression, the brusque gesture toward the door that suggested she would soon have to go to the children. Then we would watch with satisfaction as the suitor sidled back to his table looking for all the world as if he’d been accused of child molestation. Yet she would sit in her deck chair by the swimming pool, rubbing sun cream into the children’s shoulders, and gaze darkly at us all, aloof and beautiful, as if it was only a matter of time before she chose one of us as her lover.

I was foolish enough to think it was a choice between Mario and me. Mario devoted more attention to her than anyone, buying candies and board games for her children, asking if she would do him the honor of allowing him to escort her to the dance, proposing breathtaki...