As we watch the Collateral Campaign set in motion forces that will help create the necessary, but not sufficient, preconditions for World War I, we see enacted a drama in which history unfolds without an author or a script. Rather than one homogeneous authority planning everything, competing centers of power (foreign affairs in the figure of Tuzzi, the army with Stumm, international finance with Arnheim, etc.) have separate and usually competing agendas. They form temporary and rapidly changing alliances, often with groups whose purposes and beliefs are in many ways antithetical to their own. As in the summer of 1914, it sometimes happens that the particular "local" alliances that have coalesced for that moment become bound together into a single, long-term aim by the pressures of a larger event that none of them had expected. But it is important to recall that no one in charge expected or planned for a conflict of the magnitude of World War I, nor did the various parties involved envisage any permanent link to one another. For example, Musil shows us that powerful voices in Austria's foreign service and army were preoccupied with building alliances designed to prevent the Empire from becoming Prussia's junior partner. Yet against all the scheming of some of Austria's most skilled political figures, that is precisely what the Empire did become as soon as hostilities broke out. Through the surprising tactical alliance of the Prussian businessman Arnheim and the Austrian career officer Stumm, we witness how the fumblings of the Collateral Campaign (which was, after all, conceived in a deliberately anti-Prussian spirit) helped to cement a German-Austrian affiliation, which was the one goal undesired by anyone involved in its initial conception. Because Musil's problem is so acutehow to tell a story that is set, like Appelfeld's, at the prelude to a universally known catastrophe, without allowing that catastrophe to dictate the mode of narrationhe experiments with various solutions that are linked more through their family resemblance than by a set of fixed characteristics. One of the most ingenious of such strategies is elaborated in the following exchange between Ulrich and his cousin Diotima, the hostess in whose salon the Collateral Campaign regularly meets. They are talking about General Stumm, and Diotima says, "I shudder from head to foot when I set eyes on him. He makes me think of death." Ulrich, who knows how peaceable and good-humored Stumm is, answers her, "A figure of Death unusually well disposed to life." But Diotima, as so often, has the last word and describes her feelings upon seeing the General: "But I am seized by panic when he comes up to me. . . . I'm overcome with an indescribable, incomprehensible, dreamlike sense of dread!" (466; 2:198). By making the usually ridiculous Diotima, at whose vanity and pretentiousness the reader has often laughed, more prescient than Ulrich, the character with whose intelligence both the narrator and the reader tend to identify, Musil manages to incorporate the reader's inevitable awareness of the coming war without giving it any special authorial weight. If Ulrich were the one to regard Stumm as dangerous (i.e., to foresee in him one of the officers who would soon command men in operations of mass devastation) or, still more decisively, if the narrator were to do so, Diotima's intuition would be transformed into an instance of direct foreshadowing, or, more precisely, it would be Musil's backshadowing insertion of a knowledge of events unavailable to anyone in the book. But articulated as it is, the sense of dread at the incipient carnage is only an intuitive shudder by a character notorious for her capacity for self-delusion; the likelihood of war is thus incorporated into the novel but only, and thus entirely persuasively, as one of the possibilities in the air at the time.

Yet readers of The Man Without Qualities know that many of the novel's characters will die in the trenches, just as Appelfeld's readers know what awaits the Jews of Badenheim once they have boarded the trains. The lives of many of the Viennese in The Man Without Qualities are depicted as trivial and self-absorbed, and they are ironized as maliciously as are the assimilated Jews in Appelfeld's fiction. And since the futility of the hopes expressed in countless meetings of the Collateral Campaign is confirmed by the catastrophe of the Great War just as surely as the futility of the Jews' attempt to live in anti-Semitic Austria is made horribly evident by their murder in the camps, why does Musil's perspective seem so different from Appelfeld's judgmental fable?

