Driving the internal logic of dramatic narrative is the interconnection between two orders of causality. Empirical causality concerns how things happen in fact to follow one after another, not just those we could reasonably expect but also those moments of chance or accident which seem to fall from the sky. Entelechial causality, on the other hand, concerns how these moments of seemingly pure accident or arbitrariness are nevertheless configured as parts of a whole narrative structure in which we find not merely a beginning, a middle, and an end, but an end pre-inscribed in its beginning, a beginning which puts in place the conditions for that ending. Entelechial causality also establishes what counts as probable within any dramatic narrative. As States observes, entelechial causality, and thus the probabilities of action, are constrained not just by plot action but also by genre and even by authorial style.
Remarkable events can be probable, given the sort of fiction one is involved with.
It is an unpleasure or pain which we do and do not experience, which we participate in voyeuristically or by an alienated identification. Our pleasure, of course, is not keyed to our own experience of pain or terror or the unthinkable, but rather to our protected spectatorial contemplation of such experiences. States seems to be thinking about the pleasures of the sublime rather than those of the beautiful. Anyone interested in narrative will find new ways to think about some of the most fundamental issues that we all share thanks to this book. But some readers may well be struck by the underdevelopment of the very topic that the book's title advertises.