THEATER AND theory share a common etymology and, as we have seen, a vexed history. At issue is the interpretation of thea, looking, of its site, theatron, of the onlooker or spectator, theoros, and, finally, of the spectacle itself. Ever since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has sought to reduce the importance of the scenic, medial dimension by comprehending it primarily as tragedy. 1 The year 1843, in which Kierkegaard’s essay Repetition was published, marks a decisive turning point in this history. It is as though a certain blockage of “traditional” philosophical paradigms—which Kierkegaard above all identified with the thought of Hegel—necessitated a rethinking of the relationship of theater not just to theory, but to a notion of movement that the hallowed philosophical opposition of theory and practice could no longer adequately articulate. The first paragraph of Gjentagelsen 2 sets the scene:
When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, stepped up [optraadte] as an opponent. He really stepped up, because he didn’t say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them. When I was occupied for some time … with the question of repetition—whether or not it is possible, what importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being repeated—I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has. At home I had been practically immobilized by this question. Say what you will, this question will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks. Just as they thought that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition. … Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, [under the pretext] that he has forgotten something. (p. 131)3
This text stands almost alone in the nineteenth century for the prescience with which it announces a new kind of philosophy. Only Nietzsche, some forty years later, will have similar foresight in the opening pages of Beyond Good and Evil, which predict the coming of a “new species of philosophers,” no longer bound to the oppositional logic of traditional metaphysics, “philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps.’ “4 But the opening gambit in Gjentagelsen does not merely proclaim the need for a new philosophy of “repetition” to supplant and replace that of “recollection,” which has prevailed since the Greeks. By contrast to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard formulates this challenge in a style that is fundamentally alien to philosophical discourse, not so much because of the prominent role of first-person “narrative”— which is to be found, for instance, in such inaugural texts as Descartes’ Meditations —but rather because of the abrupt shifting from one discursive mode to another: from third-person to first-person narrative, from autobiographical anecdote to historical reflection, from seriousness to the jocular, which is unusual if not unique in writing usually considered to be “philosophical.” And yet what is perhaps most unusual is the use of a “pseudonymic” narrator-author. This confuses the question of authorship and of authority. Who, after all, is really speaking here? “Constantin Constantius”? What, then, about “Kierkegaard”? This sort of confusion is generally associated with texts considered to be “literary.” It is precisely what philosophy, ever since its inception with Plato, has unequivocally condemned: “When the poet speaks in the person of another … he assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs you, is going to speak. … And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes. … In this case, the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by way of imitation.” Since, however, “one man can only do one thing well, and not many,” what is practiced in poetry has to be avoided by those who would serve as “guardians” of the polis.5 In Repetition, the disjointedness of the discourse introduces an uncertainty that is augmented by the ambiguous status of its “subject,” Constantin Constantius. Let us look more closely at how this disjointedness works in the passage just quoted.
The passage begins with a philosophical anecdote from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers.6 In this anecdote, Diogenes demonstrates the existence of movement against the views of the Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno, not by what he says but by what he does, namely, putting his own body into movement: “He literally did step up … paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them.” A strange way of introducing a book upon “repetition.” And yet repetition is already very much at work in this initial citation, in a number of different ways—not just because it is a citation, and hence a form of repetition, nor because the citation is contained in a narrative recounting of an alleged event, nor even because the name of the figure narrated, Diogenes of Sinope, echoes or anticipates the name of the author of the text from which the anecdote is taken, Diogenes Laertius. All of these are important, nontrivial instances of repetition, and yet another instance is perhaps even more significant. Diogenes’ demonstration itself is as illustrative of a certain repetition as it is of movement. In “stepping up” he makes a theatrical entry upon the scene: the verb optraede also designates the entry or appearance of actors on the stage. Here, he “really [virkelig]” “steps up,” which is to say, makes his entry upon the stage, upon which he then “merely paced back and forth a few times.” Not only did Diogenes not say anything, did not offer any sort of philosophical argument—he did not even go anywhere. He “merely paced” to and fro, marking time, as it were. We are not told what sort of effect this optraeden had on his opponents or on any of the other spectators. As readers of the anecdote, we are left to ourselves to decide. And the decision is not made any easier by what follows the anecdote: namely, without any transition, the jump to a first-person, autobiographical narrative: “When I was occupied for some time, at least on occasion, with the question of repetition … I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has. At home I had been practically immobilized by this question.”
Only at the end of this passage does a possible connection between the anecdote about Diogenes’ optraeden and the autobiographical story that follows begin to emerge. Diogenes demonstrates a certain kind of (repetitive) movement by “really” stepping up and “merely” pacing back and forth. The narrator-author, “Constantin Constantius,” remembers that he had been “practically immobilized” by the question of “whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has.” A strange question to be “immobilized” by, one might think, and yet it is precisely this strangeness that Kierkegaard’s text will go on to deploy and render plausible, on the condition that the reader never cease asking the question of who is speaking or, rather, writing, and from where.
This is no simple task, however, for “Constantin Constantius” is not easy to situate. It is easier to say what and where he is not than what or where he is. Above all, he is not Søren Kierkegaard, if by that name we mean the empirical “author” of this and other texts. He is also not simply a “fictional character,” even though he has no existence apart from the text, and even though he does indeed “report” a kind of story. But his “report” does not disappear into the story or fade into transparency. And the reader who expects it to serve as a mere instrument by which that story, or message, is conveyed is bound to come away from this text very disappointed. Rather, “Constantin Constantius” will expose himself in this text in a manner not unlike that of Diogenes, “really” stepping up to engage in a variety of “repetitions” that, however, by no means provide a simple and straightforward answer to the question he is asking.
This begins, as it were, with his “name.” More “allegorical” than “proper,” more generic than individual, this name already is an instance of repetition. But not just any repetition. In repeating itself, it names a certain “constancy”: a “standing-with” in the sense of “standing-firm.” The distinctive repetition deployed in the name Constantin Constantius suggests something or someone that stays the same, despite the movement of time as the medium of change, alteration, passage. The passage of a life, for instance: “Just as they [the Greeks] taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition.”
The interest of philosophy has thus moved from “knowledge” to “life” and in so doing has shifted its emphasis from “recollection” to “repetition.” Not that the latter simply does away with the former. Rather, it redirects it from the past toward the future: “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”
Repetition, according to Constantin Constantius, is thus concerned with life rather than knowledge and with the future rather than the past. The consequences that Constantin draws from this are, however, anything but self-evident: “Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, [under the pretext] that he has forgotten something.”
