Telling It Again and Again : Repetition in Literature

title:
and Film
author: Kawin, Bruce F.
publisher: University Press of Colorado
isbn10 | asin: 0870811762
print isbn13: 9780870811760
ebook isbn13: 9780585030524
language: English
Repetition (Rhetoric) , Literature--Technique,
subject
Repetition in motion pictures.
publication date: 1989
lcc: PN56.R45K3 1989eb
ddc: 809/.92
Repetition (Rhetoric) , Literature--Technique,
subject:
Repetition in motion pictures.
 Telling it Again
and Again
REPETITION IN
LITERATURE
AND FILM
Bruce F. Kawin

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 1989 by University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
First published 1972 by Cornell University Press
The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in
part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State
College, Metropolitan State College, University of Colorado, University of Northern
Colorado, University of Southern Colorado, and Western State College.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1984
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kawin, Bruce F., 1945-
Telling it again and again: repetition in literature and film/Bruce
F. Kawin.
p. cm.
Originally published: Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87081-176-2
1. Repetition in literature. 2. Repetition in motion pictures.
I. Title
PN56.R45K3 1989 809'.92dc20 89-24783
With thanks to Frank McConnell for his guidance and support,
to Bert States for his careful reading of the manuscript, and
to Murray Naditch, Champa Norzom, Sidhu, and Carol Sykes
for the hours of talking that got it off the ground.
 Page vii

Contents
Foreword by Frank McConnell ix
Introduction 1
1. Destructive Repetition 9
"Joke Worn Thin by Repetition" 10
Inappropriate Repetition 12
Repetition Compulsion 16
Habit 19
Hemingway 23
The Falsification of Reality 26
2. Emphasizing, Echoing, Building, and Complicating 34
From Emphasis to Experience 35
King Lear 52
Miracle of the Rose 59
Pornography and the Horror Film 65
3. Eternity in an Hour 71
Repetition in Reverse: Purgatory, The Blacks, and The
72
Exterminating Angel
From Combray to Marienbad 84
 Page viii

Freedom from History 90

Love Letters 94
4. The Continuous Present 108
Time in Art 108
Gertrude Stein 117
Stein and Beckett: Beginning Again 131
Theatre and the Continuous Present 146
Art and Experience 153
Alain Resnais 156
5. Jam Today 165
Beyond Logic: Repetition as Syntax 165
Constantine in Berlin 176
Selected Bibliography 187
Index 191
 Page ix

Foreword
by Frank McConnell
This is an unusually personal introduction sinceamong other reasonsBruce Kawin's
Telling It Again and Again is such an unusually personal, and courageous, piece of
literary criticism.
If, indeed, literary criticism is what this book is. In the twenty years he has been my
friendthe twenty years since TIAA was first writtenI have often wondered, though never
asked him point blank, just what it is Kawin calls what he does for a living. If the new
critical formalism in which I was trained (and to which I still pledge fealty) is criticism, or
if the even more corseted and stylistically robotized deconstruction (hereinafter the D-
word) that currently garners tenure and NEH grants is criticism, then Kawin is a poor
excuse for a critic. In this book, and in his later books Faulkner and Film, Mindscreen,
and The Mind of the Novel, and in the virtual coral reef of essays on whatever takes his
fancy, he isconsistentlystrikingly confessional, unsettlingly eclectic (what hasn't he read?
you sometimes
 Page x
ask yourself, sighing), and unremittingly smart. In other words, if criticism is simply
(simply!) the generous and immensely serious habit of attention to books and to life that
we find in Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloomand, yes, in Matthew
Arnoldthen Kawin is in the fraternity.
I resort to sortilege. Near the end of the book you are about to read, you will come upon a
discussion of the problems of time, memory, and repetition in Waiting for Godot. Kawin
does not explain, analyze, or D-word that most crucial of plays. He simply (again,
simply!) lets you know what it feels like to be Bruce Kawin reading Waiting for Godot.
"Vladimir and Estragon's waiting," he writes, "is made bearable by the impermanence of
their memories." That is the way the paragraph begins. By the end, however, we have
ascended toor are immersed inpure Kawinese:
We can repeat a line fifteen times in a short poem if we believe in it; we can read that poem if we
do not rush over the repetitions with mental ditto marks; we can move with the vitality of each
identical sunrise; we can make love to the same person if we are in love. It is not important that we
have done or felt or said these things before; memory only displaces or undermines our objective
experience of the present. In the continuous present there is no consciousness of repetition.
I submit that writing like this is not only the keenest pitch of criticism but its only real
justification. We have lately heard frequent and vatic insistences that, under
 Page xi
the new dispensation of discourse, the line between critic and poet has been effaced: that
the proper study of mankind is, as it were, De Man. But I know of precious few acts of
reading that deliver on that claim as honestly or as fully as does TIAA; and of course it is a
claim Kawin himself never has the temerity, or maybe the need, to make. At any rate,
when I first read the passage I have just quoted, in 1970, in manuscript, I thought that I
would never again read or teach Godot quite the same way. And now, two decades later, I
know that I was right.
This is an introduction, not a hagiography. But it is also a testimony to, or celebration of,
what is by now a long friendship, so you may as well know that the quality of this book
(and, in fact, of all his books) is very like the quality of Kawin's teaching and
conversation: ferocious. I have been toldthis is not precisely my experience, but I have
been toldthat people find themselves exhilarated but quite exhausted after an hour's talk
with him. Chapter 1 of TIAA will give you a fairly accurate intimation of what that is like.
It begins with a quotation from Lauren Bacall, and then, by way of examining the
phenomenon of destructive repetition, discusses an Allen Funt film, Dickens's Our
Mutual Friend, Sophocles, Robbe-Grillet, Freud, Proust, Freud, Hemingway, Spinoza,
and Proust. And Hemingway. I am writing this, deliberately, from memory, so I may have
left someone out.
But you get the point. Or, maybe, you don't. Since
 Page xii
this book is being reprinted after twenty years, since it is being accorded the dignity (if
that is the word) of an introduction by a second voice, and since it is, above all, being
printed, it comes to you with a kind of FDA-certified aura of safety. A number of
peopleresponsible people, who make money printing and selling bookshave decided
publicly that this one is worth your attention; quite literally, they have given it its
imprimatur.
But imagine reading this, in typescript, in 1970, submitted by an undeniably intense but
also undeniably young graduate student, as work to satisfy the requirement for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy. Academic critics are legendaryand properly sofor a kind of
Olympian timidity; many of them, at least, are more terrified of being "wrong" than they
are exalted by being "right" about things. (The quotation marks are intended to express
my opinion that right and wrong are, in the first place, simply inappropriate criteria for
the discourse of criticism.) That is why critics like Burke, Bloom, and Frye, whatever their
academic prestige, earn that prestige at the cost of a certain subtle ostracism, earn it by
playing to the hilt the role of holy monster. And that is why what strikes us today as
merely brilliant in TIAA was also, twenty years ago, extraordinarily, if not rashly, brave.
Kawin elected, from his first book, to be one of the holy monsters, with all the psychic
(and, in the American university, fiscal) risks therein implied. It is precisely like the
choices in nuance, gesture, and delivery an actor has to make
 Page xiii
preparing for a role. This book, and the books that have followed it, are the best proof of
how risky and howin the actor's, not the logician's senseright Kawin's choices were.
But what, after all, is the book about? I have read it, or read in it, many times over the
years, and the best answer I can come up with is the phrase Stanley Edgar Hyman used to
describe the subject of Kenneth Burke's work: everything, preferably all at once. It is
about ''Repetition in Literature and Film," to be sure. But it is about repetition the same
way, say, Lévi-Strauss's Totemism is and is not about totemism, or Frye's Anatomy of
Criticism is and is not an anatomy, Burke's Grammar of Motives is and is not a grammar,
and Bloom's Map of Misreading is and is not a map. The term and concept "repetition" is
important as the key terms in those other books are important, because it is a
pretextliterally, a pre-textthat both concentrates and liberates the writer's meditation, at
once expansive and centered, upon life, art, and his own particular presence in that
continuum.
"We enjoy choruses when they are sung and skip over them when they are printed." That
is the first sentence of Chapter 1, and the rest of the book can be taken as an extended
footnote to its implications. First, it is remarkably honest to our real experience of reading
and singing (this kind of honesty is in short supply in academic criticism). Second, it
introduces the idea itself of repetition as, not a concept, but an experience, something
 Page xiv
we go through every day, and something whose importance we become aware of only
when we are forced to confront it in literary and cinematic texts. Thirdand, I think, most
importatntlyit grounds the argument to follow in the concept of enjoying: not liking,
understanding, deconstructing, or digging (though this last is, I suspect, closest to Kawin's
intent), but enjoying, which in the course of this book comes fairly close to Alfred North
Whitehead's complex idea of "enjoyment."
The next five chapters examine repetition, and our aesthetic and practical enjoyment of
repetition, with reference to a bewildering andat first glancearbitrary selection of books,
plays and films. Repetition, as an artistic device or strategy, can be either destructive or
constructive, we are told. And if constructive, it can imply either the illusion of
meaningful, progressive historythe cumulative but ever-changing, ever-developing
repetition of words, images, shotsor the possibility of an eternal present, in which
repetition itself becomes (as Kierkegaard called it) our daily bread, our way of breaking
through the consequentiality of language to a perception of the eternal that is, all the time,
all around us, our mantra and our salvation.
Along these three distinct lines of repetition, Kawin is able to develop astonishing
combinatorial readings of disparate texts. Perhaps the tour-de-force is in Chapter 2, where
he moves from King Lear to Jean Genet's Miracle of the Rose to the Universal Pictures
cycle of
 Page xv
Mummy films, all the while making perfect sense of how they all fit under this particular
sense of repetition, and never once descending to apologies or arguments about the
relative "quality" of the works he discusses.
But the only connection among these texts is that they are texts the author has read and
that he likes! So would have sputtered the Anglophilic university-man of two decades ago
to this sort of adventure, and so would sputter his Gallophilic inheritor today. ("Meet the
new boss," as Pete Townshend articulates his own idea of destructive repetition, "same as
the old boss"in this case, boss Tweed.)
The only answer to that objection is to admit it, and in admitting it deny its force. If this is
meditative criticismand if it is not that, it can be nothing elsethen its real point is just that
the writer allows his intelligence and his imaginationand his passionto play freely over the
range of his experience, and in reconstructing his own passional/imaginative life, suggest
to us ways of doing the same thing with our own. The great mystics do not teach what
they know (a real mystic claims to know nothingor, better, does not claim to know
anything); they share what they hear.
That is whyand Kawin might disagree with me about thisI think the organization of types
of repetition in TIAA isnot unnecessary butfactitious. As in a meditative exercise or in the
repetition of a mantra, it is an essential and finally irrelevant component of the act of
understanding. If you want a quick guide to his
 Page xvi
three types of repetition, I can offer you one. Repetition can be a thing to be feared:
Oedipus hopes he can escape from it. Repetition can be a thing to be welcomed: Lear
hopes it will keep on. Repetition can be a thing to be transcended: Arjuna in the
Bhagavad-Gita learns to neither fear nor welcome what already is.
But that summary does not come close to what this book is aboutor what it is for. Kawin
ends his discussion by analogizing certain, privileged kinds of writing and living with the
idea of the mantra, the repeated prayer that is supposed to free the contemplative self for
the observance of the always-present eternal. I suggest that you read TIAA as itself a kind
of mantra. It takes the same themerepetitionand applies it again and again to text after text,
until finally we have been prepared for Kawin's ultimate assertion, that literature can lead
us to know the sacredness "merely in living as and where we live" (to quote Wallace
Stevens, one of the few poets he doesn't quote). Kenneth Burke, in probably the best
description of the job I have ever seen, says that the critic does not "explain" anything, but
that he ''dances an attitude" toward the texts that matter to us. And Kawin, here, at the
beginning of his career, already establishes himself as one helluva dancer.
But I have said enough. And I haven't said enough. My affection for this book, and for its
author, should be evident in every line of what I've writtenas, I hope, is my real and
objective (such a word) sense of its genius.
 Page xvii
But there's something else.
Notice how many times I've written "twenty years ago" or "two decades" or "1970'' in this
introduction. All those phrases are code-names for "the late sixties," when Bruce (no
longer "Kawin") and I met at Cornell and shared a moment in timeor a moment out of
timewhich is also memorialized and incarnated in this book, and about which you should,
if you haven't already heard, know.
To begin with, everyone was very confused. Our countryour countrywas engaged in an
illegal, obscene adventure in Asia, and my studentsmy studentswere in danger of being
sent to fight in that adventure if I gave them less than a "B." And since we were all
confused, we were also close. "What the hell is going on?" you could ask a friend the day
after Kent State, and you didn't have to specify the context of the question. And since we
were all close, we felt ourselves powerful. By God, we could change the way America
and its youth thought about international and interpersonal morality. If literature, to which
we had more or less committed ourselves, meant anything, it at least should mean
something like a way of arguing against, putting an end to, the carnage across the sea and
the racism at home for which we were responsible. It was not, for us, that to read Lear or
Henry James or for that matter Mickey Spillane was a moral act: it was that it had to be a
moral act: that you had to find a way to make it so. Why else were we there, teaching and
reading, when
 Page xviii
our brothers and sisters in Bien Tre and Detroit and a hundred other battle zones were
dying?
How silly it all was, given the long view of things. A whole generation of American
academic intellectualsor, at least, a part of that generationbelieved for a while that we
could write and read and teach and think ourselves into a better world. If only we could
break the barriers, tear down the walls, between intellect and action, criticism and living,
or, as Shelley says in Prometheus Unbound, "good and the means of good."
That, also, is an essential context of the book you are about to read. TIAA is a twenty-
year-old dinosaurbut one caught live, because the energy and the faith implicit in this act
of readingthe faith that reading books well can save your soulis one he has not betrayed
or stepped back from in twenty years of writing and thinking. Since I am mentioned on
the Acknowledgments page of this book, I assume that Bruce is still laboring under the
misapprehension that I had anything at all to do with the brilliance of all this as it
emerged, and as it still shines. But I will and do claim my shareas a friend, never a
mentorin those strange, scary, apocalyptic, and heartbreakingly fine years out of which
such a wonderful book came.
 Page xix
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;
And the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down,
And hasteth to his place where he ariseth.
The wind goeth toward the south,
And turneth about unto the north;
It turneth about continually in its circuit,
And the wind returneth again to its circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
Unto the place whither the rivers go,
Thither they go again.
All things toil to weariness;
Man cannot utter it,
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.
That which hath been is that which shall be,
And that which hath been done is that which shall be done;
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:49
And the light is sweet,
And a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.
Ecclesiastes 11:7
 Page 1

Introduction
Repetition, the re-experiencing of something
identical, is clearly in itself a source of
pleasure.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Life takes its tone and character from repetition. Ordinarily we consider those events that
are capable of being repeated, or those functions that insist on being repeated, lower or
more boring than those "once in a lifetime," extraordinary, unrepeatable experiences that
we consider the true or interesting material of our life histories. In conversation, we
admire people who come gracefully right to the point; the ultimate romantic experience of
our culture is First Love, and its mature replacement, the indissoluble open-breasted give
and take of marriage, is ordained unique, "till death do us part." We ''only live once"; we
have to try everything "once." Our belief is in history, the recording of unique events
occurring in linear timetime, that is, which moves from time-point A to time-point A+1 to
time-point A+2 without doubling back, and
 Page 2
which can conveniently be organized into past, present, and future. Events whose
repetition is not extraordinary do not seem worth recording, in fact hardly seem worth
noticing. We rest secure in the uniqueness of our experience and identity.
What is true, however, is that many of the experiences we call extraordinary take on their
personal importance either because they approximately repeat earlier experiences, or
because they fulfill earlier expectations long rehearsed in fantasy; so that in both instances
an event may have an air of familiarity about it even as it is occurring.1 This is as true of a
honeymoon as it is of a Proustian flash. It is further true that nothing actually felt, nothing
real in its moment, is boring. Sexual intercourse, for example, loses neither its
attractiveness nor its reality through being repeated; its felt intensity is entirely
independent of previous experience. Why, since it is the same every time, does it not
become boring? The answer is, because it is interesting to us: it proceeds from our basic
needs, it is urgent and pleasant and present. It is outside time, and therefore outside
futility.
Every day the sun comes UP, stays up, goes down. We experience this cycle of light and
warmth 26,000 times
1Déjà vu is of course the extreme case: we perceive something twice at once, and for the sake of
mental coherence organize the perceptions into past and present. The basic defensive process of
creating past-present-future time as a means of organizing experience that occurs in a continuous
present should be noted at work here.
 Page 3
in an average lifetime, and find that not enough. What is more important for our purposes
here: we do not find the cycle boring. It has rhythmic sympathy with the way we function.
It is important. It is dependable. It is like us, and good and bad to us. It is not exhaustible;
novelty is exhaustible. The search for novelty leads in the end to boredom. We are bored
when we have run out of "interesting" things to do, or when our own lack of vital energy
disgusts us. We are not bored with our personal obsessions, our natural functions, or the
periodicity of natureno matter how familiar to us they may be. The short-sightedness of
the conventional view of repetition as repetitious is evident in the words of our most
absurd contemporary politician, "You seen one redwood, you seen 'em all."
Are we bored with life because "it's been done already"? Do we wish our heartbeat would
change color to keep us amused?
Our utilitarian attitude to time, that it ought not to be wasted, is ignorant of the nature of
time. Time cannot be wasted any more than it can be invested; we do things not with it,
but in it. The fact that something happens to us more than once cannot be used as moral
criticism of the experience or of its "use" of time. What we principally need, in our
relations with time, is the perceptual education that will allow us without anxiety (the
urgency to date) to move as time moves, in the presentthe only existing tense. Planning
and regretting
 Page 4
are metaphysically irrelevant. Our search for novelty proceeds directly from our anxiety
about death, and from our misunderstanding of the nature of repetition. All experiences,
like all propositions, "are of equal value."2 On the night before the announced end of the
world, those who have not understood all along the eternity of the present will run out
and do something they have never done before, while the others will find an equal or
greater sense of fulfillment by continuing to do what they have already found to be
pleasant or necessary.
Repetitious is one thing, repetitive is another. It is to the colloquial interchangeability of
the two words that most of the misunderstanding of the aesthetic and metaphysical
concept of repetition is due. I will be using these words in the following senses:
Repetitious: when a word, percept, or experience is repeated with less impact at each
recurrence; repeated to no particular end, out of a failure of invention or sloppiness of
thought.
Repetitive: when a word, percept, or experience is repeated with equal or greater force at
each occurrence.
Successful repetition depends both on the inherent interest of the recurring unit and on its
context. Thus
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.4.
 Page 5
we come to aesthetics. Some artists are better than others at interesting us in the things
they think are worth repeating, or at giving their completed works such life that we will
continue to re-experience them with pleasure. I do not enjoy Mozart's French Horn
Concertos less at each hearing because I have heard them before; nor do I scold Lear that
he has made his point, the last four nevers are unnecessary. On the contrary: Lear's cries
attain an intensity possible only in unremitting repetition; it is the power of his howl that is
under discussion here, and its tendency, like Ginsberg's32 after his, to open on areas of
experience generally considered inaccessible to language.
This book treats repetition both as an aesthetic device in literature and film and as a state
of mind; for as I asserted at the outset, repetition is fundamental to human experience. It
can lock us into the compulsive insatiability of neurosis or free us into the spontaneity of
the present tense; it can strengthen an impression, create a rhythm, flash us back, or start
us over; it can take us out of time completely. My way of dealing with
3 As Frank O'Hara reminds us in his poem "Why I Am Not a Painter," what appears at the outset to
be one's central subject may never appear in the finished work, but may nevertheless haunt and
inform the work throughout. Allen Ginsberg has that kind of presence in this book. I am deeply
indebted to him, and can at this point only refer the reader to the title poems of his books Howl and
Kaddish, and in particular to "The Change" in Planet News (all available from City Lights Books,
San Francisco).
 Page 6
all these functions is to concentrate on the demands that varying conceptions of time can
make on the progress of a work. Thus a good deal of space is given to Marcel Proust,
Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and Alain Resnais.
In the first chapter, the neurotic, habituating, and enervating properties of destructive
repetition are considered. The second chapter covers what is conventionally considered
the full range of the constructive powers of repetition: from its ability to emphasize,
interweave, and lyricize to its utility in the creation of what E. K. Brown calls "expanding
symbols."4 The third chapter deals with works whose characters are in some way both in
and out of time, in particular Yeats's Purgatory. The fourth chapter is concerned with the
literature of the continuous present, and the fifth deals directly with the drive past
language to silence. Implicit in this construction is my sense that there are two sorts of
narrative time: one that builds and one that continues. The first is appropriate to emphasis,
Tolstoyan interrelations, and so forth, but is in conflict with the ongoing nature of the line
of words or strip of frames, which tend to keep the audience in a continually renewed
present and to undermine the reliability of that audience's
4 E. K. Brown's Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and London: Oxford
University Press, 1950) offers an extremely interesting introduction to the aesthetics of "repetition
with variation." It deals primarily with E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.
 Page 7
memory. The aesthetics of this second narrative time depend on repetition and point out
the tendency in repetition itself to lead us not simply into the present, but into the timeless.
Despite this freedom of range, my discussion is limited in many ways, of which the most
important follows. The aesthetics of repetition cannot really be separated from the
aesthetics of change; nevertheless I have chosen to emphasize the former. I simply ask the
reader to bear in mind that except in the context of some change or progression, any
repetition taking place in advancing time is undiscussable. The growth of the work, even
from one identical line to another, makes exact repetition impossible: and this, in a sense,
is my point. This book is really about the aesthetics of near-repetition. Repetition is a
nonverbal state; it cannot be committed to any art that occurs in time. Near-
repetitionwhich, given the strictures of advancing time and linear syntax, is the most that
can be done in words or notes or framessucceeds by intimating, and to a greater or lesser
degree almost by containing, the nature of this necessarily nonverbal state. The discussion
of this state is reserved for the final chapter; until then, I refer to intense levels of near-
repetition as if they were repetitions, since they are, in any case, all that art can do.
I will try to show how repetition, the key to our experience, may become the key to our
expression of experience
 Page 8
"Man cannot utter it,"5 but he can utter around it. He can, through repetition. make it
manifest."
But because every great creative force can be destructive, we begin by exploring the
distinction between "all things toil to weariness" and "the light is sweet."
5 All Old Testament quotations are taken from The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1917). Metaphor, too, "utters around it"; but repetition has the unique ability to
bring us within reach of the nonverbal, even to generate nonverbal states of apprehension.
 Page 9

1.
Destructive Repetition
What can it possibly mean to be part of something that's over?
Lauren Bacall, quoted in Life,April 3, 1970
We enjoy choruses when they are sung and skip over them when they are printed.
Choruses do not present new information, and the reading mind fills in the experience of
a chorus as it jumps from verse to verse. We would suspend our rush to novelty if the
printed song could move us in its own time, manifest the developing unity that we do feel
when it is sung. We are bored and impatient when the new turns out to be old. What the
careful reader of this book will discover is that even a repetition can be new. The question
is, what literary techniques are available to provide for naked words that sense of
direction and development, that faith in the rightness of a repetition, which music
performs in a song? Unfortunately it is often easier to recognize a failure than a success.
Let us consider a series of related problems, both aesthetic and psychological, having as
their
 Page 10
common element repetition that either has gone flat or has actually had a destructive effect
on its material.
"Joke Worn Thin by Repetition"
Allen Funt's film, What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? (1969), includes many hidden-
camera confrontations between unclothed models and embarrassed, clothed passers-by. It
was criticized by one reviewer for running out of ideas; evaluating the film as a joke
rather than as a neosociological accumulation, this reviewer wrote: "By the last segment,
the joke has worn thin by repetition. I mean, how many things CAN you say to a naked
lady?"1 Although he disliked the film for not having enough novelty, his review leads us
to conclude that the film's real problem lay in its search for novelty. We infer that Funt's
approach (or the prevailing critical attitude that led the reviewer to expect such an
approach) was to think of as many possible different ways of exploiting what one might
say to a naked lady, and to mix them in such a way that the audience would not become
boredwould not, that is, become aware of what Funt might fear would be nondynamic
repetition. In such a case, it is not hard for the audience to recognize a fundamental lack
of invention.
Out-and-out repetitions are an aesthetic challenge;
1 Bernard Drew, "Joke Worn Thin by Repetition," Gannett News Service; in "Showtime," Ithaca
Journal, May 9, 1970, p. 9.
 Page 11
masking them in novelty is often merely a dodgeartistically insincere, proceeding from a
lack of faith in one's material or audience.
This point is best made by contrast with a sturdy joke, repeated with obvious relisha
passage no reader would be tempted to skim.
Mr. Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that
although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other
countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would
conclusively observe, ''Not English!" when, PRESTO! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the
face, they were swept away. Elsewise, the world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter-past,
breakfasted at nine, went to the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven. Mr.
Podsnap's notions of the Arts in their integrity might have been stated thus. Literature; large print,
respectfully descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine,
going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture;
models and portraits representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past,
breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven.
Music; a respectable performance (without variations) on stringed and wind instruments, sedately
expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine, going to the
City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining
 Page 12
at seven. Nothing else to be permitted to those same vagrants the Arts, on pain of excommunication.
Nothing else to beanywhere!2

