Repetition in Literature, Language, and Music

In his dialogue Laws, written in 360 B.C.E., Plato noted that "there is no harm in repeating a good thing" (Plato). In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein said, "Repeating is the whole of living, and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living" (Stein). Ernest Hemingway used repetition in his writing. Samuel Beckett used it. Walt Whitman used it. Shakespeare used it. In literature, there are various types of repetition including, but not limited to, diacope, anaphora, epizeuxis, and symploce.

From a linguistics standpoint, the process of repetition or reduplication can be found in African languages including Bantu (Swahili and Rwandan), Kwa (Yoruba), Mande (San and Soninke), Tchadic (Hausa), West-Atlantic (Fulfulde), and Gur (Mùvré) as well as other idioms such as Hindi, Samoan, Indonesian, Hebrew, French, and English.

There is also a tradition of repetition in blues and jazz music, both originating from the Mississippi Delta in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century. That repetition is oftentimes called a “groove” in blues, “swing” in jazz, “melodic sequence” in improvisational jazz, and a “restatement” throughout the music world. It forms a sense of symmetry, of synchronicity, often directed by the rhythm section. And it can be heard throughout all types of music today including hard rock, rap, gospel, and trance.
    
In addition to English words, including flip-flop, ping-pong, teeny-weeny, and tip-top, for example, repetition is still widely used in today’s Louisiana vernacular, especially in African-American and Cajun communities, such as when something is hot hot, good good, or bad bad.






Ernest J. Gaines' on Repetition

As a writer, Gaines—through travels, stories heard, his childhood in Louisiana, readings of Faulkner, and extensive research—cultivated a type of folk speech, an oral storytelling characteristic of Louisiana’s older black generation. It is a flavor rich to the area, and still savored today. Gaines spoke of his affinity for listening “to the way that people talk,” to their stories and how he would write them down later (Gaudet 4-5). In John Lowe's Conversations with Ernest Gaines, Gaines speaks about his love of blues and jazz music: "Whether I'm playing jazz or classical music, or just the radio, I usually have music in the background, but soft, so it does not disturb me. I have to keep music. It relaxes me, and at the same time it gives me a sense of rhythm, of beat" (Lowe 210). Karen Carmean adds, "Gaines finds in jazz the same lessons he marks in athletic achievement: the importance of repetition and the role of musical understatement, playing around an idea instead of direct depiction for a more powerful effect" (16-17). This is again stressed in Gaines' Fifteen Narrators, where Gaudet mentions a quote from a personal interview with Gaines. Here he speaks about how music influenced his writing: "I think the black blues singers gave us better description than even the black writers did at that particular time. Another thing especially in jazz music is a repetition of things, repeating and repeating to get the point over, which I try to do in dialogue" (Gaudet 5).


Repetition in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

The dialect present throughout The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is inundated with repetition, whether that of adjectives, verbs, names, or phrases, and in duplicate or triplicate. It is a linguistic rhythm brimming with what Gaudet called a “judicious, selective use of repetition” (4-5). His use of repetition can also be derived from his readings of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, a technique for which both are recognized, seen for instance in Lectures in America and A Farewell to Arms.
   
But Gaines' decision to use repetition wasn't set in stone from day one. For example, in one of the earlier versions of the introduction, the character who interviewed Miss Pittman, a university student in that draft, commented on the multiple accents she used when replicating the different characters' ways of speaking. He also noted that he had to add or invent dialogue throughout the novel. And he mentions that much of the dialogue was too repetitious. That could refer not only to repetition in speech, but also repetition within the stories themselves. In addition, the student noted of Miss Pittman at the end of the section that “there were times when she thought repeating a word added humor to the situation.” An even earlier draft of the forward also mentions the rhythm of Miss Pittman's speech patterns. In that version, four students interview her. They explain, “We have tried to retain the rhythm of Miss Jane’s speech, and at the same time we have done all we could to avoid dialect spelling ….”
    
As for other instances of specific speech patterns or repetition, in the “Soldiers” section of an earlier version of “Book I: The War Years,” Gaines does not use repetition in Miss Jane’s voice when describing that first “dusty” day. Instead, he uses, “hot, dry, and dusty.” However, in another version, he changes it to “dry, hot, and dusty dusty.” A version of the editor's notes also counters the addition or invention of dialogue. It’s unclear to which exact section the editor is referring, but I suspect the notes refer to the introduction. In another instance, the editor's notes mention “real black,” which seems to be changed to “black black” in the published version.
    
However, within the final version of Gaines’ novel, dialectical repetition of words is seen over and over again, so to speak. The following table includes a few examples: