No Accident, Comrade : Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives

Drawing on novels by Nabokov, Wright, Powers, DeLillo, Didion, and others, No Accident, Comrade examines the shaping influence of the Cold War's obsession with chance on post-World War II fictional form.

No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: ''It was no accident, Comrade,'' which encapsulates a popular American understanding of Marxism). By reading a wide swath of the era''s novels, Steven Belletto explains how the association of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War culture. He shows how writers innovated strategies for dealing with and incorporating chance, which allowed them to theorize the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict. Indeed, by emphasizing the Cold War''s narrative quality--that is, by viewing it as a rhetorical field--this book likewise argues that pressure was put on fictional narratives in general, and that if we attune ourselves to the uses of chance in such material, we can understand how the Cold War encouraged new relationships between aesthetics and politics.