It is clear that such an outright use of repetition can strengthen, while the chief effects of
unsure repetition are loss of audience attention (boredom) and enervation of one's
material.
Inappropriate Repetition
The Reverend Gail Hightower, in Faulkner's Light in August, is an extreme example of the
rigidity characteristic of neurotic repetition. He is trapped in an instant of time that
occurred before his birththe shotgun death of his grandfather while stealing chickens in
the Civil War. He attempts, in being called to Jefferson, to live through and nullify the
shame of this moment, but finds himself instead compulsively involved in it: reliving it in
his sermons, abandoning the present, becoming his own and the dead moment's ghost.
Hightower repeats the obsessive instant until he is the instant.
One of the principal characteristics of useless repetition is that it locks a work or a life
into an unfulfillable compulsive cycle. Hightower feels that his life "ceased
2 Charles Dickens, "Podsnappery," Our Mutual Friend.
 Page 13
before it began";3 he allows himself to become rigid, through an obsession with the past
that he cannot transcend. This condition is true of many of Faulkner's charactersSutpen
and Rosa Coldfield, for example, repeatedly described as "rigid" and "indomitable." The
activity produced by the obsession may be furious and even usefulthe construction in
Absalom, Absalom! of Sutpen's Hundredbut it cannot be said to represent progress for the
person obsessed. As Lawrence Kubie remarked, ''No compulsive work drive has ever
healed itself through working, however successfully."4
It is a terrible thing to live someone else's lifeto repeat, as Hightower does, a life other
than one's own; but certainly that is a rare occurrence. Hightower's experience has
relevance to the more common problem of inappropriate repetition. We are often forced
to relive dead and rigid aspects of our own lives rather than live creatively, in freedom, in
continuing time.
Kubie's Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process argues that creativity consists in "the
capacity to find new and unexpected connections"5 and that it is the
3 William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Random House, 1932); reference is to the Modern
Library hardcover edition, p. 418.
4 Lawrence S. Kubie, Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (New York: Noonday, 1961), p.
142. See also his p. 64.
5 Kubie, p. 141. Clearly Kubie's terminology is indebted to Freud's (discussed below).
 Page 14
preconsciousan area of the mind neither conscious nor unconscious that condenses,
intuits, and contains information that is accessible on needthat is our true creative faculty.
Both the conscious and unconscious have relatively rigid associative systems. The word
"eraser," for example, is associated by the conscious with a rubber mark-remover; but it
might be associated by the unconscious with some terrible childhood trauma and make a
person inexplicably anxious. The preconscious, however, can make an imaginative leap
from "eraser" to Oedipus Rex and produce the material for such a novel as Alain Robbe-
Grillet's The Eraserswhen its freedom is not compromised by the inaccessibility of the
unconscious symbolic process. While conscious symbols may be so clear as to be
mundane, unconscious symbols are "impenetrable and fixed disguises." This rigidity of
association ultimately directs the associations made by the preconscious. Material is
offered to the intuitive faculty with hidden and unmodifiable meanings. The unconscious
forces our ''unacceptable conflicts aims, and impulses" out into the world, each time in its
same disguise, into our dreams, our "slips," our behavior, and our art. Both the impulse
and the disguise must repeat; they can be neither modified nor resolved by this process.
This rigidity in repetition is the chief characteristic of neurotic activity: "Any moment of
behavior is neurotic if the processes that set it in motion predetermine its automatic
repetition, and this irrespective of
 Page 15
the situation or the social or personal values or consequences of the act."6
Until we resolve the conflicts that rigidify our associations, every attempt we make to
create something new (a second novel) will be twisted into a re-expression, in however
cleverly modified a form, of our concealed concerns.7
The artist's usual defense against a psychological reading of his works is that his art
consists in the variations he performs on his one true subject in his carefully perfected,
claimed, and deeded style; it is the art, not the subject, that is important; don't mistake me
for my persona. Many artists assume that their most vital material comes from the
unconsciousthat an unresolved conflict is the best insurance a creator has of not "running
dry." Can you imagine, they ask, a happy Dostoevski? Kubie astutely points out that
unless the artist is healthy, unless he can make new associations as they are appropriate to
the work before him, he can produce dreams but not artvery likely the same dream each
time. The fact that his style and his preoccupations spring from the same unresolved
material, and therefore appear well suited, may keep him from realizing that both may be
uncreative and compulsive.
6 Kubie, p. 21.
7 See also Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings, p. 27: "Always when we speak of an artist's
'personal style' we might as well speak of his 'recurrent content.'" This applies to technique as well as
to subject matter.
 Page 16
We must ask whether, in his perfection of an "appropriate" or successful style, the artist is
forging a tool to facilitate the exploration and mastery of his material or building a set of
adjoining cages: one for the material, the other for himself.
Repetition Compulsion
In his essays Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Recollection, Repetition, and
Working Through (1914), Sigmund Freud identifies the compulsion to repeat as a means
of mastering difficult material, as an obstruction and aid in psychotherapy, and as the key
to the death instinct. Its application to the problem of memory will concern us more when
we come to Beckett and Proust. In the practice of psychotherapy, repetition is
encountered as a hindrance to memoryor more properly, as a means of remembering that
can be exploited in a transference situation. The analyst would like to be able to help the
patient remember a trauma and see it in the perspective of the present;8 but what usually
occurs is that the patient acts out his trauma again in the present, without any critical
distancewithout even being aware that he is in fact repeating earlier behavior. The analyst
exploits this repetition by
8 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright,
1924); references are to the Bantam paperback edition, pp. 39, 67.
 Page 17
creating in the transference a "playground" for the material, "replacing his whole ordinary
neurosis by a 'transference-neurosis' of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work."9
The patient repeats because his repressions keep him from remembering the traumatic
material and because the material is, even so, trying to express itself.
When the motivating energy of this urge to repeat originates in the unconscious, that
impulse is called the "repetition compulsion." Freud sees this compulsion also in the
functioning of the instincts, all of which attempt to relieve tension, returning us to that
state of relaxation presumed to have existed before we became sexually excited, or
hungry, or alive. The death instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to return to the
inorganic, to repeat that earlier state.
On an instinctual level, the repetition compulsion puts us through tension-arousing and -
dispelling cycles: making us live, letting us die. On a psychotherapeutic level, this
compulsion acts in the service of the most immediate and inaccessible form of memory,
forcing us not to remember but to relive unmastered material. We may also find ourselves
repeating, rather than remembering, traumatic experiences outside the therapeutic
9 Sigmund Freud, "Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis: Recollection,
Repetition, and Working Through," Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press,
1949), Vol. II, 374.
 Page 18
context: "Thus," as Freud observed, "we have come across people all of whose human
relationships have the same outcome."10 When every one of our love affairs ends badly,
and for the same unstated reasons, no matter how different the lovers; when every
business venture turns mysteriously against us; when we are driven to help others yet
fated to see them reject usthen we may assume that we are in the grip not of an avenging
God, but of our own compulsion, to repeat.
Freud observed not only the automatic, destructive, and death-serving effects of
repetition. He also saw that repetition can operate in the interests of the pleasure principle:
Nor can children have their pleasurable experiences repeated often enough, and they are inexorable
in their insistence that the repetition shall be an identical one. This character trait disappears later
on. If a joke is heard for a second time it produces almost no effect; a theatrical production never
creates so great an impression the second time as the first; indeed, it is hardly possible to persuade
an adult who has very much enjoyed reading a book to reread it immediately. Novelty is always the
condition of enjoyment. But children never tire of asking an adult to repeat a game that he has shown
them or played with them, till he is too exhausted to go on. And if a child has been told a nice story,
he will insist on hearing it over and over
10 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 4445.
 Page 19
again rather than a new one; and he will remorselessly stipulate that the repetition shall be
an identical one and will correct any alterations of which the narrator may be guilty.
Repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of
pleasure.11
What we shall be discussing as an aesthetic problemthe relative uses and merits of
repetition and noveltyis here explained away as a function of psychic maturity. This
passage does not take into account the pleasure felt by an adult at certain repetitions in
nature and art and conversationor if it does, it posits that none of us ever outgrows his
infancy completely.
Habit
We are assaulted by stimuli from all sides; they have an intense reality which, if we were
continually aware of it, would probably so overwhelm us as to make us unable to
function. We have a skin that keeps our rawer tissues from too great an environmental
onslaught; anyone with an open wound is aware of this suddenly. We have a skin on our
senses too: we are not meant to receive all that is out there. We have blinders and
repressions and clothes and preconceptions and houses and institutions and habits.
According to Freud,
11Ibid., p. 66.
 Page 20
"protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism
than reception of stimuli."12
In a 1962 Pacifica Radio program and later in a Hubley Studio cartoon, Robert M.
Hutchins described the life and philosophy of a near-fictional neo-Freudian, Zuckerkandl,
whose view that the aim of life is death led him to such startling insights as the idea that
the only reason we get out of our beds in the morning is that we cannot take them with us;
we adapt to this reality by so anesthetizing our waking/walking experience that it is as if
we had our beds with us all day. Freud said we should make our unconscious conscious;
Zuckerkandl said we should make our conscious unconscious. He asks, which leg did we
put into our pants first this morning? What was the train like today? Such experiences are
usually lost to us by virtue of their having become habitual. Repetition without insight or
excitement creates routine, takes the life out of living, and cannot cause us pain. The idea
is to make our entire lives routine, so that we will not feel anythingto thicken the skin on
our senses.
Such a system occupies the border between the dedicated routine of Mr. Podsnap and the
existential-anesthetic routine of Beckett's Mr. Knott. Certainly when we come to habit, we
have come to the most destructive
12Ibid., p. 53.
 Page 21
effect of repetition, for it is the doing of things over and over, each time with less energy
and less interest, that is the root of repetitiousness in literatureon the way to anesthesia:
the cliché we do not even notice, the dead word, the dead work,13 the zombie.
Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu will occupy us throughout; I introduce it here
because one of its great subjects is the oscillating ascendency in our lives between habit
and sufferingbetween experience that is fenced in and neutralized and experience that is
intense and perhaps painful. The flash of forgotten reality into a dead and comfortable
world is an act of repetition"the re-experiencing of something identical"that undoes the
routinizing repetitions of a life of habit. Beckett's master's thesis, Proust, tells us much
about both authors.
"The pernicious devotion of habit," writes Beckett, "paralyses our attention, drugs those
handmaidens of perception whose cooperation is not absolutely essential." Beckett's
paraphrase of Proust prepares the experiential ground for Watt, where in Mr. Knott's
household everything is governed by routine, the simple and
13 I mean both work that has no internal energy and work that trains its audience not to respond.
Before going on, I would like to call attention to Joe Brainard's masterful one-page story, "Alice":
one of the greatest habit-as-repetition nightmares in American literature (Paris: Art and Literature
11 [1967]).
 Page 22
unknowable, and for Endgame, where at the end of the world Hamm asks continually
whether it is time yet for his painkiller, the anesthetic within anesthetic. Habit protects us
from awareness or sensation, anxiety or pain. Life is a succession of habits, between
which "for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being."14 Watt
feels pain intensely, and is anxiously aware of the reality of Mr. Knott's household, only
in those moments when he is given new duties (feeding the dog) or moved (in, upstairs,
out), or when something unusual or inexplicable occurs (the visit of the piano tuners). He
is "comforted" by explanations, logical correspondences; it is all right for things to occur,
as long as they can be explained. But the household is intuitively posited; one cannot
entirely describe its pots with the word "pot." As long as an object or situation remains
imperfectly described and apprehended, it produces anxiety in Watt, whose language
bounds into new languages in an attempt to describe consciously what is beyond the
accurate reach of language: that which Wittgenstein realized must be passed over in
silence.15 Where the language is adequate, there is no disturbance.
14 Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 20.
15 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 7. (His Sabbath, as G. C. Kinnear pointed out to me. The limits of his
world are built in 16.)
 Page 23
Our habits insulate us from pain; they also, by keeping us from discovering life with a
thinner skin, spare us the final pain of leaving pleasure by keeping us from realizing the
potential intensity of that pleasure. It is safer not to feel, but rarely does Beckett or Proust
allow a character such banal security.
Hemingway
Like Watt, The Sun Also Rises is a constructively repetitive novel about destructive
repetition. Jake Barnes's generation is "lost" to the extent that it moves on the surface of
life, goes from café to café, drinks the same drinks or, like the couple in "Hills like White
Elephants," tries new drinkslives perpetually unfulfilled and uncreative in a paradigm of
repetitive activity that accomplishes nothing: in a world where habit and novelty stagnate
and merge.
The love-encounters of Jake and Brett, in their terrible frustration, determined continually
to rebegin and never climaxlike any neurotic driveare their own specific hell:
"Oh, darling," Brett said, "I'm so miserable."
I had that feeling of going through something that has all happened before. "You were happy a
minute ago."
The drummer shouted: "You can't two time"
 Page 24
I had the feeling as in a nightmare of it all being something repeated, something I had been through
and that now I must go through again.16

The scenes with Brett are intense in their repetition just as the scenes in the cafés are
dissipating in theirs. The reason that the repetition in the former scenes is felt stronger
each time and in the latter is felt less is that the love-meetings generate tension but do not
release it, while the more pointless daily activity of the expatriates is antidramatic, sapping
energy rather than building it to some romantic or creative catharsis. Even the ''dramatic"
fights and affairs are boringnovelty of which one tires.
Jake's full-blooded impotence cannot have its tension reduced; no routine can dispel his
frustration. Thus he is our best observer of the role of destructive repetition in the lives of
othersperhaps using repetition in his lean prose as a sort of revenge of the damned, using
it stylistically to emphasize the persistence of life, the reality of reality, since for him there
is no escape from "the suffering of being." Routine makes his conscious conscious.
It is generally true of Hemingway's love-writing that love that can be fulfilled will be
frustrated, either before
16 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner's, 1926); reference is to the
Scribner Library paperback edition, p. 64.
 Page 25
or after fulfillment. Jake Barnes is castrated from the beginning. The narrator of A
Farewell to Arms, slow to open up to his lover, is indirectly guilty of her childbed death
and ends the novel alone and more wounded than he could ever have been had he not let
down his emotional guard.17
Hemingway's tough style is the index of his withdrawal and fear, the hardness he throws
onto experience. None of his major works is free from projections of phallic guilt;
perhaps this accounts for his popularity in our industrial, nuclear age. Henry kills
Catherine. The Old Man's fish is eaten. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, where Robert Jordan
comes as close to fulfillment as any Hemingway character since Nick Adams (but see
"The End of Something," "A Very Short Story," "Cross Country Snow"), after the tough
capable hero has won the boyish unwinnable woman (formerly prostituted by
superaggressive fascists), and after Hemingway has lost control of his style in lavish
description of the transcendent event, and after the final dynamite orgasm has succeeded,
the fellow is killed. It is like the Czech film Closely Watched Trains without a sense of
humor. Jake Barnes is frustrated but safe. His feelings are free to pressure-cook forever,
like those of the inhibited romantic (Werther, Yeats).
The problem of killing our feelings before they
17 But the prose stays tougha final defense, and an indication that Henry is covering his wounds as
he narrates the story.
 Page 26
threaten us is general. Few writers since Whitman have been able to consider how great
are the tensions and implications of a touch; even for the narrator of Song of Myself it is
"too much." And just as repetitions, in the construction and reinforcement of routine, dull
our awareness and keep us from pain in our daily lives, they can keep us from
experiencing with the intensity that is there already, in the instant and in ourselves, our
moments of love. Hemingway uses repetition constructively, in style and plot, to reinforce
the solidity of his objects, emotionssuch as they emergeand preoccupations; he castrates
his characters not with repetition but with some personal plot-linked idiosyncrasy. The
state his characters are in after he has castrated them, however, is analogous to the state
brought about in the emotional memory by a process of destructive repetition that I
choose to call "falsification of reality." The endan inability to feel completely without
some neutralization either of the object or of the subjectis similar.
The Falsification of Reality
Freud pointed out that by repeating an experience we may become master of it; he
described a child's game of throwing away certain favorite toys again and again, an
activity through which the child overcame his own fears of rejections.18 Repetition in this
case is operating
18 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 3236.
 Page 27
to remove the emotional content from a mental experience. As I shall attempt to show
later, beginning an experience or its description over and over can have the effect of
discovering or strengthening the reality of that experience; but in the human memory,
repetition more often than not is the destroyer and not the saver: a neutralizer, habituator,
and falsifier.
According to Proust we have two sorts of memory. When we try actively to remember
something, that is voluntary memory; and when something comes into our head without
our prompting, that is involuntary memory. When Marcel tastes the madeleine and
remembers Combray, that is involuntary memory. When he tries to recreate an experience
of involuntary memory he has just hadstepping on an uneven cobblestone and flashing to
Veniceand is unable to, and feels the reality of that involuntarily summoned past fading,
that is the action and destructiveness of voluntary memory.
Beckett interpreted the fading of the involuntarily remembered reality not so much as the
action of voluntary memory as that of habit: the system of repressions that keeps us from
the pain of experience. Leaning to unbutton his boot, Marcel remembers his grandmother,
realizes in pain who she was and that she is dead:
But already will, the will to live, the will not to suffer, Habit, having recovered from its momentary
paralysis, has laid the foundations of its evil and necessary structure,
 Page 28
and the vision of his grandmother begins to fade and to lose that miraculous relief and clarity that no
effort of deliberate remoration can impart or restore.19

Voluntary memory protects us from intensity, whether the intense instant is one of
remembering or of living; this is in effect an instance of memory protecting us from itself.
"Efforts at deliberate remoration" constitute voluntary "repetitions," which cannot create
the true, involuntarily triggered subjective repetition. Whether this is the effect of habit or
of more neurotic systems of repression, the reality of the vision is equally lost.
We may bring voluntary memory into play on purpose to remove the threatening
component of an experience. We may remember something frightening so many times
that it will no longer be frightening, just as the child's game gave him mastery over his
fears of rejection. Often, however, this is a game not of mastery but of submission.
There are some things that the more we try to remember, the more we are unable toand
the more we succeed in remembering, the more we drain. A vision such as Marcel's of his
grandmother may come involuntarily, but it is possible, by trying immediately after such a
flash to capture "that miraculous relief and clarity" voluntarily, to set seal after seal on the
experienceto
19 Beckett, Proust, p. 43.
 Page 29
to flatten it, in fact to kill it. Attempting to repeat an experience in memory makes accurate
re-experience impossible. We have to remember something less than real; to remember
without "the suffering of being," we have to falsify. Once this intense reality has been
taken out of the memory, however, we feel the natural urge to know what it is we have
forgotten; the more secretly assured we are that felt repetition has been blocked, the more
ardent our efforts at re-evocation become.
Writing about something real, or something that is real in one's imagination, is similar to
repeatedly remembering anything. For an artist to describe a scene in his head, the scene
must be called up many times until the proper words for it are found. By that time the
artist is lucky if he can at all remember the scene as he first conceived it. What is more
likely is that what he has substituted for its reality on paper has also taken the place of the
original fantasy in his head. The effect is just as completely the fictionalization of reality
when he turns a mental realitythe fantasy, the story, the past, the idea of the emotioninto a
delimited captured structure on paper as when he performs the same examining and
describing and rearranging disservice in memory. We take our pasts and what we do to
them is exactly analogous to the half-accurate art of autobiography.
Formulated, the experience has the reality of a formulation. Spinoza, Ethics, V: "An
emotion ceases to
 Page 30
be an emotion the moment we form a clear idea of it." It is art now, or adapted memorya
process of substitution that is the basis of much art; and the better the substitution, the
better the artthe worse the chances of the accurate survival of the experience. Genet: "The
work flames and its model dies."20
Say one word to yourself thirty times"meaning," for example, or your name.21 It loses its
definition, becomes abstract and absurd. It also becomes a religious tool: once it has lost
its literal associations, it addresses the silence. Now remember one memory many times.
We are in a psychic variant of the Principle of Indeterminacy, of which a concise
description follows:
This principle, which was formulated by Werner Heisenberg (in 1927), and which plays a
fundamental role in quantum mechanics states that it is impossible to specify or determine
simultaneously both the position and velocity of a particle as accurately as is wished. It is, to be
sure, possible to fix either of these quantities as precisely as desired, but only at a price, for the
greater the precision in one, the greater the inevitable lack of definiteness in the other.22

20 Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, Black Cat,
1967), P. 244.
21 After finishing this book I ran across Diane Wakoski's brilliant poem, "Filling the Boxes of Joseph
Cornell" (Inside the Blood Factory, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968), which says all of this in its
own way.
22Encyclopaedia Britannica (1953), XXII, 679: "Uncertainty Principle."
 Page 31
To extrapolate metaphorically: it is possible to remember either the physical component of
an experience, or the mental, but not both. In a Hemingway world, one can successfully
do or vulnerably feel. The falsification of reality in art or memory comes about from the
attempt at repetition, the action of voluntarily remembering; by trying to "perceive" the
event again, we change it. Similarly, in photographing sub-atomic particles, it is necessary
either to bombard those particles with other particles or to deprive them of some of their
energy, so that the measuring inevitably changes the object measured, besides making
perfectly accurate measurement impossible:
It is to be emphasized that in making observations on a system, it is necessary to exchange energy
and momentum with it. This exchange of necessity spoils the original properties of the system. The
resulting lack of precision with which these properties can be measured is the crux of the
uncertainty principle. In the microscope example, for instance, the momentum of the particle was
rendered uncertain by the impact with the light quantum by which it was being observed.23

Proust almost offers us a way out of this dilemma through the invocation of involuntary
memory: we can re-experience an eventrecapture the pastwhen that event simply pops up
in front of us as something we had
23Ibid., p. 680.
 Page 32
"forgotten" and which had accidentally been associatively evoked. But to go after it and
try to hold onposition and velocityis like holding the hand of someone who has just died.
In A Farewell to Arms and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to assure possession of the
woman is to lose her. Orpheus' art may get him so close to Eurydice that he can bring her
back to life, but neither his singing nor his looking can give him possession of her, alive,
once she has died. We must assume that what Marcel does in his projected novel (and
what Proust did in the novel we read) is not to put his "life in Time" accurately into print,
but rather to demonstrate to others how they have lives in time larger than they had
suspected.
Writing, then, is often a way of saving Time for othersreaders, charactersat the expense of
the reality of the writer's own experience. The autobiographical artistand in falsifying our
memories each of us is an autobiographeris a kind of Christ. His is the sacrifice that
renews time, even as he is intensely aware of death. For to watch one's memories flatten,
abstract, and dis-integrate before the falsifying attempts at possession is to become aware
of the continual dying of the present, the infinitesimal extent of what-is-real-now. It is
possible that repetition in art can turn this infinitesimal into an infinite, but that is for later
discussion. The process I have called falsification of reality shows us that we are always
dying, that the past is never accessible, even as on-call memory, and is as speculative and
 Page 33
"mental" as the future. That we are always dying is the tyranny of the present tense.
Personal memory does not, any more than art or children, keep us alive. The answer time
offers us, and the gift of the present tense, is that we are always living. It is entirely up to
us whether our time is always ending or always beginning.
The remainder of this book is devoted to a discussion of constructive repetition. It should
become clear that emphasizing with near-repetitions does not necessarily free one either
from the destructive action of time or from the implications of destructive repetition in
that sort of literature which subscribes to the notions of past and future. I use
"constructive" in the sense of contributing to the internal power of the work. There are
two aesthetics of constructive repetition, differentiated by their attitudes toward memory.
The first, involved with the concepts of past and future, and believing in the integrity of
memory, builds repetitions one on the other toward some total effect; this "repetition with
remembering" takes place in cumulative or "building time." The second, considering the
present the only artistically approachable tense, deals with each instant and subject as a
new thing, to such an extent that the sympathetic reader is aware less of repetition than of
continuity; this "repetition without remembering" takes place in "continuing time.'' It is to
the discussion of the first of these aesthetics that the following chapter is dedicated.
 Page 34

2.
Emphasizing, Echoing, Building, and Complicating
I have said this now three times. If I were capable, as I wish I were, I could say it once in such a way
that it would be there in its complete awefulness. Yet knowing, too, how it is repeated upon each of
them, in every day of their lives, so powerfully, so entirely, that it is simply the natural air they
breathe, I wonder whether it could ever be said enough times.
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
I have called the time that moves from past to present to future and has history, time that
builds, and the time that is always present, time that continues. In literature and film, these
time senses are distinguishable by their uses of repetition. Since this chapter is about
building time, it deals necessarily with artists who repeat something now to make you
remember something then and set you up for something that is coming later; who build
one use of a word on top of another; who draw contrasts and assume you will remember
how a word or image was used last and will draw conclusions
 Page 35
from the difference of context; who emphasize. Their art is primarily one of repetition
with variation.
From Emphasis to Experience
Throughout Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee is trying to say something that cannot
be said: he is trying to say life, and the outlet his frustration takes is repetition. He says it
three times because he cannot "say it once in such a way that it would be there in its
complete awefulness." His only recourse is to insist the audience into his state of mind, to
fill them with his frustration at what he cannot say, to repeat his points in an attempt at
transforming emphasis into experience: "the natural air they breathe."
This is clearly the limiting case of emphasis. Most outright repetition simply aims to make
us remember something, without considering whether accurate human experience is being
communicated. Advertising, for example, depends almost entirely on repetition. Where
the advertising budget is high, the dedicated television viewer may sit through the same
demonstration of the stain-removing power of a certain cleanser or the aphrodisiac marvel
of that brunette's toothpaste twenty times in a week. Most of us do not attend to this, but
experience it as static; nevertheless many children are growing up singing commercials to
themselves.
 Page 36
Propaganda works the same way. It is sometimes harder to turn off.
Fortunately emphasis serves masters other than these communications nightmares, and it
is instructive to note how many of those masters defend themselves in advance against the
charge of being repetitions. In Joseph Andrews, for example, Fielding assures us several
times that he does not want to repeat anything unnecessarily:
What the female readers are taught by the memoirs of Mrs. Andrews is so well set forth in the
excellent essays or letters prefixed to the second and subsequent editions of that work, that it would
be here a needless repetition.1
The tone is of course ironic, even suggesting that Richardson's prefixed explanations of
Pamela were needless repetitions, but his sentence does imply that not all repetitions are
needless. Over and over we hear the protestation, "I am more vexed on your account than
on my own," we watch the elite manipulate the courts, and we laugh at the dressing-down
of affectation. We are shown one character after another who pretends to be higher than
humanityfrom the lady in the coach who is offended at Joseph's nakedness to the inn-
keeper's wife who, although unwilling to lose money by helping a dying poor man,
professes to be a good
1 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Book I, Chapter I. Cf. Book I, Chapter 14.
 Page 37
Christian. The characters must frequently choose whether to extend credit to people in
need. The juxtaposition of honesty and pretense is repeated as often as the novel will
bear, as are the discussions of vanity and charity, virtue, and the role of the clergy.
But Fielding uses repetition for comic as well as didactic effects. It may be that in comedy
we expect a character to act the same way most of the time; we feel we see through a
character more surely and recognize him faster. So he may be known to us principally
through a characterizing joke or costume, which is repeated as often as the character is
before us. Mrs. Slipslop's affected speech has real comic vigor at every appearance:
"Yes madam" replied Mrs. Slipslop with some warmth; "do you intend to result my passion? Is it
not enough, ungrateful as you are, to make no return to all the favours I have done you; but you must
treat me with ironing? Barbarous monster! how have I deserved that my passion should be resulted
and treated with ironing?"2
This method of characterization through presentation of a repeated trait is of course older
than the commedia dell'arte and was later used expertly by Dickens and Chekhov, but
Fielding is so good at it that I prefer to take the example from him.
Manipulation of repetition for poetic value often depends
2Joseph Andrews, Book I, Chapter 6.
 Page 38
on those "artful" variations that prevent a work from seeming repetitious. Thus the work
of Alexander Pope becomes a comedy of symmetry and opposition, as in this line from
the Dunciad:
Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too.
One is particularly impressed by the way Pope skirts and maneuvers repetition, like a
matador controlling a close pass of the horns. The assumption here is that outright
repetition betrays a failure of invention, marking a point where the poem has failed to
advance. But repetition is an undeniable source of lyrical strength, as these lines from
Milton's Lycidas demonstrate:
But O the heavy change, now thou art gon,
Now thou art gon, and never must returns!
The Old Testament offers us what are at once some of the finest and most familiar
examples of the beauty and strength of repetition. Hebrew verse is commonly
distinguished from Hebrew prose simply by the bilateral symmetry of its lines; one half of
a verse echoes the other:
Naked came I out of my mother's womb,
And naked shall I return thither;
Job 1: 213

3 All Old Testament quotations are taken from The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1917).
 Page 39
The following verse from Ecclesiastes gives us the sense that when truth is being written
about, it can stand being looked at from another direction. Changing the terms only
enlarges the reality of the subject, makes the point firmer and more general:
He that observeth the wind shall not sow;
And he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.
Ecclesiastes 11:4
In Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, however, we discover a method of repeating from
chapter to chapter that goes beyond simple parallelism. We are familiar in the works of
the Prophets with the insistence that makes such a point as "Return, O Jerusalem" many
times; we are also used to the sort of inclusiveness that repeats entire histories from I and
II Samuel and I and II Kings to I and II Chronicles. Neither are we surprised to find, as a
method of characterization, exact repetition of actions within a hero's life: Samson tells his
first wife the solution to the strong/sweet riddle and is betrayed by her loyalty to her tribe
but triumphs anyway long before he tells Delilah the secret of his strength and is betrayed
by her but wins anyway. But the very subject of Ecclesiastes is repetition, and we find not
only some of the finest examples of parallelistic verse in that book, but also a deliberate
activity of "returning," re-examining a situation until a solution is
 Page 40
discovered. We have first the repetition, like a tonic in classical music, of the key phrase:
Vanity of vanities, saith Koheleth;
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. [1:2]
Koheleth's actual poem, which is presented in a prose frame (1:1 and 12:913), begins and
ends with those words that seal it like a circle, and emphasizes its echoes:
For all is vanity and a striving after wind. [2:17]
This also is vanity. [2:23]
For childhood and youth are vanity. [11:10]
Observations are repeated in an especially poignant way: Koheleth is pictured as
continually rediscovering them. He returnsfrom not considering, or from an unacceptable
conclusion, or from the end of the last instant of consideringand considers again.
Wherefore I perceived that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his
works; for that is his portion; for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?
But I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and behold
the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their
oppressors there was power, but they had no comforter.
 Page 41
Wherefore I praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive;
but better than them both is he that hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work
that is done under the sun.
Again, I considered all labour and all excelling in work, that it is a man's rivalry with his
neighbour. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
Then I returned and saw vanity under the sun.
[3:224:4; 4:7]
The investigation begins again and again. Neither the truth of the observations nor the
pain Koheleth feels are mitigated by this persistent re-exploration. These returnings never
threaten to become repetitious, because each rediscovery is preceded by a conclusion that,
closing the matter for us, frees us to experience each repetition as something new.
In Song of Songs we find a variant of investigative repetition in the verse:
I rose to open to my beloved;
And my hands dropped with myrrh,
And my fingers with flowing myrrh,
Upon the handles of the bar. [5:5]
The central lines are repeated not only for symmetry in the two halves of the verse; there
is emotional reinforcement in the fact that the feeling of flowing was dwelt on, was
noticed twice. I am reminded of a scene
 Page 42
near the end of Agnes Varda's film Le Bonheur (1966), where the shot that shows the
husband embracing the drowned body of his wife is repeated many times; the event is
coming under scrutiny and is showing itself so large as to find one portrayal insufficient.
The husband can't realize what has happened and goes into a kind of temporal shock;
repeating the scene signifies the intensity of his observation and emotion. At the same
time, the director is looking hard at this moral crisis, so that the repeated shot both
communicates the husband's pain and calls the audience's attention to the ambiguity and
importance of the embrace.
Finally, Song of Songs is laced with recurring situations, recurring argumentsmost
notably the several searchings in the night by the woman for the man, and the
punctuating:
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
By the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field,
That ye awaken not, nor stir up love,
Until it please. [3:5]4

