Gertrude Stein in Europe reconfigurations across media, disciplines and traditions 9781474242288, 9781474242301, 9781474242295, 1474242286

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Gertrude Stein in Europe

Also available from Bloomsbury Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos David Ten Eyck John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic Alec Marsh The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot: New Essays Edited by David Newton-De Molina

Gertrude Stein in Europe Reconfigurations Across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions Edited by Sarah Posman Laura Luise Schultz

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Sarah Posman, Laura Luise Schultz and contributors, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4228-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4230-1 ePub: 978-1-4742-4229-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword Catharine R. Stimpson Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: One Who Was Networking Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz

vii viii xi xiv xvi 1

Part 1  Stein Encounters

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1 Stein and Lived Experience Ariane Mildenberg 2 Picabia in Meditation Mia You 3 Sitwell Edith Sitwell: Stein and Sitwell in Echo Franziska Gygax 4 Triangular Politics: Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and Elisabeth de Gramont Birgit Van Puymbroeck

25 47 71

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Part 2  Mediations

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5 Fluid Writing: Stein, James, and Bergson Sarah Posman 6 Becoming American, Becoming Agrammatical: Reading Stein with Deleuze Isabelle Alfandary 7 Stein and Cinematic Identity Abigail Lang 8 In Theory: Stein and Film Philosophy Julian Murphet

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129 145 165

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Contents

Part 3  Stein Encountered

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9 Concerning Gertrude Stein: Dreaming Translation Marie-Claire Pasquier, translation by Alison Anderson 10 Gertrude Stein and her Critique of Dramatic Reason Andrzej Wirth, translation by d’onderkast 11 The Missing Link: Stein between American and European Theater Laura Luise Schultz 12 A Trail of Roses: Stein’s Legacies in 1960s Art Tania Ørum 13 Portraitist Portrayed: Four Contemporary French Perspectives on Stein Florine Leplâtre 14 Gertrude Stein Grammaticus Jacques Roubaud, translation by Jean-Jacques Poucel Coda. How to Read? Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz

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Index

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213 233

253 273 287

Illustrations 2.1 Francis Picabia, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1933. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Permission from 49 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 2.2 First page of Gertrude Stein’s “Preface” from the catalogue for Exposition de dessins par Francis Picabia, Chez Léonce 52 Rosenberg, December 1–24, 1932. 12.1 Henning Christiansen’s score for “a rose is a rose is a rose.” 239 12.2 One page from Stig Brøgger’s The Digital Mona Lisa at the 246 Terminal Beach. 12.3 Stig Brøgger, Between Road and Grass (Mellem vej og græs). 248

Contributors Isabelle Alfandary is Professor of American literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. She has published monographs on E. E. Cummings and American modernist poetry. She contributed to the exhibition catalog The Stein’s Collect and in 2011 organized the international colloquium “Gertrude Stein and the Arts” during the Paris show of the exhibition, called Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso . . . L’aventure des Steins. Alison Anderson has translated over thirty novels from French, including Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and works by Amélie Nothomb, Christian Bobin, and Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio. She currently lives in a village in the French speaking part of Switzerland. Franziska Gygax is Professor of English and American literature and culture at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is the author of Serious Daring from Within: Female Narrative Strategies in Eudora Welty’s Novels and Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein. Her current research deals with illness narratives. Abigail Lang is Associate Professor at the Université Paris-Diderot. She is the author of Le monde compte rendu: Lectures de Louis Zukofsky and the coeditor of Double Change: A Film Archive of Poetry, # 1 and # 2. With Thalia Field she has published the poetry volume A Prank of Georges. Florine Leplâtre holds degrees in Comparative Literature from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and in Film Studies from Université Sorbonne NouvelleParis 3 and is currently a PhD-candidate in Chinese Literature. Ariane Mildenberg is Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Kent. She is coeditor of Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (2010) and is currently working on two books: a monograph entitled Modernism and Phenomenology and an edited volume entitled Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism.

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Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor of English and Film Studies, School of the Arts and Media, at UNSW Australia, where he also directs the Centre for Modernism Studies. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism and the coeditor of Modernism and Masculinity, among other things. He edits the journal Affirmations: of the Modern. Tania Ørum is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the cofounder of the Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies as well as The European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM). An important figure in Danish intellectual life since the 1960s, Ørum has published widely on feminist and avant-garde theory, literature, and art. Her recent work includes De eksperimenterende tressere (The Experimental Sixties), a seminal work on the Danish art scene of the 1960s. Ørum is the main editor of the four-volume series A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries. Marie-Claire Pasquier is Professor Emerita at the Université of Paris X—Nanterre, France. She has translated work by Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Roth into French. Sarah Posman is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) at Ghent University, Belgium. She has coedited The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange and is working on a book that deals with Gertrude Stein and vitalism. Jean-Jacques Poucel is the author of Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (UNC Press, 2006) and has written articles on the Oulipo movement, which have appeared in Yale French Studies, Poetics Today, and the Oulipo dossier at www.drunkenboat.com. His translations of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Conditions of Light (2010) and Anne Portugal’s Flirt Formula (2012) were published by La Presse (Fence Books). He is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Calgary. Jacques Roubaud is a French mathematician, poet, novelist, and essayist. He is Professor of poetry at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. He has been awarded many prestigious literary prizes, among which are the Grand

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Prix National de la Poésie in 1990 and the French Academy Grand Prix de Littérature Paul-Morand in 2008. Laura Luise Schultz is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Cofounder and chair of the Danish Gertrude Stein Society, she wrote her PhD dissertation on Gertrude Stein’s plays and theater aesthetics. She was the main organizer of the 2014 international conference “A Valentine To Gertrude Stein: The Reception of Gertrude Stein in the Arts and Humanities.” Catharine R. Stimpson is Professor of Law, Professor of English, and former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. She founded the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her many publications include the two-volume Library of America edition Gertrude Stein. Writings, which she coedited with Harriet Chessman. Birgit Van Puymbroeck is a postdoctoral research fellow in English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. She recently coedited a special issue of Brontë Studies and is currently working on a book, provisionally entitled Modernist Networks: Anglo-French Connections in Literature and Culture. Andrzej Wirth is Professor Emeritus and founding director of the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany. Mia You is a doctoral student in English at UC Berkeley, writing her dissertation on Gertrude Stein’s conception of poetry and its influence on contemporary writing. She is also the Central Editor of Poetry International Rotterdam and the author of a poetry book, I, Too, Dislike It (forthcoming, 1913 Press).

Foreword Catharine R. Stimpson

Gertrude Stein is the most radical, startling writer in English of the twentieth century. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania; grew up in Oakland, California; went to college in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and had an unhappy stint as a medical student in Baltimore, Maryland. She wrote extensively— major and minor works alike—about America and Americans. Yet, she spent nearly all of her adult life in Europe, from 1903 until her death in Paris in 1946. She and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, share a gravestone in the legendary cemetery Père Lachaise. Crucially, Stein was both in and of America, and in and of Europe. Existentially, she roamed above the Atlantic Ocean and connected the two continents—as well as the island nation of England. She had a double residency, identification, interests, and allegiances. This doubleness shaped the flux, flow, and fragilities of her genius—emotionally, linguistically, aesthetically, culturally, and politically. Her genius has reverberated in Europe, for example, in the performing arts, since her death. A dominant feature of the Stein Myth has been her life in Paris: the salon, the friendships that transpired and expired in that salon, the fabulous paintings on its walls, the dogs, the robust and well-upholstered figure in brocaded vests. The myth has been persistent. Recently, in 2011, Woody Allen released the fantasy film Midnight in Paris, a gold and sepia-toned paean to the now vanished Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Matisse, Cole Porter, and Stein. She sits in her salon, underneath her portrait by Picasso, a blunt but kind oracle. Alluring though the myth is, the realities of Stein and Toklas in Europe are more compelling. Gertrude Stein in Europe is a major, original contribution to our accumulating understanding of them. The essays are varied but invariably valuable. Together, they prove how superficial it is to slap on the label of expat.

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Rather, Stein is a “deterritorialized” writer, a radical pluralist who inhabits multiple networks and who is keenly aware of the lively fluidity of the relations among the points in these networks. She knows and manipulates the fact that the French pronoun tu (you) puns on the English “two” or “too.” Enabling her deterritorialization is her identity as a lesbian, a Jew, a college-educated woman when such creatures were rare, and an avant-garde writer. Stein is unconventional, an Other in Europe and America. To be unconventional, to be an Other and not a biological mother, guarantees that Stein, as cultural landmark, is not securely tethered to one land. To be sure, Stein enjoyed her stabilities, such as the annual taste of fresh strawberries in season and her trust in her marriage (not legally sanctioned, of course) to Toklas. However, she sees, is our seer, about how dramatically perceptions, relations, and feelings shift, depending upon our location and the composition of things around us. Significantly, the Harvard professor whom she revered, the psychologist and philosopher William James (1842– 1910), invented the term “stream-of-consciousness,” not “the eternal rock-ofconsciousness.” Not surprisingly, some of Stein’s wisest and most provocative works, such as The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936), dramatize the tension between the permanent, the enduring, the self-contained, and the contingent, the changing, the relational. As a writer, Stein is studied and emulated in many modern countries: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, some of Latin America, Hungary, Poland, Japan. However, the impediments to the growth of Stein’s aesthetic influence globally are several. One is her translatability.1 The more “accessible” texts, such as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), are less knotty to translate than the more “difficult” texts, although a performance in English can animate their embodied and emotional rhythms. A piece like “Patriarchal Poetry” would drive both Google Translate and a brilliant human translator crazy. Despite her desire to be read, Stein did not much approve of translations. She thought the translator was engaged with a corpse on the page, not with the pulse of the vibrant moment. A second impediment is Stein’s sexuality. No matter how cunningly masked and closeted her words can be, reading and performing Stein entails

Foreword

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murmuring and muttering about sexual difference, let alone celebrating it. How does one do any of this in countries and regions where homosexuality is both shunned and legally forbidden? Still a third impediment is a pervasive distrust of the modernist project as Anglocentric and Eurocentric. Stein designed the postmodern art of the future, but she is also irreducibly modern. She and Toklas chose to live in Paris, the metropolitan heart of the French empire. Yet, Stein deserves her iconic status and a greater global power. She flourished in Europe as a convivial but disobedient and questioning woman who refused to submit to stifling cultural and sexual conventions, including those about language and its referential capacities. She made some bad calls in her politics, but because she wrote in the continuous present, she was able to begin again and again in a mutable here and now. She heard a plurality of voices and probed beneath the patina of custom and within its cages. In 1925–6, Stein wrote A Novel of Thank You. Like much of her work, it was published posthumously. Charming, whimsical, and deep, it has a meditative sentence that begins, “Let us consider the value of thank you . . .”2 Thank you does have shimmering value, and my thanks are to the mindful editors and authors of Gertrude Stein in Europe.

Notes 1 Marie-Claire Pasquier’s “A propos de Gertrude Stein: la traduction rȇvée,” incorporated in this volume in an English translation, is the most brilliant essay I know about translating Stein. 2 A Novel of Thank You, with an introduction by Steven Meyer (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994 (first published in 1958)), 197.

Acknowledgments This project has been long in the making and one of the great pleasures in looking back on the process is to realize the extent to which Gertrude Stein is an active force in European academic life. Since we first came up with the idea, conferences have been held, readings staged, translations made, courses taught, and friendships formed—and always, Stein has been the glorious binding agent. We very much hope that this book will contribute to the flowering of all that activity. We would like to thank everyone who has supported us, and whose comments and advice have strengthened the book. Thanks are due, first, to the contributors, for their energy and wisdom; to colleagues at Ghent University and Copenhagen University; to the participants in the roundtable on Stein at the inaugural conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies in Ghent in 2008, and those in the Stein conference in Copenhagen in 2014; to Catharine R. Stimpson, Marjorie Perloff, Steven Meyer, Charles Altieri, Lyn Hejinian, Joshua Clover, Jonathan P. Eburne, Marysa Demoor, Sascha Bru, Marius Hentea, Kate MacDonald, David Herd, and David Ayers; and to the committed Bloomsbury editorial team. Dankjewel and tak, also, to our families, for their stoic Stein enthusiasm. An early version of Ariane Mildenberg’s chapter appeared under the title “A ‘Dance of Gestures’: Hyperdialectic in Gertrude Stein’s Compositions” in The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, vol. 3 of European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, ed. Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, and Benedikt Hjartarson, 380–95 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). Marie-Claire Pasquier’s text originally appeared as “A propos de Gertrude Stein: la traduction rêvée” in Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 8.18 (1983): 487–99. Andrzej Wirth’s chapter was first published as “Gertrude Stein und ihre Kritik der dramatischen Vernunft” in Helmut Kreuzer (Hrsg.), Montage, LiLi Zeitschrift für Litteraturwissenschaft und Linguistik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 64–74. The chapter by Roubaud, “Gertrude Stein Grammaticus,” first appeared in Contemporanéités

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de Gertrude Stein: comment lire, traduire et écrire Gertrude Stein aujourd’hui, ed. Jean-François Chassay and Eric Giraud, 65–77 (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 2011). Throughout the book, excerpts from Stein’s texts are quoted, with permission granted by the Estate of Gertrude Stein. Excerpt(s) from EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Gertrude Stein, copyright © 1937 by Gertrude Stein and 1965 by Alice B. Toklas. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein, copyright © 1933 by Gertrude Stein and renewed 1961 by Alice B. Toklas. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. We are grateful to the publishers and authors for being able to incorporate these materials.

Abbreviations of Works by Gertrude Stein ABT The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1903–1932. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 655–913. New York: Library of America, 1998. BW Brewsie and Willie. New York: Random House, 1946. CE “Composition as Explanation.” In Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1903– 1932. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 520–9. New York: Library of America, 1998. EA Everybody’s Autobiography. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993. FIA Four in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. GHA The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, in Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1932–1946. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 365–488. New York: Library of America, 1998. GP Geography and Plays. Toronto: Dover, 1999. HTW How to Write. Preface and introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz. Mineola: Dover, 1975. HWW How Writing Is Written. Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited by R. B. Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974. I Ida. A Novel. Edited by Logan Esdale. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2012. LIA Lectures in America, in Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1932–1946. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 191–336. New York: Library of America, 1998. LOP Last Operas and Plays. Edited and with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1975. MA The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Foreword by William H. Gass and introduction by Steven Meyer. Normal, IL and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006.

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N Narration: Four Lectures, with Thornton Wilder. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1935. OP Operas & Plays. Barrytown: Station Hill Arts, 1998. P Picasso, in Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1932–1946. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 495–533. New York: Library of America, 1998. PF Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1970. PGS A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Edited by Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971. PP Portraits and Prayers. New York: Random House, 1934. SM Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition. Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, with an introduction by Joan Retallack. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2012. SR A Stein Reader. Edited by Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. TB Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition. Edited with a note on the text by Seth Perlow, and an afterword by Juliana Spahr. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014. TL Three Lives, in Gertrude Stein. Writings, 1903–1932. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 65–271. New York: Library of America, 1998. WAM What Are Masterpieces? Foreword by Robert Bartlett Haas. New York: Pitman, 1970. WIHS Wars I Have Seen. London: Brilliance Books, 1984.

Introduction: One Who Was Networking Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz

This one always had something being coming out of this one. This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellant thing, a very pretty thing. This one was one certainly being one having something coming out of him. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working. Gertrude Stein—“Picasso” Why is it that we think about Gertrude Stein, who moved to France in 1903 and lived there until her death in 1946, returning to the United States only once, as a “quintessentially American” author?1 An obvious answer to this question is to be found in Stein’s writings, which breathe a concern for America. For all Stein’s writing for and on America, however, there is something un-Steinian about the critical focus on her ‘Americanness’ and disregard for the European contexts in which her work came about and continues to be read. Hugh Kenner’s bracketing of Stein’s location in 1977 to a great extent still rings true: we think of Stein as “the most programmatic of expatriates and most stubborn .  .  . who never ceased to affirm that her preoccupation (in Paris) was with America.”2 We know, however, that despite her claim that she found herself in Paris “living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself ” Stein was an avid converser and enthusiastic networker (ABT 730). She hosted salons for the international avant-garde set in prewar Paris, was in touch with the Bloomsbury group, went for walks with Alfred North Whitehead, contributed not only to Anglo-American literary magazines but

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Gertrude Stein in Europe

also to local French journals, and made (and unmade) friends both in the Parisian literary circles as well as in the French countryside during the 1930s and ’40s. Because nearly all of her work came about in France, because she is a writer of Jewish-German descent writing in dialogue with an internationally inflected modernism, because the foundation of her oeuvre is a dynamic and relational understanding of identity, and because she has been a major source of inspiration for avant-garde artists and writers in post-World War II Europe, we put the spotlight on Gertrude Stein in Europe. Critics have studied the various ways in which Stein is to be situated in America but they haven’t really taken into account the complex relationship between Stein and the environments she worked in and on which she has left her mark.3 As Pascale Casanova points out, “anything relating to [Stein’s] position as an American in Paris is mentioned only in a biographical or anecdotal context.”4 That we need to move beyond such biographical and anecdotal approaches was made clear by Catharine R. Stimpson in 2002 when she pointed out that “unless you understand European politics, you don’t get what Stein was saying about America or about Europe or about the rest of the world.”5 This book understands Stein’s Europe not only in geographical and political terms but as a constellation structured by personal relations as well as debates on literature, art, language, and being. It therefore concentrates on the network of encounters and mediations that inform Stein’s writing and on her work’s afterlife in Europe, on the ways it “translates” into multifarious avantgarde experiment. Our focus on Stein’s networking—as a social, poetic, and epistemological project—is of relevance to more than Stein studies: it invites scholars to reconsider their approach to modernist literature and art. Stein’s understanding of the way in which people, things, circumstances, ideas, and words connect and relate to each other asks us to reconfigure the practice of criticism by which we dialectically team up a writer or movement with another medium, a theory, or a concept. In Stein criticism, following the trends in modernist criticism, we have had Stein and cubism, Stein and post-structuralism, Stein and (Americanized French) feminism, Stein and (American) queer theory, Stein and pragmatism, Stein and American celebrity culture, and Stein and a modernism of the everyday (as a reaction against continental avant-garde theories of shock and rupture). Those readings have led to valuable insights

Introduction

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but what they lack is a movement toward the complex and the inclusive that is central to Stein’s project. Stein’s is a pluralist project and her pluralism, as many critics have noted, is indebted to William James. But it doesn’t—indeed, if we take pluralism seriously cannot—only relate to James. “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything,” James writes in A Pluralistic Universe.6 Stein responds with “[t]he difference is spreading” (TB 11). If we, as critics of modernist literature, want to engage seriously with a body of work that tries to think through the insight that “every smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally related,” we have to approach it as, precisely, plurally related.7 In other words, we need to risk retracing the aleatory and manifold encounters that make up any creative undertaking. We need to read Stein as an American writer who was “almost French” rather than an expat “(in Paris)” (WIHS 82).

Europe Europe matters for Stein, and not merely as the “background of unreality” she ironically turns it into in Paris France (PF 13). The label of expat writer places a film on Stein’s engagement with the European situations she found herself in; expat experience is by definition an outsider’s experience. Stein’s literary thinking, however, questions the boundaries between outside and inside, forefront and background, reality and unreality. Stein’s experiences as a writer in Europe—the avant-garde experiment that was staged, performed, read, or screened round the corner from her Rue de Fleurus apartment; the prewar intellectual Zeitgeist and vitalist craze; the “gypsy” dance performances she witnessed in the South of Spain; the battle of Verdun won for France by Philippe Pétain; Stein’s and Toklas’ aiding the war effort; friends translating Stein’s work into French; the glorious landscapes of the French countryside; the Oxbridge invitation and consequent publication of “Composition as Explanation” by the Hogarth Press in 1926; the “insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese [servants]” the couple hired;8 Pétain’s promise of peace for France during World War II; the friendship of Vichy collaborator Bernard Faÿ—make up more than mere interesting anecdotes. They inform the rhythm, imagery, tone, and language play of Stein’s writing. They steer her thinking on abstract living, on aesthetics,

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and on the business of literature. They implicate her compositions in colonial and imperial politics. Fundamentally, they are part of a modernist project that insisted on undercutting identity and 1:1 relationships between objects and ideas, identities and realities, art and life. The force of Stein’s project lies in the way that it fuses her thinking about abstract questions—What is “being one”? What is perception? What is grammar? What is history? What is “ha[ving] two countries”? (PF 2)—with concrete experiences, with affect, sensory detail, and day-to-day worries. Stein’s famous “Picasso” and “Matisse” portraits, for example, reveal her feelings toward the artists but they also show her tackling the abstract question of what is (artistic) experience. “Picasso,” with the artist as a wizard immersed in the flow of his artistic labor, differs from “Matisse,” in which Stein renders an insecure artist groping for a vantage from which to assess his work (“This one was one knowing some who were listening to him and he was telling very often about being one suffering”).9 The contrast between captivating energy in the former and stalling meta-reflection in the latter shows her joining the philosophical debate on direct experience versus theoretical knowledge instigated by Aristotle in Metaphysics and taken up by a range of earlytwentieth-century intellectuals, most prominently James and Bergson. The combination of concrete and abstract, or “real” and “unreal” connections is central to this book. We present some of the hitherto understudied connections in Stein’s European network—this gives us a liaising Stein, supporting and supported by artists and friends. We furthermore trace the ways in which the theoretical aspirations of Stein’s project, the abstract thinking on perception, identity, language, and ontology, tie in with the debates stirring up intellectual life on the continent. Stein’s status as important literary thinker, stressed by those chapters is confirmed in Part Three in which we trace the ways in which Europe has built on and responded to Stein’s project after her death. Again, these conversations are about both a material Stein—a large woman, a famous address, translations, and intertextual references—and a creative project that challenges us to think about complexity in life, logic, and language. Europe in this book, in other words, constitutes a set of social, political, and geographical positionings as well as a body of knowledge that demands we inquire into conceptual and creative thinking and its relations to language, into being and living, into writing and reading. The days that Stein

Introduction

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was considered a marginal author are behind us and Stein has successfully been written into the American modernist canon. It is time for critics to stop the categorizing enterprise governed by a logic of dichotomy: America versus Europe, pragmatism versus deconstruction, everyday versus shock, etc. Rather, we should go by Stein’s networking and follow her talking and listening, thinking and speaking to us still. The scope and line of approach of this book differ from other studies that concentrate on Stein’s expat surroundings. These tend to focus on a small circle of usual suspects—the story of Stein’s friendship with Picasso is in itself a classic in American modernism studies10—or downplay the significance of Stein’s European environment. If Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, for example, moves to the fore the Parisian context in which a community of expat women writers were writing, living, and loving, it nevertheless very much looks at Stein’s work from the perspective of a writer wanting to “survive as an American in a foreign clime.”11 Even Joan Retallack, who in the wonderfully contextualizing introduction to her Stein Selections asks “How American Is It,” argues that Stein, once in Paris, “had to methodically organize a working environment that gave her the equivalent of a blank slate.” She reads Stein’s assertion in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that she “like[d] living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself ” as an assertion of an American language protectionism (ABT 730).12 Michaela Giesenkirchen, however, has shown that Stein’s assertion that for her there existed “only one language” is a programmatic simplification that doesn’t tally with the manifold linguistic echoes that speak from her work (ABT 729).13 There is one recent development in Stein research, which more than anything else has made us realize the urgent necessity of further exploring Stein’s positioning in Europe. Stein’s experience of (the years leading up to) World War II has lately been tackled with renewed insistence. We don’t want to replay this debate here in great detail but it is worth sketching its outline because it shows what makes this project a valuable and timely contribution to modernist criticism on Stein. The “discovery” of Stein and Toklas on the French countryside by American GIs at the end of the war was something of a media event in 1945.14 Questions as to how exactly Stein and Toklas, two Jewish, lesbian women in their sixties, were able to sit out the war with their impressive modernist art collection in Paris unharmed only really started to

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be asked after 1996, when two scholarly accounts appeared which devoted themselves to a suspect project Stein worked on from 1941 until January 1943, a translation of Pétain’s Paroles aux Français.15 And only fairly recently have a series of responses to Stein’s ties to the Vichy regime, a collaborationist government that conducted a misogynist, anti-Semitic policy, been voiced.16 Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration focuses on the friendship between Stein and Bernard Faÿ, Americanophile and Vichy collaborator, and suggests that what Stein wrote during the Vichy years reveals a “loyalty to a cause,” and cannot be reduced to opportunism and fear for her own safety as a Jewish, homosexual, American intellectual in the midst of an anti-Semitic, misogynist, violent regime.17 Unlikely Collaboration has been countered by, among others, Renate Stendhal and Charles Bernstein.18 Both stress the irony that is central to Stein’s suggestion that Hitler should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. For both, also, Stein’s ironic wartime voice is unmistakably American: the subtitle to Bernstein’s piece, “Sieg heil, sieg heil, right in der Fuehrer’s Face,” refers to a theme song for a Disney cartoon in which Donald Duck mockingly performs the Nazi salute, and in Stendhal’s article Stein’s writings of the 1940s lead up to the 1946 libretto The Mother of Us All, “her great feminist opera . . . a celebration of American democracy.”19 This point on irony is important. Stein was a trickster and her work demands a double focus. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t make us forget that what is central about Stein’s experience of World War II is that she didn’t find herself in American democracy, but in Vichy France, among the French. In a 1945 text, “To Americans,” written when Stein enjoyed the attention of American GIs, she posits: “I was always patriotic, I was always in my way a Civil War veteran, but in between, there were other things, but now there are no other things” (BW 778). One of these other things is her attitude toward Pétain, on which she writes: “So many points of view about him, so very many. I had lots of them, I was almost French in having so many” (WIHS 82). If we want to understand Stein’s experience of World War II we need to work with the irony of an American patriot who was in some respects “almost French.” In other words, we need to look outside of America and take into account, not only Faÿ’s, but the many voices that surrounded “Mademoiselle Stein.” The only thing this will “unmask” about Stein’s 1940s writings is that they encompass a set of complex texts written in response to a war not “relatively simple”

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like the 1914–18 war, but with “so many sides to be on all logical”—logical, Stein complicates, “as the French understand logic and as I understand logic with them” (WIHS 91).20 Stein’s “French” understanding of logic is complex and multi-angled, and her position in the midst of the totalitarian European catastrophe of the 1930–40s cannot be adequately analyzed without recognizing the European aspects of Stein’s cultural identity. Stein’s understanding of self and other, here and there, this book argues, always invites two-way traffic and doubles entendres. Our understanding of network, inspired by Bruno Latour’s project, which emphasizes continuity, heterogeneous connectivity, the process of “translation” and double movements, reverberates with Stein’s literary thinking on identity.

Identity as being in relation From the beginning of her career, Gertrude Stein conceived of identity as relational. In The Making of Americans the basic premise of trying to describe “each one who ever is or was or will be living” was that people share common personality traits, but these traits may be combined in innumerous different ways (MA 300). Identity, for Stein, isn’t about how to distinguish oneself from others, but a question of how one relates to others in unique and specific constellations. In working through the issue of identity in her writings following on The Making of Americans Stein comes up with different concepts. By the 1930s she challenges the very concept of identity in favor of the notion of entity. As opposed to identity, entity is the quality of something existing in and for itself, according to its own rules. Entity is that part of a human being’s existence that is independent of external conditions and other people’s recognition. A work of art, analogously, may become an entity, if it succeeds in defining a form so strong that it defines its own rules. Stein, paradoxically, says it must become “a thing in itself and not in relation” (WAM 88). This Steinian thing in itself isn’t an idealist form, however, but a concrete constellation buzzing with internal movement, much like the movement in a landscape or a convent. As Stein puts it with respect to her opera Four Saints in Three Acts: the movement of nuns very busy and in continuous movement but placid as a landscape has to be because after all the life in a convent is the life of a

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landscape, it may look excited a landscape does sometimes look excited but its quality is that a landscape if it ever did go away would have to go away to stay. (LIA 269)

The relations making up an entity, for Stein, are immanent, not transcendent. When she compares the movement in Four Saints in Three Acts to the movement of nuns in a convent she invites her readers to think through continuity. The convent comparison doesn’t, however, rule out fun and play. Stein’s fascination with nuns was as sincere as tongue-in-cheek. In tune with the sprightly qualities of her literary entities, her understanding of identity is playful in that it is witty and performative. Stein’s most famous musing on relational identity, the catchphrase “I am I because my little dog knows me,” also contains a fair amount of irony.21 Not only is identity here defined as something bestowed upon you from the outside— you have identity if you have an audience, as German-Polish theater scholar Andrzej Wirth remarks in a comment on Stein’s dictum.22 The sentence refers to a nursery rhyme from the Mother Goose collection, in which an old woman falls asleep on her way to the market. She wakes up completely bewildered, because a peddler has cut her clothes while she was sleeping. She hopes for her little dog to recognize her and thus confirm that she is really still herself. Alas, the dog doesn’t recognize her: “But if it be I, as I do hope it be, I’ve a little dog at home, and he’ll know me; If it be I, he’ll wag his little tail, And if it not be I, he’ll loudly bark and wail.” Home went the little woman all in the dark, Up got the little dog, and he began to bark; He began to bark, so she began to cry, “Oh deary, deary me, this is none of I!”23

The rhyme wittily explores the unhappy consequences of depending too much on the outward and simplistic image that others hold of you. We exist as (individual) human beings in our relations to others, but only when we keep these complex relations open for change on many levels and in many directions, are we able to stay connected to ourselves, and the world. This complexity is central to Stein’s poetics, and it should warn against any straightforward

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conclusions with regards to her politics—literary, nationalist or in any respect. “After all anybody is as their land and air is,” claims Stein in Narration (N 46). But land and sky are always changing, and what characterizes a landscape is that it is always “in relation one thing to the other thing,” as Stein explains in her lecture Plays (LIA 264). Rather than a question of race or ethnicity, national identity for Stein is the performative effect of a continuous dialogue between different cultures, different experiences of nature, different languages, different people. In this book Isabelle Alfandary and Birgit Van Puymbroeck elaborate on Stein’s impure language politics and patriotism.24 The concept of “nation”—like “identity”—isn’t a pre-given for Stein, but an open construct that is continually performed and reformed. Similarly, the work of art is an open structure precisely by way of its immanent movements and relations. Stein’s “connective” poetics gets highlighted in for example Juliana Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Spahr emphasizes the openness of Stein’s texts to reader participation, and points to the necessity of the reader’s investment of his or her own references in the process of activating and realizing a Stein text.

Network as being in relation Stein’s fostering of relationality, as a way of thinking about identity and as a poetic principle, puts her project on a par with contemporary discussions on method and the production of knowledge. In tune with Latour’s understanding of a network and of the process of translation (as chains of modifications, displacements, and negotiations through which actors in a network approach each other), Stein’s approach to the relation between two seemingly incompatible or contradictory systems of meaning is that of “a combination and not a contradiction” (LIA 244).25 What Latour, as well as other network thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and hypertext theorists like Stuart Moulthrop and George P. Landow point our attention to, is a spreading connectivity that changes our understanding of the ways in which we segment (our thinking about) the world and what constitutes “valid” comparisons between these segments. Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is a critique of the modern critical habit of purification by which we create distinct zones with distinct

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rules such as nature-culture or real-unreal, with room for intermediaries but not for mediators. An intermediary, Latour explains, “simply transports, transfers, transmits energy . . . [i]t is void in itself.” A mediator, by contrast, “is an original event and creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role.”26 The consequence of relating via mediators rather than intermediaries is that we no longer proceed from pure forms toward phenomena but set out from the points of separation and conjunction. For research on Stein this implies not setting out from America as her “real” country, or from Stein’s Left Bank living as an intermediary between Stein and America, but instead from the complex of connections that tie her project to Europe, from the “background of unreality” in which she “really lived” as mediator. In this network “real” and “unreal” intersect in that some of the “real” connections make it possible to see the “unreal” ones: the friendship between the French Henri Bergson and the American William James, for example, demands we gauge how Stein’s American project written in France relates to the intellectual dialogue between her Harvard mentor and the most famous Parisian philosopher of the early twentieth century. Within modernism studies the concept of “network” has proven particularly valuable to making visible the dynamics within modernism. A network perspective, as Helen Southworth has pointed out, undoes the myth of the individual artist working alone and makes visible the collaborative and reciprocal nature of modernist literary production.27 For Stein, literary creation was a collaborative and reciprocal act. In her lecture “Portraits and Repetition” she famously declared that genius is a matter of “listening and talking” (LIA 290). As Will has demonstrated in her Gertrude Stein, Modernism and the Problem of “Genius” this is a radically democratic principle.28 Rather than divine inspiration, genius in the singular artist designates an extravert openness toward the world, combined with the ability to express one’s own insight – which in its turn is qualified through this openness toward the other. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas the conflation of the voices of Stein and Toklas, author and narrator, spurs an identity play between the two women: genius is developed in the dialogue between Stein and Toklas. In Everybody’s Autobiography, which thematizes fame and genius, Stein gives the notion of genius a democratic extension, as genius may be found in everybody. A genius is one who is able to relate to life in all its variety and diversity, to embrace

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experiences and perspectives that exceed the singular point of view. Genius, then, is a potential quality that may emerge in everybody in the interaction with who and what is Other. We have opted for Reconfigurations Across Media, Disciplines and Traditions as the subtitle to this volume because we hope the book will catalyze more reconfigurations in Stein research, and more cross-Atlantic exchange. Although collaborative projects like Contemporanéités de Gertrude Stein and The Steins Collect, the catalogue to the 2011 exhibition on the Steins’ art collection, have complicated a one-way view, on the whole there has been little dialogue between American and European Stein studies.29 We have incorporated translations of seminal essays by Marie-Claire Pasquier, Andrzej Wirth, and Jacques Roubaud, because their work asks us to think about translating Stein, from one language, discipline, or system into another. We want, in other words, for Gertrude Stein in Europe to incite more talking and listening, for “that is the essence of genius, of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening” (LIA 290).

This book’s being in relation The chapters in this book are divided in three sections: “Stein encounters,” “Mediations,” and “Stein encountered.” What follows is a brief sketch of these clusters, in which we trace how they relate to existing research on Stein, point out the ways in which they echo each other, and introduce some of the key figures in them.

Stein encounters Important European perspectives in Stein research have been her friendship with Picasso, and, more recently, her close relation to the Americophile Bernard Faÿ. In a very obvious way, studies dealing with Stein and Picasso and with Stein and Faÿ situate Stein in Europe: in 1905 Stein sat for her portrait by the Spanish genius and Faÿ played an important role in helping Stein survive World War II in France. Yet when Karin Cope writes that “[e]very time that Stein writes about painting she thinks of Picasso” and when Barbara Will seeks to understand Stein’s experience of World War II

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through the lens of Stein’s friendship with Faÿ, they leave little room for the wider artistic, intellectual, and social atmosphere in which Stein was working.30 The volume opens with Ariane Mildenberg’s chapter, “Stein and Lived Experience,” which explores the relationship between Stein and phenomenology and sets the conceptual tone for the chapters to come. Acknowledging the relationship between phenomenology and pragmatism, Mildenberg moves from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and argues that Stein’s interrogation of language prefigures the latter’s notion of the hyperdialectic as “a dialectic without synthesis,” grounded in our continual questioning of experience. Her focus on the open-ended nature of lived experience anticipates the twists and turns, contingencies and affects that make up Stein’s life and career. Mia You, for example, concentrates on Stein’s 1930s surprising fascination with Francis Picabia and unravels the complex presence of Picabia in what is often considered Stein’s masterpiece of abstraction, Stanzas in Meditation. In focusing on the way in which Stanza LXXI within Part V originated as the “Preface” to the catalogue of a 1932 exposition of Picabia’s drawings, translated by Duchamp, she shows that even Stein’s most abstract literary thinking is welded to concrete encounters. Franziska Gygax compares Stein’s famous 1923 portrait of Picasso to her 1925 portrait of Edith Sitwell. Sitwell, a great admirer and advocate of Stein’s work and the author of the so-called entertainment poems Façade, has only occurred on the fringes of both modernism and Stein criticism. Gygax argues that Stein’s portrait promotes an inclusive logic, in contrast to the stress on exclusion in the Picasso portrait, while also showing that the bond between female artists isn’t without frictions. In Birgit Van Puymbroeck’s chapter the focus is on Stein’s ties to Elisabeth de Gramont, the “red duchess.” She teases out what the paradoxical, triangular friendship between Stein, Faÿ, and de Gramont can teach us about Stein’s writing and thus nuances the view on the political climate in which Stein found herself during the years leading up to World War II.

Mediations The four chapters here concentrate less on Stein’s mode of encountering than on the intersections between her project and (early-)twentieth-century

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theory. Sarah Posman explores the link between Stein and Bergson. She locates a fissure in the close intellectual companionship between Henri Bergson and William James and argues that Stein’s thinking on language is more in line with the Parisian cult-philosopher than with Stein’s Harvard mentor. Isabelle Alfandary takes the Bergsonist angle into post–World War II theory and sketches the ways in which a Deleuzian framework enables us to make sense of Stein’s American project, in which identity is continuously re-explored in linguistic experiment. She presents Stein as a deterritorialized writer rather than an expat writer; the famous 27 Rue de Fleurus apartment isn’t only a Parisian location but also a zone on a map of intensities, a space in which English, major language par excellence, can become minor and a-grammatical. The chapters on Bergson and Deleuze lay the groundwork for a reconsideration of Stein’s relationship to film. In his Cinema books Deleuze, famously, outBergsons Bergson in arguing that the philosopher’s work, in which cinema is cast aside as a mere mechanistic rendering of time, goes to the heart of cinematic experiment with time. The two chapters on Stein and film move beyond Stein’s comments on cinema and sketch intersecting discourses. Stein’s 1934–5 lecture tour in the United States catalyzed her thinking on cinema; she first came across a talking cinema, experienced the shock of seeing herself on screen, and met Charlie Chaplin. While she characterized the lively movement she encountered in the cinema as American, we should also think through what it means when Stein points out that the early portraits she wrote (in Europe) show her “doing what the cinema was doing.” In other words, we need to consider the “unreal” connection between the cinematic writings of an author who doubts “whether at that time [she] had ever seen a cinema” (LIA 294) and continental discourse on film. Julian Murphet argues for the entanglements between an ostensibly “pure” literary practice (such as Stein’s) and a media-ecological web, increasingly presided over in the early twentieth century by a cinematic protocol. Where and how Stein’s literary thinking and early-twentieth-century European film theory meet is the question he answers. Abigail Lang concentrates on Stein’s theoretical reflections on cinema and shows that the paradox that emerges from these writings—a disembodied ideal expressed through metaphors of incorporation—can be unraveled by reading Stein’s film scripts. From Stein’s understanding of film, she shows, emerges a conceptualization of movement that tallies with Bergsonism

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and an understanding of self that keeps track with Lacan’s 1930s theorizing on identity. Interestingly, furthermore, both chapters on film invite dialogue with Mildenberg’s chapter in that they problematize Stein and corporeality.

Stein encountered The third part of this volume explores the heterogeneous ways in which post– World War II European artists and writers have entered into conversation with Stein. It is well worth noting that in Europe Stein hasn’t been primarily canonized through the academic channels, but through networks of artists who have been “using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing” her texts, her aesthetics, and her public figure in their own work, ranging from stage art, music, visual arts, poetry, cartoons etc. to all sorts of mixtures between these (LIA 327). The concept of translation, in the Latourian sense of the word, serves as our guideline for the transference of knowledge and aesthetic practices between different fields in the complex cultural network in which Stein inscribed herself and in which her work is continuously re-activated.31 The section starts with “Concerning Gertrude Stein: Dreaming Translation” (1983), in which Marie-Claire Pasquier meditates on the perverse pleasures of attempting to translate Stein. Pasquier, as Renée Riese Hubert has pointed out, has been one of the most significant voices in French academic debate and one of the first to think through Stein’s exile in relation to her poetics.32 In apt correspondence with Alfandary, Pasquier’s text, translated by Alison Anderson, pays tribute to Stein’s American idiom, which she finds crisscrossed by the welter of linguistic voices that surrounded Stein in Europe. The chapters by Andrzej Wirth and Laura Luise Schultz zoom in on Stein’s importance for modern European drama. “Gertrude Stein and her Critique of Dramatic Reason” (1982) gives an astute reading of Four Saints in Three Acts and Listen To Me in which Wirth sets out to qualify and revise the analogy between Stein’s work and cubism. Nuancing Stein’s relation to cubism enables Wirth to establish how Stein systematically dissolves the conventional traits of drama into discourse, in much the same way in which Mondrian reduces pictorial elements in his “landscapes” of primary colors and straight lines. The strongest impact of Wirth’s text lies in his acknowledgment of how

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Stein’s deconstruction of the dramatic structure is a crucial step toward making theater abstract and modernist or, as we would say today with a term that Wirth introduced elsewhere with regards to Stein and the Polish dramatist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, post-dramatic. By pointing out this most important point in Stein’s playwriting aesthetics, Wirth is able to explain the ways in which Stein’s thinking on dramatic form sides with and prefigures developments in the work of the giants of twentieth-century theater: Witkiewicz, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowksi, Peter Handke, Heiner Müller, and Robert Wilson. Certainly, Wirth in his own practice as founding director of the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, Germany, has contributed to the dissemination of Gertrude Stein’s work and her importance for later developments in post/modernist theater. Bringing to the fore Andrzej Wirth’s historical role as a mediator between American and European theater, Laura Luise Schultz follows the lines of exchange between European and American theater Stein’s work has given rise to, and demonstrates how Stein’s influence may be found today in the work of European theater artists such as Heiner Goebbels and René Pollesch. Schultz critically discusses Stein’s position in the history of European avantgarde theater and the tendency to regard Stein, along with other modernist playwrights, as anti-theatricalist. Instead, she argues that Stein aimed at a post-dramatic integration of text and performance in an open-ended aesthetics where Artaud’s famous doubleness of the theater between presence and representation, fiction and reality, is regarded a field of possibilities rather than restrictions: a combination and not a contradiction. Next, we follow a “trail of roses,” with Tania Ørum drawing the contours of a Stein-inspired Nordic avant-garde. Ørum’s “geographical history” takes her from concrete poetry into music and the visual arts. Her analysis traces the translation of Stein’s modernist aesthetics into postmodernist artistic practices. The Scandinavian cluster of Steinian artists that Ørum uncovers, modifies and enriches our understanding of Stein as a precursor for contemporary performative and intermedial practices of appropriation and reenactment. The idea of appropriation is also central to Florine Leplâtre’s chapter. In “Portraitist Portrayed: Four Contemporary French Perspectives on Stein” she unfolds the ways in which Stein has been turned into a character by three contemporary French writers and one film maker. Her

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reading of a sound poem by Bernard Heidsieck, a poetic essay by Christian Prigent, an experimental film by Arnaud des Pallières and both a novel and a play by Olivier Cadiot, enables her to examine the ways in which key experimental writers and artists deal with the issues of (self-)representation and portraiture that Stein tackled again and again throughout her oeuvre and life. Jacques Roubaud’s “Gertrude Stein Grammaticus” (2008) is the collection’s poetic conclusion. Roubaud, “the most famous French reader of Stein,” is a mathematician, Oulipo poet, and poetry professor, who started promoting Stein’s work in the 1980s.33 In response to the French historical avant-garde’s disdain for Stein and Tel Quel’s focus on James Joyce, he incorporated Stein in the seminal anthology Vingt poètes américains,34 translated her work and started writing in response to it.35 One of his essays on Stein, the 1980  “Gertrude Stein Grammaticus,” published in the In’hui special issue on Stein, shows the ways in which Stein’s poetic relates to the avant-garde project of Oulipo.36 Oulipo, or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (workshop of potential literature), was founded in the 1960s and explores writing by formal constraints.37 In his 2008  “Gertrude Stein Grammaticus,” Roubaud unfolds his engaging with Stein’s poetic in a constellation of quotes, remarks, axioms, theories, corollaries, and examples. The piece is a dynamic portrait of Stein’s writing; it shows one literary thinker “talking and listening” to the other, revising, composing, reconfiguring. Better than anyone, Roubaud demonstrates the liveliness of Stein’s writing. His text makes clear that the questions Stein asks after the nature of writing, thinking, and being are still pertinent and deserve inclusive reflection and translation. Roubaud’s text is translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel, whose study Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006) shows how formalist experimentation reconsiders literary memory. A source of inspiration for this volume, it functions as an excellent guide for those interested in post-Steinian reconfigurations. Our own coda “How to Read” draws on Roubaud’s poetic reflection on Stein to gauge what makes Stein such a vital writer today, almost seventy years after her death. ‘How to read?’ may well be the only answer to Stein’s alleged last words ‘What is the question?’

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Notes 1 Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003), 619. 2 Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), 121. 3 See for example: Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham: Duke UP, 1999); Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2007); Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (New York: Oxford UP), 2012; Matt Miller, “Makings of Americans: Whitman and Stein’s Poetics of Inclusion,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 65.3 (2009): 39–59; Charles Caramello, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996); Marianne DeKoven, “‘Excellent Not a Hull House’: Gertrude Stein, Jane Addams, and Feminist-Modernist Political Culture,” in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado, 321–50 (New York: Garland, 1994); Deborah M. Mix, A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women’s Innovative Writing (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007); Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke UP, 1995); Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2009). 4 Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” 71–90, NLR 72 (2011): 86. 5 Bevya Rosten, Anne-Marie Levine, Catharine R. Stimpson et al., “A Play to Be Performed: Excerpts from the Gertrude Stein Symposium at New York University,” 3–25, Theater 32.2 (2002): 16. 6 William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in William James. Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 767. 7 Ibid., 777. 8 Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (New York: Harper, 1984), 186. 9 Gertrude Stein, “Matisse,” in Gertrude Stein. Writings 1903–1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 278–81 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 280. The lines from the Picasso portrait, quoted at the beginning, are from “Picasso,” in Gertrude Stein. Writings 1903–1932, 282–4, 283. 10 Numerous studies have tackled the ways in which Stein’s writing relates to modernist painting, particularly cubism. See for example: Marianne DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism,” Contemporary

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Gertrude Stein in Europe Literature 22.1 (1981): 81–95; Claude Grimal, “Stein, cubiste intégrale,” Europe: Revue Litteraire Mensuelle 638–639 (1982): 162–71; Randa K. Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984); Norbert Messler, “Kunst und Literatur des Kubismus: Pablo Picasso und Gertrude Stein,” Universitas: Zeitschrift fur interdisziplinare Wissenschaft 40.5 (1985): 557–68; Marjorie Perloff, “Six Stein Styles in Search of a Reader,” in A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example, ed. Bruce Kellner, 96–108 (New York: Greenwood, 1988); Renée Riese Hubert, “Gertrude Stein, Cubism, and the Postmodern Book,” in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 96–125 (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989); Ulla Haselstein, “Gertrude Stein’s Portraits of Matisse and Picasso,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 34.4 (2003): 723–43; Jamie Hilder, “‘After All One Must Know More Than One Sees and One Does Not See a Cube in Its Entirety’: Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Cubism,” Critical Survey 17.3 (2005): 66–84. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986), 190. See also J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993); Noel Sloboda, The Making of Americans in Paris: The Autobiographies of Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). Joan Retallack, introduction to Gertrude Stein Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Berkeley: U of California P, 2008), 32, 31. Michaela Giesenkirchen, “Where English Speaks More Than One Language: Accents in Gertrude Stein’s ‘Accents in Alsace’,” Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 34.1 (1993): 45–62. See also Michaela Giesenkirchen, “‘After All Anybody Is What Their Land and Air Is’: Gertrude Steins Volksgeistlehre,” in Dialoge zwischen Amerika und Europa: Transatlantische Perspektiven in Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Musik, ed. Astrid Böger, Georg Schiller, and Nicole Schröder, 131–49 (Tübingen, Germany: Francke, 2007). On Stein’s language in relation to her Jewishness, see for example: Maria Damon, “Gertrude Stein’s Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the ‘Jewish Question’,” MFS 42.3 (1996): 489–506; Amy Feinstein, “‘Can a Jew Be Wild’: The Radical Jewish Grammar of Gertrude Stein’s Voices Poems,” in Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, ed. Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris, 151–69 (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P). In August 1945 Life magazine did a feature on Gertrude Stein: Stein’s text “Off We All Went to See Germany” was accompanied by photos of Stein and American GIs in Germany. The publication of Stein’s war-time memoir Wars I Have Seen (1945) also generated quite some attention.

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15 Wanda Van Dusen and Michael Davidson, “Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942),” Modernism/modernity 3.3 (1996): 69–96; Ulla E. Dydo and Edward Burns, “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944,” appendix IX to The Letters of Gertrude Stein & Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 401–21. 16 Accounts of Stein’s experience of World War II that take into account the Pétain project include: John Whittier-Ferguson, “Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, and Memory”; Jean Gallagher, The World Wars Through the Female Gaze (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998); M. Lynn Weiss, Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism (Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1998); Zofia Lesinska, “Gertrude Stein’s War Autobiographies: Reception, History, and Dialogue,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 9.4 (1999): 313–42; Barbara Will, “Lost in Translation: Stein’s Vichy Collaboration,” Modernism/modernity 11.4 (2004): 651–68; Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007); Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia UP, 2011); Annalisa Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2012). In the wake of the two 2011 exhibitions devoted to Gertrude Stein, The Steins Collect (SF MOMA, Paris, NY Met) and Seeing Gertrude Stein (SF Jewish Museum) the issue of Stein’s collaboration triggered a chain of reactions in the (virtual) public sphere. 17 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 143. 18 Renate Stendhal, “Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?,” Tikkun (June 4, 2012), (accessed February 2015); Charles Bernstein, Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight, a dossier compiled for Jacket 2 (May 9, 2012),

(accessed February 2015). 19 Stendhal, “Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?,” n.p. 20 In Wars I Have Seen Stein writes on French logic: “I listened to so many in those days, and everybody’s point of view was so reasonable as they explained it, that is what the French mean by saying they are logical, any point of view they have which concerns themselves is so reasonable when they explain it, they have no prejudices, they have traditions and a way of life and they have a point of view, and they have a reason for it, of course there are some among them not a great many but some among them who simply want to be on the winning side, anywhere there are lots of people like that, and when they are like that it is simple but not logical, not as the French understand logic and as I understand logic with them” (WIHS 90).

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21 The sentence figures most prominently in the small plays of The Geographical History of America or The Relation between Human Nature and the Human Mind as well as in the puppet play Identity A Poem that is compiled from the plays of The Geographical History of America. 22 See Wirth’s chapter in this volume. 23 William Stuart Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose, Nursery Rhymes Old and New (New York: C. N. Potter, 1962), 159. 24 On this issue see also: Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa and London: U of Alabama P, 2001), 23ff. 25 For further analysis of this aspect of Stein’s writing, see Laura Luise Schultz: “A Combination and Not a Contradiction. Gertrude Stein’s Performative Aesthetics,” in Performative Realism, ed. Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev, 235–68 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005). 26 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), 78. 27 Helen Southworth, Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010), 17. 28 Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 135. 29 Jean-François Chassay and Eric Giraud, Contemporanéités de Gertrude Stein. Comment lire, traduire et écrire Gertrude Stein aujourd’hui: textes (Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines, 2011); Janet C. Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca A. Rabinow, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with Yale UP, 2011). Dialogue between publication zones is scant. Interesting work on Stein published outside the radius of Anglo-American publishers includes: Andreas Kramer, Gertrude Stein und die deutsche Avantgarde (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 1993); Gottfried Willems, “Frei um zivilisiert zu sein und zu sein”: das Verhältnis von moderner Kunst und Zivilisationskritik im Licht von Gertrude Steins Paris Frankreich (Palm & Enke, 1996); Claude Grimal, Gertrude Stein: le sourire grammatical (Paris: Belin, 1996); Georg Schiller, Symbolische Erfahrung und Sprache im Werk von Gertrude Stein (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 1996); Claudia Franken, Gertrude Stein, Writer and Thinker (Münster: Lit and Piscataway, NJ, distributed in North America by Transaction Publishers, 2000); Emanuela Gutkowski, I primi passi di Gertrude Stein: Three Lives: uno studio di letteratura comparata (Milano: Angeli, 2004); Dominique Saint-Pierre, Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre: d’aout 1924 à décembre 1944 (Bourg-en-Bresse: Musnier-Gilbert, 2009). 30 Karin Cope, Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein (Victoria: ELS Editions, 2005), 55.

Introduction

21

31 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10–11. 32 Hubert, “Gertrude Stein and the Making of Frenchmen,” 71–92, SubStance 18.2 (1989): 82. 33 Ibid. 34 See, Michel Deguy and Jacques Roubaud (eds.), Vingts poètes américains (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 35 Edward Lintz, “Difficiles Nuage: Gertrude Stein, Oulipo and the Grammar of the Avant-Garde,” in Dietrich Scheunemann, European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives, 191–208 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000). 36 Jacques Roubaud, “Gertrude Stein Grammaticus,” in “Gertrude Stein encore,” special issue, In’hui 0, April 1983: 45–59. 37 On Oulipo, see for instance: Chris Andrews, “Inspiration and the Oulipo,” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty First Century Literature 29.1 (2005): 9–28; Noël Arnaud, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, ed. and trans. Warren F. Motte Jr. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986); Marc Lapprand, Poétique de L’oulipo (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); Marjorie Perloff, “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall,” Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 23–45; Jean-Jacques Poucel, “Oulipo: Explore, Expose, X-po,” Drunken Boat 8 (Fall 2006): (accessed February 2015); Colin Symes, “Writing by Numbers: Oulipo and the Creativity of Constraints,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32.3 (1999): 87–107. On Roubaud, see Alison James, “Jacques Roubaud and the Ethics of Artifice,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 63.1 (2009): 53–65; Jean-Jacques Poucel, Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006).

Part One

Stein Encounters

1

Stein and Lived Experience Ariane Mildenberg

An empress without clothes? Gertrude Stein’s writing has been accused of being repetitious, nonsensical, and “inscrutable.”1 The most recent addition to this resistance in Stein reception is Elaine Showalter’s description of Stein’s work as “incomprehensible, self-indulgent, and excruciatingly boring,” topped off with a remarkable dismissal of the writer’s experimental compositions: “Stein seems more and more like the Empress Who Had No Clothes—a shocking sight.”2 Readers who encounter Stein for the first time would agree that there is an element of “shock” in reading her work, but, in order to decipher what Stein herself called her “complicated simplicity,” (PGS 34) we need to step back a little to see clearly where her “simplicity” lies. Like a practical phenomenologist and epistemologist, Stein clearly knew “what power language has for shocking us back into experience.”3 As I have pointed out elsewhere, the cushion covers, boxes, or concealing garments in Stein’s Tender Buttons can be seen to refer to our usual mode of discourse, a form of clothing in itself, which Stein’s radical compositions loosen, so that the usually concealed “thing contained within itself ” (LIA 308)—the thing as immediately perceived—can show itself.4 Thus, the “nakedness” exposed in Stein’s writing is not a dead end, as suggested by Showalter, but one that takes us “[b]eyond the knowledge of nakedness,” as Wallace Stevens puts it,5 displaying the usually invisible framework for all the wrapping and trappings of words which, according to Stein, had “lost their value” toward the end of the nineteenth century (PGS 17). Hence, if Gertrude Stein, the empress, wears no clothes, it is only to liberate our gaze

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from preconceived notions about reading and language, only to allow us to see like “the child in the Andersen story [who] uncovers the self-deception that empowers the system”6—and in Stein that is the system of language itself. Stein performs, as Jo Anna Isaak comments, “an epistemological investigation into the conditions of its visibility.”7 To expand upon Isaak’s remark, through the recursive patterns of her compositions, a “[b]eginning again and again,” which is “a natural thing,” (ce 522) Stein perpetually interrogates language, shifting the reader’s attention to the usually hidden condition of possibility of our taken-for-granted medium of communication, challenging us to “recapture the value of the individual word . . . and act within it” (PGS 18, my emphasis). So, if the crowds watching this empress without clothes are laughing, this is not a laughter that ridicules. Rather, it is an undoubtedly confusing but nevertheless “revolutionary laughter” of viewing the familiar in a new light.8 This chapter elaborates upon this observation and argues that Stein’s interrogation of language approximates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late notion of “hyperdialectic,” a dialectic without synthesis grounded in our continual interrogation of perceptual experience. Stein’s experimental work is often considered as “language writing,” focusing on the purely linguistic “play” and “momentary con-struction” of the composition,9 which, as Douglas Messerli has claimed, is “grounded . . . in the notion that language is the engenderer of experience.”10 It is my conviction, however, that Stein’s unusual compositions seek to reclaim the pre-predicative ground of experience from which language arises, “the hither side of human experience . . . the invisible component of meaning,”11 that is, the pre-reflective bond between an embodied consciousness and world, which forms the basis for language itself. In other words, the following pages are a critical attempt at writing the grounded body back into Stein’s language games.