One can begin to answer this question by stressing that the vacuity of the inner lives of most of Musil's characters, and the self-deception with which they defend their own interests, is exposed from within, partially by Ulrich's and the narrator's ironic commentaries and partially by Musil's technique of juxtaposing chapters on different characters as a means of indirect commentary on hiddenand usually unwelcomesimilarities. Musil's irony does not require a war to undermine the "true elite" (wahre Vornehmheit) of the Empire (what Graf Leinsdorf and Diotima smugly call the conjunction of Capital and Culture [Besitz und Bildung] in her salon). Tonally, the war only risks disrupting the irony with pathos, and hence, except in some unpublished fragments, it is not directly narrated. Musil neither shows the war as inevitable nor uses it to confirm the misjudgments of his charactersindeed, some of them, like Arnheim, will come out of the disintegration of imperial Europe with their social position greatly improved. As Tuzzi observes, a Jewish capitalist like Arnheim (whom Musil based on Walter Rathenau [1867-1922], the German industrialist and Weimar foreign minister) could never rise to a cabinet position in a hereditary monarchy. But although many of the characters in the novel would undoubtedly be killed in the war, the disintegration of their world is not due to their quotidian pettiness but rather to their inability to be quotidian enough. They regularly succumb to the appeal of the most rhetorically charged but contentless catchphrases of the moment, and the mobilization order that electrified Europe in 1914 would only be one more, although the most destructive, of such catchphrases. Hence, in The Man Without Qualities, unlike in Badenheim 1939, there is no need for the frisson on death imagery (the barbed wire, the restrictions on travel, the registration of inhabitants by the Health Ministry) to do the work of historical ironizing. Both Musil and Appelfeld rely on indirection and satire in order to avoid narrating the catastrophe as it is happening. But part of Musil's greater importance as a writer turns on the openness of his novel to conflicting voices and multiple, contradictory possibilities for the future: in other words, on his rejection of backshadowing in favor of sideshadowing. Even though he knows what their ultimate fate was likely to be, Musil, unlike Appelfeld, can imagine the history of his characters as not already predetermined. In both novelists' works, historical catastrophe acts as a final, brutal frame on the whole world of their books, but Musil does not see the frame as inevitable or all-explaining, nor does he rely on it to generate the story's emotional and thematic intensities.

Yet so accustomed are readers to the narrative orchestration which foreshadowing provides, that The Man Without Qualities is regularly misread as though it exemplified the very techniques it explicitly rejects. Most misreadings of Musil's novel proceed from the assumption that it is structured as a retrospective fable, not unlike Badenheim 1939 . Thus, for example, Hannah Hickman sums up the terms in which the novel is typically interpreted:

The whole work, but especially Book I, is to be seen as a portrait of a society moving inexorably towards war, like the passengers fast asleep in the train on course for collision. This inevitable outcome casts a shadow of irony over the entire narrative, as the various characters, each one a representative figure of the time, pursue their own concerns and seek their own salvation. Only Ulrich, the man without qualities, is clear-sighted enough to perceive the sickness at the heart of civilisation, but his efforts to alert those in positions of power to the dangers ahead meet with almost total lack of comprehension.It is worth lingering for a moment on Hickman's phrasing, not merely because expressions like "casts a shadow . . . over the entire narrative" help confirm the appropriateness of my term backshadowing, but also because she invokes as self-evident the link between a belief in historical inevitability and a scorn for the realm of private, individual decisions that we already saw throughout Badenheim 1939 .

In Hickman's view, to "pursue [one's] own concerns and seek [one's] own salvation" is inherently foolish or evil when an imminent crisis that people ought to be able to foresee is about to overwhelm everyone. But Musil, I believe, regarded the issue in diametrically opposite terms. The concern for his own moral, intellectual and spiritual "salvation" is virtually the only thing that deeply moves Ulrich. In fact, almost the last words of the published sections of The Man Without Qualities describe Ulrich as "fighting for his salvation" (1038; 3:442), and the quest to understand himself and his situation in the world better is exactly what prompted him to take the "year's leave from his life" (47; 1:83) that is the novel's initial premise. Indeed, many of the main characters in the novel speculate obsessively and continually about the great issues of the day and try with all their resources to direct the course of history. It is only "marginal" figures, men like Ulrich who lack the appropriate emotional "qualities" for public affairs, who renounce any attempt at historical efficacy and prefer to devote themselves to the care of their own states of mind. Similarly, the war was never seen as "inevitable" by Musil, for the very good reason that nothing in history can be so considered. The war is indisputably a pivotal turning point in world history, but its historical magnitude gives it no retrospective authority in The Man Without Qualities . Indeed, the most satiric parts of Musil's novel describe a world in stasis or in a self-perpetuating muddle, rather than on the verge of disintegration. The Habsburg Empire we actually are shown in Musil's pages could just as easily have lasted for many years more rather than collapse when it did (just as, for example, the Ottoman Empire survived for more than a century after observers were certain of its impending dissolution). The disintegration certainly happened, but occurrence, as The Man Without Qualities regularly instructs us, does not imply necessity.

