Neohelicon XXII1/2

LEONARD ORR

NARRATIVE REPETITION, REPETITIVE

NARRATION: A TAXONOMY

Repetition in narration has only fairly recently come to the at-

tention of theorists of fiction or critics of particular writers. It is
not mentioned in most classical studies of narrative, such as Wayne
Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) or Scholes' and Kellogg's
The Nature of Narrative (1966). Prior to structuralism, when atten-
tion was directed to repetition it was in the form of lists of repeated
allusions and thematic or verbal motifs which provided the work
with links and coherence, especially important in the case of such
complex twentieth-century novelists as Joyce, Proust, or Beckett.
But this role for repetition was still within the formalist and or-
ganicist notions of New Criticism. Each work was treated as an
autonomous object, divorced from the reader on one hand and the
author on the other, not connected with any other works. There
was no reason given, beyond the insistence on coherence and unity,
to explain the use and occasionally the foregrounding or dominance
of repetition. Even after New Criticism, in the 1980s, coherence,
clarity, and thematic unity was often given as the reason for the
apparently excessive use of repetition in narration. Susan Suleiman,
for example, defines "redundancy", "as a system of repetitions de-
signed to insure optimum reception of a message. It has been sug-
gested, for example, that the readability of realistic fiction is based
on redundancies operating on multiple levels: verbal repetitions,
recurrence of narrative structures, "doubling" of characters, the-
matic equivalencies, etc." (Suleiman in Suleiman and Crosman
1980:16; see also Suleiman 1980).

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204 LEONARD ORR

In the last decade theorists such as Peter Brooks, Nell Hertz,

and J. Hillis Miller have begun to draw upon the philosophical and
psychoanalytical analyses of repetition, especially those of Freud,
Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida to consider the various configurations
of repetition in the works of different authors. This new group of
readings takes repetition as something which has already occurred
at the outset. As Eliot's speaker claims in "Burnt Norton" (V):
Or say that the end precedes the beginning
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

In "Freud's Masterplot", Peter Brooks argues that

Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a
going over again of a ground already covered, a sjuzet repeating thefabula,
as the detective retraces the tracks of the criminal. This claim to be an act of
repetition - - "I sing", "I tell" - - appears to be initiatory of narrative (Brooks
1977:285; see also Brooks 1980).

J. Hillis Miller and Edward Casey accept this notion, but em-
phasize the reader's actualization or complicity in the already-
present repetition.l Recent repetition studies such as those by Udaya
Kumar on Joyce's Ulysess, Frances Restuccia on Joyce's work gen-

According to J. Hillis Miller, "The most powerful form of repetition in fic-

tion, it may be, is not the echoes of one book by another, but the way even the
simplest, most representational words in a novel [...] present themselves as already a
murmuring repetition, something which has been repeating itself incessantly there in
the words on the page waiting for me to bring it back to life as the meaning of the
words forms itself in my mind. Fiction is possible only because of an intrinsic capac-
ity possessed by ordinary words in grammatical order. Words no different from
those we use in everyday life, [...] may detach themselves or be detached from any
present moment, any living T , any immediate perception of reality, and go on func-
tioning as the creators of the fictional world repeated into existence...." (Miller
1982:72). Edward Casey notes that "It]his has to do with the way in which imagin-
ing can effect an active re-creation of possibilities - - possibilities which have been
predelineated, but not necessarily actualized, in previous experience. The imaginer
seizes upon such possibilities, actively reconstituting them as authentic psychic pres-
ences" (Casey 1975:254).
NARRATIVE REPETITION, REPETITIVE NARRATION 205

