Chapter 4

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

doi:10.1093/owc/9780199536382.003.0006

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“…High and low stories represent equally powerfully figures of a Weltanschauung, a philosophy and a vision of the world, inherent in the stories of what happens in that world, the luck of the world, as Antonio Gramsci argued with force in his Prison Notebooks, when he reclaimed folklore as a form of popular philosophical thinking, as a sedimented 'conception of the world and of life'. 11 Gramsci, for sure, would want nothing to do with the conservatism of the transversal and the transhistorical, with the static fixity of the universal, if being universal necessarily means permanence and immunity to change. The high and low forms of luck, their icons, traditions and stories, are not the same across time and place, nor indeed is any one culture's manifestation of its beliefs in luck identical to any other's.…”

Section: Something Old Something Newmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…10 Its close bond to modern science is confirmed in Darwin's famous tree figures representing the evolution of species created by random or chance genetic error and mutation. 11 And its force in modern storytelling is encapsulated in the remarkable power and resonance of the so-called 'forking-path' motif in modern fiction, derived from Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 story, 'The garden of the forking paths'. 12 All these analogous examples are so many line drawings of luck, and we will find their geometries repeated -and indeed confused and disrupted -across the wide and varied field of modern luck stories explored in Part II.…”

Section: Word Trees and Etymologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…10 The pattern recurs in other slave narratives, including Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself (1861), where the key term of the title, 'incidents', already flags up the serial 'adventure' shape of the narrative; several of the pivotal turns in the book are presented as turns of fortune, often paradoxically so in the face of danger and suffering, such as her description in the opening chapter of her childhood until the age of six, happily unaware that she was a slave ('Such were the unusually fortunate circumstances of my early childhood '), and that of her precarious hiding place after her escape, suffering from a grim snake or lizard bite ('I went to sleep that night with the feeling that I was for the present the most fortunate slave in town'). 11 There is a comparable figure from the mid-twentieth century, an iteration of the survivor topos, played out in both lived history and in narrative, that has seemed at times to stand as an essence of all the others and has thereby taken on near-talismanic cultural value for what we call modernity. This figure emerges as a consequence of the almost inconceivably improbable circumstances of their survival, from an 'accidental' encounter with what for many is the very darkest moment in modern history.…”

Section: And Into a Television Series (The Goes Wrong Show)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But they share a series of key features, starting with the common iconic status of those stars as leading figures of the masculinity of the post-studio era in Hollywood. 11 In their Russian roulette sequences specifically, the films share further crucial features and are thus in implicit dialogue with each other, through hidden generic markers -deriving from the western, above all -that point to their capacity to engage with profound problems of an (American, modern, masculine) identity in crisis. This holds not only for Eastwood and De Niro, who already at the time of the making of these films shared in their back catalogue defining iconic roles as vigilante heroes: Eastwood's spaghetti western hero known as 'the man with no name' in Sergio Leone's so-called 'Dollars trilogy ', 1964-6, andDe Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (dir.…”

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“…As Mary Ann Doane has argued, this regulation of space-time is a defining characteristic of capitalist modernity, a mechanism for taming contingency, except in those instances (or fantasies) when contingency escapes its bounds, instances that for Doane are captured in some essential way in the temporality of cinema. 11 In Before Sunrise and its sequels, too, temporal constraint is structurally and affectively central: departures loom as soon as encounters occur, with Jesse and Céline only ever together on screen for strictly delimited periods, one night or one afternoon, a contemporary reprise of the Aristotelian unity of time. (Longer, regulated cycles of time, instead, connote dull domesticity, whole lives lived together, no space and no time for luck.)…”

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Modern Luck

Gordon¹

2023

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This book has taken shape over a number of years -too many years -and it began in a dark place. As I was working in the early 2000s on the remarkable Holocaust writer and survivor Primo Levi, I noticed how often he turned to an idea of luck or good fortune as part of his 'explanation' for the awful suffering that had befallen him at Auschwitz and for the impossibly improbable fact of his survival. Levi was a marvellously articulate and sensitive thinker about so many aspects of his own history and that of millions like him, and his probing of the role of luck was no exception. But my second realization was that he was far from alone: every Holocaust survivor I read or heard seemed to return to the theme, insistently, anxiously. Every story of survival was a story of good luck. I began to wonder about the implications of this beyond the concentration camps and hiding places of the Second World War. If, as many have posited, the Holocaust encapsulated some dark essence of modernity, and if luck was such a persistent trope in stories told about it, was there some underlying tie that bound luck, or stories told about luck, to modernity? This is the question that lies at the heart of this book. Although it turns to the Holocaust more than once, in particular in Chapter 6, it deliberately goes out of its way to step beyond it, to explore over the course of its eight chapters the role of luck and luck stories across as broad a canvas as I could paint of the literary, cinematic and cultural field from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the 'long twentieth century' of my subtitle. I also took the decision to step outside the narrow confines of my own specialist field, Italian literature and cinema (although I draw regularly on this too), in order to tap into the wider (indeed universal) resonances and affective pull of this short simple word, luck, which pervades so much of our self-perception and underpins so many of the stories we tell about our own lives, the fictions that accompany it. This has made the work on the book challenging, for sure, but also consistently enriching and pleasurable, a genuine journey of discovery as I tapped into the energy that this concept seems to transmit to all those who have x PREFACE tackled it, myself included. The shadow of the dark place where I started, however, never quite went away. Luck stories are not only stories with happy endings, after all; they are also reminders of the fragility and danger that always lie only a moment away. Just as I was finishing the book, war broke out over the very same area of Eastern Europe that Levi and his few companions travelled across in 1945, on their long and unlikely journey home.All the time spent on this book has left me with too many people to thank properly for their help, advice and patience. I have presented workin-progress and received precious feedback in various forums: a public lecture hosted by the Centro studi internazionale Primo Levi, Turin (thanks to Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa), followed by lectures at t...

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Section: Something Old Something Newmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Word Trees and Etymologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: And Into a Television Series (The Goes Wrong Show)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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