Adventure and contingency in literary theory

Abstract

The relation between adventure and contingency is an ambivalent one. This ambivalence can be described by using a distinction of two aspects already tied together in âventiure (as a French foreign word in German), distinguished by Jacob Grimm as “begebenheit” versus “erzählte geschichte selbst,” rendered as ‘type of event’ versus ‘narrative pattern’ in the terminology of the Munich research group Philology of Adventure. On the one hand, it seems obvious that for an adventure, as a type of event, a contingent element is a crucial precondition. An adventurous agent must willingly expose himself to this contingent event and interpret it as a ‘Chance’ (using a French foreign word in German, again), i.e. as opportunity to gain by risking, be it simply capital—as in the economic usage of the word, from English ‘Merchant Adventurers’ to contemporary ‘Venture Capital’—, or be it fame or prestige—as in Medieval and Early Modern adventure epics and novels. On the other hand, adventure, as a narrative pattern, tends to reduce contingencies in order to ‘make sense’. Even if adventure tales tolerate and actually support episodic structures, these episodes must, after all, be motivated and integrated into a plot. In other words: Writing an adventure story always already implies to tame (or perhaps rather frame) the very contingency it is based on. Adventure stories are therefore typical cases of “eliminat[ing] the contingent part of the literary phenomena it deals with” (Duprat and Jordan, introduction to the present special issue). This tension is, however, rarely acknowledged in the history of literary theory—here taken in the longue durée, starting with Early Modern poetics. The present essay discusses some steps from the history of relevant theories, with a particular emphasis on Giorgio Agamben's recent eulogy of adventure.

Contingency in adventures and its framing

Aventure––a French medieval word of obvious Latin origin, but without an exact equivalent in Latin itself––refers to something that will arrive in the near future, something unforeseeable, or “puramente contingente” (“purely contingent”), as Giorgio Agamben (2015, p. 59) writes in a recent essay Lavventura. Agamben links adventure to tyche, the Greek concept, originally a daemon, translated as das Zufällige by Goethe (cf. 2015, p. 9). Dieter Kühn, in translating the word âventiure in Wolfram’s Parzival into modern ‛German’ (or mostly rather into French, since he insists that âventiure is a French word whose character as a foreign word has to be preserved in the German translation) chooses, as do others that this essay will go on to discuss, synonyms like hasard (IX. 446. 5) or coup de chance (XI. 563. 23).¹

In order to distinguish it from a mere accident, however, at least three further preconditions for an adventure are needed. Firstly, a willing exposure to contingency, the taking of a risque (as Kühn once translates âventiure: XI. 557. 11). If you are slain by a tree while walking around the Jardin des Tuileries, it will not count as an adventure, but as an accident. “[D]as Gemüt will hinaus und sucht die Abenteuer absichtlich auf” (Hegel, 1976, Vol. I, p. 564: “the mind wants out and intentionally seeks out the adventures”²). Similar semantic layers are evident in the economic sense of the word which the English equivalent in particular has acquired, from the constitution of the Merchant Adventurers in the late medieval period up to the present notion of ‘Venture Capital’. Early in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the first-person narrator mentions his “small Adventure” (Defoe, 2007 [1719], p. 16), referring to something neither strange nor surprising, but to a trivial sample of commodities valuing £40: his start-up capital meant to be invested and, optimistically, increased. Putting your money in a savings account, by contrast, would not count as an adventure (even if, at least in some countries, there does exist a risk of loss).

Secondly, this implies that the chance must be ‘taken’, as in the restricted sense of the German word Chance (where it is used as a foreign word in roughly French pronunciation): it must be understood as an opportunity to gain something. According to the medieval concept of aventure, contingent occurrences are used for a “testing of the identity of heroes” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 151), as occasions for their probation, or as for proof of their capabilities. Thus, “in the adventure, chance is integrated into a universal historical context” (Köhler, 1993 [1973] p. 29: “Die queste des höfischen Ritters integriert im Abenteuer den Zufall in einen universalgeschichtlichen Kontext.”)