Against any belief in historical necessity, Ulrich strives for what Musil calls a "conscious Utopianism" (16; 1:48). His utopianism is grounded in "something that one can call a sense of possibility," and he is particularly careful to insist that "a possible experience or a possible truth is not merely the equivalent of a real experience or a real truth but lacking the value of being real" (16; 1:47-48). The sense of possibility contains a legitimacy of its own, both as an instigation to action and as constitutive of human freedom. For Musil, sideshadowing and a certain kind of utopian thinking are crucially linked. But it is a utopianism radically different from the ideological varieties that have rightly been criticized as dogmatically monolithic and, in their historical consequences, have proved all too frequently totalitarian. Such critiques take as their target either fictional accounts of an already achieved utopia (e.g., Thomas More) or theoretical/political systems that claim already to know how to bring about a utopia (Marxism, fascism, etc.). If the content of, or the path to utopia is already available in the present, and if one assumes that a single model of utopia exists which is universally applicable, it is likely that the utopian impulse will turn despotic, since only human selfishness or ignorance, the effects of both of which can be curtailed by state power, prevents the establishment of the ideal society. But in Musil's reformulation, utopian thinking is itself a form of sideshadowing, a permanent awareness that things might be different, that the present state of affairs and the future toward which people seem to be tending are not the only possible ones. Such a utopianism can never be prescriptive, because it does not presume to know the specific content of the alternatives to the present. It knows only that they exist (here the plural term is crucial because it is never a single utopia that is at issue, but the existence of multiple, alternative presents and futures). For Musil, the future ramifications of the present are potentially unlimited, and this serves to guarantee human freedom in a way impossible with teleological readings of history or with a complacent acceptance of whatever is, as legitimized by the sole fact of its concrete existence.Musil's typically ironic/serious way to underline this very point is to deny the attribute of inevitability even to divine creation: "God probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of potentiality . . . for God makes the world and while doing so thinks that it could just as easily be some other way" (19; 1:50). This, in a sense, is also the problem confronting the novelist: how to create a world while still indicating that "it could just as easily be some other way." As a result, and irrespective of those parts of the posthumous drafts

(the Nachlab ) in which Musil tries out having Ulrich go into combat, it is unlikely that the war could have been inserted successfully into the novel.Only by setting his narrative before the outbreak of hostilities can Musil guarantee that neither his characters nor his narrator speak in the tones of predictive historical certainty. Because the war really did take place, there is too great a risk that its direct presence in the book would make it appear inevitable. Since Musil is so concerned to show that many things can be imagined as likely to happen, that numerous paths always exist, and that history is not driven by any rational principle or internal logic which would let the future be accurately predicted, he is also particularly careful not to allow the war to undermine the novel's fidelity to a sense of multifarious possibilities (Möglichkeitssinn ). To include the war directly would risk giving it the privilege of not being just an event in the narrative, but rather its meaning, and this, precisely, is unacceptable to Musil.

Because of these deeply principled reasons, the scope of what was unacceptable put an enormous burden on Musil to create a structure that would suggest a narratable resolution to his theoretical/ethical requirements. That he in part failed to do so is clear not only from the incompleteness of the novel at the time of his death, but also from the nature of the last sections he actually published and the enormous mass of drafts and fragments he left behind. This is not the place to develop in detail my reading of these parts and their implications for understanding The Man Without Qualities as a whole, but because the question of foreshadowing and sideshadowing are so central to the issues involved, I want to outline briefly the terms of that reading.