This conclusion is anything but self-evident, for at least two reasons. First, it is not at all clear why “repetition” should make “a person happy, whereas recollection” should make him unhappy—unless, that is, one remembers “Constantin’s” name and takes it literally: to recall something is to acknowledge that it is no longer, except in the recollection of it.7 Recollection thus confirms a certain loss, a certain passing of the past, and hence a certain inconstancy. What is recollected no longer “stands with” us or with itself, no longer “stands firm” against the flow of time except as a memory, which confirms its passing. If, however, repetition is construed as recollection projected “forward,” into the future, it ostensibly holds out the possibility of recovering that which, were it to remain simply past, would be irretrievably gone. Such recovery of the past “makes a person happy,” especially if his name is Constantin Constantius, for it reaffirms the possibility of a certain constancy, that is, of staying the same in and in spite of the passage of time. Mere “recollection,” by contrast, will make one unhappy, given one rather important assumption: “Assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example [under the pretext] that he has forgotten something.”
There is, then, one condition under which “recollection” may not make one unhappy, and although it may sound at first quite bizarre, after a while it begins to resonate in a surprisingly familiar manner. The person who has to “find an excuse to sneak out of life again,” because “he has forgotten something,” does not “give himself time to live”—or to die. The only “thing” that he could have forgotten, in this context, would be the inseparability of living and dying, of arriving and departing, forgetting and forgoing—in short, the passage of time. And it is this passage that “sneaking out of life” brings to a (premature) end. Thus, the refusal to “forget” actually “sneaks out of” the very “life” it seems to want to remember. In seeking not to forget, the possibility of living itself is lost.
Although this joke, if it is one, turns out to be at the expense of Constantin Constantius, its uncanny familiarity suggests that the joke may not be on him alone. The meta-slogan of American TV advertising enjoins its viewers to “stay with us” during (and in spite of) the “commercial break,” promising that “we’ll be right back,” the same and perhaps better than before. Why and how the same and better? Because the “break” turns out to mark the advent of salvation itself, if one follows the “message,” which insists that the more you spend, the more you save and are saved. The commercial break is a repeatable kairos that opens up the possibility of salvation in a way not so very different from that described by Constantin, except that it collapses what for him is an alternative into a synthesis. The incessantly repeated call to consume is anticipated in Constantin’s “definition” of repetition as recollection willed forward, which has the ability to make people “happy” rather than “sad,” inasmuch as it holds out the promise of overcoming the passage of time. “Stay with us” thus really means “don’t disappear in the break!” Be constant! Stay put!
The difficulty of this task, however, constitutes precisely the problem that “immobilized” Constantin Constantius “in the first place” and drove him to attempt his radical experiment with repetition. The problem was linked, as he later recounts it, to his search for “complete satisfaction”:
At one time I was very close to complete satisfaction. I got up feeling unusually well one morning. My sense of well-being increased incomparably until noon; at precisely one o’clock, I was at the peak and had a presentiment of the dizzy maximum found on no gauge of well being, not even on a poetic thermometer. My body had lost its terrestrial gravity … my walk was a floating … my being was transparent … I had a presentiment of every impression before it arrived and awakened within me. All existence seemed to have fallen in love with me, and everything quivered in fatal rapport with my being. Everything was prescient in me and everything was enigmatically transfigured … when suddenly something began to irritate one of my eyes, whether it was an eyelash, a speck of something, a bit of dust, I do not know, but this I do know—that in the same instant I was plunged into the abyss of despair, something everyone will understand who has been as high … as I was. … Since that time I have abandoned every hope of ever feeling satisfied absolutely.
It was then that time after time I turned to and became excited about the idea of repetition, and there I once again became the victim of my zeal for principles; for I am completely convinced that if I had not gone abroad with the idea of assuring myself of it, I would have amused myself immensely with the very same thing. (pp. 173–74)
In short, Constantin’s decision to return to Berlin, to see if “repetition is possible” is taken to decide, once and for all and in principle, whether or not the kind of blissful moment he describes, in which temporal, bodily existence is transcended by a being in which “everything [is] prescient,” can be maintained, repeated—that is, recovered—in more than just memory. This was the question that had “practically immobilized” him “at home” and that led him to attempt his fateful “experiment.”
For Constantin, at least, that experiment ends in catastrophe. He returns to Berlin, goes back to the pension where he had lived as a student, finds it more or less unchanged, does many of the same things he did before, but, in the end, discovers that “the only repetition was the impossibility of repetition” (p. 170). Or, as he puts it shortly thereafter: “It seemed as if all my great talk, which I now would not repeat at any price, were only a dream from which I awoke to have life unremittingly and treacherously retake everything it had given without providing a repetition” (p. 172).
In short, Constantin “awakes” to a nightmare. But to understand precisely why, it is helpful to remember that “the good Danish word” (p. 149) generally translated as “repetition,” namely Gjentagelsen, actually involves a somewhat different semantic field. As the English translators of this text recall in a note, Constantin’s formulation plays on the literality of the Danish word, whose two components, gjen and tagelsen, mean “again” and “take” respectively. In this literal sense, “repetition” is true to its word: it “takes again” in the sense of “taking back” everything it has been given. This, however, is not at all the kind of taking back that Constantin Constantius had hoped to find and that alone would have granted him happiness. There is repetition, but from the viewpoint of his desire it is an impossible repetition, for it is one that takes again, rather than gives back. Again and again.
The tension in this “impossible repetition” plays itself out in one of the two story-lines that make up the first part of this text. (I leave discussion of the second part, which contains the celebrated discussion of the Book of Job, for another essay.) After he has elaborated his introductory thesis that “Recollection’s love is the only happy love” (p. 133)—a thesis taken from another text of Kierkegaard— Constantin remarks that its author “is at times somewhat deceitful, not in the sense that he says one thing and means another but in the sense that he pushes the thought to extremes, so that if it is not grasped with the same energy, it reveals itself in the next instant as something else” (p. 133). To “grasp” such a thought “with the same energy” can only be to “repeat” it by pushing it once again to the extreme, where, however, it will “reveal itself… as something else.”8 The two story-lines, that of Constantin and that of the young man, which in a certain sense add up to a single story, push the thought of repetition and recollection to such extremes.
