Kierkegaard’s Repetition and the Reading Pleasures of Repetition in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle Series

Abstract

Søren Kierkegaard published his Repetition. A Venture in Experimenting Psychology in 1843, on the same day as Fear and Trembling.¹Both of these works are pseudonymous, but they purport to be written by different hands, a common Kierkegaardian strategy. The primary narrator of Repetition is called Constantin Constantius: note this name’s emphatic double reference to constancy, which might imply faithfulness, consistency, or unchangingness; note also how the almost-doubling of the name introduces movement into that sameness.² Repetition is one of what Kierkegaard called his “aesthetic” texts — by which is meant not that this book presents a theory of aesthetics, but that it partakes of the nature of literature — of narrative fiction, in fact. At least overtly, this book is more an aesthetic object than a philosophical and religious argument. Nevertheless, the ideas put forward therein are the point of Repetition, and its narrative foreshadows an important later development in Kierkegaard’s thinking by dealing with characters who are at what Kierkegaard would later describe as the first, or “aesthetic,” stage of personal and religious development.

Everyone can testify that the pleasure of the text is not certain: nothing says that this same text will please us a second time.

[Roland Barthes (The Pleasure of the Text 52)