4 In The New English Bible this verse has an entirely different interpretation, but still serves in a
sense to punctuate the poem. It is now considered to be spoken by the bridegroom, and to read:
I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles and the hinds of the field:
Do not rouse her, do not disturb my love
until she is ready. [Or, "while she is resting"]
[New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971]
 Page 43
This particular verse operates in much the same way as the refrain in a ballad. It makes a
point of which the entire story is an illustration; even if we cannot really understand the
full relevance of the moral until we have heard the whole story, we are kept to a definite
viewpoint throughout the rendition. We attach new material to the refrain as it comes to
us, as we would clip a sail to a mast.
Thus throughout ''The Barring of the Door"a ballad about an old couple who so
stubbornly keep to a pact of silence that they allow their house to be ransacked by
highwaymen before the old man speaks outand loses the pact, and has to bar the doorthe
refrain reminds us that the keystone to this story is "the barring of our door well." In
"Lord Randal," an exchange of dialogue between a mother and her son, who was
poisoned by eating eels while hunting, verges on the absurd as the mother asks questions
and the son answers her, interjecting each time:
" mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down."5

It is not even necessary that Randal die in this ballad; we got the point long before. But his
dying is not the point of the ballad in any case. The importance of this
5 Child 12A, in Sargent and Kittredge, eds., English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Cambridge
Edition (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1904), p. 22.
 Page 44
exchange, we find, is in the juxtaposition of the urgency of Randal's sickness and the
decisions he makes about what to leave to whom. This is a juxtaposition whose repetition
in each stanza does not exhaust itself all the way to the resolution, where Randal leaves
his castle to his mother, his money to his sister, his real estate to his brother, and:
"What d'ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?
What d'ye leave to your true-love, my handsome young man?"
"I leave her hell and fire; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down."
The true-love, of course, is the one who cooked him the eels. A ballad can be considered
resolved when the changing material at the head of each verse reaches the solidity of the
unchanging refrain: when novelty touches repetition. When their lines have equal
confidence and completion, the two halves of the form have come together. Real
resolution in a ballad, then, comes about not when the story-line is satisfiedthat is one
way the changing line itself is internally resolvedbut when the two formal elements are of
equal strength, when the changing attains the being of the fixed.
Movement in "Lord Randal" is between the near-still and the nearer-still.6 If we see the
interest in
6 The refrain, of course, does alter in context; it is received differently depending on how much the
listener has learned at the end of each verse about the story. There are many near-repetitions in the
"changing" line (in each verse, Randal is asked twice what he will leave to the subject of that verse,
and the act of inquiring repeats in every verse) and many contextual developments in the
"unchanging" line (which may, in fact, change its text, as at the end of "The Elfin Knight"). Let us
say that the "unchanging" line is nearer to repetition.
 Page 45
change and "things of this world" as Western (vanity) and the interest in the unchanging
and "movements without motion" (as in the Tao Tê Ching) as Eastern, then we may find
in the ballad an archetype that educates us by leading us out of the illusion of the
importance of change. The Hindu concept of samsara reminds us that the "sorrow and
impurity of the world"7 is a delusion and vanity. We educate ourselves out of it in many
ways, one of which is the chanting of a repetitive poem or mantra. This pure repetition
charms the mind and allows it to see past the illusion of change to the truth (unity). The
two lines of the ballad also conform to two differing notions of time: time that has
history, and time that tends to move only in the present. The role of repetition as a
deliverer from history, and ultimately from timea power it reveals in the mantrais taken up
in the final chapters of this book.
Refrain is the spine of the ballad. Other poetic devices, which do not persist so
emphatically but still introduce elements of repetition into literature, are
7 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1962), p.
351.
 Page 46
rhyme and alliteration. Both could have applied to them the definition Whitehead gave
rhythm: "a fusion of sameness and novelty." All three tend to unify, even when used
uninventively,8 for the repetition of sound, no matter what its "meaning," is the glue of
poetry. Used well, these techniques are rarely monotonous ("repetitious").
Here is a different instance of repetition's power to emphasize a point: Sergei Eisenstein's
formulation of a theory of film editing.
By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cellthe shot?
By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision.9

The Russian director's prose here offers a clue to his manner of emphasis in film.
Eisenstein not only builds his montage out of the dialectical juxtaposition of conflicting
shots, but also repeats parts of scenes, starting over and stretching time for emphasis.
In the "Raising of the Bridges" sequence from October (1928), a workers' demonstration
is broken up by machine-gun fire, and many are killed as they try to flee across the
drawbridges that link the workers' district
8 Compare rock's primordial rhyming of "love" with "of"not much resonance, but it's definitely
song.
9 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. Jan Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949), p. 37.
 Page 47
with the core of the city; then the bridges are raised. A dead woman is lifted with one side
of a bridge, a horse and carriage with another. The dead horse and the lush long hair of
the woman, each hanging over the midpoint of a bridge, repeat each other graphically.
The bridge-halves rise, begin to rise, begin to rise again, rise, and rise, until the woman
slides back, the horse falls from its shafts into the river, and the carriage crashes to the
street. As the extended and then lifted hair and horse is a repetition in composition, the
rebegun raising of the bridges is a repetition in time. This is a sequence that begins the
viewer in it again as it begins again.10
We find a similar expansion of space and timeand intensification of emotionin the Odessa
Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin (1925), where a dying mother falls against her
baby's carriage and the carriage starts to move three times before it actually carries the
child down the steps to its death, and whereas the soldiers march down those steps, firing
at the citizens who scatter in all directionsthe actual number of steps separating the
soldiers from their victims can be seen to be descended many times over, if one can
detach himself from this extraordinary sequence long enough to count.
Eisenstein's montage transfigures many techniques in
10 This seems to me to be the exact effect of the lines from Song of Songs: "And my hands dropped
with myrrh, / And my fingers with flowing myrrh." The hands are noticed twice, and thus in a sense
occur twice in the work; the effect of this repetition is to enlarge our experience of time, to begin us
again.
 Page 48
addition to repetition; yet it is possible to relate his theory of editing to V. I. Pudovkin's
(conventionally considered its alternative) on the basis of the two directors' conceptions
of repetition.
If Eisenstein's use of repetition in conflict-montage may be called expressive, that of his
great contemporary, Pukovkinwho believed shots should analogically complement one
anothermay be called didactic.11 Writing about Griffith's Way Down East (1920), for
example, Pudovkin particularly praised the way a snowstorm repeated and clarified the
"storm" in the heroine's heart.12 In Pudovkin's masterpiece, Mother (1926), there are
many instances of parallel, rather than dialectical, montage, of which the most famous is
the crosscutting of a protest march with a river in thaw. Though his concern remained
with problems of emphasis, Pudovkin was aware also of the effectiveness of outright
repetition of entire sequences, as he makes clear in this discussion of a screenplay
submitted to his studio:
Often it is interesting for the scenarist especially to emphasize the basic theme of the scenario. For
this purpose exists the method of reiteration. Its nature can easily be demonstrated by an example. In
an anti-religious scenario
11 Of course I am speaking only of those of their montages that used repetition; it doesn't seem
reasonable to consider all conflict-montage "expressive repetition."
12 V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique, trans. Ivor Montagu (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1935), p. 101.
 Page 49
that aimed at exposing the cruelty and hypocrisy of the Church in employ of the Tsarist
régime the same shot was several times repeated: a church-bell slowly ringing and,
superimposed upon it, the title: "The sound of bells sends into the world a message of
patience and love." This piece appeared whenever the scenarist desired to emphasize the
stupidity of patience, or the hypocrisy of the love thus preached.13
Another way of saying that repetition emphasizes is to say that it makes intense and solid
through persistence.14 Repeated enough, a word or idea or phrase or
13Ibid., pp. 4950.
14 This seems to be the sort of emphasis attempted in one of the greatest repetition films, Yoko Ono
Number Four (1966): a ninety-minute succession, in black and white, of nude human buttocks walking
away from the camera while they are on a treadmill and the camera is fixedgiving the impression of
walking in place, or of four gray areas shifting in relation to each otherabout twenty seconds per
person. The first five minutes seem very long (and it is at this point that most of the audience leaves),
but soon the extraordinary quality of the visual repetition itself takes hold, and the remainder of the
film seems to take place very quickly. Number Four can be a revelatory humanistic experience, or an
exercise in abstraction, but whether one attends to the four abstract, shifting areas or the spectacle of
humanitynot to mention the clever soundtrack: a montage of the rationalizations for or against taking
part in the film, recorded in the room adjoining that in which the filming was taking place, and spoken
by the hundreds of Londoners who answered an ad for "intellectual bottoms"one is readily convinced
of the reality and importance of what at first seems an uninteresting subject.
 Page 50
image or name will come to dominate us to such an extent that our only defenses are to
concede its importance or turn off the stimulus completely. Here the art consists in
carrying the audience along in phase with the build of the repetitionsdominating the
audience and relaxing the build just before it becomes unbearable.15
Nevertheless, emphasis is nearly always expressive of frustration at the inadequacy of the
simple statement to convey experiencethat is, to give one the sense of having experienced
the truth. We can only hint at what we cannot saycan only emphasize until emphasis itself
communicates. John Donne's Sermon LXXVII, from the Folio of 1640, dares to express
our sense of the inexpressible; its method is repetition.
"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God"; but to fall out of the hands of the living
God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.
that this God at last should let this soul go away as a smoke, as a vapor, as a bubble; and that then
this soul cannot be a smoke, a vapor, nor a bubble but must lie in darkness
15Still, experience is largely a matter of bearing the unbearable, of moving with the overwhelming;
persistence past the conventional point of saturation can result in communications of an almost
extraliterary sort. Most readers find Gertrude Stein incomprehensible because she refused to
"build"; her repetitions strike them as a barrage, a frequency that perhaps her little dog could hear,
but that they cannot. Of course it seems "unbearable" precisely because they expect her to build.
 Page 51
as long as the Lord of light is light itself, and never spark of that light reach to my soul; what Tophet
is not paradise, what brimstone is not amber, what gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the
worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage-bed to this damnation, to be secluded
eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God?16

This wholly different kind of hell is insisted into existence. The only way Donne could
possibly cap such a build is with direct insistent re-use of the same word: eternally,
eternally, eternally. Here we may compare Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, whose
characters are driven, in their attempts to evoke the reality of Thomas Sutpen, to furious
outpourings of involuted rhetoric, and which can end, in frenzied ambiguity, only with
repetition: "'I dont hate it I dont hate it,' he said. I dont hate it he thought I dont. I dont! I
dont hate it! I dont hate it!" When the subject is beyond direct expression, what one
builds with is almost less important to the emotional communication than the fact that one
is building. No single word can contain this urgency; the word must be used so that the
urgency speaks through it. When Lear cried, "Howl, howl, howl!" his language was
attempting to transcend language,
16 Text from Witherspoon and Warnke, Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 2d ed. (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 105. The sentence excerpted here is over four hundred
words in length.
 Page 52
entering a world where the emphasis of "Never, never, never, never, never" was
inadequate to convey "never." Filled as it is with echoes and doubles, King Lear may
serve by itself as a laboratory in the uses of constructive repetition.
King Lear
Perhaps the first thing one notices about King Lear is the way certain words return, often
in different contexts, and the larger working-out of this technique in the presence of a
subplot that varies and amplifies but virtually repeats the main plot. Sometimes it seems as
if most of the people on stage are projections of Learnotably the Fool, who appears and
disappears without warning in that part of the play where Lear's mental stability is in
question, and Gloucester, who even after seeing how Lear is deceived by Goneril and
Regan and how he turns against his honest Cordelia is himself deceived by Edmund and
turns against the innocent Edgar. Gloucester's physical blindness repeats on a less tragic
level Lear's lack of insight. The innocent Edgar's adaptability contrasts with the innocent
Cordelia's rigidity. Goneril, Regan, and Edmund "all marry in an instant." Lear's and
Edmund's invocations of Nature as their goddess call attention to each other. Kent and
Gloucester and Cornwall's three servants are models of loyal service, set respectively
against Oswald, Cornwall,
 Page 53
andin so far as Cornwall's first servant, attempting to stop his master from doing evil, is a
variant of KentOswald again. We are made aware of the difference between characters
when those we would not ordinarily think of in terms of each other act out similar scenes
in different ways, as when France makes Cordelia his, and Cornwall makes Edmund his,
with similar wordsthe one a meeting of the virtuous, the other a meeting of the vicious:
: Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor,
FRANCE

Most choice forsaken, and most loved despised,

Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon. [1.1]
CORNWALL: For you, Edmund,
Whose virtue and obedience doth this instant
So much commend itself, you shall be ours.
Natures of such deep trust we shall much need;
You we first seize on. [2.1.]
The success of this allusive technique requires that the audience have the entire play in its
head throughout the performance, for the play reflects itself at every turn and makes most
of its moral points by calling attention to difference, often through near-repetition.
(Similarly, we experience the problems of action, vengeance, and succession in Hamlet in
great depth as a result of being able to compare, in Fortinbras, Laertes, and Hamlet, three
variants of its unintegrated hero.)
 Page 54
We become aware not simply of the differences between characters but also of the
complex interrelations and implications of the play's themes through the repetition of key
words and images. We may take ''dark" as an example, simply because there isn't room to
examine the omnipresent "nature."
Lear, announcing his intention to divide his kingdom, says, "Meantime we shall express
our darker purpose" (1.1). He means "hidden," but "darker" strikes the tonic of a theme
that is developed through every association of blindness, evil, and folly of which
metaphoric condensation in this play is capable. Lear's faults in the first scene are
irresponsibility and lack of insight. He does "wrong" (1.5) and "evil" (1.1). When Goneril
"asks" him to give up half his knights, Lear cries, "Darkness and devils!" (1.4).
Addressing the Gloucester she is later to help blind, Regan hints:
Thus out of season, threading dark-eyed night,
Occasions, noble Gloucester, of some prize,
Wherein we must have use of your advice. [2.1]
There is some echo to this night visit in Kent's lines, during the storm:
The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark
And make them keep their caves.[3.2]
 Page 55
Edgar, as Poor Tom, tells Lear in the same breath that he broke oaths and "did the act of
darkness" with his mistress (3.4). He continues this emphasis with the conventional yet
transfigured, "The prince of darkness is a gentleman." Blinded, Gloucester cries, "All dark
and comfortless," and sees the vengeance he expects Edmund to execute as light ("sparks
of nature''3.7). Finally the link between Lear's lack of insight and Gloucester's blindness,
and between the darkness of sin and error and that of their attendant punishments, is
forged with Edgar's words:
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes. [5.3]
Obviously "dark" now carries the resonance that a playfull of interrelated usages has
given it.
Entire lines as well as words can call attention to each other, as in the paralleled "seizings"
of Cordelia by France and of Edmund by Cornwall. The most clearcut example of such a
parallel follows:
LEAR: what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
CORDELIA:Nothing, my lord. [1.1]
 Page 56
GLOUCESTER: What paper were you reading?
EDM UND: Nothing, my lord. [1.2]

The ironic contrast between Cordelia's honesty and Edmund's deceit is made even more
obvious than their actions make it, by this virtual repetition of an exchange.
But the repetitions for which Lear is most famous are those direct successions of words
by the identical words, which give the dialogue its authentic tone of madness, frustration,
and grief.
: I'll put't in proof,
LEAR

And when I have stolen upon these son-in-laws,

Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! [4.6]
Lear's madness takes away the space between his words. Edmund's "bastardy" outburst is
the first of these driven lines. We see that "base" obsesses him, that he is anxious about it,
the more he asserts the advantages of bastardy. The word melts before us into Edmund's
very personal meanings for it, even as Edmund's baseness is impressed upon us:
Why bastard? Wherefore base,
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? Bastardy base? Base? [1.2]
 Page 57
Lear's repeating is the principal way Shakespeare expresses the old man's madness and
pain. Again, what is beyond our expression is most forcefully put in a syntax of pure
emphasis.
: And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?
LEAR

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,
Look there, look there [5.3]
To summarize the many uses of repetition in King Lear: There is the succession of
identical words either to transcend language (Howl, howl, howl!) or to bring out that
word's special poetic nature (Lurk, lurk).
There is the repetition of similar-sounding lines that suggest each other and call attention
to their differences, as the following three lines bind and morally interilluminate their
speakers and their points:
LEAR: So young, and so untender?
CORDELIA: So young, my lord, and true. [1.1]

REGAN : So white, and such a traitor? [3.7]

There is the exact repetition of words in different contexts, which we are thus forced to
interrelate. When
 Page 58
Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms, Kent asks whether this is the promised end
(of the play, of the world), and Edgar answers him in words which directly echo
Edmund's:
: Brother, I advise you to the best. Go armed. I am no honest man if there be any good
EDM UND

meaning toward you. I have told you what I have seen and heard; but faintly, nothing like the image
and horror of it. [1.2]
KENT: Is this the promised end?
EDGAR: Or image of that horror? [5.3]

There is the basic repetition of parallel plots, and corollary to that, the repetition of certain
kinds of confrontation. Thus the onslaught of "Who's there?" in Acts One and Three
continually calls the audience's attention to the related problems of nature, disguise,
allegiance, and honesty.
Most demandingly, there are those words that carry the meanings they have acquired in
earlier contexts with them into their present and future contexts, immensely complicating
and interrelating the concerns and actions of the play, and pointing solutions within the
play to its problems:
GLOUCESTER: and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father. [1.2]
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GLOUCESTER : O madam, my old heart is cracked, it's cracked. [2.1]
LEAR: Crack Nature's moulds, all germains spill at once, That makes ingrateful man. [3.1]
EDGAR : His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life Began to crack. [5.3]
: Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for
LEAR
ever. [5.3]
Here the familial and elemental catastrophes that befall Lear and Gloucester are firmly
associated with the violation of natural ties, Lear's change in attitude toward his natural
bond to Cordelia is ironically emphasized, and the contrast between Gloucester's passivity
and Lear's rebellious rage is drawn from among these uses of the word "crack."
Miracle of the Rose
Jean Genet's novelized reminiscence, Miracle of the Rose, is as much about the
falsification of reality as it is about any of its other subjects: prison routine, the
transcendent beauty of crime, homosexual love, religion. It is also an outstanding example
of the generation of a mystical symbol through the artful manipulation of repetition. Genet
weaves his present in one
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prison into his past in others and his past loves into his present. He does not so much
repeat specific incidents as he dwells on similar situations; the swings between the prisons
Fontevrault and Mettray, and between the lovers Bulkaen and Divers, repeat so often as to
form the dominant texture of the work. By dwelling on his loves, Genet discovers that
their reality is being transformed into art, but instead of finding this upsetting, he glories
in it. The revelation of immortal beauty becomes a main theme.
He spoke again at great length about Villeroy, but a surprising thing happened: as he went on
talking, the image I had retained of my big shot grew dimmer instead of clearer. Divers adorned him
with qualities of which I was unaware. He referred several times to his powerful arms. Now,
Villeroy had very ordinary arms. Finally he dwelt on the way he dressed and then on his member,
which he said must have been something special since he had won and kept me. Gradually the old
image of Villeroy gave way to another one, a stylized one.17

Genet tells the story of his loves and illuminations over and over, and each time we come
closer to a real understanding
17 Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp.
157158. Copyright © 1966 by Grove Press, Inc. Copyright © 1951 and 1965 by Jean Genet.
Translation copyright © 1965 by Anthony Blond Limited. This and other quotations from this
translation are reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.
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of that (stylized) reality. We are in a painful but art-transformed world. The more Genet
talks or hears about his lovers and prisons, the more stylized they become to him and the
more definite in his work: the more real to us. The falsification of reality is, to him, part
of the transcendent character of art.
The story of Genet's loves is balanced by the continually returned-to story of Harcamone,
a prisoner whose execution closes the novel. Harcamone is an existential saint. Where the
reality of Bulkaen and other mortals is transformed upward into art, stylized by and into a
greater force, the reality of Harcamone is greater than that of art; the novel must strain all
boundsdwell again and again in a science of pain and detail on the past and the present,
the mortal and the immortal, the emotional and the impossiblein an attempt to touch the
reality of Harcamone. As narration transforms the lesser characters, Harcamone
transforms the novel. "Falsification of reality" operates on an entirely lower plane than
Harcamone's. Dwelling on his encounters with Harcamone, Genet does sometimes
experience that fading of the accurate image discussed in our last chapter; but it is only the
memory of the encounter that is smothered. Harcamone's reality, which stylizes art up to
its level, cannot be undermined: "Words have no power over Harcamone's image. They
will not exhaust it, for its matter is inexhaustible."18 But what language
18Ibid., p. 246.
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cannot exhaust, it has difficulty describing. Throughout the novel Genet tells us how
painful it is for him to say anything at all. Harcamone is beyond the reach of words even
as he is beyond their harm. "If I take leave of this book," Genet concludes, "I take leave
of what can be related. The rest is ineffable."19
Genet's novel dedicates itself to the capture, in language, of one complex living moment:
the incarnation of mystic criminal saintly beauty in Harcamone, in a vision Genet has
while lying with an old lover on the night of Harcamone's execution: a vision in which
Harcamone's judge, lawyer, chaplain, and executioner, abruptly the size of bedbugs, enter
Harcamone's mouth and search for the heart of his heart; in the deepest chamber a door
opens by itself and reveals "a red rose of monstrous size and beauty." Much of the aim of
the novel is to prepare a climate for the rose to reveal itselfto create a mood of the
ineffable. The miracle of the rose is pursued not "in time" but in an anti-temporal
labyrinthbuilt up to in a three-hundred-page architecture of interrelations, investigations,
flashbacks, and visions. Without actually repeating any scenes, the novel builds up a
tremendous tension as the repetitive pattern of transition proceeds. We feel by the end of
the work that we have experienced one moment, but we are not sure which one: it is an
experience that refracts eternity.
19Ibid., p. 344.
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Genet manipulates the reader's progress through this epiphany with his near-repetitions:
To speak of saintliness again in connection with transportation will set your teeth on edge, for they
are not used to an acid diet.20
The clue to Genet's anti-mask emerges when Genet discusses how Harcamone killed a
guard:
Since he avoided repetition, he was less aware of sinking into misfortune, for all too often people
overlook the suffering of the murderer who always kills in the same way (Wiedman and his bullet in
the back of the neck, etc.), since it is most painful to invent a new and difficult gesture.21

Repetition, then, makes us aware of our position; in this case it is associated with a
suffering of which most outsiders are unaware. Yet even as Harcamone discovers he has
sunk into misfortune, by the end of this repetitive work we as readers feel the immense
power of the rose apotheosis from having consciously or unconsciously gotten close to it
so often. Even though the miracle of the rose itself occurs only once, we have had our
teeth "set on edge" many times by the incidents and assumptions that anticipate itthe
prison as a mystic community,
20Ibid., p. 45.
21Ibid., pp. 6162.
 Page 64
bullets as flowers, chains as garlandsand the rose has taken on that quality of transcendent
mystery which E. K. Brown identifies with the expanding symbol in the work of Proust
and Forster.
Brown's essential thesis, which applies to Genet's novel quite as well as it did to Brown's
original subject, A Passage to India, reads:
To express what is both an order and a mystery rhythmic processes, repetitions with intricate
variations, are the most appropriate of idioms. Repetition is the strongest assurance an author can
give of order; the extraordinary complexity of the variations is the reminder that the order is so
involute that it must remain a mystery.22
Such an analysis poses problems of its own: the ineffable is not merely complicated.
Certainly the symbol of the rose takes on greater meaning, and its sense of being "both an
order and a mystery," through just such a use of repetition with variation. But Miracle of
the Rose gives a sense of something beyond the involute. As I shall attempt to show in the
next chapter, it is repetition, and not its complications, that tends to involve itself in the
concept and experience of eternity. I would like to conclude this chapter with a brief
consideration
22 E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, and London: Oxford
University Press, 1950), p. 115.
 Page 65
of pornography and the horror film, through which I hope to make this tendency to
timelessness clear.
Pornography and the Horror Film
As R. H. W. Dillard has pointed out,23 the great danger in the horror film is the failure of
death. Wolf Man, mummy, zombie, or vampire, the undead are doomed to rise from their
graves and continue a parody of life forever. Unable to die, they are doomed to repetition.
The sequel thus becomes a perfect expression of the threat, situation, and plight of the
horror object.
Most horror sequels simply extend the situation of their original; all the Frankenstein
films, for example, are linkedthe beginning of each sequel explains away the death that
occurred in the previous film. The Dracula films, on the other hand, honor the death of
the original Count but produce his relatives and victims, one after the other, as fresh
''draculas." Such sequels demonstrate the popularity of the formulaic more than the power
of repetition. One sequel-series, however, does deal in genuine repetition, and it deserves
serious consideration here.
The Mummy (1932) differs considerably from its sequels. The mummy, here called
ImhotepKharis in
23 R. H. W. Dillard, "Even a Man Who Is Pure at Heart: Poetry and Danger in the Horror Film," in
Man and the Movies, ed. W. R. Robinson (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).
 Page 66
the sequelsattempts to bring his dead love, the Princess Anckesenamon, back to life, and
is punished by the gods; later he attempts to reincarnate the princess in a living woman
and is punished again. The sequels to this film begin on new ground.
The Mummy's Hand (1940), The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The Mummy's Ghost (1944),
and The Mummy's Curse (1945) are nearly indistinguishable. The burning Tana leaves,
the dragging leg, and the consistent motivation of the mummyunder all those bandages we
remember the princess's lover, as we watch this parody of his defiance of deathdo not
change. In each version the priest controlling Kharis attempts to make the heroine
immortal like Kharis and flirts, to his own destruction, with the idea of making himself
immortal with her; it is this particular plot element whose recurrence makes the mummy
sequels feel more like repetitions, or variations on a theme, than the string of deaths and
resurrections undergone by the Frankenstein monster and the Wolf Man. The series even
has a happy ending, one that is very important for our purposes. In The Mummy's Ghost
the princess (now "Ananka") is reincarnated in a living woman (cf. The Mummy) when
Kharis attempts to embrace Ananka's mummy in an American museum, where it is on
exhibit. From the moment of this spiritual transfer, the living woman begins to age.
Finally, Kharis takes her away from the priest who has gone through the "Shall I make
myself immortal
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with her" routine and walks into quicksand. With every cut from the pursuing vigilantes
and the girl's American lover back to Kharis, we see her older, until the two lovers,
equally old, are united in death. It is interesting to note that this successful ending was
initiated by Kharis' attempt to embrace the real and original Ananka: that this attempt at
reuniting with the primary love object failed in itself, but made possible a resolution with
a new Ananka, a live woman who had aged, a rebegun mummy. Clearly this film was
made not to have a sequel, and only the demands of the box office, the popularity of the
mummy as a cinematic image, and the essential pleasure of repetition, can explain the
release of the later Mummy's Curse.
The mummy films did not exhaust themselves in the search for novelty which weakened
and misled the Frankenstein series. The mummy's image, motive, and machinery do not
change; a full-fledged myth is allowed to reappear with all its intrinsic force. Whatever
variations do occur, usually in the identity and location of the victims and priests, do not
upstage the central figure and are in harmony with his story.
The compulsive variation associated with the circumstances of sexual encounter in
pornography may reflect an aesthetic problem rather than a sexual one. An artist who
cannot make repetition interesting in itself, or who cannot project urgency and force into
his writing of the
 Page 68
sex act, may rely on novelty. Pornography must not bore. Since pornography
conventionally regards plot as an occasion only for varying the circumstances and
position of intercourse, and is interested more in portraying sex than in relating it to
anything else or exploring its implications, this literature more than any other is faced with
the difficulty of making repetition aesthetically viable. The usual technique is to avoid
exactly repeating encounters by complicating positions, changing the number of
participants, and intensifying the adjectives (repetition with variation). This reliance on
extreme variation proceeds from insecurity; it reflects both the artist's lack of faith in his
material and in his ability to present it in its own strength, and the audience's fear of
personalized demanding relationships. Repetition means confrontation. Novelties of
partner and position keep writer and reader from the realities of repetition relationships:
that person who is still there, that complex and personal need, that intense continuity.
Novelty is essential to the pornographic illusion of uncommitted and instantaneous,
always exciting but never confronted sex. It is possible that pornography's audience has
been conditioned to expect extreme changes of partner and technique by the
pornographer's inadequate response to his artistic problemhow to keep intercourse
interesting in this work, or how to justify the basic repetitionrather than by listening to its
own sexual inclinations. In any case, their insecurities serve each other.
 Page 69
According to Steven Marcus, the ideal pornographic novel would repeat forever"it would
have no ending, just as in pornotopia there is ideally no such thing as time."24 Repetitions
in pornography do not lead to gratification, an end to pleasure; as noted in my discussion
of Freud and Kubie, no neurotic, compulsive repetition will be able to resolve itself
through repetition alone ("No compulsive work drive has ever healed itself through
working"). Even though the pornographer does stoop to novelty in an effort to make his
"novel" interesting, the repetition of the essential pornographic situation itself shows
through these pseudo-artistic variations. Here, at the ground zero of pornography, the
unchanging anonymous sexual urge is conveyed by simple repeating words: again, again,
again; more, more, more.25 These words are experienced as facts; they repeat because the
motions of intercourse repeat, conveying rhythm more than meaning, allowing the
audience to read in its own tension. This shows through all the variation, and is an
example of a repeated word's transcending its literal meaning. Repetition is a vehicle to
timelessness, and to what Wittgenstein called "the mystical.'' The conscientious
pornographer takes masturbation for his mantra.
Those horror-film sequels whose heroes are undead
24 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 279.
25Ibid.
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tend also, in repetition, to go on forever. For them too there is ideally no sense of time.
From The Mummy's Ghost we learn that one of the only ways to stop something that if
left to itself will repeat forever is to present it with a repetition in opposition to its
repetitions: a repetition in reverse. (This aesthetic variant of transference psychology is
most clearly worked out in Yeats's Purgatory, which will be discussed in the next
chapter.) But if one is concerned less with reasserting the values of a threatened clock-
time society than with discovering a new life outside time for one's consciousness and
one's literature, one might put off his mummy- and book-burning and turn to a serious
examination of that timelessness that repetition has so often been used to convey. A work
might go on forever as a means of directing us to what is forever. Repetition contains
within itself the germ of the nature of eternity; and eternity is not "a long time"it is
timeless.
 Page 71