Borderline experience Stein’s endless repetitions with difference in Three Lives, the endless etymological word games in Tender Buttons, and her portraits of people presenting us with a radical disruption of traditional constructions of meaning, throw us off center. Her writing requires a certain abstention from preconceived ideas about what

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a text should look like and an openness to the experience of reading itself. And yet, the challenge and pleasure of Stein’s aesthetic concerns lie precisely in the “disappointment” of our expectations of a text. What we are left with are “rhythmic” pieces of a very particular kind, such as The Making of Americans in which Stein “was up against the difficulty of putting down . . . the complete rhythm of a personality that [she] had gradually acquired by listening seeing feeling and experience” (LIA 277). In “Poetry and Grammar” she writes of wanting to express a similar rhythm of things: “I remember in writing An Acquaintance with Description looking at anything until something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way that actual thing would come to be written” (LIA 330–1). Stein’s desire to capture in language this “rhythm of the visible world” (ABT 781) is not dissimilar to what Gilles Deleuze has referred to as the “rhythm [that] runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music.” Much like the heartbeat cycle, Deleuze explains, “[i]t is a diastolesystole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself. Cézanne, it is said, is the painter who put a vital rhythm into the visual sensation.”12 Here Deleuze is indebted to existential phenomenology and its emphasis on experience as praxis. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted on grounding philosophy in the lived and therefore open-ended experience of corporality13—what he termed “flesh” (la chair)14—and proposed that Paul Cézanne’s work was the embodiment of this phenomenological perspective: “Cézanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He considered himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us.” Cézanne’s relentless approach to painting—“[h]e needed one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait”—evidences that he anchored his work in the perpetual interrogation of what he actually perceived. He knew that “[e]xpressing what exists is an endless task.”15 Existential phenomenology deals with this nontotalizing existential process of lived experience, which is always grounded in what Edmund Husserl called “things themselves,” that is, the “emotive coloration or ‘boundary’ character” of an experience. This pre-reflective “‘borderline’ experience”16 laid bare through the method of phenomenological “reduction” is an abstention from

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conventional “objective” ways of seeing in order to attend to phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness. Through reduction, “[t]he phenomenon is seen, but it is seen in the sense that what is seen discloses the very possibility of the phenomenon.”17 This process of self-reflection highlights what William James, Stein’s teacher in experimental psychology at Radcliffe College, famously termed the “fringe of the object,” the “dimly perceived,” and still “unarticulated affinities about [a thing],” that pre-conceptual dimension of experience which is peripheral to what he called “the mind’s object” and what phenomenologists would call the noema, the object of consciousness.18 In The Principles of Psychology James writes: If anyone ask what is the mind’s object when you say “Columbus discovered America in 1492,” most people will reply “Columbus,” or “America,” or, at most, “the discovery of America.” They will name a substantive kernel or nucleus of the consciousness, and say the thought is “about” that . . . and they will call that your thought’s object . . . But the Object of your thought is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less . . . The object of my thought .  .  . is strictly speaking neither Columbus, nor America, nor its discovery. It is nothing short of the entire sentence, “Columbusdiscovered-America-in-1492” . . . we must reproduce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and with the whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure relations, which, like an horizon then spread about its meaning.19

For James the “mind’s object”—whether that is the object of a sentence, a real object, or an imaginary object—is never perceived in isolation but is always circumscribed by a dimly perceived fringe, an indeterminate framework of relatedness which can never be pinned down in its totality. James’ thought process regarding the fringe or horizon of experience is echoed thirteen years later in Husserl’s observation that concrete objects are surrounded by a “distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the actual field of perception”: What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate .  .  . is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality .  .  . An empty mist of dim indeterminacy gets studded over with intuitive possibilities or presumptions, and only the “form” of the world as “world” is foretokened.

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Moreover, the zone of indeterminacy is infinite. The misty horizon that can never be completely outlined remains necessarily there.20

The flow of consciousness, according to Husserl, is immersed in this infinite “misty horizon,” figuring the infinity and continuity of the world, which exists before reflection and can never be fully expressed, and yet it is the horizon, that is to say, the very background against which all acts and expressions stand out. The meaning of any object of experience, then, does not stem from the object in itself but from its spatial-temporal horizon, the framework of relatedness within which it comes into being. In other words, whenever we experience, we experience within a temporal horizon of unlimited possibilities that we never reflect on but are pre-predicatively aware of. Although the relationship between William James’ work on what he termed “pure experience”21 and European phenomenology has been explored since the 1960s and proved to be of “great philosophical significance” for new developments within phenomenological thought,22 similar developments have not been sufficiently examined within the kind of modernist literature that, like Stein’s, “compel[s] us to suspend our belief in the familiar” and returns us to its foundational status,23 the structure of experience itself. “[I]t is startling,” writes Bruce Wilshire “that [James’] pioneering work in phenomenology and his influence on Husserl went without proper notice for seventy years and has only recently gained recognition.”24 This might explain why the related patterns between phenomenological thought and Stein’s work have received little attention.25 Rejecting the traditional mind/body and subject/object splits that inform Cartesian dualism, phenomenology lays bare pre-reflective and pre-linguistic perceptual experience of the embodied subject, that is, the primordial bond between subject and world. James also rejected Descartes, but his exploration of “pure experience” lacked an analysis of the reflexivity of the body subject that would become the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh.”26 In the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty reflects on how we are all caught up in the “flesh of the world” as both seeing/ touching and seen/touched beings, at once distanced from and intertwined with experience.27 Where a Jamesian reading of Stein would help shed light on the primordial dimension of pure experience and its “fringes” that Stein, paradoxically, tried to express through words, phenomenology can help us write

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the reflexive body back into Stein in an entirely different way. Stein repeatedly challenges her reader to develop a certain phenomenological attentiveness open to the movement between pre-reflective, corporeal experience and reflection, the pre-linguistic essence of things and language: “As I say a noun is the name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known” (LIA 314). Stein’s preoccupation in Picasso with the objects of immediate experience— “not the things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them” (P  522)—which she shared with both Cézanne and Picasso, is one of the many examples demonstrating that her thoughts on the modernist composition, which were influenced by James, can be incorporated into the larger framework of European phenomenology. Significantly, when Husserl wrote about the “crisis of European existence,”28 which, according to the philosopher, had hit philosophy in the first third of the twentieth century, the Paris-based Gertrude Stein was preoccupied with a “mimetic crisis.”29 Through encrusted forms of representation, meaning, Stein felt, had become detached from its original foundation. Thus she described the twentieth century as “a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself ” (P 532). Yet neither to Husserl, for whom the philosopher was a “beginner as he reflects upon himself,”30 nor to Stein, for whom “[b]eginning again and again” in composition was “a natural thing” (CE 522), was the crisis of modernity “an obscure fate, an impenetrable destiny.”31 Rather, both saw it as a “cry for origin,”32 for getting back to the pre-conceptual ground of experience from which man had become estranged, resulting in the loss of the idea of philosophy (according to Husserl) and the loss of the value of words (according to Stein). In their search for radical new beginnings,33 a pre-requisite for recapturing the “primal ground”34 for perception and expression alike, the modernist projects of the phenomenologists and Stein can be considered as attempts to reconstruct a European world in crisis.

Rhythms of the visible world One of the building blocks in Stein’s project of reconstruction was to reconnect, through writing, with the “rhythm of the visible world,” the idea of which chimes with Husserl’s ever-present horizon of continuity, the “‘current’ of

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existence,” as Maurice Natanson has it, in which our linguistic gestures are inscribed.35 We must, Stein claims, examine the experiencing of experience itself through a language that is necessarily reflexive: “And it is necessary if you are to be really and truly alive it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing” (LIA 290). The moving car in this example represents the word which is what James M. Edie would call a mere “vehicl[e] of meaning,”36 whereas the “motor going inside,” its “rhythm,” refers to its pre-predicative meaning rooted in experience and “transcend[ing] all of its expressions .  .  . which will always escape exhaustive analysis.”37 For, as Edie puts it, “since all language refers to experience, the meanings incarnate in verbal expression are hardly ever simple ‘closed’ ideas . . . There is a multiple relativity in all linguistic expression and therefore in all thought about experience.”38 Disclosing the very “motor” that makes language possible, Stein’s strange writing seeks to express the rhythm of this infinite framework of relatedness, which, when one observes it more closely, opens onto infinite possibilities and becomes surprisingly fascinating, as Stein herself notes: I . . . began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different. (LIA 272, my emphasis)

Due to boundless variation in expression, repetition is not possible. This leads Stein to highlight “insistence” as opposed to “repetition”: “insistence . . . in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same.” This is lived experience, that is, experience as we live through it, forever new, moment by moment. “Repetition,” on the other hand, is not lived, as “[t]here is only repetition when there are descriptions being given of . . . things not when the things themselves are actually existing” (LIA 290). Descriptive art, Stein elaborates in Picasso, “is reconstruction from memory and painters have nothing to do with reconstructions, nothing to do with memory, they concern themselves only with visible things” (P 507).

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Suspending any objective forms of representation or “description,” which concerns “the habit of knowing,” “the appearance” that one knows is there, and derealizing the usual hierarchical status of words, Stein’s writing performs a phenomenological reduction of sorts (P  510). Rejecting the separation of subjectivity and objectivity that informs Cartesian rationalism, Stein’s modernist project should not be read as a collapse of our usual ground for knowledge, but as a means toward a fresh starting-point from which to examine our relationship with it. We must, Stein seems to say, lose the world and the word as we know them in order to gain them. Much like Cézanne’s famously decentralized paintings that paved the way for what Clement Greenberg has called the “‘polyphonic’ picture that relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge of the picture to the other,”39 Stein’s nonhierarchical compositions have “no beginning or middle or ending” (N 20) for “[e]ven the very master-pieces have always been very bothered about beginning and ending because essentially that is what a master-piece is not” (WAM 89). On the contrary, a “master-piece” according to Stein—and here she takes her bearings from Cézanne who “impressed [her] enormously”—is a nonhierarchical composition promoting “words of equal value” in which “one thing is as important as another thing” (PGS 17, 15).40 Such a composition has a nontotalizing function that highlights the lived and therefore decentered organization of sense impressions and the gradual emergence of meaning. Like Cézanne’s paintings in which inanimate people with stiffened faces and plump apples “hesitate as at the beginning of the world,”41 calling attention to the origin of the painter’s creative process, Stein’s cry for origin evokes man before the fall in the Garden of Eden, which is “not a place, but a stage of consciousness ‘prior’ to the introduction or development of reason.”42 The eating from the apple occasioned the insurmountable divide between primal man and reflective man, the experiential world and human understanding, pre-linguistic meaning and representational language. All of this offers an apt context for reading the first half of “Apple” from the “Food” section of Tender Buttons: Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potatoe, potatoe and no no gold work with pet, a

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green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. (TB 48)

As we take our bite out of “Apple,” its pre-linguistic essence or “appleyness” gradually unfolds, like “the impression of an emerging order,” as Merleau-Ponty has it, “an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.”43 As we gradually get involved in the “complicated simplicity” of this composition, we discover that meaning is made through the movement of reading, as long as we are open to suspending our preconceived notions about representation and involving ourselves in what Donald Sutherland has called “disengaged present thinking.”44 And, as we read, Stein’s “Apple” is experienced as “fringed,” that is, from related perspectives. Employing parataxis, her little prose poem highlights the relationality and interdependence not only between seer and seen, reader and words, but also between the single words, their sights, and their sounds: each word, each sight, each sound is as important as another. What our reading of this unusual combination of words allows for is a form of free imaginative variation as Husserl thought of it,45 challenging us to play with variations of the essential characteristics of the phenomenon. “Apple” is primarily described by what it is not: “Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam.” “Apple plum” makes one think of small apples that look like plums and “carpet steak” recalls the unusual recipe for carpet bag steak, the kind of steak that is slit through the middle, opens like a book, and is filled with oysters, just as the clam, to which the oyster is related, is filled with seeds. The shells of clams are made up of two halves, which can open like a book, each of which contains seeds, just as the two halves of an apple contain the seeds of the same core. But, just as Stein claims that in order to be “really and truly alive” one must be “at once talking and listening, doing both things,” (LIA 290) so should we, the readers, listen while reading and pay attention to the sonorous interdependence of words through alliteration: “apple plum” or “carpet,” “clam,” “colored,” “calm,” “cold cream”; through assonance as in “seed clam,” “calm seen,” and “cold cream”; and through rhyme: “carpet steak” and “best shake.” This multiple relativity at a purely sonorous level is part of the fringe of possibilities of “Apple,” forming the spatial-temporal “misty horizon that can never be completely outlined,” but which we never lose sight of through the durational event of reading this prose poem. The word “potato” brings to mind, as Marguerite Murphy notes, the French “pomme de terre, apple of the earth.”46 But, as soon as this meaning

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seems to have emerged, it extends the phenomenological “horizon” of another possible meaning through a repetition of “potato” in a new context: “potato and no gold work with pet.” The “little piece” recalls “a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready,” implying yet another framework of relatedness for “Apple,” the “green seen,” which becomes the ingredient of a “sweet” and “bready” “bake,” a cake. We could go on and on. What the flow of words exactly refers to remains necessarily uncertain, but what Stein’s poem does make us reflect on is how “the single mind . . . directs an apple,” as she puts it in “Rooms,” for “[a]ll the coats have a different shape,” suggesting that the ever changing meaning of this “composition” depends on how it is “directed” by the single mind of each reader (TB 67). Just as “the horizontal structure of experience always implies more than itself,”47 there is always more to be said about this “word-object.”48 The insistence and assonance in “a little piece a little piece please” reinforces that we could “piece” together the poem, again and again, in an infinite number of ways, revealing possible and multiple variants of this fruit, the “invisible component of meaning” of the object presented.49 Significantly, when Cézanne told his son that “it is all a question of putting in as much interrelation as possible,” he spoke of incorporating, in his compositions, not only the “interrelation” between himself and his object-world, but also the “interrelation” between objects.50 He explained this further to Joachim Gasquet: “Those glasses and plates are talking to each other, endlessly exchanging secrets . . . They do not stop living . . . They spread imperceptibly around each other, through intimate reflections, as we do through glances and words.”51 It is like this in Stein’s “Apple.” Between the metonymically linked words in “Apple,” as in each part of Tender Buttons, there is an existential communication as words “endlessly exchang[e] secrets,” the full meaning of which can never be exhaustively expressed. The contours, sight, and sound of each word is being caressed in the poem; each word is at some point center stage, at some point the guest of honor at this party. Stein’s open-ended, decentralized and nonhierarchical composition, in which words have equal value, promotes “meaning as an ‘open structure’ .  .  . which can be approached from an indefinite number of possible viewpoints but which can never be ‘possessed’ wholly and completely under any one aspect.”52 What emerges from this, then, is that Stein’s phenomenological interaction with “word-objects” grew out of an urge to “re-capture the value of the individual

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word” in a manner that would not reflect possession: “Was there not a way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them?” (LIA 330). The rhythms of the visible world cannot be possessed for “we are always already in . . . [and] of it.”53

Hyperdialectic The horizon, the simultaneous joining and separation of earth and sky, is an imaginary line which seems to move away from us as we approach it. This is also how we should think of the phenomenological metaphor of the horizon. As perceptual consciousness is subject to change and “remoulding us every moment,”54 as James would have it, the spatial-temporal horizon is never fixed and remains beyond our grasp: “the experiential world and human understanding remain forever separated.”55 This is one of the epistemological dilemmas central to phenomenology, which also challenged both James and Stein. The former proposed the following: “The condition of the experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection.”56 A passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception takes James’ idea one step further: “If the thing itself were reached, . . . [i]t would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp.”57 One of the doctrines the philosophers seem to have in common, then, is what we may call the fate of perception. Theorized reflection, such as writing, is grounded in the “unreflective life” of experience,58 but because of the temporal distance between experience and expression, it cannot grasp it as such. As soon as we have translated our immediate experience into words, those words are always already a mere shadow of the actual experience. Reflection, Merleau-Ponty proposes, is aware of and cannot overcome what he terms “écart,”59 the unperceived temporal distantiation between the “perceptual meaning” of pre-reflective experience and “language meaning.”60 Although we do not perceive it as it is prior to our ability to reflect on and speak about the world, “[t]his separation (écart) . . . forms meaning.”61 Hence reflection can only ever be

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hyper-reflection (sur-réflexion) . . . [which] must seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it. It must use words not according to their pre-established signification, but in order to state this prelogical bond. It must plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must descend toward it such as it is instead of working its way back up toward a prior possibility of thinking it—which would impose upon the world in advance the conditions for our control over it. It must question the world.62

From the “hyperreflection” that highlights the pre-conceptual “mute” dimension of experience emerges a “hyperdialectic,” “a dialectic without synthesis” grounded in our continual questioning of experience: What we call hyperdialectic is a thought that . . . is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of idealizations of things said, as the old logic believed, but of bound wholes . . . [W]hat we seek is a dialectical definition of being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itself . . . that must rediscover the being that lies before the cleave operated by reflection, about it, on its horizon, not outside of us and not in us, but there where the two movements cross, there where “there is” something.63

As it arises out of our ever-changing perceptual experience, hyperdialectic is not centered upon finality or reconciliation through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis but upon constant questioning and opening. For Merleau-Ponty, dialectic is not a process of reconciliation of polarized terms in dialectical tension. Rather, it is what he sees as a perpetual process of emerging where “experience is not ‘in between’ (dia) Being and beings, but rather ‘throughout’ it.”64 Reflection, Merleau-Ponty tells us, is never terminated but always keeps the passage between the pre-reflective and the reflective open, for this is the very passage—the “there where ‘there is’ something”—where meaning is produced. The lack of synthesis or closure in hyperdialectic, then, should not be taken as a sign of futility or inconclusiveness but, rather, as a reminder of the perpetual genesis of lived experience on which our reflexive cognition rests.

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“Beginning again and again,” Stein’s writing lays bare the usually unperceived divergence between pre-reflective experience and articulation where hyperdialectic occurs, a passage that cannot be closed as it remains an écart, the divergence which is the condition for the production of meaning. Commenting on Tender Buttons, Ellen E. Berry has noted that Stein’s reader must adopt “a paradoxical split of attention—a relaxed hyperattention, an unconscious hyperconsciousness, a borderline state of awareness a little like insomnia.”65 Drawing upon what Fredric Jameson, following Jean Baudrillard, thinks of as a “postmodern hyperspace,”66 the perplexing space of late capitalism, producing constantly bewildered subjects incapable of locating themselves, Berry reads Stein’s project as a postmodern “new aesthetics of fragmentation” and places emphasis on the “cognitive incapacity” of Stein’s reader,67 thus joining forces with what extant Stein scholarship interprets as postmodern groundlessness, fragmentation, or indeterminacy.68 By contrast, hyperdialectic sheds new light on the autocritical hyper attentiveness of Stein’s reader and grounds her compositions in the “unreflective life” of embodied experience. Rather than anticipating a postmodern hyperspace, Stein’s writing, then, opens onto a pre-objective nonspace or free zone,69 inviting us perpetually to “see” the world/word anew. Examining the experiencing of experience itself, the nontotalizing function of Stein’s decentralized compositions produces not postmodern bewilderment but continual questioning.70 Just as Merleau-Ponty plunges back into the “flesh of the world”71 to disclose the condition of possibility of perceptual experience, so Stein delves into the texture of language to inquire into the underlying structures of our usual modes of discourse, which, she felt, had to be recaptured for the sake of “the recreation of the word” (PGS 18). Freeing her literary compositions from the overlay of descriptive knowledge, she seeks to “express not the things seen in association but the things really seen, not things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them,” an impossible project, some may argue, as her emulation of immediate prethematic experience—an indivisible self-presence—relies on the virtues of a language that is always already a belated version of the actual experience (P 522). And yet, “to attempt to express immediate experience is not to betray reason but, on the contrary, to work toward its aggrandizement.”72

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“If I Told Him” and Shutters Shut As pre-reflective engagement with the world is always corporeal engagement, what better way to draw together this discussion and demonstrate the occurrence of hyperdialectic in Stein than to turn briefly to Paul Lightfoot and Sol León’s 2003 dance production Shutters Shut as performed by Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) to the remarkably soothing voice of Gertrude Stein reading her own “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923).73 One dance review sums up the essence of the production beautifully: The text of a Gertrude Stein poem, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” is painted on stage in front of us in Shutters Shut as the text is mixed up and mashed in the style of a most virtuosic disc jockey . . . or a Picasso painting. This particular dj, Gertrude Stein, is the sole serenader of a man and a woman gradually making their way from stage right to stage left as they paint in a Picasso fashion every nuance of a poem with their bodies as conceived by Paul Lightfoot and Sol Léon.74

Like Stein’s “Apple,” “If I Told Him” expresses the relationality and interdependency of words as they oscillate between shaping and reshaping meaning, reflecting the dynamic nature of perceptual experience. Once again, the phenomenological horizon is perpetually extended and meaning is constantly decentered as language is being interrogated: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him. Now. Not now. And now. Now. Exactly as as kings. Feeling full for it. Exactitude as kings.

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So to beseech you as full as for it. Exactly or as kings. Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also. Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because. (PP 21–2)

If we think we are going to get a literary portrait about Picasso, then we’re mistaken. Likewise, Shutters Shut is not about anything but the movement of the two bodies, a modern-day Adam and Eve of a pre-linguistic, purely gestural world who have not yet eaten the apple. Stein is not interested in description, that is to say, objectivizing interpretation. Instead her composition is eidetic, expressing essence as opposed to external identity. But if Picasso is the modernist “king” of visual portraiture, Stein is the “queen,” of an inverted vision of verbal portraiture, which is equally rare. “I was alone in understanding [Picasso],” Stein stresses in Picasso, “perhaps because I was expressing the same things in literature” (P 508). The variations of inverted parallelisms or rhetorical “chiasms” that characterize “If I told Him” in the first six lines75—“If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it .  .  .”—is mirrored by the dancers in Shutters Shut whose synchronized movements mirror each other chiastically in inverted parallels that are almost “exactly resembling.” Significantly, Merleau-Ponty also uses the notion of the chiasm as a key figure in The Visible and the Invisible. The body, Merleau-Ponty tells us, has a twofold being that locates it at once apart from other body subjects as a seeing/touching subject and among them as a seen/touched “thing.” We are all caught up in the “flesh of the world”76 as both perceiving and perceived beings, at once active and passive, both “talking and listening,” as Stein would say. The structure of all experience is therefore an intertwined chiasm,77 indicating an event that is neither a complete separation nor a complete unity between mute perception and speech, the sentient and the sensible. Rather, it is a “general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.”78

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It is because Shutters Shut, like Stein’s portrait, unfolds in this usually unperceived midway passage that it seems at once absurd and truthful. As one journalist put it, this “dance of gestures” was “making sense in the same way its text score, Gertrude Stein’s ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,’ does: not at all, and completely.”79 “[M]ean[ing] names without naming them,” in a truly Steinian manner the dancers are literally moving through the écart, the temporal space of distantiation in which hyperdialectic is inscribed, between purely gestural meaning and language meaning. But, as “one thing is as important as another thing,” so too are the processes of watching Shutters Shut and of reading Stein’s text tantamount to a passing through the écart which perpetually opens onto meaning and yet shuts out totalizing meaning: “Shutters shut and shutters and so shutter shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutter shut and shutters and so.” Underlining that “insistence is alive” and that “exact resemblance,” the mimetic representation known from nineteenth-century realism, bringing into being an exact portrait of reality, can never be attained, the rhythm of Stein’s words is, as pointed out in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” “endlessly the same and endlessly different” (LIA 272): “Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling.” Knowing that the flow of perceptual consciousness is “remoulding us every moment” and that we cannot escape the fate of perception, the “now” of portraiture is always already a belated “not now”: Now. Not now. And now. Now.

As already noted, Merleau-Ponty’s hyperdialectic emphasizes the importance of experience as praxis: experience is not “‘in between’ (dia) Being and beings, but rather ‘throughout’ it . . . For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy moves toward and becomes the experience of the world.”80 Visualizing Stein’s modernist project, expressing the “rhythm of the visible world” and literally “acting within [the word]” (PGS 18), Shutters Shut is the physical experience as the bodies live through the rhythm of Stein’s words. Just as the meaning of the portrait emerges through the different levels of “insistence” placed on each word as

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Stein reads it—thus taking her bearings from Cézanne and allowing each part of the composition to be as important as the whole—so does meaning emerge through the moving bodies. What we see is a Kafkaesque, topsy-turvy and “inverted” world like that of Gregor, the insect in “The Metamorphosis” who “is not a self speaking or keeping silent but language itself (parole).”81 The NDT performance is truly a presentation of “the speaking word” (la parole parlante), as Merleau-Ponty called it, “in which the significant intention is at the stage of coming into being.”82 Shutters Shut is the flesh of the world laid bare. The purely “fleshy” communication of the dancers in Shutters Shut expresses beautifully how Stein’s portrait of Picasso pulls the protective layer off our everyday world of communication, opening onto to the silent but expressive life of the bare bodies inhabiting them. Thus, presenting us with a critique of static and formal aspects of knowledge, the aim of Stein’s modernist composition is to embrace language from within. Stripped of the clothes of ready-made reality, the words of this empress of the modernist composition reveal, as Stein puts it, “how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside you” (LIA 313).

Notes 1 David Lodge, “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy,” in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976), 488. One of the early critics who claimed that the nonsense of Stein’s Tender Buttons was resistant to interpretation is B. F. Skinner (“Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?,” Atlantic Monthly 153 (January 1934): 50–7). In his introductory comments to Tender Buttons Carl van Vechten comments on the typical resistance in Stein reception (Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: The Modern Library, 1962), 460). 2 Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 253, 254. 3 Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973), 92. 4 See my article “Seeing Fine Substances Strangely: Phenomenology in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” Studia Phænomenologica viii (2008): 259–82. 5 Wallace Stevens, “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas,” in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 252.

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6 D. Franco Felluga, “The Critic’s New Clothes: ‘Sartor Resartus’ as ‘Cold Carnival’,” Criticism 37:4 (Fall 1995): 584. 7 Jo Anna Isaak, The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), 95. 8 Isaak, The Ruin of Representation, 96. 9 Neil Schmitz, “The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons,” as cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 101. 10 Douglas Messerli, Introduction to “Language” Poetries: An Anthology, ed. Douglas Messerli (New York: New Directions, 1987), 2. 11 Michael Berman, “The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,” Philosophy Today 47.4 (2003): 418. 12 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (New York: Continuum, 2003), 42. 13 Commenting on the work of Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. R. L. Dreyfus and P. Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), 14. Note that Husserl was already pre-occupied with the pre-reflective lived dimension of experience: “the term lived experience signifies givenness of internal consciousness, inward perceivedness.” See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964), 177. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968), 139, 248, 249. 15 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 19, 9, 15. 16 Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), 9–10. 17 Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the Principles of Psychology (London: Indiana UP, 1968), 160. 18 William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890; New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 258, 259. 19 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 275–6. 20 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1931), 11, 102. 21 William James, Essays in Radical Experience, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938), 39–91. 22 James M. Edie “William James and Phenomenology,” Review of Metaphysics 23.3 (March 1970): 486. As Edie demonstrates, James and European phenomenology “hold fundamental doctrines in common; and . . . these doctrines are thus intrinsically and necessarily fated to the same philosophical triumph or failure” (406–7). See also Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology; Hans Linschoten,

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23 24

25

26

27 28

29

30 31 32

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On the Way Toward a Phenomenological Psychology, The Psychology of William James, trans. Amedeo Giorgio (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1968); and James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987). Natanson, The Erotic Bird, xii. Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology, 4. Wilshire points out that although James never called his method phenomenological, “his actual practice points in the direction of what Husserl later explicated” (6). Wendy Steiner also notes but leaves unexplored the fact that “[t]he influence of William James is probably the significant factor in any relation between Stein and the phenomenologists, since he is in part their precursor” (Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 54). Jayne L. Walker notes that “Stein’s years of study with William James enabled her to understand the striking ‘distortions’ in Cézanne’s paintings as faithful models of the multiple and fragmentary signs of immediate visual sensations.” Walker briefly refers to Merleau-Ponty after stressing James’ influence on Stein but does not examine the connections between Stein and phenomenology. Walker, The Making of a Modernist, 11, 9. For recent explorations of phenomenology in Stein see my article “Seeing Fine Substances Strangely” and my essay “Openings: Epoché as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts,” in Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, ed. Carole BourneTaylor and Ariane Mildenberg (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 41–73. For a recent comparison of William James’ doctrine of “pure experience” and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s investigation of corporeal reflexivity, see See Nobuo Kazashi, “Bodily Logos: James, Merleau-Ponty, and Nishida,” in MerleauPonty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 107–20. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, Torchbooks, 1965), 78. The term “mimetic crisis” is Adam Katz’s in “From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein,” Anthropoetics 15.2 (Spring 2010), available at , accessed January 2015. Husserl, Ideas, 17. Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 172. Ibid., 207.

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33 Husserl thought of phenomenology as a “first philosophy,” a philosophy of a “radical beginning” (Husserl, Ideas, 27). 34 Edmund Husserl, Husserl’s Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame UP, 1981), 10. 35 Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 14. 36 James M. Edie, “Expression and Metaphor,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23.4 (June 1963): 544. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 155. Here Greenberg refers to the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock. 40 Stein shared her admiration for Cézanne’s mode of composition with Picasso who referred to him as the “one and only master!” “Don’t you think I looked at his pictures?” he once said, “I spent years studying them . . . Cézanne! . . . he was like our father. It was he who protected us.” Picasso as cited in Judith Wechsler, Cézanne in Perspective (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 18. 41 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 16. 42 Roland Paul Blum, “Emmanuel Levinas’ Theory of Commitment,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44.2 (December 1983): 159–60. 43 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 14. 44 Donald Sutherland, “The Elements” (1951), in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. M. J. Hoffman (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), 94. 45 Husserl also spoke of “free variation” as “free fancies,” in Husserl, Ideas, 198. 46 Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1992), 145. 47 Enrique Lima, “Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the Visuality of Knowledge,” Diacritics 33.3/4, New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories (Autumn–Winter, 2003): 30. 48 The term “word-objects”―a suitable name for Stein’s perceptual reconstructions, which reflect on the relation between the experience of our object-world and language―is Frederick J. Hoffman’s, as cited in Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again. Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1972), 127. 49 Berman, “The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,” 418. 50 Paul Cézanne, Cézanne’s Letters, ed. John Rewald (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1976), 323. 51 Isabelle Cahn, Paul Cézanne: A Life in Art (London: Cassell, 1995), 71. 52 James M. Edie, “Expression and Metaphor,” 544. 53 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.

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54 James, The Principles of Psychology, 234. 55 Ludwig Landgrebe, “The Phenomenological Concept of Experience,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34.1 (September 1973): 10. 56 James, The Principles of Psychology, 304. 57 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 233. 58 Ibid., xiv. 59 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 197, 198, 201, 216. 60 Ibid., 176. 61 Ibid., 216. 62 Ibid., 38–9. 63 Ibid., 94–5; my italics. 64 Hugh J. Silverman, “Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 7 (1977): 222. 65 Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering, 18. 66 Ibid., 30. 67 Ibid., 9, 30. 68 For one of the first interpretations of Stein’s work as a postmodern collapse of our usual ground of identification, see Neil Schmitz, “Gertrude Stein as PostModernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons,” Journal of Modern Literature 3.5, From Modernism to Post-Modernism (July 1974): 1203–18. Marianne DeKoven approaches Stein as an “experimental writer” along the lines of structuralist linguistics and especially gendered aspects of deconstructivist theory. The “moving in and out of focus” of meaning in Tender Buttons, she argues, “functions anti-patriarchally, as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly, multiple, fragmented articulation of lexical meaning.” See Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1983), 44, 79. For other interpretations of Stein’s work as postmodern indeterminacy, see Ellen E. Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism. (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1992); and Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy. 69 Cf. Hugh Silverman’s definition of phenomenology as a “non philosophy” in that it is “an elaboration of a lived, pre-objective philosophy.” See Silverman, Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 126. 70 Here I am indebted to Berman’s observation that hyperdialectic is a “nontotalizing movement of constant decentering, that is continual questioning,” in “The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,” 409. 71 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.

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72 Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Ohio: Ohio UP, 2004), 22. 73 See the NDT production at: , accessed January 2015. I want to thank Vanessa Mildenberg for reminding me of this production. 74 Adrienne Jean Fisher, “Dance Review: The Aspiration of Freedom,” i-DANZ: The Social Network Where Dancers Live (April 15, 2009), available at , accessed January 2015. 75 Ulla Haselstein also notes this “chiasma” in her reading of “If I Told Him” in “Stein’s Portraits of Matisse and Picasso,” New Literary History 34.4, Multicultural Essays (Autumn 2003): 737. 76 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248. 77 Ibid., 264. 78 Ibid., 139. 79 Claudia La Rocco, “The Fires of Youth on a Restless Night,” Dance Review: Nederlands Dans Theater II, in The New York Times (April 10, 2009), available at , accessed January 2015. 80 Silverman, “Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel,” 222. 81 Stanley Corngold, The Commentator’s Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1973), 27. 82 The opposite of “the speaking word,” Merleau-Ponty explains, is the “spoken word” (la parole parlée) (Ibid.), the standard and ready-made linguistic meaning of language in the world. An interesting analogy here is Stein’s distinction between “writing what you are writing” and “writing what you are going to be writing,” or “writing as it is written” and “writing as it was going to be written,” in Four in America (FIA 122, 130).

2

Picabia in Meditation Mia You

This is an introduction to Picabia In his introduction to the 1956 Yale University Press publication of Stanzas in Meditation, commonly known as the poem’s first edition, Donald Sutherland makes the surprising remark that “Gertrude Stein meant these lines of verse to be as attenuated and disembodied as the drawing of Francis Picabia—with whom a few of the stanzas are concerned—and who, she observed in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was in pursuit of the ‘vibrant line.’”1 Few commentators following Sutherland have pursued this association between Picabia and the Stanzas, and Sutherland himself appears ambivalent on the value of offering it. Despite Picabia’s long and dramatically varying career Sutherland does not elaborate on how exactly his drawings can be seen as attenuated or disembodied, nor give any indication of which drawings specifically he and Stein might mean; he also neglects to identify the particular stanzas that are concerned with the artist. Instead Sutherland proposes, “Whether Picabia often captured [the vibrant line] is a question, but a very good example of its capture would be the draughtsmanship of the Greek vase painter Exekias, if he were more familiar.”2 We feel a small pang for Picabia—the leap to Exekias is fairly stunning—but we might also understand, even sympathize, with Sutherland’s impulse. If we ever discuss the influence of painting on Stein’s poetics, we usually turn to those ready-to-wear masterpieces: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, cubism.3 Such comparisons add an extra luster to Stein’s work, and they help to expand both the size and patience of her audience. But Picabia is an even more controversial

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and dubious figure of the modernist vanguard than Stein. Does Stein really benefit from their association? Even she, in Everybody’s Autobiography, concedes that she “had known him for many years and had not cared for him,” because “he was too brilliant and he talked too much and he was too fatiguing, besides that I had not cared for his painting” (EA 58). She is even less generous in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, declaring that when she initially met Picabia in the 1910s, he “annoyed her with his incessantness and what she called the vulgarity of his delayed adolescence” (ABT 795). Even for Stein (who in the same book famously describes Matisse’s wife as looking like a horse) these comments seem harsh, but they serve, in part, to give greater credibility and poignancy to her eventual change of heart. This is the history she presents in Everybody’s Autobiography, when Stein asserts that by the early 1930s and the writing of Stanzas in Meditation, she and Picabia “have gotten to be very fond of each other. She is very much interested in his drawing and in his painting.” She even goes as far as saying, “I was not interested in anybody painting. Except Picabia” (100). Far stranger than Stein’s interest in Picabia is the particular trajectory of her interest. As mentioned earlier, Picabia is one of those problematic figures in twentieth-century art history—some dismiss his work as rubbish, and others elevate him as a radical genius. Only a handful of monographs on him exist, but even the most sympathetic of these seem to acknowledge that Picabia’s most important work comes from the 1910s and early 1920s, during the height of his collaborations with Marcel Duchamp and his engagement with the Dadaists.4 This early Picabia, if you buy the line, is an uncompromising destroyer of aesthetic expectations and conventions and a radical enemy to venerated art institutions—but by the 1930s, Picabia has transformed into something else. The later Picabia lived on a yacht along the southern coast of France, collected Rolls Royces, and made murals for wealthy women’s apartments.5 The later Picabia made art suggesting a suspicious appreciation for the aesthetic and figurative. This is not the Picabia avant-garde adherents would want for Stein, yet this is the one she chose. She advocated his work until her death, even helping him get the institutional recognition he once ridiculed and rejected, such as supporting Picabia’s election into the Legion d’honneur in 1933. Everybody’s Autobiography concludes, in fact, with Stein’s struggle to get Picabia’s work included in Paris’ 1937 World Exposition—an episode that hints

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at her lingering ambivalence to the quality of the work itself, but nonetheless makes absolutely clear his importance as an artist to her. This, I would say, is also how we must read Picabia’s presence in Stanzas in Meditation.

Picasso/Picabia We should recall here that, running parallel to the increased intimacy between Stein and Picabia, was the growing distance between Stein and her original “Spaniard,” Picasso.6 The ups and downs of their relationship are its own research field, but for our purposes, it suffices to say that circumstances put Stein on the lookout for a new creative conspirator, as well as a chance to reassert herself as an arbiter of modern art. For Stein in the early ’30s, Picabia was the new Picasso. Compare, for instance, Picabia’s portrait of Stein painted in the summer of 1933, just half a year after Stein wrote Stanzas in Meditation, to Picasso’s

Figure  2.1  Francis Picabia, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1933. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Permission from Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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famous portrait from 1906. Here is Stein voluminous against a bleak, mountainous backdrop, draped rather perplexingly in a revealing Roman tunic. This is a far cry from the compelling gravity and austerity of Picasso’s Stein, yet we find the genesis of both portraits framed under the same terms. In a postcard sent to Carl Van Vechten, Stein writes of the 1933 painting: “This is a portrait Picabia just made of me out of his head. I hope you like it” (emphasis mine).7 This immediately recalls Stein’s now legendary account of modeling for Picasso. According to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein posed for Picasso 80–90 times, until “[a]ll of a sudden one day Picasso painted out the whole head. I can’t see you any longer when I look, he said irritably. And so the picture was left like that” (ABT 713). Months later, “[t]he day he returned from Spain Picasso sat down and out of his head painted the head in without having seen Gertrude Stein again” (717, emphasis mine). Stein uses the same phrase, “out of his head,”8 to describe both Picasso’s and Picabia’s processes of creating her likeness, and interestingly both portraits mark significant stylistic turning points for the artists. For Picasso, Stein’s portrait is a harbinger of the primitivism of Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon and arguably helps set the artist on the road to cubism. For a Stein scholar, it is hard not to see Picabia as eager to follow Picasso’s lead, as he uses his own portrait of Stein as an opportunity, in the words of Maria Lluïsa Borràs, to declare his “search for simplicity and the utmost clarity” and his turn “in the direction of brutalism.”9 Borràs, in her comprehensive monograph on Picabia, calls the Stein portrait “the beginning of a new quest,” and we can only surmise that Picabia hoped Stein would be as instrumental in the success of this quest as she had been for Picasso during the cubist years.10

The beginning of a new quest We should not discount, however, that Stein and Picabia’s intimacy marked the beginning of a new quest for her as well—one that leads to new theorization of what modern art must do and, more specifically, establishes a set of terms with which we can articulate the attenuated and disembodied history of Stanzas in Meditation. While Sutherland offers that “a few of these stanzas are concerned” with Picabia, one particular episode squarely situates Picabia and his drawings at the Stanzas’ origin.

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In December 1932, just half a year before he painted Stein’s portrait, Picabia held an exposition of drawings at the Parisian gallery of Léonce Rosenberg. This marks another important reconciliation for Picabia: Rosenberg was an important supporter of cubism whom, in previous decades, Picabia had relentlessly and jealously mocked.11 Those who attended this exhibition would have been offered a small, pamphlet-sized catalogue listing the artworks on display. This catalogue also contains, as a textual “Preface” to the exhibition, fifty-three lines of verse by Stein accompanied by their French translation— executed by none other than Picabia’s old partner-in-crime, Duchamp. Now, a century of art history later, it is Duchamp and not Picabia who appears as the more plausible alternative to Picasso as the great inventor of twentieth-century art.12 That Duchamp undertook the task of translation is remarkable in and of itself, but even more remarkable is how loyal his translation appears to be. We see none of the irreverence and mischief we might expect from Rrose Sélavy; instead we find a fairly traditional attempt to translate the text, maintaining its ostensible semantic content and even approximating its lineation and its punctuation. Perhaps this accounts for why the translation has received little scholarly attention13 and only rarely been reproduced, those reproductions limited to French publications entirely devoted to Picabia’s work. Despite the prominence of the translator, it is an extraordinarily difficult text to locate.14 As for the original verse itself, Stein’s “Preface,” as it is simply named, features lines such as “This is an introduction to Picabia,” and “This is not a day to be away,” which give every indication that the poem was written for the particular occasion of Picabia’s exhibition. The “Preface” is even preceded by an epigraph by Picabia stating, “La vie n’aime pas les verres grossissants, c’est pour cela qu’elle m’a tendu la main” (“Life does not like magnifying glasses; it is for this that she gives me a hand”).15 By all appearances, Stein also lent a hand to Picabia; Picabia was the star of the show with Stein, Duchamp, and Rosenberg as his supporting players. But was Stein really willing to defer to Picabia, an artist for whom she had enormous affection but never included in her select list of geniuses?16 Toward the middle of her “Preface,” her “introduction to Picabia” suddenly slips into a persistent repetition of the word “I.” The last direct reference to Picabia seems to occur in line 24 (when Stein uses the pronoun “him”), which is just before the poem’s midpoint. From then onward Stein persistently describes what “I said,” “I was,” “I thought,” “I wish,” “I see,” “I

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Figure 2.2  First page of Gertrude Stein’s “Preface” from the catalogue for Exposition de dessins par Francis Picabia, Chez Léonce Rosenberg, December 1–24, 1932.

would have liked,” “I am,” and “I know.” Even more ungenerously, Stein repeats three times, “I would have liked to be the only one,” which she then satisfyingly resolves with, “Which I am.” Whether or not Stein comments directly on the exhibition and her, or her poem’s, status within it, the fact that her “Preface” veers away from the work of description (of saying something about Picabia and his art, which we would expect from an exhibition preface) and turns toward to the act of self-assertion is certainly remarkable. If we begin to research outside the exhibition catalogue in order to understand better the material within it, we discover that Stein’s conclusion, that she is ultimately “the only one,” bears surprising weight. Since we cannot experience the exhibition ourselves, the catalogue functions as the condensation of the occasion, the month-long event in the Parisian gallery, into a portable,

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printed souvenir. In its entirety, the catalogue consists of two cover pages, Stein’s “Preface,” its French translation, a list of the exhibited drawings’ titles, and reproductions of only two of the drawings. Stein’s verse and its translation by Duchamp claim a significant amount of space in the catalogue, and this observation becomes even more poignant with the realization that most of Picabia’s titles—the bulk of what else remains in the catalogue—no longer correspond with any surviving works. According to Borràs, “This exhibition consisted of 99 drawings, most of which had capricious, complicated titles and almost all of which were to be sold by public auction two years later under other titles.”17 William Camfield in his biography, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, writes that the drawings “had distinctive titles, but few of them were printed on the drawings themselves, and in multiple changes of ownership most of those titles have been lost.”18 The list of titles has, in the end, become a collection of emptied signifiers. Is there any hope of reconstructing this exhibition if we can’t even know which particular drawings were displayed? The two reproduced drawings underscore this point: they appear without titles, so they float disembodied from the printed list. We can only speculate which of the ninety-nine titles they once claimed as their own. One of the drawings is now known as Volupté, but this name does not appear on the catalogue list at all.

The vibrant line What the reproductions do indicate, however, is that the exhibited drawings come from Picabia’s recent “transparencies” period, which Camfield dates from 1928–32.19 According to Camfield’s rather succinct definition, the transparencies are “a style so named for its multiple layers of transparent images,” and Picabia experimented with this style in both drawing and in painting.20 These pictures involve various images superimposed upon each other; sometimes these images are disparate objects or motifs juxtaposed together, and sometimes they appear to be varying aspects of the same object, such as in Volupté, where the superimposed head and hands appear to be from the same woman depicted from thighs up in the background. Or is the woman actually in the foreground, with the head and hands behind her? It is difficult to determine what is in front or in back. Furthermore, if the superimposed images come from the same

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woman, then they must have been captured at different moments in time, as she stands in differing poses. The drawings offer no evident visual clues nor indicate a clear, structured progression in viewing that can tell us what happens first or what happens later, nor how much time passes in between. Clearly the appeal of the transparencies arises in part from their ability to depict space and time while maintaining ambiguity about position and order. Duchamp lauded the transparencies for producing “a third dimension without resorting to perspective,” and one could see how the transparencies are able to produce a sense of movement, which necessitates both space and time, without explicitly outlining or articulating that movement nor specifying how much or what kind of space and time are involved.21 An articulation of movement would effectively put an end to actual movement—to the constant, ongoing production of movement by the artwork—because then movement would be trapped within a prescribed shape. In other words, movement should not be represented but should instead emerge. Picabia explains in his own words: “My present feeling as regards aesthetics comes from the boredom produced by the sight of pictures that seem to me to be congealed on their immobile surfaces, far removed from anything human.”22 Using terms akin to Duchamp, he then continues: “This third dimension, which is not a product of chiaroscuro, these transparencies with their secret depth, enable me to express my inner intentions with a certain degree of verisimilitude. When I lay the foundation stone, I want it to remain under my picture and not on top of it.” In other words, Picabia wants to give his pictures room to move, but this room cannot be literalized through conventional formal strategies such as chiaroscuro and perspective. Instead, the room’s shape can be determined only through the various ways the picture itself seems to depart from or move against its two dimensional surface. My point may be clearer if we contrast the transparencies to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, created two decades earlier. I am not arguing that Picabia produces the superior or more successful artwork, but we might see how the motivation for the transparencies’ form derives from and attempts to resolve the problems articulated in Duchamp’s Nude. Stein herself makes this association when she writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in the passage that Sutherland references, “All his life Picabia has struggled to dominate and achieve” what she terms “the vibrant line.” She then goes as far to say that it was “this idea that conceived mathematically influenced Marcel Duchamp and produced his The Nude Descending the Staircase” (ABT 865,

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emphasis mine). According to Stein, this vibrant line “should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it” (ABT 865). In the case of the transparencies, this vibration is whatever occurs between superimpositions—a sensed, yet nonetheless implicit and undefined, movement connecting the different layers. As Stein writes in her more conventional preface to Picabia’s 1934 exhibition catalogue at New York’s Valentine Gallery, the artist “has achieved a transparence which is peculiarly a thing which has nothing to do with the surface seen.”23 However, the transparencies were more than just one of Picabia’s conceptual experiments. They signaled for Picabia a significant reevaluation of what art could be. Borràs describes this shift as “for the first time since his Impressionist period Picabia seemed to be consciously seeking to produce works of beauty.”24 It’s hard to imagine the bad boy of Dada getting swept up in the pursuit of beauty, but Camfield adds an even more surprising dimension to this period of work, observing that the transparencies are “characterized by pervasive moods of wistfulness and melancholy, and by extensive reference to art of the past.”25 Often Picabia derives the superimposed images from earlier artworks, especially those from Renaissance painters, such as Piero della Francesca and Sandro Botticelli. In Picabia’s previous works, any reference to art of the past usually came accompanied by a relentless tirade against it, but now he seems to have developed an artistic method that not only retrieves an image from the past but attempts to animate it, so that its movement, its life, appears ongoing in the present moment of perception and claims the possibility of continuing into the future. We could even say that he creates artworks that deny that such sequential, differentiated categories exist—there are only various moments in time simultaneously presented within a picture frame, equally open to and capable of moving in between having been experienced, being experienced, and going to be experienced.

Lend a hand or two interpretations This theorization of superimposition and simultaneity, as they are employed in Picabia’s transparencies, provides us with a heuristic framework with which we can save Picabia from progressive erasure in Stein’s verse. For those who

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think I make too much of the “Preface’s” claim that “I would have liked to be the only one,” as well as how Picabia’s artwork slips away from the catalogue and into forgotten history, consider the next manifestation of Stein’s “Preface” in print. The 53-line poem truly takes on a life of its own. During the 1930s, Picabia had an especially close relationship to Jacques-Henri Lévesque and Jean van Heeckeren and frequently contributed to their magazine Orbes. For this reason, Lévesque and Van Heeckeren decided to feature Picabia’s exhibition in the Winter 1932–3 issue of Orbes by printing Stein’s “Preface” alongside Duchamp’s translation.26 Extracted from the exhibition catalogue and placed within the magazine, Stein’s verse suddenly appears accompanied by whole new context: we discover that the verse is not merely an occasional poem, but in fact an excerpt of what is now considered Stein’s great achievement in poetic abstraction, what John Ashbery has called Stein’s “hymn to possibility” and Lyn Hejinian has described as “written in a language of ‘unlimited returns.’”27 Here in Orbes, Stein’s title, “Preface,” is now changed to “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation [sic].”28 For most readers today, Picabia’s catalogue probably would be less remarkable for being a souvenir of the exhibition than for being the first known appearance of Stanzas in Meditation in print—the Stanzas were written predominantly in the second half of 1932 and completed just a month before the exhibition opened.29 Within the exhibition catalogue and with the generic title “Preface,” the text appears to have been written specifically for the purpose of introducing Picabia and giving its readers some sort of insight into Picabia’s work. Printed in Orbes, alongside other poems and other autonomous forms of writing, and with the title “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation,” the text is situated within a larger poetic project that does not necessarily have much to do with Picabia or his exhibition at all. If this “introduction to Picabia” only occurs in Stanza 69, what happens in Stanzas 1–68? For how long do the Stanzas go on after this one? Sixty-nine stanzas also indicate a fairly long work; how deep within this work is the Picabia stanza buried? Here the poem unequivocally claims pride of place. Previously, it was the preface to the exhibition, but now the exhibition is literally a footnote to the poem.30 Even Duchamp’s translation, which was undoubtedly greatly motivated by his longstanding friendship with Picabia, is claimed overtly by Stein’s verse. The translation also bears a new title, from “Préface” to “Stance 69 des Stances de Meditation,” and we have to wonder if Duchamp himself

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made the title’s translation, or if it was a decision made by either Stein or Orbes’ editorial board. Did Duchamp deliberately place this new title over his French lines? Did he directly participate in transforming his one translation into two different pieces of writing, each maneuvered to better serve the work of two different artists? The Orbes printing of “Stanza 69” also includes Picabia’s epigraph, “La vie n’aime pas les verres grossissants, c’est pour cela qu’elle m’a tendu la main,” but unsurprisingly, it too is carefully positioned in service of Stein’s poem. In the exhibition catalogue, Picabia’s text appears above Stein’s verse, even above the title “Preface.” It could be read as an epigraph to the entire catalogue or even as an independent piece of writing. Clearly this is how the editors of Picabia’s collected writings read it, as they include the single sentence entirely on its own, attributed to the exhibition catalogue but without any mention of Stein’s poem, in Francis Picabia: Ecrits, 1921–1953 et posthumes.31 The sentence even comes titled “(Sans titre).” We never think of epigraphs as having their own titles, but in this case, for whatever reason, the editors were impelled to explain that Picabia’s text lacked one. In Orbes, on the other hand, Picabia’s text appears entirely embedded within Stein’s work. The epigraph—and it truly is an epigraph now—appears under the English title, “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation.” It does not recur again under the French title, in the context of Duchamp’s translation. In the catalogue, the epigraph appears before both texts and therefore could be seen as pertinent to both. In Orbes, however, the epigraph is subsidiary only to Stein’s writing, and the translation engages with only Stein’s writing and not at all with Picabia’s. In this respect the epigraph is extraordinarily à propos. “La vie n’aime pas les verres grossissants, c’est pour cela qu’elle m’a tendu la main.” “Life does not like magnifying glasses; it is for this that she gives me a hand.” In French, the phrase “tendre la main à quelqu’un” commonly means “to lend someone a hand.” In other words, it is a figure of speech that refers to helping out or assisting another person. I think that in the context of an artist commenting on his own creative endeavor, however, the phrase could take on an entirely different meaning. If “tendre la main” means “to lend a hand” in the epigraph, the hand, “la main,” belongs to life, “la vie.” Life offers her hand to Picabia. But what if we read “la main” as belonging to the artist himself, referring back to the age-old motif of “the artist’s hand?” In this instance, the epigraph would

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be saying that life literally gives Picabia a hand, a hand to draw or to paint. Life gives Picabia a hand so that, through his art, through what he makes with his hand, Picabia can address or even resolve life’s grievance against magnifying glasses. And why does life dislike magnifying glasses? Here Picabia may revive his standard stance as an anti-representational, antinaturalistic artist. In her essay “Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp” Picabia’s first wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, summarizes this stance as follows: I was well prepared to hear Picabia speak of revolutionary transformations in pictorial vision, and to accept the hypothesis of a painting endowed with a life of its own, exploiting the visual field solely for the sake of an arbitrary and poetic organization of forms and colors, free from the contingent need to represent or transpose the forms of nature as we are accustomed to see them.32

In this light, I read Picabia’s epigraph as a metaphorical manifesto: art should not be a closer or better look at reality, which is what magnifying glasses offer, but rather the creative and even arbitrary work of the artist’s hand upon reality. Art should not show what already exists; it should assert instead the artist’s defiantly generative will. This is what the artist can offer to life: to create form out of empty space, to animate the inanimate, to invent new life out of his head. Picabia’s work need not provide a good or successful representation, because representation is not the point—the artwork does not represent something found in nature but attempts to be alive like nature. Despite their ostensibly realist rendering, the figures in Picabia’s transparencies do not function as signifiers but themselves come to be living referents. Sutherland offers an account of the “vibrant line” that aligns with these terms: “in a stanza concerning Picabia [Stein] says she told him to forget men and women— meaning that the line should become so intensely its own entity and sustained by an energy or ‘vibration’ now intrinsic to it, that it could disengage itself from the character of the figures it began by bounding or delineating or expressing.”33 This theory of art arising from Picabia’s work certainly found a believer in Stein, even if the work itself occasionally did not. Stein writes: “She is now convinced that although he has in a sense not a painter’s gift he has an idea that has been and will be of immense value to all time. She calls him the Leonardo da Vinci of the movement. And it is true, he understands and invents everything” (ABT 795).

