Gillian Beer on Gambling in the Novel

 

Summary notes taken by J. A. García Landa, from Gillian Beer's lecture "Gambling in the Novel", given at the University of Cambridge (August 1, 1990). 

 

Gambling in the Novel    - Gillian Beer

Gambling in the novel is related to the anxiety provoked in the reader by fiction —the anxiety of the reader to choose different passways, to predict possible outcomes.  Reading as wagering—there is frequent gambling in Victorian fiction.

Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. The shock of having a gambler as a moral centre... and a shock of an explicit moral centre in postmodernism.

Oscar and Lucinda are people who take risks and chances, and look for new possibilities. Pascal's wager as a point of reference: a wager for the presence of the world and God; —living as betting. The problem of the novelist is making a disordered world: writing is already made, ordered. The reader's helplessness: the reader is in a game where skill can always be overcome by chance (by the already written). Cf. Hopscotch. Cf. also comics, which foreground narratological tricks. The plot in Oscar and Lucinda is disrupted by chance. Crossing of two ssytems of belief: Victorian order and posmodern meaning-through-chaos (or: teleological vs. stochastic). Reliance on numercial frequency, statistics, rather than laws. Compare with evolutionary theory in the 19th century: biology is already a narrative, not a system of fixed types. 

Dostoevsky's The Gambler: human control, money, property, the idea of fortune of man, all together in a life project as "slow gambling." 

Thermodynamics can also be seen as a narrative of change: a problematic future is announced by bothe thermodynamics and evolutionary biology, in opposition to the high confidence of imperial control in the Victorian period.

Gambling appears in 19th-c. fiction as a little figuration, a symbol of the problem of staying on top and keeping control. Games of chance and novels alleviate or figure the problem of determining the future. Narrative genetics: the writer is always in control. —But somebody else too? Modern mathematics disregards the asserts that even laws in simple systems do not produce predictable results, but their own form of chaos. 

Hardy exploits gambling in order to resolve the plot of The Return of the Native. The gambler is persuaded of the efficacy of gambling: —> the reader is persuaded by Hardy of the efficacy of fiction. The "reader" watching the gambling scene makes them play again, and wins back everything. But a vertiginous losing again. Hardy displays the absurdity of our belief in narrative fiction and its logic. With a slackening of the rules of play in narrative fiction, there is a growth of gaming scenes. Maxwell presages postmodern fiction.

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: Another version of the wager applied to narrative. The wagerer is naked, losing at strip poker; we think we know the narrative rules, but they are arbitrary and can collapse. Rule-breaking is important both in the novel and in gambling.

The vocabularies of gambling and insurance are the same: Insurance as bourgeois gambling, gambling in reverse. 

Little Dorrit: the Stock Exchange as gambling. Stock holding in The Major of Casterbridge is also dangerous. 

Gambling is seen in Victorian age as degrading, there it mixed social classes. Whist is also dangerous. A fascination with both futurity (death of the sun) and laws of chance. Game playing as a way of giving the problem a visible form. George Eliog was disgusted by gambling. But in Daniel Deronda she uses gaming as a narrative analogue and an analogue for anxiety about the future. 

Scenes of gambling are often told from the point of view of the spectator (the reader too is a kind of voyeur). The power position of the watcher (a gendered position too in Daniel Deronda). Anxiety is greater when women gamble (Esther Waters by Moore, The Gambler by Dostoevsky). 

Gambling as elation and momentary freedom for the deprived. A disapproval of women taking chances and flouting the slow pace of "insurance" (a secure husband). Also in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Women trying to get out of society's control, etc. "Always in extremes", the gambler shifts between orgiastic failure or winning sought indifferently. In Trollope gambling is implicated in all types of decision-making in Victorian society (Captain Scarborough). 

According to Winnicott, the taste for games is previous to identity-establishing. Or see also Freud's example of the fort-da game, which makes the child gain authority and power... as long as there is an adult watching.Think of iterative games in Beckett. Freud's are played in order to keep the toys inside the cot: —as opposed to external gambling.

An obsession with gambling in Victorians: at the thermodynamical, social, and fiction-communicative levels. Stastistics vs. individuality in the Victorian novel. The gambler stakes all in an outcome, he needs to control inheritance or property. Gambling as a way of setting a plot in motion, opening possible futures. Fiction accelerates the "slow gambling" of life and allows us to see society from that perspective.

 

 

 

Diez mil millones de años luz de evoluciones

 

 

—oOo—