January 27, 2023

Newsletter writers’ anxiety syndrome has two variations.  One is, “Will I run out of things to write about?”  The other is, “Am I beginning to repeat myself without realizing it?” It is not an idle fear: I have a terrible memory for what I have written.  There are days I think my motto should be, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”  Yet there is another way to think about repetition, and that is the subject of the present newsletter.  It could be summed up in a different motto: “The best things in life are repeated.”  A case should be made for that object of frequent contempt, comforting familiarity. 

All the images of the imagination have both ideal and ironic aspects, and we have touched upon the ironic forms of repetition in previous newsletters and so may get them out of the way at the beginning.  Endless yet meaningless repetition, what Blake called the same dull round, is the epitome of a wasted life.  Sometimes we joke about being on the hamster wheel of life, but hamsters enjoy their wheel: they get so exhilarated by it that they rev up the speed so that the wheel is a blur, until finally they get flung off it halfway across the cage, somehow always miraculously unhurt—and often get right back on.  What we actually mean is the repetition of mind-numbing boredom and banality.  Jackson Browne’s song “The Pretender” is sung by a self-accused loser who goes to work each day, “And when the morning light comes streaming in, / I’ll get up and do it again / Amen / Say it again.”  Why does such a “pretender,” “Who started out so young and strong / Only to surrender,” waste his life in meaningless routine?  One answer is security:  routine and avoidance of risk-taking promise safety.  Monotony is better—and easier—than being a “contender” in life’s prize fight.  Those who have contended and lost, who have been on the ropes, pummeled, traumatized, may develop obsessive-compulsive routines that give them a feeling of control and security. 

As the ironic darkens into the demonic, repetition may evolve into repeated nightmare.  The damned in Dante’s Inferno are trapped in eternal repetition of punishments that symbolize the nature of their sin.  Nietzsche, whose life was a living hell of chronic illness and isolation, posited “the eternal recurrence of the same” as the ultimate trial of his prophesied Übermensch:  only a superman could be “content to live it all again,” as Yeats put it in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.”  The older one gets, the more one is punished by life and, worse, watches those one loves being punished, the more one may be tempted to feel that once is enough, I’m out of here, the only fear being that we are in Hotel California, where “You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave.” 

But repetition has a positive side.  Indeed, we could say that life is repetition, the living pulse of everything in the universe.  W. H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” says that our “common prayer” is “not, please! to resemble / The beasts who repeat themselves,” but in fact we do repeat ourselves, from the basic rhythms of breathing and heartbeat up to the more elaborate repetitions of eating and sleeping.  Repetition is psychological as well as physiological:  animals have some of our capacity to develop reassuring routines—guinea pigs may eat the same food in the same order.  Well, so do I:  the same thing for breakfast most days, and I tend to order the same thing time after time in a restaurant whose menu has four pages of choices. Most diaries trail off because the writers become bored with the repeated recording of the same routines every day, and yet the routines may be satisfying, and a pleasure to get back to after a vacation.  I have a need to begin my day with the routine of reading my daily comic strips while drinking my coffee.  If I have to skip this ritual and launch myself immediately into life like a missile in a red alert, I can function, but I will be off balance for the remainder of the day.  I am quite content most of the time to be a creature of habit. 

At some point, routine passes over into ritual, the profane into the sacred, perhaps at the point where repetition that maintains passes over into repetition that renews.  Rituals of renewal tend to be bound up with the natural cycle, for it is in fact the natural cycle that they renew.  I have dealt with cyclical imagery and the mythical and literary imagery it generates in Part 2 of The Productions of Time, and will try to avoid, ahem, repeating myself here.  But a central type of ritual cyclically renews time, which runs down and has to be recharged, so to speak, in what amounts to a repetition of the original act of Creation.  Our New Year’s celebrations are a faded vestige of such rituals, but we make our own myths, and for me the ritual of putting up the Christmas tree, that symbol of the cosmos as a miracle of light in darkness (yes, I am repeating myself here too) is a ritual I could not bear to forego.  We even play the same Christmas albums every year while decorating it. 