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Beginning again and again What initially appears as life lending a hand to Picabia ultimately concludes with Picabia using his hands in service of life. This ambivalent interpretation of “tendre la main” could also easily describe the peculiar dynamic between Picabia and Stein.34 By the time Stanzas in Meditation was printed in its entirety by Yale University Press in 1956 (a decade after Stein’s death), readers might have been hard pressed to remember how Stein lent a hand to Picabia two decades earlier. As previously discussed, Sutherland prefaces these stanzas by acknowledging that a few of them “are concerned with” Picabia’s drawings, but he nonetheless neglects to mention how deeply entwined the Stanzas were with Picabia’s work at their very first appearance in print. Picabia’s exhibition has faded from the margins of the immense, 164 stanza-long text: both the epigraph and Duchamp’s translation are gone, as is any note indicating that the Picabia stanza once served as the preface to an exhibition catalogue. Further, we find that even the Orbes title, “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation,” has been rendered obsolete in the Yale edition, which is based on manuscripts and typescripts given by Stein to the Yale Library. Stanzas of Meditation is of course Stanzas in Meditation, and Stanza 69 is in fact Stanza LXXI within Part V, the final part of the five-part poem. If we count from the very beginning of the Stanzas, the Picabia stanza is actually Stanza 152; it is even deeper within the long poem than we initially thought.35 I want to clarify here that I am not arguing that the Picabia stanza was written separately and specifically for the exhibition, as a conventional occasional poem, and only later placed within Stanzas in Meditation.36 Part of this particular stanza’s interest, given its print history, is precisely that it can function simultaneously as an independent occasional poem and as part of Stein’s longer poetic project. What is generally assumed as the great “abstract achievement” of the Stanzas should not keep us from accounting for why Picabia is one of the rare proper nouns identifiable as an actual person in the Stanzas, and why Stein might include lines such as, “This is an introduction to Picabia,” and “This is not a day to be away.” Part of Stein’s achievement with the Picabia stanza is its sly play on the occasional poem; we see that, depending on its context, the stanza can speak to a particular day or to the everyday. This is verse created to be both for an occasion and occasional—it dances

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between situation and abstraction; between a stanza, in the sense of a room, and a meditation. In “A Common Sense,” her essay on the Stanzas, Hejinian writes: “What we call the present is the point of emergence of each thing into everything, the terrain where the constant passage into relations, the coming of things to life, is occurring. This is the point at which Stein situated her task of ‘beginning again and again.’”37 Between the exhibition catalogue, Orbes, and its subsequent publications as part of the longer Stanzas in Meditation, the Picabia stanza begins again and again. The stanza actually begins with the line “There was once upon a time a place where they went from time to time” (SM 241). The stanza itself is the place that joins together a specific “once upon a time” and the general “from time to time.” We generally think of Stanzas in Meditation as deliberately anti-referential, and the mention of Picabia in Part V, Stanza LXXI appears as an obvious example of a name extricated from its reference, of a signifier severed from its signified. However, the varying appearances of this stanza in print offer a differing conception of how Stein’s abstraction works. Within the 164-stanza poem, as it was printed by Yale in 1956 and as it has been printed thereafter, the name “Picabia” now functions as a marker of the various forms in which this stanza has appeared, including those embodying an entrenched engagement with a particular artist and his work. We saw how elements from the catalogue have been subsumed into the body of Stein’s verse in Orbes, and we could say that, subsequently, the same happens to Orbes’ epigraph, footnote, and translation—they have receded behind the complete Stanzas in Meditation and been reduced down to just the name “Picabia.” Rather than describing this process as a progressive eradication of Picabia’s presence in the poem, however, I would say that the name “Picabia” is, as Stein herself writes in the stanza: “This is whatever is that they could not be there” (SM 241). The name “Picabia,” this exceptional instance of an identifiable proper noun, connects the stanza’s various manifestations and sends its readers back to them. It is the point in common for a series of superimpositions, and drawn through these points is Stein’s own “vibrant line”—not an apparent line of text spread across the page, but an abstract line formed from the movement between pages, between various manifestations. Both Stein (ABT 865) and Sutherland speak of the “disembodied,” and I would argue that the Picabia stanza is “disembodied” not because it negates any exterior reference, but because

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it refuses to be trapped within a single, stagnant form. It is “disembodied” because its true life occurs between its various embodiments, how it moves between these embodiments. Stein’s vibrant line, as in Picabia’s transparencies, pushes the poem off the two-dimensional page as it is constituted by the straight black lines running across it. We can see the vibrant line at work not just through the stanza’s print history but even within the stanza itself. Stein writes into the stanza the possibility of movement of a constantly unfolding and reorienting poetic form not bound by its visible horizontal lines. At first glance, Stein’s lineation is far from revelatory; line breaks consistently coincide with what clearly appears to be the end of a phrase, almost always marked by a period. “There was once upon a time a place where they went from time to time.” Break. “I think better of this than that.” Break. In the rare exceptions to this rule, the line break nonetheless occurs at an obvious syntactical pause: “When I first knew him I said” break “Which was it that I did not say I said” (Lines 18–19, SM 241). These appear to be standard end-stopped lines, and in viewing them as such, we might expect to move across Stein’s poem in the direction that standard verse lines tend to push us: left to right, down to the next line, and again left to right. In the process of reading the stanza, however, we encounter a different kind of transitional device than the line break, a device that connects lines and produces a movement between them but that doesn’t dictate the direction in which they, and their readers, must move. Consider Lines 29–30: “Of course nor why I thought. / That is enough not to have given.” We could try to comprehend how “That is enough not to have given” logically follows “Of course nor why I thought,” but more compelling, I think, is to see the constellation of resemblances entwining the lines together (SM 242). The “ou” travels between “course,” “thought,” and “enough,” connecting the words. Similarly we have “nor” and “not,” but then these graphic resemblances turn toward an auditory one, with “not” linking to “thought.” The movement between these words need not go left to right and top to bottom, but can jump over a line, turn back within the line, and even race up the page across several lines. In fact, these resemblances are only seen retroactively, and so we continuously find ourselves turning away from the “natural” flow of the line as we come to realize what we could call the poem’s various motifs. These motifs emerge from the “arbitrary and poetic organization” of language’s plastic elements, giving the

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text a life of its own. This is how Stein, to appropriate her own description of Picabia, induces a vibration in the lines forming her stanza. As in Picabia’s transparencies, the disembodiment of Stein’s stanza circumvents the conception of time as a linear progression. The status of Duchamp’s translation in relation to the Stanzas is another case in point. We generally think of a translation as coming after the original poem, but the first readers of Stein’s stanza encountered it simultaneously with its translation. In fact, through the exhibition catalogue, Duchamp’s translation appears even before anything labeled as Stanzas in Meditation appears in print. We could also argue, however, that the poem does not progress toward, or ever end up with, a definitive and final form at all. We think of the posthumously published, 164stanza version of Stanzas in Meditation as the final and complete poem, but this version is based on the manuscripts and typescripts Stein deposited at Yale for safekeeping. Couldn’t we also consider the manuscripts and typescripts as, in fact, the preliminary versions of the poem, with the subsequent printings (such as in Picabia’s catalogue or in Orbes) during Stein’s lifetime to be representative of the various final forms Stein thought possible for the poem? Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, in their preface to the recent Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, also proffer this vision of the poem, stating that their edition presents a “versioning” rather than “editing” of the Stanzas’ variant texts.38 Additionally, they underscore that the poem, on many levels, “refuses powerfully the ideal of a singular, certain choice.”39 Nonetheless, and understandably for practical purposes, their edition grants primary authority to the 164-stanza Yale manuscript and then focuses on charting the textual variations within its lines. I want to argue even more emphatically that no single “corrected” edition of the Stanzas can exist, as each previous manifestation of the stanzas in print—including the particular context of their presentation and the particular arrangement and ordering of the stanzas—offers a necessary vision of the poem. And these multiple visions and revisions taken collectively reveal that Stein’s own process of editing—or, perhaps better, the possibilities of editing she inscribed into both the verse and its history—is instrumental to the general conceptual and poetic project of Stanzas in Meditation and demands further examination. Take, for example, the publication of six stanzas in the February 1940 issue of Poetry.40 The magazine calls them “Stanzas in Meditation I-VI,” and they are

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indeed labeled in order, from I to II to III and so on. However, these stanzas carry completely different numbers in Yale’s Stanzas in Meditation manuscript.41 They do not even follow the order in which they appear through the Yale manuscript; regardless, Stein, when arranging for these stanzas’ publication, must have felt they could be rearranged and renumbered and, further, that they could stand as a cohesive unit apart from the other stanzas.42 A precedent for Poetry’s rearrangement of stanzas occurred two years earlier, when Stein published three other stanzas in the 1938 edition of Muse Anthology of Modern Poetry.43 These are also numbered from I to III here but actually are embedded throughout the Yale Stanzas.44 We also find at the very end of Poetry, under its “Notes on Contributors,” that the “poems in this issue are from a sequence of Two Hundred Stanzas in Meditation which will be deposited in a special collection at the Yale University Library.”45 Stein herself mentions the same number in Everybody’s Autobiography, when she says of Bertie Abdy, a friend and potential publisher, that “he is very fond of me and he is going to print for me the two hundred Stanzas of Meditation [sic] I have written and he has tried four different printers already but printing like everything is something of which there is more bad than good of that is he perfectly certain” (EA 309, emphasis mine). This insistence on the number 200 is peculiar, as only 164 stanzas appear to exist. Is 200 merely a number of approximation? Or was it Stein’s original plan to compile a full 200, which she never completed? This would contradict the seemingly definitive claim of the poem’s final line, “These stanzas are done” (SM 249), but we might consider the circumstances under which the number 200 appears. In Stein’s account, Abdy wants to print all 200 stanzas but keeps having trouble with printers. Meanwhile, Poetry’s notes curiously describe the 200 stanzas as soon to be “deposited in a special collection at the Yale University Library” (emphasis mine), rather than published. In both cases, the full 200 stanzas don’t seem very likely to appear in print anytime soon, and now history tells us that Abdy’s endeavor does ultimately fall through.46 Perhaps we can read the number 200 as, in fact, a strategic abstraction. Perhaps Stein uses the number 200 to signal the impossibility of Stanzas in Meditation ever being set permanently and finally in print. Perhaps the promise of 200 stanzas gives the existing 164 stanzas just enough space to stretch—so that, even altogether, they constitute one form of the poem but not the ultimate

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form. We can read the last line, “These stanzas are done,” in a strictly literal sense: these stanzas are done, they have been made, but Stanzas in Meditation is not concluded. The poem is completed incomplete, which sets it free to be continually reshaped and constantly in movement.

Not to live in its frame With Steinian revisioning turning to revisionism, “[t]he history of painting is this,” she declares in Everybody’s Autobiography, Ever since Cezanne everybody who has painted has wanted to have a feeling of movement inside the painting not a painting of a thing moving but the thing painted having inside it the existence of moving . . . I am always hoping to have it happen the picture to be alive inside in it, in that sense not to live in its frame. (EA 321)

Stein then concludes, “Picabia I think will do it, I do think he will do it” (EA 322). In other words: not Cézanne, not Matisse, not Picasso, but Picabia. Stein’s creative engagement with Picabia in the 1930s leads her to articulate a very particular theory of modern art, and, because this is Stein, part of this theory’s appeal is that she sees its possible realization in her own work. In Stanzas in Meditation, the thing written has inside it the existence of moving, and we have seen how the Picabia stanza, in particular, refuses to live in a single frame, instead finding life between various ones. “Naturally I have been mixed up a lot with pictures,” Stein adds to the end of her history of painting, but she might as well say: what Picabia has tried to do and perhaps will do, these Stanzas have done (EA 322). My thanks to Isabelle Alfandary, Charles Altieri, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Lyn Hejinian, Sarah Posman, Laura Schultz, Emöke Simon, and especially Hugo van der Velden for their comments and assistance in writing this essay.

Notes 1 Donald Sutherland, “Preface: The Turning Point,” in Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, 1929–1933, The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New Haven: Yale UP, 1956), xii.

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2 Sutherland, “Preface,” xii. 3 Cécile Debray’s essay, “Gertrude Stein and Painting: From Picasso to Picabia,” from the exhibition catalogue The Steins Collect (San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2011) provides a welcome alternative trajectory to Stein’s engagement with modernist painting, with its concluding section offering an overview of Stein and Picabia’s friendship in the 1930s. 4 George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) provides an interesting study of Picabia’s work during this period, capturing both his brilliance and his fatiguing incessantness. 5 In 1929, gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg commissioned Picabia to make a series of paintings, in the transparencies style, to decorate his wife’s apartments (Picabia, Lettres à Léonce Rosenberg 1929–1940, ed. Christian Derouet (Paris: Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 2000), 17). Picabia clearly didn’t mind the work, nor the extra money, as he writes to Stein in 1934: “Have you not got any American friend who would be prepared to risk a few dollars on letting me decorate his studio? It would be a dream for me to be able to work in peace and do an important work” (quoted in Borràs, Picabia, 380). 6 Calling Picabia a “Spaniard” is misleading, as he had a French mother and lived most of his life in France. His father, however, was Spanish-Cuban, and this was enough for Stein to consider him among the “Spanish” painters: “[Picabia] said that the show that I described where my brother first saw Picassos . . . where Picasso and another Spaniard showed together the other Spaniard whose name everybody has forgotten, Picabia says there were three Spaniards there not two and that he was the third one” (EA 44). 7 The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten: I, 1913–1935; II, 1935–1946, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 270. Debray, who outlines Stein’s consideration of photography as an important influence on Picabia’s work, writes that this portrait evokes “an old portrait of Gertrude in Italy sitting cross-legged on a stone table like a Buddha” (“Gertrude Stein and Painting: From Picasso to Picabia,” 234). I think another likely inspiration would be George Platt Lynes’ 1931 photograph of Stein at Bilignin (where Picabia and his wife occasionally visited her), sitting in profile with the French Alps as background. 8 We should recall that the Autobiography was written in 1932, just a year before Picabia painted Stein’s portrait and Stein sent her postcard to Van Vechten. 9 Maria Lluïsa Borràs and Francis Picabia, Picabia (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 378, 343. 10 Borràs, Picabia, 343. 11 Even as of 1924, Picabia published an essay entitled “L’Art moderne” skewering Rosenberg for his appreciation and promotion of Fernand Leger (L’Ere Nouvelle,

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12

13

14

15 16

17 18

Gertrude Stein in Europe 5 aôut 1924, p. 2; see also Picabia, Ecrits: 1921–1953 et posthumes, ed. Olivier Revault d’Allonnes and Dominique Bouissou (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1978), 147–9)). His sentiments toward Rosenberg shifted quickly once Rosenberg showed interest in his work, and in 1930 Picabia held an important exhibition of transparencies paintings in Rosenberg’s gallery, preceding this exhibition of drawings. See The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) for a series of essays examining Duchamp’s lasting legacy on twentieth-century art. Additionally, Marjorie Perloff has written significantly on the parallels between Stein and Duchamp’s experimental work. See especially “Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp” (Forum for Modern Language Studies 32.2 (1996): 137–54) and 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Blackwell, 2002). Renée Riese Hubert’s “Gertrude Stein and the Making of Frenchmen” (SubStance 18.2 (1989): 71–92) makes an exception, by devoting a paragraph to analyzing Duchamp’s translation within her broader overview of how Stein has been translated into French. In her assessment, “Duchamp seemingly manifests his understanding of the text,” but the “French gravitates toward a more intellectual statement than the original, losing along the way Stein’s subtle search of self ” (85). Beyond the 1932 exhibition catalogue, I have only come across Duchamp’s translation printed in the almost equally rare Winter 1932–3 issue of Orbes. More recently, it has been printed in the exhibition catalogue for the Picabia retrospective held at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (Francis Picabia, ed. Jean-Hubert Martin and Hélène Seckel (Paris: Centre National d’Art et de Culture/George Pompidou/Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1976)) and as an appendix to the selected correspondence between Picabia and Rosenberg, Francis Picabia: Lettres à Léonce Rosenberg 1929–1940, ed. Christian Derouet (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 2000). Both of the recent printings are French monographs on Picabia and therefore might easily be missed by Stein scholars. Gertrude Stein, “Preface,” Exposition de dessins par Francis Picabia (Paris: Léonce Rosenberg, 1932). In his biography of Stein, Mellow quotes a letter from Stein to Mabel Dodge recounting her initial impression of Picabia: “I like him. He has no genius but he has a genuinely constructive intelligence and solid harmony” (Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), 191, emphasis mine). Borràs, Picabia, 343. William A Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life, and Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 234n46.

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19 Ironically, Picabia’s 1933 portrait of Stein marks his move away from the transparencies. 20 Camfield, Francis Picabia, 229. 21 Duchamp quoted in Borràs, Picabia, 337. 22 Picabia quoted in Borràs, Picabia, 340. 23 Stein quoted in Sarah Wilson, Francis Picabia: Accommodations of Desire (New York: Kent, 1989), 13. 24 Borràs, Picabia, 337. 25 Camfield, Francis Picabia, 229. 26 Gertrude Stein, “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation,” Orbes 4 (Winter 1932–3): 64–6 and Gertrude Stein, “Stance 69 des Stances de Meditation,” trans. Marcel Duchamp, Orbes 4 (Winter 1932–3): 65–7. 27 John Ashbery, “The Impossible,” in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael J. Hoffman, 104–7 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), 105; Lyn Hejinian, “A Common Sense,” in The Language of Inquiry, 355–82 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 378. 28 Stein, “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation,” Orbes, 65. Some of the publication history discussed here is also noted in Appendix A and B of the recently published Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, ed. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2012). 29 Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923– 1934 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003), 273. 30 The footnote, located beneath the first page of Stein’s poem and printed in a smaller font, reads: “Ce texte constitue la préface du Catalogue de l’ .” 31 Francis Picabia, Écrits: 1921–1953 et posthumes, ed. Olivier Revault d’Allonnes and Dominique Bouissou (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1978), 226. 32 Quoted in, The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 1981, 256. 33 Sutherland, “Preface,” xii. 34 We might recall that just a couple of years earlier, Stein fell out with Georges Hugnet over her “adaptation” of his Enfances. Stein wanted her work printed alongside Hugnet’s as a poem in its own right, whereas Hugnet wanted to clarify that it was a translation. Stein was not willing to defer, and when the poems were printed together in 1931 in Pagany, Stein mockingly titled hers “Poem Pritten on Pfances of George Hugnet.” Eventually she affirmed the poem’s independence by changing its name to Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded and printing it on its own through Plain Edition.

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35 In Appendix C of Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, Hollister and Setina meticulously outline the numerical discrepancies within the manuscript and typescripts at Yale and note that in Part V, the manuscript actually falls two behind at Stanza LVI due to repeated numbers (SM 267). This might account for why Stanza 69 later becomes Stanza LXXI, although it still remains unclear why Stein chose not to give any indication of the previous four parts of her long poem while printing the stanza as “Stanza 69 from the Stanzas of Meditation.” 36 In particular, the thorough investigation of the Yale manuscript and typescripts by the editors of the new Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, as well as Ulla E. Dydo’s meticulously researched timeline for the poem’s composition (see “How to Read Gertrude Stein: The Manuscript of ‘Stanzas in Meditation,’” TEXT 1 (1981): 271–30 and Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923–1934), offers no indication that this particular stanza was written separately from the other stanzas nor that it was ever considered not part of what became Stanzas in Meditation. 37 Hejinian, “A Common Sense,” 373. 38 Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, “Preface,” Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, viii. 39 Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, “Preface,” Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, xi. 40 Gertrude Stein, “Stanzas in Meditation I-VI,” Poetry LV. V (February 1940): 229–35. 41 Poetry’s Stanza I is actually the Yale manuscript’s Stanza I of Part II; Stanza II is Part IV, Stanza IV; Stanza III is Part II, Stanza II; Stanza IV is Part V, Stanza LXXXI; Stanza V is Part V, Stanza LXXXII; and Stanza VI is Part V, Stanza LXXXIII. The manuscript’s numbering is consistent with that of the 1956 edition of Stanzas in Meditation. 42 In his preface, Sutherland says of the Stanzas that “only the most intrepid reader should try to read them at the beginning and read through consecutively. If read at random, as one may read the Old Testament or In Memoriam, they yield more readily, or so they have to me . . . they are better read at random, because one of the delights of rambling about in them is encountering very fine aphorisms” (xix–xx). 43 Gertrude Stein, “Stanzas in Meditation I-III,” Muse: Anthology of Modern Poetry (New York: Carlyle Straub, 1938), 839. 44 In Muse, “Stanza I” is the Yale manuscript’s Part III, Stanza XIII; “Stanza II” is Part II, Stanza XIII; and “Stanza III” is Part III, Stanza XV. Here the manuscript’s numbering differs slightly from the 1956 Stanzas in Meditation, where the three stanzas are Part III, Stanza XII; Part II, Stanza XIII; and Part III, Stanza XIV. Incidentally, the edition of Muse Anthology referenced here, published by Carlyle

Picabia in Meditation Straub in New York, is the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Edition, “presented in honor of the literary achievements of the foremost poet, author, and critic this country has the honor to acclaim.” One of the more notable exchanges in The Duchamp Effect, between Benjamin Buchloh and T. J. Clark, arises from the suggestion that Duchamp “was the Edgar Allan Poe of the twentieth century” (Buskirk and Nixon 3, 225). 45 Poetry LV. V (February 1940): 286. 46 Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, “Appendix A: Publication History,” in Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, 259.

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Sitwell Edith Sitwell: Stein and Sitwell in Echo Franziska Gygax

Gertrude Stein’s phrase “[t]he difference is spreading” has become a key term to describe her artistic agenda, with its emphasis on the endless and continuous modifications that are at work when we use language (TB 11). In spite of this creative and powerful notion of difference, and différance, the issue of similarity is as crucial in Stein’s work. Stein’s innovative use of language demonstrates that the process of composing with words, creating meaning and sound, is as much dependent on similarity as it is on difference.1 Stein’s engagement with portraiture, moreover, demanded she tackle the mimetic challenge: how to create in writing someone like real? A third dimension of “binding together” in many of Stein’s literary portraits of persons concerns the dialogue these set up between, on the one hand, the person portrayed and what we may associate with him or her, and, on the other, between that person and the portraitist. This chapter explores the ways in which these dialogic portraits negotiate the shifting balance between similarity and difference regarding the relationship of portraitist and portrayed. The dialogue is constructed in different ways, and, as I will argue, provides insights into the complex dynamics between the two parties involved. Already in Stein’s monumental The Making of Americans the narrator is obsessed with descriptions of similarities between different people, yet here the attempt to categorize people according to similar traits leads the narrator to disappear behind a non-identifiable authority of “some” and “any one.”2 In her function as portraitist, by contrast, we often learn more about Stein than about the one portrayed. Since a number of Stein’s portraits depict

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European artists, the dialogue between portraitist and the one portrayed throws light on her relationship with her fellow artists and on her role as an American artist in Europe. Among those portraits the second one of Picasso (“If I Told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” of 1923) is the most widely discussed. It explores Stein’s position as an expatriate woman writer vis-à-vis the European artistic genius she had first portrayed circa 1910–11. I want to compare the 1923 Picasso portrait to Stein’s portrait of Edith Sitwell, which was written in 1925. In the course of the Picasso portrait the one portrayed gradually disappears to make room for the portraitist. We know that there were tensions in Stein’s friendship with Picasso, and his notion of masculinity must have been challenging, if not disturbing, for Stein. Barbara Will has commented on Stein’s preoccupation with the position of the woman artist with regard to the male genius, concluding that in her second portrait of Picasso, Stein, with the seemingly endless repetition of the pronoun “he,” performs an “act of deflation, of emptying out the referential act at the moment of describing ‘genius.’”3 In “Sitwell Edith Sitwell,” which explores the relationship between Stein and the British avant-garde writer, by contrast, one witnesses the gradual composition of a portrait presenting two women writers who have a lot in common. At the core of Stein’s portrait of Edith Sitwell is the unity of two women who were aware of their crucial role as experimental writers. It does not emphasize the portraitist’s preeminent position, but instead focuses on the similarities between Stein and Sitwell and refers to a shared artistic program of the modernist avant-garde. Furthermore, the portrait itself performs speech acts of similarity and simulacrum that are characteristic of the way in which Stein conceived of language: words used by the modern poet create an abstract pattern as in a visual representation.4 Sitwell’s description of Stein’s poetic approach to language hits the mark and reads like an anticipation of Language poetry in its emphasis on the abstract and visual patterns of words5: What may appear difficult is the habit of forming abstract patterns in words. We have long been accustomed to abstract patterns in pictorial art, but nobody to my knowledge has ever gone so far in making abstract patterns in words as the modernist poet has . . . But I can understand that the person who does not realize the necessity of cultivating all the possibilities of words

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as a medium—of understanding that medium—may be puzzled.  .  . Miss Gertrude Stein . . . is an admirable example of the case in point.6

Both Sitwell and Stein were aware of their difficult position as writers producing texts that were not only called unreadable by a general public, but even by other modernist writers, although Sitwell’s texts reached a wider audience than Stein’s in the years 1922 to 1927.7 Sitwell’s reviews of Stein’s Geography and Plays mirror her difficulties with her fellow poet’s texts: “I hope I shall not be regarded as a reactionary, but I am bound to say that I prefer words, when collected into a sentence, to convey some sense. And Miss Stein’s sentences do not always convey any sense—not even a new one.”8 In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas we learn of Stein’s admiration for Sitwell. When Sitwell visited Stein in Paris in 1924, Stein, speaking through Alice Toklas “delighted in the delicacy and completeness of her understanding of poetry” (ABT 889). Marjorie Perloff, in her account of this meeting between Stein and Sitwell, interprets Stein’s praise as a mere response to Sitwell’s admiration.9 Perloff is rather critical in her discussion of Sitwell, and does not consider her to be equal to Stein. Although it is accurate that Stein does not comment on Sitwell’s work and only mentions her special understanding of poetry in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I do not quite agree with Perloff ’s harsh judgment of Sitwell’s Stein-inspired “Jodelling Song,” which she calls “one-dimensional” and which does not allow “free play.”10 My discussion of both Stein’s portrait of Sitwell and Sitwell’s “Jodelling Song” reaches different conclusions. Furthermore, I will focus on the specific ways in which Stein’s language alludes to this connecting bond between the two women and to a playful and even erotic attraction. Julia Kristeva’s insistence on the crucial role of the semiotic can be used to explore Stein’s radical challenge of referential meaning. Word play, (maternal) rhythms, and melodies of language are considered to refer to the pre-oedipal phase, thus excluding the paternal that is representative of the symbolic, and consequently disrupting meaning and language. My reading of Stein’s portrait of Picasso also addresses issues of similarity and difference, but neither similarity nor difference create such a close bond between the portraitist and the portrayed, as is the case in the Sitwell portrait. On the contrary, in “If I Told Him,” Picasso gradually disappears.

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Stein and Picasso: If I told him, he would not like it Both the second Picasso and the Sitwell portrait belong to Stein’s so-called second-phase portraits, which besides “listening” and “talking” also included “looking” as the three main activities at work in the composition of a literary portrait.11 In “Portraits and Repetition” Stein comments: “[A]fter all I listened and talked but that was not all I did in knowing at any present time when I was stating anything what anything was. I was also looking, and that could not be entirely left out” (LIA 301). Yet, Stein also becomes aware of essential risks and problems of engaging with looking: “I began to wonder at at about this time just what one saw when one looked at anything really looked at anything” (LIA 303). Vision, or looking, is crucial with respect to Picasso and to the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Looking at the visual structure of one of Stein’s written portraits, one notices visual resemblances between words before exploring content. Looking at words and recognizing visual resemblances implies a materialist approach to words that evokes the idea of a portrait to be looked at. Again in “Portraits and Repetition” Stein elaborates on the relation between perceiving something and the specific use of words for it. Her awareness of the inconsistency and arbitrariness of words is reminiscent of de Saussure’s concept of the word as an arbitrary sign. Stein raises both linguistic and philosophical questions about the potential of language and implicitly refers to the complex issue of signifier and signified: I became more and more excited about how words which were the words that made whatever I looked at look like itself were not the words that had in them any quality of description .  .  . And the thing that excited me so very much at that time and still does is that the words or words that make what I looked at be itself were always words that to me very exactly related themselves to that thing the thing at which I was looking, but as often as not had as I say nothing whatever to do with what any words would do that described that thing. (LIA 303)

Stein’s analysis of the process of choosing words to describe something or somebody highlights the arbitrariness of the relation between the words and who or what they are meant to describe. Stein’s continuous investigation of the limits and creative potentials of language led her to the insight that even if she put together words for their material characteristics rather than their

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meaning, there was no escaping the creation of meaning. As she mentions in the “Transatlantic Interview”: “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word . . . I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense” (PGS 18).12 “If I Told Him” is indeed not a mere hopscotch of words to be looked at, but sheds light on Stein’s relationship to Picasso. The portrait begins with the introductory question “If I told him would he like it. . . . would Napoleon . . .” uttered by the first-person speaker, and raises the issue of power relations: the speaker implies that she knows something that he may not necessarily like, thus alluding to possible criticism (PP 21).13 The male person addressed at the beginning of the portrait may be Picasso or Napoleon, a potential equation that finally disappears when the pronouns “I” and “they” take over, and “he” disappears. The intended comparison between “Napoleon” and “he,” alluding to power and control, is nevertheless striking: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him. (PP 21)

The use of the first-person pronoun “I” suggests a dialogue between the speaker and the male subject and/or Napoleon, and yet the phrasing of the question with the conditional implies a kind of monologic inquiry, that is the questions are addressed to the speaker herself. The many repetitions of words and sounds (e.g., “If I told him” and “Napoleon”) and alliterations express resemblance and similarity on the one hand and construct a dialogic relationship between single words on the other hand, but no close connection between the speaker and Picasso is established. Instead, the difference between the (female) speaker and the portrayed (male) artist is “spreading.” The continuous and repetitive enumeration of the pronoun “he,” later in the portrait, even evokes laughter and ridicule (“he he he”). This mocking repetition of “he” is followed by the questions “Can curls rob can curls quote” (PP 23) that suggest a pun on “curls”

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and “girls”—an implied reference that enhances the impression of a female gender taking over: He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he. Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable. (PP 23)

Considering the competitive bond between the two artists Stein and Picasso, one can read this difference between male and female presences as a kind of gender trouble, mirroring the (gender) struggle between Stein and Picasso. The increasing isolation of the “he” becomes more and more obvious as another pun appears to be equally gendered: the combination of “Father and farther” (PP  23) alludes to a spatial distance inherent in the patriarchal term. Interestingly enough “Farther” introduces a “land” that is ambiguous because it is repeated many times and with different word combinations. The combination “I land,” for example, can be read as the verbal construction “I land” or as “one land” (PP 24). The latter is more explicitly related to the speaker’s question of “who comes first”: “Who comes first. Napoleon the first. / Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet” (PP 22), but Stein’s toying with numbers does not exclude the former: I land. Two. I land. Three. The land. Three. The land. Three. The land. Two. I land. Two. I land. One. I land.

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Two. I land. As a so. They cannot. A note. They cannot. A float. They cannot. They dote. They cannot. They as denote. Miracles play. Play fairly. Play fairly well. A well. As well. As or as presently. Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches. (PP 24–5)

Although number one is followed by “two” and “three,” “I land” ends the enumeration and is thus prominently placed. The homophone of “I land” and “island” suggests another link between the first-person speaker who “lands” and an “island”: the speaker is as unique and self-contained as an island. The following two lines “As a so. / They cannot.” underline the capacity of the “I” in contrast to “they” who “cannot,” which is repeated four times. “I” versus “they” has the final say: the speaker/portraitist “recite[s] what history teaches” (PP 25), alluding to Napoleon’s ill-fated actions and to the idea that the speaker’s language (“recite”) illuminates what history demonstrates: Napoleon/Picasso has disappeared.14

Sit Well: Edith and Gertrude in dialogue The visual structure of “If I Told Him” underlines the prominence of the “I,” which becomes isolated (“I land” / “island”). Whereas the I is prominent in the Picasso piece, the Sitwell portrait presents a much more unified visual structure

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with a symmetrical arrangement already present in the title. “Sitwell Edith Sitwell” implies a harmonious structure and, contrary to the “I” of the Picasso portrait, constructs a “we,” suggesting connections between the speaker and Sitwell. In the course of the poem a togetherness is created and there is a clear allusion to Stein’s and Sitwell’s “sharing” equal positions (“Lose and share all and more” (PP 95)). In its final lines, moreover, the poem repeats the phrase “we agree” (PP 95), expressing union and harmony. The first-person speaker introduces the figure portrayed in the title, which, as mentioned above, already alludes to an unusual symmetrical arrangement. Edith is surrounded by her family name “Sitwell,” which, of course, evokes— not only for Stein—a range of meanings relating to a congenial gathering, that is Edith who is “sitting well,” or, read as an invitation (for the reader), we should/can sit well with Edith. Ulla E. Dydo refers to the space between “sit” and “well” in the draft of the title.15 The poem’s first part indeed hints at friends sitting together and “around her,” and personal names are mentioned, all of which are female. The dominance of a female presence is striking and a union between two women is further enhanced by foregrounding “Lily and Louise,” whose connection only the first-person speaker recognizes: “No one can see the connection between Lily and Louise, but I do” (PP 92). From an interview with Paul Bowles we learn that Lily and Louise were identical twins living in the neighborhood of Bilignin and that only Gertrude Stein knew how to tell them apart.16 Yet, as is mostly the case with Stein’s references to actual people, the implications are not strictly biographical. They can be seen to function as allusions and trigger associations that are responsible for the pleasure and jouissance that her texts evoke.17 The two female names with the triple /l/ sound, for example, hint at an erotic vocabulary (love, lips, lust) and take us back to the playful and erotic dynamics that features so prominently in Stein’s text on lesbian lovemaking “Lifting Belly” (written between 1915 and 1917).18 Commenting on Stein’s use of personal names with indefinite reference in order “to treat intimate topics while minimizing her vulnerability,” Richard Bridgman mentions just these two names of Lily and Louise from the Sitwell portrait as typical examples.19 Yet, the erotic tie between (the) two women is not the crucial issue in this portrait; instead, the union and mutual understanding of Stein and Sitwell with regard to their poetic program is its main topic.

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Susan Hastings, in her illuminating article on “Two of the Weird Sisters: The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell,” investigates similarities in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Sitwell’s Taken Care of: An Autobiography, observing that those texts reflect “their own very eccentric female geniuses.”20 Both writers express a claim to genius in their autobiographies in spite of the hostile reactions with which their work was met. In “Sitwell Edith Sitwell” Stein’s repetition of the phrase “[a] change in time” (PP 92)  may refer to the unusual and new poetic language that both she and Sitwell introduced into English and American literature. The sentence that follows, “And now a bow,” can be taken as an expression of Stein’s respect for Sitwell’s poetic works and the phrase “[j]ust as long as any song” can be read as a reference to Sitwell’s Façade, a poem-song for which William Walton had written the score (PP 93). Again and again the speaker of the portrait comments on the act of composing this portrait that finally contains the two, Stein and Sitwell, and thus repeats the symmetry suggested by the title. The sentence “Why does one want to or to and to, when does one want to and to went to,” for example, combines an outward gesture (want to, went to) with a repetition of “to,” which can of course be read as its homophone “two” (PP 94). Unlike Stein’s portrait of Picasso with its emphasis on the number “one” toward the end, this portrait creates a dynamic double. Furthermore, the two (poets) are the ones that “[n]o one knows two two more” (PP 95). Again the number two is set against others (“no one”) who fail to recognize the extraordinariness of the two. Sitwell’s provocative work Façade is alluded to in the last five lines, all of which contain the word “faces,” which is preceded twice by “by and by” and twice by “apparently.” These pun on the word “façade.” Beneath the appearance (of a face) there is another, second meaning: Absently faces and by and by we agree. By and by faces apparently we agree. Apparently faces by and by we agree. By and by faces apparently we agree. Apparently faces by and by we agree. (PP 95)

The formal switching of “by and by” and “apparently” as well as the repetition of the pronoun “we” and the verb “agree,” which rhymes with “we,” creates

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agreement both in meaning, sound, and rhythm. As in the portrait of Picasso, Stein’s use of dialogue is based on the immediate interaction and play between single words, and on a toying with numbers (“one” and “two”), but contrary to the Picasso piece, the portraitist does not displace the one portrayed. Instead, the portraitist stages a congenial sitting-room atmosphere with female voices that remind us of Stein’s play Ladies’ Voices (1916) in which unidentified female speakers interact and play with each other in an erotic manner.21 No gender trouble is staged as in the Picasso portrait. Rather, by emphasizing mutual agreement, Edith Sitwell is portrayed as one who is equally “different” (“Now it has to be something entirely different and it is”), as a writer who uses language for looking (“faces”), for listening (“Miss Edith Sitwell have and heard”), and for talking (“we agree”), thus performing the three activities Stein considered essential when composing a literary portrait. Portraying Sitwell, Stein playfully creates a twosome that contrasts with the “one” and “I” (read as the Roman numeral one) of the Picasso portrait. This bond between the two is established through spreading difference and similarity. The often-repeated sentence “Miss Edith Sitwell have and had and heard” may allude to Sitwell’s receptive attitude toward Stein (“heard”) yet it may also indicate that Sitwell has the same approach to poetic language as Stein (“have” and “had”) (PP 93). The connection between the two is further emphasized by the numerous verbal slips and puns that hint at the power of the semiotic and its potential of jouissance, as suggested by Julia Kristeva. In this context it is also illuminating to think of the implied meaning of jouissance—“j’ouїs sens”–which means “I heard meaning” thus emphasizing the role of the signifier.22 Unlike the puns and slips of the Picasso portrait they repeatedly include the “I” of the speaker and the “she” of Sitwell and thus lead up to the “we agree” at the end of the portrait. As Hastings aptly notes, there is “a repetitive tension between sameness and difference” that “imbues even the brief portrait with depth and life in addition to its inherent solidity.”23 Although “the difference is spreading,” there is something/somebody that is similar at the same time. The two portraits of Picasso and Sitwell, both written in the early 1920s, present two very different stagings by the portraitist Stein. Although it creates similarity and difference at the same time, the Picasso portrait displaces the avant-garde visual artist by taking over the role of the main figure in the text, whereas in the Sitwell

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portrait Stein not only values the literary contribution to avant-garde art more highly; she even constructs an artistic twosome that fits Sit(-)well.

Melody and no(n) sense in the Stein–Sitwell dialogue This (pleasurable) agreement between Stein and Sitwell has implications for Sitwell’s reference to Stein in “Jodelling Song” as well. If we accept Wendy Steiner’s understanding of melody “as a patterning of elements created by their phonological similarity and grammatical properties,” in other words, as a kind of aurally enacted dialogue between similarity and difference in language, Sitwell’s appropriation of Stein may not be as one-dimensional as Perloff suggests. According to a footnote in Façade, Sitwell’s “Jodelling Song” is based on Stein’s “Accents in Alsace.”24 Sitwell even quotes a passage from Stein’s piece in a footnote to her book, it reads: “In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased.” Façade’s subtitle An Entertainment in the edition edited by Sitwell and the composer William Walton also refers to the pleasure of the text, and scholars such as Cyrena N. Pondrom, Marsha Bryant, and Gyllian Phillips have brought our attention to the gender subversion and jouissance at work in Façade. Sitwell furthermore indirectly quotes Stein’s code word “cow” for bodily pleasure (orgasm or excretion)25 in her “Jodelling Song”: “Man must say farewells / To parents now, / And to William Tell / And to Mrs. Cow.”26 The fact that Sitwell performed her poetry and chanted her poems through a so-called Sengerphone (a large papier maché megaphone), using her body in close interaction with her poetry, adds to the importance of the materiality of poetry (poetry to look at, to listen to, to respond to) and makes for an interesting echo of Stein’s project. Perloff is very critical toward the artistic achievement of “Jodelling Song” when she compares it to Stein’s “Accents in Alsace,” yet I think one must take into account the close relationship between voice, sound, and performance when discussing a work like Façade.27 Sitwell’s “Jodelling Song” may toy with nonsense,28 yet the combination of aurality and spectacle during Sitwell’s oral performance connects the British poet’s project to Stein’s repetitive use of “no since” in Tender Buttons, which triggers the sound and meaning of “non-sense” (TB 59). The “non sense” of this kind of language demonstrates

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that similarity and difference can bring about a productive dialogue, between words, between their writers, and between texts and readers. “No since” can be read as “no(n) sense,” but it still remains different from “nonsense” and even invites us to pay attention to possible connections between “since” and “sense,” that is temporality or historical experience and meaning/interpretation. Stein’s portrait echoes Sitwell’s Façade, which, in its turn, echoes Stein’s jouissant practice. No anxiety of influence is to be detected in these texts. Their respective authors “sit well” together, talking and listening, and looking at language.

Notes 1 Similarity is for example a key principle in Stein’s use of “melody,” which she explicitly mentions in “Portraits and Repetition,” where she also gives both the second portrait of Picasso and the portrait of Edith Sitwell as examples of those portraits that have “an internal melody of existence” (LIA 307). Wendy Steiner sees this melody “as a patterning of elements created by their phonological similarity and grammatical properties” (Exact Resemblance to Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1978), 121). 2 See also my comment on The Making of Americans in Franziska Gygax, Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 20–1. 3 Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 69. 4 According to Gilles Deleuze, the concept of the simulacrum questions the idea of a true copy, and the origin of a copy is no longer known or important (The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia UP, 1990)). 5 See for example, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1984). 6 Sitwell, Poetry and Criticism (30–1), quoted by Cyrena N. Pondrom, “Influence? Or Intertexuality? The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell with Gertrude Stein,” in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, 204–18 (Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1991), 210. 7 Pondrom provides very informative and illuminating information on the Sitwell-Stein connection in her “Influence? Or Intertextuality? The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein” and she comments on the issue of acknowledgment of the two writers (207).

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8 The Nation, July 16, 1923, quoted by Pondrom, “Influence? Or Intertexuality? The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell with Gertrude Stein,” 210. 9 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 79–80. 10 Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, 83, 85. 11 Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 106. 12 The interview between Gertrude Stein and Robert Bartlett Haas, “Gertrude Stein Talking—A Transatlantic Interview,” was originally published in The UCLAN Review (Summer 1962 and Spring 1963) and later reprinted in Gertrude Stein, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. 13 I assume a female speaker in the absence of any contrary indication. 14 A similar disappearance is staged in the portrait of Hemingway, entitled “He and They, Hemingway,” also composed in 1923. As was the case with Picasso, the relationship between Stein and Hemingway was not unproblematic, and their friendship finally ended after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with Stein’s unfavorable remarks about Hemingway. See also Gygax, “The Portrait as Word and (A)Head: Gertrude Stein and the Staging of (Her) Self,” in The Seeming and the Seen: Essays in Modern Visual and Literary Culture. Festschrift for Peter Halter, ed. Beverly Maeder, Jürg Schwyter, and Ilona Sigrist, 209–24 (Bern, London, and New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 220–2. 15 Dydo also mentions the possibility of reading the title as a command: “Sit well” since the title in the draft is spaced as follows: Sit well Edith Sitwell (SR 475). 16 See Desultory Correspondence: An Interview with Paul Bowles on Gertrude Stein (Sporadische Korrespondenz: Ein Interview mit Paul Bowles über Gertrude Stein) by Florian Vetsch (Zurich: Memory/Cage Editions, 1997). Dydo in her introduction to the portrait states that the names Lily and Louise refer to “California friends from girlhood, before Toklas and Stein met” (SR 475). 17 See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 15–16. 18 “Lifting Belly” was first published in Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913–1927) (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953). 19 Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford UP, 1970), 106. 20 Susan Hastings, “Two of the Weird Sisters: The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.1 (Spring 1985): 107. 21 See GP 203–4. 22 Kristeva, Desire in Language, 16. 23 Hastings, “Two of the Weird Sisters: The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell,” 118.

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24 Sitwell’s footnote to the “Jodelling Song” states that the poem “is founded on Gertrude Stein’s ‘Accents in Alsace’ (The Watch on the Rhine) contained in her book ‘Geography and Plays’” (Façade and Other Poems 1920–1935 (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1950), 103. 25 See Steven Meyer’s reference to Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ed. Kay Turner (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) in “‘Each one as she may’: Introduction à la logique modale chez Gertrude Stein,” in Contemporanéités de Gertrude Stein. Comment lire, traduire et écrire Gertrude Stein aujourd’hui, ed. Jean-François Chassay and Eric Giraud, 79–90 (Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines, 2011), 90. 26 Sitwell, Façade and Other Poems, 103. 27 Gyllian Phillips focuses on the function of sound in Façade and explains how Sitwell “offers a series of fantasies, in which dreams and sleep are often evoked” and that “[t]hese fantasies elaborate word play and sensual, often erotic symbolism” (“‘Something Lies Beyond the Scene [Seen]’ of Façade: Sitwell, Walton and Kristeva’s Semiotic,” in Literature and Musical Adaptation, ed. Michael J. Meyer, 61–78 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 64. 28 See Phillips who states that some of Sitwell’s poems in Façade “play on the edge of nonsense” (“‘Something Lies Beyond the Scene [Seen]’ of Façade: Sitwell, Walton and Kristeva’s Semiotic,” 72).

4

Triangular Politics: Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and Elisabeth de Gramont Birgit Van Puymbroeck

In an undated letter, Elisabeth de Gramont wrote to Gertrude Stein: “How to picture G. S. someone asked. Water, I said, imagine a torrent, you cannot describe the torrent, you feel it, when you come near, you hear the rumour, you get something of drops of splash on your feet, but you cant [sic] exactly word it.”1 This depiction of Stein hits the mark, as Stein continues to elude with her capricious attitude toward friendship, her strange repetition of words and phrases and her ambiguous political position, once described by Alice B. Toklas as “fairly left for U.S. and royalist for France.”2 Like Elisabeth de Gramont’s anonymous correspondent, we wonder how we are to understand Stein’s character and thinking, how her fickleness and faux-naïveté tallies with the philosophical profundity of her work, and in what ways the context of her residence in Paris and Bilingin, and more particularly her French network of friends, help us to understand Stein as a writer. If recent critics have focused extensively on Stein’s relationship with the right-wing university professor Bernard Faÿ in an attempt to unravel her ambivalent politics, little attention has been paid to Stein’s friendship with the so-called red, communist duchess Elisabeth de Gramont, Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre.3 Both women had much in common as they associated with the same Franco-American circles of Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney, wrote multiple and successful volumes of memoirs, and struggled to reconcile what appeared to be opposites: individualism and collectivism, popularity and an avant-garde image, right- and left-wing tendencies.4 Furthermore, de Gramont evidently knew Faÿ as she mentions his name in her letters to Stein.5

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This chapter uncovers the triangular relations between Stein, Faÿ, and de Gramont. It examines if and in what ways Stein’s multiple and various French connections elucidate her experimental writing. This chapter reads Stein’s friendships in dialogue with her politics and poetics. Rather than associating Stein with either a right- or a left-wing point of view, it presents a reading of her work that questions the relationship between text and context. The chapter does not seek to minimize or excuse Stein’s support of Vichy France but intends to underscore the complexity of her social, textual, and political networks.6 Stein engaged in multiple and various social relations. Her texts draw attention to the composition of the writing. Her politics, as displayed in her writing and interviews, question the relation between politics and aesthetics. On the one hand, Stein seems to transcend politics, in that she is concerned with a concept of life as self-contained, inner movement. On the other, she mixes an aesthetic and political vocabulary, drawing parallels between the domains of art and politics.

Bernard Faÿ and Elisabeth de Gramont Recently, Stein scholarship has been infused with a critical interest in Bernard Faÿ. Stein met Faÿ in the mid-twenties through the American composer Virgil Thomson and the French author René Crevel.7 She shared with him an interest in American history and culture and appreciated his advice and support. Stein helped Faÿ to become a professor at the prestigious Collège de France in 1932. Faÿ, in turn, promoted Stein among the French and American press and universities. For Stein, “contact with [Faÿ’s] mind” was “comforting and stimulating.”8 Faÿ, similarly, claimed that Stein’s “friendship and intimacy” had changed for him “the reality of life.”9 Faÿ, who was appointed head of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the Vichy regime during World War II, is credited with having saved Stein’s art collection from confiscation by the Nazis. He most likely also had a hand in Stein’s and Toklas’ survival of the war.10 Faÿ’s war records complicate his position as savior. As Antoine Compagnon demonstrates, Faÿ actively collaborated with Nazi Germany. Even though his alleged anti-Semitism is exaggerated, he was an official Gestapo agent, who discriminated against communists and freemasons at the Bibliothèque

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Nationale.11 Stein’s support of Faÿ until her death in 1946 seems odd, given her Jewish background.12 Moreover, it has given cause for her works to be read in the context of not only right-wing conservatism but also downright fascism. Critics find support for such analyses in Paris France, where Stein writes that it is necessary “to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free” (PF 38), in her unpublished translations of Vichy leader Philippe Pétain’s Paroles aux Français, and in her friendship with Faÿ. Recently, Barbara Will uncovered a letter of Stein to Faÿ in which she states that she saw politics “but from one angle”: his.13 Stein’s relation with Faÿ on the one hand and her published and unpublished works on the other do not necessarily imply that she was a right-wing author with a right-wing poetic or political project. Stein’s translations of the Pétain speeches have been explained in a variety of ways. Although Will pictures Stein as a politically loyal friend to Faÿ in her book Unlikely Collaboration, she had considered the conspicuous literalism of the translations “the marks of reluctance and uncertainty” in her earlier essay “Lost in Translation,” arguing that they suggest Stein’s “grudging rather than fervent commitment to the Vichy program.”14 Similarly, Richard Bridgman, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Dana Cairns Watson have observed that the translations of the Pétain speeches do not chime with Stein’s sympathy for the French Resistance fighters in Wars I Have Seen.15 For Liesl M. Olson, Paris France does not necessarily qualify as a political work but rather expresses Stein’s desire for stability and peace, to be found in “the rituals of ordinary, domestic life.”16 John Whittier-Ferguson, likewise, asserts that we must expand the terms of the discussion of Stein’s World War II fiction “beyond specific, historical questions of collaboration,” as Stein displaces politics and history from a great deal of her work.17 Finally, Stein’s explicit allegiance to Faÿ’s politics in her private correspondence can be questioned, if we consider her wider network of friends and acquaintances. Stein not only associated with the conservative Faÿ, but also with the progressive Elisabeth de Gramont, Madame de Clermont Tonnerre, who rubbed shoulders with French left-wing politicians such as Georges Clemenceau and Léon Blum. While Stein’s biographers eagerly recognize Faÿ’s influence on Stein, they tend to ignore Stein’s friendship with Elisabeth de Gramont. If biographers regularly refer to an anecdote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that

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describes Stein seeing the duchess’ newly cut bob, they do not go into detail about the two women’s relationship and correspondence.18 Stein’s friendship with the “red duchess” is nevertheless more significant than a comment about a hairdo suggests. It helps to explain Stein’s popularity in France and significantly nuances her right-wing connections. Stein was introduced to Elisabeth de Gramont in 1926 by the American poet Natalie Barney, who happened to be de Gramont’s lover.19 A descendant of the king Henri IV, “Lily” de Gramont belonged to the French aristocracy. In her teens and adolescence, she associated with Marcel Proust and Robert de Montesquiou.20 As a young adult, she married and later divorced the duke of Clermont-Tonnerre. Stein’s accounts of her friendship with Elisabeth de Gramont testify to a mutual respect and a congeniality of mind. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she notes: “[Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre] and Gertrude Stein pleased one another. They were entirely different in life education and interests but they delighted in each other’s understanding” (ABT 906). Likewise, de Gramont’s letters to Stein make plain her esteem and appreciation of the American poet. When writing to thank Stein for the flowers she sent her, de Gramont remarked: “I have often missed you, and your vitality and torrential brain.”21 Like Faÿ, the duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre supported Stein’s verbal experiments of the twenties and thirties. In 1927, she engaged Virgil Thomson to put Stein’s experimental piece “Capital Capitals” to music. The piece, a song for four male voices and piano, was performed privately at the duchess’ salon in the Rue Raynouard in Paris.22 Thomson reports on the experience in a letter to his college friend Briggs Buchanan: the room was filled with dukes and ambassadors; “The French who know no English all exclaim ‘What an extraordinary sense of English prosody!’”23 De Gramont, moreover, supported and supplied French translations of Stein’s work. She advised the translation of “a big book, an important book,” that is, The Making of Americans, translated by Bernard Faÿ, and also translated numerous pieces herself, including “St. Theresa” from Four Saints in Three Acts, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Lectures in America, and Four in America (ABT 909).24 Even if the translations often remained unpublished, Stein appreciated De Gramont’s enthusiasm and skill. On April 26, 1936, she wrote to her friend the American writer Thornton Wilder: “Mme Clermont-Tonnerre has translated 3 of the lectures beautifully

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and the [e]xamples she has done awfully well into French, . . . but then she is awfully intelligent and sensitive.”25 Stein’s friendship with de Gramont takes on an additional meaning in the context of her relation with Faÿ and its subsequent interpretations. Whereas Faÿ was a member of extreme right-wing organizations such as the Action Française and the Croix de Feu, de Gramont had Marxist sympathies and maintained important political connections with the French left. In the 1910s, she contributed articles to the communist journal Je Sais Tout and in the 1920s to the socialist journal Le Radical. In 1932 and 1935, she visited the USSR and in 1936 she was asked by the leader of the Front Populaire Léon Blum to participate in the newly formed left-wing government, an offer he later withdrew on account of her lesbianism.26 Although de Gramont was not the only figure with left-wing sympathies in Stein’s circle,27 she hints at a complex political entanglement due to her prominence in the French leftwing movement and her contact with Faÿ. De Gramont and Faÿ not only made arrangements for Stein’s 1934 lecture tour in America but also collaborated on the French translation of the lectures. Their relation, however, became increasingly strained, as de Gramont insisted on separate introductions. In 1936, the year in which the Front Populaire was elected, she wrote to Stein that Faÿ had “lost his throne!”28 Rather than choosing sides, Stein seems to have responded with aloofness. On the day of the election in 1936, she wrote to Wilder: “they elect to-day here in Paris but everybody [meaning herself] is completely and entirely indifferent.”29 Elisabeth de Gramont fascinates. On the one hand, she had Marxist sympathies. On the other, she had a passion for luxury and fashion that would set her apart from the crowd. Critical of how Marxism was applied to Russian society, de Gramont wrote in her travelogue Le Chemin de l’U.R.S.S. that “the Russian civilization was so big, that each individual rarely attained individuality, that life lost its value.”30 She deplored that “luxury, exuberance and joy” had disappeared from Russian society and noted that if a leveling marked the USSR, this leveling operated more on the brain than on material conditions: it suppressed all “‘fruitful friction’ from society.”31 Stein was never a communist, yet she was fascinated by the character of de Gramont, whom she described as a “mixture of peasant and duchess,” that is, a combination of everywoman and first lady (EA 65). Stein indeed was convinced that “every human being

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comprises the combination form,” meaning a combination of individuality and generality (PGS 16–17). In “A Transatlantic Interview, 1946” conducted by Robert Bartlett Haas, she explained this combination by referring to a painting by Cézanne: “Cezanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole and that impressed me enormously . . . After all, to me one human being is as important as another human being” (PGS 15–16). Stein links composition to life here as she explains Cézanne’s thinking on painting by referring to an egalitarian notion of society. She mixes an aesthetic and a social language, relating life to art and vice versa.