erally, Elizabeth Epperly on Trollope, John Johnston on William

Gaddis' Recognitions, and Steven Connor on Beckett have made
excellent use of these psychoanalytic or philosophic viewpoints
and have greatly expanded the notions of repetition for the literary
critic.
Of course, while the earlier formalist critics were limited by
treating the text as a closed or autonomous structure, as a complex
construction of crafted elements that worked together in a harmo-
nious manner to achieve one unified effect, more recent critics of
repetition tend to concentrate solely on the work or author in front
of them, omitting discussion of genre tradition and convention, the
readers, or the complicated relationship between the writer and the
works, especially from the standpoint of the fictional world cre-
ated by the author or the way in which authors become themselves
textualized.
It would be helpful, at this juncture, to outline a fuller view of
the varieties of repetition and the roles played by repetition in nar-
rative, to blend together the formalist and psychoanalytic notions,
and to indicate directions for this area of investigation.
Traditional discussions of repetition in narrative, especially in
the novel, concentrate on aesthetic elements such as form, symme-
try, and balance; this utilizes architectural metaphors of the well-
made and the well-constructed. This key discovery takes place in
the exact center of the book; that character balances this character,
the sub-plot in some way reflects the main plot. There can be noth-
ing superfluous; if an element is introduced in the work, it must
play some functional role in the interpretation. Any elements which
are repeated draw attention to the themes or help us identify char-
acters (or even help create character through consistency in pres-
entation). So organicism would emphasize narrative economy and
the exclusion of repetition or redundancy.
But even in the classic works of realistic narrative, carefully
based on a journalistic account, such as Flaubert'sMadame Bovary,
we find pervasive use of repetition. As Rosemary Lloyd has ar-
gued,
206 LEONARD ORR
Emma, whose reading of novels is based on the desire to substitute herself for
the central characters, fails to see that far front being the heroine of a unique
adventure she is merely one in a chain: a chain of adulterous women, Charles's
second wife, one mistress among many for Rodolphe, the constantly recur-
ring "elle" oftbe works Lron reads. [...] It is not just Emma and Charles who
are presented in this way, as part of a series rather than as individuals: Lron
and Rodolphe, of course, are also part of a series of Emma's lovers; Emma in
need of money turns to a series of possible creditors - - the notary, Binet,
Rodolphe; even the senile and dribbling marquis at the Vaubyessard chateau
is famousfor havingbeen one in a series of Queen Marie-Antoinette'slovers,
between MM. de Coignyand de Lauzun(Llyod 1990:60,61; see also Amossy
and Rosen 1982; Bart 1956; Wing 1986).

Similarly, under the guise of metempsychosis and consub-

stantiation, in Joyce's Ulysses Stephen and Bloom become identi-
fied in the face of William Shakespeare, and when Bloom makes a
list of twenty-five putative lovers of Molly, he gets some satisfac-
tion in the irony

that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he
is always the last term of a preceding series even if the fn'stterm of a succeed-
ing one, each imagining himself to be the first, last, only and alone, whereas
he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and
repeated to infinity (Joyce 1984:601).

Mimesis itself is, of course, a matter of repetition. That is, it is

never presented as something entirely new and original, but is in-
stead repeating some form, some archetype, or a prototype, and is
judged according to the varying notions of necessary exactitude or
faithfulness to the original. For Plato, all of the fine arts (including
architecture, music, the visual arts, literature, acting) and the crafts
(including building, statecraft, carpentry) are forms of imitation. In
fact, for Plato, everything is imitation if it is not an Idea. Produc-
tive craft is either production of actual objects or production of
images, either human or divine. Images may be likenesses with the
properties of the original (eikon) or apparent likenesses (phantasma),
which look like the originals but lack their properties. But all imi-
tations are only images (eidolon), which necessarily fall below the
level of the original in certain ways. Plato devotes much of Book
10 of the Republic to attacking the arts because of this duplicitous
NARRATIVEREPETITION.REPETITIVENARRATION 207

sort of imitation in which increasingly lower levels of copies are

taken as original and true, or which give the audience the illusion
of truthful representation.
Icastic imitations, which copy things from the natural world,
succeed in giving this illusion of truth by due color to each part and
keeping the true proportions (symmetrias); there is a certain imita-
tive correctness (orthotes) in which the imitation copies the origi-
nal's colors and attitudes (schemata), or the nature, number, and
appropriate order (prosekousan) of the original's parts (Sophist 235-
236; Laws 668e). Fantastic imitations produce "phantasms" by con-
structing images not according to the true proportions but those
which merely appear to be beautiful. Aristotle made a similar point
with a favourable outcome when he argued that the superiority of
the handsome person over the plain or of the painter's work over
reality consists in the fact that a number of scattered good points
have been collected together in one example (Politics 1281b10).
Aristotle grounds his Poetics in a notion of mimesis as imita-
tion from nature, but enhanced and selective representation of things
in the world, rather than the Platonic concept of a degenerating
series of imitations moving continuously away from a never repro-
duced Idea. For Aristotle, "artists imitate men involved in action
and these must either be noble or base since human character regu-
lady conforms to these distinctions" (1448a). Not only is artistic
imitation representation of human action, rather than divine Form,
but people have a natural pleasure (1448b) in noting the imitation
of human character, action, and thought, in participating in the
mimesis (1449b-1450a). As Gerald Else remarks:
tragedy is in the first place a species of imitation and must produce the pleas-
ure appropriate to all imitations: a pleasure which we already know is basi-
cally intellectual. But tragedy is not merely an imitation, it is a dramatic
imitation in which representative and significant human beings act and speak
to us directly. Hence the pleasure it gives us qua imitation must be the purest
possible. From it we learn about "life" and men directly, and enjoy the lesson
in proportion. But this is not all. The tragic imitation is of an action or activ-
ity, a (praxis), namely one shaped by the poet, and the poet gives it or should
give it proper arrangement, length, symmetry, and unity: all qualities which
208 LEONARD ORR
are calculated to make a work of art a source of pleasure (Else 1957:447-448;
see also Golden and Hardison 1981:68-73, 79-85, 91-95,268, 281-297).