3.
Eternity in an Hour
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life
W. B. Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul1
Some of the aesthetic problems of sequels and pornography are relevant in helping us to
make the transition from considerations of building time to those of continuing time.
There are many works of twentieth-century literature that contain no recognizable system
of time-counting, whose final sentences bleed into their first, that expand infinitely or
infinitesimally. Often in such works a repetition will be employed not to build on our
memory of what it repeats, but as if this were the first time we had seen it and it were
necessary to insist on the subject's existence, to rebegin the discussion just as each frame
of a film rebegins the entire screen image. This chapter will concern itself with those
1 Reprinted with permission of The Macmillan Company from Selected Poems and Two Plays of
William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal, p. 125. Copyright 1933 by The Macmillan Company,
renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted also with permission of Mr. M. B. Yeats and
Macmillan & Co. Ltd. from Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.
 Page 72
works that exist on the margins of both time-systems, whose characters move both in time
and in eternity.
Repetition in Reverse: Purgatory, The Blacks, and The Exterminating Angel
In W. B. Yeats's last play, Purgatory, both the living and the dead, the material and the
spiritual, the objective and the subjective appear at once on one stage. An Old Man brings
his son to the ruins of a burned-out house, the Old Man's birthplace. He explains that the
Boy's grandmother had made an impulsive marriage to a groom and died in childbirth.
The groom had squandered her money, cut down the trees, "killed" and finally burned
down the house. In that fire, which occurred when the Old Man was sixteen, the Old Man
stabbed his drunken father and fled. He had had a classical education, but gave none to
the Boywho in fact shares some of the grandfather's amoral materialistic coarseness and,
hearing the story, approves of his grandfather's actions. Applying Yeats's gyre-distinctions
to character, we can recognize the Old Man as subjective, his father and son objective,
and the ghost of his mother in a state of enforced inter-incarnational subjectivity.
The Old Man hints to the Boy that the mother's ghost still lives in that house, which must
be the site of her purgation. We gather from his presentation that the mother's sin was her
lust for the drunken groom, which
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was the first cause of the ruin of her house and the cause of the Old Man's existence (and
with that existence, or "pollution," his act of parricide). She must endure many dream
repetitions of her wedding night until she understands her sin, or until God frees her from
this trap, or until living people help her to "end the consequence" of her sin. Others may
help end the consequences ''upon others"; but where the consequence touches the
sufferer, the dream repeats until the sufferer understands the transgression himself, or is
released by God.2 The Old Man attempts to help his mother's soul by ending the
consequence her transgression might have upon others, by making sure that no more
offspring come indirectly from her marriage. While the Old Man and Boy are on stage, the
mother's dream begins: the groom's hoofbeats are heard, the mother's silhouette appears
in the house, and the two ghosts repeat the begetting of the Old Man. The Old Man hears
the dream immediately, perhaps from his subjective bias; the Boy neither hears the
approaching ghost-horse nor sees the young woman in the lighted window. He brings the
Old Man's attention back to the world of the living, and simultaneously the light in the
window fades out, suggesting that the audience's perception of the mother's repeating
dream is dependent on the Old Man's perception of itor that the dream is directed at the
Old Manor perhaps that it is the Old Man's dream. The
2 See W. B. Yeats, Purgatory, lines 3342 (Rosenthal, p. 203).
 Page 74
Boy attempts to steal the Old Man's money. They fight. The window lights up. The Boy
realizes that he and the Old Man are about to re-enact, in the present, the confrontation
which had ended in parricide (the Old Man was sixteen when he killed his father; the Boy
in the play is sixteen); and now the Boy sees the silhouette in the window. He is involved
in the dream. He has taken the roles both of the Old Man (sixteen-year-old would-be
parricide) and of the father (objective opposed to subjective; avenger and moral approver
of his grandfather). The audience is set for a repetition of the parricide: a reliving of the
dream both upstage and downstage: a continuation of the sin. What occurs, however, is
not that the Boy kills the Old Man, takes the money, and in getting children passes
"pollution on"but that the Old Man kills the Boy. The window grows dark.
This ends the first repetition of the dreama dream that has involved living characters. The
Old Man has repeated his own crime: he has killed two blood relatives with the same
knife on the same spot. He has "finished" the consequence upon others of his mother's
marriage, he thinks, in that there will be no more children. But the dream begins again: we
and the Old Man hear the hoofbeats. The Old Man concludes that he"others"has
exhausted his possibilities of helping his mother; returning to the terms in which he
originally described the condition of purgatory, he finds that the repetitions must continue
until the mother understands
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the consequence upon herself, or until God intervenes.
Now if only the mother were in purgatory, this conclusion would be valid; and it may be
that the mother's more subjective repeating is on a different level from the Old Man's. But
it is hard to overlook the fact that the Old Man himself has returned to the site of his
crime, that he kills his son in the same place with the same knife, that we do not see him
leave the house at the end of the play and we did not see him arrive at the beginning. He
seems to be in an earthly version of his own definition of purgatory. In the play's last line
he asks that both he and his mother be allowed to find peace; this may literally suggest
that the terms of his purgatory-metaphysic apply both to himself and to his mother. We
are led to conclude that the mother has not realized the consequence of her transgression
on herselfbut isn't it obvious that neither has the Old Man, who defends his parricide and
filicide throughout, recognized the consequence of his transgressions on himself? Isn't it
clear that both of them need to relive their transgressions until they come to this
awareness or until God gives peace? The temporal and the atemporal are joined by
repetition. The subjective (ghost) and objective (living) gyres are locked in phase.
Since the metaphysics of purgatory are conveyed to us by the Old Man, by the Boy's
gradual involvement in the dream, and by the lit windowsand momentarily catharsized
treeit is difficult to say that we know something
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which the Old Man does not. There must, then, be some understanding in the Old Man
that he too is caught in the repetition, although the audience may have enough clues into
the power of the repeating dream to draw outsiders into its cycle from the behavior of the
Boy. His exclamation that he has murdered twice for nothing is not conclusive. What does
demonstrate his awareness of his condition is the careful plan he carries out to free
himself from the dream, a plan revealed by the line, "My father and my son on the same
jack-knife!"3
We have already noted that the Old Man repeats his crime. We must note now that he also
repeats it in reverse. His second crime cancels his first. Both murders are of an objective
person by a subjective one (father and son by the Old Man); both are by the same killer.
In this sense the Old Man is reliving his transgression. But the true repetitionfrom the
point of view of the mother's dream, from the detached view of the audiencewould have
lain in the Boy's murder of the Old Man: both killers would have been sixteen, both
victims disreputable old fathers. The fact that the Old Man would be passive in this
repetitionbeing killed by the Boywould not make it any less his repetition; the mother is,
3 Reprinted with permission of The Macmillan Company from Selected Poems and Two Plays of
William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal, p. 208. Copyright 1934, 1952 by The Macmillan
Company. Reprinted also with permission of Mr. M. B. Yeats and Macmillan & Co. Ltd. from
Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats.
 Page 77
after all, passive within the dream that she controls. This is the only reason I can imagine
that Yeats would have made both youths the same age at this critical point: to emphasize
the repetition and its reverse. In the second killing, the degraded father kills his sixteen-
year-old hostile son with the same knife with which in the first killing, the sixteen-year-
old hostile son killed the degraded father. Parricide is avenged by filicide. At the same
time, the filicide repeats the parricide. The crimes are mirror-images of each other, hinged
by the "same jack-knife." Simple repetition leads to the continuance of the dream: more
offspring, more killing, no awareness. Repetition in reverse ought metaphysically to be
more effective than suicide, as an antiperformance of the crime rather than simple
atonement for it. Repetition in reverse must have occurred to the Old Man as the way out
of a labyrinth of repetition. The fact that this clever plan did not work should not surprise
us, however, for in the Old Man's terms it is still necessary for the dreamer to realize the
consequence of his transgression upon himself, and the Old Man has only begun to
question the efficacy of his murders by the end of the play.
So if repetition in reverse appears at first to be a clever solution to the trap of repetition, it
does not resolve the moral implications of the doom to repetition. The souls in purgatory
must come to some awareness. If we do not perceive that the Old Man is in his
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kind of purgatory too, then we accept the closing words of the play at face value:
"Mankind can do no more." The mother must go on until the repetitions teach her, or until
God gives peace. The audience really has little to say about that. But in the next repetition
who knows whether the Old Man will not begin to understand the consequence of his
transgression? Doesn't he begin to by the end of the play? Repetition not only operates in
Purgatory to link dreamers and to emphasize the eternal in the temporal; but it also
resembles the insatiable neurotic drives that cannot be resolved in action, that, as Freud
observed in his first experiments with transference, compulsively repeat because they are
not understood, because this is the neurotic's way of remembering. And there is hope:
repeated in a new contextthe "playground" of the transferencerepressed material may
come to seem less traumatic.4 For the mother as for the Old Man, it is possible that the
next repetition will bring them closer to awareness of consequence, to critical distance and
self-knowledge. The Old Man's final lines are defensive, protecting him from his
awareness of
4 The Oedipal nature of the Old Man's concernsfather murder, mother love, ruin of the
housecertainly alerts us, no doubt unintentionally, to the Freudian nature of this repetition. But if we
are meant to remember not the Oedipus complex but Oedipus Rex, we must still observe that
Purgatory participates more in the tradition of the Noh Theatre of Japanwhere ghosts often require
the aid of the livingthan in that of Attic tragedy.
 Page 79
being in his own repeating dream, or drama. Perhaps by the next performance of the
playor the next dream, with no son to killhe will have learned more.
Further alternatives: 1) The mother need not be in Purgatory at all. It may be the Old Man
re-animating the moment that is the focus of his sexual jealousy and the root cause of his
parricide. After all, we are aware of the lit windows only when he is. 2) The mother may
have absolutely no detachment, thus repeating rather than remembering, and may be re-
animating the dream so the Old Man will truly finish the consequence of her marriage by
killing himself. As long as he livesare we really supposed to consider him "harmless,"
even sexually?5there is still a live consequence on stage. "Mankind" can do one thing
more. 3) The stage, rather than the ruins of the house, is the site of Purgatory. All four
characters have been in Purgatory, have repeated the entire action, and continue to repeat
it as long as the play is performed. The Boy sees the lit window only when he has become
part of the dream, by realizing his role as sixteen-year-old objective potential murderer.
The audience sees the lights whenever the Old Man does. So the audience is involved in
the dream. Purgatory is contagious; the audience is downstage, the more subjective and
repeating element upstage. The entire play is a repetition.
Jean Genet's play The Blacks is the sum of its performances,
5 Cf. "The Wild Old Wicked Man."
 Page 80
as this final interpretation suggests Purgatory may be. It starts over at the final curtain.
The audience is being distracted from a real Black revolution which is going on offstage,
by Blacks who are attempting to transcend their clown-actor status by continually
reliving-through the performance-module. Part of the movement of the play depends on
the audience's awareness that this play, which is intended for a white audience, is
performed every night and that the total performance occurs only once and will end with
the Blacks' arrival at personal reality. During the performance we see, the Blacks are
clowns, attempting to tear off the roles and language imposed on them by white men,
attempting to find themselves. The Black revolution occurs backstage; the white audience
is in front of the stage. A linear progression is reinforced when the play begins again,
farther away from the audience, at the end. Helically, the play moves in a circle, but
progresses linearly. No performance is the same, by context. The sum of the beginnings
again, as we shall see later, constitutes a continuous present. The Blacks are moving
toward Black reality, toward their own language and action; distracting a white audience is
part of that fight, but working through roles, re-enacting ritualthe murder, the entire playis
an even more important part. Blacks have been given their roles by white society even as
a white author has given these actors lines. The Blacks are actors in society and on stage.
Every repetition of their exploration of this role brings them, like Yeats's
 Page 81
ghosts, closer to release from repetition (actors must act each night; people are free),
closer to self-actualization.
Yeats's Old Man is not the only figure in modern art to suspect that to repeat his crime and
simultaneously its mirror-image represents a way out of compulsive repetition. Kharis,
too, was doomed to repetition. The solution to the mummy's problem lay in embracing
the reincarnation of his beloved princess; when he touched the original, her face crumbled
and the bandages collapsed to the floor of the tomb. Doomed to undeath for attempting to
raise the princess from the dead, in possessing her he effects her reincarnation; when the
second Ananka is as aged as Kharis, they find death together. It is a second Ananka, as
the Boy is a second victim, a repetition of the sin (bringing back the dead, loving the
forbidden object) that frees the sinner from his atemporal curse. There is a parallel to this
sort of solution in Luis Buñuel's film The Exterminating Angel (1962), where a group of
aristocratic guests trapped without food or water for three months at the site of a dinner
party frees itself when one of the guests realizes that they have worked themselves around
(as in a permutational board game) to positions in the room (which they cannot leave)
identical to positions they had occupied the night of the party. The guests consciously
repeat their actions while in those positionsone plays the same piece at the piano, another
compliments her on her performancebut with a difference. If they repeated exactly what
they had done before (and their imprisonment began
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with a repeated shot of their entering the house, and continues with two different versions
of a toast, emphasizing that they are skirting a trap or time-freeze characterized by
permutational repetition), the circle would be completed; the game would continue until
they were at these positions again, when presumably they would do the same things ad
infinitum. What happens is that the gentleman who had complimented the pianist and
returned to the company now compliments her and says he thinks they'd better be going
home. The guests put on their wraps and leave. Their action consists in doing the opposite
of what they had done before, but in what looks very like a recreation of the original
scene: repetition in reverse, breaking a spell: a succession of slightly changed instants
constituting the movement of time. Buñuel has his joke at the end, however, where the
same group is trapped in a church with the congregation that has gathered to thank God
for the partygoers' deliverance. There is an expanding structure of repetitions in this film,
which gives the definite impression of being able to transcend its medium. Every time I
have seen this film, the audience gets nervous as it tries to leave.
Hightower too, near the end of Light in August, places his faith in a variant of repetition
in reverse:
"So it's no wonder," he thinks, "that I skipped a generation. It's no wonder that I had no father and
that I had already
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died one night twenty years before I saw light. And that my only salvation must be to return to the
place to die where my life had already ceased before it began.''6

He is a doom-ghost returning to a familiar spot, seeking salvation in dying at the place

where he had been robbed of a life in time.
The repetitions in Purgatory lock together the past and the present, the immaterial and the
material. They are or show the eternal in the temporal. The ghosts and the living and the
half-ghosts repeat all together, and their synchronous cycles enlarge a warp between time
and not-time until the audience itself is trapped. It is what is repeated that is part of
eternity (the dream's actions, the dream). Repetition here is an agency for the
transcendence of timeor put another way, a way out of time-freeze into time, as it is in
The Exterminating Angel and Light in August, out of the subjective and into the
objective, as in The Blacksas it leads the living characters into a dream of the dead.
Repetition is also the objective correlative of sin and purgation, of stopped time and the
intense investigation of time: the ultimate trap, and at the same time the way out of that
trap; the cage and its key; the labyrinth and its solution. The Blacks have been given white
man's lines in "an architecture of emptiness and words"; by repeating
6 William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Random House, 1932); quoted from Modern
Library edition, p. 418.
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them they can transcend their roles and reach Black reality. We see past the Old Man to
the lights in the house, past the illusory dichotomy between upstage and downstage to the
purgatorial (cathartic?) link between audience and performance, as the subjective (art)
reaches out and dominates the objective (audience)as the system of repetitions expands
past artas the Exterminating Angel moves from the door of the dining room to the door of
the church to the red EXIT sign of the theatre.
From Combray to Marienbad
In Proust's novel, involuntary memory makes a real past instantaneously present. The past
experience repeats, and the time that had intervened between the former and present
experiences of the event is obliterated. In Beckett's words, "the communicant is for the
moment an extratemporal being."7 One who is simply remembering the past is not
extratemporal, since the ordinary sort of memory brings back an imperfect, deliberately
noticed image of the past, and not the experience itself. When the impression literally
repeats, we are in its time. Involuntary memory is a time-warp that not only returns the
past to us, but returns us to the past, makes us who we were when we lived in that time.
7 Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 75.
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Where our life has been lost, it can reappear, with a vengeance, as in Purgatory, or as a
gift, as in Proust, but in either case lifting us out of ordinary time. So long as we do not
falsify our past with possession and fear and remembering, we can in the instants of its
repetition live both in the ordinary "now" and in the "then made now"transcending our
life in space by discovering our freedom in time. The metaphor of "building'' time is
inadequate in this context, for it fails to reckon with these leaps, this apparent equivalence
of time, this unstructured interpenetration of past and present. In this subjective construct,
there are only variations of the present. The "past" can perceptually repeat just as, in
melodramatic metaphor, the purgatorial hoofbeats return with no dimunition in force. The
repetition annihilates what has come between, as it does for example in Ingmar Bergman's
film Persona (1966), where the repetition, from opposing viewpoints, of the nurse's
accusatory speech leads directly to her merging with her patient. The time between
repetitions disappears just as the characters who in a sense are repetitions of each other
come together. In identity, space, and time, repetition unifies; but it also allows for
progress, as in the succession of identical performances of The Blacks, or of rebegun
instants in the continuous present.
If memory were only involuntary, however, there would be no common verbal language
among men. There would be little abstraction, generalization, or
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practical communication. Words are not phenomena, but their utility often leads us to
make language our primary referent. Language insulates us from experience in much the
same useful way as our senses sample stimuli. Our voluntary memories are in this sense
verbal memories: constructs, rather than sensory Gestalts. Without language, all our
conscious functions would be limited, according to Kubie, to "the sensory and emotional
recall of fragments of past experiences."8 Such recall is the Proustian miracle, an answer
to death, a nonverbal flash to which hundreds of thousand of words are devoted. But
could we live this way, without stamping our experiences under words and logical
constructs, outside of time?or is that the sort of confrontation with reality we would
prefer (again) to sample: to discover in the capsule or uneven cobblestone the time-sense
of cats, the ambiguity of Alice's Dinah?
The characters of Alain Robbe-Grillet have escaped Proust's problem, but they are caught
in his solution. The narrator of Jealousy, for example, never discriminates between past
and present: all time is present. The narrator is obsessed, and certain scenes that have
made a strong impression on him, or that he considers hints of his wife's infidelity with
their neighbor, recur continually, generating in their repetition a great sense of
8 Lawrence S. Kubie, Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (New York: Noonday, 1961),
pp. 138139.
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beauty and mystery. By the time one has finished the book, one has the feeling of having
read it many times. The narrator has failed to delimit his identity. He does not generalize.
He observes only the surfaces of things: the way a comb runs through his wife's hair, the
moving shadow of a column that (because spatial) is his index of time, the pattern of the
banana trees on his plantation, the uninterpretable actions of others. He does not
discriminate between fantasy and reality. The novel, which is written in the first person,
never uses first-person pronouns. One infers from the observations that there is an
observer, a person to whom the third glass and third chairand the mind of the
novelbelong. Another way of describing this narrator is to say that he observes only the
surfaces of things and of time, has no concept of their underlying concreteness, because
his ego-structure is "weak." He is marginal to his marriage. He exists on the outskirts of
personal relationship; he does not form ideas about himself; he is as passive, as unself-
conscious, and as definitively self-centered as the lens of a camera. But it is also possible
to describe his ego as absolute. The definitive quality of his viewpoint suggests in its total
subjectivity that the narrator is so secure in his being that his unquestionable identity
requires no presentation or defense. He is as clear as his experiencea life-unit that has
transcended "personality." This narrator, whose jalousie-bounded point of view is
congruent with
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his jealousy (and whose "objectivity" can therefore be seen as a radically pure
subjectivity),9 whose sense of identity is so absolute as to make first-person pronouns
unnecessary or inconceivable, and whose life in time is presented entirely in terms of re-
experiencethis narrator provides the rationale for one of the most beautiful and obsessive
frameworks for repetition in modern literature.
In Alain Resnais' film Last Year at Marienbad (1961), for which Robbe-Grillet wrote the
screenplay, a woman (A) encounters a man (X) who reminds her that "last year at
Marienbad" she had promised to go away with him if he still wanted her a year from then.
She does not remember ever having seen him. The setting is a baroque hotel in which all
the guests are formal (surface-oriented). In the precise gardens there is a statue that has
enigmatic meanings for A and X; the ornate corridors of the hotel are filled with moldings
and mirrors. X persists. Finally A comes to believe what X is saying. Her own sense of
identity is limited to her surface; her time-sense is limited to the present. Someone else's
version of the past can replace her own. She finally believes that she remembers meeting
X "last year at Marienbad" and leaves her escort (M). X's reality is
9 See Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press,
Black Cat, 1965), pp. 138139. Cf. Gertrude Stein's radical subjectivity which she considered
objectivity.
 Page 89
left ambiguous in the final line; X says A will be "alone, with me."
The central ambiguitywhether the "lovers" had met and contracted the year beforeis
ultimately irrelevant; whether the events of which A was ignorant at the beginning of the
film actually had occurred does not change the fundamental insight we gather from the
imprecision of her memory. Whether what X made her remember was true or false is
irrelevant in a world of surfaces, where any image is equally valid, and less important
than the fact that this inability to remember is essential to A's totally present-concerned
existence. Nevertheless, the problem has a solution. According to Robbe-Grillet:
The universe in which the entire film occurs is, characteristically, that of a perpetual present which
makes all recourse to memory impossible. This is a world without a past, a world which is self-
sufficient at every moment and which obliterates itself as it proceeds. This man, this woman, begin
existing only when they appear on the screen the first time; before that they are nothing; and, once
the projection is over, they are again nothing. Their existence lasts only as long as the film lasts.
There can be no reality outside the images we see, the words we hear. And when at the end of the
film the hero and heroine meet in order to leave together, it is as if the young woman were admitting
that there had indeed been something between them last year at Marienbad, but we understand that it
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was precisely last year during the entire projection, and that we were at Marienbad. This love story
we were being told as a thing of the past was in fact actually happening before our eyes, here and
now. For of course an elsewhere is no more possible than a formerly.10

