I’m thinking, for example, of Hebe Uhart, the Argentinian writer. Asked whether she worried about repeating herself she said no, not at all, because she always wrote about journeys and no two journeys were ever the same; she always discovered something new on her trips, and the particular circumstances of each one obliged her to write different things. . . .
Isak Dinesen, to give another example, was equally quick to solve this problem: “The fear of repeating yourself is offset by the joy of knowing that you’re making your way forward in the company of stories from the past.” Dinesen saw the wisdom in building out of the past. In I’ve Been Here Before, the writers Jordi Balló and Xavier Pérez talk about the pleasure of repetition, which shouldn’t prevent creators from making new or unforeseen discoveries. They also write about how the cultural sector has for years depended on the fallacy that novelty is all that matters, a publishing myth that has been embraced by the public and taken to ludicrous extremes, precisely because the cult now aims to conceal the original sources of its stories: “When it comes to fiction that repeats itself, on the other hand, we acknowledge that a connection with the past is essential to its narrative. And it is this awareness that leads these fictions into experimental territory, because they try to be original not by harking back to their own ‘pilot episode,’ but by exploiting the potential of that initial experiment to open out into new universes.”
— Enrique Vila-Matas, Mac's Problem