Stein’s compositional aesthetics In Lectures in America, Stein muses over the problem of the relation between part and whole, individual and collective by thinking about sentences and paragraphs. She writes that emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences and that this is not a matter of “contradiction but [of] combination” (LIA 244). By combining different units (sentences) into a sequence (paragraph), a new construction emerges in which each part retains its proper characteristics, but is part of a larger whole. “It is a kind of imitation of marrying of two being one,” Stein writes in Narration, “and yet being two,” as units (words, sentences, paragraphs) enter into relations, neither merging, nor remaining completely separate. This can be explained by thinking of the text as a network in which individual elements enter into relations, thus forming a larger composition or whole, without giving up their individuality. Stein’s choice of words foregrounds the network structure of the text, as she prefers pronouns, connectives, and auxiliary verbs to nouns and verbs.32 As Ulla E. Dydo points out, “[n]ouns and verbs have greater power as signs than connectives, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs. But they decline in power as signifiers in proportion to their gain in importance as word nuggets used as elements in patterns or designs.”33 Stein deliberately chooses words with little conspicuous referentiality to the outside world so as to draw attention to the composition of the writing. She weaves a tapestry of “word nuggets,” which point inward rather than outward. Like Cézanne,

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she constructs a composition of which the internal relations, rather than the individual elements, refer to reality. Hers is an impressionistic rather than a realist account, as she evokes rather than describes a personality or situation.34 Nowhere is this clearer than in Stein’s portraits of the thirties, which give an account of a real-life person by way of composition rather than description. Stein’s portrait of Bernard Faÿ, for instance, opens: A is an article. They are usable. They are found and able and edible. And so they are predetermined and trimmed. The which is an article. With them they have that. That which. They have the point in which it is close to the purpose. The in articles. In inclusion. A fine finely. (PP 41)

Similarly, her portrait of Elisabeth de Gramont, entitled “Madame de ClermontTonnerre,” reads: Just dip I love it. Cherry tree for them forever I think the color of it is good. Arch for archangel transferred In place of and make learned Be joined by paragraph answered yes (PP 89)

What both portraits have in common is that they do not describe but evoke a personality through composition. In “Bernard Faÿ,” Stein draws attention to the articles “a” and “the.” Both are “usable” for their compositional value: they carry little meaning by themselves, apart from indicating a definite or indefinite meaning. “Madame de Clermont de Tonnerre” is more complex in that the first three lines evoke a scene of description, that is a painting. This impression, however, is quickly undone by the next three lines, which refer to the relation between part and whole: “arch for archangel transferred” results in an archangel and a regular angel with the “arch” “transferred.” It signals

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the combination of generality and individuality, which Stein associates with Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre. Both elements are joined by way of a textual composition, that is a “paragraph.” In both cases, Stein uses categories of language (articles, paragraphs) to explain a character’s personality. In Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein, Wendy Steiner distinguishes between three periods in Stein’s portraiture on the basis of her lecture “Portraits and Repetition.”35 In her early portraits, Stein adopts a dialogic aesthetics of “talking and listening,” which means as much as an interactive bond between the author and the subject or the subject and the self. She writes in “Portraits and Repetition”: Of course I am interested in any one. And in any one I must or else I must betake myself to some entirely different occupation and I do not think I will, I must find out what is moving inside them that makes them them, and I must find out how I by the thing moving excitedly inside me can make a portrait of them. (LIA 298)

Stein’s method for her early portraits is dialogue. What makes up a person’s character or essence (i.e., what “makes them them”) comes out through the interaction between the subject and the self. In her portraits of the twenties, Stein adds the concept of “looking” to her method of “talking and listening.” What makes it possible to know a person (i.e., “what is moving inside them”) is no longer an intersubjective bond but an outside entity that observes the process of “talking and listening.” As Stein notes in her texts of the twenties, “I am I because my little dog knows me.” The dog observes the bond between the subject and self, thus accounting for identity on the basis of recognition. We find references to this tripartite relationship in the portrait “Madame de Clermont-Tonnere,” where Stein writes: “Now there are two imaginations / Three imaginations.” The portrait continues: How are how in How are how in me When this you see How adding finally to mend we (PP 89)

Here, the speaker refers to outside observer (“you see”) who accounts for the making of identity (“mend we”). In her portraits of the thirties, Stein abandons the techniques of “talking and listening” and of “looking” for one of “self-contained movement.” She

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writes: “I began again not to let the looking be predominating not to have the listening and talking be predominating but to once more denude all this of anything in order to get back to the essence of the thing contained within itself” (LIA 308, emphasis added). In this period, the portraits no longer reflect a dialogic bond or an outside observance but depend on inner or “selfcontained” movement, that is, the movement created by the composition itself. Stein cites the portraits of “Georges Hugnet” and “Bernard Faÿ” as prime examples of this technique: “It really does not make any difference who Georges Hugnet was or what he did or what I said, all that was necessary was that there was something completely contained within itself and being contained within itself was moving, not moving in relation to anything not moving in relation to itself but just moving” (LIA 310). The choice of words (the “word nuggets”) and their particular order create a movement in the composition itself, which does not directly refer to an outside world but which animates the text from within. We find an example of this technique in “Part Three” of “Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre”: Now think a minute about no movement. I wish for no movement. Think there I wish for no movement I think here Which I wish For no movement. I wish here I think there for no movement I wish here For no movement I think there which I wish here Actually is one word when they make known really (PP 90)

Although the speaker wishes for “no movement,” Stein creates internal or “self-contained” movement by alternating “here” and “there,” “wish” and “think.” The movement takes place within the composition of the text that takes place within the present moment (“actually”). Stein moves in circles, repeating lines, and phrases in shifting constellations. The composition does not move against on outside entity (e.g., the progression of time) but propels itself through variation.

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Stein’s portraits of the thirties are compositional rather than dialogic. They relate to an outside reality not on the basis of an “intersubjective involvement,”36 but on the basis of a “structural equivalence” between the uniqueness of the composition and the uniqueness of the subject.37 As Steiner points out, Stein equates “a literature structure with a personality essence,” aiming to render her subject by way of a literary composition. Her concept of “self-contained movement” refers to “a disruption of external reference in a structure in which elements are simultaneously separated and bound together.”38 Stein’s late portraits describe a complex relationship between composition and reality. They render a person on the basis of a “structural equivalence” between that person’s inner movement (“what is moving inside them that makes them them”) and the inner movement of a literary composition (“something completely contained within itself . . . was moving”). The rationale is that a composition, like life itself, is unique and self-animated. It should invoke life, rather than representing it via realist description. Stein’s notion of a structural equivalence between a written composition and life itself, as demonstrated by the Cézanne quote on the one hand and the analysis of her late portraits on the other, is questionable: does a literary composition made up of “word nuggets” such as articles (“a” and “the”) and deictic markers (“here” and “there”) really give an insight into the reality of life? And more importantly for my purposes, it questions the relations between politics and aesthetics in Stein’s writings of the thirties: how do we infer a political position from her texts, which are built on composition and draw attention to the structure of the writing? The question is more complex than may appear at first sight, since Stein mixes a social, political, and aesthetic vocabulary. In The Geographical History of America, she uses the political terms of “individualism” and “communism” to make a statement about the aesthetic relationship of part and whole: “individualism and communism are not separate they are the same” (GHA 369). For Stein, there is no opposition between individualism and communism, part and whole, since both come together in her view of life/composition as “self-contained movement.” Stein writes in The Geographical History of America, “Not solve it but be in it, that is what one can say of the problem of the relation of human nature to the human mind,” where the human mind stands for a conception of identity as inner movement and human nature for a conception of identity as recognition. She continues, “There is no relation [between human nature and the human

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mind], because when you are in the human mind, you are in it and when you are in human nature you are of it” (GHA 455). On the abstract level of the human mind, part and whole, individualism and communism are bound together in the process of “self-contained movement.” On the level of human nature, both are separate since human nature depends on an outside observer and, hence, on recognition. In her writings of the thirties, Stein is concerned with the human mind, defined as a conception of life based on self-contained movement. Politics, however, are situated at the level of human nature, which depends on recognition rather than self-contained movement. Political philosophies do not create but organize life and are, therefore, not interesting to Stein who is concerned with creation. As she writes in the text “A Political Series,” Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt’s political systems are not stimulating: they describe society from without rather than animate it from within.39 Similarly, Stein notes in “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them” that masterpieces are concerned with creation as pure movement: “The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition . . . I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognition that he knows, that is what destroys creation” (WAM 84). The creation of life does not rely on recognition but on self-contained movement. Stein continues, “it is extremely difficult the knowing not having identity,” that is, to separate being from knowing, creation from recognition. Yet, it is this what, according to her, defines a masterpiece: “knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not” (WAM 90–1). Stein’s texts of the thirties relegate politics to a secondary plane, namely that of human nature: what are the political implications of such a strategy? What does it mean to be concerned with creation in a pure or abstract sense, at a time when the world was on the brink of World War II?

Stein’s aesthetic politics Much has been written about the political implications of Stein’s abstract aesthetics, which have been linked with anarchism. For Marianne DeKoven, Stein’s texts resist fixed, hierarchical social and political structures because they

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resist hierarchical language structures: “Within the framework of longstanding, political ideologies, experimental writing expresses or suggests anarchism: the abolition of all forms of hierarchy, of dominance-subordination.”40 Juliana Spahr also links Stein’s texts with anarchism, but from a reader’s perspective: “[Stein’s] works value the individual meanings readers bring to works and abandon much of the authority of the author. They, like anarchism, work to have both individuality and community.”41 For Carrie M. Matthews, Stein’s texts not only upset traditional structures but also suppose the constant renewal of relations. They evoke “anarchism’s ethos of practice and unease with teleology” and constitute “a call for individuals to act together . . . unfettered by the confines of a particular political program or dictates of a state.”42 For all three scholars, Stein’s experimental writing opens up new perspectives. It does not preclude social or political action but inspires commitment by challenging the reader to think and act differently. One may, however, also approach Stein’s works from a different angle. Stein’s concern with life as pure creation may be interpreted as political quietism. Stein, as an author, is concerned with life in the abstract (the human mind) rather than with particular living conditions (human nature). By taking the human mind as her subject of interest, she relegates politics to a secondary level, even subordinating it to the primary level of aesthetics. Such a perspective suggests a politically quietist viewpoint: there is no fundamental change in the process of life defined as “self-contained movement.” In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin associates the subordination of politics to aesthetics with the rise of Fascism. According to him, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving [the] masses not their right [to change ‘property structures,’ i.e. living conditions] but instead a chance to express themselves.”43 Fascism creates a language without creating fundamental change. Stein’s language project, when viewed from this angle, similarly reduces politics to aesthetics: it creates life but does not change the conditions of life. How are we to understand Stein’s aesthetic politics, as political empowerment or as political quietism? The answer to this question depends on our point of view. Although her writing and her friendship with Faÿ can be construed as political quietist or even pro-Fascist, Stein’s texts also

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have a utopian quality to them, which extends beyond a narrow political identification: “how to write when identity is not?” It is this quality that Stein’s friendship with Elisabeth de Gramont brings to the surface, as the duchess believed in a utopian world in which social differences would not lead to class opposition but rather to a peaceful living together. As Stein notes in Everybody’s Autobiography, “The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant tills it. I suppose that is the reason why the French country is so occupying, any peasant sees it and they never stop seeing it” (EA 65). In this quote, Stein not only glorifies peasant life, but also describes an aesthetic process of “self-contained movement”: the self-perpetuating movement of life itself. Stein mixes politics and aesthetics, describing one in terms of the other. For all her conservatism, Stein does not seem to have had a particularly strong belief in any contemporary political regime. As she announced in 1935, “political theories bore me because political theories end in nothing. Soviet Russia will end in nothing and so will the Roosevelt administration end in nothing because it is not stimulating.”44 Political theories do not interest Stein, because they are concerned with identity (“human nature”) and not with creation as pure movement (the “human mind”). In the same year, she notes: “Do you think men like Hitler and Mussolini ever think? Not on your life. Human nature, not the human mind guides their actions, and the people, mind you, put up with it.”45 Hitler and Mussolini are concerned with the organization rather than the creation of life. They focus on identity as recognition rather than life as “self-contained movement.” Stein continues in “What Are MasterPieces and Why Are There So Few of Them”: “If there was no identity no one could be governed, but everybody is governed by everybody and that is why they make no master-pieces, and also why governing has nothing to do with master-pieces” (WAM 94). Stein opposes aesthetics and politics, masterpieces and government: one has nothing to do with the other as masterpieces are concerned with the human mind and government with human nature. Similarly, she comments in an interview with Lansing Warren, dated May 6, 1934: “I always say that intellectuals are not suited to be the directors of government . . . They have a mental obliquity; By that I mean that they are

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diverted by their intellects, by their ideas and theories, from responding to the instincts which ought to guide practical rule.”46 In spite of her political connections, Stein does not seem to have been particularly concerned with politics. She notes the incommensurability of politics and writing. But what about Stein’s much-discussed translations of Philippe Pétain’s Paroles aux Français? How can these be anything but a political statement? The selection of the speeches indicates Stein’s support of Pétain in 1941 when she embarked on the project, but by the same standard her abandonment of the translations in 1943 may indicate her waning belief. The method of the translation (as opposed to the translation itself) does not seem to include a political message. The word-for-word translations, to me, suggest neither “submission”47 nor “subversion,”48 but point to the continuation of Stein’s aesthetic project of “self-contained movement.” As she writes in The Geographical History of America, “reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something,” that is, it creates life without presupposing recognition (GHA 429). By the same token, translating word for word introduces “life” understood as pure movement into the political text. Rather than writing for an “outside” as Barbara Will suggests, Stein seems to continue her aesthetic project of “self-contained movement.” If the method of translation differs from the Pétain speeches to the translation of Georges Hugnet’s poem Enfances, this is because Stein’s aesthetic project evolves from “looking” in the twenties to “self-contained movement” in the thirties. The Pétain translations, unlike the Hugnet translation, aim to create movement from within: they draw attention to the structure of the writing itself.49 In conclusion, Stein’s friendship, politics, and aesthetics form a complex network of relations. They intersect in Stein’s writings but do not wholly correspond. On the one hand, Stein separates politics and aesthetics. On the other, she mixes politics and aesthetics by using political language to describe her aesthetics (the combination of “individualism and communism”) and by rewriting political texts (the Pétain speeches) into an aesthetic language of self-contained movement. Whether we consider Stein a political anarchist or a political quietist, her writing continues to raise discussion, which makes it not “dull” but “stimulating.”

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Notes 1 Elisabeth de Gramont to Gertrude Stein. The letter is undated, but probably dates from 1933. In it, de Gramont mentions that she is reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933. “[33]” is written in pencil in the right top corner. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2 Alice B. Toklas to Mrs. Charles B. Goodspeed (Elizabeth Fuller Goodspeed, also known as “Bobsy”), dated October 25, 1946. Alice B. Toklas, Staying on Alone. Letters of Alice B. Toklas, ed. Edward Burns (London: Angus & Robertson, 1974), 24. Toklas’ judgment is questionable, since Stein is generally regarded as a conservative Republican, who opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal (Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944,” The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996)). 3 Francesco Rapazzini briefly mentions de Gramont’s connection with Stein in Elisabeth de Gramont: avant-gardiste (Paris: Fayard 2004). Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, acknowledges de Gramont’s role as a translator and advisor to Stein’s American lecture tour in 1934 (Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises 1923–1934 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003), 415). Faÿ has received much more critical attention over the past few years. His right-wing past was recently uncovered by Antoine Compagnon in Le cas Bernard Faÿ: du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2009). Barbara Will evaluates Stein’s relation with Faÿ in Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia UP, 2011) and in “Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship,” Modernism/modernity 15.4 (2008): 647–63. 4 Stein published two volumes of memoirs in the thirties: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). Elisabeth de Gramont was a celebrated biographer and autobiographer. She published four volumes of memoirs, and the fictional Memoires de la Tour Eiffel (1947) written from the perspective of the Eiffel Tower. Frédéric Rouvillois identifies de Gramont as the prototype of the political snob, who uses politics as a way to shock their social environment (Frédéric Rouvillois, Histoire du snobisme (Paris: Flammarion, 2008)). 5 See Elisabeth de Gramont to Gertrude Stein, 26 ? 1936. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 6 Barbara Will demonstrates Stein’s support for the Vichy régime: “Stein’s efforts to lend her support to Pétain were both heartfelt and dogged” (Unlikely Collaboration, 118). Scholars and poets have debated this support over the past decade. See the recent dossier compiled by Charles Bernstein for Jacket2: “Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight,” ed. Charles Bernstein: http://jacket2.org/feature/gertrudesteins-war-years-setting-record-straight, last accessed on February 3, 2015.

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7 Barbara Will notes that Stein and Faÿ first met in 1924 (“Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship”), in accordance with Faÿ’s memoirs Les Précieux (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1966). Antoine Compagnon takes 1926 as the year of their first meeting, as Faÿ explicitly desires to “make [Stein’s] acquaintance” in a letter dated May 25, 1926 (Le cas Bernard Faÿ, 42). He argues that it was René Crevel who introduced Faÿ to Stein, even if Faÿ attributes this role to Virgil Thomson in his memoirs. 8 Qtd. in Dydo, The Language that Rises, 573. 9 Faÿ to Gertrude Stein, dated April 28, 1932, qtd. in Frederick W. Lowe “Gertrude’s Web: A study of Gertrude Stein’s literary relationships” (Diss. Columbia University, 1957), 219. 10 According to Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, “there can be no doubt that Faÿ helped to protect [Stein and Toklas]” (Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, “Three Lives,” The Nation (December 5, 1987)). They, however, also point to Stein’s and Toklas’ connections to the local villagers in Bilignin. 11 Barbara Will describes Faÿ’s collaboration as “collaboration d’état” (governmental or administrative collaboration), which is defined as “a mode of engagement with the Nazis that was pragmatic rather than programmatic, based on supposed common interests of state and on the realization of shared political and social goals” (Unlikely Collaboration, 163). 12 In France, there is a close association between Jews and freemasons, as argued by Barbara Will (“Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship,” 649). 13 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 69. 14 Will, “Lost in Translation: Stein’s Vichy Collaboration,” Modernism/modernity 11.4 (2004), 663. 15 Bridgeman points out that “Stein’s growing admiration for the maquis counterbalanced her conservatism” (Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford UP, 1970), 329). Dana Cairns Watson argues that “Stein was always mainly interested in the individual, hating all mass movements about equally” (Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 149). She takes up Linda Wagner-Martin’s suggestion that Stein’s “[s]upport of Pétain and Vichy in January 1942 . . . does not contradict later, or even concurrent, participation in the Resistance” (ibid., 163). 16 Liesl M. Olson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,” Twentieth Century Literature 49.3 (2003): 344. 17 John Whittier-Ferguson, “The Liberation of Gertrude Stein: War and Writing,” Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (2001): 406. 18 Sutherland (Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven: Yale UP, 1951)), Bridgman (Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford UP, 1970)),

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Hoffman (Gertrude Stein (Boston: Twayne, 1976)) and Malcolm (Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007)) do not mention de Gramont at all. Brinnin (The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Boston: Little, 1959)), Mellow (Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (New York: Praeger, 1974)) and Wagner-Martin (“Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995)) rehearse Stein’s anecdote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. For de Gramont’s lesbian marriage contract with Natalie Barney, see Francesco Rapazzini “Elisabeth de Gramont, Natalie Barney’s ‘eternal mate,’” South Central Review 22.3 (2005): 6–31. Proust based la duchesse de Guermantes, a fictional character from Remembrance of Things Past on Elisabeth de Gramont and referred to her work twice in the same novel. Although de Gramont was an ex-duchess by the time she met Stein due to her divorce, she was still referred to as “the duchess” and signed her letters with a combination of her names: E. d. Gramont C.-Tonnerre, E. C.-Tonnerre, Gramont Clermont Tonnerre, etc. Elisabeth de Gramont to Gertrude Stein. The letter is dated January 19, 1939, although the year is difficult to read. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson (Boston: E.P. Dutton, 1985), 95. Qtd. in Steven Watson, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 46. See Elisabeth de Gramont’s correspondence with Stein. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. See also Stein’s letters to Thornton Wilder in which she mentions the translation of Lectures in America and Four in America by Mme ClermontTonnerre (The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 96–101). Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, April 26, 1936 in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, 101. See Rapazzini, “Elisabeth de Gramont, Natalie Barney’s ‘eternal mate,’” 27: “[Elisabeth de Gramont’s] activism was recognized by Léon Blum in 1936 when he asked her to be a leading figure in the newly formed Popular Front. Blum had decided to include three women in his government for the first time and the red Duchess was an obvious choice. However, he was persuaded by others to reconsider: it was bad enough having three women in the cabinet, but a lesbian was just too much . . .” Other supporters of communism in Stein’s circle include the surrealist writer René Crevel, who introduced Faÿ to Stein, and Picasso.

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28 Elisabeth de Gramont to Gertrude Stein, 26 ? 1936. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 29 Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, April 26. 1936 in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, 101. However, Stein seems to have sided with Faÿ later on. In an undated letter, the only one written in French, de Gramont writes: “Je savais qu’il y a une ligne de démarcation sur le Territoire [referring to the Occupied Zone and Vichy France], mais j’ignorais qu’il y en ont [sic] également une à travers l’amitié . . . Bernard Faÿ m’a dit que vous étiez toujours à Bilignin et vous me feriez grand plaisir en m’envoyant un mot.” Elisabeth de Gramont to Gertrude Stein. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The triangle Stein-Faÿ-de Gramont lasted until after the war. Together with Stein and Toklas, de Gramont acted in Faÿ’s defense after the war. 30 Elisabeth de Gramont, Le Chemin de l’U.R.S.S. 2e Edition (Les éditions Rieder, 1933), 95. My translation. 31 Ibid., 73. My translation. 32 Pronouns refer to nouns and names mentioned before, connectives link various parts together and auxiliary verbs connect with a main verb. 33 Dydo, The Language that Rises, 18. 34 For Stein’s relation to impressionism, see Marianne DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism,” Contemporary Literature 22.1 (1981): 81–95. 35 Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1978). 36 G. F. Mitrano, Gertrude Stein: Woman without Qualities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 132. 37 Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance, 128. 38 Ibid., 128. 39 See Gertrude Stein, “A Political Series,” in Painted Lace and Other Pieces (1914–1937), with an introduction by David-Henry Kahnweiler, vol. 5 of The Yaled Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, 71–8 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1955). 40 Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 16–17. 41 Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 14. 42 Carrie M. Matthews, “Articulations of Anarchist Modernism: Putting Art to Work” (Diss., University of North Carolina, 2007), 97. 43 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969), 251.

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44 New York Herald Tribune, May 19, 1935, qtd. in James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle, 498. 45 New York Herald Tribune, December 2, 1935, qtd. in James R. Mellow. Charmed Circle, 502–3. 46 “Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics,” New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934, 9. 47 Wanda Van Dusen, “Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942),” Modernism/modernity 3.3 (1996): 69–92. 48 Will, “Lost in Translation: Stein’s Vichy Collaboration.” 49 Barbara Will notes that it was “as though ‘something outside’ were compelling Stein to produce a form of writing antithetical to her aesthetic principles” in the Pétain translations, “as though an ‘outside’ were watching, controlling, and restricting the writer’s movements, policing every word” (“Lost in Translation,” 652, 659). My argument differs from that of Will in that I regard the translations as a continuation of Stein’s aesthetic project not of “talking and listening” but of “self-contained movement.”

Part Two

Mediations

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Fluid Writing: Stein, James, and Bergson Sarah Posman

Gertrude Stein has often been called a philosophical writer and critics have convincingly mapped the ways in which her literary thinking on time and language intersects with projects as diverse as Emerson’s, Whitehead’s, Wittgenstein’s and, of course, William James’.1 In the self-reflective poetical essays and memoirs Stein wrote in the 1930s and ’40s, James is one of the few figures she pays homage to. What stands out in these references is her stressing the importance of James for her scientific thinking. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she remembers, via narrator Alice, that it was James who urged her to study medicine at Johns Hopkins rather than philosophy (ABT 740). In Wars I Have Seen, furthermore, she refers to her teacher as “one of the strongest scientific influences that I had” (WIHS 63). Philosophy, for Stein, only entered her project when she started to distance herself from James’ influence, when she stopped the bulky, typological project The Making of Americans and started writing portraits dedicated to lively movement. In “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans” she writes about this early 1910s shift in her poetics: When I was working with William James I completely learned one thing, that science is continuously busy with the complete description of something, with ultimately the complete description of something, with ultimately the complete description of anything with ultimately the complete description of everything . . . When I began The Making of Americans I knew I really did know that a complete description was a possible thing, and certainly a complete description is a possible thing. But as it is a possible thing one can stop continuing to describe this everything. That is where philosophy comes in, it begins when one stops continuing describing everything. (LIA 283–4)

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I argue that Stein’s opening her project to philosophy and concomitant revamping her take on description sets her up for a dialogue with Henri Bergson. James and Bergson shared a critique of the positivist, determinist scientific culture of their era and both envisioned a philosophy that would allow for a take on the world at once empiricist and religious (for James) or intuitive (for Bergson). Yet of the two James was more a man of science than Bergson.2 James’ Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience, applications of Wissenschaft to a broad spectrum of human life, count as hallmark publications in the development of late-nineteenth-century scientific thought in America.3 In Pragmatism James seeks to format a philosophy in which empiricism, logic, and “the humblest and most personal experiences . . . mystical experiences” join forces.4 Bergson, who projects “the union so greatly desired, of metaphysics and science”—a feat only “a truly intuitive philosophy would realize”—goes about this integrative ideal differently than James.5 He wanted philosophers to revolutionize science in coming up with a radically new mode of thinking and, importantly, a new approach to language. Interestingly, James, toward the end of his life, moved in a more Bergsonist direction.6 Stein’s approach to description in Tender Buttons, this chapter argues, does not tally with James’ project she would have encountered during her college days, in which philosophers and scientists speak the same language. More in tune with Stein’s attempt to create “a water of words” than James’ stream of consciousness coloring sentences in The Principles, is Bergson’s proposing to come up with “fluid concepts” in his “Introduction to Metaphysics.”7

James and Bergson: Truth and reality Bergson only crops up at the fringes of Stein criticism. As I see it, there are at least two reasons for what in the light of a score of Bergsonist readings of (American) modernist writers, seems a curious oversight.8 The most obvious explanation is that, to my knowledge, Stein at no point comments on the work of Bergson or even as much as drops his name. That she must have come across the philosopher’s work in her voracious reading and busy social life, however, can be taken for granted. At the time she and her brother presided over one

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of Paris’ most exhilarating salons, Bergson was the talk of the town. In his Appreciation, notably, Leo Stein looks back on the era as a time when “Bergson was in the air.”9 Furthermore, both Mina Loy and Mabel Dodge, friends of Stein’s, published articles in which they related her poetry to the philosopher’s take on time and perception.10 What may also have played a part in the sidestepping of Bergson by Stein critics is the fact that James and Bergson are so often discussed in tandem as ‘stream of consciousness’ thinkers.11 The obvious connection between Stein and James appears to make a Bergsonist approach to her work superfluous. Yet for all the ways in which the projects of James and Bergson harmonize, they are not interchangeable. In early-twentieth-century discussion on the relationship between the American and the French philosopher, their diverging was considered with more urgency than in contemporary debate. Differences between James and Bergson were stressed especially right after James’ death by his friends or students eager to highlight the originality of his genius. In The Philosophy of William James (1911) Théodore Flournoy, for example, finds it difficult to tally Bergson’s monist take on evolution, which pictures a motion from primary unity to ever-dispersing differentiation, with James’ Promethean picture of an ever-increasing sense of harmony.12 More extensively as well as more radically, Horace Kallen’s William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (1914) pits James as a truly original and democratic thinker against the fairly traditional system-builder Bergson who, by Kallen’s account, fails to move beyond transcendentalism.13 A contemporary reconsideration of these claims is more than welcome.14 To tease out the differences between the philosophizing friends’ projects is important because it would modify and deepen our understanding of those works of literary modernism readily labeled Jamesian and/or Bergsonist. With respect to Stein’s work, a James-Bergson comparison sheds new light on Stein’s 1910s poetic turnabout, when she switched from repetition-driven portraits to the sprightly Tender Buttons, since it shows her thinking on language and poetry to intersect with Bergson’s musing on language and representation, which was central to the development of literary modernism in Europe.15 An apposite starting point for an exploration of the harmony and tensions between James and Bergson—a project that far extends the scope of this chapter—are their comments on each other. The intellectual friends commended

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each other in private and public letters as well as in their lectures, but each also wrote on the other. James inserted a lecture on Bergson in A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and Bergson wrote the preface for the French translation of James’ Pragmatism, later incorporated in The Creative Mind (1933). Reading how they read each other puts me on track to point out where their respective pluralisms diverge—a diverging that centers on their understanding of reality and of the relation between reality and language. James’ Hibbert lecture “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” (1907), written before Bergson’s eulogistic preface “Sur le pragmatisme de William James: vérité et réalité” (“Truth and Reality”) to the translation of James’ Pragmatism in 1911, stages the French philosopher as a radical. “Bergson alone,” according to James, offers an alternative to the rationalist (or intellectualist) and the empiricist traditions in philosophy, which both offer ultimately unsatisfactory accounts of the relation between the world and our knowledge of it.16 For James, as for Bergson, what makes the world real is mobility, directly apprehended flux—“stream of consciousness” for the one, “durée” (duration) for the other. Neither philosophical tradition, however, has been able to make sense of reality as a dynamic and lived process. The rationalists err in turning away from experience to an absolute, and the empiricists are too intent on analyzing the world of sense in order to appreciate its flux. To analyze—to name, count, measure, and compare—experience, is to force to a standstill and break up into elements that which is essentially undivided and dynamic. Throughout the history of philosophy thinkers have sought recourse to concepts in order to understand life yet in doing so they have consistently alienated themselves from life. As James puts it, “to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other.” For James, Bergson triumphs over other philosophers because he “denies that mere conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible or possible in the world of being or fact.”17 This statement makes perfect sense in the light of James’ admiration for Bergson; like James’ own distinction between “knowledge of acquaintance” (primary, perceptual knowledge, impossible to translate into language) and “knowledge-about” (perceptions made sense of, conceptualized), Bergson distinguishes between two frameworks of knowledge, one by which the

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intellect systematizes and represents and an intuitive one geared toward the present immediacy of our inner life.18 James’ claim is also, however, a bold one for it sets him up to tackle the question how Bergson, a philosopher through and through, could move beyond conceptual logic from within philosophy. It is here, in James’ broaching Bergson’s take on representation and language, that a line of divergence between the two philosophers surfaces. In a note to his lecture on Bergson, James seeks to answer those critics who question the value of a philosophy that seeks to dethrone concepts: “[W]hat is it in itself if not a conceptual system? Does its author not reason by concepts exclusively in his very attempt to show that they can give no insight?”19 The response, according to James, is straightforward. Bergson’s concepts serve a distinctly practical role. When Bergson uses concepts he does so, James stipulates, only to “orient” us, to show us to what quarter we must practically turn if we wish to gain that completer insight into reality which he denies that they can give. He directs our hopes away from them and towards the despised [despised by rationalist thinkers, my comment] sensible flux. What he reaches by their means is thus only a new practical attitude. He but restores, against the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy, our naturally cordial relations with sensible experience and common sense. This service is surely only practical; but it is a service for which we may be almost immeasurably grateful. To trust our senses again with a good philosophic conscience!—who ever conferred on us so valuable a freedom before?20

The problem with James’ take on Bergson here is that, in line with his own persuasion, he pictures the French philosopher as a pragmatist, as a thinker for whom truth resides in action, in practical attitudes.21 In Pragmatism James famously explained that “an idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.”22 In his footnote to the lecture on Bergson, James attempts to recycle the value of concepts by stressing what they can do for us. Concepts, he writes, do not only serve us to schematize life, they “do not only give us eternal truths of comparison and maps of the positions of things, they [also] bring new values into life.”23 Concepts, according to James, may open our lives to new ranges of motivation, and are capable of arousing in us new interests and incitements, feelings of power, sublimity and admiration. James, in other words, has concepts end in life.24 It is up to each and every

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one of us to act upon concepts and thus discover the riches life has in store. This agenda, paradoxically, minimizes the function of philosophy as a discursive practice. In the end, for James, description and talk are of little use. In the conclusion to A Pluralistic Universe, the lecture “The Continuity of Experience,” he writes: I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field. The return to life can’t come about by talking. It is an act.25

For James (pragmatist) philosophy culminates in pointing rather than talking or writing. In order to get across a sense of the flux of the real he finds he “must point, point to the mere that of life, and you by your inner sympathy must fill out the what for yourselves.”26 Bergson, by contrast, did not project a future of silence for philosophy. He furthermore did not share James’ celebratory resorting to the practical value of concepts. In aligning Bergson with his own pragmatist project James, as Frédéric Worms points out, actually reverses his friend’s take on practical concepts.27 In his 1903 text “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” reprinted in the 1933 The Creative Mind, Bergson unfolds his take on the tension between an analytical mode of knowing and an intuitive approach. Central in this essay is Bergson’s insight, rehearsed by James in his lecture, that both rationalist and empiricist philosophers study parts and elements of what Bergson calls a translated reality—a sketched or represented reality—yet fail to appreciate reality itself. According to Bergson this method is in keeping with the natural tendency of our intellect. “To think,” he explains, “consists ordinarily in going from concepts to things.” As such, it is an interested and practical endeavor. “To try a concept on an object,” Bergson explains, “is to ask of the object what we have to do with it, what it can do for us. To label an object with a concept is to tell in precise terms the kind of action or attitude the object is to suggest to us.”28 In other words, we understand objects by linking them up with one or several concepts, in view of how we could use them. Such an approach, for Bergson, runs counter to philosophy. What matters in philosophy is first the object itself, not our using it. Thus, for Bergson “[e]ither there is no philosophy possible and all knowledge of things is a practical knowledge turned to the

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profit to be gained from them, or philosophizing consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition.”29 Bergson’s concept of intuition forms the cornerstone of his project. It is not a word, however, he felt completely comfortable with. In the second of the introductory essays written for The Creative Mind he confesses to the hesitation he feels in using it: “Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method.”30 He was not. Although Bergson often appears to make a clear-cut distinction between intellect and intuition, as in the quote above where practical knowledge rules out the intuitive knowledge that should be metaphysics’ challenge, the two faculties are not ultimately in stark opposition. Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have tended to seek an alternative for the flaws of the intellect (as a time-bound faculty) in a supraintellectual faculty, a timeless intuition. For Bergson, by contrast, the intellect estranges us from time. It is intuition that takes us back into time. As he sees it, the process of knowledge actually starts in time, or mobility, in the immediate contact between our mind and reality. Because we are wired to think in clear terms and to establish a sense of order in our lives, however, our mind will substitute the immediate sense of flux with a sequence of states and things. This process, what Bergson in “An Introduction to Metaphysics” calls the natural inclination of our intellect, is necessary to common sense and practical life. It is also what underpins scientific knowledge and the template on which language operates.31 Up until this point, Bergson’s intellect is very much in tune with James’ knowledge-about. Yet whereas James finds he can only point to the sensible flux—and indeed stresses the abyss between immediate perception and secondorder conceptualization—Bergson holds high intuition as the philosophical method to get in touch with the real, with duration. Intuition consists in undoing the natural, intellectual, practical way of thinking. To think intuitively demands of the mind to “do itself violence, reverse the direction of the operation by which it ordinarily thinks, continually upsetting its categories, or rather, recasting them.”32 Intuition demands that we ask the mind to scrutinize its own workings so as to be able to force it in the direction away from habit and common sense with the goal of penetrating duration. When Bergson reads

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James, then, he cannot accept the idea that there is only constructed truth, that truth comes about in our acting and thinking. As Worms points out, when Bergson in his text on James (also reprinted in The Creative Mind) applauds James for preferring those “truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought,” he sees his friend’s notion of a pragmatist truth, a truth we’re in the process of constructing, as an encounter with the real.33 In reading James, Bergson somehow forces in intuition as a prior truth. Each, in other words, approaches the other from their own framework: for James intuition is ultimately practical and for Bergson pragmatist truth is first an intuition. It is this discrepancy, between James’ horizontal thinking focused on the creation of truth and Bergson’s vertical project in which the penetration of the real takes center stage, that also informs their different approach to language and representation.

Fluid concepts Bergson’s thinking on language is ambiguous. On the one hand he is very much a language pessimist. From the early Time and Free Will (1888) it is clear that language steps in between the direct experience of duration and consciousness. Language, he writes here, is what cancels sensational immediacy.34 On the other hand, Bergson’s oeuvre develops an immense confidence in the creative potential of language. In Maurice Blanchot’s words, Bergson in effect “was imbued with an extreme distrust of words and an extreme confidence in poetry.”35 In Time and Free Will the philosopher commends audacious novelists for their craftiness in wielding language so that it triggers in readers an appreciation of duration.36 In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), he puts his hopes on the poets. Good writers, he posits here, may be capable of making language suggest duration, but truly exceptional poets can take language even further: Beneath these joys and sorrows which can, at a pinch, be translated into language, they grasp something that has nothing in common with language, certain rhythms of life and breath that are closer to man than his inmost feelings, being the living law—varying with each individual—of his enthusiasm and despair, his hopes and regrets.37

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What Bergson means by “certain rhythms of life and breath” here can be explained by his notion of the virtual. The virtual, in Bergson’s project, is the zone in which duration operates. It does not find itself in clear-cut opposition to the actual—the world of matter and concepts—but can be conceived of as an estuary that runs into the actual, in our material world of concrete things and clear-cut ideas. As John Mullarkey explains, for Bergson “there is not one virtual durée opposed to an unenduring material world; rather, there are ‘planes’ of virtuality, ‘infinite in number’, representing a myriad different degrees of durée.”38 To think intuitively, on Bergson’s terms, implies we reverse the direction of thought, from actual to virtual. Focusing on the process of actualization—on our mind delineating concrete things and emotions from the stream—we can recover a sense of the virtual movement, or what Bergson in the quote above calls the “living law,” that underlies them. When Bergson finds a sense of the virtual in poetry, he moves away from a static representationalist scheme and understands language as generating intuitive knowledge. Instead of trying to lodge reality in closed concepts one should try to have the process of knowing coincide with the generative action of reality, in a dynamic language. “Coincide” here, as Mullarkey explains, does not mean correspond but points to a common implication in process-reality.39 For Bergson, a language of process is able to give expression to process-reality not because it mimics or incarnates something but because it unfolds and meanders according to its own rhythms.40 What the meanderings of language enable us to grasp, then, is not an image of reality but the energy that stirs reality. In the two “introduction” essays written for The Creative Mind Bergson sounds out a thinking of a creative reality by means of language. Thought, he explains in the second introduction, cannot do without language: “thought, of course, always utilizes language.”41 While it holds that the concepts we normally use work against intuition, the philosopher finds that philosophers should meet the challenge of coming up with new concepts. Those new concepts, moreover, will imply a new notion of clarity. For Bergson, “the concept which is of intellectual origin is immediately clear, at least for a mind which can put forth sufficient effort, while the idea which has sprung from an intuition ordinarily begins by being obscure, whatever our power of thought may be.”42 Whereas the former merely recycles familiar material, and thus makes us feel at home, the latter radiates “the clarity of the radically new and absolutely

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simple idea, which catches as it were an intuition.”43 Those ideas are what he calls, in “Introduction to Metaphysics,” “fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things.”44 In making use of images and metaphors, of poetic language, such a fluid language is actually more “direct” than the unadorned, analytic language of science.45 It is such a language of directness and precision-inits-obscurity that philosophy should aspire to and that, for Bergson, should ultimately lead to the “union so greatly desired of metaphysics and science.” All scientific discoveries, for Bergson, start with an act of intuition, which is, however, soon written over by analysis. In forcing the mind to retrace its steps, philosophy would be able to show just how real thinking is in essence of intuitive thinking. Bergson, in other words, wants language to shed its efficacy and aim for the unique rather than the generic. He wants language to cut a particular object seen by a particular person at a particular time a concept appropriate to it alone. Just like he urges us to think against the grain, from intellect back to intuition, he wants us to use language against itself. Language on Bergson’s terms, then, turns its back on convention, tradition, and clarity. It is what Jean Paulhan has dubbed a language of terror. On Paulhan’s account, this—for him, flawed—Bergson-inspired quest for the new counts as the motor for modernist experiment in literature.46 Such a take on language is in conflict with James’ understanding of language and representation. James, as Steven Meyer outlines, relied on an interpretative account of representation.47 What mattered for him was what he could make of a text, less the way in which it was composed. His interpretative stance, moreover, was oriented toward clarity, away from opacity (or a Bergsonist clarity-as-opacity). Furthermore, because for James immediate experience can only ever be re-presented via concepts, he did not feel the urge to come up with a new conception of language, which would allow for the making present of the flux of the real. Where Bergson proposes new modes of thinking and writing that yield access to duration, James, as we have seen, holds fast to the value of (traditional) concepts, on what they point to or make us do. James, to be sure, was not deaf to the rhythms and cadences of language and in The Principles of Psychology he calls on language to mirror the flow

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of thought. Yet when he proposes that we give expression to “a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” so as to better reflect the manifold relations out of which our thinking consists, he does not call for a fluid language in the way that Bergson does.48 For James in The Principles the structure of our sentences mirrors the structure of our thinking. As he sees it, we are actually always constructing relations between concepts in our sentences—by means of such words like and, if, but, by—but we don’t normally appreciate them as meaningful. To open our eyes to the shades of meaning they convey would lead to a more faithful, if still impoverished, representation of the stream of consciousness in our language. Bergson, by contrast, proposes a radically new mode of thinking. The manifold relations he is after are not the ones we construct in our everyday thought meanderings but the ones that make up the myriad rhythms in duration, in reality itself. For those to be expressed in language, one needs to rethink language, force it onto new terrain. Paradoxically, Bergson’s musings on how to open language to intuition do not really tally with his writing. His texts can certainly be called literary—he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928—but not many would label him an innovative writer. His essayistic style is lucid and does not display the new sense of “obscure clarity” he finds central. Where in “An Introduction to Metaphysics” he stresses the importance of “choosing images as dissimilar as possible” so as to prevent any one of them to usurp the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, his own imagery is coherent and never jarringly surprising.49 Bergson, moreover, is very much aware of the “danger” involved in thinking that such concepts as unity, multiplicity, continuity, finite or infinite divisibility are “faithful representation[s]” yet he does not attempt to replace them by the tailor-made, new concepts he himself calls for.50 One way to partly resolve this issue in reading Bergson is to approach his different texts as palpitations of the “extraordinary simple” intuition that, by his account, lies at the basis of any philosophical system; not to approach his oeuvre as a completed edifice but as an empiricist quest in which concepts like the virtual, duration, and intuition are in constant dialogue with each other.51 Alternatively, one can take up Bergson’s cue and look for a language that befits life in poetry.

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Passionate naming For Stein Tender Buttons made poetry. In her lecture “Poetry and Grammar” she reflects on the series as her first experiment with poetry thus: I began to discover the names of things, that is not discover the names but discover the things the things to see the things to look at and in so doing I had of course to name them not to give them new names but to see that I could find out how to know that they were there by their names or by replacing their names. And how was I to do so. They had their names and naturally I called them by the names they had and in doing so having begun looking at them I called them by their names with passion and that made poetry, I did not mean it to make poetry but it did, it made the Tender Buttons, and the Tender Buttons was very good poetry it made a lot more poetry. (LIA 329–30)

Central to poetry, for Stein, is the issue of naming. Like James and Bergson, she was convinced that the names or nouns we use in our everyday speech are useless when it comes to rendering the flux of life. Nouns or names, she finds, are conventional, habitual labels, alien to the immediate, intuitive experience: “if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known” (LIA 314). Unlike James and in tune with Bergson, Stein endowed language with the capacity to create a different kind of names or concepts, from Tender Buttons onwards. Poets, however, should not invest in the invention of new names (“that cannot be done”) and they certainly should not attempt to have the sound of their poetry imitate the movements and emotions that make up reality (LIA 331). Such experiments, for Stein, have very little to do with the workings of language. “Language as a real thing,” she tells us: is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything. So every one must stay with the language their language that has come to be spoken and written and which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation. (LIA 331)

For Joan Richardson, Stein’s referring to the history of language is a romantic gesture. She argues that it shows Stein reverting to Emerson’s take on language, in which words are things, containing their own history of permutations.52

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Joseph Riddel, by contrast, challenges such an interpretation and stresses that Stein does not advocate a language of plenitude. Language on Stein’s terms, he argues, “does not have a history as such, except its entropic movement,” its chaotic recreation.53 In his reading, moreover, the fact that Stein characterizes language as an “intellectual recreation” underlines Stein’s defiance of what he considers to be Bergson’s romantic, organicist project. I argue that when Stein pictures language as encompassing the whole of its intellectual recreation, she wittily sides with Bergson’s wager on language. In describing language as an intellectual recreation, Stein can indeed be seen to underscore the relation between language and intellect, quite in line with Bergson and James. In this reading language serves the intellect, it helps the intellect in doing what it likes best: representing reality. Yet “language as a real thing .  .  . is an intellectual recreation” is a typical Stein phrase: at once deceptively simple and playfully rich with meaning. We can also understand the phrase as Stein pointing out that that which makes language real is to be found in the re-creation of the intellect, in its being asked to return upon its steps. This interpretation furthermore tallies with the way in which Stein defines poetry. “Poetry,” she writes in the same lecture, “is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun” (LIA 327). Poetry, in other words, amounts to a re-creative effort as its relation toward nouns is one of attraction and rejection, of doing and undoing. In poetry, then, the practical function of the intellect is thwarted; use has to make way for abuse. When Stein posits that every language “has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation,” then, she is not only saying that language comes with a tradition of intellectual development, of permutations and ever-refining concepts, but that it also has an alternative history of undoing the intellect’s work, in poetry. Stein is not very precise on how poets should go about employing language so that it no longer merely labels the things seen but instead captures what in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas she referred to as “the rhythm of the visible world” (ABT 781). The clue she gives us in “Poetry and Grammar” is that it takes passion. For Meyer, Stein’s passion takes her back to Emerson. He calls attention to Stein’s observation that “Emerson really had passion; he wrote it; but he could not have written about it because he did not know about it.”54

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In Emerson, as in Whitman, Stein recognized a predecessor in the attempt to write from experience rather than about it. Yet passion is also where her project taps into Bergson’s. Bergson, writing after Emerson, did know and write about passion. He did so, moreover, in a way that chimes with Stein’s writing about passion. In Time and Free Will the philosopher states that the qualitative multiplicities that make up time as duration are well familiar to passionate lovers. When a violent love takes possession of our soul, he writes, we see our everyday worlds transformed into “a thousand different elements which dissolve into and permeate one another without any precise outlines, without the least tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another.”55 The method of intuition, as he develops it in his later work, is meant to make us see exactly such an intermingling of thousands of boundless elements. In “Poetry and Grammar” Stein calls upon any poet to write with an “intensity of emotion” (LIA 314). It takes heightened emotion, she finds, to be able to see beyond everyday reality and translate those perceptions into new concepts. She digs up a childhood memory to clarify her point. “I remember very well,” she tells us when I was a little girl and I and my brother found as children will the love poems of their very much older brother. This older brother had just written one and it said that he had often sat and looked at any little square of grass and it had been just a square of grass as grass is, but now he was in love and so the little square of grass was all filled with birds and bees and butterflies, the difference was what love was. The poem was funny we and he knew the poem was funny but he was right, being in love made him make poetry, and poetry made him feel the things and their names. (LIA 330)

For Stein being in love does not come with pink shades, but rather with antennae that enable one to take in a whole new layer of reality, an everything that twitters and buzzes and flutters. As such, Stein’s crush is much like the one Bergson prescribes in order to pierce reality. When Stein stresses the relation between impassioned perception and impassioned writing, when she posits that it is poetry that makes one “feel the things and their names,” she makes explicit the idea Bergson sounds out in The Creative Mind, that a poetic style is not about recording a different kind of reality but that in the act of writing poetry, feeling and naming go hand in hand. Like Bergson, Stein was in search of exactitude—what she called “passionate exactness of meaning”56—and, far more than any of the

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philosophers’ writings, her style embodies a new take on clarity, which has struck many of her readers as obscure and which she herself in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) compared to mud (“my writing is as clear as mud” (EA 123)). In Tender Buttons, moreover, she subverts the format of scientific description. Stein’s decision to “stop continuing describing everything” and end The Making of Americans in 1911 sparked off a search for a new poetic style. She starts moving away from her James-inspired ongoing descriptive approach and instead of writing about her observations, she decides to render the process of perception itself. In Stein’s words, she decides she “would not know what [she] knew about everything what [she] knew about anything” but focus on “what is happening” instead (LIA 285). Only with the writing of Tender Buttons in 1912, however, does this lead to poetry. In the earlier portraits she had attempted to keep description at bay by not speaking from an objective, a-temporal perspective. By all the time adjusting her take on whomever she was observing, she explains in “Portraits and Repetition,” she had wanted to ward off closure: each time that I said the somebody whose portrait I was writing was something that something was just that much different from what I had just said that somebody was and little by little in this way a whole portrait came into being, a portrait that was not description and that was made by each time, and I did a great many times, say it, that somebody was something, each time there was a difference just a difference enough so that it could go on and be a present something. (LIA 294)

What you get in these portraits, made up of a sequence of taut grammatical sentences that each differ slightly from each other, is indeed not so much description proper. Stein rather presents us with the repeated impulse to describe, with a “beginning again and again” (CE 522). Tender Buttons, with its semantic abundance and playful grammatical twists, contrasts with those pieces in that here Stein does not cut description short but rather goes about it spuriously. In Bergsonist fashion, she challenges her scientifically trained mind to undo its habits. “A carafe, that is a blind glass,” the famous opening poem of Tender Buttons, shows Stein’s mind at work in the direction opposite to representation.

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A carafe, that is a blind glass A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. (TB 11)

Stein does not sum up the physical properties of a carafe and neither does she explain its uses. She sets out from the basic descriptive question “what is a carafe?” to conjure up what she called “a water of words” by which she pits the creative potential of naming against the way in which we normally describe things. Glass much less serves as an answer, as a first element in the definition of a carafe, than as a prompt for Stein to make creative connections and meditate on the ways in which her creative practice sets her apart from scientific description. Carafe, as something made of glass, can be related to other things made of glass; you could call it “cousin” to a drinking glass, a looking glass, or to a spectacle (as a vision-aid). Yet Stein is not really interested in mapping paradigm relations. Indeed, she upsets category-thinking. Since spectacle, of course, also means display, something special to look at, the question seems to be whether a carafe can be teamed up with both kinds of spectacles. Although a carafe is a pretty ordinary object, it is often on display, on a cupboard or in a cabinet. As such it has little to do with spectacle as something out of the ordinary and even less with spectacle as the device that helps you see better. Yet if we stick to this familiar picture of a carafe and cut the ties between carafe and looking in (mirror) or seeing by (vision-aid) in favor of an ordinary looking at, aren’t we blinding ourselves? Aren’t we missing the spectacle? Our tendency to stick with “nothing strange,” the poem makes us see, actually gives us a damaged, impoverished perception of reality—“a single hurt color”—as well as a merely functional take on language—language as a system of arrangements beyond which there is only pointing (in echo of James). The feat of Tender Buttons’ opening portrait is that it subverts these understandings of discriminative perception and language as a collection of conventional labels. The triple “and” in the first sentence foregrounds conjunction: Stein’s carafe is everything that first sentence says it is, including a container that normally holds one liquid (red wine, for example, with “hurt” connoting red, via “wound” or via “heart”) and a word, a functional element

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in a system of conventions. This logic of and (“all this”) puts the poem in opposition to what Bergson called the natural tendency of our intellect, to the pursuit of closure and a 1:1 representation scheme as the end in practical and scientific language. Stein can indeed be seen to proceed in a lateral way here, as Lyn Hejinian argues.57 Yet the crisscross relations she establishes are less in line with James’ “a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by” than with Bergson’s urging to think and write intuitively. Stein wants to do more than add nuance and feeling to descriptive language, which is what James meant us to do. And the web of relations she creates is more than an invitation to see a carafe in an arrangement. In Hejinian’s James-inspired reading, the carafe moves “[b]y being larger than a cup and smaller than a pitcher; by containing less liquid than before; by reflecting light (and thereby color); by being or containing the same color as a piece of paper; by having a vase with flowers not of that color set to the left of it from here but to the right of it from there, and so forth.”58 I think we can read Stein’s carafe as upsetting such (household, paradigmatic) arrangements. Stein’s carafe moves because she names it “carafe”—not practically or scientifically, but poetically or intuitively. The act of naming serves as an invitation to bring to light the ways in which names or nouns make us think of other nouns, as well as of verbs and prepositions, that lift the carafe out of its systems—“carafe” moves because Stein broaches a language brimming with contrariness or what she calls “mistakes” (LIA 313). Stein’s poetic naming leads her out of the ordinary yet not out of sense. The jolting word associations she presents us with show that “the difference is spreading,” that language can be used to conjure up movement and that it is this movement that makes language capable of giving expression to reality. The Tender Buttons portraits, of which quite a few deal with enclosures of all kinds (LIA 302), make a case for agile containers with watery boundaries—for fluid writing.

Notes 1 Both Claudia Franken’s Gertrude Stein, Writer and Thinker (Münster: Lit. Verlag and Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2000) and Steven Meyer’s Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) discuss Stein in a philosophical context, with a focus on James. Also in Lisa Ruddick’s Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) the relation Stein-James takes center stage.

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2 On James’ testing the boundaries between the disciplines, see for example: Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008) 3 David A Hollinger, “James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam, 69–83 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 73. 4 William James, Pragmatism & Other Writings, ed. Giles B. Gun (East Rutherford: Penguin Putnam, 2000), 39. 5 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 192. On Bergson and science, see for example: Bergson and Modern Thought: Towards a Unified Science, ed. Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter (Chur and New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1987) and Annales Bergsoniennes III. Bergson et la science, avec des inédits de Bergson, Canguilhelm, Cassirer, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: PUF, 2007). 6 In a letter from June 27, 1909 James reconsiders his descriptive, scientific outlook on the world: “I think that the center of my whole Anschauung since years ago I read Renouvier, has been that something is doing in the universe and that novelty is real. But so long as I was held by the intellectualist logic of identity, the only form I could give to novelty was tychistic, i.e. I thought that the world in which discrete elements are annihilated and others created in their place, was the best descriptive account we could give of things . . . This sticks in the human crop— none of my students became good tychists! Nor am I any longer, since Bergson’s synechism has shown me another way of saving novelty and keeping all the concrete facts of law-in-change” (quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 611. 7 Gertrude Stein, “American Language and Literature,” in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel, 226–31 (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988), 231; Bergson, The Creative Mind, 190. 8 See for instance: Sanford Schwartz’ The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985); Paul Douglass’ Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky); and Tom Quirk’s Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1990). 9 Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996), 213. 10 Mabel Dodge Luhan’s article “Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose” can be found in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Hoffman, 83–5 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986) and Mina Loy’s note was published in the 1924 Transatlantic Review.

