Eternal Return - References in Other Literature

References in Other Literature

• In modern times eternal recurrence was a major theme in the teachings of the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky, whose novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (first published St. Petersburg 1915) explores the idea that even given the free-will to alter events in one's life, the same events will occur regardless. The greater part of the 11th chapter of his "A New Model of the Universe" (1914) is devoted to the idea and he there identifies allusions to eternal recurrence in the writings of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Charles Howard Hinton.
• James Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), an Italian philosopher who proposed a theory of cyclical history in his major work, New Science. Joyce puns on his name many times in Finnegans Wake, including the "first" sentence: "by a commodius vicus of recirculation". Vico's theory involves the recurrence of three stages of history: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans — after which the cycle repeats itself. Finnegans Wake begins in mid-sentence, with the continuation of the book's unfinished final sentence, creating a circular reference whereby the novel has no true beginning or end. See also Ages of Man and Greek mythology.
• Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story "The Doctrine of Cycles" explains and refutes the concept of the Eternal Return, citing it as being "...usually attributed to Nietzsche."
• Northrop Frye, in his highly influential Anatomy of Criticism, formulated a theories of cycles influenced by Giambattista Vico and Oswald Spengler, and later commented: "I noticed that the acceptance of theories of recurrence seemed to accompany either neurotic obsession, as in Nietzsche, or projected forms of self-interrogation of the most dubious kind, as in Yeats' Vision. Also that cyclical images seemed to be central and indispensable to fascist and nazi views of history. ... reincarnation has two reactionary elements built into it. It makes possible a lessening of seriousness about the efforts to be made in this life..."
• The religious scholar and writer Mircea Eliade has applied the term "eternal return" to what he sees as a universal religious belief in the ability to return to the mythical age through myth and ritual (see Eternal Return (Eliade)). Eliade's theory of "eternal return" describes a distinctly nonspontaneous process that depends on human behavior; thus, it should be distinguished from the philosophical theory of eternal return (the subject of this article), which describes a mathematically inevitable process.
• H.P. Lovecraft's poem "Nemesis" deals with eternal recurrence, being narrated by a persona who is doomed to live over his lives "without number" as a punishment for hubris.
• Milan Kundera's seminal work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is rooted in the concept of Eternal Return, with the narration explicitly referring to and building on Nietzsche's interpretation.
• Robert Jordan's epic fantasy series 'The Wheel of Time' is set in a world in which an eternal return of history is reality and the end of each cycle is marked by the rise of a 'Dragon' who can be loosely compared to Nietzsche's Übermensch.