Allegory theorists of the medieval period, the twelfth-century

neoplatonists, and Italian Renaissance critics tend to follow Pla-
to's objections to imitation, while at the same time arguing that
artworks are a mirror to nature, that they represent the real world,
or are understood in this way, and that the responsible poet is obliged
to enhance and improve nature. By the mid-seventeenth century,
the Platonic notion of imitation is dropped from most critical dis-
cussion, except in antitheater polemics. The version of imitation
that emerges during the Restoration period may be typified in John
Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), where Lisideius
defines a play as "a just and lively image of human nature, repre-
senting its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to
which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind."
Elsewhere in the same essay, we are told a
paradox, that one great reason why prose is not to be used in serious plays is
because it is too near the nature of converse: there may be too great a like-
ness; as the most skilful painters affirm that there may be too near a resem-
blance in a picture: to take every lineament and feature is not to make an
excellent piece, but to take so much only as will make a beautiful resem-
blance of the whole: and, whir an ingenious flattery of nature, to heighten the
beauties of some parts, and hide the deformities of the rest.

Thus the poet's imitation of nature must have the appeal of the
consensus or general nature, it must be understood as a "just repre-
sentation"; at the same time, it must be an improvement upon na-
ture, which was unruly, filled with accidents, the boring, the trivial,
the unpleasant, the unresolved, ugly, discontinuous, and incom-
plete.
Much of the burden for narrative mimesis is left to description,
another area like repetition that has not yet received sufficient at-
tention and which remains underserved by theory. Here I will just
indicate three of the sub-classes of description.
First, we have techniques of both overdetermination (in which
the same place or thing is described several times with variations
NARRATIVEREPETITION.REPETITIVENARRATION 209

or the same adjectives appear again and again, as F. R. Leavis

complained of Joseph Conrad's "adjectival insistence" in Heart of
Darkness), and underdetermination (in which important items are
not described sufficiently to make them clear, where the vagueness
is foregrounded to the point of a narrative gap or enigma).
Second, there is the ludic device most strongly associated with
the nouveau roman, of pseudorepetitive descriptive linkages. As
Vicki Mistacco explains,
[t]hese are descriptions which impede assimilation "with the everyday w o r d "
through the "overuse of expressions such as "like", "as if', "recalling" and
"analogous". These generally introduce gestures toward reality which prove
spurious in the sense that, when totalized, they offer no grounds for a coher-
ent representational construction by the reader." These expressions "serve as
operators of the textual glisseraents resulting from the principle of "endless
associations" (Mistacco 1980:389, 390).

Related to this is Deleuze's notion of transversality ("the estab-

lishment of associative patterns that allow a work to cohere with-
out betraying its multiplicity and fragmentation and without lead-
ing to a factitious totalizing unity" (cited in Mistacco 1980:392
n34). In both pseudorepetition and transversality, the repetitions
serve create a spurious notion of coherence and order and to lead
the reader into a false and ultimately futile search for coherence.
Third, we must include cataloging or a catalogue-effect, in which
we have long lists of miscellaneous items which appear, at first, to
be aiming at completeness and thoroughness but which break lin-
ear order and ultimately dissolve into chaos (examples may easily
be found in Beckett's Watt, the "Ithaca" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses,
and in the novels of Robbe-Grillet). Names and mannerisms of
characters can be seen as mini-descriptions which are repeated with
great frequency (Dickens is a clear example of this with characters
named Bounderby, the Veneerings, and Pecksniff, or Trollope's
social-climbing Lookalofts; for mannerisms, we have Great Ex-
pectation's Mr. Jaggers and the scented soap that indicates when
he is in the vicinity, or Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby's whistling
"Lillabulero" whenever he is embarrassed or nervous). Descrip-
210 LEONARD ORR

tions of settings can function in many of the same ways (for exam-
ple, the Golfo Placido, the mountain Higuerota, and the silver mine
in Conrad's Nostromo). Or Mary Ann Caws considers the repeated
and reversed or transformed scenes in Hardy's Jude the Obscure
involving windows and photographs.