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11 In the introduction to her Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) Bryony Randall, for example, sketches the intellectual context for a modernist understanding of time by means of a chapter on Henri Bergson and William James, in which she underlines the extent to which their projects merge. 12 Théodore Flournoy, La philosophie de William James (Saint-Blaise: Foyer Solidariste, 1911). 13 Horace Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1914). 14 Critics who deal with the tensions between the two projects are: Milič Čapek in Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971) and Frédéric Worms in “Reciprocal Readings,” in The Reception of Pragmatism in France & the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, ed. David G. Schultenover, 76–92 (S.J. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2009). 15 See Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. S. E. Gontarski, Paul Ardoin, and Laci Mattison (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 16 William James, A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), 109. 17 Ibid., 109. 18 William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, in Writings 1878–1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers (New York: Library of America, 1992), 22. 19 James, A Pluralistic Universe, 122. 20 Ibid. 21 René Berthelot’s Le pragmatisme chez Bergson (Paris: Alcan, 1913, vol. 2 of Un romantisme utilitaire: étude sur le mouvement pragmatiste) discusses Bergson as a partially pragmatist thinker. 22 William James, Pragmatism & Other Writings, ed. Giles B. Gun (East Rutherford: Penguin Putnam, 2000), 75. 23 James, A Pluralistic Universe, 122. 24 See Hilary Putnam’s article “James’ Theory of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam, 166–85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 25 James, A Pluralistic Universe, 131. 26 Ibid. 27 Worms, “Reciprocal Readings,” 81. 28 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 177. 29 Ibid., 178. Bergson does stress the practical value of concepts in modern science: “[Modern science] rests . . . upon ideas one ultimately finds clear; but these ideas, when they are profound, become progressively clear by the use made of

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Gertrude Stein in Europe them; they owe then the best part of their luminosity to the light cast back upon them, through reflection, by the facts and applications to which they have led, the clarity of a concept being little else, accordingly, than the assurance, once it is acquired, of manipulating it to advantage” (197–8). Bergson, The Creative Mind, 30. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 190. Worms, “Reciprocal Readings,” 82; Bergson, The Creative Mind, 213. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Minneola: Dover Publications, 2001), 130. Maurice Blanchot, “Bergson and Symbolism,” trans. Joel A. Hunt. Yale French Studies 4 (1949): 64. “Now, if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego, shows us under this appearance of logic a fundamental absurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named, we commend him for having known us better than we knew ourselves. This is not the case, however, and the very fact that he spreads out our feeling in a homogeneous time, and expresses its elements by words, shows that he in his turn is only offering us its shadow: but he has arranged this shadow in such a way as to make us suspect the extraordinary and illogical nature of the object which projects it; he has made us reflect by giving outward expression to something of that contradiction, that interpenetration, which is the very essence of the elements expressed. Encouraged by him, we have put aside for an instant the veil which we interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. He has brought us back into our own presence” (Bergson, Time and Free Will, 136). Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. S. H. Brereton and F. Rothwell (København, Los Angeles, and Saint Paul: Green Integer, 1999), 141. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 54. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155; Jeanne Delhomme, Vie et conscience de la vie. Essai sur Bergson (Paris: PUF, 1954), 172. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 35. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 190. Bergson explains: “Let us not be duped by appearances: there are cases in which it is imagery in language which knowingly expresses the literal meaning, and

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abstract language which unconsciously expresses itself figuratively. The moment we reach the spiritual world, the image, if it merely seeks to suggest, may give us the direct vision, while the abstract term, which is spatial in origin and which claims to express, most frequently leaves us in metaphor” (The Creative Mind, 43). In this vein, Stein’s multilayered writing, seeks to be direct. Stein, as Hejinian stresses, is “seldom metaphorical” (The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), 119). It is in Bergson’s work, Paulhan contended, that the literary terror, as practiced by for instance Proust, Apollinaire, Fargue, and Éluard, finds its philosophy. By his account, Bergson’s metaphysical questioning of language aggravated and precipitated the terrorist quest for the expression of a new and original reality, as first called for by Sainte-Beuve (The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature, trans. M. Syrotinski (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006), 28). Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 219. James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, 238. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 166. Ibid. In his essay “Philosophical Intuition,” written in 1911 and taken up in The Creative Mind, Bergson argues that at the basis of all philosophical systems lies a single intuition, “something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it” (108). In “Introduction to Metaphysics” he argues that a true empiricism should keep as close as possible to life and, by a kind of spiritual auscultation, “feel its soul palpitate” (175). Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2007), 237. Joseph N. Riddel and Mark Bauerlein, The Turning Word: American Literary Modernism and Continental Theory (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996), 113. Stein quoted in Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 220. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 132. Stein quoted in Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 231. Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, 100. Ibid., 101.

6

Becoming American, Becoming Agrammatical: Reading Stein with Deleuze Isabelle Alfandary

Gilles Deleuze was a passionate reader of American literature, and more generally of what he called “Anglo-American” literature.1 Although the French philosopher read in translation, he had been deeply impressed and touched by his readings of Melville and Whitman, to name but a few. He had got to know some of E. E. Cummings’ poems and commented upon them.2 His encounters with American writings—be they poetry or prose—led him to formulate the assumption that American literature is “a minor literature” par excellence. Anglo-American literature is not a gratuitous example in Deleuze’s mind when he formulates his concept of a minor literature. In his article on Whitman, the philosopher comes to this conclusion: “Is not American literature the minor literature par excellence, insofar as America claims to federate the most diverse minorities?”3 Together with Kafka’s writing, American literature stands out in Deleuze’s theory as the epitome of what it means to be minor, or to be more precise, to become minor, for the minor mode is a matter of becoming. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari present “a high coefficient of deterritorialization” as the first characteristic of a minor literature.4 In what follows one key modality of this minor mode will be addressed: the becoming agrammatical of American literature. I do so by staging Gertrude Stein as a deterritorialized writer—an American writer on Deleuzian terms.5

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27 rue de Fleurus, Paris: Location for becoming Deleuze repeatedly refers to Kafka as “a Czech Jew” in his essay Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.6 Kafka’s postulated identity is not to be understood as an essence but a starting point to take flight from. On Kafka’s “Letter to the father,” for example, Deleuze notes that “the question of the father isn’t how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn’t find any.” In other words: “opening the impasse, unblocking it.”7 As for Gertrude Stein, she was an American, the granddaughter of a German-Jewish immigrant to the United States, and an American expat in France. Stein wrote in English, in American English, and in American English in Paris, France. Or, to follow the Deleuzian cue “make a map, not a tracing”: Stein wrote 27 rue de Fleurus.8 27 rue de Fleurus functions as Stein’s place in the world. It is, of course, a flat in Paris, but there is more to it; 27 rue de Fleurus is the condition and destination of Stein’s writing. For that reason, 27 rue de Fleurus is not limited to its Parisian location, to Stein’s postal address, or the venue of her literary salon. 27 rue de Fleurus, which Stein insistently claims, makes sense only on a deterritorialized map, a Deleuzian map of intensities, which is geared toward performance rather than an alleged competence.9 Of course, as everyone who has read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas knows, Stein wrote some of her books at the actual Fleurus apartment. It was the home she shared with Alice Toklas for several decades and the place where she hosted her famous salons early in the twentieth century. Those gatherings were attended by many, if not all the avant-garde painters and writers of the Parisian international artistic scene. By revealing her address, by publicizing it, and performing it in her writing, she assigns a contingent location to her writing.10 27 rue de Fleurus, then, is Stein’s deterritorialized address, the address of her reterritorialization in Paris, and at the very same time of her deterritorialization out of Paris since it is always more than a mere location. It stands out as a territory without a territory, a distopia rather than a utopia. Stein seems to have been fully aware of the geographical dimension of all becomings: only in Paris could she become the American writer she hoped to become. Geography was a serious matter to her, a recurrent concern on which she elaborated in Geography and Plays and The Geographical History

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of America. The Fleurus address is of paramount importance in a Deleuzian reading of her writing since it enables us to grasp the ways in which what Deleuze, commenting on The Trial, calls “powers of deterritorialization,” operate in Stein’s poetic grammar.11 Regarding the minor mode, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that it is inseparable from a bilingual situation: “It will be noted that they are all more or less in a bilingual situation: Kafka, the Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German; Beckett, the Irishman writing in English and French; Luca, originally from Romania; Godard and his will to be Swiss.”12 Gertrude Stein and her insistent and puzzling will to write in American English outside of America could be added to this list. Stein was not strictly speaking what one would call bilingual, although she had been raised in a world of linguistic interferences. As a toddler, she had lived in France and Austria. Deleuze mentions Kafka’s “complicated” relation to Yiddish,13 a relation which Stein, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, certainly had in common with the author of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Yet if Stein was not bilingual, the situation she found herself in—writing American English in France—was. By bilingualism, Deleuze does not mean the capacity to speak two languages but to appropriate one’s own language by placing it in a state of variation: “It is in one’s own language that one is bilingual or multilingual.”14 Gertrude Stein had come all the way to Paris in order to be given the opportunity to speak her major language in a private mode, surrounded by foreigners. She seemed to have had an early and clear sense of the need of deterritorialization. Not only Stein’s body, then, but her language too underwent displacement in a foreign land, was immersed in an outside when she moved to Paris in 1903. This relationship with the outside is for Deleuze a key feature of Anglo-American literature: “Anglo-American literature constantly shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside.”15 Gertrude Stein was hardly the first wandering writer in the history of American literature. Deleuze mentions the conquest of the West in his analysis, but the American geographical becoming is also eastbound.16 Indeed, expatriation amounts to something of an American

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literary tradition. Many American writers, from James to Stein, Pound to Cummings settled or temporarily stayed in Europe to write a new literature, to “make it new.” In order to write her own American English, Stein knew she had to flee home and the company of native speakers. To Stein Paris meant a place where she could be left “more intensely alone with [her] eyes and [her] english” (ABT 729). Stein’s immediate and original intuition is that American English cannot exist, and that American literature cannot come into existence without dislocation. She pushed the logic of dislocation to its utter limit. If American English can be interpreted as a deterritorialized variation of English, it cannot be itself without becoming. It ceases to be itself as soon as it gets anchored and rooted. American English should, by principle, be a language in constant becoming, the paradigm of a deterritorialized language. Yet a language constantly warding off convention—undergoing incessant geographical displacement and grammatical difference—is a logical impossibility. Nevertheless, this is the language Stein aims for, a language without a land and without a system. Minor uses of language as defined by Deleuze are unsustainable linguistic modes, compelling speakers to variations and forbidding imitation. In Kafka we read: In this sense, Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible—the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise .  .  . In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language.)17

The same can be said of Stein’s American English in Paris. Her writing is, famously, impossible. Some of what she writes is hardly readable and what she has handed down to future generations of American writers is an oeuvre impossible to grasp and, therefore perhaps, impossible to sidestep. Many twentieth-century artists and poets, from John Cage to Charles Bernstein, have acknowledged their debt to Stein. Her marginal, ongoing writing has thus in a sense come to embody the becoming of American writing. In the history of American literature Stein has cleared the narrow path, if not the dead end, of agrammaticality—what the French call impasse.

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Agrammaticality as creative impasse In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze makes clear that agrammaticality should not be interpreted as a transgressive speech act but as a creative, poetic gesture. “Agrammaticality, for example, is no longer a contingent characteristic of speech opposed to the grammaticality of language; rather, it is the ideal characteristic of a line placing grammatical variables in a state of continuous variation.”18 To coin such an agrammatical English, to write in a minor mode, the American writer has to look for a welter of geographical variations—a search that in Stein’s case, as I have argued, implied the transgression of geographical boundaries. Interestingly enough, Stein’s quest for a poetic agrammaticality began with the writing of “Melanctha,” one of the three novellas to be included in her first book, Three Lives, which she worked on in the early years of her life in 27 Rue de Fleurus, in 1905–6. In “Melanctha” English is literally “set in variation,” to take up one of Deleuze’s phrases, since Stein coins an imaginary language for Melanctha Herbert, in a Black English context. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze argues that major languages such as British or American English are being “worked upon by all the minorities of the world”:19 the more international— not to say the more imperialistic—a language is, the more exposed it is by its foreign speakers to innumerable and unpredictable variations: For if a language such as British English or American English is major on a world scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world, using very diverse procedures of variation. Or the way Black English and any other number of ‘ghetto languages’ set American English in variation, to the point that New York is virtually a city without language. (Furthermore, American English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the minorities.)20

In “Melanctha,” Stein draws her grammatical and rhythmical deviations from the “linguistic labor of the minorities,” she appropriates a paradigm in a most creative and idiosyncratic manner. Stein belonged to several minorities at a time, being a woman, a Jew, and a lesbian. She hardly ever mentioned her Judaism, however, and certainly never proclaimed her homosexuality. In fact, she remained deliberately minority-blind throughout her life. She notably disregarded the danger of being an American Jew in France in

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the darkest hours of the German occupation and she never vindicated her identity, apart from her name, her address, and her American citizenship. This “Americanness,” I argue here, is not a matter of essence but of becoming. One might say that for Stein, one is not born an American but one is made one through the operation of language. In keeping with the Emersonian tradition, Stein thought of becoming American as of becoming herself, her own self. As a writer, she had the intuition of being a minority all to herself, experiencing what Deleuze calls this “mute and unknown minority” that belonged only to her.21 Stein wrote in her own broken idiom: she discovered and experienced American literature as a literature where broken English becomes American. In a sense American English results from the becoming minor of standard English in and through the dialects of the minorities mingled and conjugated with the languages of the world, the languages of the immigrants. Following Deleuze’s suggestion, one may go so far as to venture that American literature can be construed as this cluster of foreign, real or imaginary, incomplete, and multiple variations of standard English. Stein’s language in “Melanctha” is not strictly speaking derived from Black English, although some have read it as “authentic.”22 And, for all the stereotypes it contains, it certainly resounded with the black community.23 “Perhaps,” Werner Sollors argues, “it was Stein’s very directness that made the difference. In her fiction, her explicit and programmatic use of stereotypic adjectives and ethnic tags, coupled with her love for repetition, at times seems to deplete racist language of its traditional weight.”24 For Stein, the existence of Black English, as a set variation, paved the way for her own broken English, her repetitions, and agrammatical syntax. Black English, in other words, served as a linguistic model for Stein’s American modernism. This American dialect, such as the Baltimore dialect she invents in “Melanctha,” was primarily used as a creative matrix opening up onto what one might call poetic grammars or literary styles.25 Style constitutes the literary equivalent to dialect, a literary idiolect, which has nothing to hide, “as opposed to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language.”26 If you think of American English as a variation of British English, Black English counts as a variation of a variation. Stein’s style results from a series of variations, a mise en abyme of English.

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Comparing Kafka’s Prague German with Black American English, Deleuze envisages the minority factor as a key factor. It is important to realize, however, that the minority factor is not essentially socially or racially conditioned. A white female, who happened to be a lesbian and a Jew, was able to take up a Black American English Baltimore dialect, or more precisely what she perceived and imagined this dialect to be, in order to create her own disruptive syntax. The fictitious and cliché-like language of Melanctha Herbert happened to be Stein’s passage into her own.27 Throughout the novella, the narrative voice’s syntax—for the novella is based on a free indirect speech pattern—seems to be derived from Melanctha’s trivial and oral, heavily anaphoric and rhythmic way of talking. In “Melanctha,” Stein elaborates what Deleuze calls a writer’s “machine of expression”; not an emotional outpouring or omniscient description but an interplay of elements, for which the writer is simultaneously gears, mechanic, operator, and—appropriate with regard to Stein considering her legendary driving—victim.28 Midway through the narrative, her poetic grammar is literally born before the reader’s eyes: Jane was beginning to make Jeff Campbell see much clearer. Jane Harden did not know what it was that she was really feeling. Jane was always honest when she was talking, and now it just happened she had started talking about her old times with Melanctha Herbert. Jeff understood very well that it was all true what Jane was saying. Jeff Campbell was beginning now to see very clearly. He was beginning to feel very sick inside him . . . He felt very sick and his heart was very heavy, and Melanctha certainly did seem very ugly to him. Jeff was at last beginning to know what it was to have deep feeling. He took care a little longer of Jane Harden, and then he went to his other patients, and then he went home to his room, and he sat down and at last he had stopped thinking. He was very sick and his heart was very heavy in him. He was very tired and all the world was very dreary to him, and he knew very well now at last, he was really feeling. He knew it now from the way it hurt him. He knew very well that now at last he was beginning to really have understanding. The next day he had arranged to spend, long and happy, all alone in the spring fields with Melanctha, wandering. He wrote her a note and said he could not go, he had a sick patient and would have to stay home with him. For three days after, he made no sign to Melanctha. He was very sick all these days, and

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his heart was very heavy in him, and he knew very well that now at last he had learned what it was to have deep feeling. (TL 169)

Like Kafka, Stein rejects “the role of the narrator, just as he will refuse an author’s or master’s literature.”29 Like Kafka, furthermore, she kills all metaphors (“Metaphors are one of the things that makes me despair of literature”).30 In this long paragraph, she finds what Deleuze calls “[her] own point of underdevelopment, [her] own patois, [her] own third world, [her] own desert.”31 A patois, a French word for dialect, is this place where there is no longer any “individual concern.”32 Stein’s biographies may stage her as a narcissistic person, her writing does not indulge in self-expression. Indeed, the fact that the literary machine that is “Melanctha” does not distinguish between a standard-English narrator and dialect-speaking characters may well be what made the story a source of inspiration for other writers exploring an ethnic modernism.33 Stein’s idiosyncratic becoming agrammatical unfolds as a becoming everybody, it’s an inherently democratic agrammaticality. In Deleuze’s words: “For the majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is never anybody, it is always Nobody—Ulysses—whereas the minority is the becoming of everybody, one’s potential becoming to the extent that one deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian ‘fact,’ but it is the analytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of everybody.”34 In Everybody’s Autobiography Stein tells the story of the aftermath of her American celebrity as a consequence of the publication of her best-selling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Everybody’s Autobiography, symptomatically enough, shows us Stein relinquishing the narrative voice and mask of Alice in order to speak in everybody’s name: We went to Berkeley and they had invited me I think it was the Phi Beta Kappa to lunch, and during the lunch there were a lot of them there everybody asked a question not everybody but a good many, they thought I answered them very well the only thing I remember is their asking why I do not write as I talk and I said to them if they had invited Keats for lunch and they asked him an ordinary question would they expect him to answer with the Ode to the Nightingale. It is funny everybody knows but of course everybody knows that writing poetry that writing anything is a private matter and of course if you do it in private then it is not what you do in public. (EA 301)

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Here, her American audience is referred to by the collective pronoun “everybody” and Stein realizes how much she is part of that “everybody,” even when she retreats to be able to write. At some point in the narrative, she is struck by an electric sign moving around a building saying “Gertrude Stein has come” (EA 180). Although this was an “upsetting” experience for Stein (“to suddenly see your name is always upsetting”) it was also “natural enough” since being a an American celebrity does not prevent Stein from being an everybody, a body like each and every body undergoing processes of becoming in the indistinct and shapeless democratic mass (EA 180). Central to a minor literature is, for Deleuze, not only its deterritorializing force but also that it functions as a “collective assemblage of enunciation,” which may serve as a possible approach to the Steinian “everybody.”35 During her American tour, on which she elaborates in Everybody’s Autobiography, furthermore, Stein had the opportunity to visit the middle of the country, which she had never been to before. “The middle,” for Deleuze, is where the minor mode, the becoming agrammatical of English takes off: “It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle. The English zero is always in the middle.”36 Interestingly, Stein, in her many attempts to write a narrative, kept addressing the question of how to begin. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she acknowledges her intrinsic impossibility of not writing in medias res: “When I began writing I was always writing about beginning again and again” (EA 258). No language is ever minor or major per se. Minor and major are but degrees: their differences can only be assessed as a Deleuzian differential intensity—as ongoing, creative difference. “Major” and “minor,” as Deleuze conceives of the notions, operate in dialogue. “The problem” as he puts it “is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming.”37 There is no such thing as a minor language in itself: a minor language only exists in relation to a major language, which it invests and undermines for the purpose of making it minor. A minor language, then, is the nickname of a poetic operation. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss Nicolas Ruwet’s examples of Cummings’ grammatical poetic language such as the line “he danced his did,” taken from a poem of which the first line goes: “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”38 They write: The atypical expression constitutes a cutting edge of deterritorialization of language, it plays the role of tensor; in other words, it causes language to

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tend toward the limit of its elements, forms or notions, toward a near side or a beyond of language. The tensor effectuates a kind of transitivization of the phrase, causing the last term to react on the last term to react upon the preceding term, back through the entire chain. It assures an intensive and chromatic treatment of language. An expression as simple as AND . . . can play the role of tensor for all of language.39

Many of Stein’s lines could actually be quoted to exemplify a similar process. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” the famous line from “Sacred Emily” (1913), is often taken to encapsulate the whole Steinian project and style (GP 187). The lack of an initial article together with the asyntactical repetition of the verb “is,” used as tensor, makes this line a visible and accomplished instance of Deleuzian agrammaticality.

All alone with one’s English? For Deleuze, a minor language, for all its collective bearing, is something like an idiolect.40 Despite Stein’s embrace of an American “everybody,” her writing at times flirts with the idiolect, verging on what the French Wittgensteinian philosopher Jacques Bouveresse calls “private language” (langue privée).41 Stein’s idiosyncratic tongue was met with sarcasm as well as admiration by her contemporaries, but only occasionally roused the enthusiasm of a publisher. As one hilarious and illuminating episode from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas clearly demonstrates, she regarded her language American English: One day some one knocked at the door and a very nice American young man asked if he might speak to Miss Stein. She said, yes come in. He said I have come at the request of the Grafton Press. Yes, she said. You see, he said, slightly hesitant, the director of the Grafton Press is under the impression that perhaps your knowledge of english. But I am an American, said Gertrude Stein indignantly. Yes yes I understand perfectly now, he said but perhaps you have not had much experience in writing. I suppose, said she laughingly, you were under the impression that I was imperfectly educated. He blushed, why no, he said, but you might not have had much experience in writing. Oh yes, she said, oh yes. Well it’s alright. I will write to the director and you might as well tell him also that everything that is written in the manuscript is written with the intention of its being so written and all

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he has to do is to print it and I will take the responsibility. The young man bowed himself out. (ABT 727)

An idiolect is a language unique to an individual, the language spoken by the self to the self, in other words, the language of the idiot. In “Bartelby or the Formula,” Deleuze comments on the function of the scrivener’s famous phrase “I would prefer not to.”42 He finds that the formula ends up carving out a foreign language within language.43 Bartelby’s madness to that extent is no coincidence. If minor writings tend to border on the insane it is because psychosis treats ordinary language in an analogous way, applying to it a comparable procedure. Deleuze ponders on the schizophrenic vocation of American literature and wittily suggests that it introduces a bit of psychosis into English neurosis, in order to “invent a new universality.”44 For Deleuze, in other words, a minor literature always opens onto the collective, and thus moves in a different direction than the speech of the mad. Wolfson’s type of mental disorder, “The author is American but the books are written in French,” cannot ultimately be read as the paradigm of American literature, then, since Wolfson’s book is “not a literary work and does not claim to be a poem.”45 But Wolfson does offer the philosopher a way into American literature. Deleuze does not argue that all it takes to become an American writer is to be schizophrenic, but traces in American literature an impulse to write in a foreign language, to appropriate English by turning it into a foreign language. Events of “stuttering,” as Deleuze calls them when analyzing Melville’s Bartleby (“He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer or murmur”46), are definitely present in Stein’s repetitive—she would call it “insistent”—agrammatical syntax. Agrammaticality is a modality of Deleuzian stuttering: what it manifests is that the one who stutters is either unable or unwilling to abide by the syntactical rule. As Deleuze and Guattari remark in A Thousand Plateaus, mental institutions are specifically meant for those who do not accept the syntactic order. Language means, first and foremost, order: “Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.”47 Grammar is made up of lexicon and syntax. Syntax concerns the binding, and hierarchical ordering of diverse items into sequences. Stein challenges and resists what Deleuze and Guattari call “the elementary unit of language,” that is to say, its prescriptive function, “the order-word.”48 Gertrude Stein’s syntax is a process of becoming, giving birth to a digressive variation or a foreign language within the English idiom.

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In “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” Deleuze further argues: “English and American literature is thoroughly imbued with a sombre process of demolition, which carries off the writer.”49 In “Portraits and Repetitions,” Stein boldly indulges in the conceptualization of the American character: “I have just tried to begin in writing Four in America because I am certain that what makes American success is American failure. I am certain about that” (LIA 291). In his or her becoming agrammatical, the American writer exposes himself/herself to failure and possibly to destruction and dystopia. The process of agrammaticality is not a peaceful becoming, but a violent one. Gertrude Stein’s project of agrammatical becoming, intent on “kill[ing]” the (American) nineteenth century she grew up in (WIHS 21), sheds an American light on Deleuze’s theory of minor literature according to which authors are foreigners in their own tongue—a theory that beautifully echoes one of the intuitions by the major French modernist: “les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère” (“Great books are written in a kind of foreign language”).50

Notes 1 See chapter two “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” in Dialogues II, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet and trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2002). 2 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone, 1990). 3 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 57. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan and foreword by Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 16. 5 In The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (80) Michael North discusses T. S. Eliot’s modernism in relation to Deleuze’s concept of a minor literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994). For a Deleuzian “minor” reading of Stein see: Mary Frances Zamberlin, Rhizosphere: Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Writings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner (New York: Routledge, 2006). 6 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 66.

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7 Ibid., 10. 8 “What distinguishes the map from the tracing,” Deleuze explains, “is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real . . . The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification . . . A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same.’” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1987), 12). 9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 13. 10 Interestingly, Stein uses her Bilignin abode in a similar way in some of her (landscape) texts, but not the apartment at the Rue Christine, to which Stein and Toklas moved in 1938 after the lease on the Fleurus apartment had expired. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 68. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 98. 13 “What is complicated is Kafka’s relation to Yiddish; he sees it less as a sort of linguistic territoriality for the Jews than as a nomadic movement of deterritorialization that reworks German language” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 25). 14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105. 15 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 36. 16 “American literature operates according to geographical lines: the flight towards the West, the discovery that the true East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond. The becoming is geographical” (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 37). 17 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16–17. 18 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 99. 19 Ibid., 102. 20 Ibid., 102–3. 21 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 110. 22 Bettina L. Knapp, Gertrude Stein (New York: Continuum, 1990), 86. For more on Stein’s language use and ethnicity, see: Sylvia Wallace Holton, Down Home and Uptown: The Representation of Black Speech in American Fiction (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), 96–8; John Carlos Rowe, “What Is Inside: Gertrude Stein’s Use of Names in Three Lives,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 36.2 (2003): 219–43. 23 See Werner Sollors, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2002), 26ff. Sollors also points out the critical voices, for example, Claude McKay. For a more recent denouncing of Three Lives as racist, see: A. L. Nielsen, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1988).

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24 Ibid., 32. 25 Interestingly, Michael North, whose reading of “Melanctha” centers on the notion of the mask, makes a link, via Henry Louis Gates’ Figures in Black, between masks and a Deleuzian understanding of “dialect.” He writes: “Yet the ‘self-conscious switch of linguistic codes’ that Gates identifies as one of the primary strategies of dialect speakers is a mask that does more than just cover or obscure. Under this definition dialect is not a particular kind of language, not a mere deviation or deformation, but a particular use of language. It puts the standard language in conflict with itself, ‘constructing a continuum of variation,’ to quote Deleuze and Guattari, ‘negotiating all of the variables both to constrict the constants and to expand the variables’” (A Thousand Plateaus, 104, quoted in North, The Dialect of Modernism, 72). 26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 98. 27 While, for Jayne L. Walker, Melanctha’s idiom is “a poetics of impotence” (The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984), 27), I side with Charles Bernstein’s appreciation in A Poetics of the utopian dimensions of Stein’s language. He writes: “In her own or possibly her parents’ broken English and, more important, the spoken language of African-Americans, Stein found a linguistic utopia—a domain not colonized by England, not Island English’s sovereign subject. This ‘new word’ is surely anything but impotent, I won’t say seminal either, I’m running out of adjectives: bounteous” ((Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1992), 142). 28 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 58. 29 Ibid., 18. 30 Ibid., 22. 31 Ibid., 18. 32 Ibid., 71. 33 Sollors, Ethnic Modernism, 33. 34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 81. Tied to the collective function of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari stress, is its political bearing. 36 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 39. 37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105. 38 E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems: 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1994), 515. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 99. 40 Ibid., 105. 41 Gilles Bouveresse, Le mythe de l’intériorité (Paris: Minuit, 1987). 42 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 68.

Becoming American, Becoming Agrammatical 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 7, 10. Ibid., 110. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76. Ibid. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 39. Proust, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 98.

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Stein and Cinematic Identity Abigail Lang

As she readily acknowledged, Gertrude Stein was no cinéphile. She “hardly ever practically never” went to the movies and wrote “the cinema has never read my work or hardly ever” (LIA 251). A few anecdotes in the autobiographies record the enthusiasm of Fernande, Picasso’s then girlfriend, for movie-houses or, more famously, Stein’s meeting with Chaplin in Beverley Hills in 1935. But her writing grapples directly with cinema in two ways: as retrospective metaphor for her writing project in Lectures in America, and in the form of two film scripts. Throughout the lectures she composed for her US tour, Stein compares her work to the cinema, as if to make the former more conceptually accessible and aesthetically acceptable to a growing popular audience. This is not to suggest that this late acknowledgment of the cinema is solely opportunistic. The two film scripts she composed in 1920 and 1929 and published in Operas & Plays testify that her interest in this still new art form went back at least fifteen years. Stein’s 1934 theoretical reflections on the cinema as the art of movement, which I contextualize and elucidate in the first part of this chapter, end in a contradiction that her film scripts, foregrounding cinema as phantasmagoria, allow to unravel further. I follow this lead in the second part of the chapter. While Stein’s general comparison of the style of her portraits to cinematic aesthetics has been widely discussed among critics, her actual film scripts have been less analyzed, and seldom in relation to the style of her portraits. In what follows, I explore how Stein’s film scripts respond to the new medium that she herself thought articulated a modern sensibility of movement. To this end I sketch the background and implications of Stein’s general feeling that the modern sensibility is cinematic.

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Even though these ideas have been scattered throughout existing scholarship on Stein, what matters here is to establish the consistency between Stein’s general sense of modernity, the literary method of her portraits, and the cinema as an art form whose cultural and aesthetic impact Stein understood and engaged with in her film scripts. The film scripts are vital because they help us unravel the paradox implicit in Stein’s theoretical reflections on cinema: the apparent contradiction between a disembodied ideal and the metaphors of incorporation, through which this disembodied ideal is expressed. My reading of Stein and film, furthermore, allows us to trace the ways in which Stein’s thinking on the changing human “sensorium” is not only an offshoot of her college days, when she was taught by William James and Hugo Münsterberg, but also resounds with insights from early twentieth-century French philosophy and psychoanalysis, most notably Bergson’s understanding of temporality and Lacan’s 1930s theorizing on identity.1 What legitimates the comparison for Stein, what establishes a dialogue between the cinema and her work, is the fact that they are contemporary. Stein and cinema tackled similar questions: I of course did not think of it in terms of the cinema, in fact I doubt whether at that time [1908–12] I had ever seen a cinema but, and I cannot repeat this too often one is of one’s period and this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in our way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing. (LIA 294)

As Walter Benjamin has shown, the cinema and series production are two aspects of the same modernity: Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.2

Many of Stein’s contemporaries felt her work pertained to this modern mechanical repetition. In a 1926 review of a screening at the Film Society, which included Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique, critic Milton Waldman writes that the film is constructed “on a number of repeated patterns which included a straw hat, a girl’s smile, a triangle, a circle & various pieces of machinery. Its result was equivalent to the writing of Miss

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Gertrude Stein.”3 Besides the general feeling of modernity, it is the repetition of motifs that motivates the comparison, as well as the rapid succession of abstract images and a nonnarrative structure. Ballet Mécanique is all rhythmic motion: swinging, oscillation, shocks, rotating spools, kaleidoscopes, spinning tops, egg-beaters, and pistons. The human body is fragmented, mechanized, or artificial: a woman’s eyes, the stomping feet of a marching battalion, mannequins’ legs dancing. A laundress with a bundle of wash is insistently, and ultimately mechanically, going up a flight of steps, in what may well be “the first instance loop printing” in the history of cinema.4 When Kenneth Macpherson, with the help of the poet H.D. and her companion, the novelist Bryher, launched Close-Up, the first British journal devoted to the theories of cinema as art (not just entertainment), he immediately contacted Stein for a contribution. He wrote: The most modern tendency seems so linked up in this way and the kind of thing you write is so exactly the kind of thing that could be translated to the screen that anything you might send would be deeply appreciated.5

For Macpherson as well, then, there was something strikingly cinematographic in Stein’s writing. It is true that the key concepts that Laura Marcus isolates as recurring over and over again in early theorizations of cinema are the very same Stein uses to theorize her own writing: repetition, movement, time, emotion, vision, sound. If Stein wasn’t a cinéphile and seems to have taken little interest in the emergence of the cinema as an art, she was a former psychology student, and the Lectures in America reveal she paid careful attention to cinema as a medium and how it reflected and molded the new modern sensorium. That “cinema is a psychological experiment under conditions of everyday reality that uncovers unconscious processes of the central nervous system” was Hugo Münsterberg’s insight and thesis in his 1916 book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study.6 Münsterberg was a German psychologist, or psychotechnologist as he preferred to call himself, whom William James had brought over to Harvard. He had supervised some of Stein’s experiments while she was a student at Radcliffe. The Photoplay is one of the earliest books on the cinema, whose import Friedrich Kittler sums up as follows: Münsterberg’s demonstration that the new medium is completely independent aesthetically and need not imitate theater suggests that it assembles reality

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from psychological mechanisms. Rather than being an imitation, film plays through what “attention, memory, imagination, and emotion” perform as unconscious acts. For the first time in the global history of art, a medium instantiates the neurological flow of data . . . Film presents its spectator with their own processes of perception.7

While the cinema is briefly mentioned in Stein’s “Pictures,” it is really the following lecture, “Plays,” which engages with the new medium. After a deluge of unanswered questions on hearing and seeing at the theater Stein asks: “Does the thing heard replace the thing seen does it help it or does it interfere with it. Does the thing seen replace the thing heard does it help or does it interfere with it” (LIA 251). That Stein thus pits hearing and seeing against each other already testifies to the effects of modern media on the sensorium. According to Kittler: “Ever since that epochal change we have been in possession of storage technologies that can record and reproduce the very time flow of acoustic and optical data. Ears and eyes have become autonomous. And that changed the state of reality.”8 Worth quoting in full is the passage in which Stein summons the cinema as an ally in her quest to extricate the relationships between sight, sound, time, and emotion as well as action and story. These questions don’t get solved in the lecture. Stein rather continues exploring them in her ongoing practice. I suppose one might have gotten to know a good deal about these things from the cinema and how it changed from sight to sound, and how much before there was real sound how much of the sight was sound or how much it was not. In other words the cinema undoubtedly had a new way of understanding sight and sound in relation to emotion and time .  .  . I may say as a matter of fact the thing which has introduced a person like myself to constantly think about the theatre from the standpoint of sight and sound and its relation to emotion and time, rather than in relation to story and action is the same as you may say general form of conception as the inevitable experiments made by the cinema although the method of doing so has naturally nothing to do with the other. I myself never go to the cinema or hardly ever . . . The fact remains that there is the same impulse to solve the problem of time in relation to emotion and the relation of the scene to the emotion of the audience in the one case as in the other. There is the same impulse to solve the problem of the relation of seeing and hearing in the one case as in the other . . . It is in short the inevitable problem of anybody living in the composition of the present time. (LIA 251)

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In her very first lecture “Composition as Explanation,” written in 1926 in a freezing garage in Montrouge while her Ford was entirely taken down and repaired, Stein asserts that the modern composition is characterized by the continuous present: “A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition in the world as it has been these thirty years” (CE 524). “These thirty years” take us back to 1896, which happens to be when the first movie was screened,9 so that one might claim that the natural composition, the modern vision, is partly molded by the cinema—and partly by psychoanalysis, also “born” in 1895. In her early portraits, Stein says, “I continued to do what I was doing in The Making of Americans, I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing” (LIA 294). Two “bothers” soon face Stein, both grounded in memory. The first problem is that of resemblance in portraits: to compare, one needs to live in two times, the present of perception and the past of memory. The second problem is the fact that knowledge is acquired gradually but knowing is immediate: “a whole there then within me,” an entity not an identity (LIA 278).10 Again, the cinema (retrospectively and metaphorically) offers a solution to the problem of resemblance introducing memory in portrait-making: “Funnily enough the cinema has offered a solution of this thing. By a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing, it is in a way if you like one portrait of anything not a number of them” (LIA 293). There seem to be at least two ways to understand this. On the one hand, cinema fascinates, hypnotizes, grabs the attention, and restrains the viewer’s imagination and memory. This is precisely what Benjamin laments when he compares cinema and painting: The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before a movie screen he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested . . . The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind.11

Stein was very clear that she too wanted to prevent associations of ideas and she sought to do so by reducing her vocabulary and eliminating connotation: “I

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didn’t want, when I said water, to have you think of running water . . . I wanted to get rid of anything except the picture in the frame” (HWW 157). On the other hand, by insisting on one portrait of anything not a number of them, Stein suggests that even if a shot unwinds in time, it constitutes a unit and thus does not rely on memory or introduce a parallel time. The shot indeed counts as the cinematographic unit, even if the unit on the reel is the photogram. These two concurrent units suggest a parallel with Stein’s conception of the sentence and the paragraph. For Stein, the sentence should give itself at once, instantaneously. This is why she suppresses anything that might interrupt: punctuation or nouns, which are stretches, spaces of time. Stein repeatedly writes that one of her greatest pleasures as a child was to parse sentences, that is, to spatialize them, like a photogram. The sentence is an instant, a single moment. It suspends time, and therefore gives an intimation of eternity. In “Poetry and Grammar” she writes: “I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. In that way one is completely possessing something and incidentally one’s self ” (LIA 314). The paragraph would be an equivalent of the shot, a succession of photogram-sentences, infinitesimally different. The hypothesis is further confirmed when, in the late 1920s, Stein further differentiates the sentence as unemotional and the paragraph as emotional. For Stein this holist approach to the sentence and the paragraph is in keeping with the times. She defines the twentieth century as American and America as holist. The United States, creator of the twentieth century, had the conception of “assembling the whole thing out of its parts” while the nineteenth century, which “was roughly the Englishman’s Century” proceeded by a method of “‘muddling through.’ They begin at one end and hope to come out at the other” (HWW152). By contrast, “in the beginning of the twentieth century a whole thing, being what was assembled from its parts was a whole thing and so it was a paragraph” (LIA 285). With her penchant for paragraphs, she shares Bergson’s approach to time as an intensive quantity, a time “composed not of discrete entities which remain identical to themselves when they are divided but of fused elements, time displays a continuum of intensities which, when one divides it, generates the difference in nature of a perception that has become remarkable.”12 According to Stein, the artist expresses not only the contemporaneity of his time but its time-sense as well. Things move faster or slower from one

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generation to the next. “In the Twentieth Century you feel like movement” (HWW 153); “We in this period have not lived in remembering, we have living in moving being necessarily so intense that existing is indeed something, is indeed that thing that we are doing” (LIA 297). Initially at least, it seems that Stein’s conception of time followed the traditional spatialization and division in points. Stein’s “space of time . . . a space that is filled with moving” echoes Etienne-Jules Marey’s definition of movement as a ratio between a space and a given time (LIA 286). In Creative Evolution Bergson famously denounces this representation as the cinematographic illusion. In order to perceive movement in this mechanist model, a frame of reference is necessary, some fixed mark. A moving train demands a still background. Gradually, after World War I, Stein seeks a means to express movement in itself, independently from any relation, any frame of reference. She starts conceiving of a vibratory and even disembodied movement: But the strange thing about the realization of existence is that like a train moving there is no real realization of its moving if it does not move against something and so that is what a generation does it shows that moving is existing .  .  . [I]f the movement, that is any movement, is lively enough, perhaps it is possible to know that it is moving even if it is not moving against anything. (LIA 287)

Although she uses a mechanical metaphor, it is liveliness and life itself that Stein seeks to capture. If the vitality is sufficient, the movement may become perceptible without a frame of reference: “As I say the American thing is the vitality of movement, so that there need be nothing against which the movement shows as movement” (LIA 292). Another metaphor whose vehicle is a means of transportation makes clear that Stein is not after translation but vibration, an interior rather than exterior movement: “As I say a motor goes inside and the car goes on, but my business my ultimate business as an artist was not with where the car goes as it goes but with the movement inside that is of the essence of its going” (LIA 305). Stein cares for the engine’s hum, the “essence” of movement, not the distance traveled—again, an intensity. And in the portraits of the 1920s, of which she declared that of Georges Hugnet the most successful, she starts condensing: “There again, if you read those later Portraits, you will see that I used three or four words instead of making a cinema of it. I wanted to condense it as much as possible and change it around, until you get

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the movement of a human being” (HWW 159).13 Marey too sought to isolate movement and do away with the body when, in 1884, he chronophotographed a man in black suit with white stripes down arms and legs walking in front of a black wall. All the first tests filmed by Edison’s assistant in the Black Maria Studio strive to do the same; for example, Annabella’s imitation of Loïe Fuller where the serpentine line of flowing veils foregrounds the dance and erases the dancer.14 In the Lectures in America’s retrospective accounts, Stein’s investigation of movement culminates with what Robert Bartlett Haas has called “disembodied movement” (PGS 107), a term which seems to reach out for some elusive entity reminiscent of the prime-mover, élan vital, or soul. At the end of “What is English Literature,” Stein singles out “the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something” (LIA 222)  as American, a judgment her American tour confirmed for her.15 Stein claims that her portraits of Georges Hugnet and Bernard Faÿ, having “concentrated the internal melody of existence,” had “the essence of the thing contained within itself,” “something completely contained within itself and being contained within itself was moving” (LIA 307, 308).16 But the metaphors she uses to convey the acme of her quest seriously qualify the ideal of disembodiment, already pointing toward a further stage: instead of giving what I was realizing at any and every moment of them and of me until I was empty of them I made them contained within the thing I wrote that was them. The thing in itself folded itself up inside itself like you might fold a thing up to be another thing which is that thing inside in that thing.

Do you see what I mean. If you think how you fold things or make a boat or anything else out of paper or getting anything to be inside anything, the hole in the doughnut or the apple in the dumpling perhaps you will see what I mean. (LIA 308)

In the end, the investigation of movement opens up to something quite other. The concentration of movement, the conversion of translation into vibration culminates in an extreme form of self-containment. Stein is no longer a psychograph, couching on paper, transcribing, exteriorizing, making real (“realizing”) the portrayed and portrait-maker at once. Now the portrait engulfs the portrayed, who becomes his portrait. The process is one of ingestion, of

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incorporation, as the food metaphors confirm, while also suggesting the puzzling objects studied in topology. “The thing in itself folded itself up inside itself ” suggests a punctured torus turning itself inside-out or a Klein bottle. So while Stein associates “the disembodied way of disconnecting” with “something completely contained within itself and . . . moving” as truly American and the culmination of her exploration of movement, these metaphors of complex and paradoxical incorporation belie disembodiment, pointing to some enigmatic or impossible incorporation instead. This is as far as Stein’s “psychotechnological” reflections on cinema as an art of movement parallel to her own endeavor will take us. To solve the crux of a disembodied ideal expressed through metaphors of incorporation, we must now turn to Stein’s two film scripts. Although she repeatedly compares her work to the cinema in the Lectures in America, Stein doesn’t mention the two scenarios she wrote in the twenties. Whether there were plans for producing actual films is unknown; none were made in her lifetime.17 Yet they contrast so much in style with the rest of what Stein was writing at the time that one may venture that they were genuinely conceived as film scripts, and are to be read as such, focusing on the cinematographic potential. Written in 1920, the first script is soberly entitled “A Movie” and is indeed primarily concerned with movement. After a curious three-tiered epigraph in Stein’s unmistakable style, the three-page script is written in a straightforward manner alternating description and direct speech. Its somewhat unnatural telegraphic style is less suggestive of a clipped scenaristic mode than of a breathlessness caused by the hectic pace of events. “A Movie” is based on William Cook, an expatriate whom American Alice and Gertrude met in 1916 in Mallorca where he was living with Jeanne Moallic, a French model and cleaning-woman who becomes the “Bretonne femme de ménage” in the script (OP 395). The two couples returned to Paris in June 1916. Cook worked in a car-factory, as a taxi-driver and as a test-driver for Renault. It was Cook who taught Stein how to drive, in his taxi. Considering how she would grow to love driving, “A Movie” may well have been written to commemorate that event and the subsequent purchase of her first Ford, and to thank Cook.18 “Given that this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production” (LIA 294), it only made sense to use the new media to commemorate the purchase of the car that best symbolized effective mass

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production. Stein, Toklas, and Auntie (the new Ford) entered the service of the American Fund for French wounded, driving to Perpignan and Nîmes in spring 1917 where they made acquaintances with American soldiers. They returned to Paris in May 1919. Cook apparently worked for the American secret services and enabled the arrest of two thieves within the American command. For their bravura, Cook and Moallic were invited to join the great parade on the Champs-Elysées in July 1919, aboard their Renault. The events described in “A Movie” are very much based on fact. “A Movie” plays by the rules of dramaturgic conventions and includes plot, character, scenery, beginning, middle, and end, all of which Stein had discarded in the plays she had been writing since the 1913 “What Happened.” For Stein to stray so far from her current style suggests she may have written the piece with the doughboys she had befriended in mind. What better way to pay homage to Cook’s valor and the heroism of all the young American soldiers who come to fight in France—thus reconsidering the Monroe Doctrine mentioned in the epigraph—than through the cinema in general and with a suspense-ridden action-movie with a happy end in particular? In Wars I Have Seen, Stein associates the arrival of the liberators with the cinema: “Everybody is waiting, they say it goes so fast it makes them feel as if they were at a cinema” (WIHS 234). Everything goes very fast in “A Movie,” which reads like a celebration of speed and modernity conveyed in short sentences, telegraphic style, eliding articles and introducing abbreviations (f.m. for femme de ménage, by no means a conventional French acronym (OP 395)). From the opening shot of a mobilization locomotive, to the ballet of taxis taking soldiers to the Battle of the Marne, to the speeding Americans on motorcycles, the vehicles become more personal and faster. Their speed and modernity is further enhanced by contrast with the stately historic arches of the Pont du Gard and the Arc de Triomphe, which Stein describes with unwonted grandiloquence as “that imperishable monument of the might and industry of ancient Rome” (OP 397). “American painter painting in French country near railroad track. Mobilisation locomotive passes with notification for villages” (OP 395). Modern warfare barges in a peaceful impressionist landscape. This opening shot evokes without fail the 1895 L’arrivée d’un train en Gare de La Ciotat by the Frères Lumière, famous for the panic it caused when first screened and for presciently encapsulating the essential grammar of cinema (the long shot,

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medium shot, close-up sequence in particular). As Noël Bürch has shown, the temporal and spatial continuity on which classical cinema would depend to advance narrative was importantly established by one type of scene: the chase. Its proliferation in the 1910s and 1920s enabled directors to perfect their syntax and spectators to train their perception to provide duration and succession. Stein doesn’t include a car-chase per se but her two-day two-nights continuous drive from Paris to Provence would have required ellipses, and her full-tilt crash and final stunt some special effects. The final scene with the military parade, furthermore, evokes newsreels. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein makes the following comment on the Armistice parade: “All the nations marched differently, some slowly, some quickly, the French carry their flags the best of all, Pershing and his officer carrying the flag behind him were perhaps the most perfectly spaced” (ABT 848). That the Americans are the “most perfectly spaced” suggests their bodies are best attuned to the machine and ready to join the Ford assembly line or relax to the rhythm of the flickers—or the chorus line. Ballet Mécanique included a shot of a marching battalion, but more importantly maybe, it is the very example Bergson uses to denounce the “cinematographic illusion” in Creative Evolution (1907): Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, such as the marching past of a regiment . . . [T]here is another way of proceeding, more easy and at the same time more effective. It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does.19

Moreover, in 1882, the year in which he perfected the chronophotographic gun, Marey launched the Station Physiologique de Boulogne-sur-Seine, funded by the French state, after the Ministry of war had become interested in Marey’s studies on human locomotion and particularly the role of the “marching method” of the German army in its 1870 victory. As Paul Virilio has shown and Kittler sums up: “In the principle of cinema resides mechanized death as it was invented in the nineteenth century: the death no longer of one’s immediate opponent but of serial nonhumans.”20 “But,” Kittler also notes, “ghosts, a.k.a. media, cannot die at all.”21 In Stein’s second scenario, “the seriality of film enters plot itself.”22 “Film,” writes Kittler, “was the first to store those mobile doubles that humans, unlike other primates, were able to (mis)perceive as their own body. Thus, the imaginary has the status of cinema.”23

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Stein wrote her second film script in the spring of 1929. Georges Hugnet, whom she had met in 1927 and had begun collaborating with on translation projects, was just then finishing his first movie La Perle. They may have discussed plans for making a movie in France after a scenario by Stein, which would explain why Stein wrote it in French. Not only is this the first piece she wrote in French, it is also, according to Ulla E. Dydo, the first time that Stein used “transparently personal details,” in such an explicit way.24 If “A Movie” obliquely commemorates the acquisition of the first Ford, “Film” more explicitly commemorates the acquisition of the first dog, Basket, and the second Ford, bought in the winter of 1928–9. Where “A Movie” utilized and celebrated cinema’s ability to record movement, “Film” considers the cinema as a phantasmagoria, its generic bilingual title suggestive of the specters and appearances written in light on the celluloid skin of the film roll. The subtitle or title proper, “Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs,” establishes a relationship which it immediately denies. This triggers a whole series of hypotheses on resemblance, relations, and identity, which the film multiplies. The French surrealist Philippe Soupault pointed out that Chaplin was the first to construct a movie as a theme with variations, to imagine a composition rather than an action with suspense.25 While the three scenes that compose the movie are set in chronological order (“Quelques heures plus tard”: a few hours later; “Le surlendemain”: two days later (OP 399, 400)), they don’t so much convey a beginning, middle, and end as two variations on an initial theme: two laundresses, one older, one younger, perhaps reminiscent of the ascending laundress in Ballet Mécanique’s inaugural loop; a young lady and a young man; two ladies in a two-seater, clearly Stein and Toklas, two sisters who are not sisters, neither sir nor nun; two white poodles on an errant photograph, literally a moving image; two small packets that will remain unopened. Characters and objects circulate, are exchanged, lost, stolen, found again—though one never knows whether what recurs or is found again is the same. The movie ends in a final metamorphosis, or rather an incarnation: a real poodle materializes. This poodle—christened for a container (Basket) and thus perhaps the long-sought “thing contained within itself ”—will vouch for identity in years and writings to come: “I am I because my little dog knows me” (GHA 487). The point of view in “Film” is akin to that of the dog since Stein was, probably for the first time, representing herself from the outside, as seen by others, anticipating the

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device used throughout The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. That the piece was written in French, the language of her outside, then, suddenly makes renewed sense. Although the identities, relations, actions, and motivations of the characters remain obscure, they produce many strong emotions, which suggest the use of close-ups: ardor, pleasure, excitement, screams of joy, haste, and final perplexity. The history of drama abounds in recognition scenes where identities are reestablished and families reunited, but here, on film, no recognition happens. Clues multiply but only Stein may have held the keys to what very much resembles a dream, an eerily premonitory dream whose meaning will be unveiled, to Stein herself maybe, a few years later. As Dydo notes “one shivers with hindsight to see the situation of the film as a dreamlike forecast of where Stein was going before she or anyone else was able to read that dream.”26 “Film” seems to encrypt the identity crisis Stein experienced after The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made her famous. Not surprisingly, the material of “Film” is taken up and further elaborated in Ida, the novel Stein struggled to write in 1937–40 as a study of the effects of publicity on personality. The new and much expanded variant given in Ida culminates in a sentence flickering with double entendre, to dye/to die, twin/to win: And then she said Love later on they will call me a suicide blonde because my twin will have dyed her hair. And then they will call me a murderess because there will come the time when I will have killed my twin which I first made come. If you make her can you kill her. Tell me Love my dog tell me and tell her. (I 7)

The laundress (blanchisseuse in French, literally a bleacher) in “Film” has now become a peroxide blonde. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein evokes the vampirized movie stars sucked dry by Hollywood—unless they are ectoplasm to begin with, two-dimensional figments: “Fernande adored [Evelyn Thaw] the way a later generation adored Mary Pickford, she was so blonde, so pale, so nothing and Fernande would give a heavy sigh of admiration” (ABT 685). By fictionalizing the serial nature of the cinematographic image and furthering the tradition of the phantasmagoria, “Film” illustrates a definition of cinema given by French critic and filmmaker Jean Epstein: “a machine for mass-producing dreams” (“machine à usiner le rêve en grande série”).27 In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein mentions a walking marathon she had

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witnessed near Chicago with the participants “neither waking nor sleeping” (EA 216). She links this experience to her friend Jacques Viot’s comments on the cinema. Viot, the French screenwriter associated with the surrealists who had established the use of flashback in French cinema, tells Stein that “you have to remember in writing film stories that it is not like writing for the theatre the film audience is not an audience that is awake it is an audience that is dreaming, it is not asleep but it is always dreaming” (ibid.). For Stein “[t]he walking marathon was more that than any film” (ibid.). The Chicago marathon may have been the only time Stein witnessed such a spectacle but she recreated one in Ida where her protagonist, “before or after she made up her mind to be a twin” also “joined a walking marathon” (I 12). At the end of her triumphant lecture tour in the United States, Stein wrote a short text titled “I Came And Here I Am” (1935). Here she tells of three experiences which conveyed to her how modernity and its technological inventions in transportation and media had, in modifying perception, radically altered the notions of the real and the unreal: getting filmed; flying; speaking on the radio. This is how she relates her “screen test”: It was a strange thing that happened to me. One never gets quite used to unexpectedly seeing one name’s in print no matter how often it happens to you to be that one: it always gives you a shock of a slightly mixed-up feeling, are you or are you not one. No matter how often it happens there is always this thing, but what is that, imagine what is that compared to never having heard anybody’s voice speaking while a picture is doing something, and that voice and that person is yourself, if you could really and truly be that one. It upset me very much when that happened to me, there is no doubt about that, if there can really not be any doubt about anything. (HWW 68)

Stein’s experience is extremely banal and corresponds to countless other accounts of screen tests. Jean Epstein quotes from Mary Pickford’s memoirs in which she recounts her own traumatic first screen test and he comments: At the end of her first cinematographic experience, if Mary Pickford had been so inclined as to declare: I think therefore I am, she would have had to add this serious restriction: But I do not know who I am . . . What must this be taken to mean, except that Mary Pickford did not know she was Mary Pickford; that she had no idea she was this person whose identity million of people could still vouch for today .  .  . And so while it doesn’t

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cause it, the cinematographer stresses singularly a doubt of great import: the doubt concerning unity and permanence of the self, identity of one’s person, being.28

What may have turned the screen test into such an alienating ordeal for Stein at the time is that it reiterated in condensed form the split that public recognition and success had already caused in her, separating and confusing inside and outside, real writing and writing for Mammon, entity and identity. By the end of her life, she would question the ability of the novel to survive in the age of mass media and publicity: This is due in part to this enormous publicity business. The Duchess of Windsor was a more real person to the public and while the divorce was going on was a more actual person than anyone could create . . . Then [in the nineteenth century] the novel supplied imagination where now you have it in publicity, & this changed the whole cast of the novel. (PGS 21)

More durably than a shop window (or the glass door of a train, in the case of Freud) catching one’s reflection unaware, [f]ilm transforms life into a form of trace detection .  .  . The reason is technological: films anatomize the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans (in contrast to animals) with a borrowed I and, for that reason, remains their great love. Precisely because the camera operates as a perfect mirror, it liquidates the fund of stored self-image . . . And all that not because media are lying but because their trace detection undermines the mirror stage. That is to say: the soul itself, whose technological rechristening is nothing but Lacan’s mirror stage.29

Stein’s screen test can be seen to reiterate the founding experience of what Lacan, reconceptualizing an existent notion, would start theorizing in the 1930s as the mirror-stage, notably in a conference given in 1936 at Marienbad. Contrary to what the word “stage” implies, the mirror-stage really governs a lifelong dynamic of identification and refers to the split structure of the subject—which Lacan will continue calling “paranoiac” until the 1950s— divided between an I, the subject of the unconscious, and a social and specular self. Lacan was one of the first French intellectuals to draw on the sensational case of les sœurs Papin, two sisterly French maids who became instant celebrities in 1933 after killing, enucleating, and trimming like rabbits the wife

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and daughter of their employer. In the winter of 1933 Lacan published two articles entitled “Motif du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin” and “Le problème du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoïaques de l’expérience” in the famous Surrealist journal Le Minotaurei, whose first issue in June 1933 had featured a cover by Picasso, a text by Breton on Picasso, and Dali’s “Interprétation Paranoïaque-critique de l’Image obsédante l’Angélus de Millet.” In the first article, Lacan shows how paranoia is “entirely dominated by the fate of a brotherly complex” and ultimately revolves around “the human enigma of sexuality,” quoting Christine Papin’s avowal: “I think that in a former life I must have been my sister’s husband.”30 In both articles Lacan stresses how aesthetically symbolic and socially meaningful the paranoiac’s delirium really is. The second article ends by listing the characteristics of these shared “symbolic expressions” which recur in many cases of paranoia. These symbols compare with the most distinguished artistic or folkloric productions and typically feature an iterative identification of the object, the delirium often displaying fantasies of cyclical repetition, ubiquitous multiplication, endless periodical returns of the same events, same character recurring as twins or triplets, sometimes hallucination of doubling of the subject’s person. These intuitions are clearly very close to processes of poetic creation and seem to constitute a condition of typification, conducive to style.31

This reads like a strikingly apt description of Stein’s “Film” and sheds psychoanalytical light on the countless pieces where she uses twins and brothers and sisters as a symbolic means to address identity and sexuality. At the end of “I Came And Here I Am,” after having been filmed, after flying, and after having her picture taken, Stein recounts her experience with broadcasting as a complete fulfillment: “you really knew, not by what you knew but by what you felt, that everybody was listening. It is a wonderful thing to do, I almost stopped and said it, I was so filled with it.” And she concludes: “This then was the last completion, of what is, that is that the unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural” (HWW 72). Stein here acknowledges how the new media, by affecting the human sensorium, have also changed the frontiers between real and imaginary. Or as Epstein put it: And so, the cinematograph which had already led us to think the profound equivalence between matter and spirit, the aleatorical and the determinate,

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also shows us the community between the real and the unreal which are fundamentally linked by fine transitions and which are made and unmade one from the other, one into the other, one by the other.32

Notes 1 Jonathan Sterne warns that as “a physiological term that denoted a particular region of the brain that was thought to control all perceptual activity,” the term sensorium “fell out of favor in the late nineteenth century as physiologists learned that there was no such center in the brain in control of all perceptual activity” (The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003), 16). Still, the fact that it remained in use, appearing in the writings of Walter Benjamin and, later still, Walter Ong, suggests that it continued to embody some desired function. 2 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intr. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 175. 3 Milton Waldman quoted in Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 118. 4 P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 161. 5 Kenneth Macpherson in Close-Up, 1927–1933. Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (London: Cassell, 1998), 14. 6 Hugo Münsterberg in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 161. 7 Ibid., 161. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 The first public screening, by the Lumière brothers, took place in September 1895 in La Ciotat, followed by the first Paris screening on December 28, 1895. 10 The contrasting concepts of “entity” and “identity” are developed by Stein in the 1930s to signify the difference between a thing—an art work or a human being—existing fully in and for itself, as an entity, and those other features of living where you are dependent on the recognition of others, as identity. 11 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intr. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 238. 12 Véronique Bergen, L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 279. The translation is mine. The French quote reads: “composé non pas d’entités discrètes qui demeurent identiques à elles-mêmes lorsqu’on les divise, mais

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Gertrude Stein in Europe d’éléments fusionnés, le temps présente un continuum d’intensités qui, quand on le divise, génère la différence de nature d’une perception devenue remarquable.” In Stein’s portrait, the name of the French artist-poet, Georges Hugnet, is spelled without an -s as George Hugnet. Annabelle Moore, born Annabella Whitford, was an American dancer and actress who appeared in many early silent films for the Edison Studios. In “I Came And Here I Am,” Stein writes: “This then was the last completion, of what is, that is that the unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is. Long ago, oh way so long ago, long before I had ever dreamed of these things that prove it, I said that what made America and American literature was a quality of being disembodied” (HWW 72). In 1927, Stein “began to feel movement to be a different thing than [she] had felt it to be . . . It was to me beginning to be a less detailed thing and at the same time a thing that existed so completely inside in it and it was it was so completely inside that really looking and listening and talking were not a way any longer needed for me to know about this thing about movement being existing” (LIA 308). Marie-Claire Pasquier tells me that “Film. Deux Sœurs Qui ne Sont Pas Sœurs” was made into a movie in France in the 1970s. “[E]xcept walking and driving an automobile it [looking at pictures] is what I like best after my real business which is of course writing” (EA 320). Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 305. In French: “Supposons qu’on veuille reproduire sur un écran une scène animée, le défilé d’un régiment par exemple . . . une seconde manière de procéder, beaucoup plus aisée en même temps que plus efficace [, c]’est de prendre sur le régiment qui passe une série d’instantanés, et de projeter ces instantanés sur l’écran, de manière qu’ils se remplacent très vite les uns les autres. Ainsi fait le cinématographe” (Henri Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice (Paris: PUF “Quadrige,” 2007), 304). Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 149. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 16. Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923–34 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2003), 423. Susan McCabe, “‘Delight in Dislocation’: The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray,” Modernism/modernity, 8.3 (2001): 26, 429–52. Dydo, The Language that Rises, 425.