First, there is the story of “the young man,” which makes its appearance center-stage as abruptly as had Diogenes. This is a text full of abrupt coups de théâtre. Although I cannot give this “story” that isn’t one the reading it demands, it may suffice to recall its main drift: “About one year ago,” Constantin writes, he “became very much aware of a young man (with whom I had already often been in contact), because his handsome appearance, the soulful expression of his eyes, had an almost alluring effect upon me” (p. 133). Constantin is anything but a detached observer, and the young man soon confides in him “that he had fallen in love.” Of all the long descriptions Constantin gives of this love, I will limit myself to the following quote, which also marks a high point in their relationship:
His gait, his movement, his gestures—all were eloquent, and he himself glowed with love. Just as a grape at the peak of its perfection becomes transparent and clear, the juice trickling from its delicate veins, just as the peel of a fruit breaks when the fruit is fully ripe, just so love broke forth almost visibly in his form. I could not resist stealing an almost enamored glance at him now and then, for a young man like that is just as enchanting to the eye as a young girl. (p. 135)
Constantin confesses that he is “almost enamored” with the person at—or from—whom he “steals” a glance. But of this passion, as with so much else in this strange story, nothing concrete will emerge— nothing that could be measured in terms of what is often called “real people.” And not without good reason: nothing is less certain than that the bearer of the name Constantin Constantius is anything like a “real person,” any more than is the anonymous “young man,” of whom Constantin will later acknowledge that “it seemed to me as if I were that young man myself” (p. 172). This confession comes immediately before his bitter admission, already quoted, that “life takes” without giving back, and that therefore there “is” no true “repetition” (p. 172).
Of course, the usual solution to this problem is speciously simple: it is merely to interpret both Constantin and the anonymous young man as “parts” of “Kierkegaard” himself, the real author who, just before writing this text, had broken off his engagement to Regina Olsen. But, as Howard and Edna Hong note in the introduction to their translation, although Repetition must be considered to be one of “the most closely personal” writings of Kierkegaard, his personal autobiography can never suffice to provide an interpretive framework for this text, for reasons that Kierkegaard himself later, in Two Ages (1846), formulated with extreme precision: “Anyone who experiences anything primitively also experiences in ideality the possibilities of the same thing and the possibility of the opposite. These possibilities are his legitimate literary property. His own personal actuality, however, is not. His speaking and his producing are, in fact, born of silence” (p. ix).
The text of Gjentagelsen, perhaps more than many others, must be read against the grain, or from the edges of what it explicitly states, and this is nowhere more necessary than in respect to the relationship to “the young man” and his “confidant,” Constantin Constantius. Anyone who reads this “story” with the expectation of discovering exciting or palpitating events, will go away sorely disappointed. But anyone who reads it as a kind of philosophical or moral parable will hardly be any more satisfied. For in the strictest of senses, what happens in this ostensible love story is actually nothing. In this respect—that of its invisible climax—the story recalls both the death of Oedipus and the Breathless passage of de Gaulle’s motorcade, discussed in the previous chapter. True, the cut here is not nearly as dramatic as in Sophocles or Godard, but it is all the more insidious given its place in Constantin’s story of the young man’s love. The “young man” confesses his love for the “young girl” to Constantin, whom he chooses as his “confidant” precisely so that “he could talk aloud to himself.” But the essence of that love is like the bursting of the grape: no sooner has “love broke[n] forth almost visibly in his form,” than it disappears. In a passage already quoted in Chapter 4, but which merits repetition in this discussion of Repetition, Constantin describes this curiously anticlimactic moment:
He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship. In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference; he will throw himself down again, his eyes will fill with tears again, he will repeat the poet’s words again. … For a long time nothing has affected me so powerfully as this scene. (p. 136)
The anticlimactic aftermath of the young man’s love is laced through with repetition. It repeats the opening scene in two ways. First, by falling in love, the young man “leaped over life,” somewhat the way the one who refuses to give himself time to live “sneaks out of life” because he has “forgotten something.” The young man leaps over life and falls out of love almost as quickly as he fell into it, precisely in order to be able to remember them. Were the girl to die, “it would make no difference,” since for him she is already gone, past, lost and thus made an object of nostalgic recollection. Reciting the poet’s words, “pacing up and down” as had Diogenes, the young man demonstrates that there may be movement, but it does not necessarily go anywhere or change anything.
Constantin acknowledges that he is “powerfully” affected by “this scene,” but it is a scene that is never seen, that remains invisible. Like the scene from Breathless, it never really—”actually”—takes place. In its place, there is a void or a cut: “He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was able to recollect his love.” How the young man moves from the one situation of being in love, to the situation of being able to recollect it, is never shown, never described. There is no transition, only a leap: “he leaped over life.” And although this still seems to conform to a certain temporal sequence, in fact it was there from the very beginning: “In the very first moment he became an old man in regard to the entire relationship” (p. 136). The “young man” acts like “an old man” from the start, and in so doing, demonstrates his propensity for “recollection”: “But so much is certain: if anyone can join in conversation about recollection’s love, he can. Recollection has the great advantage that it begins with loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose” (p. 136).
Recollection has “nothing to lose” because it has already given up. This loss, however, is unacceptable to Constantin Constantius and to the modernity he represents. In the past, “recollection” could accept “loss” in the name of knowledge. For an age that is no longer informed strictly by knowledge, however, but by “life,” such a loss has become intolerable, because the “life” it lives is largely that of the solitary individual. From that point of view, no “knowledge” can compensate for the individual’s unsurpassable limit, death. Hence Constantin’s desire to “will repetition.” The “young man” does not understand this: “My young friend did not understand repetition; he did not believe in it and did not powerfully will it. … If the young man had believed in repetition, what great things might have come from him” (pp. 145–46).
Repetition as Constantin here describes it is an object of faith and of will: either one believes in it, and wills it, or one does not. The young man does not, although he, like everyone else, practices it, for instance, in repeating verses from the poet Poul Møller: “He repeated the same verse that evening when we parted. It will never be possible for me to forget that verse; indeed, I can more easily obliterate the recollection of his disappearance than the memory of that moment” (p. 146). Originally, Kierkegaard (or Constantin) wrote “death” instead of “disappearance,” for in the initial version of the text the young man shoots himself. But, whether “death” or “disappearance,” Constantin reacts to this “parting” by recollecting repetition, just as his notion of repetition will repeat recollection, only projected into the future. In both cases, Constantin’s belief in repetition is inseparable from the hope of “taking back” what has been lost in the “parting.” Constantin’s hope is through repetition, as repetition, to be able to “take back” and thus to stand-fast. His return to Berlin will definitively shatter this hope. But in the process another kind of repetition, of Gjentagelsen, will have begun to emerge: repetition as the medium of difference rather than as the means of staying the same. And that medium will reveal itself as being irreducibly theatrical. Constantin formulates the general principle involved quite clearly: “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new. When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence” (p. 149).
