Come again?

Repetition (1843)
Søren Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press, 1983)
100 pp. First reading.

What is repetition? I’ve read the book, and I don’t know. After reading the sort-of-recent guest Book Note (parts 1 and 2) on Either/Or, I was inspired to take up this brief volume. I have not done well. I simply don’t understand what the book is about.

Granted, it’s not a simple affair. Like Either/Or, this is a polyonymous work that lacks the center a stable authorial voice would provide. The primary author is Constantin Constantius, a self-professed “observer”, who narrates the story of his turbulent friendship with an unnamed Young Man. His young friend (whom I suspect may be the character called A in Either/Or) falls in love with a young woman, betroths himself to her, but then, deeply troubled by his choice, abruptly severs the relationship and disappears. Constantin hears nothing from him for some time, but then receives a series of letters. They are unsigned, but he knows who has written them. These letters form the second part of the book, and in them the young man unveils the drama of his inner struggle in the wake of his broken engagement. Constantin takes a few pages to comment on the letters, and then a final letter arrives: his fiancee has married another; the young man has found peace.

But what of repetition? We are told that it stands in dialectical tension with the Greek idea of recollection: whereas recollection dwells on the past, repetition “is recollected forward”, yet it is not hope. It is not something that simply happens, for “it takes courage to will repetition”. Repetition is not interested in “the interesting”. It is, in some sense, transcendent, for it “places a person in a purely personal relationship of opposition to God, in a relationship that he cannot allow himself to be satisfied with any explanation at second hand.” A central exemplar of repetition in the letters of the young man is Job, who contends against everyone, including God, to demand justice. But where, precisely, does repetition occur in Job’s life?

Constantin travels to Berlin, a city he has visited before, in order “to test the possibility and meaning of repetition”. Is it, then, as simple a matter as having an earlier experience again? Does it occur when the external circumstances repeat, and the internal experience also repeats? Or doesn’t repeat? How can this kind of banal experiment be related to Job’s experience? In any case, Constantin seems to have come up short — or has he? — claiming that “the only repetition was the impossibility of a repetition.” Thanks.

The best I can do is this: repetition pertains to some kind of profound experience in which the inner life acquires a solidity or spiritual strength to stand above or against circumstances or external pressures. How it pertains, I find it hard to say. What aspect of such an experience is the repetitive aspect? I don’t know. It seems to belong to the ethical sphere (if I may draw on the taxonomy outlined in Either/Or).

Constantin Constantius has apparently enjoyed making things difficult for the reader. He says that he has written “in such a way that the heretics are unable to understand it”. It figures. As I am apparently a heretic, I might despair of really penetrating the book’s elusive center and fall back instead on simply observing that the book is, for instance, “not a comedy, tragedy, novel, short story, epic, or epigram”, but I’m afraid that would only give him satisfaction. The way is blocked both before and behind.

I don’t much care for Constantin Constantius. His elliptical style seems calculated to keep outsiders out, and is topped off with an unbecoming smugness. Though his writings contribute more than half the book’s length, he avers that the true subject of the book is his young friend, referring to himself as only a “midwife” or “ministering spirit” — or even a “vanishing person”. I’m not sure of that; he can’t resist having the last word.

Perhaps the difficulty of the book is part of the meaning of the book. Perhaps one cannot grasp its meaning on first acquaintance. Perhaps it is, in other words, a book that invites a repetition. Perhaps?