The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is usually interpreted as a negative, skeptical vote against the possibility of mythical renewal.  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, says the Preacher, traditionally identified with Solomon: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is the thing that shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun” (1:9).  Northrop Frye makes a tour de force argument in The Great Code against the traditional view that Ecclesiastes is the expression of a world-weary pessimism that somehow sneaked into the Bible.  His view is not entirely an outlier:  Ecclesiastes provided the lyrics for Pete Seeger’s folk song “Turn, Turn, Turn,” electrically popularized by the Byrds: “To everything there is a season, / Turn, turn, turn / And a time to every purpose under heaven.”  Frye does not quite put it this way, but his argument implies that while the endlessly turning cycle seems ironic to the ordinary self, Paul’s “natural man,”  the imagination sees it rather as the only possible basis of something that goes beyond the endless turning of the wheel.  Elsewhere, he makes a very similar argument about James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book about the circularity of life that literally goes around in a circle, the incomplete last sentence being completed by the incomplete first one.  In Creation and Recreation, Frye mentions a short but tormentedly complicated book by Kierkegaard called Repetition.  In it, Kierkegaard contrasts Plato’s view of all knowledge as “recollection,” a recovered memory of something already known and latent in what we would call the unconscious, with what he calls true repetition, a movement towards the future rather than backward towards the past, using as example the story of Job, who loses everything but is restored to a condition better than he was before, a repetition devoutly to be wished, and one that clearly parallels the total narrative of the Bible as a repetition in the sense of a “new heaven, new earth” at the end of time.  T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets are a poetic cycle exploring this theme, that cyclical time and its repetitions may be more than an endless loop. 

Even the knight of faith, however, as Kierkegaard called his spiritual role model, does not escape the suffering of life in time, the pain of transience and loss.  The  line from Eliot’s “East Coker,” “In my end is my beginning,” may ultimately be transvalued into a transcendent hope, but originally it was the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots, executed for political reasons after a short, unlucky life.  At best, the ordinary self is what Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling dryly called a knight of infinite resignation.  In a tragic love affair, the knight of infinite resignation loses the beloved but reconciles himself through recollection, remembering the time of love and consoling himself with the belief that there is something eternal in the memory that time cannot destroy.  He lives backwards, loves backwards, fixed on the past, trying to repeat it by summoning up its ghostly memories. The knight of faith, on the other hand, believes that, even though the belief is logically absurd, he will still get his love in this life, because to God all things are possible.  In other words, he will experience something like Job’s restoration.  Kierkegaard was struggling with the loss of his love Regina Olsen—but the fact is that he never regained her.  The plots of all four of Shakespeare’s four final romances turn on the restoration of love in time, but they are bittersweet in their mood, and the miraculous restorations come only after a lifetime of suffering.   In Kim Stanley Robinson’s utopian novel Pacific Edge, the main character is awakened by love to a sense of life’s transience, and thinks, “We do these things once.”  But even utopia does not conquer time:  in the end, he too loses his girl, who marries his obnoxious rival. 

It is sad when something just ends, with no further repetition.  On December 31 of last year, one day from New Year’s, Tom Batiuk ended the comic strip Funky Winkerbean, which he has been creating for fifty years, and which I have been reading for much of that time in my morning times with my coffee.  Of all the forms of popular art, comic strips offer the pleasure of expectable repetition, every day.  Perhaps it isn’t quite an accident that the greatest narrative arc of Funky Winkerbean, excerpted later as a graphic novel called Lisa’s Story, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is about the loss of the main character’s wife to breast cancer.  Once again the beloved is lost, accessible only through recollection and its repetitions:  before she dies, Lisa makes a series of recordings for her daughter, to be played at various stages of her daughter’s growing up. 

Still, there is a type of repetition that moves in the opposite direction from the cycles of loss.  In Life and Habit, Samuel Butler developed a meditation on habitual repetition into a theory of creative evolution.  This rather obscure book became a favorite of Frye’s, who discarded its evolutionism while extracting from it a key insight into what he called creative repetition:

The fear of technology is linked to the fear of something anti-creative in the mind, something that produces the mechanical act that repeats without knowing why, the clinging to set patterns of behavior however self-destructive or foolish.  The creative opposite of this is the stabilizing repetition of practice, of what is called habitus in Latin and hexis in Greek, the repetition that gradually accumulates a skill.  (Words with Power, 304). 

Frye was an accomplished pianist, and his invariable example of the creative repetition that we call practice is playing a musical instrument:

Similarly, the mechanical memory that broods on an unalterable past is in a state of bondage to it, whereas practice-repetition is a technique for setting oneself free.  To practice the piano is to set oneself free to play it.  (Words with Power, 305)

But physical skills are by no means the only acquisitions of creative repetition.  People think of intelligence as something innate, a capacity that some people are apparently born with and others lack.  No doubt there is an innate component to intelligence, but in fact thinking is a skill that is developed by practice repetition.   Insights gained from a lifetime of dedicated reading may slowly begin to link together and suggest a total pattern, which in turn generates new reading and thinking, leading synergetically to new insights. 

