The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

I end this autobiographical prelude with the following story. I had no defined specialty (outside of my day job), and wanted none. When people at cocktail parties asked me what I did for a living, I was tempted to answer, “I am a skeptical empiricist and a flâneur-reader, someone committed to getting very deep into an idea,” but I made things simple by saying that I was a limousine driver.

Once, on a transatlantic flight, I found myself upgraded to first class next to an expensively dressed, high-powered lady dripping with gold and jewelry who continuously ate nuts (low-carb diet, perhaps), insisted on drinking only Evian, all the while reading the European edition of The Wall Street Journal. She kept trying to start a conversation in broken French, since she saw me reading a book (in French) by the sociologist-philosopher Pierre Bourdieu—which, ironically, dealt with the marks of social distinction. I informed her (in English) that I was a limousine driver, proudly insisting that I only drove “very upper-end” cars. An icy silence lasted the whole flight, and, although I could feel the tension, it allowed me to read in peace.

Chapter Two: YEVGENIA’S BLACK SWAN

Pink glasses and success—How Yevgenia stops marrying philosophers—I told you so

Five years ago, Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova was an obscure and unpublished novelist, with an unusual background. She was a neuroscientist with an interest in philosophy (her first three husbands had been philosophers), and she got it into her stubborn Franco-Russian head to express her research and ideas in literary form. She dressed up her theories as stories, and mixed them with all manner of autobiographical commentary. She avoided the journalistic prevarications of contemporary narrative nonfiction (“On a clear April morning, John Smith left his house. …”). Foreign dialogue was always written in the original language, with translations appended like movie subtitles. She refused to dub into bad English conversations that took place in bad Italian.[11]

No publisher would have given her the time of day, except that there was, at the time, some interest in those rare scientists who could manage to express themselves in semi-understandable sentences. A few publishers agreed to speak with her; they hoped that she would grow up and write a “popular science book on consciousness.” She received enough attention to get the courtesy of rejection letters and occasional insulting comments instead of the far more insulting and demeaning silence.

Publishers were confused by her manuscript. She could not even answer their first question: “Is this fiction or nonfiction?” Nor could she respond to the “Who is this book written for?” on the publishers’ book proposal forms. She was told, “You need to understand who your audience is” and “amateurs write for themselves, professionals write for others.” She was also told to conform to a precise genre because “bookstores do not like to be confused and need to know where to place a book on the shelves.” One editor protectively added, “This, my dear friend, will only sell ten copies, including those bought by your ex-husbands and family members.”

She had attended a famous writing workshop five years earlier and came out nauseated. “Writing well” seemed to mean obeying arbitrary rules that had grown into gospel, with the confirmatory reinforcement of what we call “experience.” The writers she met were learning to retrofit what was deemed successful: they all tried to imitate stories that had appeared in past issues of The New Yorker—not realizing that most of what is new, by definition, cannot be modeled on past issues of The New Yorker. Even the idea of a “short story” was a me-too concept to Yevgenia. The workshop instructor, gentle but firm in his delivery, told her that her case was utterly hopeless.

Yegvenia ended up posting the entire manuscript of her main book, A Story of Recursion, on the Web. There it found a small audience, which included the shrewd owner of a small unknown publishing house, who wore pink-rimmed glasses and spoke primitive Russian (convinced that he was fluent). He offered to publish her, and agreed to her condition to keep her text completely unedited. He offered her a fraction of the standard royalty rate in return for her editorial stricture—he had so little to lose. She accepted since she had no choice.