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27 Jean Epstein, Le cinéma du diable (Paris: Jacques Mélot, 1947), 72. The translation is mine. 28 Ibid., 64–5. See also: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/epstein_jean/epstein_ jean.html 29 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 150. 30 “Motifs du crime paranoïaque. Le crime des sœurs Papin,” Minotaure, n° 3/4, 1933–4. The translation is mine. See also: http://aejcpp.free.fr/lacan/1933–12–12.htm. 31 “Le problème du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoïaques de l’expérience,” (Minotaure, n°1, 1933). The translation is mine. See also: http:// aejcpp.free.fr/lacan/1933–06–01.htm. 32 Jean Epstein, Le cinéma du diable, 67. The translation is mine.

8

In Theory: Stein and Film Philosophy Julian Murphet

Is there a way to conjugate the works of Gertrude Stein with the Proper Names of a specifically European film theory? Would Delluc, Balázs, or Kuleshov, for instance, so modify our sense of the Steinian corpus—inflecting it according to valences unique to the film-theoretical labors of each of these pioneers—that, while preserving intact the infinitive’s proper lexeme, it would be possible to parse entirely new grammatical agreements within a complex verbal paradigm? It is a thought-experiment well worth undertaking, if only to satisfy an implicitly Steinian appetency for “diagraming” sentences—in this case, meta-propositions about the curious ways in which an ostensibly “pure” literary practice (such as Stein’s) was ineluctably ensnared within a mediaecological web, increasingly presided over in the early twentieth century by a cinematic protocol (LIA 314).1 Stein herself must be given credit for this last observation, since as she put it in her Lectures in America: I of course did not think of it in terms of the cinema, in fact I doubt whether at that time I had ever seen a cinema but, and I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one’s period and this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing. (LIA 294)

It is as Heidegger used to say about the typewriter, “Even if we do not actually operate this machine, it demands that we regard it.”2 This is the sense in which Stein proposed that her Zeitgeist was serial and cinematic, to the extent that the question of her own individual exposure to “a cinema” was perfectly redundant: she was obliged to “regard” it in any event, and “express” it willy-

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nilly according to an impersonal historical logic, that similarly authorizes our thought-experiment here. For if, in Europe, Stein was secretly being impelled by the American-dominated film industry, then contemporary European film theorists might offer a working route-map to the manner in which Stein’s thought, expression, and the very nature of her “regard” were being altered by this new medium. In what follows, I propose five conjugations of the verb “to write” as Stein enacted it: a Bergsonian-cum-Deleuzian one; a Benjaminian and Kracauerian one; an Eisensteinian one; a Vertovian one; and a Bazinian one. If Bergson seems an odd member of this select company, being not himself a film theorist, his extraordinary early use of the “cinematograph” as a philosophical metaphor in Creative Evolution remains one of the central contributions to what can be called “European Film Theory,” as Deleuze has made abundantly clear. In all, these five conjugations refract a full spectrum of the radiance of that Theory, and light up Stein’s work in ways that are more than suggestive.

Doing what the cinema was doing Stein’s first “great” stylistic innovation, the massive slabs of pseudo-repetitious prose that make up the forbidding edifice of The Making of Americans, can be productively read through the contemporaneous critical–metaphorical incorporation of cinematic technology into Bergson’s account of Creative Evolution. In trying to account for the kinds of self-deception into which everyday consciousness is habitually led, Bergson seized hold of the film apparatus as a fitting analogue for such pseudo-knowledge. The first “error” into which cinematic perception falls has to do with its photographical base; since living bodies are constantly evolving in motion, and any attempt to freeze that changefulness into analytic “forms” is a falsification in immobility: “form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”3 Such reification lands us in the quandary of grammar itself, and this forges the first material link between consciousness, photography, and language in Bergson’s system: adjectives, substantives, and verbs are analytic falsifications of change itself, consequent upon our mental–photographic predilection for still forms over fluid life. Cinema, while it may appear to correct this photographic fascination with frozen forms by bestowing movement upon them, is not only no better, but substantially worse than these “snapshots.” Taking “a series of snapshots . . . and

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[throwing] these instantaneous views on the screen,” cinema sets “immobility . . . beside immobility” and animates them through the automatic movement hidden in the machinery of the apparatus. The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures [of, say, a marching regiment] an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge.4

Far from negating the fast-frozenness of formal simplification, film compounds it with the further simplicity of a mechanically derived “movement in general.” No film theorist of the time was as astute a critic of what cinematic motion and moving pictures actually were—namely, not movement at all, but illusions of it. Such illusions simply mystified the true nature of change, for as Bergson said, “movement in general” teaches me nothing about this or that transition. No matter how many snapshots I string together and artificially reconstitute as cinematic motion, I can obtain nothing but those very snapshots plus a movement that is not “theirs,” but a machine’s. “The application of the cinematographic method therefore leads to a perpetual recommencement, during which the mind, never able to satisfy itself and never finding where to rest, persuades itself . . . that it imitates by its stability the very movement of the real.”5 This argument is pivotal in European film theory since it discerns the technical seam between the “chronophotography” of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, and cinema proper, and embeds that seam in a theory of consciousness that is not too distant from Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. But it is also germane to any discussion of Gertrude Stein’s verbal praxis in the first decade of the twentieth century. Elsewhere I have suggested that Stein’s education under William James and Hugo Münsterberg at the Harvard Annexe (Radcliffe) would have exposed her to Marey’s work on animal movement, and by implication to Bergson himself, whose influence on James at the time was profound.6 If this scientific training was to have emerged in the “mechanistic” conception of The Making of Americans—where “she attempted to describe the precise mechanisms of human personality in great detail, with the ultimate aim of describing every possible kind of

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human being”7—then so too, transposed into that work, do we find Bergson’s uncomfortable seam between photography and motion pictures ambivalently reinvented at the level of prose style. There is an uncanny correspondence between the matter and the manner of her “masterpiece’s” obsessive interest in what “repeats” itself in human beings, and so discloses their “bottom nature” irrespective of conscious intention. For while she ruminates on this “repeating being” in people, and their “resemblance” to others of the same “bottom nature,” the narrator abandons her voice to a kind of cinematographic mechanism of its own: This being resembling, this seeing resemblances between those one is knowing is interesting, defining, confusing, uncertain and certain. You see one, the way of looking at any one in that one that is like some one, the way of listening, a sudden expression, a way of walking, a sound in laughing, a number of expressions that are passing over the face of that one, it is confusing, too many people have pieces in them like pieces in this one, it began as a clear resemblance to some one, it goes on to be a confusing number of resemblances to many then, some resemblance that is very clear one is not remembering then it is baffling, more and more resemblances come out in that one, perhaps that one is not independent dependent and yet that was so clear in the beginning, more and more then with knowing resemblances are multiplying and being baffling and confusing and always each one of all these resemblances one who sometime wants to have this one as a whole one, wants to really know kinds in men and women must completely feel, admit, remember and consider and realise as having meaning. This is then a beginning of learning to make kinds of men and women. (MA 340)

In isolation, the passage loses what in context is its most remarkable feature: its virtual indistinguishability from a plethora of surrounding prose blocs. The isomorphism between form and content is especially salient given the narrator’s concern to adduce a “science” of human character from “the steady pounding of repeating” (MA 294) on the one hand, and the “understanding of resembling” (MA 332) on the other—as for any scientist, what matters is the ability to detect minute variations within the “steady pounding” of experimental data. And in that case, Stein’s text itself is nothing other than a laboratory or test facility for the detection of the “slightest variation” (MA 294)  amidst a monotonous pounding of repetition; or in other words, a cinema.

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Any close look at a film strip will reveal a string of apparently identical photographs, whose “steady pounding” before the intermittent beams of a projector will suddenly convulse them into life, thanks to the almost imperceptible “variations” between them. Stein’s narrator is like a film projector observed and slowed down to a pace where the artificiality of movement is, à la Bergson, exposed as such. Indeed, nobody knew this as intimately as Stein herself. “Funnily enough the cinema has offered a solution of this thing .  .  . I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing” (LIA 293–4). What Bergson had called the “perpetual recommencement” of the cinematographic method (and which had struck him as a travesty), Stein grasped as the solution to a problem that is at once methodological and aesthetic—“beginning again.” In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein analyzed her achievement in The Making of Americans in terms of two correlative aesthetic axioms: the “continuous present” (about which more below) and the art of “beginning again and again”: “Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another. These are both things” (CE 524). As a compositional “thing,” beginning again and again is in profound ontological accord with the art of moving pictures. Deleuze, whose highly influential theory of cinema is predicated on a close reading of Bergson’s work, calls cinema “neither an art nor a science” at the level of its mimesis of movement.8 For there is no logical commencement or termination point to such analysis of motion: it merely begins all over with every fluctuation of the shutter mechanism, inhumanly indifferent as it is to anything as arbitrary and conventional as narrative or organic form. As Stein put it: “A thing you all know is that in the three novels written in this generation that are the important things written in this generation, there is, in none of them a story. There is none in Proust in The Making of Americans or in Ulysses” (LIA 298–9).

Post-auratic portraiture and ornament The aversion from story, from narrative form, as a “nineteenth-century” way of doing things with language—that is, expressing sentiments “neither by words nor by sentences,” but “by phrases” (LIA 216)—typifies Stein’s sense of the modern transcendence of inherited formal verities. For with narrative

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energies suspended for the duration of any textual act, the interest shifts to grammatical functions distributed over a spatial grid: a paragraph. And in what is perhaps Stein’s greatest single addition to the repertoire of modern forms, the “portrait” as she uniquely practiced it, we find the paragraph-unit of prose utilized in such a way that (again, through choice repetitions of words and parts of speech) all the accumulated nineteenth-century “aura” of the bourgeois portrait genre, in various media, is liquidated at a stroke. Walter Benjamin endorsed Gisèle Freund’s sense that “with photography, technical development in art converged with the general technical standard of society, bringing the portrait within the means of wider bourgeois strata.”9 The new currency of the middle-class photographic portrait forced the genre several steps down the ladder of artistic aura from the zenith of aristocratic oil portraits, to be sure, but it affirmed the unique characteristics and irreducible humanity of any given sitter in posed visual “phrases” of his respectability and solidity as a citizen—what Benjamin called the “cult value” of the human countenance.10 Not so in Stein’s portraits, where now “words” and “sentences” compete to adduce something altogether distinct from the stereotyped phraseology of selfhood: In dancing she was dancing. She was dancing and dancing and in being that one the one dancing and dancing she was dancing and dancing. In dancing, dancing being existing, she was dancing, and in being one dancing dancing was being existing.11

This glimpse of Isadora Duncan is not meant to present her as a physiognomy, or a merely external view; it seizes hold of an inner dynamism. It is not a naïve mimeticism or a pursuit of apt “phrases” that dictates the compulsions of the prose, but a rhythm lurking in the words themselves. Present participles of the verb “to dance” mirror one another across vacant thresholds formed by two pronouns (“one” and “she”), a preposition (“in”), the simple past tense (“was”), and the addition of an extrinsic participle (“existing”). To be sure, a species of “representationalism” is at work here—there is somebody dancing in these words. But the relationship between subject and medium has been altered so that “she” is less a pronomial substitute for Isadora Duncan (just as the Proper Name in the title, “Orta,” is a place-name reference to Spain and so to Pablo Picasso, rather than a biographical link to Duncan), than it is an extension of her person into the region of language. Rather than the prose “painting”

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Duncan’s attributes, the reverse seems to be true: Duncan’s choreography infiltrates the style of the language, and sets it dancing. But the prose, for all that, is anything but “expressive.” It is impersonal, abstract, and almost entirely mechanical in accent—an impression aided by the ubiquity of this style across the “early” portraits of 1908–11. What dances is a kind of automatism in the very core of the language, liberated from humanistic phrases, and flickering between the words the way a projector flickers between the photograms. Benjamin famously observed of “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” that, unfettered from the duty of ritualized uniqueness, the modern artwork was saturated by the automatisms of the machine world. This radically affected the function of the human figure in art. In the motion picture, he wrote, “the human being is placed in a position where he must operate with his whole living person, while forgoing its aura. For his aura is bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of the aura.”12 Footage exists of Isadora Duncan dancing at an outdoor recital, where the rapturous attention of well-dressed onlookers seems hardly vindicated by the few desultory twirls we see on screen: here is a case, indeed, of the “whole living person” separated from her aura. So it is in Stein’s prose, where not Duncan, but the kinetic effect of her movement seems to linger in the repetitious pulsations of the language. Benjamin referred to “the apparatus . . . penetrat[ing] so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, is the result of a special procedure”—a procedure that in Stein’s portraits is not followed.13 Instead, Stein precisely foregoes the “pure view” of reality in order to allow the automatisms of the apparatus their own autonomy. What that permits is the adumbration of Benjamin’s “vast and unsuspected field of action,” entire social worlds “exploded” with the “dynamite of the split-second.”14 If it is “another nature that speaks to the camera as compared to the eye,”15 then so much the more is that the case for Stein’s language: Some do not know very well that their way of living is a dull one, is a tedious enough one, is a dreary enough one. Some of such of them are changing, are shopping, some of such of them are shopping and shopping is something, they are shopping and shopping is something but changing is not in being one buying, changing is being one having some one be one selling something and not selling that thing, changing is then existing, sometimes in some quite some changing, in some quite completely changing, in some some changing, in some not very much changing.16

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The application of this kind of verbal automatism, relentlessly ringing the changes on fixed lexical units, at once “flattens” the literary world into a monotony of grammatical functions, and simultaneously “explodes” out of that homogeneity the fragments of another world altogether: imperceptible to eyes reared on nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, the ambiguous and impersonal oscillation between “shopping” and “changing” rises to a rhythmic and existential exaltation in the final period. If the camera allows us to discover an “optical unconscious,” then Stein’s prose arguably asks us to discern a grammatical unconscious that only this aggressive accent on language’s automatisms can reveal. Siegfried Kracauer, Benjamin’s contemporary and perhaps a more devoted filmgoer than his more Utopian comrade, had a somewhat more critical view of the role of what he called the “mass ornament” of cinematic entertainment and chorus lines. “It is,” he wrote, “the rational and empty form of the cult, devoid of any explicit meaning, that appears in the mass ornament. As such, it proves to be a relapse into mythology of an order so great that one can hardly imagine its being exceeded.”17 Projected in what he called “palaces of distraction,” films could scarcely live up to their expectations. “[The cinema] favors the lofty and the sacred as if designed to accommodate works of eternal significance—just one step short of burning votive candles. The show itself aspires to the same exalted level, claiming to be a finely tuned organism, an aesthetic totality as only an artwork can be. The film alone would be too paltry an offering.”18 This mismatch between promise and delivery haunts the cinema with a restless and unredeemed political unconscious. For Kracauer, the “secret” can be attained through hermeneutic analysis. “In the endless sequence of films, a limited number of typical themes recur again and again; they reveal how society wants to see itself. The quintessence of these film themes is at the same time the sum of the society’s ideologies, whose spell is broken by means of the interpretation of the themes.”19 For Gertrude Stein, however, a more homeopathic path would be trodden. She was regularly gay then. She was quite regular in being gay then. She remembered all the little ways of being gay. She used all the little ways of being gay. She was quite regularly gay. She told many then the way of being gay, she taught very many then little ways they could use in being gay. She was living very well, she was gay then, she went on living then, she was regular

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in being gay, she always was living very well and was gay very well and was telling about little ways one could be learning to use in being gay, and later was telling them quite often, telling them again and again. (GP 22)

So ends “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” in what could well pass as a bizarre apotheosis of the Hollywood “happy ending,” since it both affirms the attainability of reward and its educability: the notion of “telling them quite often,” “again and again,” what the art of being “gay” consists in, is a kind of modus operandi for comic cinema. The trick consists in adapting “literature” to the level of expectation of the “little shopgirls,” as Kracauer dismissively called them, who flocked to the films, and then applying its linguistic automatisms in such a way that “the sum of society’s ideologies” might actually become unstitched in the sentence form itself.20 Stein’s use of “being gay” erupts in an ambivalent excess, thanks to repetition, that loops the economic imperative to “enjoy” onto an illicit homosexual desire in which the “little shopgirls” are unaware of their own participation. The grammatical unconscious works this way too. Stein locates, deep within an increasingly standardized Hollywood mythology—dovetailing Eros and consumerism—the bud of a deviant and excessive desire: “flirting in the Bon Marché” comes alive in her sentences with a compulsive, libidinous, always potentially explosive force, felt in the grammar as a product of repetition.

Montage of attractions Wendy Steiner describes the sense of surprise that invariably attends a turning from the first group of Stein’s portraits (1908–11) to the next: “Moving from a limited vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, we suddenly encounter a veritable cornucopia of words, constantly novel and surprising.”21 Readers bewildered by the extraordinary lexical fecundity of these pieces are often unable to note what Steiner disambiguates as the microscopic distortions taking place on the axis of selection: abstruse allusion, circumlocution, condensation, metonymy, compound negatives, internal rhyme schemes, abstract substitutions for particulars, and so on. “The result is a totally opaque surface with all connections to its subject or theme obscured.”22 The energetic distributions of dynamic fields hitherto arranged within the relatively capacious spaces of

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the paragraphs are now constrained within the distributive limitations of the sentences themselves. If the earlier paragraphs, in Richard Kostelanetz’s words, are “filled with clauses that have equal weight within the whole,” whereas the sentences are eccentrically but still respectfully deferential to grammatical proprieties, this second stage of Stein’s portraiture downshifts that clausal egalitarianism to the level of the words.23 All words are now “equal” and what matters is how their infinite differences relate, not in the patterns of logic, but spatially and kinetically. Sherwood Anderson perceived that “She is laying word against word, relating sound to sound, feeling for the taste, the smell, the rhythm of the individual word.”24 Stein herself put it this way: “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word and at this time I found very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense” (PGS 18). The “autonomization” of smaller and smaller aesthetic particles, along with their cyclotronic acceleration and mutual collisions in the electromagnetic field of style, is a law of artistic modernism most forcefully legislated by Sergei Eisenstein. Deriving his impetus from the early Soviet stage and its peculiar distortion of Western music-hall variety acts, Eisenstein formulated the axiom of the “montage of attractions” and then adapted it into the leading film theory of the age. In his initial broadside, Eisenstein rejected the representational conventions of “Realism” in order to predicate an aesthetics on physioand psychological automatisms triggered by attractions; “mathematically calculated .  .  . specific emotional shocks”: “instead of a static ‘reflection’ of a particular event dictated by the theme . . . a free montage with arbitrarily chosen independent . . . effects (attractions)” would govern Soviet artistic practice for many years.25 In his further theoretical elaboration of montage, Eisenstein specifically emphasized the scientific nature of his application of “dialectics” to cinematic technique. “The shot is by no means a montage element. The shot is a montage cell. Beyond the dialectical jump in the single series: shotmontage. What then characterises montage and, consequently, its embryo, the shot? Collision. Conflict between two neighbouring fragments. Conflict. Collision.”26 Tabulating an immense range of possible conflicts within and between individual shots, Eisenstein pushed the notion that “the collision of [any] two factors gives rise to an idea.”27 This, the doctrine of intellectual montage, was an alogical or suprarational belief that one could arrive at

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higher-order intellectual “effects” by way of nonverbal visual “cells,” whose violent collision exploded them out of the impressionistic continuum of stored sense data and catapulted them toward the Idea. Heretically in context, Eisenstein thus pushed the notion that film art was closer to literature and language than it was to painting or theater, since it too gravitated toward the concept out of discrete molecular units: “the methodology of language . . . allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects . . . Language is much closer to film than painting is . . . So why not rather lean towards the system of language, which is forced to use the same mechanics in inventing words and word-complexes?”28 This unexpected proximity between a film art predicated on “arbitrary” juxtapositions and conflicts, and the time-honored language arts, comes into remarkable focus if we turn immediately to the work of Stein’s second portrait period. The delightful “Susie Asado” arouses strong suspicions of a “montage of attractions” principle operating under the surface of the text: Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.    Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.    Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller. This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus. A pot. A pot is a beginning or a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.    Drink pups. Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. (GP 13)

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Steiner’s clever itemization of the puns implicit in this chain of signifiers hangs on the sense that “the unintelligible surface with its rhythmic repetitions and nursery rhyme evocations creates an impression that one might be willing to accept as equivalent to the person referred to as Susie Asado. Such a portrait is like an implicit simile: the experience of these words, suggesting a cosy tea-party, is as pleasant as an experience with Susie Asado.”29 But, for all the latent homologies between sound and sense, there is surely more at stake in Stein’s dynamic pattern of words than an extended simile. The separation out of individual syllables—“tray” and “sure” from treasure; “rare” and “bit” from rarebit—autonomizes even these smaller “montage cells” from their semantic straightjackets. The all-pervasive indicative mood—“This is a please this is a please”—is tactically dismantled by the derangement of parts of speech within its grammatical structure— “there are the saids”—so that “is” is itself “autonomized” into a rhythmic unit that contributes more to a sustained “idea” about light vowel sounds than to any extraliterary experience: “When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.” What matters is the concrete affect, the mood generated in the reader by such purely formal play with units of sound. Rather than ascribe this mood to a supposed “subject” Susie Asado, perhaps it makes better sense to suggest that “Susie Asado” is the direct nomination of an affective intensity that exists only in the “montage” of lexical elements on the page. These do not “collide” in the manner demanded by Eisenstein; Stein’s praxis is more measured and less concerned with “smashing skulls” against Soviet truth. But her effects are more disorienting than Eisenstein’s fixity within the “theme” of revolutionary upsurge, since they float free from any thematic anchor other than that constituted by their own material properties.

Camera-eye? One of the most damning accusations Ezra Pound made against the early cinema was what he called its impressionism, in a charge that worked both ways: “The logical end of impressionist art is the cinematograph. The state of mind of the impressionist tends to become cinematographical. Or, to put it another way, the cinematograph does away with the need of a lot of impressionist art . . . It is

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a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism, which is intensive.”30 And yet, there is in the very dynamic of modern impressions a principle germane to the most advanced aesthetics. In language not too dissimilar from Stein’s, Pound drew a critical distinction: The life of a village is narrative; you have not been there three weeks before you know that in the revolution et cetera, and when M le Comte et cetera, and so forth. In a city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, over-cross, they are “cinematographic,” but they are not a simple linear sequence. They are often a flood of nouns without verbal relations.31

A “flood of nouns without verbal relations” is perhaps the best brief description of Stein’s poetic masterpiece, Tender Buttons: A curtain, a curtain which is fastened discloses mourning, this does not mean sparrows or elocution or even a whole preparation, it means that there are ears and very often more much more altogether. (TB 71) Sugar any sugar, anger every anger, lover sermon lover, center no distractor, all order is in a measure. (TB 73)

Between the first and the second passages taken from the final section, “Rooms,” we remark the relative drying up of verbal functions: from the relatively complex primary and auxiliary forms in the “curtains” sentence, we are left with only the single indicative “is” in the “sugar” period, which shoulders no fewer than eleven substantives (three of them repetitions) on its single syllable. Nouns dominate Tender Buttons to the extent that, although she would later declare that “verbs and adjectives are more interesting than nouns and adjectives,” Stein had openly accepted the exhilarating task of “making poetry” by calling things “by their names” (having “gotten rid of nouns” in The Making of Americans) (LIA 315, 329–30, 325). If there is a film theorist able to speak to this particular quality of her prose, it is doubtless the master of cinematic “impressionism” in its mature phase, Eisenstein’s nemesis, Dziga Vertov (David Kaufman). Working for the Moscow Cinema Committee in the early 1920s, Vertov launched his Kino-Pravda series in a quest for “film truth”—fragments of the urban Real that, inaccessible to the naked eye, can only be brought into focus by the mechanical eye of the camera and the expertise of the film editor. Above all it was imperative to forget every

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aesthetic rule inherited from the long history of the fine arts: the “artistic” as such, the very sense of aesthetic propriety and proportion, was scrapped, in preference for a fully “mechanized” sensibility of automatic perceptions and artificial interventions. The “corrupting influence of artistic film-drama” was repudiated for its sterile psychology and sentimental predilections (just as Stein had abandoned the nineteenth-century novel form); Kino-Pravda “doesn’t order life to proceed according to a writer’s scenario, but observes and records life as it is . . . Kino-Pravda is made with footage just as a house is made with bricks.”32 So too, Stein’s Tender Buttons is made with nouns; not in such a way as to flatter a preconstituted novelistic psychology, but as if to make use of verbal things simply lying to hand, invisible in their own specificity to routine perception, but capable of building textual habitats for a different sort of human body: A custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that a large part of the time there are three which have different connections. The one is on the table. The two are on the table. The three are on the table. The one, one is the same length as is shown by the cover being longer. The other is different there is more cover that shows it. The other is different and that makes the corners have the same shade the eight are in singular arrangement to make four necessary. (TB 16)

This new version of literary impressionism rests on an “inhuman” eye, intimately related to Vertov’s “camera-eye,” which, “since it is perfected, perceives more and better.”33 What the “eye” of Stein’s prose in Tender Buttons perceives is a rich seam of verbal automatisms hiding in plain sight from the humanist literary machine. With its jubilant cascade of nouns, it generates the same kind of exuberant and creative impressionism that Vertov patented for film: “free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.”34

Change mummified: The continuous present If there is a species of impressionism at work in Stein’s “lively words” in Tender Buttons, then it is interesting to note where her rapidly developing aesthetic

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evolution would next lead her (LIA 255). In a longer and later work like “Lifting Belly” we read: She is my sweetheart. Why doesn’t she resemble an other. This I cannot say here. Full of love and echoes. Lifting belly is full of love. Can you. Can you can you. Can you buy a Ford. Did you expect that.35

Suddenly, we feel that we are in the presence of an incantatory benediction, almost an epithalamion, rather than a Vertovian immanent field or an Eisensteinian particle accelerator. Horizons have opened—there is a feeling of expansive and breathing, human space—but the dynamism of the earlier work is subdued, even atrophied. Where once strict laws of displacement and condensation would prohibit such an explicit topic sentence as we open with here, now not only is the playful insertion of stray lexical units (“a Ford”) both delayed and smoothed over with a rhythmic hand, but meta-statements such as “This I cannot say here,” and “Did you expect that” buffer the shock and mechanical automatisms of the earlier portraits. We have indeed entered another, distinctive Steinian domain, and this one too can be made to disclose its aesthetic secrets through a conjugation by film theory. There is a hearkening back in this later style to one of the key aesthetic breakthroughs of The Making of Americans, which needs some closer scrutiny: what Stein called the “continuous present.” Whereas in that early epic masterpiece, this “continuous present” was in league with a parallel innovation (“beginning again and again”), now it is as if that stuttering, repetitious function has been superseded, so that we are immersed in something like the sheer experience of a temporal duration stretched to the point of infinity. Stein would write later about the “troublesome” distinction in writing between the “time of the composition” (a “natural” and “contemporary” thing, an immanent relationship with the temporal dimension borne out in the grammar of the text), and the “time-sense in the composition,” which she distinguishes from the former according to “its quality of distribution and equilibration”

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(CE 529). The distinction is an elusive one, but perhaps we can shed light on it by referring to the extraordinary meditations on time made by André Bazin over the instance of cinematic temporality. The cinema, writes Bazin, is objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.36

This striking passage argues that what motion pictures preserve is not objects in some false, “snapshot view of transition” (as Bergson argued), but the actual, felt duration of things in time. The cinematic image confronts us with incontrovertible evidence that what we “see” on screen corresponds to the fact of there having been certain things, in time, disposed before a camera, automatically recording light’s dance off and around them. Charles Rosen summarizes the implications: This makes not only the temporality of the image, but also the representation of temporality in the image (and sound) crucial to any stylistics of cinema. In fact, the imprinting of a length of time is the particular contribution of cinema to the evolution of image-production. Photography preserves an instant of time for a subject, but cinema preserves a fragment of time that can be experienced as an actual duration. Time itself seems captured.37

Here again we note the distinction between the time “in” and the time “of ” the composition: a relation that Bazin raised to the level of ontological dominant in film as an art form. In no other art does this distinction become so materially significant, since in no other art does the immanence of a temporal record become constitutive of the “image” itself. Or at least, so it is according to Bazin, who therefore championed those artists within the cinema who prioritized the kind of exposure to time as such, without coercive narrative integuments or editorial manipulation, associated with the long take and extreme depth of field. When we turn to Stein, we see how this same preoccupation led her verbal artistry in a cognate direction.

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STANZA XXVII It is not easy to turn away from delight in moon-light. Nor indeed to deny that some heat comes But only now they know that in each way Not whether better or either to like Or plan whichever whether they will plan to share Theirs which indeed which may they care Or rather whether well and whether May it not be after all their share. This which is why they will be better than before Makes it most readily more than readily mine. I wish not only when they went (SM 203)

Where once parataxis and the molecular autonomization of ever smaller units might have converted the sentence form into a spatial field virtually outside of time (or, where the “time of the composition” was reified into a single instant), now a capacious hypotaxis unfolds its stately rhythms along and down a syntactic structure governed by conditional and conjunctive/ disjunctive clause alternations, and saturated by the subjunctive mood. The voice is comparatively orotund, and distinctly “human” despite the strange irresolution of its semantics. A serene “quality of distribution and equilibration” has supervened over the opacity of the sense, such that what we take away from the text is precisely an image of a duration, a time-sense “in” the composition that is proof of there having been a time “of ” the composition, which cannot be directly presented. In a further absorption of film’s ontology, Stein would appear to have endowed her later prose with the unique capacity to pivot around a “representational” and an “indexical” ambivalence of function. “They did not know / That it would be so / That there would be a moon / And the moon would be so / Eclipsed” (SM 236). The way the subjunctive “would be”s form a caul over the raw eventfulness of the “moon” is isomorphic with the gap between the duration of the moon’s light and that of the poetic voice: representing that duration is also forcing the eclipse of the thing itself. Stein’s later work embraces that fundamental melancholy of cinematic indexicality— the world “withholding reality before us.”38 The present may be “continuous,” but it gives evidence of what has ceased to be.

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Notes 1 In “Poetry and Grammar” Stein writes: “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagraming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves” (LIA 314). 2 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998), 86. 3 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 302. 4 Ibid., 305–60. 5 Ibid., 307. 6 See my “Gertrude Stein’s Machinery of Perception,” in Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford (eds.), Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing After Cinema, (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 67–81. 7 Stephen Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. 8 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. High Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 6. 9 Walter Benjamin, “Letter from Paris (2): Painting and Photography,” Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 239. 10 Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility (Third Version),” Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 257. 11 Gertrude Stein, “Orta or One Dancing,” in Gertrude Stein. Writings 1903–1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, (New York: Library of America, 1998), 285–303, esp. 300. 12 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 260. 13 Ibid., 263. 14 Ibid., 265. 15 Ibid., 266. 16 Gertrude Stein, “Flirting at the Bon Marche,” in Gertrude Stein. Writings 1903–1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 304–6.

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17 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 84. 18 Ibid., 327. 19 Ibid., 294. 20 See Kracauer, “The Little Shop Girls Go to the Movies,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 291–307. 21 Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1978), 89. 22 Ibid., 95. 23 Richard Kostelanetz, “Introduction,” The Yale Gertrude Stein, ed. Kostelanetz (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980), xvii. 24 Sherwood Anderson, “Four American Impressions: Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Ring Lardner, Paul Rosenfeld,” The New Republic, Wednesday, October 11, 1922, 3. 25 Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, Vol. 1: Writings 1922–1934, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI Publishing, 1988), 34–5. 26 Ibid., 144. 27 Ibid. 28 Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1977), 60. 29 Steiner, Exact Resemblance, 103. 30 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 89–90. 31 Ezra Pound, “Review of Jean Cocteau, Poésies 1917–1920,” The Dial, 70 (January 1921): 110. 32 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson and trans. Kevin O’Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 44–5. 33 Ibid., 15. 34 Ibid., 17–18. 35 Gertrude Stein, “Lifting Belly,” in Gertrude Stein. Writings 1903–1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, (New York: Library of America, 1998), 436. 36 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Grey (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), 14–15. 37 Charles Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001), 29. 38 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 189.

Part Three

Stein Encountered

9

Concerning Gertrude Stein: Dreaming Translation Marie-Claire Pasquier, translation by Alison Anderson

What a system in voices, what a system in voices. Stein, Pink Melon Joy (1915) The comments that are about to follow do not aim to advance theory. They do not even aspire, pragmatically, to offer technical solutions to clearly defined problems, with examples as accompanying illustrations. The exemplary virtue of the chosen quotations will not always be strikingly apparent: on the contrary, each one will seem to be a special case, and any attempt to see them as models will be reduced to trial and error. The name “Gertrude Stein” might serve as a pretext to gather all the quotations together, but it is a deceptively unifying principal, because this Gertrude Stein has more than one trick up her sleeve, and more than one sleeve. We may talk about her “gait” and try to follow in her footsteps, as we’ve been told to do, but as it happens there are times (as surprising as this may seem) when she moves along on tiptoe, or takes great strides, or even walks backward; sometimes she merely stays in one place, interminably, as if warming up, and then she seems to forget that she has been there a long long time already, and that night is falling. What does it mean, “translating Gertrude Stein?” Why does there seem to be a perverse pleasure in it even when you fail, and when you do succeed it is like a ray of sunshine falling on you as you round a corner? Why does it seem that she has already been translated, or is untranslatable, which amounts to the same thing? If my remarks here seem disjointed, it is no deliberate artifice; rather, they are bound to be, if they are to “translate” the discontinuous reality

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separating the times when one makes a lucky find (“serendipity,” a word as lovely as a tale from the Arabian Nights), the times when one is dismayed, the times when one gets ahead, and others when one is stalled, close to the text, far from the text, within earshot or far from the heart of it, in harmony or filled with misunderstandings (Marcelle Marini, who has been studying Marguerite Duras’ writing for a long time, says the two go together). “Art imitates nature in her manner of operation.” This sentence, passed on from century to century and theory to theory, could apply to these attempts to translate Stein. To make Stein heard in a language other than the one in which she writes, the idea is not to produce the same meaning, far from it. The meaning eludes us, in any case, it is meant to elude, to appear before it has even been formed, a semblance of meaning, then to disappear the moment it is formed, ambiguous, scoffing at us. The idea, rather, is to produce the same effect. It might be an effect of urgency, of precipitousness, for example, as in the opera: an “affect,” as we say. Or it might be an effect of surprise, playfulness, or insistence, obstinacy. Holes into which meaning falls, between the words, or inversely, an impenetrable surface. What one must have is the “manner,” the way painters working in a studio knew, as good craftsmen, how to produce the style of their master’s school—without ever, strictly speaking, imitating that manner, the way a forger would. Does this mean we end up with a pastiche? No, not really, for imitation in that case would be mocking, effect minus meaning. It is manner perceived, perfidiously, as mannerism, which allows for “in the manner of.” But as with a pastiche that is not a parody, there is a discreet appropriation. The aim is to maintain, so to speak, a knowing distance. Gertrude Stein was herself an example of this through the way in which she allowed herself to be contaminated by the languages around her, namely French or, when she was traveling, Spanish. Try to imagine a situation where the entire sound space around you is filled with a language you do not understand well, which you speak only minimally, and then only for practical, everyday reasons, a language you listen to as if it were music. It’s the language of hic et nunc and, in the meanwhile, your own language, English, preserves a great inner strength. You share it with your brother Leo, and your friend Alice. It is the language of intimacy, the language of reminiscence, the language of writing.

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Thus, there is contamination when the two languages cease to be two hermetic systems and allow occasional infiltrations from one side or the other of the barrier. It is like a game of invisible translation with the very text. The examples that are the easiest to locate are no doubt the ones in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. and so I was very content. One’s eyes had become so habituated to menless streets. Gertrude Stein always says that she only has two real distractions, pictures and automobiles. We consoled him as best we could. (ABT 799, 819, 865, 870)

At times the French penetrates more openly, if the aim is to recount what was said with documentary precision. (Hemingway was adept at this technique, in order to convey local color without having to describe it.) For example: “Gertrude Stein said to this soldier, but you are tellement gentil, very nice and kind. Madame, said he quite simply, all soldiers are nice and kind” (ABT 831). In this exchange, Gertrude Stein is speaking French to the soldier in order to make herself understood, and Alice translates for her American readers, reducing the bourgeois enthusiasm of “tellement” to “very,” and translating “gentil” by two monosyllables which go together naturally, “nice and kind.” As for the soldier, with his “Madame,” he identifies himself as French, and polite, a bit pompous, even, in the French manner. Subsequently, his words (in all probability, “tous les soldats sont gentils”) are relayed in their American version: “all soldiers are nice and kind.” For what matters here is not the French formula in its particularity, but a paradoxical, yet universal notion, which could be extended to “our boys”: just as precision is the courtesy of kings, kindness is in the nature of soldiers. Or at least that is how kings and soldiers would like others to see them. And the two American ladies are touched by so much French gallantry. Another example of contamination: Please Do Not Suffer, A Play, written in 1916 while Alice and Gertrude were in Mallorca. Genevieve, a Breton maid, is speaking: I worked at a cafe in Rennes. Before that I was instructed by a woman who knew knitting and everything . . . My child is a girl and is still a little one. She

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is living in an invaded district but is now in Avignon . . . I like knitting and I like to buy provision. (GP 263)

From the start, “cafe” (even without its acute accent), and “Rennes” point to the fact that it is a Frenchwoman speaking. But the turns of phrase do as well: for example, “who knew knitting and everything” has been directly and exactly translated from French (a little farther along someone will say, “She has not a knowledge of swimming” (GP 264)). Note in passing that the expletive “et tout ça” in French has been rendered as “and everything.” Note, too, the unusual charm of “and is still a little one” which is no doubt the translation of “elle est encore petite.” As for “in an invaded district,” this is the best thing that Gertrude Stein, rather than Genevieve, could find to convey “en zone occupée” (in the occupied zone): the Americans had neither the word nor the thing. “Provision” is evocative, makes one think of a shopping bag, a thrifty housewife, good food stored in the kitchen. A bit further along, in the same scene, Alice interrupts to say, “What did we have to eat today. We had very young pork. It is very delicious. I have never eaten it better” (GP 265). We can skip over the slight anomaly of “very delicious” or “never eaten it better,” and pause in surprise for a moment at “very young pork.” The oddity in English comes no doubt from the fact that what is young is the living animal, the “pig,” and not the meat that has already been prepared at the butcher’s or the charcutier’s and is ready to be consumed, the “pork.” “Very young pork” might be an approximate rendering of “porcelet,” or “cochon de lait” (in Spanish, lechón). Infiltrations have not spared proper names. And yet proper names, in principle, should be safe, by virtue of being proper names, from any attempt at appropriation by a foreign language: a proper name is what is not translated. Except, naturally, in cases of naturalization or assimilation. There is in particular a scene in America America where Kazan’s young hero, Stavros Topouzoglou, has arrived at Ellis Island at last and, posing as Hohanness Gardashian, sees his name changed into “Joe Harness. Joe.” His name had to become just a little bit common, pronounceable, identifiable. Gertrude Stein was absolutely fascinated by proper names. The play entitled Short Sentences is a long list of names, each one associated with a statement no longer than one line, and each one appearing only once.1 To possess someone’s name, enough to be able to call out to them and pronounce their name, magically, ritually (an act of love

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or an act of intimidation), is to possess something essential belonging to that person. In a subdued, secular form, it is a residue of enchantment practices. In Do Let Us Go Away, A Play Antonio says, “I will come when called” (GP 218). Not that he has a choice. A name is like an individual’s secret formula. It is a taboo, like nudity: that which must not be exposed or uttered in vain. Any questioning of identity starts with the name. In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, the heroine says, I am I and my name is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel . . . Would it do as well if my name was not Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel . . . And I am I Marguerite Ida or am I Helena Annabel . . . Will he tell that I am Marguerite Ida that I am Helena Annabel. (LOP 95, 96, 97)

The transgression consists here in giving four names instead of one, a twice double identity, a square of mirrors, absolute confusion. The name can only be said and said again, since it is never reduced to meaning, cannot be translated, does not belong to the common domain. A proper name is what protects one from the common grave. It is also the last word, when there is nothing else left to say: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” To invent a proper name is to inaugurate fiction (“Call me Ishmael”), to make a sovereign gesture, or to commit a crime of lèse-majesté, as one prefers, a crime some people will never dare to commit, and which also means that they will never be novelists (Roland Barthes). What happens in Gertrude Stein’s case, in the case of a play like Short Sentences, where proper names are, in a way, woven into the text, is that this play in fact becomes untranslatable. Untranslatable? Really? But what if reading is already translating? Litany, when uttered out loud, might already be a form of translation: translation from the secret code into a prayer, in other words into a useful, operative gesture. The oral uttering of the written text is an operation comparable to a musician’s interpretation of a written score of music: interpretation here does not mean the unraveling of a meaning, but is an act in its own right, an implementation. In certain cases Gertrude Stein plays transgressively with the zones that share both what is proper and common. For example, again in Do Let Us Go Away, we read: “Jenny Chicken does not sing a song about the chicken. She says she does not like them small” (GP 218). Who is this Jenny Chicken? It

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would be hard not to see her as Jeanne Poule, the Breton maid (Genevieve’s real name?) whom Alice and Gertrude had sent for, from Mallorca: Life in Palma was pleasant and so instead of traveling any more that summer we decided to settle down at Palma. We sent for our French servant Jeanne Poule and with the aid of the postman we found a little house on the calle de Dos de Mayo in Terreno, just outside of Palma, and we settled down. We were very content. (ABT 821)

More word play with the names: in Please Do Not Suffer, there is a Mrs. Marchand (who, if we are to believe the Autobiography, was the wife of the French consul, so the name has not been made up). This is what she says: “Yes I like walking” (GP 264). And a bit further along: “She is a large woman and rather walking” (GP 265). The “rather,” which does not go well with “walking,” allows us to infer that this is nothing other than a “shift of function,” a passage from the name to the person, or the personality, by means of a (deliberately?) faulty translation, based on Marchand/marchant. We could do a pastiche of a film title here by distorting its meaning: “My Name is Nobody.” There are other instances where Gertrude Stein plays with syntax. For her, the point is to capture and reproduce with accuracy (or plausibility, that is with a semblance of accuracy) the sentences the Mallorcans use when they want to express themselves to the noble foreigners in English, and thus by means of the few words they know, and their desire to communicate, they devise a language which preserves the ceremonious opulence of the language upon which it has been based. This gives, in Do Let Us Go Away, A Play, the sort of sly rhetoric used by the owner of the house which Alice and Gertrude have found thanks to the postman. In the absence of any recording device, trusting only the more subjective and more accurate faithfulness of memory, Gertrude Stein works with language in such a way that the décor and the characters are introduced. The aim is, as subtly as possible, to come to an agreement, which will satisfy the two opposing parties: I am assisting and I am further obliged to come tomorrow. Will you kindly give me the key. It is a disappointment to me that we have not been able to be rid of that which is bothering us. It is a great disappointment to me.

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(The owner.) It was agreed that you take it by three months. It will disturb me to come up once a month for the money. (The owner.) I am very anxious to have you pleased with the house. (GP 220, 221)

The mixture of mistrust and courtesy is presented here without commentary, but there’s the wink of an eye nevertheless. The complicity with an American audience, an audience of friends, might irritate the natives we French also happen to be, with its paternalist overtones inherited from the nineteenth century (one is reminded of the speech Mark Twain assigns to the black slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn). But the game is subtler than first meets the eye, because the dialogue (the exchange plus the misunderstanding) also involves the two American women, showing their own mistrust and stubborn resistance (why should we pay for three months when we do not know when we will be leaving?): It was agreed that we take it by the month and we will send you your money by mail. (The owner.) If it is lost it will be at your risk. It will not be lost. (GP 221)

Gertrude Stein uses the American idiom as an oral language, a language greatly marked by the voice, by the voices that convey it, polishing it the way the sea polishes pebbles, with its intonations, inflections, rising and falling tones. Little vocal signals that only other Americans can grasp the moment they are uttered. One of the problems posed by Steinian writing, it would seem, is: how to translate voice through writing? Gertrude Stein is someone who writes because, she says, she listens. She says: because who can ever prove (except by repeating what was said, and even then . . . ) what they have heard, what he or she has heard? “Talking can be a way of listening that is if one has the profound need of hearing and seeing what every one is telling” (LIA 270). Every word here is important: “can be”: speaking may be a way of listening, which means not necessarily. Speaking, in this case, would mean making room in one’s speech for the other person’s words, reproducing them or, rather, producing them, in their truth, their meaning, in what was only virtual until the moment when the understanding of those who knew how to hear those words made them appear in act. And it “can be” precisely that, translating, and

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in particular translating Gertrude Stein. Her neutralized speech, locked within her refusal to say something, chained to a compulsive need to say and say again, is waiting for that other person who will have that particular way of listening that comes across through speech. To translate Stein is to take into one’s hands something that was only sound but which, by being taken and carried in this way, becomes speech. Not explained, not reduced to a meaning or developed until it becomes meaning, but held aloft in its desire to communicate in spite of everything, in its desire, precisely, to be nothing but communication. What one says when translating Stein is: I am listening to you. Every word is important: “the profound need.” Yes, this is only true if the need is a vital one, so powerful as to be obsessive, the need to have the sound of voices inside one, in the depths of silence. The way others escape with a conch shell to listen to the sea. What do I hear when I close my eyes? And don’t I go on hearing it, even when I try to silence it, and now that is what speaks inside me and through me. “Of hearing and seeing what everyone is telling.” Hearing and seeing are equal here. It is hearing and seeing that one needs in order to understand, otherwise there is nothing but noise, nothing but noises. One must see this voice as the bearer of a desire: to seduce, to subject one to its charm, or to attack through insult and injury, or to defend oneself, plead one’s cause, voice one’s lament again and again, as from the very depths of an abandoned lover’s soul. Stein’s technique, as we know, often consists in using fragments of statement, juxtaposed without any apparent logic. Which is why it is difficult, even impossible, to translate, since you are deprived of any context. It is often said that translating is understanding. One might put the reverse proposition to good use: understanding is translating. It is already translating. It is already telling stories, about the text or in relation to it, stories in your own language; it is telling yourself the text. Telling yourself what the story is telling you, and why you like it, why it speaks to you. “ . . . and of course I did not know what it was all about. But gradually I knew and later on I will tell the story of the pictures, their painters and their followers and what this conversation meant” (ABT 672). In a conversation, there is what she says, and what she means. You can perceive the words yet ignore the meaning. The meaning only exists because of everything that is not said. Translating is knowing what is not said.

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But translating can also, paradoxically, mean accepting that you do not understand. That you will not drag the secret from the text by force. As Marguerite Yourcenar has said in writing about music: “Music is not indiscreet, and when it laments, it does not say why.”2 The idea is simply to let the text be heard, or at least not prevent it from being heard; the idea is not to stand in the way. The ideal translation would be one that functioned as a sort of discreet subtitling. A good example of this is the use of supertitles at the opera. The familiar arias, the music set to words: you hear them, with their German structure or their Italian inspiration, none of that is lost, but superimposed upon that aspect of the work comes this additional information, and you no longer lose the emotional aspect inherent in the drama, which otherwise might have lulled you. Why talk of opera here? Because in Stein’s work there is the faint sound of a voice, a faint sound of voices. It has been said, about Beckett: what happens is words. Here, what happens, what goes by, are voices. They are not unlike faraway, diffuse voices coming from the garden, you can just make them out through an open window, in summer, and they give the air a dimension of suspended peace, of waiting for nightfall. Of nostalgia, too, because in the writing, these fragments of conversation are always memories of voices. What one remembers are voices, or even: what happened were the voices. Inasmuch as any translation, any passage to another phonological system forces the text; inasmuch as to attenuate the violence of the translation, you must return to the voice. Let’s not forget Lucinda Childs, sitting on a chair, saying, as if she were inventing every syllable: “Ida my dear sister.” This was in Camera Obscura, in which Simone Benmussa inserted and staged passages from the novel Ida. Through the miracle of an American voice, “Ida my dear sister” was something American, was something by Gertrude Stein, just as much as “Dear Ida my twin,” and this in spite of the impoverishment of meaning due to the passage from “twin” to “sister.” “Ida my dear sister” or “Dear Ida my twin” are headings in a letter, and therefore the voice, in principle, is not involved. But Ida is addressing Ida all the same, from a distance, and the voice on stage renders the power of this imaginary relationship with an invented twin, gives reality to this fantastical double. You exist because I am speaking to you: that is the founding illusion of any love relation. In Stein’s writing, or at least in one of her modes of writing, there is an absence of punctuation. Why should that interest us here? Because it means

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that oral signals such as intonations and pauses are not indicated by any written marks such as quotation marks, question marks, or commas. Does this suppression of information, this refusal to make use of an accepted convention, serve the purpose of intensifying the ambiguity of the message, to impose a more active participation upon the reader? Is this a pictorial process, erasing the contours of objects, blending them into the surroundings, blending their figures into the light? Perhaps, but above all, by means of a paradox that might have been sensed and exploited, this suppression, through its very anomaly, actually draws attention to the necessary breathing between statements, and to the fact that they only have meaning when they are conveyed by a voice, by the intention to speak, by oral power. As the oral has not been completely transformed into the written, with rules that belong to writing, we find ourselves in an intermediary support, where the eye has to make up for what is missing, and what is missing is not visual but auditory. Reading aloud is a form of translation (transposition from one system into another) that makes statements sound natural once again, like fish restored to water, like a thirsty plant given water. The suppression of punctuation is a far more efficient, economical, and aesthetic method than the painful efforts of certain playwrights to transcribe spoken language, with its particularities of pronunciation, “phonetically.” This is how Gertrude Stein goes about it, in the opera entitled Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. This is Faust speaking: I knew it I knew it the electric lights they told me so no dog can know no boy can know I cannot know they cannot know the electric lights they told me so I would not know I could not know who can know who can tell me so I know you know they can know her name is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel and when I tell oh when I tell oh when I when I tell, oh go away and go away and tell and tell and tell and tell and tell, oh hell. (LOP 94)

The comma preceding “oh hell” signals the end of the actor’s lines as surely as any heroic distich would: it stands out on the page like a moving image, suddenly, right in the middle of all the static shots, or, inversely, like a photograph seizing a face which, until then, had been in motion. What is the reader to make of this mark? The system was working perfectly, and then suddenly, like a piece of dust in one’s eye, a scratch in one’s throat: here comes a little signal, totally unexpected, the author has sprung it on the reader, what kind of parry can he

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invent, put on the spot like that? He finds nothing, resigns himself with a shrug of the shoulders: “oh hell.” Which might give, in French: J’en étais sûr j’en étais sûr qui l’a dit les lumières l’ont dit un chien n’en sait rien ni un petit garçon et moi non plus et eux non plus les lumières électriques m’ont dit la nouvelle je n’en étais pas sûr pas du tout sûr qui le savait qui me l’a dit je sais la nouvelle tu la sais aussi et eux aussi qu’elle s’appelle Marguerite Ida et Hélène Annabelle et quand j’annoncerai la nouvelle que c’est elle oui que c’est elle, allez vite annoncer la nouvelle que c’est elle oui que c’est elle, que c’est elle diable c’est elle.3

This passage is preceded by three little syllables, stage directions, which could easily be overlooked: “Faustus sings.” This cannot help but remind us of the famous letter from Monsieur Lepic to his son that so pleased Eisenstein,4 a letter where Monsieur Lepic, basically, was saying, “Oh honestly, my dear Carrot-Top, your last letter was strange, there’s no date on it, you’re talking about springtime but it’s still winter, and then why is everything in capital letters.” To which Carrot-Top replies, “My dear papa, just a quick note to explain my last letter. You didn’t notice that I wrote it in verse.” Gertrude Stein, when she wrote that passage, in 1938, did not yet know that it would be set to music,5 but she was already writing with the idea at the back of her mind that it could be an opera libretto, with its alternating arias and recitatives, with a “ballet of electric lights.” Setting the text to music, and the singing, are already an enactment, a “translation” of the writing. In French there is the play with the rhythms and sounds, in particular the “ell” in “tell” and “go tell” also found in “hell” and “Annabel,” the sound which is also that of the letter L when said out loud, which is both the sign of the feminine (elle) or the masculine (el) in the two languages Gertrude Stein hears around her while she is writing in English: yes, it is a secret, erotic playfulness, but it must at all costs (however clandestine) be implemented. What one reads, in the works of Serge Leclaire “Prendre le corps à la lettre” (or: To Take the Body Literally), “Le corps de la lettre,” or “Le rêve à la licorne”—is what one wants to hear about jubilation, about narcissistic affirmation, about what Leclaire calls “the secret jaculation.”6 We learn that the letter is distinct from the erogenous zone, as well as from the object, “provided it is not altogether part of the body, but more precisely the feature which constitutes the body’s limit” and also determines it.7 We learn that, “above all, it can be reproduced as identical to itself ” and also that it is

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“likely to be reproduced, re-evoked, repeated in a way, to scan and articulate the song of desire.”8 Even if we do not fully understand what we are reading (for reasons other than those which mean we do not always understand Gertrude Stein), we can sense that there is an effort in the work which, if someone were to take the trouble, would illuminate the inexplicable pleasure to be found in the repetition of sounds, and in the rhythms which reoccur and become dominant, erotically, all through this Doctor Faustus. “The Dream of a Translation”: to conclude, there is the choice of title to defend. It is not the dream of the unicorn, Leclaire’s “Le rêve à la licorne.” It is the dream of taking—but how—the literal from the body. It is, when faced with an enigmatic or even inexplicable text, which nevertheless speaks to you, like an incomprehensible dream, the dream of a translation which enters into communication with the text in ways that are those of pure contact, of an immaterial touching, like that of a love affair. The translation should do nothing more than caress the text, rewrite with a finger on the skin, without being able to tell the text from the translation. It is the fable told by Borges about the rewriting of Don Quixote.9 It is making the text one’s own while leaving it other. It is like “interpreting” with one’s voice in song, or with one’s hands on an instrument: enabling others to hear. So-called literal translations, where the touch is too material upon that other body that is the text, fail to reach their goal, and make the text into a material, physical body that is no longer symbolic; they go astray, into fetishism, dividing the text up and violating the coveted body, imprisoning it in inertia. Translation, if it is to be possession, can only ever be a dream of possession, from a distance, and for the sake of others. It reestablishes a triangular relationship, whereas certain texts close themselves off again, in a dual relationship that is an absence of relation.

