Contingency traps: the role of form in creative processes

Literary texts are already written before they get read, and they are therefore not subject to chance in the same way as encounters in everyday life. However, at the same time, these texts often manage to evoke a strong sense in readers that the events they read about could have turned out otherwise. I propose the notion of the “contingency trap” as a conceptual tool to address this theoretical challenge. This article addresses how authors deploy form in the creative process to integrate contingency in their texts and make it available to their readers in reading. Two interviews with Gwenaëlle Aubry about her essay Saint Phalle serve as the first case study, and her account is contrasted and compared with an analysis of Italo Calvino’s reflections on contingency in literary narrative with particular focus on his Il Castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1973). These authors’ insights into the creative process will then be complemented by research on cognitive processes related to literary creativity in order to sketch a more general theoretical understanding of how form works as a contingency trap.