Chapter 7 - ‘It is no accident that …’

Summary

The quirkiness of the comment made by a character in Nabokov (quoted above) makes an apt beginning for an essay that will have much to say about meaningful coincidences. A reader who encounters Nabokov’s novel without knowing Herodotus’ story about Polycrates may be momentarily puzzled, though amused. Those who do catch the allusion will note the modernizing variant (a cuff-link, not a ring), and the added detail of its being the anniversary of the loss, a point that reinforces the unlikelihood of a parallel outcome; but above all such a reader will recognize that the climax has become an anti-climax: nothing happens, and the fish is just a fish. In a sense there is no story. Or rather, the story becomes effective here only through the contrast, because in Herodotus Polycrates did recover his ring from the belly of a fish. Nabokov’s outcome is, of course, overwhelmingly more plausible, but accustomed as we are to narratives in which loose ends are tied up, we feel that something is missing. In Herodotus, however, the general tendency is for items and episodes to connect, for links to be made, and for meaning to emerge from these connections. The following pages will explore how far that tendency extends, and the final section is intended to place Herodotean practice in a larger context.