—Leszek Kołakowski
“What would happen if you were just swept along like a leaf on the water? What would happen to you?”
—Rachel Cusk
My tale of coincidence must have begun during the taxi ride to Istanbul airport, when I got stuck in traffic. The driver was swearing in Greek, and I was sweating. A small, metal cross with two additional bars, the lower of which tilted, dangled from the interior mirror. When the driver finally dropped me off at the airport, apologizing and cursing under his breath, I realized that I had long since missed my flight home. I settled down next to a few people whose flights had probably been cancelled and who were preparing to spend the night at the airport. I managed to get hold of a ticket on my phone, although it meant an overnight stay in Belgrade. Better that than having to spend another night in this city.
On leaving Belgrade airport, I met a short man with a little belly and a greasy plait whose age was difficult to estimate. I hesitantly let myself get involved in a conversation on the bus from the airport and ended up having dinner with him in an upscale Italian restaurant in the city centre. Over wine and Belgrade’s take on Italian cuisine, he told me about an Icelandic app that allowed users to check if they were related to their potential partner, to be used at least before they started trying to have children. I thought I had read that there was something similar among Haredim in New York. He talked about ethno-states and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and soon went on to tell me about his trip to Ukraine, which had taken him to the front because his uncle was a highly decorated officer in the Ukrainian army. We then went for a drink in a slot machine casino since everything else had already closed, and I wasn’t sure if he was trying to flirt with me. When we drunkenly parted ways, he urged me to add him on Facebook, which I didn’t do, not even the following day.
Back in Berlin, I had to face the reality of the affair I had started before I’d left. On the evening of my return, we went for a walk in the twilight and it was humid and I saw her with completely new eyes. The distance had done me good. I could now understand that this was serious and that I might want to spend the rest of my life with her. She probably sensed it too. There was no other way to explain why she squeezed my hand firmly and resolutely, despite our stickiness, at the exact moment of my realization. When I awoke next to her the following morning, I was overcome by a strong suspicion that I couldn’t suppress. While she was still asleep, I took hair samples from her and myself and sent them to two different labs to make sure later that day. After a week and a half, the first result came back, but I waited another half week to check on both results together. I hadn’t met my lover in the meantime. I couldn’t look her in the face. I accessed both websites in two different browsers. The test I had launched in Opera showed that there was a 99.998 percent probability that we were not related, but the other, in Safari, claimed that we were third cousins. I was speechless, but let the power of probability convince me that we had a future. Just a few days later, I proposed to her.
*
In his house, bathed in evening light, Joseph Kern, the retired judge, stands bent over in front of his television, which is reporting on a shipping disaster on the English Channel: a sudden storm has caused a ferry to capsize, and only seven passengers out of hundreds have survived. The narrator then gives the names and nationalities of the individual survivors. First the Frenchwoman Julie Vignon is shown being led exhausted through the night past television reporters shouting “Julie!”, shortly followed by the Pole Karol Karol on a rescue stretcher, blinking confusedly into the light of the camera. The old judge’s face remains tense but unmoved as two Swiss men are announced: Auguste Bruner and Valentine Dussaut. They walk through the crowd of helpers and reporters, then stand very close to each other, wrapped in grey blankets, their faces wet from rain and seawater. They have jumped off the brink of death.
This well-known final scene from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red is a reunion. Julie Vignon is the main character of the first film in the trilogy (Blue), Karol Karol that of the second (White). The three films permeate each other with a network of recurring motifs, symbols and cameo appearances, even if they function as independent works. That the main characters meet in the final scene of this last film as survivors of a senseless and tragic accident is more than just illustrative material for Kieślowski’s striving for formal rigour and symbolic structure. It is a prime example of what I would like to call narrative coincidence, which appears again and again in his films and is perhaps even the constitutive driving force behind the Three Colours trilogy. And, to be clear, I mean the narration of coincidence, not random acts of storytelling.
*
Narrative coincidence has played a major role in cinema as a generator of effect and driver of plot, basically ever since Hollywood emerged. A screenwriter named Scott Myers refers to Casablanca (“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine”) on his writing advice blog. There, he gives practical tips on how to deal with coincidence in a screenplay:
- You are only allowed one coincidence per script.
- If you’re going to have a coincidence, might as well be a big one.
- Avoid writer’s coincidence by making it a bad coincidence.
- If you have a coincidence, have a character acknowledge it in dialogue.
In this context, visible traces of the script’s madeness, of its artificiality, are considered poor craftsmanship. Myers’s tips primarily show how narrative coincidence can be used without attracting too much attention. So he is basically trying to renaturalize the effect. It is remarkable that he thinks he can quantify fatefulness: “one coincidence pretty much falls under the umbrella of Fate”, but after two coincidences, fate can no longer be assumed to be the cause, leaving only the bland aftertaste of long afternoons in the Writers’ Room.