Thirdly, a complex interplay between intention and non-intentionality is necessary for an adventure. The hero of the medieval aventure typically slackens the reins in order to leave the choice of his way through the woods to his horse, thus intentionally suspending his intentionality, enforcing his openness to the something-to-be-arriving. On the one hand, in the “chronotope [of adventure] all initiative and power belongs to chance” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 100). On the other hand, the casual event must leave room and time for a re-action, or for a re-installment of the adventurer’s initiative: the hero must be able to resist, by fighting, or by some other action. If his horse stumbled over a stone and broke its legs, this occurrence might work as a precondition to further adventures (since it reduces the rider's mobility), but it would not count as an adventure in itself.

Adventures are, provisionally summarized, events for which contingency is a necessary precondition, but for which contingency has to be necessarily tamed. But do all these features appertain to the adventure as an ‘Ereignistyp’ (a ‘type of event’)? From a philological point of view, it is crucial to note the twofold character of the word âventiure, first concisely analyzed by Grimm: âventiure does not only refer to the “begebenheit” (the ‘event’), but also to the “erzählte geschichte selbst” (Grimm, 1842, p. 22), to an ‘Erzählschema’ (a ‘narrative pattern’).³ In his Parzival translation Kühn also uses, for other instances of âventiure, the word histoire (I. 3. 28), and once even the German Erzählung (IX. 453. 8). And since the word can refer to the narrative pattern of the whole romance as well as to parts of it, Kühn sometimes chooses Roman (VII. 338. 3 or XVI. 827. 11), sometimes nouvelle (e.g. V. 272. 30) or épisode (VIII. 404. 11). In other words, composites like “adventure story” tend to be tautological, and they should be understood as “adventure as story.”

We cannot, however, take for granted that everything which characterizes adventure as a type of event is also valid for adventure as a narrative pattern. It is, for example, plausible to ‘translate’ âventiure as péril (as Kühn once does: XII. 587. 12) in order to highlight its dangerous character. But this obviously only refers to the event depicted, not to the depiction: narrating a fight with a dragon or reading a story about a fight with a dragon is usually not as dangerous as fighting with a dragon—the usual precondition even for the aesthetics of the sublime being, in Kantian terms: “wenn wir uns nur in Sicherheit befinden” (“provided that we [while watching thunderstorms, volcanoes, and waterfalls] are safe,” cf. Kant, 1983 [1790], p. B 104 [paging of the second edition]).⁴ Similarly, the economic semantic layers of adventure are rarely transferred to the respective narrative pattern: while ‘narrative economy’ is a widespread metaphor, the tenor of this metaphor is usually not associated with risk, but rather with rational housekeeping; writing is conceived as the production of reliable goods in a pre-capitalist or low-capitalist small-sized enterprise, not as ‘adventurous’ (speculative) investment of large sums of loaned money into highly volatile derivatives.

And, most importantly for the topic under consideration here: the relations of adventure to contingency are obviously different when adventure is understood as a narrative pattern instead of a type of event. This is particularly clear with regard to intentions. Modern theories of art, it is true, emphasize elements escaping the author’s intentionality, elements which can also be described as contingent, as Adorno writes: “no work of art deserves this name which distances itself from anything contingent to its own law.” Similarly, aleatorical devices like those used by John Cage in his music composition are extreme ways of declaring the admission of, or even resignation to, contingency (Adorno, 1970, p. 329).⁵ It is, however, scarcely possible to produce stories by aleatory devices (except for, perhaps, a few selected features of the plot). Therefore, Mark Currie’s observation that” [narrative] pretends a contingency that is already cancelled by writing”⁶ (Currie [2024]) is valid for adventures-as-stories as well.⁷ Disambiguating the word, it is therefore plausible to make the adventure as a narrative pattern responsible for the act of taming or, perhaps better, Framing Contingency.⁸

Adventure and contingency in the history of literary theory (from the middle ages to Agamben)

Within the frame of this Special Issue, however, this essay attempts a second order observation not of literature itself, but rather of literary theory—whose “theoretical effort normally aims to account for—and thus to reduce and/or eliminate—the contingent part of the literary phenomena it deals with.⁹ The following is a short and incomplete survey about how literary theory—the term taken in a longue durée—has dealt with the relationship of adventure to contingency, particularly interested in the (non-)distinction between adventure as a type of events and as a narrative pattern.¹⁰