Notes 1 Gertrude Stein, Short Sentences [1932] in Last Operas and Plays (New York: Vintage [1949], 1975). 2 “La musique n’est pas indiscrète et lorsqu’elle se lamente, elle ne dit pas pourquoi” (Marguerite Yourcenar, Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat, in Oevres romanesques (Paris: Galimard, 1982), 16).

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3 Faust ou la Fête électrique, trans. Marie-Claire Pasquier, dir. Richard Foreman, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, October 1982, in Théâtre/Public, No. 48, November– December 1982, 35. 4 S. M. Eisenstein, La Non-indifférente nature/2, (Paris: 10/18, 1978), 218. The letter from Monsieur Lepic (excerpt from Poil de Carotte by Jules Renard) has been reproduced in its entirety. 5 By Richard Banks in 1951, for Judith Malina; by Meyer Kupferman in 1953, for the Sarah Lawrence College; and by Al Carmines in 1979, for Larry Kornfeld. 6 Serge Leclaire, Psychanalyser (Paris: Seuil, 1968). 7 Ibid., 95. 8 Ibid., 95–6. 9 “Pierre Ménard, auteur du Don Quichotte,” in Fictions (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). George Steiner also refers to it in his book After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

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Gertrude Stein and her Critique of Dramatic Reason Andrzej Wirth, translation by d’onderkast

Critics have often highlighted the analogy between Gertrude Stein’s literary technique and the cubists’ methods, but this has not led to new insights. The author herself gave the incentive to this comparison, by often stressing the parallel between her literary procedure and the way in which Picasso, Matisse, and Braque—her favorite painters whom she considered her discoveries as a collector—saw things. This essay sets out to examine the dramaturgy of Stein’s “play as landscape” in the context of a possible analogy with a subgenre of the cubist period, the collage. We will examine two plays from different periods: Four Saints in Three Acts (1927) and Listen to Me (1936). The periods in question were defined by Donald Sutherland, one of the leading experts on Stein, as “The Play as Movement and Landscape, 1922–1932,” and as “The Melodic Drama, Melodrama and Opera, 1922–1946,” albeit not without pointing out that such a periodization is difficult and subjective.1 In essence, all of Stein’s plays are “landscape plays”; this characteristic of her dramaturgy was understood well by Stein’s successors such as Robert Wilson, who compares his plays with parks. Four Saints in Three Acts, one of the few plays staged during Stein’s lifetime (in New York, in Virgil Thomson’s musical setting, in 1934), has a seemingly pleonastic subtitle: An Opera to Be Sung. Stein’s intention is clear: she wants the opposite of a closet drama, a text to be staged, to be read aloud, spoken, sung, danced. In this sense, all of Stein’s plays are concrete poetry, speak-ins, operas, ballets. I would like to suggest here that from a presentday perspective Stein’s most difficult texts have become much clearer both as an aesthetic program and as a theatrical project. What stands out is above all

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their deconstructionist motivation. What Stein deconstructs in these plays is the notion of the “standard play.” Dialogue is dissolved in discourse; characters are only recognizable as voices of the discourse; plot becomes the simple movements of syntax; the dramatic time is freed of sequential logic and seen as a “continuous present,” without “before” and “after,” without beginning and end, and so on. Four Saints in Three Acts, which engages in an ironic game with the audience’s expectations (“In narrative prepare for saints”), redefines the notion of narration in the sense of a “continuous present” as superfluous: “What happened today, a narrative” (LOP 440). Programmatically, the dramaturgic logic is sublated by “idle acts”; repetitions (e.g., “Repeat First Act”); and rhetorical questions (e.g., “Would it do if there was a Scene II” (LOP 455) or “Could Four Acts be Three” (LOP 462)). What is also sublated is the grammatical logic, by means of a syntax without predicates and by arbitrary punctuation. Right at the beginning the play defines the intended modality of existence of the linguistic referents: “Four benches used four benches used separately . . . That makes it be not be makes it not be at the time” (LOP 441). In other words, language is not used in its connotative but in its denotative function and does not lay claim to representation. The only formal principle offered in the text is the free creativity of the writer: “Four saints are leave it to me” (LOP 442, emphasis added). A play composed in such a way is an object similar to a landscape, which also refers to itself alone. In Four Saints in Three Acts: “The difference between saints forget me nots and mountains have to have to have to at a time” (LOP 442). The time of a landscape play is not “dramatic,” but identical with the observer’s time. “It is very easy in winter to remember winter spring and summer it is very easy in winter to remember spring and winter and summer it is very easy in winter to remember summer spring and winter it is very easy in winter to remember spring and summer and winter” (LOP 442). The experience of a landscape play does not lie in the expectation of some sort of resolution, but rather in the act of watching it unfold: “Gradually wait” (LOP 444). The parodic emphasis with which the structure of the acts and scenes is included points to an aesthetic strategy (“Repeat First Act; Enact end of an act; Scene III and IV”; three Scene Xs; an Act III without any scenes. The often practiced swapping of the numerical order of scenes and acts). This strategy does not seem all that dissimilar to that of the early collagists of cubism—

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Picasso, Matisse, and Braque—who put their collages into a frame to highlight the “pictorial” nature of the object created, despite programmatically rejecting the claim for representation (a picture—of what?). In Stein’s work this strategy also serves as a Verfremdungseffekt— deconstruction via overcomposing: Acts without action (“Saint Therese seated”) as a “frame” for a dramatic discourse rejecting any coherence based on traditional units: “There are a great many places and persons near together” and after the ostensible introduction of Saint Therese as a main character it is announced that Saint Therese can also be Martha (LOP 445). As well as “Saint Louise and Saint Celestine and Saint Louis Paul and Saint Settlement Fernande and Ignatius / Saint Therese. Can women have wishes .  .  . Can two saints be one,” and so on (LOP 448). The dramatic figure becomes a grammatical modality: “Saint Therese and begun. / Saint Therese as sung. / Saint Therese act one. / Saint Therese and begun. / Saint Therese and sing and sung. / Saint Therese in an act one. Saint Therese questions” (LOP 453). The first sentence in Act One, Scene IX (sic): “Saint Therese meant to be complete completely” (emphasis added) retains its ironic-ambivalent status as an aesthetic premise: it defines the impossible for the analytical phase of cubism (the early Picasso, Matisse), a possibility in its synthetic phase (Cézanne, Mondrian). Elsewhere in the text, we find the sentence “Never to return to distinctions” (LOP 468), which could be interpreted as a motto for synthetic cubism. In Four Saints in Three Acts the distribution of the thematic material is rendered arbitrarily, i.e., it is “randomized” aleatorically. The text contains randomly scattered lines, which refer cryptically and in code to its formation process: “Saint Therese. Add to additional” (LOP 474). This imperative—the elimination (Aufhebung) of the dramatic character via additive multiplication— can be interpreted as the standard method used by the theatrical avant-garde in the 1970s, which Stein anticipated (good examples for this are Robert Wilson’s “Operas” and Pina Bausch’s dance theater). One could understand this adding process in a more general sense as well, namely as the basic process of the collage technique in its original sense: “pasting” the added pieces of the “found” material on a surface defined by a frame. “Let it be why if they were addng adding comes cunningly to be additionally cunningly in the sense of attracting attracting in the sense of adding adding in the sense of windowing and windowing and frames and pigeons and ordinary trees and while while

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away” (LOP 477). “Frame” and “window” became noticeable structural elements in Richard Forman’s dramaturgy in the 1970s. The status of language in Stein’s landscape plays appears to the eye of the observer educated in traditional literature to be full of ambiguities. He feels a certain uncertainty whether the language used should be understood semantically or asemantically—as “texture,” musical surface, or wordplay with homonyms (“pun”). This uncertainty disappears with the same observer when looking at a collage by Picasso, Braque, or Heartfield: it seems to be taken for granted that, in a collage, the artist leaves to the observer the decision of what is to be regarded as “objective” or “abstract.” This discrepancy of perception apparent here could be seen as proof for literary aesthetics lagging behind those of the visual arts. The basic structure of Four Saints in Three Acts is, as in the other landscape plays, a narrative voice, which does not produce any linear narration (Stein contrasts “narration” and “narrative”)—and which does not maintain a distance between what is narrated and how it is narrated, as for example Epic Theater. In Stein’s plays, pseudo-dramatic figures or “voices” work on the same level as the narrative voice, which renders the basic pattern of her plays more similar to a lyrical poem than a conventional drama (cf. Stein’s dictum: “I just kept on writing until I had emptied myself of the emotion”). Writing is not seen as a product, but as a process (“writing in progress”) and contains corollary elements of this process (e.g., fragments of dialogue with Stein’s partner Alice and her dog, etc.). “Framing” and “windowing” are techniques used by Stein which defamiliarize the notions of “frame” and “window” by blending in material dispersing the composition (in a semiotic sense the addition of “noise”). As when observing a collage, in Stein’s landscape plays we are addressed primarily by “textural” elements: by the graphic composition of the text (when being read silently) and by the orchestration of the sounds of the words (when read aloud or when listened to with or without the music). The subject matter does not appear in the form of a fabula, but is, as in music, distributed over the key phrases floating freely within the body of the discourse, and by its motivic repetition. The transition between the “textural” elements of the surface to the images structuring the “sense” of each of these, is left to the observer and can lead to manifold legitimate interpretations. Evidently, we are leaving the

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traditional ground of explication du texte here and moving into the direction of an as yet nonexistent yet necessary critique capable of reflecting tensions, forces, movements, and tempos. The use of word clusters as well as the reductive syntax devoid of predicates (“Two in the sun . . . Easily saints . . . and as much,” etc.), both characteristic of Stein’s language, has, like Mattisse’s papiers découpés, the function of a kind of syntactic cut-out. These cut-outs create surprising effects when staged or when read aloud, like for example: “A no, a no sense” (aloud: innocence), or “four” as an oral homonym for “for,” etc. The programmatic mysteriousness of Stein’s texts is not unlike the strategy of a collage, which leaves the symbolic decoding to the observer. As is well known, Stein practiced by methodically describing objects not mentioned by name (cf. Tender buttons, 1914). Four Saints in Three Acts is defined as a discourse of saints only at first glance; thematic references do not form a coherent theme and it is left open whether the hagiography here works as a metaphor of artistic autism (i.e., the autism of the artist). Four Saints in Three Acts’s linguistic discourse appears as a collage of “voices” that function as an abstraction of “small talk,” in accordance with Stein’s dictum: “People may come and go, but party talk stays the same.” Not until the 1960s and 1970s do we find a similarly conceptualized travesty of the dialogue, in Handke’s speech plays or Sprechstücke and Robert Wilson’s “Chit chatter” (as Stein’s celebrated dictum: “How do you do / Very well I thank you” (LOP 466)). Stein creates a kaleidoscopic effect by dissipating language, the fragments (“bits”) of which let themselves be adapted to the different lines of interpretation. Stein’s landscape play dramaturgy gets by without situations. Change is derived by the stream of images, which place themselves on top of each other and amplify or neutralize each other, a process in which repetitions, recapitulations, and enumerations play an important structural part. Stein’s text gives chosen words an emblematic quality, which is also a striking analogy to the collage-technique, which tends to highlight the emblematic aspect of the “found forms.” In Four Saints in Three Acts, for example, the names of the saints are used emblematically rather than symbolically. Stein’s conviction that the audience should experience (miterleben) rather than relive (nacherleben) or anticipate the “stage emotions” stands in contrast to both Stanislawski and Brecht, but is in accordance with her own theory

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of a “continuous present.” Aimed at the direct, “instant response” of the observer, Stein’s landscape plays try to be tantamount to the impression of a landscape which “will never end.” Given such texts, which fan out into a panorama, the process of “understanding” becomes analytical, not synthetic. Stein’s dramaturgy and the subgenre of the collage seem to belong to the same aesthetics, in contrast to the premodernist aesthetics of a “delayed response.” Nine years after the landscape opera Four Saints in Three Acts, Listen to Me (1936) was written, which nowadays can be read as anticipating Handke’s speech plays or Sprechstücke. Stein’s Listen to Me has the structure of a soliloquy. It is the narrative voice of the text addressing itself directly to the audience (reader); dramatic characters are modalities of this solo voice. What makes Listen to Me interesting and significant, however, is the use of drama metalanguage as the object language of the play. To stick to our comparison: Four Saints in Three Acts can be explained as the dramatic paradigm of Picasso’s, Matisse’s, and Braque’s analytical cubism, whereas Listen to Me can be considered the paradigm of Cézanne’s and Mondrian’s synthetic cubism: it is geometrical, mathematical, and with a new appreciation for coherent subjects. Perhaps orphic cubism, with its focus on color as form and object (Delaunay, Der blaue Reiter, Paul Klee), can make the analogy suggested here more palpable. Listen to Me has a coherent subject that is also very universal and structuralist—I would like to call it a critique of dramatic reason to emphasize the epistemological quality of Stein’s work. Language, reflected as structure (i.e., as grammar), is part of this aspect. At the beginning of Listen to Me, it is stated “For has nothing to do with get,” a remark setting the tone for the use of language in the play (LOP 387). The ontological status of the dramatic character is discussed and presented as a contradiction: “There are three characters . . . There are always more than three characters because air is where” (LOP 387). Time and again the intended play breaks down in the clash with the problematic concept of the dramatic character: “They do not think therefore they think apart” (LOP 388). This critique should not be understood as an allusion to the conventionality of traditional dramatic discourse—characters thinking the author’s thoughts as “their own”—but, more radically, as a difficulty of symbolic thinking per se: “What does it speak about. It speaks about the great difficulty of what anything is about” (LOP 388). Listen to Me, like Mondrian’s abstract compositions, appears as a universal and reductive

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program: “I wish words of one syllable were as bold as old. I will tell in words of one syllable anything there is to tell not very well but just well / And so there was no curtain / Curtain is a word of two syllables” (LOP 389). This quote shows how radical and fundamental Stein’s critique of the theater is: in a structuralist interpretation, the curtain is considered a punctuation mark, a theatrical “full stop”—“.”. In the same way as the dramatic figures are mere modalities of dramatic speech, “the curtain,” “the act,” and “the scene” are modalities of dramatic writing. In the great anticipation of present-day structuralists (cf. Derrida) Stein uses “writing” as Verfremdungseffekt for the conventions of stage language: “To talk is very pleasant when it looks like writing” (LOP 391). The notion of the dramatic figure is attacked ironically and reduced ad absurdum as a generalized arbitrary convention of dramatic speech: “So then they do say something. / All together they say / Very well. / Does anybody know for certain how many characters are they . . . Fifth character. The best thing to do is to know the first character by looking” (LOP 395). Thirty years before Handke, Stein’s paradigmatic characters revolt against the rationality of dialogical discourse: “The first character. I have never thought of telling. / . . . No I have never thought of telling anything. / Curtain.” (LOP 396). Listen to Me is a brilliant model of the anti-play, which neutralizes itself (sich aufhebt) like Mondrian’s abstract “landscapes.” After many attempts at positioning the characters in the play, the dramatic figure is recognized as a hypostasis and reduced nominalistically: “Perhaps character is four syllables” (LOP 413). This sentence could have originated from the Vienna Circle—from Wittgenstein, Carnap, or Schlick. In Listen to Me, this nominalistic reduction is applied to other notions of traditional drama, e.g., fabula: “Once in a while nothing happens” (LOP 394); act and scene: “Act five dear Act five / Caught alive” (LOP 417); time: “Because there is no after or before” (LOP 410); exposition and finale: “How can there be another end when the earth is round” (LOP 409); and individual psychology: “And so the world is covered with Sweet William. / And his Lillian” (LOP 392). One feels reminded of Brecht’s reductive psychology (“Einer ist keiner” (which literally translates as: one is none)) and Heiner Müller (“Einer ist zu viel” (literally: one is too many)). This reductive shortening of the traditional dramatic structure solicits an answer to questions like: Who is talking in a play in which “There is no one and one / Nobody has met anyone”? (LOP 421). The answer is anticipated

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in the title Listen to Me and then made clear in the text: “Who is there. / Who is there / I am here” (LOP 418, emphasis added)—the narrative voice of the text. For certain text sequences, Listen to Me uses the method of word-collage. One of Stein’s most beautiful dramatic word-collages creates the finale of Act IV: Lillian. There is a wish Lillian. There is a horse Lillian. There is a head Lillian. There is an eye Lillian. There is kneel Lillian. There is a wish when I kneel on the eye of the horse and wish it.    Sweet William was not there.     Curtain.      (LOP 412)

Typical of Stein is the contrasting of visual concepts with the focus on the denotative value of the word and the rational–irrational association of elements. This process is analogous to the analytical phase of cubism (1910/1911) and had already been used by Stein in her earlier landscape plays. The Listen to Me word-collage of this kind is clearly linked to the subject of the discourse (deconstruction of the standard-play). The performed collage is almost “overconstructed” in its nearly syllogistic composition. The missing propositions are William’s replies (“Sweet William was not there”). This word-collage demonstrates the chronic not-comingabout of the dialogue, and as a result the switching off of the drama’s inner communication system. Listen to Me holds an exceptional position in the dramatic literature of the 1930s because it explicitly makes the metalanguage of drama and theater the subject of discussion by consistently using the system of secondary codes as primary speech codes. It was Stein’s most radical step to make the drama abstract and to create with literary means a program that shows striking analogies to the so-called Neoplasticism of the 1920s. (Cf. Paisieu’s subtitle [1928]: “A Play. A work of pure imagination in which no reminiscences intrude.”) Mondrian based his abstract style on the reduction of pictorial elements to vertical and horizontal lines and to three primary colors and “noncolors.” The procedure

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used by Stein to make the drama abstract is also reductive: the reduction of the inner communication system of the drama in favor of the outer communication system, understood as a direct reference of the narrative voice to the listener/ viewer—in accordance with the formula “Listen to me.” Mondrian’s selfrestraint with “pure” colors corresponds with Stein’s self-restraint as regards the denotative value of words; in the same way that for Mondrian secondary colors only exist as a postimage, for Stein the “meaning” or the “sense” of a text is implemented only as a postimage in the perception of the observer. One could pursue these analogies between Stein’s literary style and Neoplasticism even further: the transition from representation to composed structure, the search for the generalizing formula, interest in the material’s rhythmic arrangement, a penchant for geometrical abstraction and symmetry, and so forth. The reference to such parallelisms, however, cannot be a replacement for the analysis of Stein’s most difficult texts (and the plays belong to that category). The disjunction between the phonological and the semantic level of the speech code so typical for Stein’s literary abstractionism demands the introduction of a critical lingua, which we have for painting but not yet for linguistic compositions. Applied to drama, Stein’s time conception of the continuous present, which she owes to William James, her professor at Harvard, meant the abandonment of chronological linearity of succession and progression (the equivalent of the linear perspective in painting?) in favor of a durative and iterative time concept combining subjectivity, statics, and cyclicality. The cycle of repetition in Stein’s dramatic texts creates the impression of timelessness, of the elimination (Aufhebung) of dramatic time. Stein’s conception of dramatic time as static duration and cyclic repetition creates a clear anticipation of the postmodern time conception in the works of Beckett and in the Theater of the Absurd. To place Stein’s intention more accurately into a historical perspective: Brecht, occupying himself with deconstruction at the same time as Stein, led his attack against “the Aristotelian drama,” which is a different name for the standard-play. Nevertheless, Stein would surely reject Brecht’s Epic Theater because of its lack of aesthetic radicalism, and she would probably scorn his concepts of “narrating on stage” and “historicization” as “a stage novel,” in short: “an old staff.” Stein would probably write off Brecht’s political stance with the dictum “Saint Therese not interested.” Although Stein does use the word

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“narrative,” she only does so as a negation. Stein’s and Brecht’s deconstruction programs therefore represent opposite positions. A more obvious analogy, which cannot be analyzed at great length here, but which nonetheless requires our attention, are Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre as well as his plays, which he wrote as a paradigm of this theory in the 1920s. Witkiewicz advocated the deconstruction of the standard-play (as an example of this he used Ibsen and Strindberg (sic!)). He believed that the revolution of cubism had modified the aesthetic sensibility in a groundbreaking way, and that current drama and theater had been overtaken by this revolution. His innovative project of a “theatre of pure form and metaphysical feelings” seems much more moderate than Stein’s, especially regarding the treatment of language: in Witkiewicz’ work language never reaches the state of objectification, which characterizes Stein’s linguistic abstractionism. The parallelism of the two programs, which came into being wholly independently from each other in geographically separated and different cultures, would be a fascinating research subject for a comparatist. I note this down as an incentive for researchers interested in modern theory of drama—it would mean venturing into entirely new ground! What is striking in the two plays selected for our study is the polemical element in Stein’s deconstructivist endeavors. And yet, every comprehensive deconstruction also follows positive objectives. For Witkiewicz, the intended result of deconstruction was an “awakening of metaphysical feelings,” which neither religion nor philosophy can bring about anymore. With her deconstructions Stein hoped to be able to describe the “entity,” a notion she contrasted with the notion of “identity.” According to The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1935), this juxtaposition is of fundamental importance for the understanding of Stein’s work. “Entity,” as conceptualized by Stein, cannot be represented by the fabula, the “story.” (Stein’s dictum: “do not bother about a story”). The experience of “entity” is “immediate” and only possible in the continuous present (this is where Stein’s concept of “the novel of the present” originates from. For Stein, of course, every novel is a “novel of the present”). Experiencing “identity,” however, is only possible via the contact with the audience, according to Stein. One has “identity” if one has the audience. (Stein’s dictum: “I am I because my little dog knows me.”) “Entity” and “identity” are only given as moments, not

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as situations. Composing moments of the experienced present into a collage became Stein’s fundamental method. We have shown the application of this method to her dramatic work by an analysis of two specific examples. Stein was aware that her literary collaging (“assembling the whole thing out of its parts”), although inspired by the successful American car industry (sic!), produces texts of which the beauty and relevance could not be recognized immediately (HWW 152). Her prediction proved quite accurate—she reckoned with a time-span of thirty years until the importance of her oeuvre would be recognized. From a modern-day perspective, “this idea of a whole thing,” which has always accompanied Stein’s dismantling of traditional writing methods, is very transparent (HWW 153). Orthodox punctuation was omitted to highlight the importance of paragraphs as basic units of meaning (in The Making of Americans, 1925); nouns were eliminated in an attempt to express movement through syntax; memory and recollection were excluded to intensify “the sense of the immediate”; vocabulary was reduced to intensify the emblematic aspect of words (“the picture within the frame”); “events” were downgraded to highlight the situation (“existence”); repetition was introduced to increase the appreciation of minimal changes, etc. Stein’s grand deconstruction served a constructive purpose, and we are only just beginning to realize how her ambition anticipated or paved the way for nearly everything that present-day theater strives to achieve: its conception of time (Beckett), its existential tendency (Grotowski), its formal–informal structure (Robert Wilson), its epistemological tendency (Richard Foreman), its linguistic strategies (Handke), and its operatic mixed forms (Wilson and Pina Bausch).

Note 1 Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein. A Biography of her Work (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 207.

11

The Missing Link: Stein between American and European Theater Laura Luise Schultz

In 1983, Polish-German theater professor Andrzej Wirth was applying for a professorship in the German city of Giessen, where the Justus-Liebig-University was setting up a new theater department. Wirth, who had spent several years at Stanford and the City University of New York, chose to lecture on Gertrude Stein for his trial lecture, and was appointed.1 During the next decade he turned the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen into a leading theater school in European theater, inviting famous artists and scholars from all over the world. Over the years, some of Germany and Europe’s most ground-breaking theater artists have developed from this small department in Giessen, artists such as René Pollesch, Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop, and many others. It was no coincidence that Wirth chose to bring precisely Gertrude Stein with him, when he returned to Europe after years in California and New York. If we take a look across the Atlantic, to the New York theater avant-garde, which has so many affinities with German post-dramatic theater, we clearly see Stein’s influence on some of the most important theater and performance artists. Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Anne Bogart have acknowledged the connection themselves; many others have demonstrated it in their work. Since the 1970s, American avant-garde theater artists have worked extensively in Europe, and through their cooperation with European artists American performance theater and European post-dramatic theater have enriched each other. The present professor in Giessen, composer and theater director Heiner Goebbels, has directed three productions based on texts by Gertrude Stein. As such, Goebbels tacitly continues the Steinian tradition that has always

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been an “underground” current of the school in Giessen and its post-dramatic approach to theater. Significantly, Goebbels has stated that his first real encounter with Stein’s writings was when Robert Wilson read a passage of The Making of Americans at German playwright Heiner Müller’s funeral. Goebbels later directed the opera Hashirigaki, where he mixes text from The Making of Americans with music by the Beach Boys. These exchanges of Gertrude Stein-inspired theater aesthetics across the Atlantic may seem coincidental at a first glance. The fact that Stein’s relationship with the European theatrical avant-garde from the first half of the twentieth century has never been fully acknowledged, makes it difficult to recognize any direct influence of hers on European theater. In fact, her plays are to a large extent considered oddities; texts written for purely literary purposes with no real understanding of, let alone impact on, actual theater practice. I argue the contrary. Gertrude Stein is in many ways a missing link in the history of Western experimental theater of the last century. Stein’s position as a missing link between American and European theater is not only of historical interest, but also important for understanding some of the most crucial aesthetic aspects of theater and playwriting of the last century. As Andrzej Wirth wrote in 1982: Stein’s grand deconstruction served a constructive purpose, and we are only just beginning to realize how her ambition anticipated or paved the way for nearly everything that present-day theater strives to achieve: its conception of time (Beckett), its existential tendency (Grotowski), its formal-informal structure (Robert Wilson), its epistemological tendency (Richard Foreman), its linguistic strategies (Handke), and its operatic mixed forms (Wilson and Pina Bausch).2

Wirth mentions both American and European artists, recognizing the fact that postmodernist theater in the second half of the twentieth century developed in an intercultural climate, and that Stein’s influence is part of that exchange. I would add, that due to her cross-cultural outlook, Stein was able to anticipate and combine aspects not only of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, but also of performative and post-dramatic approaches to theater and writing that have surfaced only recently as major issues of art and theater in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3

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Theatricality and anti-theatricality One important reason why Stein has only slowly made her way into drama and theater histories is that she does not fit into categories. When literary scholars devote a chapter to Stein’s plays, they seldom relate her work to theatrical practice. At the same time, theater and drama scholars have often associated Stein’s plays with a certain type of anti-theatrical, modernist closet drama. William B. Worthen, who in Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama explores the performativity of dramatic texts, claims that “Stein’s plays define the play as a page—rather than as a stage-event.”4 Jane Bowers in her important study of Stein’s plays, “They Watch Me as They Watch This”: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama, argues that Stein is actually trying to reach her audience directly through the text, to let her own voice reach the audience beyond any theatrical mediations (as actualized by the staging of the play), and beyond the actor, who is reduced to an almost disturbing medium.5 The idea that Stein’s plays were never meant to be performed, or are not suitable for performance, ties in with a broader trend within drama studies to regard a certain tradition of modernist drama as anti-theatrical. This anti-theatrical, literary modernism is then contrasted with an anti-literary, theatricalist tradition within avant-garde theater and performance. One prominent example is Martin Puchner, who in his Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama states: What we begin to see here is that the polarization between anti-theatricalism and theatricalism corresponds to some extent to the distinction made by a number of theorists between high modernism and avant-garde. We may thus speak of a modernist anti-theatricalism and an avant-garde theatricalism.6

Puchner is undoubtedly right in his identification of both a theatricalist and an anti-theatricalist tendency in twentieth-century art and literature, but contrary to Puchner I do not think that Stein is readily placed in the antitheatricalist line. Similarly, her writings show both modernist and avant-garde characteristics. According to Peter Bürger, the primary aim of the avant-garde is the dissolution of art into life.7 High modernism, on the other hand, is associated with the investigation of internal relations of the art form itself, thus insisting on the ideal purity and autonomy of the work of art, according

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to which painting should be concerned only with painterly issues, literature with literary issues, and so on.8 Stein, however, while insisting that her artistic medium was literature, at the same time used painterly strategies in her approach to writing, as demonstrated, for example, by her use of genres borrowed from painting: the portrait, the still life, the landscape. Rather than trying to force Stein’s work into one or the other category, we should acknowledge the fact that she was consistently exploring the very relationship between the work of art and referential reality, between discursive meaning and material world, and between the autonomy and the heteronomy of art.9 Representation as such was questioned in modernism, and this led to the deconstruction of linear perspective in painting, of the linear narrative with a clear beginning, middle and ending in literature, and of the traditional fourthwall drama in the theater. Both the formalist investigation of the specificities of the different media and the experiments with new exchanges between presentation and representation, matter and discourse, are aspects of the same deconstruction of the stable, mimetic relationship between art and world. The opposition between high modernism and avant-garde is to a certain extent a theoretical construction that often proves difficult to maintain in the concrete encounter with the specific work of a singular artist. Similarly, as Michael Fried demonstrated in his 1967 essay, theatricality is a concept that is not easily limited to theater in twentieth-century art, but increasingly affected all art forms. What is today recognized as the “performative turn” in art and culture actually began in the early avant-garde, when, for example, Futurists and Dadaists brought their paintings and poems on stage in their serate and cabarets. Stein in her writings and her approach to theater reflected and explored this broader sense of performativity and theatricalization of art and life. She employed it as a means of deconstructing the dominance of mimetic representation, as a new way of conceiving the relationship between art and reality.10

Gertrude Stein and avant-garde theater One scholar who does recognize Stein’s understanding of avant-garde performance is Sarah Bay-Cheng. In her book Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s

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Avant-Garde Theater, Bay-Cheng criticizes the tradition of reading Stein’s plays as closet drama. While Bay-Cheng fully acknowledges the focus on language that many scholars emphasize in Stein’s playwriting, she nevertheless argues that this does not mean that Stein was estranged from or unfamiliar with avant-garde theater. On the contrary, she finds that Stein implemented many crucial traits of avant-garde performance in her plays: Techniques such as fragmentation and the creation of multiple or conflicting meanings are found both in Stein’s theater and in Dada and Surrealist performance. The simultaneity so integral to the Futurists’ vision of performance dominates much of Stein’s dramatic writing. Moreover, the disruption of audience expectations that Wirth finds in Stein’s drama was an essential component of avant-garde theater beginning with Alfed Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), and continuing through nearly all of the avant-garde’s first hundred years.11

Bay-Cheng continues to argue that the presentation of Stein’s plays as purely literary seems to neglect that Stein had close ties to “some of the most notable theater artists including Tzara, Breton, and Apollinaire.”12 In support of this perspective, Stein herself actually mentions that she went to several avantgarde performances, namely the performances of Isadora Duncan and the Ballets Russes, among these Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.13 Bay-Cheng even links Stein’s development as a playwright directly to her exposure to avant-garde performance: Significantly, it was only after a period of approximately ten years of major avant-garde performance and filmmaking in Paris that Stein began seriously to write for the theater. Before 1927 she wrote short experimental pieces and called them plays, but it was not until the late 1920s that Stein began to write stageable drama.14

The development in Stein’s playwriting that Bay-Cheng observes might very well reflect Stein’s attendance or discussions of avant-garde performance in Paris after World War I, as well as the practical experience of writing the libretto of Four Saints In Three Acts in collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson in 1927. It nevertheless puzzles me that Bay-Cheng, by excluding the first decade or more of Stein’s playwriting, in part repeats the very argument that she is criticizing. The dichotomy between the anti-theatrical, literary experiment, and theatrical drama is still at work in her distinction between

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“stageable drama” and “short experimental pieces” that were just called plays by Stein.15 What I argue is that Stein at the same time emphasized the performativity of the text and the performativity of the theater. That was her great challenge to theater and theater writing. Already from her early plays she emphasized the performativity of both the text and the theater in order to move both literature and theater beyond the mimetic, dramatic paradigm, to turn both the theater and the theater text post-dramatic.16

The performativity of the text—and of the theater Despite Worthen’s accurate assertion of the prominence given to the performativity of the written text itself in modernist theater texts (i.e., “the play on the page”) I still think it is highly problematic to assume that a writer such as Stein—and many other modernist playwrights—were ignorant of or even antagonistic to theatrical practice. Especially as Stein herself insisted on having her plays performed rather than printed.17 In his book Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann cites both Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller for the opinion that the theater text should pose a challenge to the theater: At the same time, one has to realize the productive side in some twentiethcentury and contemporary authors’ lack of consideration for the possibilities of the theatre: they write in such a way that the theatre for their texts largely still remains to be invented. The challenge to discover new potencies of the art of theatre has become an essential dimension of writing for the theatre. Brecht’s demand that authors should not “supply” the theatre with their texts but instead change it has been realized far beyond his imagination. Heiner Müller could even declare that a theatre text was only good if it was unstageable for theatre as it is.18

What if the seemingly anti-theatrical train of modernist playwriting is not a high modernist gesture of anti-theatricality, as argued by Puchner and Worthen, but rather a way of developing a new theatrical language? In Stein’s case, the seemingly anti-theatrical stance of her plays was actually quite the opposite: an attempt to move away from the literary conception of theater associated with drama, where the dramatic text completely governs the stage performance. Instead she emphasized those layers of theatrical

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performance that did not relate to the dramatic action on stage, and were not plotted out in advance by the text. These layers are precisely the ones that Erika Fischer-Lichte in The Transformative Power of Performance designates as performative: those interactions and effects of performance that emerge during the live event and have not been planned and foreseen by the theatrical mis en scène.19 It is obvious both from her plays themselves and from her lecture “Plays,” that Stein was very conscious of the specific artistic means of expression and modes of perception of the theater performance itself. In “Plays” she discusses at length the difference between the literary and theatrical experience of an “exciting action,” and she devotes attention to the specifically theatrical, however nondramatic, qualities of the theater experience when she mentions the child’s early impressions of the circus-like atmosphere with “a great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air” (LIA 256). Stein highlights those aspects of the theatrical event that are not dependent on the fictional story in the dramatic text. She maintains that the child hardly even recognizes the stage and the action on stage, except for a few disparate moments of special intensity: “and then there are moments, a very very few moments but still moments. One must be pretty far advanced in adolescence before one realizes a whole play” (LIA 256). The widespread reading of Gertrude Stein as a modernist purist mainly stems from her famous critique of the “syncopated time” of theater. According to Stein, theater arouses a distressing “nervousness” due to the fact that as a member of the audience your emotion is “always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening” (LIA 244). In other words, you need to follow the action on stage, but at the same time you are distracted by what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called das TheatReale—the famous doubleness that Artaud pointed out in the theater between fictional and physical reality, which makes you always ”stumble,” according to Stein: to such an extent that the time of one’s emotion in relation to the scene was always interrupted. The things over which one stumbled and there it was a matter both of seeing and of hearing were clothes, voices, what they the actors said, how they were dressed and how that related itself to their moving around. (LIA 258)

Obviously, it is the concrete material presence of the actors, actions, props and costumes, and so on, in short of the different means of expression in the theater

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that disturbs the seamless identification with the fictional action on stage and makes you disturbingly aware of your concrete presence in the theater. This critique of the doubleness of the theater experience has led to the misunderstanding that Stein is actually trying to clear her plays of any traces of theatricality. This reading, however, does not take into account that Stein opens her lecture “Plays” with the very clear statement that the theatrical syncopation should be regarded “a combination and not a contradiction.” Stein in no way tries to purify the theater text from any traces of theatricality. Quite the contrary, she integrates the qualities of performance into the text itself. For example by folding what Worthen calls the didascalia,20 into the play itself as an integral part of the composition. As Worthen rightly points out, this is one of the most innovative features of Stein’s plays. However, rather than undermining the stageability of the play, as Worthen argues, this technique aims at integrating text and performance into one composition. The play is both on the page and on the stage—and this doubleness between discursiveness and physical materialization on stage is precisely what interests Stein about the play. But Stein’s business, as a writer, is with the text of the play: “When I see a thing it is not a play for me, because the minute I see it it ceases to be a play for me, but when I write something that somebody else can see then it is a play for me” (EA 199). Here Stein clearly breaks with the author’s authority and the privilege of the text over performance in Aristotelian drama. But she does so without abandoning the text itself, by employing a performative mode of writing. Not in order to exclude theatricality, but to set the stage production free from the author’s authority.

Gertrude Stein and post-dramatic theater In the beginning of the 1980s, when Andrzej Wirth was applying for the professorship at Giessen, he wrote some short articles that are still among the most comprehensive scholarly explications of Stein’s playwriting aesthetics. At that time Wirth used the term “post-dramatic” to describe theater texts by Stein, Kandinsky, and Witkiewicz—texts that no longer complied with the classical dramatic format: “This means basically a post-dramatic position. Because of course, we can say only metaphorically that The Yellow Sound is a play. It’s actually post-dramatic. And in Witkiewicz and Stein then we have a very massive attempt to deconstruct drama.”21 Wirth diagnoses precisely what

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is at stake in the theater texts of those early avant-garde poets: a deconstruction of the dramatic structure itself, a post-dramatic position. By linking their work to the experiments of later performance theater, Wirth demonstrates the far-reaching effects of some of the most overlooked and misunderstood experiments of the early avant-garde. It is significant that Wirth used the term post-dramatic to refer to theater texts, since post-dramatic theater has often been associated with anti-textual theater. Wirth’s early use of the term suggests that modernist or avantgarde playwrights may very well be engaged in the same exploration of new theatrical forms beyond drama as the physical performance theater. It was not Wirth, however, but his colleague during the early years in Giessen, HansThies Lehmann, who developed the concept of post-dramatic theater into a consistent theory. In his book Postdramatic Theatre22 Lehmann connects different theatrical practices from the twentieth century, which altogether demonstrate a movement away from the dramatic paradigm toward a postdramatic theater, which according to Lehmann crystallizes in the second half of the century, most notably from the 1960s to 1970s onward. Like Wirth, Lehmann recognizes Gertrude Stein as a predecessor of the post-dramatic theater of the second half of the century: “For postdramatic theater Stein’s aesthetics is of great importance, although more subconsciously so outside America.”23 It is this “subconscious importance” that I wish to uncover, since Gertrude Stein was not only one of the earliest representatives of the deconstruction of dramatic conventions leading to contemporary postdramatic theater, but also one of the most consistent. For more than thirty years, she was engaged in a thorough examination and deconstruction of all the basic assumptions of conventional drama, questioning in her plays the relationship between typographical conventions of the drama text and scenic action, between seeing and hearing on stage and in the text, between actor and character, between stage and audience, between simultaneity and succession, between action and situation, between plot and scenery, and so on.

What we see and what we hear To a certain extent, Bay-Cheng is right when she says that Stein only gradually approached the genre of the play. But already the early plays show Stein

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approaching different dramatic conventions of the play. Here I would like to emphasize three main aspects of these early plays: her experiments with typographical layout, the question of the relationship between sight and sound, and the deconstruction of the psychological character as the center of the plot. A text that in an almost exemplary way shows how Stein connects these aspects is IIIIIIIIII from 1913. The text is composed of several short pieces with titles consisting of capital letters held together by hyphens: M–N H– AND ALF–. An occasion to sell all cables all towels and all that is what is met, is not met. A cold has that means saw dust and hot enough, hot enough heating. (GP 197)

The organizing principle behind the combinations of letters in the headings is difficult to decipher, and like the title IIIIIIIIII, these headings throw doubt on how to read and pronounce them. Are these words or mathematical formulas? Should the title be read as “ten” or “ten times I” or “oneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneone?” And then there is the sound-play on “eye.” This is an important point, since the conflict staged in this title is a conflict between what you see and what you hear. The “I”s of the title IIIIIIIIII turn into bars and literally block my natural reading process, put a barrier up between the formal and lexical decoding, between writing and pronunciation, sight and sound. The headings of the single pieces of the text actually refer to names of Stein’s acquaintances, in the present example to American painters Marsden Hartley and Alfy Maurer. But if the reader has no knowledge of these biographical references, the headings might as well be read as variables in a mathematical equation whose specific result or “meaning” would depend on the application to a specific case. As such, a tight web of interrelated questions concerning character, sight and sound, textuality and corporeality are addressed in this play. The problem of the relationship between seeing and hearing is one of the crucial questions that Stein poses years later, in the 1934 “Plays”: “Does the thing heard replace the thing seen does it help it or does it interfere with it. Does the thing seen replace the thing heard or does it help or does it interfere

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with it” (LIA 250–1). Half a century later, Robert Wilson separated sight from sound in his silent operas and explained how he worked in separate processes with the different layers of performance in his early productions: Wilson: I think it’s difficult to hear and see at the same time. Frequently when I go to the opera, it’s difficult to hear because I’m visually distracted. I became interested in opera because I was concerned about this problem: the possibility of hearing and seeing at the same time. Kostelanetz: How did you resolve it? Wilson: In that what we see doesn’t necessarily illustrate what we hear, and that these things are thought about separately, although sometimes what we see can illustrate what we hear. I didn’t start out to serve the music or to serve the text but to think about the visual aspect as something separate. It had its own construction, and they were thought about separately. In the case of working with Philip Glass on “Einstein on the Beach,” although I knew what Phil was doing with the structure of the music, I chose to do something different with the structure of the imagery or the action of the actors. Sometimes we worked together, but for the most part we worked independently, and they were put together like a sandwich.24

And even later, in 2008, Heiner Goebbels pointed to Stein in trying to understand what is at stake in the Swiss theater group Rimini Protokoll’s Call Cutta—a new kind of mobile phone theater in which the participator is sent out into the city of Berlin with a mobile phone and guided through the German capital by an Indian call center employee based in Kolkata. Analyzing the direct engagement with one’s immediate, personal surroundings, that the participant experiences during the city walk in Call Cutta, Goebbels quotes Stein’s remarks on the relation between sight and sound in the theater and suggests that: “a theatre that is essentially defined through listening, and can separate this hearing from seeing, allows significant free space for the perceptions of every individual.”25 In line with my own reading above, Goebbels understands Stein’s critique of the stage tempo as a call for a more open theater concept, not a more constricted one, and he notes the importance of loosening the tight, mimetic bounds between sight and sound—which is usually a hierarchical relationship in which visuality dominates, as is also implied by Wilson in his description of being visually distracted at the opera.

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These examples of artists, who in different historical periods moved away from a mimetic approach where sight and sound are used to illustrate and support each other and instead opened the theatrical space up to new approaches and investments of meaning, demonstrate how the mimetic imperative ties the different layers of the theatrical event together and has to be deconstructed at all levels. As Goebbels notes in his analysis of Call Cutta, the loosening of the mimetic tie between sight and sound also implies a new relationship between audience and actors: “the protagonist is the audience member himself.”26 As it turns out, Stein’s post-dramatic rethinking of theater from within the theater text itself was not just a literary experiment, but implied a systematic rethinking of all layers of the play, both as text and as performance. And of course Stein’s systematic reworking of the play could never have been and was not undertaken without a certain knowledge of and affinity to contemporaneous theater.

Anti-text and anti-body Even though we tend to see Stein as an isolated figure in avant-garde theater, Stein was in no way the only avant-garde playwright concerned with the links between sight and sound, text and body. In a striking analysis of Tristan Tzara’s Le Coeur à Gaz (The Gas-Heart) from 1922 to 1923, Sarah Bay-Cheng argues that Tzara’s play not only obstructs the smooth transformation from page to stage, but simultaneously disrupts the play as text and as embodied performance—it is anti-textual, anti-theatrical, and anti-corporeal at one and the same time. More specifically, Bay-Cheng focuses on a typographical illustration that is contained within the third act of Tzara’s play. The illustration bears the title “DANSE (du monsieur qui tombe de l’entonnoir du plafond sur la table).”27 The illustration shows the letters V, Y, y, and r engaged in a typographical “dance” on the page: The letters are distributed on the page in such a way that they may possibly, if one turns the text upside-down, seem to illustrate the dancing movements of the gentleman falling from the funnel. BayCheng argues that in this typographical performance “the letters themselves threaten to replace the bodies of the actors.”28 In fact, the whole play, in which the characters are constituted by the single, fractured parts of the face: Mouth,

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Eye, Neck, Nose, and so on, is a “relentless resistance to the mimetic presence of the human actor.”29 The specific interest of the typographical illustration of the gentleman’s dance is that it intimately links the critique of text-based theater with a critique of the “inherent realism of the human body.”30 Tzara’s illustration makes obvious that there are two sides to the mimetic imperative of classical drama, which demands that the words on the page be illustrated by actions on the stage: “the anti-body theater of Dada is an attack on the theater as the mimetic articulation of the human body and the translation of word into body.”31 Bay-Cheng herself concludes that “Tzara deftly conscripts the unsuspecting reader into simultaneous service as reader, performer, spectator, and Dada destroyer of text and flesh.”32 Despite Tzara and the Dadaists’ own proclamations, I don’t think we can focus purely on the destructive impetus. In my view, the insight to be gained from Bay-Cheng’s reading of Tzara’s simultaneously anti-textual and anticorporeal play is that the understanding of the actor’s body as a model of the organic, autonomous subject was intimately connected to the normative conception of the relation between text and performance as a mimetic and realist relationship. The deconstruction of the psychological character was a main focus in the process of moving theater beyond conventional drama, as Elinor Fuchs has demonstrated in The Death of Character.33 The insistence on the artist’s bodily presence in performance art was one way of puncturing the idea of character as the mimetic model of the autonomous subject. But, as Wirth has pointed out, Stein also played a crucial part in this development: “It was probably the most radical step, to make drama abstract through the dissolution of the figure.”34 The dissolution of character into discourse that Wirth diagnoses in Stein’s plays is closely related to her concept of the landscape play.

Landscapes with dispersed figures Gertrude Stein’s most widely recognized contribution to modern theater is her concept of landscape theater. She first uses the term to describe her plays from the early 1920s, which she began writing during a summer stay in the French countryside, and the concept is echoed in the title of her 1922 collection Geography and Plays. When Stein calls her plays landscapes,

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she moves away from plot-based, Aristotelian theater. Instead she creates kaleidoscopic texts that contain plenty of actions, movements, and relations between single words, objects, and figures, but never subordinate these under an overall, determining narrative logic. Rather, she creates a virtual play between possible meanings in a complex time-space that involves virtual as well as real aspects of both text and performance. Robert Wilson describes Four Saints in Three Acts as “a work that is of no time—not timeless, but full of time—of no conclusions, no beginning, no end. It is part of a continuous line.”35 One of the main strategies that Stein employs in order to create this sense of temporal fluctuation and avoid plot-based psychological drama is to multiply her characters. In Four Saints in Three Acts from 1927, each character seems to appear in numerous different incarnations, as in these lines of Saint Therese’s: Saint Therese. How many saints are there in it. Saint Therese. There are very many many saints in it. Saint Therese. There are as many saints as there are in it. Saint Therese. How many saints are there in it. Saint Therese. There are there are there are saints saints in it. (LOP 458)

Here Saint Therese is mentioned again for every new line of hers, implying either that she appears in as many versions at one and the same time, or that she changes from moment to moment and is somehow a different character for each line she speaks. Even more significant is the fact that Stein does not make clear exactly how many saints there are in the play. This will depend on the production and the director’s choices, not the author’s. Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights from 1938, one of Stein’s most narrative plays, has a female protagonist with a double double name: She is called “Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel.” This dispersion of the character inscribes the possibility in this play of letting the same character move in different directions at one and the same time, and as such gives a complexity to the plot. The characters can, so to speak, follow several lines of action at the same time, in the course of one and the same performance. Stein did not believe in the idea of a stable psychological subject or identity, and she consequently had to find new ways of representing changing, unstable figures on stage by

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literally dissolving them into the dialogue and disperse them across the stage, the scenic landscape. One of the first students in Giessen to be exposed to Andrzej Wirth’s experiments with theatrical form was German director and playwright René Pollesch. The main characteristic of Pollesch’s plays may indirectly be traced back to what Wirth defined as the most radical step in Stein’s deconstruction of the drama: the dissolution of the character into the discourse. Pollesch’s characters have no consistent, fictional identity. They are reduced to fields of fluid, merging and combating discourses, and this all-pervasive flow of discourse undermines every attempt at establishing a distinct identity. In Pollesch, the characters are no longer the agents of a dramatic dialogue, but rather, their momentary identities are themselves only effects of the flow of discourses that they are exposed to and in which they grapple for some firm ground under their feet. For example in the play Insourcing des Zuhause: Menschen in Scheiss-Hotels, where discourses from different spheres of work and privacy melt together. Feelings related to the private sphere are turned into service offers and profit-generating labor, in a complete confusion of what we tend to think of as different spheres. N I am in this hotel, and there are these fluent transitions between living and working! C And everybody works here, in this hotel. And they plug their notebooks in, in these ISDN-hotels! T Although the hotel offers home or produces it, everybody works here. N Insourcing of labor and home in hotels!36

Now the point is that what in Stein is a liberating force—the possibility of acting out different social identities and roles—in Pollesch becomes a crisis, because the demand for change has itself become a normative, capitalist imperative. The dramaturgical point, however, is that in order to articulate this changed perception of reality and identity the theater has had to deconstruct some of its most fundamental and normative dramatic conventions. It has had to become post-dramatic. Gertrude Stein’s deconstruction of the unity of dramatic character has been one of the major contributions to this change of the fundamental assumptions of theater.

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Dramatic theater is governed by a mimetic imperative: a realist aim to fit everything together in the smooth and well-done play—an artistic project culminating in naturalist theater, and since then brought to perfection in the Hollywood film. It means that everything is structured along those mimetic lines. Not only is every element conceived mimetically, but also every connection between different layers, so that the sound usually has to illustrate the sight, scenography is meant to function as background for the actors, the actors as bearers of the action, and so on. Accordingly, the deconstruction of this hierarchical and, in the phrasing of Heiner Goebbels, “totalitarian” aesthetics should be conducted on every level and affect the whole structure of the play in all its aspects as text, performance, and event. Stein’s concept of the play as landscape is basically an attempt to open the whole structure of theater toward a free engagement with equally positioned means of expression. This is the great challenge that Stein posed to the theater, and explains why her plays have seemed so immensely difficult to stage. They subvert all our basic assumptions of theater, playwriting, and performance.

Notes 1 Andrzej Wirth: “Lob der dritten Sache,” in Christel Lauterbach (Hrsg.) Spiegel der Forschung 20 (2003) Nr. 1/2, 118–25, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen. . Accessed February 2015. 2 Andrzej Wirth, “Gertrude Stein und ihre Kritik der dramatischen Vernunft,” in Montage, LiLi Zeitschrift für Litteraturwissenschaft und Linguistik, ed. Helmut Kreuzer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 74. Translation printed in this volume as: “Gertrude Stein and her Critique of Dramatic Reason.” 3 In the limited space of this article I will not open the huge discussion of the differentiation between concepts of theatricality and performativity, postmodernist, and post-dramatic theater. As I see it, Stein’s writings and theater concept demonstrate a performative approach to writing, art, and theater that reaches beyond a mimetic conception of art, and in this approach she employs strategies that anticipate postmodernist aesthetic concerns. In the theater this development implies a critique of conventional drama, in short a post-dramatic stance. 4 William B. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 71.