Coincidence as a tool of narrative art quickly reaches its limits. Narrative coincidence in the emphatic sense—as I would like to approach it—denotes those narrative situations in which coincidence emerges overtly as narrated coincidence, as an end in itself. Narrative coincidence can thus also serve to point to the status of narration as a product of artistic activity. André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, for example, published in 1925, works extensively with coincidence in order to push beyond the gimmickry and illusion aesthetics of the nineteenth-century French novel.
*
Although the appearances of the characters from the other films in Kieślowski’s trilogy are noteworthy, Red builds towards the scene described above as its key moment. Due to a coincidence—Valentine hits the old judge’s dog with her car and brings him the injured animal—she and Joseph meet. Joseph tries to get rid of the dog by giving it to Valentine. She catches him secretly listening to his neighbours’ telephone conversations; while Valentine and Joseph repel each other, they grow closer against their respective wills, so to speak.
The closer Valentine and Joseph grow, the more visible Joseph’s interventions in the actions of his fellow human beings become, and the more obvious it gets that his spying is motivated less by voyeurism than by a desire for a humane kind of creatorship that contrasts with his ostentatious misanthropy. He prophesies to Valentine that Auguste, his neighbour’s lover, who—as the audience knows, but the character himself does not—is in turn Valentine’s neighbour, has not yet found true love. Once they are familiar with each other, Joseph tells Valentine about a prophetic dream in which she appears as a forty- or fifty-year-old: he tells her that he knows for certain that she will one day be happy and loved. These prophecies, which evoke fundamental desires in Valentine and are realized simply through the self-assurance with which they are presented by Joseph as her counterpart, are also an expression of Joseph’s wishes for Valentine. His dream is less a prophecy than a classic pipe dream, but telling her about it is a quasi-creative act.
In the final scene of the film, Joseph’s various interventions come together. Because he turns himself in for his spying, his neighbour meets a new man during the subsequent court case and drops Auguste. On Joseph’s advice, Valentine plans to take the ferry to Great Britain. Heartbroken, Auguste takes the same ferry, the implication being that Joseph makes sure he does. Joseph has worked his way out of his passive-misanthropic state (or was led out of it by Valentine) and is now the creator of the situation in which the two characters have to get to know each other, who meet again and again throughout the film and who we suspect are destined for each other. On the one hand, this creator is himself subject to chance, as it were, as shown by the encounter between him and Valentine and the accident during the storm. After moulding, arranging and manipulating the scene, Joseph watches on his shimmering television as the—his?—characters fulfill their destiny and abandon themselves to fate.
On the other hand, Joseph is the self-reflective mirror of the creators of this trilogy themselves—and even more importantly, creators of narrative works of art in general. In the character of Joseph Kern, the filmmaker Kieślowski and his co-author Krzysztof Piesiewicz show themselves at work, as it were. They are the ones who create situations that can’t actually be, who subject their characters and character shadows to random events, encounters and patterns. So how could Joseph’s facial expression be anything other than tense but motionless as he is now confronted with the result of his carefully orchestrated situation, which in turn is itself subject to laws that elude him. How could his—that is, Kieślowski’s—face be anything other than relieved, as in the last frame of the film (which in turn became Kieślowski’s last due to his premature death, seemingly opening up a further level of reference between creative-narrative chance and real-life fate), looking directly at us viewers. Meanwhile, the sounds of an aeroplane or helicopter can be heard in the background and a tear runs down the cheek of Joseph Kern, who knows that he has created a kind of redemption, a happy ending.
*
Walter Benjamin writes: ‘Has fate any reference to good fortune, to happiness? Is happiness, as misfortune doubtless is, an intrinsic category of fate? Happiness is, rather, what releases the fortunate man from the embroilment of the Fates and from the net of his own fate.’ Here, Benjamin points to the potentially reactionary nature of the concept of fate, which shows itself in its most unbelieved, worn-out and commodified manifestation in the current digital renaissance of astrology and spirituality—as tiresome as the question about one’s star sign on a Tinder date. It is no coincidence that the concept of fate is linked to that of community in the ‘Schicksalsgemeinschaft’ (common fate), as one that unites the members of a group with objectively conflicting interests against a collective enemy and tolerates no deviation.
*
As I sat on a bench by the Iglesia de San Francisco de Asis, its bells began to ring and elderly people in festive clothing, some couples, most of them alone, walked slowly and gracefully across the square to the church. It was midday, and against the backdrop of a clear blue sky, some imposing clouds loomed—they seemed like commands to me. Back in my room with the torn-looking yellow walls, I emptied my pockets, looked through my rucksack and suitcase for clues that might help me with one, this, text. I found:
- a wooden prayer chain with a small cross on it, as used by Orthodox Christians to recite the Jesus prayer, each bead a reiteration
- an empty case made of matt black plastic that probably fitted an iPhone 12
- a receipt from a drugstore chain in London where a meal deal consisting of a tuna and corn sandwich, a packaged fruit salad and a canned iced cappuccino; lube and two packs of melon gum had been purchased at 6:23 p.m.
- a catalogue from a genetic testing agency in Prague, whose slogan was: ‘Your DNA—Your History—Your Truth. We will find it!’