Although a variety of reasons, including depression at the lack of an audience, an intermittent but long-standing "writer's block," intellectual exhaustion, and the financial uncertainties of an exile's life in Switzerland (where Musil and his Jewish wife, Martha, fled in 1938), have been advanced for Musil's inability to complete The Man Without Qualities, I think that once Musil rejected ending the novel with the melodramatic thunderclap of the outbreak of war (say, for example, the reading of a telegram announcing Franz Ferdinand's assassination at what would then obviously become the last meeting of the Collateral Campaign), the novel had to remain unfinished for strictly internal reasons. The Man Without Qualities is a novel that, for all its biting irony, struggles to achieve not a distance from the world, but an adequacy to the world's inherent complexity. A resolution in the text that remained entirely private (for example, the illuminations of Ulrich's and Agathe's "holy conversations") and had no correspondence in or influence upon the public world would be inherently unsatisfactory. One way to crystallize what is at issue here is to understand that the "unfinishability" of The Man Without Qualities is closer to the open-endedness and potential interminability of Montaigne's work (whose individual essays, like the three published books of the Essais themselves, were revised many times during the life of the author to take into account new ideas, circumstances, or feelings) than to the Mallarméan project of the single, all-encompassing Livre that would absorb the entire, anarchic raw material of human life into its own depths and transform it into a sacred text, self-sufficient and autonomous. Montaigne's Essais and Musil's novel are "unfinishable" because the understanding of human existence expressed in their writings has no telos or single, unique meaning with whose realization their texts could end. Mallarmé's Grand Oeuvre, on the other hand, is in principle unrealizable because of the absolute split between word and world, between language as an autonomous object and the world of phenomenal (un) reality. For Musil, as for Montaigne, it is the inconclusiveness of life itself, both on the individual, biographical level and on the historical one, that makes the whole notion of closure so problematic.In the event, the only historically responsible climax was, as we have seen, exactly the one Musil could not draw upon directly without jeopardizing the main theoretical premises of much of his narrative. We can trace Musil's increasing preoccupation with the problem of how to end his novel, and one of the most revealing signs is the greatly increased, and often distressingly clumsy, introduction of foreshadowing as the novel continues and his confidence in being able to go on with and complete it becomes more and more uncertain. If, earlier in the The Man Without Qualities, interjections like "an appalling war with its millions of dead" (408; 2:129) are surprising for their rarity, by the end of the last parts published during Musil's lifetime in 1933, their frequency and overemphatic nature steadily increase. Musil's anxiety about being able to complete his novel successfully is manifest not only in the backshadowing of historical events that he now allows to break his earlier restraint, but also in the foreshadowing of future occurrences in the purely private lives of his fictional characters. Thus, we now read sentences like "This was what Hagauer later termed Ulrich's being an accessory before the fact" (738; 3:95); "It was like a little rent in the vale of his life, through which indifferent nothingness peered. Here the basis was laid for much that happened later" (781; 3:145); or "Now this certainly did not mean that at this period Agathe already had the intention of killing herself" (855; 3:230). But the most awkward examples of the strain in Musil's quest for an ending appropriate to the book's historical as well as personal spheres are audible whenever the narrator allows the shadow of the war to validate one of Ulrich's theories. Thus, in the final paragraphs to be published before Frisé's posthumous editions, Ulrich describes a general collapse of intellectual coherence and the corresponding increase in personal and social aggression: "The rubble of futile feelings, the rubble one age bequeaths to another has piled up as high as a mountain, without anything being done about it. So the War Ministry can sit back with its mind at rest, and wait for the next collective disaster." Had it been left in this form, Ulrich's pronouncement would be consonant with ideas both he and other characters have expressed throughout the novel and would represent only another, nonauthoritative prediction of what might happen. But then, in a single phrase, the narrator removes Ulrich's sentences from the realm of sideshadowing and gives them the retrospective inevitability of authorial backshadowing: "Ulrich was prophesying the fate of Europe, though he did not realize it" (1038; 3:442). Ulrich may not realize that his speculations are, in fact, certainties, but both the narrator and the reader do, and it is fascinating to see how, whenever his self-confidence was at its most unsteady, Musil reverted to the narrative conventions he had earlier done so much to discredit.

But far more important than these instances of imaginative slackening is the fact that ultimately Musil chose not to rely on backshadowing to provide the coherent ending for which both he and his few remaining admirers longed. The war was permanently available as the great temptation to give The Man Without Qualities the kind of closure otherwise impossible to achieve, and the stubbornness of Musil's refusal to utilize it in this way, even at the cost of leaving his book incomplete, is the ultimate evidence of the centrality of sideshadowing in his thinking.