This process of creative repetition involves not just reading but re-reading.  Of the making of books there is no end, says the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, and there are so many books we should have read, so many books to “keep up with,” so why then reread?  Well, if you have a memory as bad as mine, you may reread a book simply to remember what was in it.  I have read whole books that I couldn’t tell you a single thing about, and not because they were bad books either.  But there is a better answer than that.  Children have an endless appetite for the rereading of certain bedtime stories, and some people reread certain books endlessly, from The Lord of the Rings to Jane Austen.  A kindred activity is continuing to read new books in an ongoing series, each new book repeating a certain fictional formula.  This used to be a somewhat more respectable activity, and accounted for much of the popularity of novelists like Trollope and Dickens.  But nowadays it is supposed to be an immature habit, and authors themselves at times complain of their fans’ intolerance when they try something different.  Critics regard such fans as beasts who repeat themselves, like the monkeys in the experiment you always hear about who could stimulate the pleasure centers in their own brain by punching a button, and who addictively sat punching the button, ignoring all else, including food and sex, to the point of exhaustion.  And are the critics not right?  Shouldn’t we want new literary adventures, and not the same old same old?  It works the same way in popular music.  I have sometimes wondered how it feels when performers of my generation face an audience that they know is mostly there to hear them play the songs that made them famous fifty years ago.  Is it humiliating to be living off of one’s greatest hits, one’s long-past glory? 

Such a question has two answers, corresponding to the two ideal modes of human existence, one active and striving, the other relaxed and receptive.  Blake called these two modes Eden and Beulah:  life consists of their rhythmic alternation.  The active mode is a development of Frye’s practice-repetition.  In his book S/Z, French critic Roland Barthes speaks of rereading as active, claiming counterintuitively that rereading saves the text from repetition, going so far as to say that those who do not reread read the same story everywhere.  What can he mean by this?  I understand it through teaching, for I have taught certain works every year for over thirty years, and could be content to teach them for thirty more.  It may not be true for all kinds of rereading or for all kinds of text, but certain works, when read repeatedly over time, change and deepen, reveal hidden depths, disclose new insights but also raise new questions.  They cast new light on other works of literature, and they read differently at different stages of one’s life.  One reason to read criticism—or it would be if more criticism were better written—is to see what a text looks like through another person’s reading, which is itself a kind of rereading.  Critics keep reading a work like Hamlet, getting a new reading, really a new work, every time they apply a new critical theory, or read the text in light of the preoccupations of a new age, and the best interpretations are not merely tortured ingenuity but a genuinely fresh look.  Hamlet has sustained new readings for four centuries now, and the well shows no sign of running dry.  Moreover, a single critic of genius may change the whole critical conversation by reading in an original and evocative way.  This would happen more often if criticism could be liberated from the two things that hold it hostage, the publish-or-perish tenure system and the culture wars.  Harold Bloom said that he read Frye’s Fearful Symmetry at least 50 times and had it mostly memorized.  While I can’t compete with that, I reread Frye endlessly, and with great profit and pleasure. 

Literature rereads itself in the course of literary history.  As I show in Part 3 of The Productions of Time, there is a progressive element in the literary tradition that is most prominent in the epic tradition.  Virgil’s Aeneid is a rereading of Homer, and a highly revisionist one, and Dante’s Divine Comedy is a rereading of the Aeneid.  All the major Romantic poets attempted works that were a rereading of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  All these rereadings attempt to build upon while at the same time refine and revise their epic predecessor:  they are, in other words, examples of creative repetition.  Out of awareness of this process Schiller developed his theory of naïve and sentimental poetry.  An early poet like Homer has a rugged vitality has results from his being naïve in the sense of instinctive and lacking self-consciousness.  Later poets like Virgil are more refined and intellectually sophisticated, but tend to lack Homer’s raw energy.  It is really a version of “If youth knew, if age could.”  Such a theory can be expanded, as it is in Spengler, into a whole theory of cultural aging in which a vigorous culture declines into decadence and its arts develop from folk primitive to sophisticated maturity and then decline into intellectualized mannerism.  A lot of high culture is indeed today almost totally conceptual:  often, a work of visual art or piece of music seems to have been created more to exemplify a theory than to provide an experience.  “Postmodernism” is a code word signifying the feeling that the arts are worn out, that the only thing left is self-conscious pastiche. 