While aventure is a crucial term in Medieval poetics, no poetological treatises in the vernacular¹¹ from this era exist, so that it is necessary to interpret the ‘implicit’ poetics articulated within the romances themselves, in episodes like Parzival’s dialogue with Frou Âventiure on which Grimm based his explanation of the word. Walter Haug’s entire book on Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter (2009 [1989]) was almost exclusively derived from prologues and digressions in German and some French romances. According to Haug’s central thesis, some of these texts from the late 12th century programmatically elaborate a certain autonomy of fictional narrations, which are no longer dependent on their former function of serving as mere examples for moral truths (cf. Haug, 1998, p. 163). This thesis is crucial for Haug's description of the role of literature in its relation to contingency. Haug anticipates Currie's description, according to which contingency in narrative fiction is always already fictional in itself, since it only feigns not to have been planned before. Remarkably enough, Haug presumes the contemporary reader's insight into this very paradox. According to him, even the very contingentness of events in fictional narratives is perceived as fictional, so that the literary game allows to reflect or to learn to deal with contingency.¹² This description presupposes an awareness of fictionality to a very high degree, or, put differently, an insight into the distinctness between adventure as a type of event and as a narrative pattern—an insight contested in more recent contributions about medieval conceptions of adventure, to which I will return.

Even when treatises of poetics in vernaculars started to be written, as in 16th century Italy, adventure played a significantly smaller role than in contemporary poetic production. Manuel Mühlbacher, on whose results I here rely, nevertheless succeeds in detecting “traces of the adventure” (2019, subtitle) by concentrating on the genre of the romanzo and its loose structure of a potentially infinite series of adventurous events. “E perché d'erranti persone è tutto il poema, egli altresì errante è,” writes Giovan Battista Pigna in his treatise on I romanzi (from 1554, quoted in Mühlbacher, 2019, p. 126: “Since the whole poem deals with errant persons, it is equally errant itself.”) “Der romanzo wird dadurch zu einer Gattung der Kontingenz: Nichts ist notwendig, alles ist jederzeit möglich” (Mühlbacher, 2019, pp. 126-7: “The romanzo therefore becomes a genre of contingency: nothing is necessary, everything is always possible”). And this is claimed for the narrative pattern as well as for the events; Pigna distinguishes these layers only in order to claim their structural analogy, or rather the former's dependence on the latter: since the poem deals with contingent objects, it is contingent in itself.

This result, however, stands in obvious tension to the standards of Aristotle’s (then newly rediscovered) Poetics, so that Torquato Tasso felt forced to construct a compromise between varietà, the variety of potentially endless episodes, and some unity of form and plot.¹³ The unity of form declared by Tasso might be illustrated by the strict formal laws of the epic, especially in its Romanic ottaverime which serve for a strong bonding of the linguistic surface via metre, rhyme and stanza.¹⁴ One might even say that these features are means for taming linguistic contingencies (the arbitrariness of signifiers)—but it is hard to grasp how Early Modern epic poems, with their endlessly digressing series of adventures, can meet the Aristotelian requirements for a unity of favola (plot).

Tassos claim of unity appears as a typical act of “eliminat[ing] the contingent part of the literary phenomena it deals with.” About two hundred years after Tasso, moreover, the strategies for this elimination were radicalized to the degree that a whole class of allegedly contingent literary phenomena was either dismissed altogether—or historicized as something belonging to an era nearing its end.

The first strategy (dismissal) is to be found in the context of establishing the Bildungs- or Entwicklungsroman in the 1770s, and its concentration on the “Innre der Personen” (“interior of persons,” to quote Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman, 1965 [1774], p. 58), on the psychic development of the characters which is purportedly not contingent, but follows an immanent logic. Complementarily, adventures as mere outward events are simply dismissed––most explicitly, for example, in the respective lemma of Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (from the same period: 1771–74). There, “Abentheuerlich” is defined as” [e]ine Art des falschen Wunderbahren, dem selbst die poetische Wahrscheinlichkeit fehlet” (“a type of wrong wonderful, which even lacks poetical probability”)—where the “selbst” (‘even’) is to be conjectured as: “not to speak of its reality,” and the addition of “falsch” (‘wrong’) to “Wunderbahres” to be understood as: “not even the kind of wonderful which Aristotle explicitly allows under certain conditions.” The proper character of the adventurous, Sulzer continues, is its provenance in a world, “wo alles ohne hinreichende Gründe geschieht” (“where everything happens without sufficient reasons”)—i.e. adventure is dismissed precisely because of its contingency.

