Risk Theory and the Contemporary American Novel

Abstract

“Risk never sleeps”—this warning sets the stage for the Traveler’s Insurance advertisement broadcast on national television during the American League Championship baseball playoffs in the fall of 2007. Risk-personified, the central figure in the ad, roams the city at night, inadvertently setting off one calamity after another. He washes his face in the vast restroom of an empty office building and starts a flood; he tests the controls of an adjustable bed in a department store and ignites a fire; he rides a floorwaxing machine in a museum and sends statues crashing to the floor. His ambiguous ethnicity, set off by a white suit, seems sinister in this post-9/11 consumer landscape, and it is made more so by the black lettering (R-I-S-K) on his knuckles (see Figure 1). Short and dark with a drooping mustache, he is either a multicultural everyman (Greek–Italian–Malaysian) or a threatening foreigner (Pakistani–Iranian). In classic advertising fashion, this alien figure commands attention by exploiting but then defusing what people fear. Un-deliberate in his destructiveness (which surprises him as much as anyone), Risk-personified is no match for Traveler’s Insurance. A distinctive feature of contemporary American culture is our anxiety about risk. We are preoccupied with the prospect of catastrophe: nuclear war, environmental disaster, terrorist attack, susceptibility to accident and terminal illness, and, most recently, economic collapse. Risks are generally understood as calculations about the likelihood and impact of forces (hidden and transparent)