This general formulation leaves open the question of how that “which has been” once again “now comes into existence” as repetition. To explore the question of “how-now,” Constantin Constantius embarks upon his “investigative journey,” his “experimental” voyage to Berlin. From the very start his voyage is an experiment in repetition, one that will surely strike the contemporary reader as quite familiar. Constantin, to be sure, does not travel by air, but by coach. And yet his experience is not so very different from what one undergoes in today’s “coach” class:
When I arrived in Hamburg I had lost not only my mind but my legs as well. During those thirty-six hours, we six people sitting inside the carriage were so worked together into one body that I got a notion of what happened to the Wise Men of Gotham, who after having sat together a long time could not recognize their own legs. Hoping at least to remain a limb on a lesser body, I chose a seat in the forward compartment. That was a change. Everything, however, repeated itself. (p. 151)
One of the things that repeats itself is Constantin’s wondering whether he “will ever be human again,” which is to say, whether or not he will be “able to disengage” himself “in the singleness of isolation, or if you will carry a memory of your being a limb on a larger body” (p. 151). The answer will come a bit later, and in an unexpected way, but it is worth remarking that the question of repetition here seems inseparable from a complex transformation in which forced and prolonged contact with other bodies transforms one’s own into a “limb on a larger body” that, despite or because of this reintegration, still experiences the “singleness of isolation” that for Constantin is inseparable from being “human.” Integration and isolation are thus by no means mutually exclusive in the bodily experience of repetition.
Upon finally arriving in Berlin, Constantin returns to his “old lodgings” in Gendarme Square, “the most beautiful in Berlin,” surrounded by two churches and a theater, the Schauspielhaus. The theater turns out to be not just outside, but inside his rented lodging as well:
Sitting in a chair by the window, one looks out on the great square, sees the shadows of passersby hurrying along the walls; everything is transformed into a stage set [scenisk Decoration]. A dreaming [drømmende] reality glimmers in the background of the soul. One feels a desire to toss on a cape, to steal softly along the wall with a searching gaze, aware of every sound. … The cloudless arch of heaven has a sad and pensively dreaming [tankedrømmende] look, as if the end of the world had already come and heaven, unperturbed, were occupied with itself. …
But here, alas, again no repetition was possible. (pp. 151–52)
Although Constantin Constantius finds no repetition here, it is going on all the time, in the most theatrical of ways. Not the least of these is marked by the frequent use of the present participle, theatrical tense par excellence, to designate the strange going-son of this “stage set”: Constantin “sitting by the window,” watching the shadows “hurrying along the walls” in a “reality” that seems to be “dreaming,” and finally the moonlit heaven itself “dreamingly” sunk in thought. This scene, which in its own way recalls both the Platonic cave9 and, as we will see in a moment, Descartes’ shadow-play, epitomizes the dilemma that Constantin will encounter: repetition exists, but only in its most literal version, that of “taking again” without “giving back.” The image that results, which will haunt him throughout this text, is not just one of the “end of the world,” but of an end that has come and gone, an end that therefore repeats itself without end, in the endless “occupation” of “heaven” with “itself.” In that occupation there is no need or place for anyone else: it is the image of a pure and perfect narcissism, but at the same time of the absolute absence of everything human. All that is left is the All: Heaven, repeating itself, for heaven’s sake. “Rien que le tout,” in the words of Clov, in Beckett’s Endgame. Clov, who is looking out of the window at the earth, asks Hamm what he would like him to recount:
Clov. Any particular sector you fancy? Or merely the whole thing?
Hamm. Whole thing. …
Hamm. I was never there.
Clov. Lucky for you. (He looks out of window.)
Hamm. Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don’t know what’s happened.10
Constantin, by contrast, “knows” what has happened, but cannot accept it. He finds that his “landlord, the druggist, er hatte sich verändert” [he had changed (himself)] (p. 152) and therefore he disqualifies him from the kind of repetition he is looking for. To change is not to stay the same, not to recover what has been lost, to rediscover oneself. Rather, it is to envisage a self that is not one, but also not simply another. In the scene under discussion, Constantin describes himself, but as the “man” who is both someone and no one.11 This experience of being “man,” and yet neither one nor another, both and neither, is bound up with the desire to “toss on a cape and steal softly along the wall.” But “one does not do this” and instead only “sees a rejuvenated self doing it” (p. 152). In short, one becomes specularly reflective, observing oneself doing in fantasy what “one” cannot do in reality. This ambiguous situation of the spectator also haunts the scene from Descartes already mentioned:
But meanwhile I am surprised at how prone to errors my mind might be. … For we say that we see the way itself if it be there, and not that we judge from the color or the figure that it is there. From whence I would immediately conclude that there the way is cognized by the vision of the eye, not by the inspection of the mind alone—if perhaps I had not now looked out the window at human beings going by in the street, whom themselves I also say, as a matter of the usage of language, that I see. … But what do I see besides hats and clothes under which automata might be concealed? Yet I judge that there are human beings there.12
Descartes, who is primarily concerned here with examining the conditions under which true knowledge is possible, exemplifies his worst-case theory through the confusion of humans with machines, with “automata.” But for Constantin, concerned primarily with living life rather than acquiring knowledge, the nightmare is different. It is a vision in which the difference between humans and machines is not that decisive, for both are absent after the end of the world has come … and gone. What is left is the dissociation of reflexivity from human consciousness: it is heaven that is dreamingly pensive. But such tankedrømmend, far from proving the existence of a cogito, demonstrates its potential absence. Something may be going on, but it need not be the result of an I. The thinking thing here takes leave of the thinking I. Constantin repeatedly discovers this leave-taking to be the essence of repetition. It is not just a piece of wax that changes, but the thinking of it as well. What most fascinates and horrifies Constantin about this change is that it seems self-inflicted. “‘Er hatte sich verändert,’ in the pregnant sense in which the German understands this phrase and, so far as I know, ‘to change oneself’ [at forandre sig] is similarly used in some of Copenhagen’s streets” (p. 152).
What has changed from Descartes to Constantin is that “change” and alteration have emerged as functions of the “self,” and this transforms the status of thinking itself. For Descartes this status was compatible with the present participle, which defined its stability:
I am, I exist, it is certain. But for how long? So long as I am cogitating, of course. It could perhaps also happen that if I would cease all cogitation I as a whole would at once cease to be. I am now admitting nothing except what is necessarily true. I am, then, precisely only a cogitating thing [res cogitans] , … truly existing [vere existens].. .. I said, thinking [Dixi, cogitans]. (pp. 104–5, my italics)
The temporal tense that defines the medium of such “thought” is not the present indicative, not the famous cogito, but the present participle. I am or exist only as long “as I am cogitating.” The actuality of the “I think” depends upon the present participle, which is the tense that defines itself through repetition.
