Wednesday's Writerly Happenings

Over And Over Again

It took us a long time to grow fond of repetition. Hemingway almost killed it for us. He was copping Gertrude Stein’s style, and in so doing lent the technique a certain kind of gimmickry. In “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” for instance, Hem gives us:

Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.

Maybe we were sick of code switching when we got around to reading Winner Take Nothing, or maybe Hem let it go limp.

Either way, repetition, as we see it, is best when it packs a hammer.  In Tranquility (Archipelago, 2008), Attila Bartis drives down the hammer, repeatedly.

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