Here, the contrast with Marcel Proust is particularly illuminating. Proust, as we will shortly see, also recognized the intellectual and moral force of sideshadowing, but his commitment to the authority of a finished "great novel" in the classical tradition was even greater, hence his determination to end À la recherche du temps perdu with a movement of closure essential to a canonic masterpiece. In the event, Proust's longing for such an act of closure required a climactic set piece marked by a series of almost scandalously fortuitous coincidences (the famous rush of three separate episodes of involuntary memory at the matinée of the Princesse de Guermantes). But since Marcel went on to write the novel, triggered in part by these very accidents, they are now inscribed as decisive turning points in the narrative of a life that needed to be reinterpreted as a destiny in order for the story to be told at all. This conjunction of randomness and fate, although theoretically defensible, is too programmatic and didactic in its enactment to be entirely persuasive. Neither at the level of psychological motivation for Marcel's decision to begin writing, nor at the level of narrative plausibility for bringing the novel to a close, is such a series of almost Dickensian, "inevitable coincidences" adequate to the demands Proust places on them. What would have been required is an entirely new solution to the problem of ending a novel so that both contingency and necessity are equally registered: an epistemological perspective and a technical strategy that could manage to achieve a conclusion without seeming coerced or rigged. In order to dissipate a certain embarrassment at Proust's actual way of ending his book, the most theoretically adroit of his recent critics like Leo Bersani and Margaret E. Gray have tried to problematize his procedure, especially the relationship between Marcel and the novel's narrator: their readings suggest more ambiguity about the end than it probably possesses, in part, I think, because while that ending is all too unmistakably in accord with the formal requirements of a unified "classical" novel, it is dissonant with the richest insights and local unfoldings of the book itself, which depend on the multiplicity of perspectives and possibilities only sideshadowing makes narratable. The fundamental move of Bersani's suggestive new reading is to sever the link between the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu and the aging Marcel, whom we watch resolving to go home and begin writing his life story after his shattering experiences at the Princesse de Guermantes' matinée . I disagree with Bersani's interpretation, and, for all its admitted awkwardness, accept the more conventional interpretation, which regards the narrator as the adult writer into whom Marcel painfully grows. I say so reluctantly, because if the identity of character and narrator were indeed separate, the novel would be even more expressive of a radical openness incompatible with foreshadowing than I think it actually is. (In this context, it is worth asking whether a novel fully committed to sideshadowing ought to center on the life story of a single, clearly identifiable protagonist at all. Even Musil, for whom sideshadowing was a central intellectual/ethical principle, had Ulrich's experiences dominate The Man Without Qualities still more than Marcel's dominate À la recherche du temps perdu . Perhaps only in works like Joyce's Dubliners (1914) or Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel [1930], 1919 [1932], and The Big Money [1936]), in which a whole city or historical era are the real "main characters," can sideshadowing be best enacted.)

Musil's inability to complete The Man Without Qualities should more properly be understood as his refusal to do so. In spite of the many temptations, evident in the later stages of the published sections and still more in the Nachlab, he resisted artificially concluding the book's quest for a new kind of novelistic structure, a narrative order that did not rely on pre-established patterns. Instead, Musil left in fragmentary form the most serious response modern literature has yet provided to what he had recognized in an early essay as our need for "a type of intelligence . . . that would strive to discover and systematize the kind of knowledge that suggests new and daring directions to our emotions, even if these remain only pure plausibilities; an intelligence, that is, in which thinking would exist only to offer an intellectual framework to certain still undefined ways of being uman.Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be,Desiring the exhilarations of changes:Wallace Stevens,
"The Motive for Metaphor" What does not change / is the will to changeCharles Olson, "The Kingfishers" Earlier in the book, I spoke about a certain readerly pleasure provided by works that flaunt their acceptance of mutually exclusive possibilities and make evident their unwillingness to enfold each narrative "accident" into the larger structure of the whole. In this countertradition, stories whose narratives at first seem structured like the biography of an actual human being can reveal themselves as utterly unconstrained by the most basic facts of human existence, including even the inevitability and irreversibility of death. In principle, a fictional character can have a limitless number of times to perform his life, can have many, not just one counterlife. In Yehuda Amichai's Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963), for example, the main character, Joel, returns to his childhood home in Germany to find relics of his past and to plot acts of vengeance on the townspeople for their eager participation in the extermination of the town's Jews. But he is described as simultaneously staying in Jerusalem to throw himself into an affair with Patricia, an American gentile temporarily working in Israel as a doctor. Amichai is careful to keep the two logically incompatible plots linked through a complex, if occasionally forced parallelism of characters, events, phrases, and imagery in both sections, and the whole novel ends when Joel is accidentally killed while on reserve duty on Mount Scopus. Amichai, that is, welcomes the plurality of experiences, but permits only a unique and irreversible death in his fictional universe.