From Descartes to Constantin, the scene repeats itself but also changes. Memory and repetition, implicit in the Cartesian scene, are now explicit, although often in ways that Constantin himself is not willing or able to acknowledge:
When I came home the first evening and had lit the candles, I thought: Alas! Alas! Alas! Is this the repetition? I became completely out of tune, or, if you please, precisely in tune with the day, for fate had strangely contrived it so that I arrived in Berlin on the allgemeine Buβ und Bettag [Universal Day of Penance and Prayer]. Berlin was prostrate. To be sure, they did not throw ashes in one another’s eyes with the words: Memento o homo! Quod cinis es et in cinerem revertaris [Remember, O Man, that dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return]. But all the same, the whole city lay in one cloud of dust. (pp. 152–53)
Although Constantin is quick to dismiss this fateful coincidence— “This discovery had no connection with ‘repetition’ “—there is every reason not to take him at his word. If repetition has, as he asserts, the function of making people “happy,” it is by virtue of overcoming the “loss” that recognition, for instance, confirms. Repetition, as Constantin seeks it, is supposed to bring back what time has taken away. It is no wonder, then, that he seeks to separate this notion of repetition from the memento mori associated with the German Buβ und Bettag.
His efforts in this direction, however, once again wind up repeating those of Descartes. Like Descartes, who withdrew from active life in order to devote himself fully and without distraction to his search for an Archimedean point that would “be firm and immovable,” from which “the entire earth” might be “moved from its place” (p. 99), Constantin also seeks to establish himself “cosily and comfortably in his quarters” so as to have “a fixed point like this from which [to] rush out, a safe hiding place to which [to] retreat” (p. 153). Such a “fixed point” must be distinguished from what it had begun, the night before, to resemble: namely, a certain theater. In this kind of theater, there are no “fixed points,” not even for the audience: “Everything is transformed into a stage set.” Constantin must therefore leave this domestic theater behind him if he is to find the repetition he is looking for. Or, rather, he must try to put the stage-set back in its proper place: in the theater, where it belongs. Yet he will discover a theater in which there are no proper places and where nothing stays put for long:
Berlin has three theaters. The opera and ballet performances in the opera house are supposed to be groβartig [magnificent]; performances in the theater are supposed to be instructive and refining, not only for entertainment. I do not know. But I do know that Berlin has a theater called the Königstädter Theater. Professional travelers visit this theater seldom. … When … I read in the newspaper that Der Talisman would be performed at that theater, I was in a good mood at once. The recollection of it awakened in my soul and stood before me as alive as though it were the first time. (p. 154)
It is in the hopes of rediscovering and, indeed, resurrecting a life that has disappeared that Constantin returns to the Königstädter Theater. But before he is forced to recount what awaits him, he reflects on what he calls “the magic of the theater,” a magic that works most powerfully on the “young”:
There is probably no young person with any imagination who has not at some time been enthralled by the magic of the theater and wished to be swept along into that artificial actuality in order, like a double, to see and hear himself and to split himself up into every possible variation of himself, but in such a way that every variation is still himself. … In such a self-vision of the imagination, the individual is not an actual shape but a shadow. More correctly, the actual shape is invisibly present and therefore not satisfied to cast only one shadow. The individual has a variety of shadows, all of which resemble him and which momentarily have equal status with being himself. (p. 154)
As Constantin describes it, the “magic of theater” consists in provoking what he calls “the passion of possibility.” This passion is useful, according to Constantin, when it comes at the right time and place, while one is young. If it does not keep to its place, it can have “tragic or comic” results. Constantin compares its course to the wind plunging down from the mountains, first with a hideous “shriek, almost startling to itself,” then modulating successively into a “hollow roar,” a “moan,” a “sigh,” and finally “a gay, lyrical waltz … whose melody it renders unaltered day after day” (p. 155). Repetition here entails a process of domestication, taming the wild struggles of “the individual’s possibility” by its actual self. Unlike the “mere passing of the wind,” the theatrical passion of the individual “does not want only to be heard” but also “to be visible at the same time.” By shaping— gestaltend (p. 155)—the individual attempts to endure without being trapped in an actuality that permits no alternatives, no possibilities of change. The Gestalt or shape it assumes is that of an “audible shadow.” Such an audible shadow, however, calls for an appropriate environment:
Then, in order not to gain an impression of his actual self, the hidden individual needs an environment as superficial and transient as the shapes, as the frothing foam of words that sound without resonance.
The stage is that kind of setting, and therefore it is particularly suitable for the Schattenspiel [shadow play] of the hidden individual. (p. 156)
Through all this shadow play, the “hidden individual” still ultimately seeks “to recognize itself” (p. 156). This leads Constantin to distinguish between the individual’s “predilection for theatrical performing” and what he describes as a “call to scenic art [scenisk Kunst]” ; between, in short, performativity and theatricality. The former is bound up with the desire for self-recognition, whereas the latter is less concerned with the self than with “a capacity for detail” or, more literally translated, “a disposition for the singular [Disposition til det Enkelte].” This disposition, Constantin continues, returns in later life to determine a no less singular relationship to theater, namely, one that is “comically productive [comisk productiv].” This desire to descend into the street, onto the stage, is the same one that grips Constantin from his window perch in the pension. It is the desire no longer simply to look, to remain a spectator, in a fixed position. At the same time, it is a desire that knows and accepts its own impossibility. It does not go out into the moonlit street or descend onto the stage, but merely watches its “rejuvenated self” doing this in imagination. But this means that it returns to the role of spectator, precisely imagining itself as an active participant or protagonist. This could be called “comic productivity,” were it not for the fact that comedy, as an aesthetic genre, is still too general and too perfect: “Since tragedy, comedy, and light comedy fail to please him precisely because of their perfection, he turns to farce [Posse]” (p. 158).
