Difference In Repetition: From One Revolving Door To Another

Difference In Repetition:

From One Revolving Door To Another

(I seldom read fiction so forgive me)

In an attempt to get closer to the truth of the matter, if there is one sole truth or any in these works, the reader is ready to trust anyone who addresses him or her; what else is he or she left with? However, the often easy procedure of taking everything the narrator or speaker says at face value becomes difficult when a narrator’s legitimacy is called into question. Who is left to lead the reader through the shadows, granted there even is a reader at all? In this essay, I will outline the way in which Repetition by Søren Kierkegaard and Repetition¹ by Alain Robbe-Grillet address the reader, follow this by stating the implications of this on the way objectivity works within the novels. I will then argue that while addressing the reader helps to clarify the nature of repetition in Kierkegaard’s novel, it ultimately becomes more obscure in Robbe-Grillet’s novel.

Within pages of what purports to be an accurate account provided by Henri-Robin, everything that has already been said is called into question by a speaker within a footnote. Not only is the reader told that ‘Henri-Robin’ is a fake identity and that he has misrepresented facts within his account, but the reader is also told that the narrator ‘himself (is) unreliable’ (Robbe-Grillet 17). Where does this dethroning of the narrator leave the reader in terms of grasping the true story? Is this narration conducive to objectivity or uncertainty? All the reader is left with is a hybrid; an objective uncertainty.  

While it may intuitively seem like the reader is worse off, the speaker within the footnotes turns out to provide useful information to the reader. For one, the supposed ‘Henri-Robin’, who in reality (or at least to the speaker in the footnotes) is called Ascher (45), is called out on attempting to ‘convince his eventual reader of the poisoning theory’ (75) by purposefully convoluting his narrative. The speaker reveals, furthermore, the serpentine manner in which Ascher drops in and out of the first and the third person. (45)  The speaker also reveals what he suspects to be the nature of Ascher’s narrative; it is supposed to be an objective report for Pierre Garin. (45) More fundamental to the story, however, is the fact that the speaker reveals the most important secret Ascher keeps from the reader: his prior experience in Berlin as a child. Does the speaker, in essentially hijacking Ascher’s credibility, lead the reader to objectivity by filling in the gaps left by Ascher?

In one sense, insofar as the speaker reveals key information about the story, one is tempted to give himself or herself up to his footnotes; he provides clarity where Ascher gets lost in the bewilderment of immediacy. However, the speaker himself proves to be fallible and morally ambiguous; he is revealed to be susceptible to error, as well as a key part of the story; a part so key it no longer seems reasonable to take his word for granted. For one, while he himself criticises Ascher for the failure to give an objective report, the speaker himself at the end of the novel is revealed to have a degree of fallibility; he acts on false information provided by Pierre Garin and attempts to murder Ascher thinking the twins have left for the Russian zone (167). It seems like, in the same way Ascher finds himself a victim of Pierre Garin`s ‘traps’ (45), the speaker is himself falls prey to the cunning Pierre Garin. In terms of moral ambiguity, the fact that the speaker turns out to be Ascher’s brother (164), as well as his involvement in the molestation of Gigi (104) erases any hope impartiality on his part insofar as he directly interwoven into the core of the story. The fact that the reader is led to doubt the original narrative based on an account which he or she in turn begins to doubt as the story develops leads to uncertainty comparable to that experienced by Ascher; one begins to doubt a doubt; uncertainty begets uncertainty.   

              While Robbe-Grillet’s Repetition¹ only leads one deeper into the uncertainty of the text, Kierkegaard’s Repetition has a nearly reversed effect; it seems to pull the reader out of one uncertainty to the effect of some explanatory value concerning the purpose of the young man within the text.  This is nearly reversed because, while Constantius does reveal some things about the nature of the text, there is still a degree of uncertainty emanating from his letter. The reader in Kierkegaard’s Repetition is addressed directly (“My dear reader!” (Kierkegaard 226)) in a letter appearing at the end of the text entitled Concluding Letter By Constantin Constantius. In this letter, Constantius reveals a telling fact about the young man. Namely, he is not real! Constantius claims to have ‘brought (the young man) into being’ (228) His justification is that a poet is ‘worth the trouble’ (228); a poet is ‘ordinarily an exception’ (228).  This revelation leads to a further divulgence: the young man was not being honest about his idea of repetition; there is a difference between what the young man said about repetition and what he experienced. While the young man explained ‘the universal as repetition’, he in fact understood repetition on a religious level; he saw repetition as ‘a raising of his consciousness to the second power’. (229) The degree of uncertainty, on the other hand, manifests itself in the way Constantius speaks about himself and the reader. For one, he calls himself ‘a vanishing person’. (230) He also calls the reader ‘fictional’. (226) While the reality of Constantius, the reader, and the young man is called into question, this reveals something in relation to repetition; there’s a sense in which it can be grasped of subjectively, and another sense in which it cannot be explained objectively; the young man is condemned to a false notion of repetition when attempting to explain it, while grasping its essence experientially. This directs one to the notion of repetition as stated by Constantius at the beginning of the novel; one needs to ‘demonstrate’ repetition as Diogenes attempted to demonstrate motion (131).    

I would argue that repetition manifests itself differently in Robbe-Grillet’s novel. While the artificiality of the young man, Constantius, and the reader are exposed, giving the novel a degree of uncertainty, these facts in a sense give the reader a way out of Kierkegaard’s Repetition. The fact that Constantius says he created the young man gives the story a conclusion where one can at least look down and have a good idea of the frame of the novel. In contrast, there’s a sense in which the constant uncertainty and surreal mist throughout Repeition¹, best exemplified by the inherent uncertainty in the narrative (the more you believe Ascher the least you can believe the speaker, and vice-versa), make it impossible for the reader to believe Ascher has truly escaped his ordeal; the reader is still led to believe, at least intuitively, that the story does not end when Ascher embarks on his ‘honeymoon’; will he simply not wake up again in a booby-trapped apartment with a different name? While Constantius gives a sense of finality to the novel, there’s a sense in which the repetition in Robbe-Grillet’s novel is never ending. One is captured within its revolving doors of uncertainty; one is condemned to the ‘same old story from age to age, repeated once again’ (169)?  

In conclusion, similarly to the alternate ways the reader is addressed in Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Robbe-Grillet’s Repetition¹, repetition itself manifests itself in two different ways within these texts. While Kierkegaard’s Repetition gives one a sense of repetition as experiential, Robbe-Grillet’s notion of repetition is more a condition of existence that is inescapable.                

Work cited:

Grillet, Alain, and Richard Howard. Repetition: a novel. New York: Grove Press, 2003. Print.

Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye. Repetition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.