This passage will be dealt with more fully in the next chapter. For now it is important to
notice that the discussion has led us from a consciousness of past-present-future timein
which memory and repetition with variation serve to emphasize, echo, label, abstract
from, falsify, and organize past experienceto a modern consciousness that entirely
disowns "the time of the clocks"11 and the organized sense of self (however inaccurate)
that goes with voluntary memory, building time, and a rigid conception of "character."
Freedom from History
Man has always believed that repetition has the power to abolish time. In the examples
above, we saw how moments of repetition (the recurring dream, the past recaptured, the
perpetual present of Jealousy) expressed the breakdown of building time both in the
verbal surfaces of their works and in the vivid "memories" of their characters. Mircea
Eliade's study of archaic ontology, The Myth of the Eternal Return, demonstrates the
fundamentality of repetition in primitive religion and
10For a New Novel, pp. 152153.
11Ibid., p. 139.
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gives many examples of man's reliance on the repetition of events and gestures to abolish
history, to continually rebegin time.
Just as primitive man sees an object as sacred because it participates in higher reality
(possesses manna or is associated with a god's actions), he also finds it necessary for
human actions to participate in higher reality if they are to have any lasting value. Actions
are able to do this to the extent that they repeat archetypal actions performed "in the
beginning of time"; thus the most important ritual repeats the most important archetypal
event: the creation of the world. At the cosmogony, activity, matter, and time began; the
cosmogonic ritual is considered to occur at the same time as the cosmogony. Primitive
man learns from the periodic rebirth of the earth in spring that the pain of winter has no
permanent effect, that the spring returns each year with its original vigor: that the
destructive actions of time, in other words, are not permanent; that the life-force, whose
activity is cyclical, remains indestructible by virtue of its continually starting over from the
beginning. To say that spring "returns" would be to posit its continuing existence over the
winter, like the second coming of a god. Primitive man perceives this reappearance of
vegetation as a ''beginning again," from scratch as it were. This beginning again has the
psychological effect of negating winter. By beginning the world over again in his
cosmogonic ritual, man abolishes whatever "profane time" has intervened between the
two creations and
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thus defends himself against the irreversibility of eventsdeath, history, winter. Similarly,
for Proust, whose great antagonist is profane time, the repetition of earlier events
abolishes the dead intervening time, reuniting the lost subject with its lost object. The
repeated experience takes place at the time of the first experience, and liberates Marcel
from time's destructive action. In their linking, both the time of the first action and the
time of its repetition participate in a metaphysic that transcends profane reality and points
to a life in time that is greater than one can imagine. Proust founds a religion of time
whose basic rite is transcendent repetition; in a sophisticated context, he rediscovers the
Myth of the Eternal Return. (A believer in history, Freud turns repetition to remembering,
helping his patient to see the transference-repeated event in "perspective.")
When Marcel understands the action of involuntary memory, his long struggle with his
will is resolved; he becomes able to begin his novel; he finds himself. The immortality
that he associates with art he recognizes is founded in the redemption of time through
involuntary memory.
Repetition makes identical. People who perform identical actions are related by virtue of
that action: the differences between them are obliterated, just as the temporal
discrepancies between performances of an identical act are suspended. The contrast, in
Le Temps retrouvé, between the characters destroyed in profane
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time (Charlus, for example, or Marcel before his illumination) and the narrator who has
discovered sacred time, and for whom the events and images of his lost life have
suddenly regained reality, at first suggests a victory over time. But we should notice that
while the repetitive power of involuntary memory in one sense releases Marcel from time,
it also gives that time its true value, and makes life in profane time the key to life in sacred
time, and life in sacred time the life of "giants." "History" is the province of voluntary
memory; it is unimportant, except to the extent that it illuminates what must be outside
history.
Just as an event in profane time can take on reality by repetitionas the ordinary uneven tile
in Venice, since it is the cause of a repetition, participates in a transcendent time-system,
and as the performance of a god's act by a man puts that man in a sacred context or lifts
his time back to the time when that act was first performedso a word can take on more
than its ordinary force by virtue of its repeating an earlier use of that word, or can allow a
work of art to move as the present moves, beginning again and advancing with the
continual youth and power of the present. The aesthetics of repetition thus find their
archetype in primitive religion, in the universal belief that an act or a word becomes more
real through being repeated, not less real (repetitious). My discussion thus turns to Eliade's
comment on Ecclesiastes.
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Hegel affirmed that in nature things repeat themselves for ever and that there is "nothing
new under the sun." All that we have so far demonstrated confirms the existence of a
similar conception in the man of archaic societies: for him things repeat themselves for
ever and nothing new happens under the sun. But this repetition has a meaning, it alone
confers a reality upon events; events repeat themselves because they imitate an
archetypethe exemplary event. Furthermore, through this repetition, time is suspended, or
at least its virulence is diminished.12
Eliade's belief that repetition alone confers reality upon events supports my suspicion not
only that repetition is the great unifier, both in art and in nature, in identity and in time,
but also that it is that tool, in a more aesthetic context, whose activity can lead to the
annihilation of boredom, to the vitality of language, to the increasing intensity of time and
image, through its fundamental sympathy with the rhythms of our desires, of our
existence.
Love Letters
Proust's novel brings its narrator to the point where he has just begun to transcend
profane time. Even before the final volume of that work appeared in print, however, a
literature that dealt with what Gertrude
12 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon,
Bollingen, 1954), p. 90.
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Stein called "the continuous present" had begun experiments in time and description that,
although many of them built from A la recherche du temps perdu, might well have left its
narrator baffled. An examination of the assumptions about the operation of time and
memory in the 1945 film Love Letters, directed by William Dieterle and written by Ayn
Rand, may serve as a transition to the discussion of this literature.
The romanticism of Love Letters begins where that of Cyrano de Bergerac ends. Roger
Morland, an egotistical and carefree young man, meets beautiful Victoria Remington
(played by Jennifer Jones) just before going off to war. He is not a good letter writer, and
asks his friend Alan Quinton (played by Joseph Cotten) to write his love letters for him.
The film opens as Quinton, who has become very involved with this unknown, idealized
woman, writes what he insists is his final letter. It reads in part, "I think of you, my
dearest, as a distant promise of beauty untouched by the world." While on leave, Morland
marries Victoria. Quinton is wounded and discharged. Back in England, Quinton learns
that Morland has died in some sort of accident. Obsessed with the image of the woman he
has never met, Quinton leaves his own fiancée and goes to live in a cottage left to him by
his Aunt Dagmar, which is not far from the address to which he had written Morland's
letters: Meadow Farm, Longreach. On the night he leaves London for this proximate
solitude, he attends a party where he
 Page 96
meets a mysterious girl named Singleton. He gets drunk and talks about Victoria Morland.
When all the other guests have left, the hostess (Dilly) tells him that she knows Victoria
and will tell him about her if he ever wants her to. Inland, he visits Longreach and finds
Meadow Farm deserted. He returns to London, where through his researches in old
newspapers he finds that Victoria Morland had been committed to prison after the murder
of her husband. He returns to the scene of the party, where he again meets Singleton, who
asks him to tell her about Victoria Morland. Dilly returns, sends Singleton out on an
errand, and informs Quinton that Victoria Morland is (as we have suspected) Singleton.
This girl of many names has none of her own: she was named Victoria Singleton by the
orphanage that raised her, and Victoria Remington by strong stern overprotective Beatrice
Remington, who adopted her. She had been found a year ago on her knees before the
fireplace at Meadow Farm, with blood on her breast, a knife in her hand, and a look of
utter innocence and confusion, over the body of Roger Morland, with Beatrice paralysed
in her chair by a stroke. Victoria's loss of memory was total. As Singleton puts it, because
she has no past she has no future; she has only the moment.
Quinton courts Singleton; they fall in love. One night they kiss. Singleton says: "You
know what's the difference between us? You're unhappy because that can never happen
again, and I'm happy because it's happened
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once." But there are many repetitions in this story, not the least of which is that they kiss
again. For Victoria, for whom the present is all there is, any action has a reality totally
independent of its ever repeating, or of its coming after some past and before some
future. But the burden of the plot is to educate her through repetition into remembering,
which is felt to impart greater reality to existence. When Quinton asks Singleton to marry
him, something upsets her. From some kind of unobjectified dreadwhich the audience
and Quinton realize represents some half-memory of her earlier marriageshe at first rejects
him, then asks him to ask her again: not for emphasis, but to start the question over
(begin it again). He does, and everything goes smoothly. When they are about to be
married, Dilly asks, "But what will it do to her, the repetition of so important an event?"
At the altar, Singleton says, "I take thee, Roger " The priest reassures her that all brides are
nervous, and she continues, "I take thee, Alan.'' The second try works, in both cases,
updating her to the present. Of course the audience realizes that this is really the second
time Victoria is marrying the same man, since in her marriage to Roger Morland, she
believed she was marrying the author of the beautiful letters.
Quinton and Victoria often discuss her amnesia. Quinton, who has decided never to tell
her about Roger or the murder and who finds her presentness attractivesince it detaches
her further from the profane world,
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gives her more of that quality "a distant promise of beauty untouched by the world"does
not push her. Victoria says, "I love you but I must try to remember. You do want me to
remember, don't you?" and he answers, "Of course I want you to remember. But you can't
force your way into the past. You must let it come or not, just as it will." As in the scene
of their first kiss, Victoria's presentness is sometimes equated with an absence of
responsibility, with looseness, a take-it-as-it-comes present-lust that is filmically exploited
as sexy; but she is moving to responsibility, to foundation in the past, to total "character.''
(In this sense Love Letters is the converse of Marienbad, where the present-bound
woman is pursued by a lover who insists on her confrontation with the past, and attempts
to heave her into "reality.") Quinton shows Victoria ten gold sovereigns which his Aunt
Dagmar had left for the woman he chose to be his wife. Victoria takes five, saying, "I'm
only half a person now."
But the past forces its way into the present. The postman delivers a letter from Beatrice
Remington in which information is promised about Victoria Morland, and Victoria
becomes upset. While picking berries for breakfast, she smears the juice on her breast just
as she had Roger's blood before; she screams and starts to remember the murder. Where
the Freudian subconscious repeats because that is the only way it can remember, here the
life around her repeats parts of her past (letters,
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blood) and pushes her into relivings. Through the repetition of past events, Victoria is
forced to remember. (The berry scene is of course suggestive also of Proust's involuntary
memory; it is interesting to find these two memory-systems, which in spite of their
different orientations both depend on repetition, serving each other in the popularized
memory-construct of Love Lettersand later of Hitchcock's Marnie.)
Victoria writes Quinton "her first letter"; it contains the words, "I think of you, my
dearest, as a distant promise of beauty untouched by the world." After the berry incident,
she flees to Longreach in the car Quinton had given her for her birthday (or rebirth, or
rebeginning), where she finds her old guardian, recovered from her stroke. Beatrice
prompts her memory, and Victoria relives the murder, as the film directly presents it, in
flashback.
Victoria had fallen in love with the letters, not with Roger. She had spent all her time
reading them. Roger resents her ignoring of his present reality in favor of these relics; his
temporal as well as sexual jealousies climax one night, while Victoria is rereading the final
letter. "You're going to like me as I am," he threatens; "I'm sick of competing with a
ghost." He tells her he did not write the letters, and throws them into the fire; Victoria
fights him ("My letters!''); he knocks her unconscious; Beatrice rushes to her defense,
stabs Roger, and has a stroke. Victoria snatches a charred piece of paper
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from the fire ("I think of you, my dearest "), sees the body, picks up the knife and does
not know what it is, cleans her hands on her breast. Whether she had killed him or not,
she assumes the guilt; it was her responsibility, brought on by her living too much in the
past. She protects and punishes herself by obliterating that past. Amnesiac, she lives only
in the present, where there is no guilt, no responsibility, no identity, no history. Before,
her present had been inadequate; now it is everything ("I'm happy because it's happened
once").
Reliving the experience, Victoria finds out her innocence. Beatrice could not tell the police
what had happened; she could not move or speak. She was waiting for Victoria to come
to her. As with the proposal and the marriage vow, the repetition has been more
successfuland more presentthan the original event. Where she had gone to Meadow Farm
with the intention of finding out from Beatrice all she could about Victoria Morland, with
whom she knows Quinton is still in love, so that she can give him up to his true love
(because as her memory begins to return so does her consciousness of guilt)where, that is,
she had gone to give Quinton his past, she has found her own. She turns and finds
Quinton in the doorway; he recites a few phrases from his letters and they embrace. He
has found his past love and his present love, as she has found that her present love is her
past love. And their love begins its third phase, begins on the pure Hollywood foundation
of innocence
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with knowledge, of a vital present informed by a vital past. They have found a life in time
(not in the continuous present, since they "begin again" with memory), through the agency
of repetition.
The earlier phase of their marriage, while Victoria was amnesiac and Quinton silent, can
be seen as another instance of repetition in reverse. She is marrying for a second time the
man she loves, only this time he is in his proper person. He is marrying the reality whose
idealization he had long loved. It is the same marriage, with different peopleboth removed
from their earlier idealizations of each otherand in a sense with the same vows ("I take
thee, Roger ")Roger and Alan on the same "jack-knife." But one beginning again is not
enough; it is only a step to that complete life in time to which the film's value-structure
aspires. The past must repeat in the present; this half-marriage must break up, as it
virtually has by the time Victoria flees in her stained dress to Meadow Farm, for the match
to be begun yet a third time, with everything remembered. Here, each beginning again
imparts a further reality to the union, and advances its development, just as repetition in
reverse allows an escape from the time warp. The rebegun Victoria, growing at last to the
age of her constant lover, must remind us of the rebegun Ananka.
Repetition resurfaces as the active principle in Hollywood's conception of the time warp
in Dieterle's 1955
 Page 102
Portrait of Jennie. Here Joseph Cotten returns as an uninspired painter, and Jennifer
Jones as a little girl who can control the rate of her progress through time. When Cotten
first meets her, she is a little girl living decades earlier than everybody else; she says she
will hurry and grow up faster so they can be lovers. At their next meeting she looks older;
she is in tears because her parents, circus performers, have been killed. Cotten checks this
and finds that the disaster she refers to had occurred many years before. Things go on like
this until she is his age and he is nearly the same age he was when they met. Finally their
times synchronize, in her death. She tells Cotten to meet her at Land's-End Light in New
England; he does some more checking and finds that a terrible tidal wave had struck this
lighthouse long ago, and that a woman had died in the storm. Putting two and two
together, he warns the town that the tidal wave may repeat, and goes out to save her. The
wave does strike, and Jennie is killed; the wave pulls her away from him, and with an
awareness of her destiny in time, she seems almost to let go of Cotten's hand voluntarily.
The portrait Cotten executes of her is his finest work.
Again Jennifer Jones's time is different from that of Joseph Cotten, but where before she
was immobile and he moved normally, in Portrait of Jennie she is supernaturally fast
while he continues to move in ordinary time. In both cases she is locked in the past until
she
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synchronizes with normal time (the time of the first tidal wave and that of its repetition
being in an Eliadean sense simultaneous); in both cases that synchronization marks the
end of the film.13 In both films she is an inspiration to him, and her atemporality is
specifically attractive, suggestive of a lover who gives all and is not answerable to
ordinary considerations of responsibility. In Jennie, even more than in Love Letters,
Cotten's attempt to move in Jennifer Jones's time must failnot because he doesn't try hard
enough, but because the film will not let him. The film's value-structure forces "realism,"
"the time of the clocks," on the lovers, determines that their love is doomed but
attractively romantic, inspiring but "impractical." Jennie can be captured only in art, just
as Victoria Singleton Morland must come to terms with the "touch" the world has dealt
her if the "promise'' of her beauty is ever to cease being "distant." Both films demonstrate
the lust of responsible time for freedom, and in both the repetition of an earlier event is
climactic, ending or sealing the heroine's temporal dislocation.
It is a commonplace of metaphysical romanticism, as it is of religion, that there is a reality
higher than that which we perceive as ordinary. It should now be possible to interrelate
the primitive's use of repetition to project
13 Just as the synchronization of building story and continuing refrain marks the end of the
traditional ballad, and as the Mummy and Ananka die together.
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himself into "the paradise of archetypes" and to deny profane time; Proust's belief that the
reliving of forgotten impressions revealed a means of defeating death; the absolute
irrelevance of objective time to the characters of Robbe-Grillet; and the untemperable
demonic nature of insatiable repeating drives, which have no conception of time,
perceived by Faulkner, Yeats, Freud, and currentlywith Portnoyby Roth. Clearly
repetition is felt to have the power to negate time just as it has the power to punctuate,
create, or transfigure time. Its very quality of being the same thing again makes us doubt
that this thing was ever not here, or that there was any time in which it could have not
been here, any time other than this timewhich is, after all, the only time that is real. The
past is a construction of our imaginations; our memories change with us. The past is as
personal an abstraction as our expectations of the future. No work of art can depend on
its audience's accurate memory of something that had occurred earlier in that work; if a
concept is important or is changing, it must force itself to our attention again. A book is a
string of words that we follow from start to finish; it has a consistent and single time
scheme. A film is a ribbon of frames that goes properly in only one direction and has only
one tense. A painting is instantaneous, no matter how long our experience of it. The
motion on Keats's urn is eternal and still. Like Victoria Singleton, as long as we cannot
remember what has come before, each moment
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can have its full potential for us, need not depend for its reality on any earlier moment. If
we think about it at all, we must see that this is how we do experience the present. Our
relations with the past are part of the present or they are irrelevant: a memory is a
conscious act occurring in and created by the present, just as the future is a fantasy of the
present. If we don't live now, we don't live. By denying this, we deny ourselves the
metaphysical possibility of experiencing reality completely: "excuse me please, I think I'll
just hide in the past for a while, see you tomorrow." Living in the present is not godless
hedonism, as some of the message of Ecclesiastes is interpreted, but direct experience.
Victoria's first kiss occurred once; at that moment it filled all the time there was. It cannot
be touched by any future falsifications, nor can its reality be at all influenced by any
future repetition or absence of repetition. The memory of it, of course, can be falsified
completely.
There is a great deal of repetition in the continuous present, but that repetition is not
essential in itself to the reality of the event that occurs in the instant and may or may not
repeat. In a properly projected film, no frame repeats. If an identical picture does return
later in the presentation, it is an entirely new piece of celluloid, and has no effect on the
metaphysical position of the earlier frame. (In the case of a length of film joined at its
ends into a loop, the identical frame recurs later in time, and so is a different time-space
unit received by a
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later, aged, audience; it is a later instant of projection even if it is the same piece of film,
and completely removed from the art-moment of its earlier appearance. But it can have
the effect of putting the audience back in that first time.) The frame is projected for a
fiftieth of a second or less, but in its instant it is all that is on the screen, regardless of how
our memories and experiences receive and integrate it. But for the film to remain
coherent, for the audience to realize where it is, the images must repeat, with however
slight or radical variation, from instant to instant. The entire image must be begun again,
from a blank emulsion, on a white screen.
Most of us have been startled by our science teachers' confident assertion that our cells are
always dying and replacing themselves, so that every six or eight years we entirely change
bodies. We are a new set of cells every time, begun from protoplasmic scratch, yet we
maintain identity. Our existence is dependent not on that earlier set of cells, but on the
present grouping. We are our own repetitions. By beginning again, we have continued.
But this continuance has no effect on the past we have already livedas our being dead in
the future does not affect the fact that we are alive now.
If this repetition accounts for our present reality, as the rebeginning image on the screen
continues the motion pictureif, in other words, repetition and reproduction are
singlehandedly responsible for the persistence of lifeit may be that repetition represents
the
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key to a higher reality as well, or to a heightened awareness of common reality. The
repeated cosmogony, which for primitive man rebegins the creation and places him
outside profane time, has its poetic variant in the mantra, where the repeated chanting of a
religiously significant verbal formula charms the mind into a perception of a reality that is
beyond language or materialjust as a phrase in literature can, if it is repeated enough, take
on a presence greater than that of ordinary language, a power not approached by the
poetry of novelty.
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4.
The Continuous Present
The first time.
When was the first time.
As the first time it was of no importance.
Another time as permanently and another time just
as permanently.
Come.
Come.
Coming.
Not just as permanently.
Gertrude Stein, Mildred Aldrich Saturday1

Time in Art
The epigraph above is an investigation of the relative permanence of repetitions. The third
line asserts that the time something first occurs is unimportant compared to the times of its
repetitions, and dismisses the search for "the first time." We are watching a process of
thought that occurs in the present tense of its writing; this is a recorded sequence of
deliberative instants. In the fourth line Gertrude Stein asserts that something can have as
1 From Portraits and Prayers (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 115.
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much strength in its returning as it has in its first appearance; it can present itself "just as
permanently." She begins an experiment. "Come" has the same force the second time as it
does the first. But the third time it appears as ''coming," which as a gerund or participle is
less "permanent" than an imperative. Permanence is of course considered not in the sense
of duration but in that of being, of insistencehow permanent it is in its instant. She
concludes that in a phenomenal world it is not inevitable that every recurrence be "just as
permanent."
Up to now this book has dealt with aesthetic constructs in which, through "building,"
permanence persisted or increased. In examining such writers as Beckett and Stein,
however, we must consider permanence in the sense of the experiment above. As readers,
we are not presumed able to remember an earlier usage of a word or phrase accurately. It
is assumed that we will falsify that perception, as it enters our past, either through laziness
or through appropriation to our personal context. It is assumed that if we pay complete
attention to the words in front of us, we will need not to be thinking about words that
existed in the past. What is important in that past will recur when it is important, in the
surface of the text. An image does not acquire an increasing permanence, properly
measured at the conclusion of the work, but has its own permanence or laxness at the
moment of its occurrence only. That forcefulness is
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measured instantaneously. An image has presence but not duration.
The present opens the whole of temporal space, just as for Wittgenstein a tautology opens
the whole of logical space. Like a tautology it obliterates itself in its formulation, and like
a tautology it is unanswerable. The present is equal to itself, as a tautology is a repetition.
By living and writing in the present, we may come to our full potential and the full
potential of art.
Proust learned that time could be repeated, but not remembered. His novel does explain to
us our freedom in time, but that novel itself is answerable to the temporal assumptions
and limits of profane time. The eternal present occurs in flashes, but is not taken as a
principle of composition. Many readers, of course, are glad that it was not; but since part
of what is being argued for in this book is a way of writing consistent with the limits of
speech in time, let us consider some of the most important works that have taken that
strangely atemporal nature of the present as a principle of composition. We may begin by
returning to Robbe-Grillet's version of Marienbad:
Last Year at Marienbad, because of its title and because, too, of the works previously directed by
Alain Resnais [discussed at the end of this chapter], has from the start been interpreted as one of
those psychological variations on lost love, on forgetting, on memory. The questions most often
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asked were: Have this man and this woman really met before? Did they love each other last year at
Marienbad? Does the young woman remember and is she only pretending not to recognize the
handsome stranger? Or has she really forgotten everything that has happened between them? etc.
Matters must be put clearly: such questions have no meaning. The universe in which the entire film
occurs is, characteristically, that of a perpetual present which makes all recourse to memory
impossible. This is a world without a past, a world which is self-sufficient at every moment and
which obliterates itself as it proceeds. This man, this woman, begin existing only when they appear
on the screen the first time. The entire story of Marienbad happens neither in two years nor in three
days, but exactly in one hour and a half. And when at the end of the film the hero and heroine meet in
order to leave together, it is as if the young woman were admitting that there had indeed been
something between them last year at Marienbad, but we understand that it was precisely last year
during the entire projection, and that we were at Marienbad. This love story we were being told as
a thing of the past was in fact actually happening before our eyes, here and now. For of course an
elsewhere is no more possible than a formerly.2
2For a New Novel, pp. 152153. The theory of the unities now is seen as superfluous: an attempt to
deny the intrinsic time of art. Almost any play or film takes place in one place (stage, screen) in less
than twenty-four hours, and appropriates all its content to one context. What plot-time could
possibly undermine the art-time?
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In the context of a complex film like Marienbad this theorizing may seem obscure, but its
accuracy can be verified by applying it to any other work of art. The time of a painting is
instantaneous, no matter how long a story it tells. A multiple-image work, such as the
Merode Altarpiece by the Master of Flémalle, or Warhol's Ethel Scull (Two Times), may
be perceived at once, much in the manner of a split-screen motion picture, or it may be
followed from image to image. But all the images exist in the same time-format, which is
that of the canvas or wood on which they appear.3 The juxtaposition of instantaneous
scenes makes no postulations as to how long it will take the audience to apprehend those
scenes; it makes no distinction between the time of performance of the sheet of paper, and
the simultaneous presence of its scenes. What is the time of performance of Trajan's
Column?
This point can be made more clear if we consider Masaccio's fresco, The Tribute Money,4
where three stages of a story are presented simultaneously by the method known as
"continuous narration." A crowd watches Christ direct Peter to find in the mouth of a fish,
3 The logical expression of this technique in literature is the split page, where for example William
Burroughs offers in "Who Is the Third that Walks beside You?" (Art and Literature 2 [1964]) three
columns meant to be read simultaneously.
4 Brancacci Chapel, Sta. Maria del Carmine, Florence, c. 1427. This analysis is indebted to H. W.
Janson, History of Art (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, and New York: Harry Abrams; 1962), pp. 166,
323324.
 Page 113
the money demanded by a tax collector, also facing Christ in this central grouping. At the
left edge of the fresco, Peter is shown catching the fish; at the right, he is shown giving
the tribute money to the tax collector. Peter appears three times, the tax collector twice,
and Christ once. In the central grouping, Peter gestures off to the right and the collector to
the left, thus directing us around in the story. The three actions take place in a unified
landscape, and whatever the time we assume has elapsed for Peter and the tax collector
between the scenes in "reality," as far as the work is concerned all three events are equally
present. There may in reality have been only one Peter who could be in only one place at
one time; but in a work of art, where one is dealing with an image of Peter, there is no
reason many images may not be presented simultaneously.
In art forms that unfold as they progress in timeliterature, music, film, sequential
graphicsthis simultaneity must be approximated by beginning again. If The Tribute Money
were a triptych, for example, the mountain before which the three events take place would
have to be painted three times instead of once. But whether a work begins again, or is able
to exploit the comprehensibility and grace of continuous narration, that work's manifest
tense is present, whatever the medium. No matter how long a film is, every frame at the
instant of its projection portrays the presenta flashback may be supposed to be occurring
in the "then" of the story, but it is on the "now" of the screen, just
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as it was in the "now" of Proust's mindand any written word rests on the page, or is read,
in its present tense.
Although writing does have words like "then" and "before," these must be considered part
of the content of the work in which they appear. They are formally, technically no more
representative of the passage of time than a swirling fuzzy Hollywood flashback-signal.
However one rereads, pauses, or skips over this line of words, it has its own time-
determination, which cannot be altered by the context into which the reader places it or by
the conditions of its reception. Like a moment, it has occurred in its own present and
cannot be touched by any future presents. Time is one of the subjects of literature, as it is
the subject of a time-pinpointing word like "before." When Robbe-Grillet omits these
words, he does not alter the formal time-sense of his work, but makes it suddenly clear
that that undifferentiated present, that natural time-sense of literature and film, is precisely
what he is concerned with.
There is some disagreement about what this natural time-sense ought to be called. For
Robbe-Grillet, it is a "perpetual present";5 for Beckett, an "instantaneous present";6 for
Eliade, a "continual, atemporal present";7
5For a New Novel, p. 152.
6 Richard Coe, Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, Black Cat, 1970), p. 17. My discussion of
Beckett is indebted to this work and Hugh Kenner's before it.
7The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 86.
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and for Stein, a "continuous present."8 The differences of approach that these terms imply
will, I hope, become clear in the course of this chapter.
I asked earlier whether writing the same work over and over in different guises was not a
sign of neurotic domination of the creative process. Walter Slatoff's excellent study of
Faulkner's Quest for Failure and the following letter from the Faulkner-Cowley File may
suggest to us that Faulkner's repeating of one essential attempt throughout his works is an
instance not of a lack of artistic control but of "beginning again," in much the way
Beckett's novels begin each other again, continuing one impossible but necessary
philosophic and artistic (not neurosis-expressive) attempt. In 1944, replying to Malcolm
Cowley's review of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner wrote:
I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. This I think accounts for
what people call the obscurity, the involved formless "style," endless sentences. I'm trying to say it
all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible, on one
pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way. I'm inclined
to think that my material, the South, is not very
8 "Composition as Explanation," The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Vechten
(New York: Random House, 1962), p. 518.
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important to me. I just happen to know it, and dont have time in one life to learn another one and
write at the same time. Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon
but not a novelty 9

The South was chosen and repeated as a subject because life is not novelty; all subjects
lead to the same unchanging subject whose expression, saying "it all," by its impossibility
determines failure and by its importance demands trying again. The style is each time the
same because it proceeds from the same artistic intention. To fill his works with incest,
despair, and frustration, Faulkner need be neither a Freudian nor a Freudian disaster;
there are definite artistic reasons for repeatedly investigating the material of the minds of
one's characters and for repeatedly straining the bounds of one's ability and medium.
Both Faulkner and Beckett try for inclusive and accurate expressionFaulkner of "it all,"
and Beckett of the instant, which as we shall see is in its way "all" and impossible to hold.
9 Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 1415. One
reason Faulkner may have found himself having to begin this attempt again is that "all" cannot be
said in words; there is more to reality than the logical. Cf. Benjy's difficulty, from the other side of
verbal sophistication: "I was trying to say" (See p. 175: it can all be put on one pinhead, by a
mystic, easily, since "the pinhead" and ''it all" are one; but it cannot be crammed. Also see note 25,
p. 129.)
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The continuing nature of reality has passed from a formal characteristic of art to the point
where this continuity is art's direct thematic and programmatic concern. If when we
remember we falsify, then there must be an art in which the audience does not have to
remember what has come earlier in the work, or what is external to the workone
independent from that falsification which has so far been the principal effect of art. Art
must falsify its model unless it is its model, unless its occurrence is its subject and appears
as it occurs. The aesthetic aim of metatheatre (to create a theatre that is aware of itself as
theatre, whose characters know they are actors, as in Genet's The Blacks) is frustrated by
the necessities of text and performance; for actors are speaking rehearsed lines, and they
are not free to reflect spontaneously on their predetermined condition. Even in antitheatre,
with its antistage improvisations, the mass cast freakouts give the impression of being
planned and paid for. But literature does have the ability to be true to itself (its only
"actor" being not the reader but print), to be meta-aesthetically consistent in the teeth of its
audience's falsifications. Whether literature can be true to life is another question.
Gertrude Stein
"Gertrude Stein," she wrote of herself, "has always been possessed by the intellectual
passion for exactitude
 Page 118
in the description of inner and outer reality."10 Yet her descriptions seem totally unrelated
to their objects. We naturally ask, what does the description of Oranges in Tender
Buttons, "Build is all right," have to do with oranges?11 Gertrude Stein rejected ordinary
speechwhich is full of irrelevant associations, connotations, and evocationsin favor of
what she considered an accurate, directed, and consistent language, both objective and
abstract, whose words and movements would be in her absolute control, and which
would not refer obliquely to the associations of old poetry.12 Stein's manner of recording
exactly what she seesor the movements of her consciousness in relation to its object of
attentionin a language that means only what it means now, is a discipline of objectivity
that her audience has tended to receive as incomprehensibly subjective, if not decadent.
10The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, also cited in Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A
Biography of Her Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 13.
11Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p. 496.
12 Jorge Luis Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" suggests ironically that a cliché
can become alive again through repetition that is independent of rememberingthat if a modern author
wrote Don Quixote (using the identical words of Cervantes' work) the work would be new and
original; the words would have no remembering in them of any earlier usage, as the author would have
forgotten Cervantes' book in order to repeat it. Repetition with remembering creates history or clichés,
from author to author.
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For Stein, experience itself "was objective to the point of being indistinguishable from
reality."13
It is not enough to reinvent language; the act of recording itself must be clear and alive.
Gertrude Stein attempted, through simultaneously observing and recording, and by
beginning again with each new instant of observing and recording, to make her carefully,
consciously chosen individual and nonevocative words record what she actually saw. In
her "portraits" particularly, it was important to see each thing, each person, in its or his
uniqueness, apart from any resemblance to other things or persons. The success of these
observations depended on her being able to see only the present, to write only in the
present, to educate her audience to read only in the present.
13 In attempting to discuss Gertrude Stein, it is important to clarify her distinction between
objective and subjective. She was entirely aware that inner and outer reality were not the same
thing. We generally assume that inside means subjective and outside means objective, but for
Gertrude Stein objective more often meant "accurate." If one's inside can perceive the outside
accurately, then the accurate recording of the thinking of that inside should be able to be considered
an objective recording of reality. Consciousness and subjectivity are not the same thing;
consciousness is the activity and awareness of the mind, while subjectivity more directly implies
falsification and contextualization.
The quotation is from Frederick J. Hoffman, Gertrude Stein (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis
Press, Pamphlets on American Writers, 1961), p. 13.
 Page 120
The effect of Stein's unfamiliar syntax on our spoken-language-oriented ears is to make
us consider each word in the relations that it imposes on the words around it. Every
mental observation has its own syntax, or manner of organization. Language changes with
its object and subject. As we pay attention to each word, our idealized concentration
reveals the exact image these exact words here generate; to what else can we relate them
but to their simple meaning in their immediate context? Another way of putting this is to
say that these words do not "remember" how they have been used before, that their author
puts them down as if this were the first time she had ever seen them, as if their present
contextsince the present is the only existing time, and this syntax defies relation to
ordinary syntax or to earlier moments in its own worldwere the only context that could
ever be important for these words. Each word begins its history in this particular usage.
Her mind free of old associations, literal or otherwise, Stein lets words come together in
new ways,14 as they
14 If we consider Kubie's distinctions among conscious, preconscious, and unconscious symbolic
systems as they affect the creative processby which a word is tied to a rigid literal association or
meaning in the conscious, and to a rigid experiential association in the unconscious, but is free to
combine as the changing situation directs or suggests in the preconscious, with creativity defined as
the ability to perform new juxtapositionsthen we can see the importance of the preconscious in
Stein's literary method: although she insisted that her choosing was conscious, and it was. My point
is that a free preconscious was
Footnote continued to page 121
 Page 121
are appropriate and forceful and interesting, in the spontaneous and deliberate act of
writing.
There is nothing that anyone creating needs more than that there is no time sense inside them no past
present or future.15
The author must allow her work to take shape in front of her, with all her concentration.
She must move with the progress of the work, keeping not the past or future of the work
in mind, but only its present; not the past usages of her words, but her words; not what
she remembers the subject looks like, but how it looks. If she concentrates completely in
the moment of writing she must also concentrate completely in the simultaneous moment
of observation, seeing the object for what it exactly is, not what it has been compared to
or considered. If the grass under the pigeons becomes shorter then longer then yellow,
she can see it and write it. (We begin to see, perhaps, how Proust's sense of language, his
love of comparison, his sense of past and present and future, kept his work from
recapturing the past, and how only
Footnote continued from page 120
vital to the success of her deliberate activity. For "the creative amalgam of intention and accident," see
Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford, 1971), pp. 240242.
15 Cited in B. L. Reid, Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), p. 39.
 Page 122
in nonverbal flashes was his narrator able to put away remembering in the experience of
repetition.) She must see in the present, and see the present completely. What is
"recollected in tranquility" is falsified.
In the overfamous line "A rose is a rose is a rose ", for example, we find what looks very
like repetition playing an important part in making a dead word ("rose") real again,
removing the word from its "history," and insisting on its existence in advancing time.
The difficulty of writing poetry in a "late age," as she explains, is precisely that of giving
words life, in the face of all their remembering. Asked by a student at the University of
Chicago to explain this line, Gertrude Stein replied:
"Now listen! Can't you see that when the language was newas it was with Chaucer and Homerthe
poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say 'O moon,' 'O sea,' 'O
love' and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can't you see that after hundreds of
years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find
that they were just wornout literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from
them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of
pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it's hard to write
poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, something unexpected, into
the structure of
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the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it's not enough to be bizarre; the
strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That's why it's doubly
hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know
in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about 'I have a
garden; oh, what a garden!' Now I don't want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it's just
one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now
listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying 'is a is a is a ' Yes, I'm no
fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred
years."16