The translation of Posse as “farce” is unsatisfying insofar as it reduces the theatrical connotation of the word. Possen were burlesque, popular plays, which enjoyed great popularity in Vienna and Berlin during the 1840s. Perhaps the greatest author of such Possen, also an actor and director, was Johann Nestroy, whose play The Talisman Constantin returns to see.13 In his notes to this text, Kierkegaard describes the Posse as the “extreme point of the humorous” (p. 326). An “extreme” marks the spot where something turns into something else. The Posse thus relates to the legitimate dramatical genre of comedy as the “exception” relates to the “universal.” In his “Concluding Letter” to the reader, Constantin Constantius describes the relation of the universal to the exception as “a wrestling match in which the universal breaks with the exception, wrestles with it in conflict and strengthens it through this wrestling. … If one really wants to study the universal, one only need look around for a legitimate exception. … The exception thinks the universal with intense passion” (p. 161).14
The Posse distinguishes itself from aesthetic genres, whether theatrical or other, by the absence of a self-contained “work.” It produces plays, pieces, Stücke, which can never be understood as instantiations of a general rule. Instead, they are what Constantin calls “accidental concretions,” a term we will come to in a moment. Traces of this “accident” can be read in the etymology of the word itself. Posse derives from the French bosse, a dent, hump, or disfiguration, usually resulting from a violent blow or shock. Used in the plural, Possen also designates nonsensical, absurd, grotesque behavior, “practical jokes,” buffoonery—in any event, a highly theatricalized mode of behavior directed at others. But on whom or on what is this sort of joke? If we recall, as Kierkegaard does in another place, that posse is also the Latin verb for “to be able,” and that it therefore can be contrasted with esse, “being,”15 the joke could just turn out to be on being itself, on being, that is, understood in the sense of a self-contained noun rather than a gerund, for instance.
From this perspective, Posse would entail a possibility that would not merely trace a mode of, or transition toward, a self-contained reality, but would have to be dealt with on its own terms. One of these terms is “accidental concretion” (p. 163), which repeats and transforms—perhaps deforms—Hegel’s conceptualization of art as “the sensuously concrete form” of the universal.16 Posse is precisely not art, however, inasmuch as it does not concretize the universal by instantiating it in sensuous particulars and thereby attaining a kind of self-contained “perfection.” For the same reason, however, it is also not simply “performance,” if by performance is meant the actualization or realization of an intention, because both work and performance relegate the spectator to the status of a more or less passive observer. Posse, by contrast, appeals to the audience’s desire to be “comically productive,” to participate as singular beings in a theatrical spectacle that can no longer be defined either as an object of sensuous perception or as a work.17 The audience of the Posse, which is generally drawn from “the lower levels of society” (p. 159), is “not at all conscious of [itself] as audience but wants to be down there on the street or wherever the scene happens to be” (p. 159). This relationship to and dependence on the audience, in all of its heterogeneity, distinguishes the Posse from every generic conception of theater, and above all from comedy as well as tragedy. Compared to these, the Posse is imperfect and incomplete. But this is also its chance, because in its very incompleteness it has the capacity to elicit “an indescribable effect,” which depends as much upon “the observer’s mood” or situation as upon “plot,” “character,” or any other of the thematic contents represented on stage. By contrast, the Posse is never “contained”—and has, strictly speaking, no “contents.” Instead, it is open to the advent of “accident,” since the “mood” or situation of its audience is never entirely predictable, much less a “necessary” function of the universal. This distinguishes the audience of the Posse from a “proper” theatrical audience:
A proper theater public generally has a certain limited earnestness; it wishes to be … ennobled and educated in the theater. …It wishes, as soon as it has read the poster, to be able to know in advance what is going to happen that evening. Such unanimity cannot be found at a farce, for the same farce can produce very different impressions, and, strangely enough, it may so happen that the one time it made the least impression it was performed best. (pp. 159–60)
Once again we discover that the efficacy of the Posse may have nothing to do with the quality of its performance. It involves repetition, but not necessarily repetition of the same, for “the same farce can produce very different impressions.” The singularity of the Posse thus depends in great part upon that of its audience, which is never “unanimous. ” There is, to be sure, a kind of “actualization” on the stage, but that “actuality” never seeks to coincide entirely with its representational (thematic) content—for instance, a “fine character portrayal” (p. 160). Instead, what happens on stage cannot be isolated from what goes on off it, namely, in an audience that does “not come with a firm and fixed mood” but maintains itself in a “state in which not a single mood is present but a possibility of all” (p. 161).
Those in the audience, we recall, want to be “comically productive”; they would like to “descend” from the galleries to the stage. “But since this is out of the question, they behave like children who only get permission to look out of the window at the commotion on the street” (p. 159). The audience is condemned to watch—to be spectators of a spectacle. Nevertheless, this childlike audience does far more than simply “look” or even listen: it laughs. And its laughter involves it in a movement that epitomizes the way in which repetition, taken seriously, alters the very notion of movement itself. Laughter is a movement that disrupts the stasis of the body, destabilizes its situation, but not in order to change it for another place. Laughter is a repetitive movement of the body that, like Diogenes and the young man, is going nowhere and yet changing everything. Laughter goes to extremes, and as such it cannot always be subordinated to conscious volition: its onset requires a certain uncertainty, a certain lack of knowledge or relaxation of control. A certain disposition to assume the risks of such lack of knowledge and control is what distinguishes the audience of the Posse from more respectable theatergoers:
Thus a person cannot rely on his neighbor and the man across the street and statements in the newspaper to determine whether he has enjoyed himself or not. The individual has to decide that matter for himself. … Seeing a Posse can produce the most unpredictable mood, and therefore a person can never be sure whether he has conducted himself in the theater as a worthy member of society who has laughed and cried at the appropriate places. (p. 160)
In short, the spectator of the Posse has no “universals” to fall back upon: neither those of “society” nor his own. He cannot rely upon the critics, the media, or his companions to determine his response:
No effect in farce is brought about by irony; everything is naïveté. Therefore the spectator must be self-active wholly in his singularity [ganske som Enkelt vaere selvvirksom]…. The amusement consists largely in the way the spectator relates to the Posse, something he himself must risk, whereas he seeks in vain to the left or right or in the newspapers for a guarantee that he actually has enjoyed himself. (p. 160)
This naïveté can obtain “for the cultured person” as well as those from the lower classes; indeed, for the former the Posse will “have a very singular meaning,” deriving from “the copiousness of the abstract and then again by the interjection of a tangible actuality” (p. 161).18 Among the many instances given of how this “accidental concretion” of the “abstract” and the actual takes place on the stage, probably the most memorable is the description of Beckmann, one of the stars of the Königstädter Theater. Beckmann is as notable for what he does not do as for what he does: “Beckmann … does not distinguish himself by character portrayal but by ebullience of mood. He is not great in the artistically commensurable, but is admirable in the singularly incommensurable. He does not need the support of interaction, scenery, and staging; precisely because he is in an ebullient mood, he himself carries everything along [han Alt selv med]” (p. 163).
