Continually

Just as the order of numbers in a sum makes no difference, just as there is no special sequence to towns on a map, the mind and the masterpiece may pass back and forth between thoughts as often and as easily as trains between Detroit, Duluth, and Denver, and chapter headings are, in fact, only the names of places. Oral literature had to be sequential (like music before tape), but type made possible a reading which began at the rear, which repeated preferred passages, which skipped. As in an atlas, the order was one of convenience, and everything was flat. A geographical history rolls time out like that. Of course, there are stories still; an evening's entertainment, that's all human nature asks for; but masterpieces have to bear repeating and repeating. There are no surprises, no suspense, no tears, no worries in them. We know what will happen to Ahab. Duncan's dead, and Anna's under her train. I can tell you the page. The Wings of the Dove lies spread before us now as openly as Iowa. Literature in the eyes of the human mind is like land seen from a plane. And so is Gertrude Stein when we find her. Macbeth shall murder sleep again, Tom Jones receive a beating, Heathcliff . . . ah, well . . . "Oblige me," she says, "by not beginning." Netherfield Park is let at last. Mr. Gradgrind is still proceeding on the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over. Bloom is carrying a piece of soap about. The next century is approaching like a distant train. John Barth has just written Chimera, Beckett has brought out The Lost Ones, Nabokov a book called Transparent Things. And they are reissuing The Geographical History of America almost a hundred years from the author's birthday. Oblige me, she says, "Also by not ending."

~ William Gass, "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," The World Within the Word

Complicated lives

Since reading The Silent Woman and her defence of Franny and Zooey, I've had a great respect for Janet Malcolm, as controversial and imperfect as some her work may be perceived. Aside from her brilliant penchant for asking the questions behind the questions, her sensible, down-to-earth honesty is always refreshing to read. In her recent Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, she's completely open about her shortcomings as a reader:

All three [scholars] prefer Stein's "real" writing to the "audience" writing, and when I confessed--as I am often obliged to--that the "real" writing is not congenial to me, they looked at me pityingly. "Well, you're honest," [Ulla] Dydo said kindly on one of these occasions. On another, while talking about the Thornton Wilder-Gertrude Stein book, I said in passing that I liked Our Town, and Dydo gave me a dark look. "Is it too sentimental for you?" I asked. "Ugh," she said, and shuddered. At these times I feel like someone who has ordered a cheeseburger at Lutèce.

I was thrilled to finally get my hands on a copy. (The fact that it's designed to look like a book published ca. 1940 only added to my glee.) Despite the rigorous questioning that goes on regarding how Stein and Toklas survived WWII, she seems to have (for the lay reader, at least) a wonderful grasp of Stein's writerly intentions ("She refuses to see things clearly that can only be seen darkly. She would rather groan and beat her breast than impose a false order on disorderly complexity."). She also does a good job of demonstrating why Stein's work is especially relevant now (while dicussing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas):

For forty years Stein has been working as a twentieth-century modernist innovator. But now she is obliged to consider the possibility that the nineteenth century did not end when she and everyone else thought it did, but is only ending now, with the arrival of barbarism. "Realism was the last thing the nineteenth century did completely. Anybody can understand that there is no point in being realistic about here and now . . . it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter." And yet, paradoxically, something tells Stein that there is great point in being realistic now, that life is indeed real and earnest and that she must try to rouse herself. "The horrors the fears everybody's fears the helplessness of everybody's fears, so different from other wars makes this war like Shakespeare's plays." Stein knows better than to try to write like Shakespeare, but she also senses that the occasion demands that she not try to write like herself, either. Modernist experimentalism will not express what she wants (and doesn't want) to express.

I believe the allusion to Longfellow is intentional (with the unspoken hint that perhaps the grave is its goal), and that life necessitates a both/and approach to art, as opposed to an either/or. I would think that "modernist experimentalism" would be the perfectly precise mode of expression for the times, but it seems that one thing shouldn't always be excluded at the expense of the other.

Yet there was one unaddressed issue that left me deeply curious. Stein sympathized with Franco, but was friends with Picasso ("she loved the Republican Party, she hated Roosevelt, and she actually supported Franco."). Picasso doesn't figure into Malcolm's book very much--I supposed that if he did, it would be a whole other book. It just left me wondering how that relationship worked. (How did they discuss Guernica? What could she have even said?)


As it is--all historical and biographical musings aside--Malcolm's thoughts on Stein's writing was the part I enjoyed the most (like this bit on The Making of Americans):

Stein's vocabulary is small and monotonous. When she uses a new word it is like the entrance of a new character. It is thrilling. "Every word I am ever using in writing has for me very existing being," she writes. "Using a word I have not yet been using in my writing is to me very difficult and a peculiar feeling. . . . There are only a few words and with these mostly always I am writing that have for me completely entirely existing being, in talking I use many more of them of words I am not living but talking is another thing, in talking one can be saying mostly anything, often then I am using many words I never could be using in writing."

Stein seems to be transcribing rather than transforming thought as she writes, making a kind of literal translation of what is going on in her mind. The alacrity with which she catches her thoughts before they turn into stale standard expressions may be the most singular of her accomplishments. Her influence on twentieth-century writing is nebulous. No school of Stein ever came into being. But every writer who lingers over Stein's sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own.

Related items:

• Brendan Wolfe's thoughts on the matter.
• Mark Thwaite approves.
• Elizabeth Bachner's solid review at Bookslut.
• The Antipodean enjoyed it (and adds a shot of the Australian cover).
• And for good measure, Ron Silliman's review of Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934 by Ulla Dydo.

Dreaming of thought

Treena at Sleek Clouds on "A Letter from Li Po":

Aiken expresses that time exists in a place "such as imagination dreams of thought." This is how we see things, isn't it? At least, it's how we see those elusive things that come to mean so much to us: inklings, epiphanies, limits. And it is, perhaps, the only way we can express those thoughts of which our imaginations can only dream: by expressing meaning in images directed at the sub-conscious, perhaps even by-passing the brain's logic. [...]

Here, constrained by (or in) the bottleneck of Time, we as lovers of literature must seek something divine in all this--and Aiken helps us when he declares, "all is text, is holy text." It passes into poet after poet...

Gertrude Stein's work is memorable, and gives off a similar vibe: text into text, text out of text... But Aiken hides meaning "individually" in every single line--and we find it. Whereas, with Stein meaning is a general impression we have of the text. Yet both make literature an event worth attending because we know that these writers will probe the questions worth asking. They are like the calligrapher Chang Hsu who "needed to put but his three cupfuls down to tip his brush with lightning," and on whose scroll "wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, [till] the sky opened upon Forever."

I'm well into the 200s in Against the Day--behind schedule, but enjoying it (which is, after all, the point). Today has been quiet. Reading these entries have helped fill the day with meaning. I learn to keep these windows open and expect more from the sky.