Plotting Against Plausibility: Toward a Poetics of the Improbable

The concept of probability has been central to narrative poetics since before the time of Aristotle. By contrast, non-probabilistic types of narrative have largely been ignored or treated as misguided or sadly failed attempts at probabilistic stories. The history of literature, however, includes several distinct types of non- or anti-probabilistic narrative, all of which have been in existence for centuries. This article identifies four types of text that suspend, supersede, ignore, or travesty probabilistic concerns; examples of these are, respectively, the romance, supernatural works, apologues, and many absurdist dramas and postmodern fictions. Especially compelling in this context are the works, by a variety of authors including Aristophanes, Oscar Wilde, Eugene Ionesco, and Tom Stoppard, that mock the very idea of a probabilistic order of events. This article goes on to analyze how such works sequence narratives once the framework of probability is removed.