In The Counterlife, however, Philip Roth shows that a detailed description of a character's death in one chapter need not be binding for subsequent sections of the same book. Thus, Henry Zuckerman, whose death from a quintuple bypass operation is narrated in the first section, is also portrayed as having survived the surgery and gone to live with the disciples of a ferociously militant right-wing zealot in a West Bank Israeli settlement. Similarly, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, Henry's brother, who tells us the story of Henry's death and then of his curious aliyah, is himself later described as having died of the very disease and operation he had attributed to Henry. Alternative and mutually exclusive destinies, love affairs, and moral obligations are tested in Roth's novel, with the result that the book as a whole is constituted as an exploration of the impulse to create a series of new existences for oneself and the cost of doing so. In this sense, fiction is precisely what can reject fixity, and it offers the most unqualified enactment of our longing for fluid possibilities and limitless sideshadows. The desire to be free, at least in one's imagination, from the tyranny of one's own deepest convictions and the moral obligations they impose is part of the pleasure of novels that pluralize the confines of a strictly linear biographical narrative. But there are other factors involved as well, including an urge to crack the armature built up by even the most secure and respectable of one's accomplishments, in order to break free from the expectations scripted by previous successes. And because every success is always partial, always a compromise formation, sideshadowing can crystallize one's repugnance at all the half-measures and surrenders that lie behind the most glittering of triumphs. More generally, there is the longing to keep open imaginative options that any unique action or position, no matter how right, inevitably forecloses. It is this longing that the narrator of Louis Begley's The Man Who Was Late expresses when he thinks about his happily growing daughters. He does not regret any of their specific actions or choices; but he is saddened by the very act of feeling himself for the first time able to predict "what they would most probably be like as adults. There was nothing in what I saw that I could reprove, but the disappearance of other possibilities of development was in itself depressing."No doubt the pleasure yielded by the sudden lifting of conventional narrative and biographical constraints, celebrated in novels like those by Roth and Amichai, is dependent for its intensity on our long experience of the more restrictive models it contests. The refusal to satisfy an expectation of closure, as much as the appeal of tidy endings, only makes sense within the domain of narrative possibilities opened by figuration itself. But then, the question that Marcel Proust, more rigorously and relentlessly than any other writer, forces us to confront is why, at the level of our own self-understanding, are we so powerfully attracted to both foreshadowing and sideshadowing, even when we acknowledge them equally as only constructs of our own imagination? Why, in other words, does our pleasure in sideshadowing and our recognition of its liberating potential coexist with an equally powerful urge to accede to various deterministic master tropes of biographical and historical inevitability? In part, I think this is because of a hope that at a certain level biography will be revealed as destiny. The conviction that one's life can somehow be understood as having the inevitability of a classically arranged narrative can act as a barricade against the sometimes overwhelming nostalgia for paths not taken and regret for actions left undone. We want to convince ourselves that the life we ended up having was, from the outset, actually the only possible one. Because we are still such Platonists in our hierarchies, culturally trained to value only the necessary and essential, and because the "Principle of the Insufficient Cause" applies as much to our personal lives as it does to historical events, what one might call a "nostalgia for determinism" is triggered by the realization of the contingent and accidental character of much of our existence. Musil formulates this sense of frustration with typical irony: "After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life's journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything's having come about as it has. It might just as well have turned out differently" (130-131; 1:177). Yet so fundamental is our desire to see a necessary link between biography and fate that when the rupture between what were plausible expectations and the course of an actual life seems too enormous to incorporate into the conventional topos of a pragmatic "adjustment to a stern reality," we often think, in Cynthia Ozick's elegant formulation, that "his life as he was driven to conduct it was a distortion, not a destiny."

At the same time, however, and in spite of the eagerness to believe that we actually had little choice in the choices we made, an overly forceful statement of pure determinism quickly provokes our resistance as well, just as in literature, too insistent a use of foreshadowing makes a text appear to lack verisimilitude and be clumsily manipulative in its structure. If everything that transpires is immediately marked as only a figure for some future event, the narrative may forfeit our identificatory sympathy with the characters' struggle to choose one action rather than another, and in so doing may eliminate an indispensable element on which our pleasure as readers depends. Hence the medieval, and particularly the Thomistic, insistence on the significance of the literal/historical, as well as the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses of Scripture, and hence, too, Dante's effort to maintain the historical verisimilitude of his descriptions of contemporary Italy and his scrupulous care wherever possible to ground his immense allegorical structure in the circumstantial peculiarities of the historical moment. Without such care, an allegory quickly empties its "local" stories of any significance independent of its larger and all-encompassing meaning. Precisely such an emptying happened, as we have already seen, to the independent significance of the events narrated in the Hebrew Bible when they were allegorized as a cycle of prefigurations of the Gospel story by Church Fathers who neglected the most powerful principles of their own literary theorizing when it came to the Jewish sacred books. Paradoxically, Appelfeld treats the Jews of Badenheim much like the Christian exegetes treated the Jews of the Hebrew Bible, that is, as empty ciphers for an ahistorical moralizing allegory. And like all such allegories, Appelfeld's can never narrate historical events convincingly. Such writing is in its deepest nature atemporal, linking everything together into a permanently deferred but everywhere implied total vision. There can also never be any real sideshadowing in allegory. Historical events that unfold through time involve the succession of nonnecessary events and contain sideshadows at each moment of their unfolding; they are thus inherently in contradiction with the terms of an allegorical understanding/narration.