Remarkably, Sulzer does not even distinguish between adventure as a type of event and adventure as a narrative pattern; he simply dismisses both (or sends them into an exile where they might be allowed “merely for amusement”; “von den Dichtern bloß zur Belustigung nachgeahmt,” all quotations: Sulzer 1771–74, Vol. I, p. 3). Even while it is evident that Sulzer deals with the narrative rather than the event, he does not discuss the narrative pattern as such, but considers it as a transparent medium of imitation which would not allow a reflection of contingency, as is maintained by Haug for medieval fiction.

The second strategy (the historicizing of adventure) is to be found in one of the most extensive treatments of adventure in the history of literary theory; in this case as a subsection of aesthetics, or rather, as the author himself explains the title of his lectures on the topic, of the “Philosophie der Kunst” (“Philosophy of art,” Hegel, 1976, Vol. I, p. 13). Hegel’s respective lectures include a passage of about eight pages in a modern print version, entitled “Die Abenteuerlichkeit” (‘adventurousness’), which according to him constitutes the “Grundtypus des Romantischen” (“basic type of the Romantic,” Hegel, 1976, Vol. I, p. 562, with ‘Romantic’ referring, it is understood, to the whole of Christian art since the Middle Ages, Dantes Commedia included). Adventurousness, or ‘the’ adventurous (“das Abenteuerliche”)—twice Hegel uses the word “Abenteuereien” (approximately: “all this adventure stuff”, “endless adventuring around”)—is characterized by an inflationary use of the adjective or adverb zufällig (ibid., ‘accidental’, or ‘contingent’). Even the world itself into which the adventurous mind wants to go out is characterized as a “zufällige” (all quotations: Hegel, 1976, Vol. I, p. 564-5). Other typical epithetons of Abenteuer[lichkeit] in Hegel are “willkürlich” (‘arbitrary’) or “mannigfaltig” (‘manifold’).

All this obviously refers to adventures as events depicted in their respective literary texts, and Hegel, again, makes very few distinctions concerning adventure as narrative pattern; even while he identifies “das Romanhafte” (‘the novelistic’) as a particular stage in the evolution and, finally, the dissolution of the Romantic, he mentions epics, novels and plays (Ariost, Cervantes, and Shakespeare) in one and the same sentence (cf. Hegel, 1976, Vol. I, p. 565). Without explicitly stating it, he seems to imply, like Pigna almost 300 years before, that the adventurous texts themselves are errant like their adventuring protagonists. And it is only from desultory uses of the word Abenteuer in other contexts that one might infer a distinction between adventure as type of event and as narrative pattern. When Hegel writes of Ulysses’s adventures (cf. Hegel, 1976, Vol. II, p. 446), these are certainly not arbitrary ‘Abenteuereien’, but necessary “Hemmnisse” (‘impediments’) within the “well-rounded whole” (“ein abgerundetes Ganze,” Hegel, 1976, Vol. II, p. 447) of an epic world—where ‘epic world’ is to be understood in the double sense of the world depicted in the epic as well as the epic as a world in itself. It is only here that something like a synthesis between the bad infinity of adventuring around and the unity of a literary work is achieved—but how exactly this might come about Hegel does not tell us. Hegel, almost like Sulzer (though in a more dialectical construction), identifies the dissolution of the Romantic, and thus of Adventurousness, with the Bildungsroman, now in verbal allusion to Goethe’s Lehrjahre (i.e. the title of the first Wilhelm Meister-novel in its second version; cf. Hegel, 1976, Vol. I, p. 567-8)—eliminating adventurous contingency by historicizing it.

