Singular events: the ‘as if’ of Beryl Bainbridge’s Every Man for Himself

There are no singular events. Experience is process, the paradox of myriad singular events. History is the selective recording and privileging of events, organized by the dominant culture in a pattern of figuring or recession. Also, there are singular events, culturally, socially, constructed as punctuating experience: moments of arrest, which are simultaneously moments of transformation. Moments of regression that are also moments of progression. Amongst these are events that have intense symbolic meaning conferred upon them, to the point that they can seem ‘naturally’ to function as figurative within a vast cultural narrative. Such an event is the loss of the Titanic.