Nevertheless Stein denied that repetition had anything to do with the success of that line.
She insisted in fact that her writing contained no repetitions.17
In her verbal portraits Stein was reproached with
16 Thornton Wilder, "Introduction" to Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1947), pp. vvi.
17 For the purposes of my own discussion, in which I have loosely accepted near-repetitions as
"repetition," I choose to discuss the aesthetic implications of those near-repetitions that do occur in
Stein's work, and to point out how they do contribute to the sense of life that those works show. I am
well aware that even hearing an identical phrase many times is to hear it in the changing contexts of
our reception and the ongoing progress not only of the author's consciousness but also of the work. The
discussion of true repetition will have to wait till my final chapter.
 Page 124
being repetitious, and her defense of her method, the lecture "Portraits and
Repetition"informed perhaps even on her part by a confusion between "repetitive" and
"repetitious"makes quite clear her belief that where there is life, there is no repetition. Her
use of the term is strict; for her it means identical recurrence with no increase in force,
with none of the slight differences in composition that constitute life. Something that is
being taught (a piece of knowledge with the excitement of discovery taken out of it) can
be repeated in drill; an artwork that simply copies another work can be said to be a
repetition; but in her writing there is no repetition.18 We can see what she means from
those portraits.
If we do not pay complete attention to the person before us, we cannot write an accurate
portrait of that exact person. To produce these abstract verbalizations of her experience of
her subjects, Gertrude Stein trained herself to observe people without caring whom else
they were like, and to write with that same concentration, faithful to the integrity of her
subject. Each of us is unique, and each of our instants is unique. No matter how many
times something happens to us, it is real each time. And each ideal Steinian statementeach
new instant of writing synchronized with the subject's fresh movement of consciousnessis
unique, and real each time.
18 "Portraits and Repetition," Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), pp.
178179.
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Stein preferred to call her near-repetitions "insistence." In this succession of
simultaneously observed and recorded instants she felt progress; remaining in phase with
her subject, she believed she accurately experienced and transcribed its identity, its
assurance, its "excitingness of pure being."
Existing as a human being, that is being listening and hearing is never repetition. It is not repetition
if it is that which you are actually doing because naturally each time the emphasis is different just as
the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving.19

In comparing the slight differentiation between the successive frames of a motion picture
to the differences among her statements and observationsasserting that the differences
keep both images moving, just as they constitute the life of the subjectGertrude Stein
makes clear one reason why it is so futile to skim her writing and clarifies her definition
of repetition. A motion picture in which each frame was identical would not move. The
near-repetition of similar frames, when properly projected, communicates life. If you take
a yard of film out of the can and just look at it, you cannot see the movement although
you might possibly infer it; the frames look identical. You certainly cannot see how the
slight changes act on each other, or feel the movement
19Ibid., p. 179.
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they produce. Scanning the frames is like skimming Stein; it isn't possible to feel her work
without putting yourself in its present. Like each frame of a film, each Steinian statement
fills the reader's ideal attention, excluding (by baffling) memory, until the object of her
attention is insisted into complex and coherent existence:
Funnily enough the cinema has offered a solution of this thing. By a continuously moving picture of
any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing I was doing what the
cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was
until I had not many things but one thing.20

It appears to be the act of saying what something is that divides the perception into
instants: observe and record, then begin observing again without any memory of the
earlier observation that might obscure or misdirect this observation. In a process not of
emphasis but of beginning again and again, she describes what something is, and what it
is now, and what it is now.
Just as the primitive kept his world new by yearly returning to the moment of the creation,
and by making his life the repetition of archetypal actions gave himself the feeling that
time was not irreversibly accumulating,
20Ibid., pp. 176177.
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Gertrude Stein's beginnings again keep her writing in its continuous present, keep it alive.
She was interested in history, but she resisted ''remembering," and felt that "the first time"
was "of no importance." While the primitive believed in unbuilding time by returning to
Time Zero every year, Gertrude Stein returns to the time of the beginning with each
statement, so that there is never any accumulation of building time but an abstract,
objective, and jerky continuing.
Implicit in this method of capturing the instant is the assumption that the instant could be
looked at hard and precisely. If we hold to the simile of the sequence of motion picture
frames, we must see Miss Stein's "film" as like Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), which with
one exception is a sequence of tableaux, and there is time to take a good look at each
"frame"or like the progressing freeze-frames which show one character's memory of the
assassination in Costa-Gavras' Z. Twenty-four frames a second (normal projection speed)
is too fast for precise apprehension of each image. Stein's attention slows time: her
attention is her time. In reaction to William James's "flow" or "stream" of consciousness,
Frederick Hoffman notes,
Miss Stein was much more interested in the fact of an arrested consciousness, apparently static and
fixed and sacrificing motion or flow to precision. She did not
 Page 128
ignore "flow," but found it very difficult to attend to, and dangerous as well, for attention to it ran
the risk of losing the integrity and precision of the word-object nexus.21

There is progress in Gertrude Stein's narration, but it is slow; and plot, of course ("What
Happened"), is not very important. The progress is among the instants, toward complete
expression, not, as Reid has put it, toward "the collapse of the artist's attention to his
subject."22 A lecture is over when its audience has experienced its meaning, a portrait
when its image is complete, a life when the subject has reached the present or has died.
Here are some endings:
Now that is all. ["Composition as Explanation"]
Through to you. [Four in America]
And now it is today. [Everbody's Autobiography]
And she has and this is it.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas]
Gertrude Stein's solution to the problem of the passing present depends on the ability to
see each instant distinctly and to record it accurately. Beckett's insistence
21 Frederick J. Hoffman, Gertrude Stein, pp. 1213. Cf. Heisenberg, Principle of Indeterminacy:
choose between the particle and its movement.
22 B. L. Reid, Art by Subtraction, p. 109.
 Page 129
on the artist's world as one of failure, of art as a falsifier, and of the present as
instantaneous, puts him on the other side of this question. His characters and his art are
unable to catch up with time; the Unnamable talks endlessly and at great speed trying to
keep up with the fact of his existence or consciousness; Vladimir and Estragon are
moving so slowly, have so slowed their time, that what to them seems overnight is for
nature a season (the tree blooms between Godot's Acts One and Two) and for Pozzo and
Lucky an age; but even so they are the victims of moving time, unable to reach stasis: the
temporal equivalent of that silence aspired to by the Unnamable, the end of time. The
narrator of Texts for Nothing continues his failing as Gertrude Stein continues her
beginning, and with that memory that Proust eulogized and Stein rejected ("No, but one
last memory, it may help, help to fail yet again").23 For Stein, language is capable of
capturing reality if it puts away memory in accurate present concentration; for Beckett,
"words are the chief ingredient of the art of failure."24 The principal problem with words,
according to Beckett, is that they take time to say: they are slower than reality, whose time
is the ''instantaneous present."25 Beckett rejects freeze-frames;
23 Beckett, Nouvelles et textes pour rien (Paris: Minuit, 1955), p. 141. Cited in Richard Coe,
Samuel Beckett, p. 5.
24 Cited in Coe, p. 11.
25 See Coe, p. 17. Of course, if each word has all of the awareness in it that it is ever going to have,
the time that the word
Footnote continued to page 130
 Page 130
for him, the synchronization-point of language and time is silence.
The way a motion picture projector works is to show a still frame, darken the screen by
closing the shutter, advance the film to the next frame, reopen the shutter and show the
next unmoving frame, close the shutter, and so on. Gertrude Stein's instants of
perceptionof observing and recording, that is, of listening and talking, or of
photographing and projectingare recorded by a still medium, "arrested consciousness,"
and projected while instantaneously still. The film-advance pattern is ideally identical in
both camera and projector; the film, unexposed, is without remembering, and the instant it
sees, it records.
Beckett appears to reject this method as one of art; the film is stopping and starting, and
when projected
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has a version of reality, but the reality in question never started and stopped for the
convenience of its recording. It continued. The recording of that reality is impossible for
literature (or photography), but there is nothing else to try. The very fruitful differences
between Stein's and Beckett's solutions, which depend on their different conceptions of
consciousness, may be made more clear from three comparisons: between Watt and
Melanctha (both early creationsMelanctha from Stein's first published narrative, Three
Lives, and Watt Beckett's second and last novel in Englishboth written on the brink of the
abandonment of old language); between "As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story" and The
Unnamable (both products of matured aesthetics); and between the assumptions of time
and movement in Stein's play Four Saints in Three Acts and Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
To start things off, I suggest that the difference between the acts of Godot is like that
tween the frames of a film or the sequential insistences of Stein: with Vladimir and
Estragon in the limbo of a motion picture camera shooting at ever longer intervals but
mercilessly continuing to advance the film.
Stein and Beckett: Beginning Again
The repetitions in Watt are actually permutations. Every possible variation of a statement
is given in the hope that one of the formulations may happen to correspond
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to the truth. Watt (unit of work, or of illumination) is a servant in the household of Mr.
Knott (enigma, need, nothing). The household is governed by routine. Even when the
actions Watt performs and observes are repetitive and trivial, the fact that they cannot be
comprehended by the logic of any language, that reality and action transcend the
apprehension of a closed system, makes this activity immense and problematic. The
unknowable is unredeemable. The pots in Mr. Knott's household cannot be described by
the word "pot." When every possibility of statement in the English language has been
exhausted, Watt invents other languages, permutations on the structure of English
(inverting words, and letters within the words) as he attempts to narrate his experience to
Sam, another inmate of something like an asylum. Sam is the equivalent in Beckett's work
of Conrad's Marlow: a compulsive narrator with many of the traits of the anti-hero whose
tragedy he relates. Thus Sam appears to understand something of the nature of the
household, but is quite as unable as Watt to communicate its mystery; his attempt to tell
Watt's story exhausts him, and Watt ends on a note of "fatigue and disgust." The riddle of
action, of phenomenon, by its unknowability26 drives
Footnote continued from page 129
"takes" is instantaneous, or identical with that of the awareness. This is what Stein attempted.
Narrative is unsuited to nonlinear language; it does take several words to tell a story, and they
therefore "take time"; this is what accounts for the frenzy in Faulkner, the anxiety in Beckett, and the
assurance in Stein. Faulkner tried to put ''it all" in one sentence, but did not give up narrativein fact
crammed in more narrative than most writers; Beckett never quite gives it upeven the Unnamable
manufactures fictions, and Mr. Knott's routines are in themselves a story; but Stein is not interested in
"what happened." Another point: Faulkner felt that once he had said it all, he would be finished
writing; the Unnamable expects that once he is said, he will be able to be still; but life does not stop at
being said: it continues to grow and change; Stein knew that "it all" needs always to be said anew, as it
all is always new.
26 Wittgenstein said "the riddle does not exist"; no formulation within language can touch what is
beyond speaking of; the solution to the problem is seen in the vanishing of the problembut neither Watt
nor Sam approaches this insight (although, of course, Beckett does), and each continues the impossible
attempt to put the question.
 Page 133
the investigative mind to desperations of language. Mr. Knott's household, demanding and
defying explanation, obsesses Watt and Sam much as the demon Sutpen possesses the
narrators in Absalom, Absalom! when they attempt to describe him, their involvement and
frustration and the size of the Sutpen action/myth generating the frenzied intensity of that
novel's rhetoric. This permutational strategy has three expressions:
1. Listing every relevant fact or object in an attempt to fence in the phenomenon:
And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father's and my mother's and my father's father's
and my mother's mother's and my father's mother's and my mother's father's and my father's mother's
father's and my mother's father's mother's and my father's mother's mother's and my mother's father's
father's and my father's father's mother's and my mother's mother's father's and my father's father's
father's and my mother's mother's mother's and other people's fathers' and mothers' and fathers'
fathers' and mothers' mothers' and fathers' mothers' and mothers' fathers' and fathers' mothers'
fathers' and mothers' fathers' mothers' and fathers' mothers' mothers' and mothers' fathers' fathers'
and fathers' fathers' mothers' and mothers' mothers' fathers' and fathers' fathers' fathers' and mothers'
mothers' mothers'. An excrement.27

27 Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 4647. This and quotations on the
following pages are reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by
Calder & Boyars, London; reprinted by permission.
 Page 134
Although the words "fathers" and "mothers" repeat, there is in the Stein sense no
repetition, since each element of the statement is different from the others, and there is a
progress toward complete statementor exhaustion.
2. Listing the logical permutations in an attempt at problem solving:
Twelve possibilities occurred to Watt, in this connexion:
Mr Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was
1. responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement
existed, and was content.
Mr Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who
2. was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an
arrangement existed, and was content.
Mr Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew that he
12.was responsible for the arrangement, but did not know that any such
arrangement existed, and was content.

Other possibilities occurred to Watt, in this connexion, but he put them aside, and quite
out of his mind, as unworthy of serious consideration, for the time being.28
Watt's mind is an anguished computer; it adds and is disturbed. He has some intuition, as
indicated by his putting aside further permutations (for the time being!), but in general his
problem is that he is logic-bound, in a Wittgenstein nightmare, his tool of apprehension
28Ibid., pp. 8990.
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the closed logical system of language, which has no direct relation to reality. Watt is the
extreme working-out, the ultimate parody, of the logic of cause and effect.
3. Carrying logical permutation to the language itself:
So all went well until Watt began to invert, no longer the order of the words in the sentence, but that
of the letters in the word.
The following is an example of Watt's manner, at this period:
Ot bro, lap rulb, krad klub. Ot murd, wol fup, wol fup. Ot niks, sorg sam, sorg sam. Ot lems, lats
lems, lats lems. Ot gnut, trat stews, trat stews.29

But of course, like English, these languages still are closed systems, unable to express the
nonverbal or "mystical." From this we infer the limitations of that other great
permutational system, Borges' "Library of Babel," which contains all possible
combinations of all possible letters; the library must already contain the finished essay
"The Library of Babel" that its hero is in the process of writing, and its refutation; but its
inconceivable God will be only a God of the Library.
For Beckett, the drive to continue in this hopeless attempt at truth-saying is our only
honorable activity
29Ibid., p. 165.
 Page 136
within language. Its pain is our proper existential mode. So the attempt begins again, in
another list, in another novel. For language to reach truth, and to earn the right to be
silent, is the goal of all narrative striving in Beckett's Sisyphean work, and unless language
transcends language or time stops, success is impossible.
Language aspires to silence, time to stasis.30 Denied silence, Beckett exhausts nonintuitive
language in frustration at unsayable reality. But Gertrude Stein apparently finds no such
trouble. She begins again and again not because each attempt at description or moving-in-
phase-with-the-living-object failed and had to fail, but because each attempt, successful
and complete in itself, is part of a larger process that depends on this accumulation of
instants for its sense of life. The movements of Stein's language and subject are
synchronized; but for Beckett, no matter how slowly the time of his works proceeds, it
seems always to be juxtaposed with a faster and unknowable time. Perhaps Beckett knows
more than Stein; or perhaps he is more afraid of the unprestructured. Both nevertheless
begin with prolonged presents, proceed to continuous presents, and in search of a purer
present, turn to theatre.
In writing Three Lives and particularly the long
30 Beckett's insight here reminds us of Freud's formulation of the death instinct (the desire of
organic matter to return to the inorganic). Watt's smile, for example, has to be "upset" into life, then
works itself out so the face can "be at rest again" (Watt, p. 27).
 Page 137
story Melanctha, Stein developed what she later called a prolonged present, a period of
stretched attention in slowed time.31 This time sense, generated by Stein's devices of
"beginning again and again" and "using everything" (see her lecture "Composition as
Explanation"), is to some extent discernible in Watt. The enigma of Mr. Knott's household
is stretched and maintained and examined in what can only be called slowed time, and
repetition is the stylistic expression of the continual rebeginning of Watt's investigation,
the index of its progress and its urgency. But Watt can remember; he does not start each
time from a complete blank (he is, after all, telling Sam what happened in the past).
In the long story of the life of Melanctha Herbert, and particularly of her affair with the
doctor Jeff Campbell, repetition has an investigative function within a prolonged
situation. We hear, for a great part of the story, an evolving and repeating dialogue
between the lovers whose beginning again and again, with reformulations and insistences
(and some memory), shows how they are progressing and what they are stuck on and
how great their need is to resolve their feelings. They
31 Sutherland, pp. 5152: "The difference between a prolonged and a continuous present may be
defined as this, that a prolonged present assumes a situation or a theme and dwells on it and
develops it or keeps it recurring. The continuous present would take each successive moment or
passage as a completely new thing." See Stein's lecture "Composition as Explanation" for
"beginning again and again" in Melanctha.
 Page 138
are "always saying" nearly the same things to each other. Repetition here is an objective
correlative to their emotional states and to the progress of their relationship. (This long
dialogue has the same structural role as Watt's immense deliberation over how to give the
remains of Mr. Knott's food "to the dog.") As in a repetition compulsion, all of
Melanctha's relationships end unhappily, for reasons she does not understand (and as the
epigraph informs us, it is neither her fault nor life's).
Jeff and Melanctha experience a difficulty similar to Watt's in that they find it hard to
express in their speaking exactly what it is that they are feeling. This problem is
complicated by the fact that each of them relates so differently to time and memory. As
Melanctha puts it, "I certainly never did see no man like you, Jeff. You always wanting to
have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling. And I don't never
any way remember ever anything I been saying to you."32 Uninterested in memory,
Melanctha lives in the present more than the "long thinking" Jeff. Significantly, Jeff is
prevented by his time sense and by his concentration from seeing things clearly; he
cannot, like Melanctha, "begin again" in that attentive present tense that was for Stein
necessary to any real insight:
And Jeff tried to begin again with his thinking, and he could not make it come clear to himself, with
all his thinking,
32Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, pp. 407408.
 Page 139
and he felt everything all thick and heavy, now inside him, everything that he could not understand
right, with all the hard work he made, with his thinking.33

Melanctha's not remembering is the first indication that Gertrude Stein is moving toward
an awareness of the relation between present-consciousness and "the excitingness of pure
being." Melanctha's beginning again, however, is muddled: there are many things she can
remember and many steps toward self-actualization she is afraid to take. She remains
depressed and unfulfilled: complex, spontaneous, troubled. It is only when Stein works
through her Proustian interest in resemblance and the past in her next novel, The Making
of Americans, and emerges with a disciplined attention to the present alone, that her
narrators are freed from the trouble Melanctha is always finding.
But Beckett never dismisses the problem of memory. For the characters in Watt,
beginning again implies beginning with the memory of what has come before, not
beginning again in a new present without memory. The Unnamable feels the need to
recallor inventpast identities and a childhood for himself, and Arsene, the servant who
leaves Mr. Knott's household as Watt arrives, observes:
A turd. And if I could begin it all over again, knowing what I know now, the result would be the
same. And if I
33Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p. 407.
 Page 140
could begin again a third time, knowing what I would know then, the result would be the same. And
if I could begin it all over again a hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the time
before, the result would always be the same, and the hundredth life as the first, and the hundred
lives as one. A cat's flux.34

These lives are like the succession of Steinian statements except that there is remembering
in them, which of course defeats the presentness of each life (and the accuracy of each
statement). This fantasy is not so much of rebeginning as of extension (a prolonged
present). This may be the reason that reincarnation is intuitively attractive only when it is
assumed that one will not remember one's previous lives, except perhaps in flashes that
give a sense of transcendence. We are content to live it all again "if it be life"; but Arsene's
implicit rationalist fear of abandoning memory and knowledge keeps his projected lives
from taking on "the excitingness of pure being." His eternal life of increasing knowledge
is as limited as Watt's intense and endless investigation, and from the same bias.
The Unnamable starts his new life almost without memory or knowledge, and so is ahead
of Arsene on the road to successful existence in the continuous present, although what he
is seeking is an end to that present. He soon begins to reconstruct a past for himself
34Watt, p. 47.
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Beckett's gesture of a plot for the novel. But the novel's true plot is the progress of his
consciousnessthe ultimate plot in much of Stein's writing toowhose fundamental activity
is that of "going on." Begun again, he is forced to continue. He is aware of the distance
between language and reality ("call that going, call that on"),35 he cannot speak and must
speak,36 and in the strict sense, has nothing to speak about; he is unable to measure
time37 or to exist "elsewhere."38 He exists in one continuing time where it is always
presentthe time of consciousnessand in one nonplace. He does nothing and is nowhere; he
is manifested only in language, yet is unnamable. His sentences characteristically are full
of interpolations; he cannot deliberate and then utter in order. His language moves as fast
as (in fact is) his consciousness, running and staying in the same place like Alice.39 He is
the archetypal Beckett character, whose images in the earlier novels are Molloy, Murphy,
Malone and who is angered at having been roused from unconsciousness into speech
35The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, Black Cat,
1965), p. 291. Translated from the French by the author. Copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc.
This and quotations on the following pages are reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.
Published by Calder & Boyars, London; reprinted by permission.
36Ibid., p. 301.
37Ibid., p. 299.
38Ibid., p. 297. Cf. Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, p. 153.
39 See several interesting discussions in the Alice books of the problem of beginning again, of identity
in the continuous present,
 Page 142
that is, into another novel. (There is a close analogy here with repetition compulsion: the
longing of the roused language for silence.) Beckett has stripped almost all pretensions of
plot and character from the act of writing in an attempt to push language to that point
where it really confronts the objects of its falsifications, to the protoplasm of fiction. The
Unnamable is as anxious as Watt, although not as determinedly logical (whatever thoughts
he has are incidental to the act of speaking); in both, however, confrontation with enigma
drives them to try to explain, to push languages to their limits, to say the unsayable and be
at rest. If we return to Arsene's version of reincarnation, we can see that The Unnamable
represents a change in Beckett's way of conceiving beginning again. The Unnamable
wakes from anonymous unconsciousness to anonymous consciousness, without real
memory or the ability to remember, only the ability to keep trying to express his condition
accurately, in order that his expression may be completed; Arsene would begin again with
all his knowledge from earlier lives. The Unnamable makes up all that he discovers, but
even that is hard won. The
Footnote continued from page 141
especially '''I could tell you my adventuresbeginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly; 'but
it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'" ("The Lobster-Quadrille")
Also several anticipations of Beckett in the Mad Tea-Party: the way time was stopped at tea-time by a
time referred to as "him" (evening, Godot), and the inhabitants of the treacle-well who drew
"everything that begins with an M"
 Page 143
Unnamable has no conception of an objective "past present or future"; every instant of
conscious activity is new. Beckett's sequence of novels with the same archetypal
characterbut with each attempt at that character a new onecan be compared to a sequence
of Steinian statements, each a beginning again, with an occasional Proustian flash from
novel to novel, as when the Unnamable "remembers" his other manifestations. And the
sequence has reached its near-end, its almost-object, in the archetype of its earlier
expressions.
We do not know whether silence is reached, since we do not know whether the end of the
last paragraph is the momentary silence that separates paragraphs or the lasting silence,
resolution and identity:
all words, there's nothing else, you must go on, that's all I know, they're going to stop, I know that
well, I can feel it, they're going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few
moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn't last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go
on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they
find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already,
perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story,
before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the
silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in
 Page 144
the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.40

We notice that "they" have dropped out of the final goading; there is no second "you must
go on." (We also notice that a close repetition seems an aesthetically successful way of
resolving a string of repetitions: "I can't go on, I'll go on.") The goad to beginning the
discussion again, in the hope of achieving a dynamic and accurate correspondence
between language and reality and an end to pain (life, frustration, impotence), has in The
Unnamable finally confronted the danger of anonymity, of surrender to the inexpressible
and uncontrollable; identity has been renounced, but life has persisted, and the
unknowables and unsayables whose knowing and saying is the mission of the existential
artistand which must be dealt with before any "story" can be told or identity affirmedhave
been brought infinitesimally closer into range.
Gertrude Stein's story-portrait "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" is of course not of the
complexity or length of The Unnamable, but it is a good example of her work in the
continuous present. It may profitably be read in conjunction with "As a Wife Has a Cow:
A Love Story," which begins by defining its terms (Unnamable: "I, say I call that going,
call that on"; As a Wife: "Nearly all of it to be as a wife has a cow, a love story"),
40The Unnamable, p. 414 (end of the novel).
 Page 145
proceeds through variations on those terms and on time ("Not and now, now and not, not
and now, by and by not and now "), and reaches its resolution in a completeness of
statement and realization of story and identity analogous to the Unnamable's silence ("My
wife has a cow").
"Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" gradually tells the story of two women who live together for
a time and "cultivate their voices," then grow apart. Together, "they were regularly gay,"
and when Helen Furr is on her own again she lives "regularly" and is gay in telling all the
little ways she had learned of being gay. The continuity of her existence, with its
expanding happiness, is put in terms of her repeated telling of her knowledge of living:
She told many then the way of being gay, she taught very many then little ways they could use in
being gay. She was living very well, she was gay then, she went on living then, she was regular in
being gay, she always was living very well and was gay very well and was telling about little ways
one could be learning to use in being gay, and later was telling them quite often, telling them again
and again.41

