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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

nings, middles, and ends. 6
Unlike time, rhythm is sensually experienced in the human body.
It can be seen, heard, and felt and, like all living creatures, we are sub-
ject to the rhythmic realities of sunrise and sunset, the waxing and wan-
ing of the moon, predictable seasonal changes, and the internal motions
of our own bodies. Our hearts beat. We breathe in and out. We have a
circadian “clock” in our brains that controls sleeping, waking and eat-
ing in tandem with our exposure to light and our encounters with oth-
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ers. We copulate rhythmically. Women menstruate monthly. About a
year after we are born, we stand up and walk on two legs and, once
learned, that gait accompanies us through life until perambulation be-
comes difficult and we add a limb, the cane, or several limbs, the walk-
er. But we also create rhythms. Chanting, drumming, dancing, gestur-
ing, repetitions of sacred words, magic words, songs, and ritual acts
permeate human ways of being. Rhythm is repetition, and remembered
repetition creates meaning. As Kierkegaard wrote under his pseudo-
nym Constantine Constantius, a name that conjures repetition and con-
stancy at once, “If one does not have the category of recollection or of
repetition, all life dissolves into an empty and meaningless noise.” 8
The consummate philosopher of rhythm is Susanne Langer, the
radical American thinker who formulated a theory of art founded on
the idea that art is “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” 9
Although trained in analytical philosophy, Langer became interested
in the vital rhythms of embodiment, in its temporal flow and motion,
its quickening and its lulls. She argued that all living things share “a
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basic biological pa ern […] that produces the life rhythm.” Rhythmic

6 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellhauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 109.
7 See Jeanne F. Duffy and Charles A. Czeisler, “Effect of Light on Human Cir-
cadian Physiology,” Sleep Medicine Clinics 4 (2009): 165-177. See also Ralph
Mistlberger and Debra Skene, “Social Influences on Mammalian Circadian
Rhythms: Animal and Human Studies,” Biological Reviews 79 (2004): 533-556.
8 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, trans. Howard
and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 149.
9 Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953),
40.

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