by Derek Neal
I was listening to “My Turn Now” from Atlantic Starr’s 1980 album Radiant when my friend complained that “they just say the same thing over and over again.” This is true. The part of the song that elicited this comment was near the end, when the lead singer and the backup vocalists engage in a call and response:
(Baby, it’s my turn)
Oh, it is my turn now
It’s my turn now
(It’s my turn now)
(Baby, it’s my turn)
I want the world to know
That love is the love you sow
(It’s my turn now)
This is, of course, what music does. Words are repeated, phrases are repeated, melodies are repeated, and the song gets stuck in our heads and we repeat it to ourselves. Techno music, which is one of my favorite genres, is often criticized as being too repetitive, usually due to its ever-present bass drum; what some listeners fail to realize, however, is that once you hear the bass drum enough you stop hearing it. It acts as a sort of metronome, keeping time while melodies, harmonies, and rhythmic elements give shape to the music. When something is repeated, its meaning changes. I’ll say it again: when something is repeated, its meaning changes.
In Des Inconnues by Patrick Modiano, a young woman in Lyon interviews for a modelling job:
I sat down again in the chair next to him. I didn’t know if I could put my shoes back on.
“Is that your natural color,” he asked me, indicating my hair.
I told him it was.
“I’d like to see your profile.”
I turned my head toward the windows.
“You have a nice enough profile…” He said this as if delivering some bad news. “They’re quite rare, nice profiles.” He seemed worn out by the thought that there weren’t enough nice profiles in the world. He looked at me with his hawk eyes.
“For photos you’d be fine, but you’re not what Monsieur Pierre is looking for.”
I stiffened. Did I still have a slight chance? Perhaps he would ask for the opinion of this Monsieur Pierre, who was surely the boss. What exactly was he looking for? I was ready to conform to whatever Monsieur Pierre wanted.
“I’m sorry…we won’t be able to hire you.”
The verdict had been cast down. I no longer had the strength to say anything. The dry and courteous tone of this man made me understand that I wasn’t even worth asking Monsieur Pierre his opinion.
As the story progresses, the words of this man will repeat themselves to the narrator. She describes a dream she sometimes has:
He’d lost his voice. It was no longer him who spoke, but a disc that spun. The same words repeated themselves for eternity, “Your natural color…show me your profile…you’re not what Monsieur Pierre is looking for,” and they lost their meaning.
Each time I woke up, I was stunned that this episode, more and more distant in my life, had disappointed me so much and had made me so unhappy. I’d even thought, crossing the bridge that night, to throw myself into the Saone. For such a small thing.
The narrator takes a train for Paris the next day. Arriving at the apartment of a friend, she explains her failed interview:
I told her everything: my interview at the fashion house; the dry voice of the guy with hawk-eyes, which I’d heard again the night before as I dozed somewhere around Dijon: “Is that your natural color? Show me your profile…” And there, in front of her, I burst into tears.
Why do these words cause her such pain? On their own, they’re rather innocuous: “Is that your natural color? Show me your profile…” But as she notes, when they’re repeated, they lose their meaning. The words are no longer about hair color or physical appearance, but about her failure as a model and her own internalized unworthiness. When she bursts into tears, it’s because these words have come to symbolize her failure. This is also seen in her misremembering of the words themselves. The man interviewing her says, “I’d like to see your profile,” but she turns this into, “Show me your profile.” A polite request has turned into a harsh order. Furthermore, the “dry and courteous tone” used by the man becomes something deeper and darker, as if he’s lost his voice from repeating the words so many times. The man, while not exactly friendly in the original exchange, takes on the character of a villain in the narrator’s repetitive dreams.