Like many seemingly intractable theoretical problems, the reliance upon the mutually exclusive notions of foreshadowing and sideshadowing in understanding our lives may appear self-contradictory when formulated in general terms, but recast more prosaically, it becomes far more amenable to understanding. One way to account for this double interpretative horizon is to see that what we commonly draw upon, without consciously articulating, is a kind of imprecise mediation between an entirely predetermined and a totally random explanation for our lives. This mediation seeks to persuade us that our lives took the paths they did on a kind of probability basis. That is, at every moment there were other courses possible for us, but each of these alternatives spoke to perhaps, ten, twenty, or even twenty-five percent of our needs and expectations at the time; the option we did take, however, hypothetically represented a greater percentage, perhaps on the order of thirty-five percent. The direction we followed was therefore not necessarily directed to satisfying the majority of our inclinations and ideas, but only to a sufficiently decisive plurality over any of the other potential routes we saw open at the time.

More subtly than any work of art I know, À la recherche du temps perdu probes the endlessly reconfigured relationships we establish between the different epochs of our lives, so that at times the characters' whole past seems like a preparation for and foreshadowing of their identity in the present, while at other moments, each episode exists almost inviolate in its own distinct sphere, with emotions and associations so rich in themselves as to make ludicrous the notion that they are preparatory to anything beyond themselves. Only in rereading do these early references assume any importance. Although in a sense akin to foreshadowing, they lack the inevitability and determinism of conventional foreshadowing, and often point to a whole range

of sideshadowed possibilities. Proust creates both a special case of "only after the fact" foreshadowing (a foreshadowing that doesn't reveal itself as such until much later, and then only in a careful rereading) and sideshadowing (he often traces alternative paths to the one taken), and he can do so because he believes simultaneously in destiny and chance, or, more accurately, he believes that terms like destiny and chance are neither historical nor biographical "facts," but tropes, constructs we create to make sense of our lives and give them the inner logic and form they would otherwise lack.

For example, early in À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel mentions a quarrel with his parents "because I did not accompany my father to an official dinner where the Bontemps were to be present along with their niece, Albertine, a young girl still almost a child." Since, in a few years, Albertine will become the overwhelming obsession of Marcel's life, there is something at once breathtakingly daring and entirely prosaic in the way Proust gives us a glimpse of a future that easily might have happenedan earlier meeting with Albertine and thus, perhaps, a different course to their love affairwhich thereby would have changed utterly the course of the novel we are rereading. Even when Marcel's attraction to Albertine actually begins in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, she is at first just one of the band of young girls, upon any of whom Marcel's desire might settle as easily as upon another, and among whom it hovers for many pages with pleasurably random motility. But once Marcel's imagination has isolated Albertine from amid her friends in the little band, his curiosity about her is remade, deliberately and remorselessly, into a devastating passion kept vivid with all the resources of Marcel's maginative power.Marcel is both the reader and the novelist of his own life, creating, more than discovering, a plot that enables him to interpret his past as part of a coherent narrative. But that narrative is recognized from the outset as explicitly literary, and the emphasis of the novel is on the work required to create an adequately inclusive and unanticipatable interpretive structure. Moreover, the narrator's immense investment in the project of comprehending the impulses and needs that govern human conduct is regularly undermined, not so much because of the inherent psychological complexity motivating behavior, but rather because so many hypotheses could account equally for the same observable conduct. Proust draws upon all of the formal possibilities of sideshadowing to make clear the fundamental epistemological uncertainty into which the narrator, the protagonist, and the reader of the Recherche are all regularly plunged. From Marcel's central, lifelong obsessions with the "real nature" of Albertine's sexuality to the smallest details of social interaction, sideshadowing forces us to acknowledge the incoherence of our longing for a reliable, logically necessary explanation. Even so simple a question as why the Guermantes should treat their cousin, the Marquise de Gallardon, with aloof indifference proves unanswerable: "perhaps because she was boring, or because she was disagreeable, or because she was from an inferior branch of the family, or perhaps for no reason at all." Yet not only may there be many motives for what happens, including some that do not occur to the narrator, but much of what we do and feel may take place "for no reason at all" (and here it is hard not to notice the similarity to Musil's "Principle of the Insufficient Cause"). This realization is itself finely balanced against the conviction that one can make sense, even if only retrospectively, of one's existence as the unfolding of a single, all-embracing narrative. The narrator's shifting perspective on the often contradictory paths that Marcel followed from Combray to the final matinée at the Princesse de Guermantes, the tense equilibrium between epistemological uncertainty and analytic assertiveness, and between an explanatory narrative based on pure accident and one based on ineluctable destiny is paradigmatic for the more general question of how we try to reconcile the competing attractions of foreshadowing and sideshadowing in our own lives, both as readers of texts and as interpreters of our own histories.