The central figures are hemmed in from all sides and from within, by pic-
tures, texts, and customs, all of which are themselves already repetitions
(photographs of pictures, models of models, pictures of statues ... (Caws
1985:78-79).

The repetitive device of intertextuality has received much at-

tention and is well known. But here again, intertextuality needs to
be further subdivided. If we are speaking about a text taken or ap-
propriated from elsewhere, and transformed through being re-
contextualized, then we can see intertextuality as including not only
allusion and direct quotation, but clich6s, parodies, pastiches, stereo-
types, stock characters, and so on. All of these forms are repeating
with a difference (even direct quotation without alteration is made
different simply by its new textual surroundings). As Mistacco has
noted, we have covert borrowing and transforming of material from
a larger body of texts (thus Freud's Delusion and Dream, a study
of Jensen' s Gradiva, is behind Robbe-Grillet' s Topology of a Phan-
tom City which never mentions Freud or Gradiva directly). We
may also see that, while Freud inserts puns into a hierarchical,
binary sign system, puns are used to connect heterogeneous mate-
rial in the reader's mind; nonhierarchical, intertextual, and
intratextual puns "assure the continued mobility and open plurality
of the novel" (Mistacco 1980:393).
We should also differentiate between intertextuality and intra-
textuality, where intratextuality may refer to the repetition of char-
acters, settings, and situations in a series by one author (Stephen
Dedalus and his memories in Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist,
Trollope's "Barchester" or "Palliser" novels, Balzac's "Human
Comedy", Zola' s "Rougon-Macquart", Faulker' s "Yoknapatawpha"
fiction, Hardy's "Wessex" stories, novels, and poems). In such se-
ries intratextual repetition is not only necessary but is desired by
NARRATIVEREPETITION.REPETITIVENARRATION 211

the readers to fulfil their "lust for iteration", as Umberto Eco notes
in his analysis of Superman comics and Ian Fleming's "James Bond"
novels (Eco 1979: chaps 4 and 6; see also such works as Pugh 1974
and Watkins 1987). Another way to think of this, as John Frow has
indicated, is that intratextuality is "the elaboration of a text from a
central semantic core" (see Frow 1986:151-152).
But I would go one stage further in this area to the type of rep-
etition which demonstrates the importance of psychoanalytic ap-
proaches for this discussion: this stage I call transtextuality. When
any of these many different kinds of texts are recontextualized, and
so resemanticized, as intratexts or intertexts they become unmoored
from their origins, as it were, they float freely in the new textual
environment bringing with them all of their different repetitions
with variations, in the mouths of different speakers, in different
languages. Although still connected through mimetic referential
codes to the represented world, transtextually the narrative opens
into the area of possible worlds or the narrative universe. Here it
would seem the Bakhtinian norms of the novel (such as dialogism
and heteroglossia) apply. This new textual environment impinges
upon different times and cultures through the textual encounters
actualized b y the readers. The originary universe is now the mi-
metic discourse of a particular intratextual series, in the way that
Cervantes' Don Quixote stands behind Borges's "Pierre M6nard,
Author of Don Quixote" or Joyce's characters are transformed in
Raymond Queneau's We Always Treat Women Too Well. The best
metaphor for this might be Foucault's well-known "Fantasia of the
Library" (Foucault 1977:86-109). As John Johnston has noted about
Foucault's essay,
Michel Foucault has commented on the book's capacity as an object to create
a system of references that feeds off of while also revivifying a domain of
knowledge shaped not by rhetorical or pragmatic concerns but by the library
as space and institution. Foucault emphasizes that this domain is less an en-
closure or fictional alternative to the depiction of external reality than the
creation of a "new imaginative space". Hence, the "imaginary is not formed
in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs,
from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is
212 LEONARD ORR
born and takes place in the interval between books." More important, this
"interval" created through citation, allusion, and textual reference is in no
way neutral or inert, for the imaginative space opened up by the kind of
erudition Foncault describes is a scholar's phantasmagoria, teeming with phan-
tasms (Johnston 1990:160).