Since then, adventure tales or novels have a bad press in the mainstream of literary criticism or theory, at least in Europe; often seen as something not to be taken too seriously, or to be found in popular literature only. Once in the era of literary theory written with a capital T, i.e. the 1960s, one finds a characteristic bonmot in Jean Ricardou’s Problèmes du Nouveau Roman: “Ainsi un roman est-il pour nous moins l’écriture d’une aventure que l’aventure d’une écriture” (“Therefore, a novel is for us [the Nouveaux Romanciers, but implicitly the authors of modern, or modernist, novels in general] less the writing of an adventure than the adventure of writing,” Ricardou, 1967, p. 111). This is catchy, indeed, but, firstly, remains uncontrolledly metaphorical, and, secondly, doesn't help in describing adventure as a narrative pattern, since the outcome of these adventurous writings is precisely not conceived as an adventure novel (even if at least Robbe-Grillet did play with adjacent genres like the detective novel).

Few of the philological contributions to the study of adventure stories deserve the designation theory. One of these is Agamben's essay, mentioned above. As a contribution to the philosophy of adventure, it is certainly an inspiring text, with its linkage to the mythology and philosophy around tyche. He approaches aventure to the event in general, which is the événement of philosophical (or even theological) dignity, to be distinguished sharply from mere ‘occurrences’ or ‘happenings', and which is, therefore (to use an intentionally paradoxical description), necessarily contingent.

More important for the present context is Agamben's literary theory of adventure. Starting from Grimm's already summarized distinction between adventure as event and as narration (cf. Agamben, 2015, p. 23), he claims, bluntly and repeatedly, that these two aspects are indistinguishable: “Non si tratta,” to quote only one of five or six similar formulations, “della corrispondenza fra eventi e racconto, fra fatti e parole, ma del loro coincidere nell'aventura.” (“It is a matter not of a correspondence between events and narrative, between facts and words, but their coinciding in the aventure.” Agamben, 2015, p. 28).¹⁵ Relying on an article written by Peter Strohschneider (cf. 2006, p. 379), Agamben describes this relation as ‘performative’ (cf. 2015, p. 34); since, however, every speech act is, following the second part of John L. Austin's groundbreaking lectures, somewhat ‘performative’ (cf. Austin, 1992 [1962], pp. 83–91 for the breakdown of his distinction), it would be more precise to call this particular one a ‘declaration': a speech act producing what it states (cf. Searle, 1975, pp. 16–19). For the performance of such a speech act being successful, one usually needs a God (“Fiat lux”), a hypnotizer (“You are sleeping”) or at least a Donald Trump (“You’re fired”), i. e. some kind of “extra-linguistic institution” (Searle, 1975, p. 18, provided that God may also be counted as such an institution). Strohschneider (cf. 2006, p. 379–382), however, claims that under certain conditions and within a neatly defined set of texts (Arthurian romance), something analogous works for the poetic construction of an adventure—and Agamben generalizes this for adventure tout court.

This identification of facts and words is a radical ‘linguistification’ to the degree that it almost cancels the difference between poetry and magic. Against Agamben, I would insist, somewhat commonsensically, that the ambiguity of a word does not necessarily involve the impossibility of distinguishing its different meanings.¹⁶ German native speakers, for example, would not be tempted to think that castles and locks are indistinguishable—even if these are designated by the same German word Schloss (and even if this ambiguity is not arbitrary, but metonymically motivated, as in claustrum, ‘the closed’ [add: ‘building’]). Likewise, I would insist on the possibility of distinguishing event and narration, or, in the case of the reversed order of the declaration which anticipates what it is going to produce: between locutionary act and perlocutionary result (“—et facta est lux”; the patient has fallen asleep; the apprentice is fired; the adventure is here).¹⁷

Admittedly, it is not always easy to distinguish between adventure as a type of event and adventure as a narrative pattern, particularly not in the realm of fictional adventures.¹⁸ While I would hesitate to generalize the coincidence between facts and words (“fatti e parole”), I would concede a coincidence between fictions and words (“finzioni e parole”), since the ontological status of a fictitious event cannot easily be established beyond its existence in a fictional speech act. As such an act, an adventure is, pace Agamben, always “impuramente contingente”—and its particular contingents (in the sense of ‘shares’) of contingency and deliberate choice remain to be further investigated.