The retrospective/biographical model for interpretation is so appealing because, in James Young's phrase, it starts its narrative with a "full knowledge of the end, which inevitably contextualizes early experiences in terms of later ones."In any narrative based on such a model, the first small detail is endowed with an importance it only acquired afterward and could not have had for the subject experiencing it for the first time. So Marcel's refusal to meet the Bontemps and their niece had no importance for the boy trying to cure himself of his love for Gilberte Swarm, but reinterpreted from the vantage point of a man who remembers his love for Albertine as the most intense experience of his life, the refusal acquires a haunting irony. Marcel, who blames himself for so many failures, does not, at least, blame himself for this missed meeting, and it is difficult to imagine that any reader could fault him for an inadequate foreknowledge of his future passion. Throughout these pages, my aim in having deliberately shifted the focus away from the Shoah to the story of an unrepresentative, socially privileged individual is precisely to see how the conventions of foreshadowing and backshadowing are also crucial in understanding how we make sense out of the vicissitudes of a unique, purely private existences. I said at the outset that this is a book about narrative conventions and historical understanding, not about the Shoah as such, although it is the Shoah that provides the sternest test for my critique of backshadowing. No doubt, however, readers have been tempted to object that the situations Proust is narrating and the ones confronting the characters in Badenheim 1939 are so radically dissimilar that it is simply incoherent to discuss them in analogous terms. At their most restrained and unemphatic, such objections might underscore that the pogroms and the political success of organized anti-Semitic parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided prior examples or a recurrent danger confronting European Jewry, whereas Marcel's missed meeting with Albertine was both completely accidental and unprecedented. And, of course, to compare the results of Marcel's refusal with the consequences of the Badenheim vacationers' self-deception reveals a disparity unbridgeable in its gravity. But Proust's novel, with its unparalleled richness of psychological/epistemological probing and the exactness of its account of how we continuously construct and reconstruct novelisticallythe meaning of our existence (our "destinies," in an older rhetoric), is especially pertinent because it engages so directly the problems of narrative and temporality central to our existence as beings who can only understand themselves through the stories they invent. Paradoxically, when the domain in question is that of all-encompassing historical forces, a realm in which accurate foreknowledge would seem to be even less possible than in the restricted horizon of a single individual's self-knowledge, the demand for prescience actually increases rather than diminishes. We do not expect Marcel to know what he is missing by turning down the invitation from the Bontemps, but as we have seen in novels like Appelfeld's or histories like George Berkeley's, blame for their failure to foresee the future is assigned collectively to assimilated Austro-German Jewry in spite of the accompanying disclaimers that their fate was "unprecedented" and "unimaginable." One consequence that arises from a willingness to take seriously the Principle of the Insufficient Cause and the logic of sideshadowing in discussing the Shoah is to recognize that rethinking the history of European Jewry requires something other than assembling more facts about their lives and the manner of their extermination, invaluable as such research undoubtedly is. A compilation of data, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an inventory of names, dates, and events, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an explanation. What is needed, I believe, is a change in the essential terms of the narrative models drawn upon in our accounts, so that on the one hand, the distortions inherent in foreshadowing are guarded against more carefully and, on the other, that the risks of an in extremis veritas interpretation of culture are questioned more self-consciously in our accounts. To think differently about the Shoah is to think differently and more prosaically about values in general, and although the Shoah must not itself be seen as the tragic instrument by which those prosaic values were made manifest, it brings into harsh focus the inadequacy of conventionally apocalyptic accounts.