The Mud on Napoleon's Boots: the Adventitious Detail In Film and Fiction
Alan Spiegel
WHAT do we mean when we speak of the adventitious in narrative art? If the term implies, as it certainly seems to, an occurrence in the narrative that presents itself without apparent design, a narrative event determined by nothing so much as chance, then strictly speaking the term is not applicable to any of the events in works of fiction as we have known them. The cause of every event in any given work of art can always be traced back to a single source—the artist himself. And yet, in spite of this, I think (and no doubt many would concur) the arts of our own time—the modern novel and the cinema in particular— require the use of this term, adventitious, and require it with a special urgency that was not felt in the past.
When I use the term adventitious to describe something that happens in a narrative event, I am referring either to the postures or gestures of a character or an object that neither signify nor connect with anything else in the narrative context beyond their own phenomenal appearances. The adventitious detail usually takes the form of an accident, the causes of which are not readily apparent, an accident that is seemingly without a narrative function and cannot be easily related to any pattern of artistic inevitability. It is, of course, a relative term and depends for its effect primarily on our sense of its opposite, that is, our sense of the necessary and the inevitable as we have experienced them, not only in life, but, even more crucially, in the traditional practices of narrative fiction.
Everywhere in the works of James Joyce, for instance, from