The transtextual recalls in this instance the devices that fall within
the realm of the loose collocation of terms such as interior duplica-
tion, the play-within-the play, mise-en-abyme, mirror-texts, self-
conscious or self-reflexive works, together with embedded tales,
narrative frames and the framed-tale, and interpolated tales. In all
of these instances, the relationship to narrative repetition is clear
even in the most basic definitions, for we are speaking of the text
which reveals its fictionally and therefore the hand of the author
behind the narrators. The text is in some way about its own writ-
ing, also revealing the author as reader and reviser, as constructor
and character-creator, but the author is still being covert, seen only
in occasional and purposely misleading moments within the tic-
tional heterocosm. For example, as Ronald Schleifer has noted about
Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited",
In the middle of the conversation the poet steps back from the situation to
examine his own statements: the words he has been speaking ("thus") flash
across his mind. This is the moment of recollection - - Geoffrey Hartman
calls it "recognition" - - that recurs throughout Wordsworth's poetry. The
poet recollects his own words after they have have been spoken and recog-
nizes that the deadness which he finds in the unseen Yarrow is his own. In
other words, he sees himself in his imaginative vision of Yarrow "bare": in
the middle of his speech he "recalls" himself, as it were, speaking (Schleifer
1977:351).

Moreover, authors do not merely posit their readers; they act as

readers. Caught in the reflexive trap, it must be admitted, real read-
ers may act as characters, or at least exactly the way the narrator
presupposes the narratees will act. As the narrator builds a rela-
tionship with the real and the putative narratees, narratees are in-
vited to answer questions, solve enigmas, get the narrator out of
difficultieslor understand the narrator's meaning with just the nar-
NARRATIVE REPETITION. REPETITIVE NARRATION 213

rator's nod and wink. For example, as Katherine Hayles has ar-
gued about N a b o k o v ' s Ada,

if we are to understand Van's narrative, we are obliged to enter into those

rhythms, and hence to share his preoccupations. [...] Because so many pas-
sages reflect or vary details from previous passages, the reader who fails to
remember these massive amounts of detail will find subsequent passages in-
creasingly unintelligible. The reader realizes that he must not only closely
attend to the present details, but must retain those details as they move into
the past in order to understand the future details moving into his present.
Understanding the text, even on a literal level, thus requires that we duplicate
Van's "tense-willed" mind and his dedication to accurate recall (Hayles
1982:36).

It w o u l d be p o s s i b l e to demonstrate this same p o i n t about

Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Watt.
Here is where we get into the issue of a given author's oeuvre
and career. Unless we stay within the formalist constraints o f a
w o r k ' s autonomy, and even formalists rarely do when seeking re-
current elements in a series o f works as corroboration o f their in-
terpretations, then we quickly move to the author. W h a t did the
authors know, what books did they read, what languages and ideas
did they have access to, what did they say in their letters, and so
on. Except for contemporary authors, we only have access to text
about the author or by the author; there is no author in any atextual
sense. W e are utilizing the Foucauldian notion of the author-func-
tion. When we see this it is apparent that the author is treated by
the critic as a character constantly shadowing the narrators and
main characters o f all of the novels, stories, poems, and so on
throughout the trajectory o f his or her career and beyond, for the
afterlife o f an important author is in the textual eternity o f mem-
oirs, diaries, scholarly editions, biographies, movies, critical works,
variorums, letters, copyright disputes, and academic journals. This
is the common hermeneutic notion o f the shifting horizon of the
text and the reader, joined by what we may refer to as the shifting
textualization o f the author.
The textualization o f the author does not begin with the first
published literary pieces, because, like Tristram Shandy, readers
214 LEONARD ORR

try to go back to the author's moment of conception, but in this

case the author exists only fragmentarily in the surviving texts,
exactly like the characters in the author's fictive heterocosm, in a
special variation of narrative recursion. The authors inscribe them-
selves within their works, making the text a Deleuzean machinic
assemblage which can then be dismantled. The repetitions form
the narrative nodes through which glimpses may be seen of the
hidden originary presence. As John-Paul Riquelme has noted, in
The Teller and the Tale, the most closely argued study of this phe-
nomenon, in Finnegans Wake
Joyce regularly directs our attention to origins, especially to the sources for
his own text. [...] As we read the Wake, we experience in mediated ways how
the text yeas produced. [...] Joyce cannot five us in unmediated form ~ e
experience of his mental processes that result in writing. Instead, he provides
a finished document that becomes the raw material for us to undergo analo-
gous experiences (Riquelme 1983:45).