The gaiety and its discussion continue together with no loss in vitality. This quality of
keeping subject, object,
41Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p. 568 (end of the story). See Bridgman, pp. 9596, on the
question whether this ending is ironic. My point is the same whether Miss Furr was
Footnote continued to page 146
 Page 146
and speech in phase in continuing time is what the Unnamable, on Beckett's behalf, is
trying to achieve.
The similar movements of "As a Wife Has a Cow" and The Unnamable make clear that
although Stein is concerned with psychology and Beckett with philosophy, the two writers
approach the problems of time and language with similar literary tools: notably repetition
in the continuous present. I am not suggesting that Steinese offers a resolution to the
problems of existentialism, but it is interesting that their evolving attitudes toward
beginning again and memory are so closely related. Beckett's conviction of failure and the
need to continue, and Stein's conviction of success, are both addressed in one sense to the
difficulty of creating internally consistent writing, writing which in itself is. Both are
aware that they are trying to do the impossible or at least the very difficult. Beckett's urge
to failure has been discussed already; it remains to add that one of Stein's mottoes was "If
it can be done why do it."42
Theatre and the Continuous Present
Both Beckett and Stein turned to theatre for its flawless present tense. Stein's plays, which
aim at an
Footnote continued from page 145
actually gay or was anxious to appear gay: the being and the telling are synchronized.
42Lectures in America, p. 157.
 Page 147
abstract and straightforward simplicity, nevertheless require some introduction. They are
conceived as "movement in a space or in a landscape";43 they are what can be seen by
looking at it. Free from plot, they are nearly free from causality; they consist mostly of
"playful" juxtapositions, made up of movement rather than consequential action. A
situation is presented, in relation only to itself; it exists rather than informs. Characters do
not always have names, and even when they do we cannot describe their identities with
the limited index of "personality"; sometimes there are just numbers with stylesbut they
have definite being. The idea in her first play, What Happened, was "without telling what
happened to make a play the essence of what happened."44 There is a great vitality in
Stein's plays; we become interested in the action not because we are being built to a
climax, or because we are watching characters clash with themselves and their
environment, but because the characters and their environments, as a consistent
landscape, are moving in phase: in short, appear not to move in any direction, but project
the energy of motion:
But the strange thing about the realization of existence is that like a train moving there is no real
realization of it
43 Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, p. 125.
44 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, p. 119.
 Page 148
moving if it does not move against something if the movement, that is any movement, is lively
enough, perhaps it is possible to know that it is moving even if it is not moving against anything.45

Four Saints in Three Acts is static in the sense that it is not moving in relation to anything
else; but everything in the play has its own energy: the energy of a living work. Its author
said, "anything that was not a story could be a play,"46 because stories involve suspention
of attention from what is going on in the theatrical present. What else is a play but
something going on and being looked ata stage landscape in juxtaposition with an
audience landscape? This book is something going on on a page; if it were a poem it
might take on the dynamic spatial arrangement characteristic of actors on a stage. You
reading this are outside but attentive, and in our juxtaposition there is an energy
independent of your reasons for reading this or my reasons for writing it. How you came
to be facing this page or my words to be on it are stories, of less interest than the
dynamics of our current relationship, which is one of presence. If I were to abandon logic
in this work, there would be little for me to do but continually to confront you with my
presence and its process. Soon I would turn to poetry or calligraphy in an attempt to
45Ibid., p. 165.
46Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, p. 113.
 Page 149
dramatize our relationship, to give it spatial energy. To insist on the present quality of our
time together, I would at some point turn to theatre.
Theatre is a good vehicle for the art of the continuous present for two reasons: a play
occurs before the audience in the present and keeps moving, and its materials are
presented with reference only to themselves and are therefore dependent not on causality
but on juxtaposition and repetition. Energetic occupation of space: that seems to me the
nature of landscape in theatre. Ideas can be spatially juxtaposed, can be emphatic about
their existence, much as a mountain and valley spatially are and insist. Such a theatre is
not limited to the dance; Stein's theatre certainly demonstrates that anything from an
abstract version of the life of Susan B. Anthony, to counting, can take on spatial energy in
a continuing time. Stories are distractions; situation is truth.
Gertrude Stein presents motions that stay in placeas good a definition as I can find of the
quality of excitement and stasis (waiting) in Godot. Both Godot and Four Saints are plays
of landscape, yet both progress to what feel like endings. Both are static yet develop, and
in both, as Sutherland says, "the heart of the matter is constantly there."47
47 Conventional dramatic structure generally keeps the audience catching up with it, rather than
allowing stage and audience time to move together. In the theatre of repetition, these
Footnote continued to page 150
 Page 150
The heart of the matter in Waiting for Godot is, simply, waiting. Vladimir and Estragon
meet on a country road in the evening, wait for Godot, encounter Pozzo and Lucky, and
are told by a boy that Godot will be there tomorrow. That is the plot of each of the two
acts. The two tramps move infinitesimally closer to Godot in the course of their play; the
action is not over for them, but it feels proper that it should be for us. The ending of the
second act is very much like that of the first, but some forward movement has occurred
(enough for us to guess how a third act would move) and has been perceived through the
discrepancies between the near-repetitions of the two acts.
Footnote continued from page 149
times attempt continually to be in phase, without remembering, in the present. As Donald Sutherland
puts it, "Gertrude Stein was right enough when she pointed out that the emotion of an ordinary stage
climax is essentially relief, that is, a relief over having at last caught up with the heart of the matter.
She meant instead to create something in which the heart of the matter would be constantly there"
(Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, p. 115). The clearest example of this kind of play is the
mystery drama that is solved at its end. Such plays are of course primarily concerned with "what
happened." In a theatre that cared more about the essence of what happened, a mystery might look very
like In Circles or Waiting for Godot. The solution would be always on stage but never "solved in the
action." The mystery and its solution would be identical, and always present; one would always be
caught up, and would ideally feel a complete movement in the mystery. A mystery novel in the
continuous present might look more like Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy than his Erasers.
 Page 151
Vladimir and Estragon's waiting is made bearable by the impermanence of their memories;
they have always been here; they cannot really remember the first act by the time they are
in the second; they have to move in the present. Vladimir remembers the Boy who does
not remember him, but he does not make enough out of this to be said to become entirely
aware of the repetition. It is generally true of repetition that if one is involved with what
he is repeating, if for him and his audience the word or action has the life and meaning of
appropriateness and discovery, recurrence will not be felt as repetitious. It may be felt as
"insistence" or simply as energy, but it will not be dead. We can repeat a line fifteen times
in a short poem if we believe in it; we can read that poem if we do not rush over the
repetitions with mental ditto marks; we can move with the vitality of each identical
sunrise; we can make love to the same person if we are in love. It is not important that we
have done or felt or said these things before; memory only displaces or undermines our
objective experience of the present. In the continuous present there is no consciousness
of repetition.
The two acts in Godot, which change but repeat, and in which there is only the most
imprecise kind of remembering, thus approach the nature of successive statements in
Steinese (cf. Four Saints' stage direction, "Repeat First Act"). They are the fixed-while-
exposed frames of the motion picture, between which
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there is darkness. The time of the tree speeds past the time of the tramps, as the stasis-
and-advance-with-slight-change art-time of motion picture film cannot approach the
always there and always changing objective reality before the lens. The time of the tree is
smooth and fast, that of the acts jerky. The speed of the tramps appears slower the more it
increases (approaching the speed of light? the time of the tree?). Their waiting begins
again with each long day.
Identity is a matter not of x = 1 or x = 2, but of x = x; the self is not a name. Stopping the
search for self at ''personality" is like being electricity and deciding that one is whatever
has been plugged ina toaster, for instance. We change as we move in time; moving in
relation to nothing but ourselves, we grow and have life, and are life. We are unnamable,
not simply M after M. Time counts one, one, one. Units succeed each other but in the
continuous present do not build; and even this concept of units is true only in art: time
does not count at all.
Stein's saints "have to be to see," and "to see to say."48 The Unnamable must say until he
is. Because the saints are, because they can listen and talk at the same time, without
identity-anxiety, their speech can present reality and move at its speed. Beckett's characters
have not definitively found their selves; they wait
48 Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays, p. 480 (from the finale of Four Saints).
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for time actually to stop so they can see it; the tree would have to be as fixed as their
frame (as in End-game, where nature has almost stopped): a still photograph of a still
object, not a motion picture (depending on a trick, persistence of vision) of a continuous
reality. His speakers are only approaching the identityentirely without memory, entirely in
being and being in the presentthat will free them from the need to talk: in which
experience, language, and time will synchronize in silence.
Art and Experience
The question is whether experience can be caught in timewhether any act of recording can
approach the act of living. Words and frames occur singly, and accumulate into
statements or movements. It is in their nature to divide experience and to present pieces of
experience in sequence, trusting the act of apprehension to restore continuity. They make
it necessary for us, and thus instruct us, to apprehend the present, a perfect continuum, as
a series of instants. It is this act of division which distinguishes art from experience. Pure
continuum remains inexpressible; while we are aware of its nature (when, for example,
we experience the enormity of actual love, and no italicizing or adjectiving or framing or
insisting will begin to express or image that transcendence which is falsified even by
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being called "feeling"), the act of dividing and arranging and killing into the
communicable is laughable to us, and horrible. There is no need to say such things: we
say them in living, becoming and answering such experience with experience, rejecting all
art-methods, rejecting what always is false.
And the truth then is seen as greater. It is not simply the illuminated moment that cannot
be put into words: it is all experience. Reality, because it is continuousalways the real,
always present, always what life is and the way life has of moving through itself, so that
time and reality are one, and one with life, as existence and experience are oneis
necessarily and always outside the verbal, or divisible. It is typical of our need to
habituate ourselves to experience that we are aware of this intense continuity only in
extraordinary moments, gasping and laughing at ourselves at the absurdity of "I love
you," later rememberingsuch is voluntary memoryonly the terrible words. But all of
reality is unnamable. There is really not so much difference between Watt's "pot" and
"love"or ''Incarnation," or "I." All of our words are in quotes.
Thus when Stein takes the present by instants she is working comfortably within the
limits of art, perceiving, as the director Jean-Luc Godard put it, the "truth" twenty-four
times a second; or, as Stein said, "every time it is so it is so."49 (Of course Godard, a
49 Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, p. 85.
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sometime believer in art, did not put truth in quotes.) It is in the supreme distrust of
Beckett, and in the wrenching honesty of Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that we
find art responsibly, desperately hating itself, pulling for the real, for the intense
expression of continuity. And we know they must fail, that the acts of Godot are frames,
and art a camera, for which reality will not stop: that Agee's raging experience of
humanity will be picked up, his people's living will be picked up "as casually as if it were
a book."50 And of course he has asked for this, by making a book.
The instant-method does what art does, frame after frame. Dividing the present is a
falsification, and near-repetition perfects this method, but does not undo the damage. The
continuous present, to be experienced, must not be split. If we must suffer the fall into
language, we must still try to undo the divisions of verbiage, and the false connections of
syntax, in a nearly preverbal discipline of true, not near, repetition. We will deal first with
the attempt at literal repetition in art, and then drive if we can past art, past the aesthetics
of near-repetition, to the experience of the timeless, the unquestionably real, the
undifferentiable: where as unnamables we will not feel that we must speak until we are
said: where, like Antoine Doinel in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, we can say the mystery
50 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1960), p. 13.
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of our name into the mirror so many times that the name becomes impenetrable and we
are gladly rid of it.
Alain Resnais
Both emphasis and falsification depend on remembering. Repetition with remembering
emphasizes up to a point; then it creates its own monsters, and finally deadens them into
routine. But repetition without remembering can renew.
By this reasoning, even a film loop would not be boring so long as we did not, as an
audience, approach it with remembering. Nevertheless, such a loop would not be a good
artwork about repetition, since it could not manifest that developing consciousness which
we have seen is essential to the vitality of work in the continuous present. There would
have to be an active mind, in the work, for whom each repetition was a new experience.
The audience, attentive to the development of the hero's consciousness as manifested in
the work's repetitions, would soon comprehend, if not experience for itself, the nature of
repetition without remembering.
Alain Resnais, the French director whose central theme seems to be the interrelations of
repetition, remembering, and love, has at last given us such a filmor half of such a filmin
which scenes repeat without variation and yet manifest advancing consciousness. Before
 Page 157
discussing Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), let me review Resnais' earlier work.
The intrusion of something past on something present is Resnais'virtual signature. Nuit et
brouillard (1955), for example, intercuts a concentration camp's present (overgrown,
peaceful, in color) with its past (horrible, black and white). Marienbad may be its own
"last year." Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour (1963) counterpoints a young man's obsession
with an atrocity in which he had participated during the Algerian war, with his
stepmother's attempt to rebegin an old love affair under a load of false memories. The
young man's memory is goaded by an 8mm film of happy soldiers taken in Algeria; the
stepmother has a bad memory (like Beckett's Proust), and her lover falsifies the past to
such an extent that they both become aware that their nostalgia is for a nonexistent past.
The stepmother puts off a constant present lover in her obsession with her first; the young
man, all the time analytically documenting the present, speaks of his girl friend, Marie-Do,
as if she were Muriel, the victim of the atrocity. When the falseness of her own memories
is exposed, the stepmother becomes involved in the story of Muriel (Marie-Do). This film
deals with the past exclusively in terms of the present, that is of its falsifications and
correspondences. Instant succeeds instant; there are no dissolves or fades, only straight
cuts. The present is never mixed with any other time.
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In Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) a French actress has a short affair with a Japanese
architect. The twitching of the architect's hand in sleep reminds her of the reflexive
twitching of the dead hand of her first lover, a German soldier. In both affairs she loves
someone from a country France had fought in the war; she has in fact come to Hiroshima
to make an antiwar film, starting herself back to the time of her earlier affair. This affair is
no more successful than the first, although we can see that it might have represented a
repetition in reverse (Germany victimized France, France as an Allied power indirectly
destroyed Hiroshima; the actress has come to Hiroshima out of an involvement with its
past, while the architect is operating in its present with an eye to its future).
Je t'aime, je t'aime deals not with memory but with repetition. Claude Ridder survives an
attempted suicide and is persuaded by a group of scientists to test their subjective time
machine. He and a mouse will be sent, for one minute, one year back into their own pasts;
they will experience that moment and return to the present. Claude had tried to kill
himself out of the guilt he feels at having murdered his mistress, Catrine; compulsively
involved with his past, and uninterested in living in the present, he lies next to the mouse
in a womblike structure and is reborn into his past. The moment to which he is returned is
shown directly on the screen: no fuzz, no framing, no dissolves. He is
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swimming underwater for the whole minute. That moment occurs in the present tense of
the film, just as it repeats for Claude, who relives it with no temporal distance, no
"remembering." (Resnais' manner of cutting among times without opticals or fades makes
an important point: one does violence to realism by any kind of cutting, moving from one
shot to another. Any straight cut is a time-leap. The year-leap in Je t'aime is as
cinematically consistent as the jump cut in Muriel from a full serving dish to the dish and
its leavings when the meal is finished, or from over Cary Grant's shoulder as he talks with
Joan Fontaine to over Joan Fontaine's shoulder as she talks with Cary Grant.) Claude
disappears from the water, reappears in the time machine. Then he disappears again. He
swims toward the camera again. He is caught in that moment. The identical shot repeats;
we infer that his involvement with the past is keeping him from returning to the present
(or, since the mouse is having the same trouble, that the machine doesn't quite work). The
choice of an underwater moment is perfect: the audience feels out of breath, demands that
Claude get out of the water, into that past, for oxygen. The next shot shows Claude
wading in, backwarda physical gesture that perfectly conveys the multiple tensions of this
time-choice, not a reversed film, nor a variation in what had occurred. He swims toward
the camera. He is back in the time-womb. He is on the beach with Catrine.
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From there the film presents scattered past instants, each present to the time traveler and
each presented in a single shot. Repetition is far better than nostalgia and guilt, or
remembering. The sequence of scenes becomes rhythmic, as certain of the repetitions
(notably those of wading and of swimming) repeat. He relives enough of the affair to let
the audience know why he tried to kill himself. The resolution of the film is reached
when he relives the moment of his suicide. He reappears in the scientists'present, outside
the time machine, dying of is wound. We do not know whether he dies this time.
Here the repetition in reverse (of the suicide) is done not through memory, as in
Hiroshima, but in the actual time of its earlier occurrence and simultaneously, at a later
point in the film and in Claude's subjective experience.51 The last thing we are shown is
film-time actually stopping. The mouse had gone on a temporal juggernaut like Claude's
(at one point their pasts intersect: Claude and Catrine wonder what a white mouse is
doing on the beach); with Claude returned to the present, the mouse is seen in its bell jar,
sniffing upward for air, in a freezeframe.
Although the movement of the plot is melodramatic (and the scientists'attempts to save
Claude are dramatically pathetic, wasting half the film), Je t'aime, je t'aime
51 So these are also Eliadean repetitions. Cf. Marker's brilliant film of "a time twice-lived," La
Jetée.
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is a genuine exploration of the continuous present and of the implications of montage.
The nature of that present is put in terms of repetition: all instants in time, all shots in
film, are of equal value, equal permanence. A shot recurring on the screen repeats, with
no framing, in the presentjust as Claude relives his past in his present. (And Claude
moves among places and times without the time machine's moving, just as remote places
and times are juxtaposed on the fixed theatre screen.) There is progress in this repetition,
as in Purgatory it is hoped there is progress. Of course this film is exactly the record of a
purgatory, where by repeating one's sin one may come to an understanding of it, may
bring it into one's present (as Claude brings his wound), may bring one's subjective time
into phase with "outside" time. Sin stops time,52 just as any really important action holds
one's attention; that sin must by worked through or purged for us to say, "The time is
free!" From its double title forward, Je t'aime, je t'aime is a compact expression of the
difference between remembering and repetition, as it is a demonstration of the way art
continues in its present tense regardless of the story-tense of its scenes or shots or
sentences. Every shot is equally present; there are no framing devicescinematic equivalent
of "then," "later," ''before"anywhere in the film. Every instant is new. Even when
52 Cf. The Unnamable, p. 414: "strange pain, strange sin, you must go on "
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a shot is repeated many times (he swims toward the camera), the film-time is advancing,
continuing its image, and the audience is feeling each breath-held sixty secondsa very long
time in filmwith real intensity, real need for oxygen, at every repetition. That shot is not
remembered; it is here.
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"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasures!" the Queen said. "Two-pence a week, and jam every
other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said "I don't want you to hire meand I don't care for
jam."
"It's very good jam," said the Queen.
"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and
jam yesterdaybut never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day.'" Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you
know."
"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing."
"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a
little giddy at first"
"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a
thing!"
"but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."
"I'm sure mine only works one way," Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before
they happen."
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass,
"Wool and Water."
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5.
Jam Today
When in a mountainous region one hears the wind day in day out execute firmly and unchangingly
the same theme, one perhaps is tempted for an instant to ignore the imperfection of the analogy and
to rejoice in this symbol of the consistency and assurance of human freedom.
Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition

Beyond Logic: Repetition as Syntax

So far I have discussed repetition as if it were some unstable artistic compound: handle it
carelessly and it will kill both you and your subject, handle it in full awareness of its
properties and with a genius for its use and it will serve you well. My aesthetics have
consisted in attempting to clarify these properties and to define care. But aesthetics is
often a discipline more of philosophy than of art. The continuous present is not an
invention of philosophy, but the time-conviction of a student of consciousness. Even so it
has led us to the problem of time and the problem of transcending limits: problems with
which philosophy and religion have perhaps better equipped us to deal directly than have
 Page 166
psychology, poetry, and film. If I have built up a theory of repetition in and out of time,
in and out of art, the consistency of that theory is owing not to some three-thousand-year
artistic conspiracy, but to what I am attempting to define as the innate character of
repetition, a poetic and thematic nature that has made itself clear to hundreds of artists
independent of any latter-day philosophizing. I feel it necessary here to attempt to touch
directly this nature, this fundamental tendency that I believe is to timelessness, and I must
turn to three philosophical/religious texts, hoping that they may make my concluding
argument clear: Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the Hindu Upanishads, and Kierkegaard's
Repetition.
Language has definite limits; there are some things of which it cannot speak. Because
language is logical, it cannot describe the illogical any more than we can, strictly speaking,
think the illogical.1 Just as, to the religious, there is an incomprehensible force outside the
world, to Wittgenstein and Beckett there are realities outside logic, events neither caused
nor causes, awarenesses that cannot be verbalized.
The outgoing servant Arsene attempts to explain Mr. Knott's household to Watt, Watt to
explain the household to himself and to Sam, and Sam (with his novel)
1 "Thought can never be of anything illogical. It is as impossible to represent in language anything
that 'contradicts logic' as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts
the laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist." Wittgenstein,
Tractatus, 3.03, 3.032.
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to tell it all to the reader. Sam is prevented by "fatigue and disgust" from completing his
record; Arsene speaks in the moment of giving up; and Watt, as a logical positivist, is
defeated by definition. None of the three can speak without saying everything. Every
detail must be precisely stated, every action or position or demonstration explained to the
full. This attempt at inclusive precision in statement is defeated by the nature of language
(if not by the vestige of narration); Watt is the record of that failure. The boundaries of
Watt's apprehension are not those of Mr. Knott's household:
Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr Knott's pots, of one of Mr Knott's
pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it
was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that it was not
a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot,
pot, and be comforted.2

That we are logical is no reason everything else must be logical. A sort of burnt offering
to the Absurd, Watt leaves us with the question: How does a closed system see past itself,
and say what it cannot directly say?
Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a series of propositions (by definition logical) that by its end
has managed to lead us to perceive the mystical, or has shown us where
2Watt, p. 81.
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to start looking. There are no surprises in logic (6.1251); whatever can be put into words
can be put clearly. What can be posed as a problem can be answered. But "the solution of
the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem" (6.521). For logic, cause-and-
effect is a law. We forget that the notion "cause" implies the notion "effect," that "belief in
the causal nexus is superstition" (5.1361). In reality there must be able to be events that
are not caused or causes.3 Problems and their solutions move in a closed system, but life
is not closed; its truths ''make themselves manifest" (6.522) and cannot be put into
language.
We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life
remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the
answer. [6.52]
Watt is on the road to answering all possible questions, making all possible statements, on
a stack pass in the Library of Babel.
3 A first cause, for example, is demanded by logic to explain the existence of the universe; yet a
first cause must have been uncaused, a first cause contradicts the laws of cause and effect, a first
cause is outside logic and demands not proof but belief. And if a first cause does not conform to the
logical demands concerning causes, how can one within logic predicate a necessary first cause? In
a rigorous defense of causality, logic leads straight to religion, but proves the truth neither of
causality nor of religion.
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Watt and the Tractatus generate in the reader an awareness of what is beyond language.
The Tractatus explains thought and language, shows us that they are closed, that they can
deal only with the logical, that every problem they can pose can be answeredthen appeals
to our sense of what cannot be expressed. We are shown, through language, language's
limitations:
Feeling the world as a limited wholeit is this that is mystical. [6.45]
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually
recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used themas stepsto climb up beyond them. (He must,
so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. [6.54, 7]
The Tractatus cannot discuss what cannot be put into language.4 It does not transcend
itself, but points. The reader must use these propositions to transcend them.
4 Watt, on the other hand, does attempt to discuss what is impossible to discussto name, for
example, a not-pot. Watt makes us aware of the limits of language poetically, through frustrating and
exhausting us, while the Tractatus simply tells us about these limits. Himself only one of its names,
Watt attempts to name the Unnamable.
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The Tractatus remains logical; it is not poetry or silence. Even poetry, as it is written in
language, cannot finally abandon logic, but it can give the illusion of doing so. One of the
richest techniques in the generation of this illusion is repetition.
Up to a certain point, repetition emphasizes the sense of what is repeatedbuilds, as it does
in King Lear. Beyond that point, the repeated word loses its original meaning: it becomes
a routine or cliché, a blank wall, a falsified memory, or a drone. But repeated past this
point, the word can become a force, the drone primary sound. By repetition, a proposition
can become a secular mantra.
The Upanishads attempt to communicate in language an understanding of that reality of
which phenomena are the distortion, that Sound of which matter is the lowest frequency.
They lead the reader to understanding through repetition and often also through the
reduction of language to its suggestive, arational, primary element (the syllable). If all
comes from one, then the identity of statements shown through repetition begins the
reader's education in reduction (expansion) stylistically. Speech gives the illusion of
difference, but it can also lead to an understanding of the fallacy of difference, as it does
in this tale from the Chhãndogya Upanishad:
His father said to him: "Svetaketu, as you are so conceited, considering yourself so well-read, and
so stern, my dear,
 Page 171
have you ever asked for that instruction by which we hear what cannot be heard, by which we know
what cannot be known?"
"What is that instruction, Sir?" he asked.
The father replied: "My dear, as by one clod of clay all that is made of clay is known, the difference
being only a name, arising from speech, but the truth being that all is clay. "6

Svetaketu returns to his father with "all possible scientific questions" answered, and now
begins to learn what cannot be taught. The principal tension in the Upanishads is that of
language's attempting to transcend itself, to make manifest the nonverbal. Svetaketu is led
to see the unity of all things, and the identity of his Self and the life-essence of the
universe through his father's repetition:
"Now that which is that subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self,
and thou, O Svetaketu, art it."6

Each time he hears this line, Svetaketu replies, "Please, Sir, inform me still more," and the
father agrees, until at the end of the chapter:
5 Chhãndogya Upanishad, Sixth Prapathaka, in Nicol Macnicol, Hindu Scriptures (London: J. M.
Dent & Sons, Ltd., Everyman's Library, 1938), p. 166.
6Hindu Scriptures, pp. 171 ff.
 Page 172
"As that truthful man is not burnt, thus has all that exists its self in That. It is the True. It is the Self,
and thou, O Svetaketu, art it." He understood what he said, yea, he understood it.7

The father's explanations do not build on each other; each unit of argument makes the
same point in a similar way. But after nine units, Svetaketu understands. He does not give
in, or "learn," but sees. The communication was not logical but transcendent of logic,
through repetition.
The aesthetics of novelty belong to the assumptions of cause and effect. If each pictorial
or language unit is seen as leading necessarily to another, and takes its meaning from that
relation and progression, it is not possible for each unit to have complete identity; we
expect change and development, and see each unit not for what it is but for what it comes
from and leads to. We remember and anticipate. But where an event can be an event
without being a cause, it can exist on its own and be read or observed for what it is in
itself, in its own space and time. Each unit is complete regardless of that to which it looks
back or forward. It takes place in the present. It does not lose force in recurring; the
repetitious is considered so because it appears to the remembering and anticipating mind
that the discussion is not progressing as readily or assuredly as it should,
7Hindu Scriptures, p. 174.
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that it is foundering in the present from a lack of understanding of its larger direction. But
units do not necessarily have larger direction; this direction can be something imposed on
them from without. Our minds work by logic; they think of things as being causes with
effectsbut it is certainly possible that they distort what is before them, organize illogical
reality to make themselves feel comfortable (as Watt would "be comforted" if his pot
could be described "pot"). Mathematics can prove only the truths of mathematics, and
logic of logic. Neither system can touch or prove reality, although each may be able to
infer it, or occasionally find correspondence with it; falsification is inevitable. It is even
possible to say that we reduce the life force we represent to a logically apprehensible
"identity," that we make ourselves Mr. B or Miss L as a defense against the immensity of
life in and around us. In a Darwinian sense, we are the animal that survived through
reason; reason is an accident, and it has always been part of our nature, though not
necessarily part of that of all phenomena. Our mind arranges experience into cause and
effect, perception into logic, time into clocktime, life into personalitydefensively, as a way
of controlling or defining territory. The concept of personality is a territorial distortion
(like arranging one's furniture), making experience easier to deal with; but it is still a
distortion. Mathematics, personality, and logic are part of a box or room we have defined
for ourselves;
 Page 174
we have closed ourselves in with this box, but we can make the box a step. That is one
meaning of the conclusion of the Tractatus.
Language attempts to reach indivisibility, the freedom from relegation to "then" or "part"
or "name," through repetition. Here is a story from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:
The threefold descendants of Prajapati, gods, men, and Asuras [evil spirits], dwelt as
Brachmacharins [students] with their father Prajapati. Having finished their studentship the gods
said: "Tell us (something), Sir." He told them the syllable da. Then he said: "Did you understand?"
They said: "We did understand. You told us 'Damyata,' Be subdued." "Yes," he said, "you have
understood.''
Then the men said to him: "Tell us something, Sir." He told them the same syllable da. Then he said:
"Did you understand?" They said: "We did understand. You told us, 'Datta,' Give." "Yes," he said,
"you have understood."
Then the Asuras said to him: "Tell us something, Sir." He told them the same syllable da. Then he
said: "Did you understand?" They said: "We did understand. You told us, 'Dayadham,' Be merciful."
"Yes," he said, "you have understood."
The divine voice of thunder repeats the same, Da da da, that is, Be subdued, Give, Be merciful.
Therefore let that triad be taught, Subduing, Giving, and Mercy.8

