This is far from an original insight on my part–Coover is known as a writer of metafiction, and Waugh’s decision to lay down the dice and “go deterministic,” as it were, is a direct representation of the author’s godlike powers within his own world, while the impact of chance represents the necessary constraints involved in mapping fiction to the real world. So, yeah, this is standard stuff that you don’t need me to tell you about.
The reason I’m talking about it here is that it reminded me of the idea of storytelling as predictive model checking, that the purpose of a story is not just to “entertain” (whatever that means) but also to explore the implications of an idea or scenario. On one hand, the author or authors have autonomy; on the other hand, they are constrained, both by form (whether this be poetry that rhymes or scans, prose written in standard English in the form of blocks on a page, etc.) and by internal logic.
To the extent that storytelling–or statistics–is a form of predictive model checking, we’re always cycling between (1) designing experiments (in statistics jargon) or coming up with stories that give us a chance to explore models and their implications, (2) fitting models to data (that is, reconstructing our implicit assumptions by lining up their predictions to the real world), (3) using models to make inferences and predictions (in fiction, this would be writing the story, working out the implications of the characters and setting), (4) getting surprised, which can come from realizing that our assumptions imply something that contradicts some aspect of our previous understanding or from seeing a misalignment of predictions to observed data, and (5) changing our model (which could include changing our understanding of past data, by analogy to what happens in reading detective fiction when you realize that you’d been misinterpreting some earlier event in the story, having been misled by a false schema).
Some years ago Robin Hanson uploaded a paper of Tyler Cowen’s entitled “Is a Novel a Model?” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228642839_Is_a_Novel_a_Model). Here’s the abstract:
I defend the relevance of fiction for social science investigation. Novels can be useful for making some economic approaches — such as behavioral economics or signaling theory – – more plausible. Novels are more like models than is commonly believed. Some novels present verbal models of reality. I interpret other novels as a kind of simulation, akin to how simulations are used in economics. Economics can, and has, profited from the insights contained in novels. Nonetheless, while novels and models lie along a common spectrum, they differ in many particulars. I attempt a partial account of why we sometimes look to models for understanding, and other times look to novels.
Bill:
Interesting; thanks for the reference. Cowen’s article indeed makes a point similar to the point that I’ve made, using different language, that fictional storytelling is a form of simulation or prior predictive check.
Also, a number of people have used game theory to investigate story-telling. For example, if you do a web search, I’m sure you’ll come up with some game-theory approaches to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which is explicitly structured around a something called the “beheading game.” Michael Chwe has written “Jane Austen, Game Theorist”:
Game theory—the study of how people make choices while interacting with others—is one of the most popular technical approaches in social science today. But as Michael Chwe reveals in his insightful new book, Jane Austen explored game theory’s core ideas in her six novels roughly two hundred years ago. Jane Austen, Game Theorist shows how this beloved writer theorized choice and preferences, prized strategic thinking, argued that jointly strategizing with a partner is the surest foundation for intimacy, and analyzed why superiors are often strategically clueless about inferiors. With a diverse range of literature and folktales, this book illustrates the wide relevance of game theory and how, fundamentally, we are all strategic thinkers.
This reminded me of some work by the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith: https://petergodfreysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Models-Fictions-Conditionals-for-Sci-Imag-PGS-preprint.pdf
I had an uncanny moment with Coover and his novel in 2024:
https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-universal-baseball-association-inc.html
And then I wrote about how I first came to read the novel (and to read about the novel):
https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2024/10/finding-coovers-universal-baseball.html
I was especially amused that the scholar writing about Coover had no idea that tabletop baseball games actually exist.
Andrew S.:
I followed your links, and . . . is this a thing, that every one of your posts is exactly 111 words long?
How do you do this? Do you type into a text window with a word counter, and then when the number of words reaches 100, you figure out how to end it just so? It’s an interesting idea.
P.S. Your story about the reviewer not knowing about tabletop baseball games reminds me of when the novelist Thomas Mallon wrote an article with the stunningly-wrong statement that, “Among American writers of his day, [Norman Mailer] was alone in thinking that a trip to the moon, even one funded by the military-industrial complex of the country that he sometimes called Cancer Gulch, might be worth a book.”
Mallon seemed to have never heard of Barry Malzberg, not to mention Robert Heinlein.