Saturday, May 29, 2010
On Style and Kierkegaard
Thanks, James, for starting us off. Now, a point I'd like to bring up. Did anyone notice or think about the fact that on the one hand, Repetition was published under the pseudonym and in the voice of "Constantin Constantius" and on the other, that the book is written also from the point of view of the young man? What do you think this implies and what is the reason for it? That is, what purpose does it serve?
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I thought that the plurality of voices worked to make the form of the book mimic the content. I think that Kierkegaard presents repetition as an affirming model of existence that depends on movement and change, or a constant interplay between past and present. If you read 'Repetition' as positing Being (or rather, Becoming) as an unending experience of repetition, then it seems appropriate that Constantin and the young man both have a voice in the book because it is a means of displaying the transformative dialectic between past (and older Constantin) and present (a young poetic man). The two voices imply that life is a repetition since Constantin can recollect his days as a youth in order to understand the Young Man, yet it also implies that repetition gives birth to difference (of experience, opinion etc...) and that it is in this difference (IE: of narrative voice, or as a product of repetition compared to an idealistic 'sameness' produced by recollection) that we may find happiness.
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