Elements of Surprise by Vera Tobin

Author:Vera Tobin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Surprise and (Dis-)Satisfaction

I suggested at the start of this book that, in general, stories that aim to entertain should be surprising and perhaps also that the surprises should be counterbalanced by some degree of presentiment and expectation. If King Shahryār can predict all that comes next, he has no need for Scheherazade to tell it to him. But if nothing drives him to anticipate, wonder about, and look forward to what the next installment might be, he will not care to find out. The narratologist Meir Sternberg has influentially claimed that all narrative interest and indeed “the workings that distinguish narrative from everything else” derive from the interplay of surprise, curiosity, and suspense (2001, 117). Suspense, for Sternberg, is that which arises from an “early awareness” of gaps in a narrative, while surprise, by contrast, is the result of “a more or less imperceptible suppression” of early events that is followed by “a sudden retrospective illumination of what has gone before” (157). This definition of surprise, though it distinguishes the concept clearly from suspense, also points out the degree to which both rely on groundwork laid relatively early in a story. Surprise comes out of the blue—but it may show us something about the blue that was there, if unnoticed, all along.

Works and genres can of course differ in their mixture of surprise, suspense, and curiosity, as well as in the degree to which their surprises are built into the text in advance of their revelation. Sternberg suggests, “It is in these terms that we can account for the difference between the surprise ending in the detective story, toward which we impatiently strive throughout the reading-process, and that in a picaresque, panoramic novel like Smollet’s Roderick Random, which, though equally produced by the prior suppression of exposition, is surprising in a more startling way—being totally unprepared for and contrived merely in order to provide a happy resolution” (2001, 319n18). Indeed, it can be supremely irritating to believe one is in a genre that calls for one kind of surprise, only to receive a quite different kind of surprise instead. In fact, though Sternberg characterizes the abrupt turnabouts of the kind of picaresque exemplified by The Adventures of Roderick Random as a basically neutral feature of the genre, certainly not all readers have been content to accept Random’s “more startling” surprises without a fight.

A closer look at the reception of this particular picaresque can give us a sense of how powerful the draw of well-made surprises can be for audiences that have had a taste of them and what a potent and addictive form of satisfaction they can be: Random (written in 1748) is episodic, peripatetic, and, until its final pages, unsentimental. It was written, according to its author, as a “satire upon mankind” (in a letter to Alexander Carlyle, quoted in Knapp 1949, 43). Its protagonist is a cynic and a rogue whose pleasure in his own cynicism and roguishness sustains him in his travels through an apparently tirelessly brutal and heartless world.

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