- a printout of an amateurishly designed blog entry from 2010 that addressed Roberto Bolaño’s relationship to coincidence, with two quotes from Bolaño himself underlined in pencil
- three one-pound coins that slipped out of my hand and landed on the tiled floor with two heads and one tail facing upwards
- a farewell letter, more like a note, which said: ‘You probably know yourself that I have to go . . . You have good karma. Take care of yourself. Z.’
- my passport, which looked like it had been washed at least three times
- a packet of menthol cigarettes with only two left, one of them turned inside out
- a brochure from a large London cinema advertising a screening of Kieślowski’s entire Decalogue spread over a weekend in April
- a black piece of cloth no bigger than the palm of my hand
- a green gaming token with Cyrillic letters on it
Only some of it looked familiar.
*
The act of creation is inherent in narration—authors, their narrators and characters actively tell the story. In Red, this takes place in a somewhat more convoluted and unreliable way through the character of Joseph. As a result, coincidence and fate are closely linked without pointing to a culpable connection, without excluding chance from the outset. There are no coincidences in narrative coincidence. As a recognizably produced situation, narrative coincidence makes it possible to narrate an experience that eludes rationality or even points to a possible realm beyond rationality and irrationality. Narrative chance makes it possible to pose the question of God without having to answer it or even explicitly articulate it. And on the other hand, it frees the artist from having to provide answers to the wrong questions, which will inevitably be asked.
How can it be that all these characters meet on this ferry of all places? How can they, of all people, be among the survivors? How can it be that this accident happens to them, of all people, so that they become visible to us viewers at this last moment, leaving us astonished? It just can’t be. Or can it? The question is wrong, because the narrative beyond rationality and irrationality defies logical or irrationalist conclusions. It is not relevant whether there are (cosmic or mundane) reasons that make such an improbable accumulation of coincidences possible. That we are dealing with a genuinely narrative work of art frees us from the burden of having to fully understand and decipher it.
The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott describes the ‘transitional space’ as a space between subjectivity and objectivity, between the internal and external world. When a small child is in the process of separating from his or her mother and constituting himself as a separate individual, he or she first explores this space. This is primarily where playing takes place, the objects of which neither belong entirely to the external world nor are purely imaginary for the child. A simple piece of wood can take on the most vivid meanings in the child’s play without completely giving up its characteristics as a piece of wood. This is why adults usually know intuitively that it would be quite pointless to ask the child during play what is real, what is genuine or what is merely imagined. At best, the question would be ignored and at worst it would shatter the play and perhaps even temporarily the transitional space. According to Winnicott, it is precisely in this psychic space, which he also calls the ‘Third Space’, that cultural and religious experience takes place.
In the case of Red, it is thus a transitional space within a transitional space—the experience of fate, woven into the narrative; a game within a game—that we encounter. The question of reality is suspended, but the question of realism is not. In fact, I would argue that narrative coincidence can only work in the context of realistic storytelling in the broadest sense, since coincidence only emerges as an unheard-of occurrence in tension with (or as a violation of) an otherwise claimed realism. This is presumably what the term magical realism once denoted before it was made a catch-all for Latin American literature: the magical is explicitly and naturally present in such storytelling that simultaneously claims realism. In narrative coincidence, the otherworldly finds its way into narrative reality in a way that does not press for logical or spiritual closure.
*
Coincidence . . . is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence . . . is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.—Roberto Bolaño
*
Three years later, I met the stranger from Belgrade again on the other side of the world. Frequent travellers claim that this kind of thing happens often, but I’m not so sure. I met him in a hotel lobby in Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil. He was Brazilian and, as it turned out, worked as a federal judge in the city. When we recognized each other, he reproached me for not having texted him. I was relieved to see a familiar face for the first time in a long time and gave him a hug. It had been a few months since I had been dumped, and at first I found it difficult to maintain a coherent conversation.
In the days that followed, he drove me around the city in his car with the air conditioning on full blast so we could smoke his menthol cigarettes in the cool, and he took me to an eye clinic because my contact lenses had disappeared. I felt very grateful and added him on Facebook. He never really seemed to have to work and never showed me his flat, so he seemed like an illusion, a distorted figment of my imagination. I got to know his group of friends and especially his boyfriend, who was a Tunisian engineer in his mid-twenties. We went out to eat at a Lebanese restaurant, and the boyfriend told me that he had spent six months in Berlin—his flat was on the same street in Charlottenburg as mine—and that sometimes he himself was amazed at how he had ended up in the most German part of Brazil. My stranger smiled—he seemed less surprised.
Since I decided to leave shortly afterwards, the stranger took me to the airport. As we approached a motorway slip road, I saw a young woman standing on the pavement looking in our direction. She had one arm propped up by her side and a bag next to her. She looked very familiar to me. Was that . . . ? No, quite impossible. Or was it? I shuddered. I opened the window, leant out and watched as we quickly moved away from each other until she was just a blur in the distance.