The sense of the Danish phrase, which ends with the preposition, med, “with,” is difficult to render in English: Beckmann brings everything with. With what? With “himself,” to be sure. But nothing is less “sure” than that selv. For in what does that “self” consist? In the description that follows, it becomes clear that it is neither character nor any other portrayal. What distinguishes Beckmann as a master practitioner of the Posse is not his ability to represent character—or anything else, for that matter. It consists, rather, in his very singular way of moving onto and on the stage, a talent rarely found outside of the Posse, in legitimate theater:
In an art theater proper, one rarely sees an actor who can really walk and stand. As a matter of fact, I have seen only one, but what B. is able to do, I have not seen before. He is not only able to walk, but he is able to come walking [komme gaaende]. To come walking is something utterly different [ganske Andet], and by means of this genius he also improvises the whole scenic setting [Omgivelse]. (p. 163)
If this essay on repetition revolves around the question of movement, beginning with the scene of Diogenes pacing back and forth, then the account of Beckmann’s singular and genial way of moving about the stage discloses a new dimension of repetition. Constantin insists on the difference between actors who know how to “walk”—of which there are already not many—and the unique case of Beckmann, who doesn’t just know how to “walk,” but who knows how to “come walking” onto the stage. The most obvious difference between “walking” and to “come walking” is that the former takes the site for granted and simply moves around on it, whereas the latter raises the question of its delimitation and of its limits by coming from elsewhere, making its entry, its optraeden, from an “utterly different” place, perhaps. When an actor “comes walking,” his coming brings with it—med— the question of where he is coming from, and hence implicitly raises the question of the relation of the stage to its setting or surroundings. These “surroundings”— Omgivelse in Danish, translated above as the “setting”—are never just the property of the stage, never merely a space contained within its borders, but also and above all that which surrounds the stage without containing it fully: in short, the “theater.” Thus, the theatrical stage always relates to an elsewhere, which is never simply another place or an entirely indeterminate space. Neither space nor place, it is between the two, and that intermediary position makes it as temporal as it is spatial. This ambiguity is retained in the English word stage, which translates the “good Danish word” Stadier, used by Kierkegaard in the title of one of his most famous writings, Stages on Life’s Way. It is because the “stage” is also a temporal “stage,” although not simply in the sense of a transitional movement, that Beckmann’s “coming” is so “utterly different,” so ganske Andet: it comes from an utterly different space and time from that we are used to, and it moves in a very different way.
When Beckmann comes, it is not just walking. The Danish phrase translated in this manner actually says something else as well: it tells us that Beckmann comes going, komme gaaende. In Danish as in German the verb gaaen (gehen) means both “to walk” and “to go,” in the sense of “to leave.” The excellent German translation of this text, by Emanuel Hirsch, translates the Danish phrase into German as gegangen kommen,19 literally, “gone coming.” But Beckmann is not simply “gone”—he is very much there, on stage, although his actual being-there, on the stage, involves “leaving” as much as “coming.” His “coming” is also his “going,” not in the sense of simple presence or absence, but in the curious and singular mix that we already have encountered in Aristotle’s designation of actors as prattontes, literally, as “actings” (anticipating the terms and tense of the Scholastic theory of signs and signification, signans and significandi, and of its structuralist reprise, Saussure’s signifiant). Beckmann’s “coming” to the stage is, from its very advent, an event, since in “arriving” he is simultaneously “going” somewhere else: arriving and departing in the discontinuous iterations of the present participle, whose “presence,” as already discussed, is defined by its problematic co-presence with its articulation. Constantin describes the results as follows:
He is able not only to portray a wandering apprentice [vandrende Haandvaerksbursch]; he is also able to come going like one and in such a way that one experiences everything, surveys the smiling hamlet from the dusty highway, hears its quiet noise, sees the footpath that goes down by the village pond when one turns off there by the blacksmith’s—where one sees B. come going [komme gaaende] with his little bundle on his back, his stick in his hand, carefree and untroubled. (p. 164, my italics)
What is striking about this scene is how absent humans are from it: the “hamlet” may be “smiling,” but its inhabitants are nowhere to be seen. Instead, there are only traces : the dusty highway, the quiet noise, the footpath leading down to the village pond, the turn-off at the blacksmith’s. Only the figure of the wandering apprentice himself seems an exception. If we read on, we discover just how exceptional that figure is: “This workman is no character sketch; for that he is too rapidly traced in his masterly contours. He is an incognito in whom the demon of lunatic comedy dwells, who is always ready to break out and carry away everything in utter abandonment” (p. 164). Just as Beckmann “comes walking,” his figure—the wandering apprentice— comes going, abandoning itself in a movement that moves from song to dance and beyond: “In this respect, B.’s dance is incomparable. He has sung his couplet, and now the dance begins. What B. ventures here is neck-breaking. … He is now completely beside himself. The sheer lunacy of his laughter can no longer be contained either in figures or in lines” (p. 164).
The figure coming almost immediately makes way, first for the traces of the smiling hamlet, then for a dance that soon takes leave of all representation. One would be tempted to say that the figure is replaced by the dancer and the dancer by the dance, but the “neck-breaking” movements place every figure and every dance “beside” itself. All that is left is “the sheer lunacy of laughter,” a laughter that “can no longer be contained either in figures or in lines.” Figuration explodes into disfiguration, and the iterative movement of corporeal self-abandonment soon spreads, contagiously, from Beckmann to the audience, from the stage to the galleries, where Constantin’s description now shifts.
Constantin is, of course, himself a part of this audience. He thus recounts how he at first takes his “place in the first balcony,” where “relatively few sit” and where one is relatively unhampered “by the exaltation of an art that makes people jam a theater to see a play as if it were a matter of salvation” (p. 165). It may well turn out to be nothing less for Constantin, but if so, that will depend less upon what he sees, that is, the spectacle, than upon what he hears :
So you are sitting alone in your box, and the theater is empty. The orchestra plays an overture, the music resounds in the hall a bit unheimlich simply because the place is so deserted. You have gone to the theater not as a tourist, not as an esthete and critic, but, if possible, as a nobody. … As a rule, I sat far back in the box and therefore could not see the second balcony and the gallery, which jutted out over my head like the visor of a cap. All the more magical is the effect of this noise. Everywhere I looked there was mainly emptiness. Before me the vast space of the theater changed into the belly of the whale in which Jonah sat; the noise in the gallery was like the motion of the monster’s viscera. (pp. 165–66)
The noise resonates, changing the vast emptiness of the theater into a kind of bodily container, protective and yet threatening at once. Yet what Constantin is trying to forget is even more anxiety producing, as the following apostrophe to the memory of his “unforgettable nursemaid” suggests:
My unforgettable nursemaid, you fleeting nymph … you, my faithful comforter, you preserved your innocent purity over the years, you who did not age as I grew older. … Then I lay at your side and vanished from myself in the immensity of the sky above and forgot myself in your soothing murmur! … —Thus did I lie in my theater box, discarded like a swimmer’s clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly swirled by me. I could see nothing but the expanse of theater, hear nothing but the noise in which I resided. Only at intervals did I rise up, look at Beckmann, and laugh so hard that I sank back again in exhaustion alongside the foaming stream.
