Table Of ContentTelling It Again and Again : Repetition in
title:
Literature 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--
subject
Technique, Repetition in motion pictures.
publication date: 1989
lcc: PN56.R45K3 1989eb
ddc: 809/.92
Repetition (Rhetoric) , Literature--
subject:
Technique, 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