The repetition which protects the author and frustrates the reader
is unavoidable; the author is trapped in the text as a repetition-
machine. In her analysis of Beckett's Ping, for example, Susan
Brienza notes that it utilizes a
midget grammar' of repeated phrases. [...] but more redundant, condensed
and ambiguous, and therefore more difficult to read. This fiction [...] contin-
ues Beckett's statement on the difficulty of writing; now the artist is trapped
within the very linguistic devices that were to have freed him (Brienza
1987:160).

What is the use of repetition? Does it direct the reader into a

specific reading or clarify the difficult text? Christine Brooke-Rose,
discussing repetition in the nouveau roman, notes that
the detective story in general, blurs by overdetermining false clues and
underdetermining true ones (a code within the hermeneutic code, which the
adept soon learns to look for); the ambiguous text, on the other hand, seems
to overdetermine one code and even to overnecode the reader, but in fact the
overdetermination consists of repetition and variations that give little or no
further information. The overdetermination functions, paradoxically, as
underdetermination ... (Brooke-Rose 1980:135).
NARRATIVE REPETITION, REPETITIVE NARRATION 215

So then, as w e h a v e seen, rather than operating to create c o h e r e n c e

and clarity, to reveal and unify, often repetition is m o r e a m b i g u -
o u s l y and c o m p l e x l y related to hiding the author, s o w i n g c o n f u -
sion, and creating misleading trails.
It is not difficult to find that specific critical analyses o f narra-
tive repetition use t e r m i n o l o g y related to p s y c h o l o g i c a l o b s e s s i o n
o r c o m p u l s i o n . J a n e M a r c u s , for e x a m p l e , speaks o f V i r g i n i a
W o o l f ' s " o b s e s s i v e trinities".

Woolf felt armed for that aesthetically most insistent and exciting aspect of
her art, the rhythmic, repetitive "three". That plaintive motive [...] is repeated
like a witch's spell of a child's nursery rhyme. [...] In a sense The Years is
about repetition as well as repetitive in style. Structurally the obsessive re-
peating seems circular ... (Marcus 1987:24-25, 37-38).

T h e r e is a b r i e f conversation in H e n r y J a m e s ' s The Golden Bowl:

"Oh, the thing I've known best of all. [...] That, I think", she added, "is the
way I've best known".
"Known?" he repeated after a moment.
"Known. Known that. [...] Known there were things...."
"Would they have made a difference if you had known them?"

M a r y A n n C a w s c o m m e n t s on this:

'What I know,' she repeats, and this incessant and deliberately inhuman or
unnatural iteration of her knowledge, 'her repeated distinct "know, know"',
strongly affects the Prince's nerves, as well as the reader's own. This artifici-
ality or mechanical repetition draws a heavy border around the scene, set
apart obviously as the verbal automatism of the hurt mind isolates it and its
interlocutor, an obsessive framing, spectacular in its degree (Caws 1985:196--
197).

A n d M a r g o t Norris has persuasively argued that the repetition

in J o y c e ' s Finnegans Wake does not fit any preset m o d e l such as
V i c o n i a n C y c l e s or e v e n a circle or other g e o m e t r i c pattern. In-
stead

the repetition in Finnegans Wake appears to be compulsive, that is, produced

by irrational rather than logical necessity, and therefore actively induced - -
the result of human impulse rather than time. There is ample reason to con-
sider the possibility that the repetition of events is generated by the pressure
216 LEONARD ORR
of an unresolved conflict, a mysterious trauma whose pain has never been
relieved (Norris 1974:345).

Since I indicated in the beginning of this paper the importance

of bringing psychoanalytic interpretations into connection with the
formalist approaches to narrative repetition, we must say a few
words about Freud. In the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud
viewed repetition in relation to the construction of identity and the
attainment of pleasure through a discharge of energy (see SE 5,
566). Nineteen years later, in his essay on E. T. A. Hoffmann's
story "The Sandman", Freud discusses the return of the repressed,
or the recurrence of a repressed event; this repetition causes fear to
attach to something ordinary because of the anxiety about the re-
pressed events, making the homely (heimlich) unfamiliar, uncanny
(unheimlich). ~ As Elizabeth Wright has noted, this essay seems to
reveal Freud held
in the grip of a repetition-compulsion.... On the one hand, it is argued, Freud's
paradigm for the uncanny, E. T. A. Hoffmann's story becomes a prime exam-
ple of the return of repression, because Freud edits out its uncanny potential.
On the other hand, Freud's essay as a (w)hole is held up as a prime example
of the return of the repressed, because what is left out of the story returns to
haunt the essay... (Wright 1984:143).

