Some thoughts on repetition:
- As mentioned in the last post, repetition brings structure and predictability to our lives.
- Repetition leads to "masterplots."
- Repetition is characteristic of language and music. Elizabeth Margulis writes about how music tends to be more repetitive than language, since music is an "information-poor" system and language is "information-rich."
- Repetition operates in music in many respects: tonality, form, genre, etc.
- Repetition can also be seen as shaping time in a non-linear way. I'm thinking of, for instance, the modularity of the days of the week, or months of the year. Seven days after today, it will be Sunday again; twelve months from today, it will be March again. But, next Sunday will be April 1 (not March 25), and next March will be March 2019, not March 2018.
- Traumatic memories are repeated, adding to the perception of them as "out of time."
The musical RENT comes to mind here as a way in to talking about repetition and time. The show takes place over the course of a year, and time plays a very important part in the drama. The narrative moves from Christmas to Christmas, and encompasses several major holidays along the way. The AZT alarm structures Roger's life, and eventually brings he and Mimi closer. The most famous musical number, "Seasons of Love," reflects this obsession with time: "five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes--how do you measure a year..." The song appears after intermission at the beginning of act two by the whole cast: it does not advance the plot--it is a moment out of time.
The title of Paul Monette's Borrowed Time also indicates the importance of time in structuring our lives. I think it would be interesting to juxtapose the stories of both of these (perhaps alongside other prominent AIDS stories like the movie Philadelphia or And the Band Played On).
But here, too, it is important to think about these masterplots: how might queer conceptions of time influence our interpretations of these works? (I know there's been work done on queering time, that it relates to the dominant thinking about time is reflective of the importance of procreation, which is mainly a cis- heterosexual concern; I don't have the citations handy at the moment but will add them later).