I think we probably are witnessing the end of a cultural cycle, but I also think it likely that in Western culture’s end is its beginning.  Rome declined and fell, but the dying Empire was the matrix out of which was born the Christian culture of the Middle Ages.  High culture in our time does seem to be intellectualized and enervated, but we have at the same time experienced a century-long explosion of energy and creativity in the popular arts.  Cultural repetition, in other words, does not have to take the fatalistic form it does in ironic thinkers like Spengler.  There is a pervasive mood of morose resignation about the fact of our “belatedness,” but we are not necessarily sinking into old age and senescence.  It is just as plausible that we are passing through a crisis of cultural adolescence, complete with crazy mood swings, a new identity crisis every Tuesday, self-conscious insecurity, and a habit of overthinking absolutely everything.  In other words, cultural maturity could be ahead of us rather than behind us, and we could outgrow the neurotic mood we seem stuck in right now. 

It might be easiest to understand this by analogy with one’s personal reading experience throughout a lifetime.  The joy of reading when young is that everything is a fresh discovery.  We watch a two-year-old wander around the room, examining everything with equal fascination, a traveler in an exotic foreign land.  Reading is like that for the young bookworm.  Certain young-readers’ books—“juveniles” as we used to call them—imprinted themselves vividly upon my imagination simply because I was utterly receptive to them.  It is a definition of innocence:  when everything is for the first time.  Most Bildungsroman end at the moment of coming of age, and so do most autobiographies.  It is the early life that is vivid and interesting.  Nonetheless, I have always been intrigued by the question Jung asks in his essay “The Stages of Life”:  what is the use of the second half of life?  After mid-life, is it only a slow decline and fall, an increasing déjà vu, a sense of “been there, done that”?  But in terms of a personal history of reading, that has not been my experience at all.  Instead, two other things have happened that make the end of an Edenic period of reading everything for the first time into a fortunate fall.  First, I continue to reread, teach, and revolve around certain works that are central to me.  Some are creative, some critical; some are high culture and some popular; some famous and some obscure.   But those works continue to reveal new depths.  Sometimes I feel like Schliemann at Troy: the excavation of each deeper level only reveals the outlines of a still deeper level.  Freud said that a dream has a kind of navel, at which point it is anchored in mystery and becomes uninterpretable.  I think at least some texts are like that. 

Second, I have read widely over so many years that Northrop Frye’s idea that all literature, indeed all texts, form a total “order of words” has become less of a theory to me and more of an actual experience.  Frye’s order of words, like Joseph Campbell’s idea of a Monomyth of which all myths are variations, is frequently criticized as an attempt to reduce all literary variety to the wrong kind of repetition.  There is nothing new under the sun because all works turn out to be repetitions of the same monotonous patterns.  In short, archetypes are really stereotypes; the Monomyth is really monomania.  But my own reading experience moves in the opposite direction.  The interconnections among texts, which include differences and fierce conflicts as well as resemblances, create a sense of almost overwhelming richness.  I am speaking here, as always, of the real, totally inclusive order of words, not of some “canon” of elite works selected to fit some ideological agenda.  It is not a coercive order with everything subordinated to some definitive center, but a structure of the imagination rather than the reason.  To the imagination, everything is a possible center, depending on your choice of focus—which is why my anxiety about running out of newsletter topics is unnecessary, or so I hope.  Frye was once asked whether he was not writing the same book over and over, and he replied that he was indeed, and did not trust any critic who did not.  The last thing that means is that his works are all very much alike. 

The problem for critics who insist that there is only difference and conflict, never unity and repetition of the same, is that the creative writers do not agree with them.  Some critics would simply respond that such writers then need to be “demystified,” but many of the greatest writers of modern times have their own version of the order of words.  Wallace Stevens speaks of a “supreme fiction” of which all individual poems are “notes toward.”  In his poem “To Juan at the Winter Solstice” Robert Graves says that “There is one story and one story only / That will prove worth your telling.”  A repeated leitmotif of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is “the same anew.”  Joyce is in fact a good example of the kind of writer who recreates the same vision with every new work, but each time in a deeper and richer way.  From his early realistic work through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, Joyce is rereading himself, rewriting himself, and is also recapitulating more and more explicitly the entire literary and mythological tradition. 

One writer in whose works creative repetition suggests a deep, universal pattern is Shakespeare: in fact I think it may have been Frye’s early work on Shakespeare as much as his study of Blake that suggested to him the idea of a deep, underlying pattern of which individual works are creative repetition:

We said that one may say of a rigorous convention that the works in it are all alike.  Nobody could say this of Shakespeare’s comedies: it is all the more significant, therefore, that Shakespeare imposes some likeness on his plays by repeating his devices.  The storm at sea, the identical twins, the heroine disguised as a boy, the retreat into the forest, the heroine with a mysterious father, the disappearing ruler: these themes occur so often that in some plays—Twelfth Night, for example—a whole group of such formulas is restated.  When we study the four romances at the end of Shakespeare’s career, this sense of recapitulation expands to include at least some of the tragedies, as, for instance, the jealousy induced by Iago is reflected in the jealousy induced by Iachimo.  (A Natural Perspective, 133)

Contrasting Shakespeare’s kind of romantic comedy or comic romance with the comedy of manners, Frye says:

Shakespeare’s comedy, which reaches its final form in the dramatic romance, is far more primitive and popular, and is of a type found all over the world. The conventions of romantic comedy are much the same whether we find them in Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale, in Fletcher or Lope de Vega, in the commedia dell’arte or the uninhibited plots of Italian opera, in Menander, in Kalidasa, in Chinese comedies of the Sung dynasty, in Japanese kabuki plays….It looks as though the romance is actually the primitive and popular basis of dramatic entertainment, all other forms being specialized varieties of it.  (“Comic Myth in Shakespeare”, 31)

To the inevitable academic objection that Frye (like Campbell, like all myth critics) ignores the differences, the answer is: no, he doesn’t, and even if he did, the resemblances are undeniably there too. 

Shakespeare worked in the popular theatre, in which “as you like it” was a guiding principle.  And what audiences then liked is what audiences like now:  comfortable familiarity kept lively by creative variation.  This brings us to the second answer to our question about whether audience response ought to be active or receptive.  The active response of a reader or audience accomplishes work:  it transforms a text, convention, or genre and therefore creates something new out of what is traditional or given, and, like all genuine work, this work of creative repetition helps renovate human experience and the human world.  But then there is the Sabbath, the day of rest, the day on which God relaxed and enjoyed what he had created rather than restlessly recreating it.  We are not comfortable with enjoyment, with the pleasure principle, and institutional religion has done its best to turn the Sabbath into a day of austere repentance.  In the arts, high culture often regards pleasure with contempt, indeed with moral outrage.  If readers or audiences enjoy a work of art, that work is pandering to the audience’s worst impulses.  But Shakespeare pandered shamelessly, to the consternation of friends like the high-minded Ben Jonson.  Popular music deals in simple, repeated formulas, and the art of popular music is doing something meaningful and expressive within highly predictable formulas.  Yes, there is always the song you once loved but can no longer tolerate because it has been played to death, but that is the effect of commercial exploitation rather than the genuine desire for repetition.  We actually like to hear the greatest hits fifty years later, and I suspect that most of the artists still enjoy playing them, as I enjoy teaching the Odyssey, which I have taught every year since 1991.  Secretly, we are not far from the child who wants the same bedtime story repeated every night.  When she was three, my former niece loved the game of being thrown into the air and brought down again.  The minute her feet touched the floor she would yell “You do again!” 

It may be one of our most deeply buried wish-fulfilment fantasies that life will turn out to be a game like that.  The past seems to disappear utterly, and, as Kierkegaard pointed out, we try to comfort ourselves with memories.  In memory, the moments we loved, the people we loved, are somehow still “there,” not vanished utterly, never, never, never, never, never to be alive again, as Lear with his broken heart said of Cordelia.  Many people feel that the dead are somehow still with them, but what of the precious moments and events of our lives?  That moment of taking the ferry to Toronto Island, that moment of making music together.  What if the moments do not really die, but, in some purgatorial process of refinement, the good ones are refined out of the dross of the quotidian and the nightmarish and are still happening, somehow, somewhere?  What if the eternal return of the same is not a recipe for damnation but of heaven?  It is not really so bizarre as it might seem, for it is a way of speaking of time as it is said to exist for God, as an Eternal Now in which past, present, and future are co-present.  When I first read it as a teenager, I thought that the ending of E.R Eddison’s classic high fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros was just corny.   The heroes have accomplished their quest and conquered their enemies—and are terribly depressed, because now all those great adventures are over.  But, lo and behold, they learn that time is the worm ouroboros of the title, the mythical serpent with its tale in its mouth—and the tale begins all over again.  Now, I think I understand.  You do again.  Repeat as necessary.  

References

Frye, Northrop.  “Comic Myth in Shakespeare.”  In Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance.  Edited by Troni Y. Grande and Gary Sherbert.  Volume 28 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2010.  Originally published in 1952.

Frye, Northrop.  A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance.  In Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, 127-225.  Originally published by Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.