By itself this was blissful, and yet I lacked something. (p. 166)
In thus responding to the noise and laughter, Constantin has transformed the Posse into the same “recollection love” for which he has castigated in his “young friend” and which he has condemned in general: “Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it” (p. 132). Alone in his theater box, oblivious to everything but the noisy laughter that breaks down all borders and leaves him beside himself, he is that discarded garment, which, having severed its connection with the human, can appear to be exempt from the ravages of time. And yet even such bliss is not enough for Constantin: “I lacked something.” Nor is this surprising, since he has responded to Beckmann’s Posse with “recollection’s love,” which “initially at least makes a person unhappy” (p. 131). This is a love that confirms time as the medium of loss. Repetition, as Constantin understands it, seeks to reverse that movement by projecting what has been into what will be. Constantin seems to discover the possibility of such a projection in his recollection of a figure directly across from him:
Then, in the wilderness surrounding me, I saw a figure that cheered me more than Friday cheered Robinson Crusoe. In the third row of a box directly across from me sat a young girl, half hidden. … She was not wrapped in sable and marten but in a voluminous scarf, and out of this sheath her humble head bowed. … When I had watched Beckmann and let myself be convulsed with laughter … and let myself be carried away … my eyes sought her, and the sight of her refreshed my whole being with its friendly gentleness. … She came there, as did I, every evening. (pp. 166–67)
Of this vision, nothing will come—nothing except the recollection we have just read, and the brutal discovery that the recollected experience cannot willfully be repeated. The sight of this young girl, “quietly smiling in childlike wonder,” seems to offer Constantin a way out and something to hold onto: a figure that stands out of time in its youthful innocence, a figure also of repetition, for “She came there, as did I, every evening. At times I wondered what could be the reasons for it” (p. 167). Constantin will never find those reasons, just as he will not find the young girl when he returns to the Königstädter Theater in the hopes of repeating his experience. Only through a repetition that is willed can Constantin hope to find constancy and continuity in and despite the passage of time: “If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would not have come into existence. … Therefore, the world continues, and it continues because it is a repetition” (p. 133).
Thus, the question that has led Constantin to his voyage finally appears with a certain clarity. Not “is” there a repetition, or what it might mean, but rather, can repetition in this sense be willfully brought about? To this question, his experience and experiment provide an equivocal response. This is how he describes his return to the theater:
No box was available for me alone. … There was scarcely a single empty box. The young girl was not to be found, or, if she was present, I was unable to recognize her because she was together with others. Beckmann could not make me laugh. I endured it for half an hour and then left the theater, thinking: There is no repetition at all. This made a deep impression on me. I am not so very young, am not entirely ignorant of life. … I did believe, however, that the enjoyment I had known in that theater would be of a more durable nature. (pp. 168–69)
There is no repetition, no “durable” enjoyment, no “recollection projected forwards,” not in the theater, at least. But what, then, outside of it? What about at home?
With these thoughts in my mind, I went home. My desk was in place. The velvet armchair was still there, but when I saw it, I became so furious I almost smashed it to pieces. … Of what good is an armchair of velvet when the rest of the environment does not match; it is like a man going around naked and wearing a three-cornered hat.
My home had become dismal to me simply because it was a repetition of the wrong kind. (p. 169)
At his pension Constantin discovers that there are repetitions, but “of the wrong kind.” Far from procuring the happiness he had hoped for, they call into question the possibility of such happiness. Things can stay the same over time, the armchair for instance. But “what good is a velvet armchair when the rest … does not match.” The rest—for example, the person who is to sit in that armchair? What good is it if that armchair lasts, endures, stays the same over time, “repeats itself identically,” when the person who sits in it does not?
Constantin goes out, to a café he knows, then to a restaurant, then back again to the Königstädter Theater, only to discover, again and again, that “the only repetition was the impossibility of a repetition” (p. 170). And so he gives up on Berlin and decides to return home. “My hope lay in my home.” This is the scene of his homecoming; note the shift from present tense to past:
I arrive. I ring my doorbell. My servant opens the door. It was a moment eloquent with meaning. My servant turned as pale as a corpse. Through the door half-opened to the rooms beyond I saw the horror: everything was turned upside down. I was petrified. In his confusion he did not know what to do, his guilty conscience smote him—and he slammed the door in my face. That was too much. My desolation reached its highpoint, my principles had collapsed. … I perceived that there is no repetition. (p. 171)
Constantin could not have been more distraught if his home had been demolished. It is enough that it has merely been turned topsyturvy in the process of being cleaned by his servant, who has been caught short by Constantin’s premature return. Constantin’s voyage did not leave the servant enough time. But that is precisely the problem he has to deal with and cannot: there will never be enough time for the kind of repetition Constantin is seeking, the kind that would give back rather than take again. If Constantin remains true to his name, so does Gjentagelse: it takes and takes again, without ever giving back:
How humiliated I was: I, who had been so brusque with that young man, had now been brought to the same point. Indeed, it seemed as if I were that young man myself, as if my great talk, which I now would not repeat at any price, were only a dream from which I awoke to have life unremittingly and treacherously retake everything [tage Alt igjen] it had given, without giving a repetition. And is it not the case that the older a person grows, the more and more of a swindle life proves to be? (p.172)
Different as they may be, the young man and Constantin are impossible to separate, since the “repetition” Constantin is looking for is one that, as he says, would simply repeat recollection forward, as it were, without altering its structure. Constantin’s repetition, like the young man’s recollection, seeks only to make up for the loss. It expects from life a fair exchange and is bitterly disappointed when the books don’t balance.
All that is left to Constantin are words whose meanings don’t match their sound, the echo of unfulfilled promises and prophecies: in short, the “coach horn” he ironically apostrophizes at the end of his voyage. For the end of the voyage is not the end of the show, but only of a single showing:
Move on [Faer fort], you spectacle [Skuespiel] of life—let no one call it a comedy, no one a tragedy, for no one saw the end. Move on, you spectacle of existence, where life is not given any more than money. Why has no one returned from the dead? Because life does not know how to captivate as death does, because life does not have the persuasiveness that death has. (p. 176)
Life cannot hold an audience. Not, at any rate, with the tenacity of the Great Persuader. Only the Posse can challenge death, by repeating and rehearsing it in a laughter that cannot be willed, because it is going nowhere.20