What would it mean to be happy with repetition? Not to endure it, or resist it with invention, but to find in it something like paradise. Michael Wood, in Maps of Fiction, writes: “And paradise is the capacity to be happy, not bored, with monotony, with repetition. As animals are, ‘because only animals were not expelled from Paradise.’” It is a discomfiting proposition. The implication is that the Fall is not some moral failure but the dawn of interpretive consciousness (our compulsive registering of change, consequence and time). Animals live in a kind of forgiveness, Wood suggests. We live in the after-effect, the irreversible.
Reading this, I recalled a line from Simone Weil: “Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.” Consciousness, for Weil, is not triumphal illumination but a kind of weight, a gravitation toward meaning that we cannot suspend. Animals, in Wood’s phrasing, “don’t register change or time, or they register them lightly.” That “lightly” seems key. It is not a question of cognitive ability but of the quality of experience: time as recurrence rather than rupture.
To live in time as we do is to suffer what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”, those shocks that interrupt the dull membrane of habit and leave us changed. Repetition, in this sense, is never pure: the same act, the same phrase, carries the scar of its prior appearance. Reading, too, is never innocent. We re-read, but we do not return; we re-encounter, altered. The animal’s paradise (if it exists) would be the capacity to experience the same again without weight, without drag.
But is that a loss, or merely a difference? I thought also of Clarice Lispector, writing in The Passion According to G.H.: “I was seeing silence. And it was not an absence of sound, it was not a muffling. It was a thing filled with itself.” Her narrator reaches something like ecstatic repetition, not the boredom of sameness, but the terror of undifferentiated presence. Not paradise, but its terrifying cousin: a state before or beyond meaning. Here, too, the animal (in this case, a cockroach) becomes the figure of an anterior, inhuman knowledge. But Lispector does not long for it. She fears it. The human project remains interpretation, even if it is unbearable.
Wood’s phrase “the world of the forgiving novelist” stays with me. Forgiveness, here, is not sentimental. It is the novelist’s gift: to permit recurrence without nullity, to repeat without flattening, to create characters who live through the irrevocable without being reduced to it. To read such novels is to experience a version of paradise, not because nothing changes, but because change becomes legible without being terminal. The Fall, then, is not corrected, but narrated.
We cannot return to animal time. We register loss, and with it, the contour of what was. But perhaps reading (slow, recursive, interpretive) teaches a kind of softness toward repetition. Not paradise, but a form of peace: not to be bored, even in the presence of the same sentence, the same story, again and again.
Some years ago, I realized that there is no need to buy varieties of cat or dog food. As far as we know, a dog or cat does not approach its food bowl and think, “Geez, I had chicken hash yesterday!” Instead, from what we can see, their reaction is, “Yum! Chicken hash!”
On the other hand, repetition IS often a source of happiness: the happiness of comfort and predictability. People read their third, fourth, twentieth Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse novel because they want more of the same. And far more of our existence depends on continuity than on change, while it’s also true that animals are far better at detecting some types of change–the flicker of a rabbit’s tail in the bushes, for example–than are humans.
it’s a thought-provoking quotation, but I’m not sure I fully agree with it.
Reading a twentieth Agatha Christie might be predictable, but I wouldn’t describe it as repetitive in the sense that Michael Wood intends.
It chimes well with my own way of looking at life, but here as a provocation more than an assertion.
This is an interesting premise… maybe most animals are too busy simply surviving to think about such things in depth. 🙂