8 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in Nicol Macnicol, Hindu Scriptures, pp. 102103. "Da" should be
left alone rather than talked about, but it might at first be conceptualized as "Da ": that
Footnote continued to page 175
 Page 175
The three differences made by the three audiences out of the one syllable do not falsify
the intention of the syllable; "da" is them all. It is the language of nature.
The different names for "clays" create the illusion of difference among clay, but the truth
is that all is onethat all selves not simply "have self" but are Self; the repeated syllable "da"
is a prelanguage of unity. Repetition makes us see the unity of which names are a
distortion, but it must also make us see the fallacy of connections, of syntax. We know
that there are an infinite number of points in a line, but there are also an infinite number
of points in a point. (The Trinity is a similar, equally simple mystery.) The world is and
depends on the illusion of difference; realizing that all is one, we are freed from
phenomena. Our self returns to, joins, becomes that Self which is. We stop drawing lines
between the points of our experience, stop saying this is different from and connected to
that; we see this is that. Names create difference, and syntax creates connections among
those differences, allowing them to act on each other in time. But clock-time, of course, is
another of these illusionsthe decision to apprehend the present by splitting it into instants
forever separates art from the continuity of the real; unity is outside time.
Footnote continued from page 174
is, as containing, unsaid, all of the words that are made out of it. To speak such a word is to speak not
only "da," but the simultaneous meanings of the silence it carries: to speak, in effect, the nonverbal as
well as the syllable.
 Page 176
(Only in time could there be, as Stein asserts, "a difference between Barcelona.") Syntax
allows us to think in terms of petty networks, but it is as faulty and mechanical and
unenlightened when considered in relation to Unity (which, having no differences. needs
no connections) as the telephone system might be to a group mind. Repetition is
minimum syntax: a word relating to and acting on itself. No connection could be less
conducive to the consideration of networks, of structures made out of false differences.
The word, and then the word. Our mind, taken off "connections," may begin to perceive
the One. The word has all its reality (within the limits of language) at every use; but the
syntax of repetition, undoing those falsifications wrought by the syntax of novelty, takes
the word further, into its inherent preverbal timelessness.
Constantine in Berlin
For Kierkegaard, repetition is not only "the whole of life,"9 but in fact, eternity. His
Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, published the same day as Fear and
Trembling (October 16, 1843), is in two parts. The first discusses, in a comic fashion, the
possibility
9 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 33; page references are to the 1964 Harper
Torchbooks edition.
 Page 177
of repeating actual experience in the phenomenal world. The second, which at its head
repeats the title, Repetition, abandons "experimental psychology" and deals with repetition
in eternity. As Constantine, the comic narrator, defines them:
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is
recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly so called is recollected
forwards. Therefore repetition, if it is possible, makes a man happy, whereas recollection makes
him unhappyprovided he gives himself time to live and does not at once, in the very moment of
birth, try to find a pretext for stealing out of life, alleging, for example, that he has forgotten
something.10

Kierkegaard tells two interrelated stories. The second concerns a young man who falls in
love with the idea of a girl he has met; she remains his inspiration as long as they are
apart. Recollection inspires his writing, and turns him into a sighing unhappy lover:
His eyes filled with tears, he flung himself down on a chair and repeated the verse again and again.
He was in love, deeply and sincerely in love; that was evident, and yet at once, on one of the first
days of his engagement, he was capable of recollecting his love. Substantially he was through with
the whole relationship. he did not love
10Repetition, p. 33.
 Page 178
her, he merely longed for her. the love of recollection does indeed make a man unhappy. My young
friend did not understand repetition.11

The young man is trying to continue his love as if its being over were essential to its
attraction; he tries to keep his fiancée distanced (in poetry or melancholy) and remains in
a sense unable to enjoy her. But the melancholy drives him too far; the young man
renounces his fiancée (as Kierkegaard had his) and the love of recollection; he "remains
perfectly still," and in this primal solitude discovers repetition, which he describes as
receiving himself back. His emotions had become "falsified"12 in his affair with the girl;
when he gave her up, hoping they might continue in perpetual stasis, she surprised him by
marrying someone else. The young man writes to the narrator, Constantine Constantius:
She is married. I am again myself, here I have the repetition, I understand everything, and existence
seems to me more beautiful than ever. The discord in my nature is resolved, I am again unified. Is
there not a repetition? Did I not get everything doubly restored? Did I not get myself again, precisely
in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance? And what is a repetition of
11Repetition, pp. 38, 40, 41.
12Repetition, p. 41. (Falsified through recollection, or remembering.)
 Page 179
earthly goods which are of no consequence to the spiritwhat are they in comparison with such a
repetition? Only his children Job did not receive again double, because a human life is not a thing
that can be duplicated. In that case only spiritual repetition is possible, although in the temporal life
it is never so perfect as in eternity, which is the true repetition. I am born to myself one can hear
oneself speak even though the movement goes on in one's own interiorthere where one every instant
stakes one's life, every instant loses it, and wins it again.13
The echo of "beginning again and again" in the final sentence suggests the identity of the
great repetitioneternityand the instants of repetition that are our dynamic life: of the
continuous present and the timeless. This spiritual state, of continual repetition (which is
one repetition, just as time is a sequence of timeless instants and yet of course not really
divisible into instants), is parodied by the first story, which tells of the narrator's attempt
to achieve a repetition in action.
13Repetition, pp. 125126 [italics mine]. The stalking-losing-winning image refers to the heartbeat,
whose every renewal of life gives us ourselves again. It is interesting to compare the young man
with Steins St. Therese, who receives herself back from instant to instant of Four Saints in Three
Acts; for this reason the stage directions insist on her existence even within one of her speeches:
Saint Therese. Once in a while.
Saint Therese.
Saint Therese. Once in a while.
 Page 180
Constantine Constantius repeats a trip to Berlin in the hope that he will find the second
trip as pleasurable as the first, and to determine whether repetition is possible. He finds
that it is not: the rooms where he stayed have been remodeled, the theatre is not as funny,
and he himself has changed. Constantine's message is clear:
The young man's problem is, whether repetition is possible. It was as a parody of him that I made
the journey to Berlin to see whether repetition was possible. The confusion consists in the fact that
the most inward problem is here expressed in an outward way, as though repetition, if it were
possible, might be found outside the individual, since it is within the individual it must be found,
and hence the young man does exactly the opposite, he keeps perfectly still. Accordingly, the
consequence of the journey is that I despair of the possibility and then step aside for the young man,
who with his religious primitiveness is to discover repetition. The young man transfigures repetition
as his own consciousness raised to the second power.14
The young man wins himself back from an intense romance, from guilt, and from self-
absence. The eternity he discovers, with its security of individual being and
consciousness, is not Stein-secular but religious. And he is free to love "the idea" without
writing melancholy poetry to the woman (whom in a sense he
14 Kierkegaard quoted in Walter Lowrie, "Editor's Introduction," Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition,
pp. 1415.
 Page 181
never really knew at all) who was the temporal occasion of his awakening to that idea.
This raising of consciousness to the second power cannot be forced any more than
repetition can be effected in the outer world, or than voluntary memory can help one
repeat a complete experience. (The Proustian instant is certainly one where the past is
"recollected forwards.") And there is freedom in this repetition to which "progress" is
irrelevant and novelty adolescent. One is oneself, happy, constant:
Repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires. For it is only of the new one grows tired. Of
the old one never tires. When one possesses that, one is happy, and only he is thoroughly happy who
does not delude himself with the vain notion that repetition ought to be something new, for then one
becomes tired of it. He who would only hope is cowardly, he who would only recollect is a
voluptuary, but he who wills repetition is a man, and the more expressly he knows how to make his
purpose clear, the deeper he is as a man.15

In art, too, repetition is a sign of maturity, of assurance and strength. The image of the
wind in the mountains is meant to illustrate the way one realizes his personal possibilities
and from them forges a character, but it makes sense in an aesthetic context as well, where
the artist repeats with assurancenot out of an inability
15Repetition, pp. 3334.
 Page 182
to create something new, but as an expression of artistic freedom and intensity:
When in a mountainous region one hears the wind day in and day out execute firmly and
unchangingly the same theme, one perhaps is tempted for an instant to ignore the imperfection of the
analogy and to rejoice in this symbol of the consistency and assurance of human freedom. One
perhaps does not reflect that there was a moment when the wind came to this region as a stranger,
flung itself wildly, meaninglessly into the fissures until, after it had learnt to know its instrument, it
brought all this into accord in the melody which from day to day it executes unchangeably.16

For Kierkegaard, the aesthetics of repetition, the personal will to repetition, and the eternal
interest and assurance of repetition in nature are all anticipations of Repetition in eternity.
For it is only in a spiritual sense that one is able to discuss true Repetition. Literature takes
place in a developing present, and its repetitions must remain near-repetitions. They can
only suggest Repetition, just as Eliade's primitive (believing
16Repetition, p. 59. The last sentences of the young man's last letter to Constantius imitate, with
repeating constructions, the repeating ocean waves: the stylistic, natural, and independent
tendencies of repetition unified. ("Hail to the breaking wave. Hail to the breaking wave !")
 Page 183
in Repetition) relied on near-repetition of archetypal gestures and actions to place himself
in eternity. The literature and religions of the continuous present share the conception of
time as a succession of timeless instants, but where primitive man repeated the deeds of
other men, Kierkegaard's young man repeats himself, multiplies himself by himself
exponentially. Rather than playing a trick on time (starting it over every year, to keep up
with it), the lover of Repetition transcends time entirely.
Had Constantine Constantius' trip to Berlin succeeded, it would have been a near-
repetition, because it would have occurred in time. Even if he had experienced the same
trip, he would have been a different person during the repetition. With himself as his own
ancestor, his trip to Berlin demonstrates the fallacy of the Eliadean primitive's attempt at
repetition. But it is precisely himself that the young man repeats, always more assuredly,
and it is thus that he comprehends eternity.
We discover through repetition that the solution to time is outside of time. The present is
always escaping us (time is passing); but on the other hand, we are never in anything but
the present. And the continuous present teaches us that "permanence" is a question not of
duration but of intensity and being. If we consider clocks as having the same relation to
time as propositions bear
 Page 184
to reality, we realize that a clock can tell about time but cannot express or be time. The
present is timeless. As Wittgenstein put it:
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs
to those who live in the present. [6.4311]
The infinitesimal is infinite; as we live always in the present, we live always:
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. [6.43111]
The present does not remember the past. By beginning again, our art-time is always
present. By repeating a sound until we see past itwhether that sound is a syllable, a
religious formula, or our namewe may come not to have to apprehend the present by
instants, but may find the continuum of our self in the continuum of the true, and so live
in eternity. It is not doing things over that is the key to life in the present, but abandoning
the illusions of past and future: attention to that timelessness which is the time of our
consciousness and of reality. The sun comes up every day (and we receive it) in perfect
attention; it does not fear that it is being repetitious, nor presumably does it remember
what it has done before or consider what it
 Page 185
will do in the future. It is the strength of assertion, the assurance of identity, that is the
force of repetition; it is the apologetic consciousness squeezed between past and future,
unsure of itself and its intentions, wavering, faltering, that gives the sense of the
repetitious to recurrence. The present is eternal, and eternity is repetition.
 Page 187

Selected Bibliography
(Movies are alphabetized by director.)
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston, Houghton
Mifflin, 1960.
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York, Grove Press, 1958.
. Proust and Three Dialogues. London, John Calder, 1965.
. Three Novels [Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable]. New York, Grove Press, 1965.
. Waiting for Godot. New York, Grove Press, 1954.
. Watt. New York, Grove Press, 1959.
Bergman, Ingmar. Persona. 1966.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York, New Directions, 1964.
Brainard, Joe. ''Alice," Art and Literature 11. Paris, 1967.
Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York, Oxford University Press, 1971.
Brown, E. K. Rhythm in the Novel. Toronto, University of Toronto Press; London,
Oxford University Press, 1950.
 Page 188
Buñuel, Luis. The Exterminating Angel. 1962.
Child, Francis James. English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Helen Sargent and
George Kittredge. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1904.
Dieterle, William. Love Letters. 1945.
Eisenstein, Sergei M. Film Form, trans. Jan Leyda. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World,
1949.
. October. 1928.
Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask. New York,
Pantheon, Bollingen, 1954. [Also available as Cosmos and History]
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York, Random House, 1936.
. Light in August. New York, Random House, 1932.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey. New York,
Liveright, 1924.
. "Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis: Recollection,
Repetition, and Working Through," Collected Papers, Vol. II, trans. Joan Riviere.
London, Hogarth Press, 1949.
Genet, Jean. The Blacks: A Clown Show, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York, Grove
Press, 1960.
. Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York, Grove Press, 1967.
Godard, Jean-Luc. 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle. 1966.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York, Scribner's, 1929.
. The Sun Also Rises. New York, Scribner's, 1926.
Hoffman, Frederick J. Gertrude Stein. Minneapolis, University
 Page 189
of Minnesota, Pamphlets on American Writers, 1961.
The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917.
Hutchins, Robert M. Zuckerkandl. Pacifica Radio, 1962. Hubley Studio, 1968.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter
Lowrie. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1941.
Kubie, Lawrence S. Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process. New York, Noonday
Press, 1961.
LeBorg, Reginald. The Mummy's Ghost. 1944.
Léger, Fernand. Ballet mécanique. 1924.
Macnicol, Nicol. Hindu Scriptures. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., Everyman, 1938.
Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians. New York, Basic Books, 1966.
Marker, Chris. La Jetée. 1962.
Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Clarac and Ferré. Paris, NRF,
Bibliothèque de la Plèiade, 1963. [Available in English under the title Remembrance of
Things Past, trans. Moncrieff and Mayor. New York, Random House.] House.]
Pudovkin, V. I. Film Technique, trans. Ivor Montagu, enlarged edition. London, George
Newnes, Ltd., 1935.
. Mother. 1926.
Resnais, Alain. L'Année dernière à Marienbad. 1961.
. Hiroshima, mon amour. 1959.
. Je t'aime, je t'aime. 1968.
 Page 190
. Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour. 1963.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard. New York, Grove Press,
1965.
. Last Year at Marienbad, trans. Richard Howard. New York, Grove Press, 1962.
. Two Novels [Jealousy and In the Labyrinth], trans. Richard Howard. New York, Grove
Press, 1965.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. c. 1605.
Slatoff, Walter. Quest for Failure. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1960.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody's Autobiography. New York, Random House, 1937.
. Four in America. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1947.
. Last Operas and Plays, ed. Carl van Vechten. New York & Toronto, Rinehart & Co.,
Inc., 1949.
. Lectures in America. New York, Random House, 1935.
. Portraits and Prayers. New York, Random House, 1934.
. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Vechten. New York, Random House,
1962.
Sutherland, Donald. Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work. New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1951.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness. London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1961.
Yeats, W. B. Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L.
Rosenthal. New York, Macmillan, 1966.
 Page 191

Index
A
Absalom, Absalom!, see Faulkner, William
Advertising, 35-36
Agee, James (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), 34-35, 155
A la recherche du temps perdu, see Proust, Marcel
"Alice," see Brainard, Joe
Alice in Wonderland, see Carroll, Lewis
Alliteration, 46
Ananka, see The Mummy
L'Année dernièe à Marienbad, see Resnais, Alain and Robbe-Grillet, Alain
Art, nature and limitations of, 7, 29-32, 84, 110, 117, 129-130, 153-156
"As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story," see Stein, Gertrude
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, see Stein, Gertrude
B
Ballads, 43-46
Beckett, Samuel, 6, 16, 109, 114-116, 129-146, 149-155, 166-169
Endgame, 22, 153
Proust, 21-23, 27-28, 84, 157
Texts for Nothing, 129
The Unnamable, 129, 131, 140-146, 152
Waiting for Godot, 129, 131, 141n, 149-152, 155
Watt, 20-23, 129n, 131-142, 154, 166-169, 173
Beginning again, 5, 23, 41, 46-47, 67, 70, 74, 80, 85, 90-94, 97, 99, 101, 106, 113, 119,
126-127, 136-143, 146, 152, 179, 184; see also Beckett, Samuel and Stein, Gertrude
Bergman, Ingmar (Persona), 85
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, see Freud, Sigmund
Bible, see Ecclesiastes, Job, Parallelism, and Song of Songs
The Blacks, see Genet, Jean
Le Bonheur, see Varda, Agnes
Boredom, 3, 9-12, 22, 24, 68, 94; see also Habit
Borges, Jorge Luis
"The Library of Babel," 135, 168
"Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," 118n
Brainard, Joe ("Alice"), 21n
Brown, E. K. (Rhythm in the
 Page 192
Novel), 6, 64; see also Genet, Jean
Building time, see Time
Buñuel, Luis (The Exterminating Angel), 81-84
Burroughs, William ("Who is the Third that Walks beside You?"), 112n
C
Carroll, Lewis, 86
Alice in Wonderland, 141n
Through the Looking-Glass, 86, 163
Choruses, 9; see also Ballads
Clichés, 21, 118n, 120, 122-123, 170
Closed systems, see Systems, closed
"Composition as Explanation," see Stein, Gertrude
Compulsion, see Freud, Sigmund; Kubie, Lawrence S.; Neurosis; and Repetition
compulsion
Conrad, Joseph, 132
Continuing time, see Time
Continuity, 68, 117, 131, 152-156, 175-176, 184; see also Dividing and Reality
Continuous narration, see Narration, continuous
Continuous present, see Present
D
Da, 174-175
Death instinct, 16-17, 136n, 142; see also Habit and Repetition compulsion
Déjà vu, 2
Dickens, Charles, 37
Our Mutual Friend, 11-12, 20
Dieterle, William
 Love Letters, 95-105
Portrait of Jennie, 101-103
Dividing, 45, 50-51, 53-54, 56, 83-84, 153-156, 170-176, 179; see also Instants
Donne, John, 50-51
Dracula, see Horror films
Drill, 124
E
Ecclesiastes, vii, 8, 39-41, 94, 105
Eisenstein, Sergei M., 46-48
October, 46-47
Battleship Potemkin, 47
Eliade, Mircea (The Myth of the Eternal Return), 90-94, 103-104, 107, 110, 126, 143,
160n, 180, 182
Emphasis, 5-6, 24, 33-37, 46-52, 57, 97, 109, 123, 125-126, 149, 156, 170, 172; see also
Time, building
Endgame, see Beckett, Samuel
Eternity, see Timelessness
Everybody's Autobiography, see Stein, Gertrude
The Exterminating Angel, see Buñuel, Luis
F
Falsification of reality, see Reality, falsification of and Memory
A Farewell to Arms, see Hemingway, Ernest
Faulkner, William, 104
Absalom, Absalom!, 13, 51, 133
letter to Cowley, 115-116, 129n, 166-167, 175; see also Language, nature and
limitations of
Light in August, 12-13, 82-83
"saying it all," see Faulkner, William, letter to Cowley
Fielding, Henry (Joseph Andrews), 36-67
Film, nature and limitations of, 6-7, 70, 87, 89-90, 104-106, 111, 113, 125-127, 130-131,
152-156, 159-162
 Page 193

F
Films, see names of directors
Flashbacks, 5, 99, 113-115, 157
Four in America, see Stein, Gertrude
Four Saints in Three Acts, see Stein, Gertrude
Frankenstein, see Horror films
Freud, Sigmund (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), 1, 13, 16-21, 26, 69-70, 78, 92, 98, 101,
104, 116, 136n, 158-161; see also Repetition compulsion and Transference
Funt, Allen (What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?), 10, 68
G
Genet, Jean
The Blacks, 79-81, 83-85, 117
Miracle of the Rose, 30, 59-64
Ginsberg, AlIen, 5
Godard, Jean-Luc, 154-155
Griffith, D. W. (Way Down East), 48
H
Habit, 6, 19-24, 26-28, 50, 132, 154, 156, 170
Heisenberg, Werner, 30-32, 128n
Hemingway, Ernest, 23-26, 31
A Farewell to Arms, 25, 32
For Whom the Bell Tolls, 25
In Our Time, 25
The Old Man and the Sea, 25
The Sun Also Rises, 23-25
Hiroshima, mon amour, see Resnais, Alain
History, 1, 34, 45, 90-93, 100, 118n, 120, 127; see also Eliade, Mircea
Horror films, 65-67, 69-72; see also The Mummy
Hutchins, Robert M. (Zuckerkandl), 20-21; see also Freud, Sigmund and Habit
I
Identity, 2, 86-88, 90, 92, 100, 106, 125, 141n, 143, 152-153, 170-176, 180, 183-185; see
also Names and Personality
Indeterminacy, Principle of, see Heisenberg, Werner
Ineffable, see Nonverbal
Insistence, 109, 125-126, 131, 137, 149, 151
Instantaneity of apprehension, see Instants and Present, instantaneous
Instantaneous present, see Present, instantaneous
Instants, 82, 85, 105, 108-110, 116, 119, 121, 124, 126-128, 130, 136, 143, 153-157, 161,
174-176, 179, 184; see also Beckett, Samuel; Dividing; Present, instantaneous; and Stein,
Gertrude
"It all," see Faulkner, William
J
James, William, 127-128
Je t'aime, je t'aime, see Resnais, Alain
La Jetée, see Marker, Chris
Job, 38, 179
Jokes, 10-12, 18, 82
Joseph Andrews, see Fielding, Henry
K
Kharis, see The Mummy
Kierkegaard, Søren (Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology), 165-166, 177-
183
King Lear, see Shakespeare, William
Kubie, Lawrence S. (Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process), 13-16, 69, 86, 115-116,
120n, 181-182
L
Language, nature and limitations of, 5-7, 22, 29-30, 32, 56, 61-62, 69, 83-84, 86, 104, 107,
110, 114-122, 129n, 130-132, 135-136, 138, 141-142, 148-149, 153-156, 166-176, 182
 Page 194
Last Year at Marienbad, see Resnais, Alain and Robbe-Grillet, Alain
Lectures in America, see Stein, Gertrude
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, see Agee, James
"The Library of Babel," see Borges, Jorge Luis
Light in August, see Faulkner, William
Logic, 86, 132-135, 148, 165-170
Loops, 80, 105-106, 123n, 156, 162
Love Letters, see Dieterle, William
M
The Making of Americans, see Stein, Gertrude
Mantras, 45, 69, 107, 170, 184; see also Ginsberg, Allen
Marcus, Steven (The Other Victorians), 69
Marker, Chris (La Jetée), 127, 160n
Masaccio (The Tribute Money), 112-113
Master of Flémalle (Merode Altar-piece), 112
Melanctha, see Stein, Gertrude, Three Lives
Memory, 7, 16-17, 33-35, 53, 70, 78, 88-90, 92, 97-99, 101, 104-106, 109-111, 117, 118n,
120, 122, 126, 129-130, 137-142, 146, 149n, 151, 153, 156-163, 172, 177-178, 181, 184
inaccuracy of, see Reality, falsification of
involuntary, 21, 27-33, 84-86, 92-93, 98-99
voluntary, 27-33, 86, 90, 93, 154, 181
Merode Altarpiece, see Master of Flémalle
Metatheatre, 79-81, 84, 117
Milton, John (Lycidas), 38
Miracle of the Rose, see Genet, Jean
"Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," see Stein, Gertrude
Monotony, see Repetitiousness
Mother, see Pudovkin, V. I.
The Mother of Us All, see Stein, Gertrude
The Mummy, 65-67, 69-70, 81, 101
Muriel, see Resnais, Alain
Mystical, see Nonverbal, Transcendence, and Wittgenstein, Ludwig
The Myth of the Eternal Return, see Eliade, Mircea
N
Names, 30, 152, 171, 173, 175, 184; see also Identity and Personality
Narration, continuous, 112-113
Neurosis, 5, 12-18, 23, 78, 115; see also Freud, Sigmund; Kubie, Lawrence S.; and
Repetition compulsion
Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process, see Kubie, Lawrence S.
Night and Fog, see Resnais, Alain
Nonverbal, 7-8, 50-52, 62, 64, 70, 107, 122, 135, 153-156, 166, 170-176; see also
Language, nature and limitations of; Silence; Systems, closed; and Transcendence
Novelty, 3-4, 9-11, 13, 18-19, 23-24, 44-46, 67-69, 107, 116, 122-123, 172, 176, 181
 Page 195

O
October, see Eisenstein, Sergei M.
Ono, Yoko (Yoko Ono Number Four), 49n
Our Mutual Friend, see Dickens, Charles
P
Parallelism
in character and plot, see Shakespeare, William
in Hebrew verse, 38-41
Permanence, 91, 108-110, 161, 183
Permutation, 82, 131-135, 137
Perpetual present, see Present, perpetual
Persona, see Bergman, Ingmar
Personality, 147, 152, 173; see also Identity and Names
"Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," see Borges, Jorge Luis
Pope, Alexander (Dunciad), 38
Pornography, 67-72
Portrait of Jennie, see Dieterle, William
Portraits and Prayers, see Stein, Gertrude
"Portraits and Repetition," see Stein, Gertrude, Lectures in America
Potemkin, see Eisenstein, Sergei M.
Present, 2-3, 6, 32-34, 85, 88, 93, 104-106, 113-114, 119-122, 126, 151, 154, 157, 159, 161,
175, 183-185
continuous, 2n, 6, 80, 85, 95, 101, 106, 108-162, 165, 179, 183
instantaneous, 114, 116, 129, 175; see also Instants
perpetual, 89-90, 111-114
prolonged, 136-137, 140
Progress, 7, 161, 181
Propaganda, 36
Proust, Marcel (A la recherche du temps perdu), 6, 16, 21-23, 27-28, 31-32, 64, 84-86, 92-
95, 99, 104, 110, 121-122, 129, 139, 143, 181; see also Memory
Proust, see Beckett, Samuel
Pudovkin, V. I.
Film Technique, 48-49 Mother, 48
Purgatory, see Yeats, W. B.
R
Reagan, Gov. Ronald, 3
Reality
falsification of, 26-33, 59-62, 105-106, 109, 114, 117, 119, 156-157, 170, 173, 175-176,
178
as subject, 29-30, 60, 113, 117-119, 131-133, 141-142, 152-156, 173, 184
"Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through," see Freud, Sigmund and Transference
Refrains, see Ballads and Choruses
Religion, 165
Eastern, 44-45; see also Mantras and Upanishads
Primitive, see Eliade, Mircea
see also Timelessness and Transcendence
Remembering, see Memory
Repetition
compulsion, 16-19, 69, 78, 138, 142, 158-161; see also Death instinct; Freud, Sigmund;
Neurosis; and Transference
defined, 4, 7, 124, 166
in reverse, 66-67, 70, 72-84, 101, 158, 160
Repetition, see Kierkegaard, Søren
Repetitiousness, 21, 36-38, 93, 151, 172-173, 184-185
 defined, 4, 124
Resnais, Alain, 6, 110, 156-162
Hiroshima, mon amour, 158, 160
Je t'aime, je t'aime, 156-162
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Last Year at Marienbad, 88-90, 98, 110-111, 157; see also Robbe-Grillet, Alain
Muriel, 157, 159
Night and Fog, 157
Rhyme, 46
Rhythm, 5-6, 46, 64, 69, 94, 160
Rigidity, see Neurosis
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 86-90, 104, 114, 141, 149n
The Erasers, 14, 149n
Jealousy, 86-88, 90
Last Year at Marienbad, 88-90, 98, 110-112, 141; see also Resnais, Alain
Routine, see Boredom and Habit
S
Sequels, 65-67; see also Horror films
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet, 53
King Lear, 5, 51-59, 170
Silence, 6, 30, 45, 107, 129-130, 136, 142-145, 153, 169-170, 174n; see also Language,
nature and limitations of and Nonverbal
Simultaneity, 113, 119, 121, 125
Slatoff, Walter (Quest for Failure), 115
Song of Songs, 39, 41-43, 47n
Stein, Gertrude, 6, 50n, 88n, 94-95, 108-110, 117-131, 134, 136-141, 144-149, 151-152,
154, 165, 180
"As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story," 131, 144-146
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 117-118, 128
"Composition as Explanation," 128, 137n
 Everybody's Autobiography, 128
Four in America, 122-123, 128
Four Saints in Three Acts, 121, 131, 148-149, 151-152, 176, 179n
Lectures in America, 124-128, 146-148
The Making of Americans, 139
Melanctha, see Three Lives
"Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," 144-145
The Mother of Us All, 149
Portraits and Prayers, 108, 119, 124-126
"Portraits and Repetition," see Lectures in America
Tender Buttons, 118
Three Lives, 131, 136-139
What Happened, 128, 147, 149n
Stolen Kisses, see Truffaut, François
Style, as repetition, see Kubie, Lawrence S.
The sun Also Rises, see Hemingway, Ernest
Symbols, expanding, see Brown, E. K. and Genet, Jean
Syntax, 7, 56-57, 69, 120, 165, 175-176; see also Dividing
Systems, closed, 132, 135, 167-169, 173-176; see also Film, nature and limitations of;
Language, nature and limitations of; Nonverbal; Transcendence; and Wittgenstein,
Ludwig
T
Tender Buttons, see Stein, Gertrude
Theatre, 18, 146, 148-149, 179n; see also Beckett, Samuel; Genet, Jean; Metatheatre;
Shakespeare, William; Stein, Gertrude; and Yeats, W. B.
Three Lives, see Stein, Gertrude
Through the Looking-Glass, see Carroll, Lewis