The Thunderstorm of Repetition in the Works of Max Porter

Max Porter’s fictional works, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Lanny (2019), display a dazzling abundance of narrative and poetic figures of repetition. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, Porter’s use of repetition shows a profound scepticism towards the orthodox view about a secondary position of repetition in relation to the original, which translates into Porter’s commitment to questioning the limits of literary conventions. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of the repetition of self through the traumatic experience of a “thunderstorm”, this article interrogates the extent to which Porter’s probing of the aporia of grief and loss through the figures of repetition partakes in his tactical sabotaging of the closural status of the literary text.