In Umberto D, the 1952 film from Vittorio De Sica, a pensioner who is struggling to make ends meet stops outside the Pantheon in Rome and puts out his hand. Then he pulls it in, only to put it out again. Then he does it a third time. On YouTube, someone has uploaded this clip with the title, “Umberto D tries out begging.” This is an apt description. We are not watching Umberto beg for money; we are watching him think about what it would mean to beg for money, as conveyed by his repetitive hand motion. The first time he puts his hand out, he does it slowly; he stares at his hand disbelievingly. The second time he does it more assuredly; he’s familiarizing himself with the action. As a man is about to walk by, he thrusts out his hand rapidly, as if ripping off a band-aid. When the man reaches into his pocket, Umberto turns his hand over and looks at the sky, pretending to check for rain. The man moves on. Finally, Umberto hides behind a column while his dog holds his upturned hat in its mouth. The feeling of shame in this scene is immense, and it’s achieved without a single word being spoken, but through an action repeated. How different the scene would be if Umberto had only put his hand out once, or if he’d given his hat to his dog in the beginning.
Thomas Bernhard’s 1986 novel Extinction relies heavily on repetition to create its hypnotic effect upon the reader. The main character, Murau, spends the first 154 pages of the book in his apartment in Rome, contemplating photographs of his family and ruminating on his life and his future after receiving news of his parents’ and brother’s deaths. There is barely any plot, just Murau and his thoughts, circling endlessly in his head and in ours. He riffs on one theme, such as his connection with the gardeners at his family estate, Wolfsegg, before moving onto another subject, such as his mother’s affair with his friend, Spadolini, before jumping to a third topic, such as his family’s complicity in Nazism, only to then return to his first theme, the gardeners at Wolfsegg. Each time Murau returns to a subject, he repeats what he has said before and then adds to it, or sometimes he contradicts what he has stated previously. His repetition is a circling that deepens the mystery of his mind, rather than a logical progression from one idea to the next. The story itself is recursive in that Murau talks about writing a book called Extinction in which he will do the very thing this book is doing, and the story then adds another layer to itself by adding “writes Murau” on both the first and last page of the book. Just as Murau repeats himself, the book as a whole is repeating itself.
In an article on Bernhard in the New Yorker, Ruth Franklin makes the point that Bernhard’s prose “creates, holds, and repeats key phrases and ideas as a composer might do with a melodic motif.” In Extinction, this often happens when Murau will be in the middle of a characteristic diatribe, only to interject with “as I told Gambetti,” before continuing with his rant. Murau is Gambetti’s private tutor, and much of what he tells us is simply a rehashing of what he has told Gambetti earlier, a fact of which Bernhard never hesitates to remind us. Yet another layer.
But why all this repetition? In Susan Sontag’s essay on the French director Robert Bresson, she highlighted his use of “doubling,” by which she meant his tendency to have a character narrate an action before seeing it on screen, or vice versa. Sontag notes that this can remove suspense from the film because we know what will happen before it occurs (in the case of narration before image), or that it can “put a brake on the spectator’s direct imaginative participation in the action” by pausing the development of the plot (in the case of narration after image); no new information is added, and the story is seemingly put on hold. The effect, according to Sontag, is to “both arrest and intensify the ordinary emotional sequence.” Paul Schrader references Sontag’s analysis and calls Bresson’s doubling a “distancing device” between the viewer and the film.
In the examples I have cited, the explanation for repetitiveness may be that it allows the reader or viewer to inhabit the consciousness of the protagonist, which is achieved at the expense of plot. One way to allow this to happen is to slow down the time of the narrative so that it is equal to real time or even longer than real time. For example, in the first part of Extinction, how much time passes in the world of the novel? Perhaps a few hours as Murau stands in his apartment looking at his family photographs; in terms of the real time required to read this section, it is equal to this or perhaps more than a few hours. This may both arrest and intensify the emotional sequence, as Sontag says, because we are forced to wait for the main plot point to occur—Murau’s return home for the funeral—while at the same time we are able to experience “consciousness in action,” which is how Franklin articulated Bernhard’s main objective in writing. We are distant from the plot, or the narrative of the story, but close to the mind of the characters. The appeal of this may be that it brings us closer to ourselves, too, and our own repetitive thoughts and actions.