Terms like obsessive and compulsive repetition naturally return

us to Freud's 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which

2 On the uncanny and Freud's essay, see Sheldon Bach, "Narcissism, Continu-
ity and the Uncanny", International Journal of Psychoanalysis 56 (1975), 77-86;
Helene Cixous, "La fiction et ses fantomes: Une lecture de 1' Unheimliche de Freud",
Po(tique 3 (1972), 199-216; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago, 1981); Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandman", in Josu6 V. Harari, ed.,
Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 296-321; Fran~oise Meltzer,
"The Uncanny Rendered Canny: Freud's Blind Spot in Reading Hoffmann's 'Sand-
man'," in Sander Gilman, ed., Introducing Psychoanalytic Theory (New York:
Brunner/Mazel, 1982), 218-239; Lis Mr The Freudian Reading: Analytical and
Fictional Construction (Philadelphia: Univ. of Philadelphia Press, 1991), chap. 5;
Bernard Rubin, "Freud and Hoffmann: 'The Sandman'," in Sander Gilman, ed.,
Introducing Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1982), 205-217;
Samuel Weber, "The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment",MLN 88 (1973),
1102-1133.
NARRATIVEREPETITION.REPETITIVENARRATION 217
F r e u d sought an explanation for the fact that some people repeat
u n p l e a s a n t and traumatic experiences again and again through re-
curring dreams, obsessive rituals, and repeated types o f relation-
ships, contrary to his earlier u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the drive to pleasure
or dreams as wish-fulfillments; here was revealed, it w o u l d seem,
a death-drive, a desire to return to the inorganic.

We cannot escape a suspicion - - Freud writes - - that we may have come

upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps organic life in
general which has not hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not stressed
[...] an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.

The drive towards death is presented n o w as part of the conserva-

tive t e n d e n c y of drives, since "the i n a n i m a t e was there before the
animate". As S a m u e l W e b e r has observed, once Freud hit u p o n
this e x p l a n a t i o n , he s e a r c h e d for e v i d e n c e f r o m the l i v e s o f
" n o n n e u r o t i c persons".

Everywhere Freud finds [...] the same: the same story of ingratitude, betrayal,
inconstancy, love-like the child, who not finding what it is looking for, is
destined to repeat that search ever after as an adult. [...] Thus Freud continues
to recount stories, drawn not from the experience of psychoanalysis, but from
"the lives of normal people": "There is the case, for instance, of the woman
who married three successive husbands, each of whom fell ill soon after-
wards and had to be nursed by her to death..." (Weber 1982:133).

Far too m u c h has b e e n written recently on B e y o n d the P l e a s u r e

P r i n c i p l e for us to do m u c h with it in this paper, but its usefulness
for this c o m p l e x web of narration is clear? Lacanians, for e x a m -
ple, takes up the n o t i o n of the entrapment of both the narrator a n d
the critic w i t h i n the repetition. This obsessive and a m b i v a l e n t rep-
etition of textual elements and texts, and the c o n t i n u a l return b y

3 On Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle see Edward Bibring, "The Con-
cept of the Repetition Compulsion", Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943), 468-519;
Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing", in Writing and Difference (Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 196-231; Jacques Derrida, "Sp6culer sur
'Freud'," in La Carte postale: de Socrate a Freud et audela (Pads: Flammadon,
1980), 277--437; Hans W. Loewald, "Some Considerations on Repetition and Rep-
etition Compulsion", International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52 (1971), 59-66.
218 LEONARD ORR

writers to the same scenes, structures, words, devices, plots, char-

acters, even while they complain bitterly about the process of writ-
ing has perhaps found some explanation through the various revi-
sionary analyses of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. "Why does the
narrator do such a thing?" asks Stuart Schneiderman.
To avoid anxiety, you might say, and this failure is repeated in the writer who
takes his writing to be a repetition of what the narrator has done. There is
anxiety that something might be spoken, then it might be addressed to the
subject and that the subject might have to do something about it. To ward off
this anxiety, to make sure that nothing is spoken at all, all you have to do is to
keep writing (Schneiderman 1991:156).

