Top 10 random encounters in literature

Coleridge once described poetry as “wild ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular”. That’s one way of looking at literature, everything unusual being absorbed into the larger flight pattern of a given work. But another perspective might focus less on the regular forms than on the wild ducks. This way of looking at literature places the onus on the random encounter – the moment when one duck peels off.

Some of the ducks in my poetry book go back around a decade. I can barely remember the person I was 10 years ago, except for the fact we share a lot of the same clothes. Czesław Miłosz’s poem Encounter makes me feel better about this. Here, the speaker recalls an old memory as though watching himself in a film adaptation of his life: “Where are they, where are they going.”

It reminds me that poems, even at their most personal, come from outside. They begin not with self-expression – or not just that – but with surprise. An encounter with the unknown.

There was a point in the writing of my new poetry collection RENDANG when I let myself trust to random encounters. I stopped thinking about what I wanted to say and started reacting to what was being said around me. I wrote about the “holy man” I met near Piccadilly Circus, and the sad divorcee in Wetherspoons. Like Miłosz, I tried to imagine encountering myself for the first time.

The books and poems below all helped me to imagine the self as a collision point: less a regular flock of ducks than a space where ducks meet and disappear.

1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Victorian novels often have random encounters at their heart, but Pip’s childhood meeting with Magwitch, in a graveyard on Christmas Eve, holds a special place. It’s what changes Pip’s fortunes without him realising and takes him away from his life among the “open marshes”. Dickens’ novel is a parable of class and capitalism: Pip is magically lifted out of poverty and then left stranded when he’s made aware of the illicit origins of his wealth.

2. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter (1990)
In her introduction, Carter writes that “for most of human history, ‘literature’, both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written – heard, not read”. This pathbreaking anthology casts its net beyond Europe and, in centring the voices of women, changes how we read fairytales. Instead of Snow White, there’s Nourie Hadig, the princess of Adana, and a Chinese variant on Cinderella called Beauty and Pock Face. Life is wildly unpredictable, a random encounter with a witch or passing villager always about to change everything.

3. An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
Growing up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Naipaul first travelled to India in 1962 to track down any remaining family and spend a year in the country of his parents’ birth. If his later travel writing could be cold and reactionary, here it burns with examined self-contempt. It’s flawed as an essay about another country and culture, but as an encounter with the self – and what it means to have a mixed heritage – it brings the unknown and difficult to the surface.

4. Tan Tien by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
This is the kind of poem that creates a space inside of you, “the way a round arch can give onto a red wall”. Berssenbrugge slips in and out of an eerie yet intimate third person. It could be the story of a Chinese-looking tourist visiting the Temple of Heaven in Beijing and feeling adrift. As in the work of Asian American avant-garde poet Myung Mi Kim, the ruptures in syntax become a way of exploring a differently textured self, familiar and foreign depending on the context.

5. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Coleridge’s ballad, the mariner is a man consumed with guilt after shooting down an albatross – an act both pointedly cruel and random that leads to the deaths of his shipmates at sea. Bound to confess his sin again and again, he corners a wedding guest outside a church who’s transfixed by his “strange power of speech”. It’s a story about why we tell stories and what little relief they bring.

6. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
Berman writes about growing up in New York City, one of the wealthiest places on Earth, surrounded by ruins, with a feeling of “emptiness in a place designed for over-fullness”. He calls this systematic assault on a community “urbicide”. But his writing also glows with optimism about what can happen when a community opposes itself to the forces of capital, when “the multitude of solitudes that make up the modern city come together in a new kind of encounter, to make a people”. Random encounters are the basis of urban solidarity.

7. Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton (1924)
Surrealism is much more than lobster telephones. This is how André Breton puts it in the first sentence of his manifesto: “So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.” The really random encounter happens not between two wilfully disparate objects (say, a banana and a blow torch) but between those domains of thought usually separated by polite society. It’s about making art open to an encounter with politics and desire, to “what is most fragile in life”.

8. Ulysses by James Joyce
After some 370 pages charting the “parallel courses” of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom across Dublin, they meet by chance at a maternity hospital on Holles Street. Leopold has gone to check on Mina Purefoy, who is about to give birth. Stephen and his friends are drinking. Their meeting happens in the midst of a potted history of English prose style, with their encounter rendered in the “eftsoons” style of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur – a tale that itself deals with the Grail quest among other strange encounters.

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9. The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
The random encounter here is between two different kinds of text: there’s the story of a marriage breaking down, and there are lots of quotations – presented as epigraphs – from Keats. How they relate is never made explicit, but there are moments when they touch. In trying to make sense of her heartbreak, the speaker tries to understand beauty – “Terrible risks. / Ray would have said” – before concluding on a Keats-y note: “Hold beauty.”

10. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
To read an anonymous tale from the 14th century is to encounter something otherworldly. In this case, it just so happens that tale also involves a green-hued, big-bearded man who arrives at the court of King Arthur and challenges anyone to try hacking his head off – the only catch being that he’ll return the favour next year. The rest of the story delves into the various forms of violence, politesse and desire that bind us. To read it involves opening yourself up to both the strangeness of the language and the story’s final irresolution.

• RENDANG by Will Harris is published by Granta Books (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.