Nov 22, 2025
Raymond Carver is just one of many writers who reveals how contingency punctures our illusions of control and leaves a real opportunity for grace in the process. [Philosopher] Martha Nussbaum explains that the contingent is well-charted territory for novelists; the very structure of the novel has a built-in “emphasis on the significance, for human life, of what simply happens, of surprise, of reversal.”
Although Nussbaum does not discuss the concept of grace per se, the Aristotelian conception of learning she believes that novelists possess is consistent with Christianity because they start in the same place. Both insist that people learn the most (and the most important things) from events that are outside of human control. Novelists, argues Nussbaum, cultivate the reader’s perception and responsiveness by sharing stories in which the characters’ attempts at achieving the good life are challenged by contingency. It is too facile to say that a reader learns a “moral” by reading a story. What a reader learns is how to think about contingency when it appears in his or her own life. In other words, the reader learns to think of contingency as a possible avenue for grace. As Nussbaum explains, the ability to read a situation is an active task that is “not a technique; one learns it by guidance rather than by formula.”