Deleuze argues that the activity of writing is intimately linked

both to the lines of flight and a territorialization of the self as well
as a becoming-other, a becoming-minority, an effacement, an
enactment of the trickster and traitor. According to Deleuze,
the finality of writing, beyond any specific instance of becoming-
other, is
the final enterprise of becoming imperceptible. [...] Writing has no other end
than to lose one's face, to jump over or pierce through the wall, to plane
down the wall very patiently (Deleuze 1987:45).

Society makes the "face", and through writing the writer un-
makes it, to keep the secrets secret, to keep even the fact that there
are secrets secret by the seeming continual confession of public
writing and a foregrounding of voice. Contrary to the traditional
romantic notion of the sincerity or self-expression of the writer,
Deleuze argues that
in reality writing does not have its end in itself, precisely because life is not
something personal. Or rather, the aim of writing is to carry life to the state of
a non-personal power (Deleuze 1987:50).
Writing is very simple, Either it is a way of reterritorializing oneself, con-
forming to a code of dominant utterances, to a territory of established states
of things [...] or else, on the other hand, it is becoming, becoming something
other than a writer ... (Deleuze 1987:74). 4

4 As Dana Polan notes in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's KaJka:

"But contrary to, say, Sartre, who in L'Idiot de lafamilie presents the literary devel-
NARRATIVE REPETITION, REPETITIVE NARRATION 219

W i t h t h i s a n a l y s i s o f w r i t i n g as a w a y to a v o i d b e i n g a w r i t e r ,
a n d o f t h e f o r e g r o u n d i n g o f r e p e t i t i o n a n d i n s i s t e n c e i n o r d e r to
avoid revealing the repressed or acknowledging the problem, with
this complicity of author and reader who are brought together in
t h e m e d i a t i o n o f t h e t e x t , w e are b r o u g h t full c i r c l e in t h i s b r i e f
o u t l i n e o f n a r r a t i v e r e p e t i t i o n . 5 A s E l i o t n o t e s in " E a s t C o k e r " (III):

You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again.'~

opments in a biography as a supreme solution to thepsychologicalproblems of a life

(in this case Flaubert's hang-ups with Dad), Deleuze and Guattari don't see writing
as a solution to the interiorized problems of an individual psychology. Rather, writ-
ing stands against psychology, against interiority, by giving an author a possibility
of becoming more than his or her nominal self, of trading the insistent solidity of the
family tree for the whole field of desire and history. The romance of the individual
life is exceeded, deterritorialized, escaped" (Polan in Deleuze and Guattari 1986:xxiii).
For Deleuze, besides the works cited, see Bogue 1989 and Holland 1991. The major
work for this area of narrative would be Deleuze 1994.
5 The extension of the psychoanalytic metaphor raises intriguing questions.
For example, since the text itself is already a repetition, what is the status of the
author? If we are using the models of '~'he Uncanny" and Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, it might seem that the author is analogous to the analysand and the critic/
reader the analyst, with the text as the dreamwork and as a focus for their mediation
(as dreamwork, of course, it is already distorted and condensed in order to be ex-
pressed by the analysand. How might transference and counter-transference operate
in this analogy?
6 Schematically, then, the outlined taxonomy of repetition would look like this:
I. Form, symmetry, balance; II. Organicism and narrative economy; IH. Mimesis,
imitation, vraisemblabisation; IV. Description. 1. Overdetermination and Underde-
termination. 2. Pseudorepetitive descriptive linkages and transversality. 3. Cataloging
or catalogue-effect. 4. Recurrent names, mannerisms, settings. V. Intertextuality.
1. Allusion and direction quotation, a. allusion, b. clichts, c. parodies, d. pastiches.
e. stereotypes and stock characters, f. puns. g. genre conventions. 2. Intratextuality.
a. recurrent characters, b. recurrent settings, c. recurrent situations. 3. Transtextuality.
a. interior duplication, play-with-the-play, mise-en-abyme, b. embedded tales, inter-
polated tales, c. narrative frames and frame-tales, d. authors as readers and revisers.
e. covert authors in the fictional heterocosm, f. shifting textualization of the author.
ft. oeuvre, fff. author-function, ffff. author as shadowy transtextual character in-
scribed in the works. VI. Repetition which does not reveal, bring coherence, but
which baffles and frustrates or traps. VII. Return of the repressed. 1. Death-drive.
2. Closure, homeostatic plot, or return to frame. VM. Writing as effacement and
escape. 1. "aim of writing to carry life to the state of a non-personal power" (Deleuze).
2. Writing as reterritorializing oneself.
220 LEONARD ORR
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