Creating a Magical World with Repetition

Repetition has always belonged to strange stories. Folktales repeat the same tasks and warnings, names. Myths send different generations toward the same mistakes. Ghost stories return to the same room, the same sound, the same hour of night. In surrealist and magical realist fiction, repetition can do something similar. It teaches the reader what kind of world they have entered.

An impossible event that happens once may feel like an interruption. If it happens again, or if something like it happens again, it begins to feel less accidental. The reader may still not understand it, but understanding is not always the point. What matters is that the event has acquired a rhythm.

Silvina Ocampo’s stories often work this way. Her fiction is full of doubles, mistaken identities, children who seem to know too much, prophecies that may or may not be prophecies, and strange transformations that are never explained in any satisfying way. One unsettling event resembles another. A pattern begins to form, though the pattern is rarely clean enough to be solved.

That repetition is part of what makes Ocampo’s fiction so eerie. Her stories do not ask the reader to believe in a supernatural system. They simply keep disturbing the line between what is ordinary and what is not. After a while, that instability becomes part of the atmosphere.

Alejo Carpentier uses repetition on a much larger scale in The Kingdom of This World. Revolutions come and go. Rulers replace other rulers. Violence returns under different names. People transform, or believe they can transform, into animals. Ritual and history move alongside one another. These repetitions give the novel a circular quality. History does not seem to move neatly forward. It doubles back. One form of power disappears and another takes its place. What first seems miraculous begins to feel bound up with the political world rather than separate from it.

Repetition can also make an ordinary setting begin to feel uncanny. Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe contains relatively little that could be called supernatural. Giovanni Drogo arrives at a remote military fortress and spends years waiting for an enemy that may never arrive. The routines of the fortress repeat endlessly. Guards stand watch. Seasons pass. Rumors appear and fade. Drogo keeps imagining that something is about to happen.

Gradually, the fortress stops feeling like a normal place. Waiting changes it. Nothing has to leap through a wall or appear in a dream. The repetition itself alters the atmosphere. Time seems different there. Life elsewhere becomes increasingly unreal, while the strange, empty routine of the fortress becomes normal.

A writer can create this effect with very small things. Perhaps a character finds a dead bird on the porch every winter. Perhaps an aunt tells the same family story differently each time. Perhaps someone keeps repairing a gate that is never broken. The first appearance may seem incidental. The second creates recognition. After that, the reader begins to wait, and that waiting is useful. It creates a kind of pressure around the recurring image without forcing the writer to explain what it means.

Writers sometimes get nervous about this. If the dead birds keep appearing, they may feel they need to tell us what the birds symbolize. If several generations repeat the same mistake, the narration may stop to explain the family pattern. But an image often becomes weaker once it has been translated into a fixed meaning. The bird does not need to equal death. The gate does not need to equal repression. Repetition can allow an image to gather meanings instead of settling on one.

Writers are often surprisingly bad at noticing what they repeat. While drafting a novel, a writer may discover that kitchens keep appearing at important moments, or that several characters touch the same object when they are frightened. Maybe an image introduced casually on page twenty returns three hundred pages later. Sometimes the writer planned this. Often they did not. A literary coach can help identify those patterns before the writer explains them away or removes them as accidents. Some repetitions deserve to be developed. Others really are accidents. The difference usually has less to do with frequency than with whether the repetition gains something each time it returns.

A repeated image should rarely come back unchanged. It can pick up another association. Its emotional meaning can shift. A gesture that seems affectionate early in a novel may look threatening later. A family story may first sound comic, then tragic. A dream may eventually turn out to resemble a memory.

The coach’s job is often simply to point toward something already happening in the manuscript and ask the writer to look at it more closely. That can be especially valuable in surrealist or magical realist fiction, where too much explanation can drain the life from an image. A coach can help a writer trust a recurring element long enough to see what it becomes.

Repetition gives strange fiction a memory. A house remembers what happened inside it. A family repeats the life of someone who died long ago. A town keeps reenacting an old disaster. A phrase spoken by one person returns years later in another person’s mouth. Recurrence suggests that something is moving underneath the visible story. The reader may never be able to name exactly what it is, and that is often where the power lies.