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5 Jane Palatini Bowers, “They Watch Me as They Watch This”: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991). 6 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), 7. In Stage Fright, Puchner explores a line of anti-theatrical modernist dramatists from Mallarmé through Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Brecht, and Beckett. In his book Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006) Puchner traces a parallel line of performativity and theatricality in the language of the avant-garde manifesto. 7 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992). 8 Theater of course challenges this neat categorization, because if theatricality is the name of the confusion or contamination of the art forms, as Michael Fried argued in his 1967 essay on “Art and Objecthood,” where should we place the movement of re-theatricalization that began in European theater at the end of the nineteenth century? As a modernist purist movement, exploring the essence of theater, or as an avant-garde challenging of the boundaries between the artforms, cf. Fried’s dictum that “what lies between the arts is theatre” (Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (London: Studio Vista, 1969 (orig. 1967)), 142). 9 Jacques Rancière in his work on The Politics of Aesthetics has in fact argued that it is precisely the tension between autonomy and heteronomy that secures the critical impact of the work of art (The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2006)). 10 In my article “A Combination and Not a Contradiction. Gertrude Stein’s Performative Aesthetics” I discuss how the notion of play in Stein’s writing is not limited to the genre of the play as such, but comes very close to contemporary theories of performativity as an interdisciplinary concept (in Performative Realism, ed. Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2005)). 11 Sarah Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada. Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (New York and London: Routledge 2004), 50. 12 Ibid. 13 See “Plays” (LIA 260), and the description of the Stravinsky performance in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (ABT 796–8). 14 Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada, 50. 15 Stein actually seems to have been very cautious about when to use the genre definition “play.” Ulla E. Dydo points out that in the manuscript of her 1913 portrait One Carl Van Vechten, Stein experiments with the subtitles “Almost a play” or “A kind of play.” The portrait is set at the second performance of Stravinsky’s scandal-causing ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, which Stein attended

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Gertrude Stein in Europe with Carl Van Vechten in 1913. It has many similar traits to Stein’s first real play, What Happened A Five Act Play that was written a few months earlier, but even though the portrait of Van Vechten had a theatrical subject and a style reminiscent of her first real play, Stein did not consider it an actual play (SR 273). Gerda Poschmann suggests the term theater text instead of the word “drama” to describe texts written for the stage that are no longer dramatic in any conventional sense (Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext. Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramaturgische Analyse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997)). In a letter to Mabel Dodge, from October 1913 Stein writes: “No decidedly not, I do not want the plays published. They are to be kept to be played.” Of course Stein eventually did print her plays, as it proved difficult to get them played (Patricia R. Everett, A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends: the Correspondence between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1996), 205). Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London and New York: Routledge 2006), 50. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Stage directions, captions, acts, and scenes, and other textual devices meant to support the scenic realization. Andrzej Wirth, “Stein and Witkiewicz: Critique of Dramatic Reason,” in Poland Between the Wars: 1918–1939, ed. Timothy Wiles (Bloomington: Indiana University Polish Studies Center, 1989), 295. German original 1999, English translation 2006. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 63. Richard Kostelanetz, “Writing and Performance. A Conversation between Linda Mussman, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and Richard Kostelanetz,” in American Writing Today (Washington, DC: US International Communication Agency, 1982), 507. Heiner Goebbels, “What We Don’t See Is What Attracts Us. Four Theses on Call Cutta,” in Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll, ed. Miriam Dreysse/Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag 2008), 122. Ibid., 121. DANCE (of the gentleman who falls from a funnel in the ceiling onto the table). Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Translation, Typography, and the Avant-Garde’s Impossible Text,” Theatre Journal 59.3 (October 2007): 480. Ibid. Ibid., 481. Ibid.

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32 Ibid., 483. 33 See Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996). 34 Andrzej Wirth, “Die Auflösung der dramatischen Figur oder ‘I am I because my little dog knows me.’ Von Gertrude Stein zu Richard Foreman und Robert Wilson,” in Theater Heute, Heft 10 Oktober 1982, 39. My translation. 35 Robert Wilson, “Director’s notes,” in Houston Grand Opera Stage Bill (Winter 1996): 2. 36 René Pollesch: Insourcing des Zuhause: Menschen in Scheiss-Hotels, in Wohnfront 2001–2002, ed. Bettina Masuch (Berlin: Alexander Verlag 2002). Translation from: Bettina Brandl-Risi, “The New Virtuosity: Outperforming and Imperfection on the German Stage,” in Theater magazine 37.1 (Durham, NC: Duke UP 2007), 18.

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A Trail of Roses: Stein’s Legacies in 1960s Art Tania Ørum

Gertrude Stein was everywhere in the 1960s. Several of her works, which she had difficulties getting published in her lifetime, were published by the Something Else Press, owned and directed by the American Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. This testifies to her influence on the Fluxus movement, which was itself an intercontinental phenomenon with tentacles spreading from the United States and Europe to Asia and Latin America. The international Fluxus network no doubt helped distribute Stein’s work and foster a renewed interest in her writing among its members and audience. Her impact, however, transcended the extended Fluxus circles. Artists had been reading Stein and passing her work on to other artists, long before the academic readers and critics learned to read her. So she was transmitted through many channels to experimental artists of the 1960s. And the 1960s avant-garde artists in their turn, whether writers, painters, sculptors, composers, performance artists, or filmmakers, were inspired by her work and recognized in her a kindred spirit and a forerunner. The performative, minimalist, and materialist turn in all the arts both in the United States and Europe in the 1960s was clearly anticipated by Gertrude Stein’s writing, and artists working in these areas sought her out as a source of inspiration and reference. Gertrude Stein’s writing reached Scandinavia in the 1960s through the Fluxus network, which had active members in Denmark from 1962, when the second European Fluxus concert was held in Copenhagen, organized by composers and visual artists. But even before that concrete poetry, which had one of its roots in Sweden in the early 1950s, had introduced Gertrude Stein in the Nordic countries. And the equally international network of concrete

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poets helped circulate and theorize Stein’s writing from the 1950s onward. This chapter will mainly trace the intermedial reception of Gertrude Stein’s work in Denmark as an example of her multiple legacies in the arts.

Writing When the Swedish writer and visual artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote his manifesto for concrete poetry, “Hipy papy bthuthdththuthda btthuthdy,” in 1953, his title paid tribute to Owl in Winnie the Pooh. The predecessors and fellow “language kneaders” listed at the end of the manifesto included: “the Greeks, Rabelais, Gertrude Stein, Schwitters, Artaud”1—a list that would no doubt have pleased Stein, who liked to shortlist herself with, for instance, Shakespeare, Matisse, and Picasso. Concrete poetry, Fahlström explains in his manifesto, is a question of kneading the linguistic material at the level of letters, sounds, and words as well as at the level of sentence structure, vocabulary, rhythm, and logic. This approach to poetry will allow, he says, “[d]iscriminated words” access to the poetic vocabulary, it will produce “unimagined possibilities” and unfamiliar relations, which will “undermine the reader’s certitude of the hallowed relationship between a word and its meaning” and liberate the poet. “Changing the word order is not enough; one must knead the entire clause structure. Because thought processes are dependent on language, every attack on prevailing linguistic forms ultimately enriches worn-out modes of thought,” Fahlström states. But although this produces literature that may “appear to have certain similarities” with surrealist poetry, Fahlström takes care to underline that the “concrete reality of ” his texts “is in no way opposed to the concrete reality of real life.”2 I am not sure which “Greeks” Fahlström is thinking of. But his programmatic statements could easily be applied to the writings of Rabelais, Stein, Schwitters, and Artaud, who are all part of the cultural heritage claimed by the postwar avant-garde. They have all expanded the vocabulary, structure, and rhythm of literature, and by working on all levels of the language material they have produced new meanings and new ways of thinking. All of them share Fahlström’s adherence to concrete reality and everyday life. And in their specific ways each of them heralds dimensions of the postwar avant-garde.

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Rabelais’ long lists and his carnivalesque way of turning social and perceptive hierarchies upside down echo in Fahlström’s motto “Manipulate the world—take care of the world” as well as in the concrete poetry and prose of the 1960s and the revolutionary youth culture of the late 1960s. Kurt Schwitters’ cross-over between sound, language, and sculpture and his use of everyday material was highly relevant to the cross-aesthetic activities of Fahlström himself and those of the avant-garde of the 1960s in general. Antonin Artaud heralded the performative turn of the postwar avant-garde, which was also a turn away from the psychology and symbolism of the 1940s and 1950s toward physicality and the surface. “Let’s say good-bye to all systematic or spontaneous depiction of psychological, contemporary cultural or universal problems,” Fahlström suggested in his manifesto.3 And Gertrude Stein practiced kneading “the entire clause structure” as well as the vocabulary, the linguistic material, and “the hallowed relationship between a word and its meaning” while staying very close to “the concrete reality of real life.” In her lectures she explicitly stated the realism of her experimental writing and, like Fahlström and the avant-garde of the 1960s, she was more interested in everyday life and observations than in the sur-realism or subconscious levels targeted by the Surrealists. The performative turn of Gertrude Stein’s writing—which performs the persons it portrays, for instance, by catching the rhythm of their thought and interaction with others—anticipated the speech acts theorized by J. L. Austin and practiced by the concrete poets. So it is no wonder that Gertrude Stein was one of the predecessors to whom Fahlström paid tribute in his manifesto. The poetry “written on the basis of language as concrete matter,” which Fahlström sought to implement in 1953 received little attention until the concrete poets of the mid-1960s rediscovered his manifesto and had it reprinted in 1965. And with the development of concrete poetry in the Scandinavian countries Gertrude Stein was also rediscovered. In his 1966 introduction to concrete poetry the Danish concrete poet and critic Hans-Jørgen Nielsen distinguished between, on the one hand, the open, expressive aesthetics of Swedish concrete poetry, inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète and John Cage’s chance music, and, on the other hand, the more constructivist tradition, established by the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer and the Brasilian Noigandres group. Whereas the Fahlström tradition was seen as a continuation of Futurism and Dadaism, the Gomringer tradition (to which

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Nielsen and most of the Danish concrete poets belonged) claimed Stéphane Mallarmé and especially Gertrude Stein as its predecessors. And Nielsen pointed out that poets and theorists belonging to this variety of constructivist concrete poetry, such as the German writers Max Bense and especially Helmut Heissenbüttel, were “deeply influenced by Stein’s experiments.”4 Indeed, when Helmut Heissenbüttel was awarded the prestigious Büchner prize, he began his speech with an unmistakable tribute to Stein: “Eine Rede is eine Rede. Eine Rede is eine Rede heißt eine Rede ist eine geredete Rede das heißt sie muß geredet das heißt gehalten werden . . . ” (“A speech is a speech, a speech is a speech means a speech is a spoken speech that means it must be spoken that means it must be given . . . ”).5 By the mid-1950s Gertrude Stein had begun to be published in German, and the number of translations multiplied in the early 1960s. In 1953 the Austrian concrete poets Gerhard Rühm and Hans Carl Artmann had come across Stein’s Last Operas and Plays in the Amerika Haus in Vienna. This discovery created considerable enthusiasm in the Wiener Gruppe and they planned a production of a piece by Stein for their avant-garde theater, the “Franciscan Catacombes Club,” but abandoned the project when the task of translating Stein proved impossible.6 Helmut Heissenbüttel discovered Stein’s work in 1954 and became one of her most influential critical proponents.7 Heissenbüttel’s essay, “Reduzierte Sprache” (“Reduced Language”), which was the first proper analysis of Stein’s work in German, appeared in 1955,8 and as a concrete poet, Heissenbüttel freely acknowledged his debt to Stein. Without the acquaintance with her work, his own poetic experiments with reduction, word mixture, and transformation of metaphors and verse into vocabulary and grammar would not have been possible, he declared.9 Heissenbüttel’s essay and the publication of the translation of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in Zürich in 1955 secured Gertrude Stein’s reputation in the Germanspeaking countries. In 1957 the influential philosopher, concrete poet, and editor of Augenblick, Max Bense, who had encouraged Heissenbüttel to write about Gertrude Stein, wrote a more theoretical essay about Stein pointing to the parallels between Alfred North Whitehead and Gertrude Stein and drawing on Heissenbüttel’s analysis of Stein’s use of language and the split between form and content in her writings. Bense was especially interested in the primacy of syntactic

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patterning over semantic content in Stein’s compositions and in her dynamic use of language, especially verb forms. He thought this mode of writing led to the appearance of a “reduced” expression without depth, which did not communicate but created an “analog” language of structures rather than substance, and textures rather than texts.10 Hans-Jørgen Nielsen was undoubtedly influenced by Heissenbüttel and Bense, as the many references to them in his early writings indicate. He even spent some time studying with Bense in Stuttgart and drew on Bense’s “information aesthetics,” which was an attempt to create an information theoretical foundation for aesthetics. This inspiration is evident in Nielsen’s reading of Gertrude Stein as well, although he was far more unambiguous in his admiration for Stein than Bense. Nielsen used Stein as a prominent example in his campaign to widen the conception of literary texts in the conservative Danish context. Her interest in comics is quoted in one of Nielsen’s essays, which argues that comics are as interesting to read as so-called high literature and that mass culture should not be held in contempt.11 In an essay titled “Language Has Many Sides” he insisted that poetry need not be like the introspective metaphorical modernism prevalent in postwar Scandinavia, but could include experiments with grammatical, phonetic, rhythmical, and visual dimensions. Stein’s writing is beyond traditional classifications of prose and poetry, Nielsen argued. Whereas Tender Buttons was read by Heissenbüttel as prose, and by the Danish poet Poul Borum as poetry,12 Nielsen felt that Tender Buttons as well as Stein’s other writing should rather be seen as simply text, working on other levels of language than most literature—and therefore often deemed illegible. Nielsen’s analytical example in this essay is the notorious sentence “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” also considered by Heissenbüttel. Apparently a stuttering, monotonous repetition, the sentence may be read in several ways, as Nielsen demonstrates. Like Bense, Nielsen reads the first half of the sentence as “object language,” a statement about reality, and the second half of the sentence as “metalanguage”: a comment on the linguistic construction of reality. But unlike Bense, Nielsen does not conclude that such linguistic patterning reduces communication and content. Instead he reads the sentence as a philosophical statement about language and reality, as well as about what is endlessly the same and endlessly different. And thus the text is seen to voice

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an entire ontology, which, in its utter simplicity, exemplifies the poetical power and philosophical depth of Stein’s writing.13 Nielsen introduced Stein not only to a general public in Denmark, but also to his circle of artists at the Experimental School of Art (also known as the Ex School), which is now recognized as the most prominent and influential postwar avant-garde group of artists in Denmark. The influence is visible as a trail of roses through Danish 1960s art. The trail leads from Nielsen’s reading of Stein’s rose to the Danish composer Henning Christiansen, who put the sentence to music in his orchestral work A Rose for Miss Stein (1965). The two artists worked intensely together on various joint projects from 1964 to 1967.

Music The score for Henning Christiansen’s minimalist composition was published at the private small press, panel 13-serien (the panel 13 series) whose postal address was Christiansen’s flat in Copenhagen. It consists of a 94-cm-long piece of paper, bearing the neatly handwritten words: “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” which can be folded into four sections of 23 ½ cm to fit into the thin yellow cover whose front has the title, the name of the composer, opus 31, and the information that this is the second of the joint works published in the panel 13 series. On the back of the cover is a short version of Nielsen’s reading of Stein’s sentence. The semantic complexity of this sentence cannot be conveyed in music, Nielsen added here, and it has not been the composer’s intention to do so. Christiansen’s musical interest has been “the tautological form, the regular repetition of elements, what gertrude stein called ‘familiarity’ and it has been natural to use the letters of the text as paradigm for the musical version as well. In that way the work is simultaneously a tribute to a grand lady—‘a rose for miss stein.’”14 The score is marked “summer 65,” duration: 14’, and written for 28 strings to play “double stops con sordino sul tasto” at specified intervals coinciding with the letters, each group on individual notes: the “5 vl.” should play an h, the “7 vl.” should play an a, the “6 via” a g, the “6 vic.” an f, and the “4 cb.” an F. Each group of instruments has been given a certain length of time to hold their note: “h’’’, a’’, g’, f, F.” And in order to help the musicians read the score it is indicated at the start that “2’’ = 30 M.M.”

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Figure 12.1  Henning Christiansen’s score for “a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Henning Christiansen’s later programmatic essay on auditive and visual form in the journal ta (1967) starts out with Stein’s roses: EN ROSE ER EN ROSE ER EN ROSE ER EN ROSE

In this essay or manifesto the composer initially professes his preference for simple structures, which, in contrast to the complex patterns of the atonal and electronic music of the period, are actually audible and can be recognized by the audience as rules and ideas. Christiansen says he dislikes expressive and emotional music and gladly refrains from entertainment and dramatic effect. “Music is for listening to. A sound is a sound. The distance between two sounds is the distance between two sounds. If one sticks to this, music is transported from the realm of dreams and metaphysics into reality. Music becomes an object which is its own reality,” Christiansen declares. And after this very Steinian credo he goes on to talk about A Rose for Miss Stein toward the end of the essay. The work has been orchestrated for 28 strings to “play it like an electric newspaper,” the composer explains. “Not much is left of the letters,” he admits, but the “cluster sound mirrors the tautological structural content” of the text. “Gertrude Stein’s sentence has been an opportunity to create a cluster sound which is not just founded on an amorphous sonorous mass (often used as a ponderous gesture by composers) but which is founded in an objectively existing form—the visual appearance of the letters,” that is, the individual instruments follow their line across the score and play only when and as long as the black color of the letter lasts, during the white spaces they remain silent. The attitude to music professed by the composer is equivalent, so he concludes, to the one found in concrete poetry, especially in the pure form of Eugen Gomringer and Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, for whom

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“a word is really a word.” In order to achieve an aesthetically interesting experience a reduction is necessary, Christiansen thinks, and in order to avoid mere emotionalism the experience “needs a concrete object, a real case to hold on to. Before Wittgenstein Gertrude Stein formulated it: A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”15 Henning Christiansen’s presentation echoes Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s essay and the discussions in the Ex School circle, where Wittgenstein was another influential figure, but it also demonstrates the close connections between Gertrude Stein and concrete poetry as perceived in the 1960s. However, even before Henning Christiansen orchestrated the rose, he seems to have been familiar with the work of Gertrude Stein, perhaps through his close relationship with Dick Higgins. In his period as a Fluxus artist from around 1962 until 1964 he participated in many happenings and Fluxus performances in Europe, but also created some musical compositions. Among these is the concert piece to Play to Day, dated December 1964, which borrows its title from Gertrude Stein’s text Play from 1911 and includes texts by Dick Higgins, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Henning Christiansen himself.16 This concert for piano, orchestra, and three voices is a characteristic piece of Fluxus instrumental theater. The score instructs the pianist to read texts aloud and perform various actions such as counting, showing the audience an alarm clock, asking them questions and throwing candy to those who answer, in between playing the brief musical pieces (of 5 to 140 seconds), which form the composition proper. It is a playful piece not only in terms of the humorous activities and the drawings inserted in the score, but also in terms of the music and the relations between the musical pieces and their titles. Each piece of music has a distinct character and a very Stein-like title, reminiscent of the texts in Tender Buttons: “How,” “Pewter,” “What,” “Letter,” “Coat,” “When,” “Five,” “But,” and so on. And just like in Stein’s portraits of objects, food, and rooms in Tender Buttons, one wonders what the relation is between the individual title and the piece it belongs to. It is hard to imagine music that could portray for instance “How.” “How” is performed by horns, strings, and drums, which make a circus-like sound and play a quick minimal tune for 25 seconds ending with a drum marking full stop. The “Pewter” that follows is a slow repetitive piano piece of 90 seconds with large intervals into which are inserted sequences of trumpet, violin, violoncello, and clarinet, which each

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hold a tone for 30 seconds. It is obvious that the music does not illustrate or represent the title, just as Gertrude Stein’s texts in Tender Buttons cannot be read as recognizable representations of the objects mentioned in the title. As she herself said about the portraits of things in Tender Buttons, the “words which were the words that made whatever I looked at look like itself were not the words that had in them any quality of description” (LIA 303). In Christiansen’s composition the titles do represent the music in so far as each time one of the repeated pieces, for instance “How,” “What,” or “But,” appears, it refers to the same music. In some cases the graphic image of the score serves as a representation of the title, as, for instance, when the notes of the piece called “Tractor” form images of tractor wheel imprints. In the radio version of to Play to Day all of these titles are read aloud as a long string of words joined by “and” at the start and the end of the composition. Taken together like this they sound rather like a text from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein or like concrete poetry. The original score has all the titles listed on one page near the end, and just above the list of titles is a short text by Christiansen about driving in his car and enjoying the changing impressions of the landscape. The association of textual and musical compositions with landscapes is quite close to Stein’s ideas of composition as landscape, although in Christiansen’s case they are not worked out in any detail, but on other occasions Henning Christiansen actually composes pages of landscapes consisting of notes, letters, and words, sometimes forming trees or clouds. Christiansen’s concert thus seems to refer to Gertrude Stein’s writing not only in its title but also in its anti-representational attitude and its attention to concrete words and sounds, the way it “kneads” the structures and meanings of language and music. Henning Christiansen went on to work closely with the German artist Joseph Beuys for many years, but he kept Gertrude Stein in mind. In the 1970s he made a television film featuring two of his constant sources of inspiration, Gertrude Stein and the French composer Erik Satie (played by a couple of elderly Danish actors), having an outing in a park dressed in historical costumes and exchanging remarks on art. In the TV program Christiansen explains their importance and plays his composition Satie auf hoher See (Satie in High Sea), opus 52, 1973. And as late as in 1994 he did a series of performances with his wife, the artist Ursula Reuter

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Christiansen, called variously Very Fine und Sein and Very fine and mine—kissingpiece, both variations on a line from Stein’s “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” (1922): Very fine is my valentine. Very fine and very mine. Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine. Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine. (PP 152)

As a “kissingpiece” for Henning Christiansen and his wife, it is fitting that the title should be borrowed from a valentine. And the rhyme on the English word “Fine” and the German word “Sein” (the noun “being” or the possessive pronoun “his”) is close to the way Stein herself kneaded French words into her texts and created puns on sound similarities between the two languages. One well-known example is the first line of her portrait of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which renders an American pronunciation of his name: “Give known or pin ware” (PP 26).17 A later section of Stein’s Valentine called “Kneeling” starts by counting from one to ten: One two three four five six seven eight nine and ten. The tenth is a little one kneeling and giving away a rooster with this feeling. I have mentioned one, four five seven eight and nine. Two is also giving away an animal. Three is changed as to disposition. Six is a question if we mean mother and daughter, black and black caught her, and she offers to be three she offers it to me. That is very right and should come out below and just so. (PP 154)

Numbers as linguistic material and counting as a way of ordering speech, writing, and thought is a frequent feature in Gertrude Stein’s texts. It could be interpreted, in line with Fahlström’s invitation to produce “unimagined possibilities” and unfamiliar relations, as a way of undermining “the reader’s certitude of the hallowed relationship between a word and its meaning.” But it could also be read differently if approached through Henning Christiansen’s use of numbers.

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Christiansen uses counting and numbers in several of his compositions and performances. One counting piece, tape-recorded and performed several times, consists of the composer going “I am number one. I am number two. I am number three . . . ” and so on, counting upward for hours and sometimes even days. In the radio performance of to Play to Day this counting piece can be heard as a more or less constant layer of sound, most often in the background, often drowned out by music and speech, but at intervals surfacing as something like the backbone of the composition. Counting is, of course, a minimal and simple way of ordering things. And as such it is a strategy often encountered in minimalist works of the 1960s. In Christiansen’s work it is a matter of cataloguing existence, taking stock of what is there, marking the passing of the present moment and the fluctuating and context-bound character of identity, and inserting one’s self into an ongoing series of predecessors. Gertrude Stein liked to insert her own name among the great names of literary history, and in the light of Christiansen’s use of numbers, Stein’s numbers can also be read as inventories of reality, existential states of mind, emotion, and identity.

Visual art The trail of roses was continued by other members of the Ex School. The painter and performance artist John Davidsen devoted an entire year to roses. He started in December 1968 by arranging a small exhibition in his own windowsill, which clearly signaled Stein. In her lecture on “Poetry and Grammar” (1935) Stein said that the natural way to count was not “that one and one make two but to go on counting by one and one . . . One and one and one and one and one. That is the natural way to go on counting” (LIA 324–5). And that was basically John Davidsen’s approach to roses. On the first day of Davidsen’s private exhibition he put one rose signed and marked with the date in a glass vase, on the second day he added one more rose marked with the date and so on for ten days. This small private exhibition was documented in a printed leaflet, counting in Gertrude Stein’s way “EN ROSE ’OG’” [A ROSE ’AND’] on the front cover, and continuing inside the leaflet “en rose og en rose og en rose . . . ” and so on, across the ten pages of photographs of the vase with more and more roses in it. On the back cover the roses are gathered in a bouquet surrounded with the cards dated from

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December 1 to 10, 1968 and all signed by the artist. Here again numbers refer to instances of time, as well as playing with the authenticity of art and the signature as a guarantee of the artist’s identity and of the art object. The theme of roses thus clearly had its origin in Gertrude Stein’s sentence “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” but the continuation of Davidsen’s year-long rose campaign expanded the meaning of the rose to include the whole spectrum of conventional associations. In the spring of 1969 he had an exhibition of roses, featuring ten different color prints of an identical single rose. In the summer of 1969 the central exhibition hall in Copenhagen, Charlottenborg, celebrated its 200th anniversary with an exhibition for which John Davidsen made the installation “På dagen” (“for this day,” a Danish expression of congratulation). On this occasion John Davidsen did a second version of the private windowsill exhibition: Every day he added a small podium and a vase of ten roses, each signed and labeled with the date, to the installation room. And since none of the previous ones were removed, the installation was gradually filled with roses in various stages of freshness or decay. After these exhibitions, posters of roses were made, small plastic roses scented with rose fragrance were distributed in the artists’ journal ta’BOX, and posters of the single rose branded with the banner “John Davidsen 1969” were placed all over town on rented space on advertising pillars during the summer months.18 These manifestations were followed by one more exhibition, which added to the posters a series of five serigraphs picturing John Davidsen holding a large bouquet of red roses. Davidsen called these serigraphs “the chocolate boxes,” because they were printed on gold, silver, and metallic paper like the kinds of paper used to wrap chocolates in a gift box, and because he saw the pictures as a gesture “offering himself as a gift to the people”—not unlike the way Gertrude Stein offered her texts as gifts to friends as “flowers of friendship.”19 The rose campaign culminated in a series of glasses filled with rose jelly made according to Davidsen’s recipe, which were sold as art objects but were also served for breakfast at the most fashionable hotel in Copenhagen for a month, while the “chocolate box” serigraphs were also at display there. Although the spectrum of associations related to the rose is much wider in Davidsen’s series of rose works than in Stein’s original sentence, and although he worked in an expanded field of art, which differs from Stein’s textual medium,

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their artistic attitudes bear comparison. John Davidsen was examining the relation between everyday activities and art, which is the main subject of many of Stein’s works. While she inscribed everyday objects, personal activities and food in, for instance, Tender Buttons, Davidsen made his home into an exhibition room and brought the conventional private gesture of offering roses for anniversaries or courtship into the art institution. In these and other performative works, Davidsen tried to turn himself and his own body into a public figure—much like Gertrude Stein turned her own home and life into gossip and myth in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Another member of the Ex School, the painter Stig Brøgger was one of the founders of the experimental cinema collective ABCinema in 1968. As a conceptual artist Brøgger worked across disciplines, genres, and art forms. His interest in Gertrude Stein was via concrete poetry and was of a more formal nature. The inspiration from Stein can be seen, for instance, in his films and film scripts. In several of his films, film scripts, and mixed media works Stig Brøgger makes use of a tripartite system. The film script called The Digital Mona Lisa at the Terminal Beach (1969) was never actually turned into a film, but balanced between art genres as its four pages were reprinted in a journal and were also blown up and hung for art exhibitions in the 1970s.20 Masquerading as a film script, The Digital Mona Lisa is divided into three columns. The middle column on each of the four pages consists of four black and white photographs of the famous Mount Rushmore bearing the carved heads of American presidents.21 Although the motif is the same, each photograph has a different sky of clouds above the presidents’ heads. The columns to the left and right of the Mount Rushmore column have changing photographs, diagrams, and texts dealing with subjects such as clouds, pain, Marx’s notion of exchange value, and quotations from the manual for Brøgger’s Fujica camera. The film script is a portrait of America, which has the founding fathers in the center surrounded by contemporary images such as advertisements, the television image of the first man on the moon, pictures of the shooting of Robert Kennedy, and the American artist Walter de Maria lying in the desert. The grid structure dividing the pages into three horizontal and four vertical squares and the use of repetition is characteristic of minimalist art. But the focus on the specifically American content as well as the repetition of Mount

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Figure  12.2  One page from Stig Brøgger’s The Digital Mona Lisa at the Terminal Beach.

Rushmore in slightly different versions also points in the direction of Gertrude Stein’s way of describing people and situations through small variations of words and sentences, which she claimed was not repetition but insistence. In its formal approach, Brøgger’s portrait of America is not so different from Stein’s in, for instance, the first page of “Saving the Sentence,” which is the first section of How to Write (1927–31), one of the books by Stein that Brøgger bought and read: When he will see When he will see When he will see the land of liberty

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The scene changes it is a stone high up against with a hill and there is and above where they will have time. Not higher up below is a ruin which is a castle and there will be a color above it. Painting now after its great moment must come back to be a minor art. (HTW 13)

Stein as well as Brøgger mix references to perception, reflection on art, and description of landscape with standard images or ideological clichés of America such as Mount Rushmore and the land of liberty. In Brøgger’s case the inspiration from Stein is less a matter of thematic content than of aesthetic principles. In this case there is no reference to Stein, but in other works the reference is explicit. The mixed media film Between Road and Grass makes use of a similar tripartite structure, but here the central column has the moving images of the film while the two flanking columns are static slides of a section of asphalt road (to the left) and grass (to the right). It can be described an experimental film in the Warhol tradition of split screens, as an electronic painting or as a Rauschenberg combine. This film also comes in a paper version, which has VEJ (road) printed eleven times in a column to the left and GRÆS (grass) eleven times in a column to the right. Between these borders of road and grass, there is a text that records changing qualities, moods, and locations.22 This text is a visual poem, printed in green letters on brownish-yellow paper suggesting the asphalt as well as the green grass. It was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s writing, and in accordance with Stein’s dislike of nouns it literally highlights the adjectives rather than the nouns, thus pointing to sensual and emotional states rather than to the objects that are also there: “an EMPTY glass/ a sharp RATTLING sound/ three WHITE steps/ a sudden and GRACEFUL movement,” the top four lines go. Rather than portraits of objects the text gives the reader glimpses of things affected by somebody’s actions: someone emptied the glass, produced the sound, perceived or climbed the steps, and made a sudden movement. There is no narrative in the text, the reader has to piece together his or her own version of what such glimpses could add up to—much like the reader has to create coherence in one of Gertrude Stein’s texts. Stig Brøgger not only tried his hand at writing in the vein of Gertrude Stein, he used her compositions as an inspiration in his work in other arts and media, not only in the 1960s but much later as well. His reflection on Stein’s methods of composition in relation to his own work as a visual artist finds a

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Figure 12.3  Stig Brøgger, Between Road and Grass (Mellem vej og græs).

visible expression in one of Brøgger’s much later paintings. He bought some of the new editions of Stein’s works published by the Something Else Press. And in direct response to reading Gertrude Stein’s How to Write, he produced the painting How to Paint (1993–4).23 The painting also has a tripartite structure. The center is a blank canvas. The left-hand third is a colorful abstract painting showing yellow, red, blue, and light brown fields of paint on a black and white background. And the right-hand third has a portrait of Gertrude Stein based on a black and white photograph. She sits at the bottom of the canvas, hands and face emerging out of her dress, which is almost indistinguishable from the white surface, which surrounds her and fills the top half of the canvas.

The flowers of reception The cross-aesthetic reception of Gertrude Stein in Denmark is fairly typical. Stein’s writing was hardly taken seriously by more than a few literary scholars until the 1980s when poststructuralist theory made her texts more accessible to academic readers. Artists from all the arts, however, had always been able

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to read her work. And with the performative turn in the arts in the 1960s, accompanied by concepts of the open work of art to be completed by the audience, materialist aesthetics and the turn “against interpretation,” the artists of the period were in a position to appreciate the extent to which Stein’s work had anticipated current artistic concerns.24 Academic readers had been trained to ask questions about narrative development, the psychology of characters, and the content of literary texts, which were not very helpful faced with Stein’s writing. Nonacademic readers who did not feel that they had to master or account for Stein’s texts could read them for pleasure. And artists, grappling with their own work, could recognize similar experiments in Stein’s work. For the postwar writers Gertrude Stein’s way of kneading letters, sounds, words, and language structures was an inspiration because they were themselves set on producing new linguistic surfaces, new kinds of realism and physical means of poetic performance for a new media age. Stein’s writing was more radical than most concrete poetry in its reliance on the reader’s willingness to perform and make sense of language kneaded into unfamiliar and shifting forms of meaning. A postwar composer would respond less to the linguistic intricacies, which fascinated the writers and philosophers, and more to the rhymes, rhythms, and structural principles of Stein’s texts. Trying to invent minimalist music in a period of highly complex musical modernism, a composer such as Henning Christiansen found congenial inspiration in Stein’s simplicity, antiexpressivism, and playful resoluteness to cut composition down to basics. Visual artists would recognize similar structural principles in Stein’s writing that they were trying to implement in their own works: minimalist sculpture tested the effects of repetition explored in Stein’s writing, performance artists noticed the performative speech acts in her texts as well as the examination of the relation between everyday life and art, and conceptual artists related to her mixture of perception, meta-reflection, and standard images. The minimalism of the period, which played down the craft aspects of the individual art form and stressed the conceptual aspect common to all the arts, made it easier to cross over from one art into another. This prompted composers, filmmakers, painters, and sculptors to try their hand at writing and to take literature as a model in their respective art forms, just as writers took inspiration from sculptural work or film. It is thus no coincidence that the 1950s and 1960s

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witnessed a surge of interest in Gertrude Stein’s work, in the Scandinavian countries and all over Europe.

Notes 1 Öyvind Fahlström, “Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben—Manifest för konkret poesi” (“Hipy papy bthuthdththuthda btthuthdy—Manifesto for Concrete Poetry”) in Öyvind Fahlström i etern—Mainpulera världen (Öyvind Fahlström on the Air—Manipulating the World), ed. Teddy Hultberg (Stockholm: Sveriges Radios Förlag/Fylkingen, 1999), 119, 109–20. 2 Ibid., 117, 119. 3 Ibid., 110. 4 Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, “Anonymitetens formverden” (“The formal world of anonymity”) in Vindrosen 3 (1966). Reprinted in Nielsen, Nielsen’ og den hvide verden (Copenhagen: Borgen 1968). 5 Helmut Heissenbüttel, “George Büchner Preis Rede 1969,” Text und Kritik, 25 (1970): 42. 6 Gerhard Rühm, “Vorwort,” Die Wiener Gruppe (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), 9–12. Quoted in Charlotte Melin, “Gertrude Stein and German Letters: Received, Recovered, Revised,” Comparative Literature Studies 22.4 (1985): 497–515, 500. 7 Helmut Heissenbüttel, “‘Meine’ oder ‘die’ fünfziger Jahre” in Vom ’Kahlschlag’ zu ’movens’, ed. Jörg Drews (München: Edition Text und Kritik, 1980), 57. Quoted in Melin, “Gertrude Stein and German Letters,” 500, 513. 8 Helmut Heissenbüttel, “Reduzierte Sprache. Über ein Stück von Gertrude Stein,” Augenblick, 1.4 (1955): 1–16. Quoted in Melin, “Gertrude Stein and German Letters,” 500, 513. 9 Helmut Heissenbüttel, “Jedermans vierte Rose. Paraphrasen zum 100. Geburtstag der Gertrude Stein,” Stuttgarter Zeitung February 2, 1974, 51. Quoted in Melin, “Gertrude Stein and German Letters,” 501, 513. 10 Max Bense, “Kosmologie und Literatur. Über Alfred N. Whitehead und Gertrude Stein,” Texte und Zeichen 3 (1957). I draw on Melin’s presentation (“Gertrude Stein and German Letters,” 503–4). 11 Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, “WOOOSH!! Superhelte og Kybernetiske antihelte. Tegneserie-renaissancen,” in Nielsen’ og den hvide verden, 74–8. Reprinted in Nielsen, Nye sprog, nye verdener : udvalgte artikler om kunst og kultur (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006). 12 The poet and critic Poul Borum introduced Gertrude Stein to the Danish public in a chapter also dealing with futurist and dadaist poets in his comprehensive Poetisk modernisme (Copenhagen: Stig Vendelkjærs Forlag, 1966), 77–89.

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13 Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, “Sproget har mange sider,” in ‘Nielsen’ og den hvide verden, (Copenhagen: Borgen 1968), 31–7. Reprinted in Nielsen, Nye sprog, nye verdener. 14 Henning Christiansen, EN ROSE TIL FRK. STEIN, opus 31 (Copenhagen: panel 13/2, 1965). The piece has never been performed. 15 Henning Christiansen, “A ROSE IS . . . ,” ta’ no. 2 (1967). The journal ta, which appeared from the start of 1967 to the end of 1968, was the programmatic organ of the group of artists connected with the Experimental School of Art. 16 Henning Christiansen, To Play To Day (1964). The printed score To Play ToDay—af mine memoirer [from my memoirs], opus 25, 46 minutes, appeared in 1974. The piece was first performed in February 1966 in the radio program “Vor tids musik” (“Contemporary Music”). 17 See Ulla E. Dydo’s introductory note to the poem in SR 278. 18 ta’BOX 1–4 was an artist-driven journal published in a plastic bag during the year 1969. Davidsen’s scented plastic rose was included in ta’BOX no. 1. No. 3 had a small cup of rose jelly made and signed by the artist, while two other issues of the journal held copies of the rose leaflet. The rose poster was included in a number of other art and literature journals in 1969. For more details see Tania Ørum, De eksperimenterende tressere (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009) and Lars Morell, John Davidsens plakater 1964–2003 (Aarhus: Dansk Plakatmuseum 2003). 19 “He gives himself as a gift to the people” is the title of an interview with Davidsen in the popular daily Ekstrabladet. 20 The Digital Mona Lisa at the Terminal Beach was originally a four-page leaflet included in ta’BOX 3 1969, later reprinted in other magazines. The blown-up photographs of the pages are now at the art museum Vestsjællands Museum. 21 The Mount Rushmore pictures were also realized as a series of paintings exhibited in 1969, and used for an artists’ book, now at the Henie Onstad Museum in Oslo, Norway. 22 The mixed media film Between Road and Grass was shown at the art exhibition Prospect 71 in Düsseldorf, Germany 1971. Mellem græs og vej is included in the joint publication MIDWAY produced by Stig Brøgger and Mogens Møller for the Festival 200 at Charlottenborg 1969, later reprinted by the publishing house Rhodos. 23 Stig Brøgger, How to Paint (1993–4), Oil and wax on canvas, 240 × 480 cm. Arken Museum (ARK43). 24 For the concept of the open work, see Umberto Eco’s The Open Work (Hutchinson: Radius, 1989), first published as Opera aperta in 1962. Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Against Interpretation” concludes with the statement, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), 14).

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Portraitist Portrayed: Four Contemporary French Perspectives on Stein Florine Leplâtre

Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (669) The opening quote is what Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, according to narrator Alice in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It suggests prediction regarding the fortune of Stein as the subject of portraits, above and beyond her life. I focus on the ambiguous appropriation of this major figure of American letters by four French writers and artists. Many French writers have written about Stein; I zoom in on those who gave her body flesh, built her character, and gave it a narrative and dramatic dimension. It is the personal engaging with the persona of Stein, zealously created by Stein herself, which we find in a sound poem by Bernard Heidsieck, a poetic essay by Christian Prigent, an experimental film by Arnaud des Pallières, and in both a novel and a play by Olivier Cadiot, that enables us to examine the ways in which the issues of (self-)representation and portraiture Stein tackled again and again throughout her oeuvre and life live on in contemporary literary and artistic creation. With The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as their vantage point, these authors, who are all self-avowedly working under Stein’s influence, present critical portraits rather than hagiographic tributes. The dialogue they set up, in other words, is one that takes up Stein’s invitation to “connect” as one that allows for difference.1 The portraits serve diverse dramatic purposes and engage in

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aesthetic dialogue on different levels. The artists do not only give shape to Stein by entering into dialogue with the characters she creates in The Autobiography and in Everybody’s Autobiography, they also bring to life her project by engaging in poetic debate. To this end, they employ different strategies. Christian Prigent’s text, “Petit portrait de Gertrude Stein en débile profonde” (“A small portrait of Gertrude Stein as a retarded person”), published in TXT review in 1979, starts with a description of a street scene; a mentally ill young woman obstinately kicks a policeman.2 This can be seen as an allegory for Stein’s language experiment, for her refusing to make proper use of traditional rhetorical devices and for her recalcitrant grammatical arrangements. In Respirations et brèves rencontres (1999) the sound poet Bernard Heidsieck relates dozens of “encounters” with twentieth-century writers, each functioning as a kind of portrait of the writer. Working with sound archives, he cut and mixed recordings of Stein’s breathing, and acts as if he is talking to her.3 Starting from a more conventional framework, a commission by a national TV channel for a collection of portraits, Is Dead (Portrait incomplet de Gertrude Stein) (1999) by Arnaud des Pallières assembles sound archives, readings of selected texts by two actors with archive materials and original footage.4 Here, we get to see Stein read from her tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetery (Stein’s voice is played by Michael Londsdale). The character of Stein in Olivier Cadiot’s Fairy queen (2002), a narrative adapted for the stage by Ludovic Lagarde, is more fictitious.5 In the plot, a fairy is invited to a lunch party at Stein’s. A young artist, the fairy is given the chance to show her work but the performance she gives for Stein’s guests is criticized by Stein. In what follows I trace the ways in which these portraits deal with Stein as a literary authority as well as with the ways in which Stein (re)created this very notion— the artists are not up for an easy dialogue, but it is one they cannot sidestep.

“We were a legend”: Reading Stein writing Stein All of the portraits can be considered responses to Stein’s autobiographies. The following passage from Stein’s memoir Wars I Have Seen serves as the ideal introduction to our portraitists since it shows Stein involved in legend-making: And there is nature and its evolution and then there is coming home before it is dark in the evening after playing and then there is the beginning of being a

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legend . . . It is easy to become a legend between babyhood and fourteen, and so ever afterwards books can be read, because books are all about anybody who has become a legend, and I can remember becoming a legend again and again between babyhood and fourteen, and seeing the others between babyhood and fourteen and they can become a legend . . . From babyhood until fourteen, to play in a garden in the evening when it is darkening is a legend. It feels like that, it is like that, any evening when it is darkening . . . When my brother and I walked and walked up into the mountains on the dusty roads, and we left and we came and everything and nothing came in between, we were a legend then, just then. When we went camping and dragged a little wagon and slept closely huddled together and any little boy or any little girl could have been what any little girl or any little boy was, we were a legend then, we were legendary then. (WIHS 19–20, 22, 24)

When Stein repeats and varies on the phrase “we were a legend,” with “legend” etymologically meaning “to be read,” she can be seen to stress her childhood experience as a special time, a time to remember, to write about. But she also plays with (literary) clichés about childhood. The quoted lines display a tension between the intuition of feeling special, and belonging to a collective—“all the little boys and little girls”—who are likely to experience the same kind of adventure. The passage crops up in Olivier Cadiot’s Fairy queen. This is how Cadiot rewrites it: A legend. When my sister and I walked across the fields with a little wagon in the evening, we were a legend, when we woke up in the morning, we were a legend, and same is when we chew wheat grains to invent the chewing-gum, we were a legend.6

In uttering the phrase “we were a legend,” the fairy turns into a contemporary alter ego of Stein. The little changes in the action, which is hardly material for legends, reinforce the universal potentiality of feeling legendary. In the voice of the fairy in Fairy queen, the cataphora of “we were legendary” suggests the young artist fairy wants to be considered a character to be written and read about. Yet Cadiot, by quoting and modifying sentences, is not merely echoing Stein. He is literally rewriting the legend. Similarly, when des Pallières quotes the lines from Wars I Have Seen at the very beginning of his film, he indicates that the film functions as a rereading of Stein’s legend-making.

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For the most part, the “legend of Gertrude Stein” is given shape in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and all of Stein’s portraitists in one way or another refer to this narrative. In doing so, they are in line with a fairly recent line of Stein research that focuses on Stein and celebrity.7 Prigent, for instance, after mentioning how difficult it is to read Stein’s writing, modifies: “Fortunately there is the character (the rue de Fleurus, Picasso, etc.) and mundane stardom.”8 According to Prigent, in other words, the legendary Stein facilitates the reading of the texts. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the public persona Stein creates in it—a character she felt highly ambivalent about throughout the 1930s—is where the artists find grip. What they focus on is the mundane living Stein sketches and her staging herself as an authority among modernist artists in Paris. At times The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas sounds like an exciting conversation, brimming with juicy anecdotes about “real people.” Alice talks for dozens of pages about the Saturdays when guests were invited to parties at their apartment on the Rue de Fleurus. The final chapter, “After the war,” begins: “We were, in these days as I look back at them, constantly seeing people” (ABT 850). A second shared concern is Stein’s relationship to Alice as both husband and wife, and Stein’s masculinity or “maleness.”9 In Cadiot’s Fairy queen, for example, stardom and the mundane are announced when the fairy is invited and sums up what she knows about her host: “famous writer, likes dogs and flowers, hosts people everyday.”10 Real people from Stein’s time appear: there are “Sarah, Allan and Leo,” her sister, nephew, and brother, the friends Claribel and Etta Cone, as well as Mildred Aldrich, who “loved” the performance.11 Heidsieck, too, sketches a party atmosphere to present his encounter with Stein. He neither describes nor names people, but mentions and mixes Stein’s breathing sound with the continuous buzz of numerous, intermingling voices. The poem starts with him taking leave: “I have to go I’m expected Must run There are so many people here! I don’t want to disturb you.”12 Both the fairy and the “I” of Bernard Heidsieck look and sound very nervous about being invited. In fact, they appear to be re-embodying Alice’s arrival at Stein’s apartment, as told in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “I had been invited to dine on Saturday evening which was the evening when everybody came, and indeed everybody did come” (ABT 663). In Cadiot’s narrative, the fairy’s description of her walk through to Stein’s “atelier” directly echoes the description of the place made by Alice.

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Apart from the busy social life of the Stein-Toklas household, the portraitists broach the gender roles in the relationship. Their approach, again in keeping with the Steinian format of dialogue that Chessman presents, tends to allow for more discord, humor, and irreverence than the many scholarly pieces devoted to Stein and gender.13 In the autobiographies Alice often appears as wife, most famously in the passage where she is asked to sit with geniuses’ wives: “Miss Stein told me to sit with Fernande. Fernande was always beautiful but heavy in hand. I sat, it was my first sitting with a wife of a genius” (ABT 671). Gertrude, on the other hand, is often described in masculine terms by narrator Alice: “Later I often teased her, calling her a general, a civil war general of either or both sides” (ABT 672). Cadiot and Heidsieck take up these features, giving Alice the role of wife when building her character. At the very end of his poem, Heidsieck finally takes leave of Alice: “SEE YOU, ALICE!”14 The capital letters suggest a raised voice. Heidsieck first addresses Gertrude and second Alice, who is supposed to be further inside the place; he takes leave of her as hostess. The fact that he mentions her name at the very end has a humorous effect: it breaks the aesthetic commentary, and recalls, very prosaically, that Gertrude does not exist without Alice, even though the guests pay little attention to her. As for Cadiot, he lets Gertrude introduce her wife: “this is Alice, you know her already, she is my steno-cook, she is already famous, A.B. Toklas Inc., the best brand of blender, which also functions as typewriter and coffee maker.”15 The humorous way in which Alice is introduced allows Gertrude to appear as an absurd cliché husband, who leaves domestic matters to “his” objectified wife. The “maleness” of Gertrude Stein, as she herself formulates it in a 1906 notebook, is further stressed in the works by des Pallières and Cadiot (in the stage version of his book), where male actors play Stein’s voice—Michael Londsdale for the former, Philippe Duquesne for the latter. If you listen to sound archives, you’ll notice that Stein’s voice was not especially low or masculine. The choice of giving her texts or lines to a male actor is significant of the ways in which these contemporary portraits construct gender. The authors and directors use masculine voices in different ways: des Pallières sets it in opposition to Alice’s feminine voice (played by Micheline Dax)—which may suggest the restoration of a two-gender paradigm, jeopardized by the same-sex duo in real life—whereas Cadiot and director Ludovic Lagarde use a male actor for Alice too, Laurent Poitrenaux, contrasting both Alice and Gertrude with

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the feminine voice of the fairy (Valérie Dashwood). Admittedly, Lagarde and Cadiot are used to working with these two male leads; still, this conspicuous stage choice highlights a deviation from gender norms.

A “freak of nature”? All the artists, each in their own way, not only stress Stein’s masculinity but also give her freakish or animal traits. In this, too, they are in line with scholarly debate on Stein.16 Interestingly, Stein’s “freakish” aspects enable them to set up a dialogue with Stein’s avant-garde poetic. Before deliberating on Stein’s language experiment, Prigent describes his mental picture of her “sticking out her tongue, heavy with the rotundity of a celluloid doll with bear skin and an unshaped hat.”17 Des Pallières associates some abstracts of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with a picture track of country life, featuring a farmer killing a hen and numerous cows: a cow calving, a herd walking slowly, some ruminating. If the cows remind us of Stein’s poem “A Wife Has A Cow,” this animal may also be interpreted as a metaphor for Stein’s approach to her work—Stein ruminating on language and “calving” her writings. The length of Cadiot’s text, moreover, multiplies the striking and iconoclastic images he uses to describe Stein first as fat and then as obsessed with food. When she appears, one third into the book, she is first introduced as “a very imposing woman.”18 Yet soon things get out of hand. Here, she performs a eulogy on the duck and goose rillette, there, she demands some more chops. Her imposing body becomes obese. After a while the text gets into demolition mode: “She suddenly looks like a hippopotamus dressed as a duchess, a conger eel in a Theater bell.”19 This passage points at a disjunction between the human and nonhuman spheres. Stein is not only too fat to be human, she is also supernaturally strong. In a later passage we read: “She is so sturdy that five persons would hardly be enough to control her, she is struggling, she hits a guy with a candlestick.”20 To see Stein in action, Cadiot seems to say, is to be prepared to be blown away by voluminosity, unwarranted combinations, and tremendous force. A variation on the freakiness is the mechanical metaphors used by B. Heidsieck: “I felt like I was in front of .  .  . a teletypewriter.” And later he compares his encounter with Stein to “a big dose of drop hammer.”21 Both these images convey machinic repetition, yet whereas the first is obviously linked

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to the activity of writing, the second conveys destruction. For Heidsieck, as well, Stein is too much. One can see two different kinds of dehumanization in these portraits: while Heidsieck conveys the idea of a machine chiefly as a metaphor of style, Prigent and Cadiot insist on the body, building their animal comparisons (bear, hippopotamus, conger eel) on Stein’s bulky appearance and female masculinity. Tellingly, A Freak of Nature is the title of an essay collection by Prigent on so-called difficult writers: Mallarmé, Artaud, Stein, and other contemporaries such as Cadiot and Prigent himself.22 He uses the metaphor of freakiness to represent illegibility from the perspective of a paradoxical eulogy: “illegibility” is for him the common trait of the authors he really appreciates. With regard to Stein the idea of “freak” may be interpreted in two nonexclusive ways: it may express a sexist view on an openly lesbian woman, who, as a successful writer and influential Maecenas, holds an authoritative position; it may also symbolize, more positively, irreducible originality in writing. In this sense, only conventional and communicational language use would be “human,” whereas every difference from language norms would be expressed by an extra-normous representation of the body. Dehumanization is then a way of building a base for aesthetic dialogue, a dialogue that cannot take place in normal cultural discourse.

Critical prosopopeia: Dialogues with a genius The dialogues the portraits set up with Stein are creative dialogues. They show us creative ways of dealing with Stein’s aesthetic legacy. Stein’s critique on representation, her refusal of classical lyricism in poetry, focus on common language, and the famous repetition that replaces narrative progression has had a great influence on French contemporary poets. A good starting point from which to consider this dialogue is Stein’s own conception of “genius,” since it allows for an ambiguous authority.23 Barbara Will has argued that “genius” is an equivocal concept for Stein. Stein both claims and queers it, twisting it between solitude and collectivity, solipsism and dialogism. It is a classical and romantic concept that she first appropriates in her notebooks, when she is writing The Making of Americans, and later more publicly in The Autobiography, in the famous paragraph about

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the wives of geniuses.24 In this paragraph, following Will, Stein is “glamorizing a coterie of high modernist geniuses with herself at their centre.”25 Stein uses the notion in an ironic way, however; Alice’s gossip about “geniuses”—not unique but plural—almost deflates its romantic authority. On the level of writing and reading, Stein oscillates between a focus on herself writing and on a potential reader. Her insistence on the process of writing, for instance in G.M.P., raises the question of literary hermeticism. Will formulates the problem in these words: In the “playful” process of “watching herself write” to which G.M.P. bears witness, Stein is clearly taking pleasure in the process of composition as it happens, in the immediacy of writing, in being an audience to herself. Yet where does this leave the reader, the “outside” audience? Perhaps more than with any other writer, Stein’s reader enters into this disruptive, unsettling modernist text with a sense of belatedness, of having arrived after the combustive experience of “writing being written” is over.26

The question of the possible solipsism of the “genius” is thus raised. It is changed in Everybody’s Autobiography where the self and writing about the self dissolve into the mass of “everybody.” This work combines both narration and self-reflexive narration, specifically in the chapter titled “What Was the Effect upon Me of the Autobiography.” Contrary to the first autobiography Stein refers to herself in the first person in Everybody’s Autobiography. But in the reflective moments, she often uses the impersonal pronouns “one,” and, more often, the personal pronoun “you” in its impersonal use.27 This use of “you” is of course grammatically common, but it depersonalizes the speech and opens it up to the reader’s involvement. Will describes the process in the following lines: “Stein again works to queer the figure of the ‘genius’ by constituting its voice through dialogue with an unnamed, general, and generic ‘you.’”28 The frequent use of pronouns or adverbs, which express totality, like “everybody,” “everything,” “always,” contributes to this dialogical gesture. I suggest that the dialectics of solitude and dialogism may be a way of understanding the dialogues with Stein that the artists under consideration engage in when they each give shape to “their Stein.” In des Pallières’ performance of Stein’s texts, he uses three voices: two actors, a female narrator for Alice, and a male voice for Stein, as well as Stein’s own voice, where a recording exists (“A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” The Making of Americans).29 Borrowing from

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Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, this gesture of letting Stein speak, is an “apophrades” or “return of the dead”; when a poet, having supposedly fully mastered his art, opens his text to one by his predecessor.30 Des Pallières’ engaging with Stein is very personal in that he translates her reflections on literature and representation into filmic language. In doing so, moreover, he opens up their conversation. The dissociation of sound track and picture track, that is, the pasting of footage featuring peasants on a reading of a text, increases the number of potential listeners—the spectators of the film, plus the mute characters inside the film. The three writers are more explicit in their critique on Stein’s poetry, yet they as well grant her the status of authority. Prigent’s essay is more deliberative and ambiguous in its meaning than dialogical in its enunciation. From beginning to end, he uses corporal metaphors to describe and analyze Stein’s writing. First, he draws a comparison between a traffic jam caused by a mentally deficient young woman kicking a policeman and Stein’s style, whose use of repetition and extremely simple syntax impede “the normal circulation of literary language.”31 He interprets the use of repetition as a verbalization of “morbid inertia.”32 Does he identify with this aesthetic project, or does he describe it to distance himself? In a single movement he points to what he thinks is enjoyable in her writing, and to what he considers the limits of her project. Commenting more specifically on Everybody’s Autobiography, he writes that “pleasure (hers, ours) comes from . . . the ability to dis-involve oneself more from what is at stake in the enunciation than the utterance appears involved (autobiographical).”33 Here Prigent seems willing to take this aspect of Stein’s work as a model. Nevertheless, he concludes his essay on a critical note: Afterward, one can think that Gertrude Stein produces a large amount of volume(s) to very little effect; that, as to the theater of grammar, Cummings is far stronger; . . . and that the project of neutralizing literary effect through laborious imitation of supposed ‘popular’ syntax only weakly punches the sound bag of popular speech, numerous and resonant. But for that, gotta be of strong glottis, which is not where Gertrude is strongest.34

The “glottis,” the larynx hole delimited by the vocal strings, seems here to symbolize orality via metonymy: true to form, Prigent uses the concrete image to represent something abstract. For Prigent, Stein is more successful in extinguishing rhetoric than listening to and transcribing the living voices

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of “everybody.” One could argue that this is not her project, but the alleged weakness of the glottis signifies a failing of (vivid) orality. If Prigent’s essay shows no more dialogism than the classical introduction of quotation in the flow of his own speech, Heidsieck’s and Cadiot’s works are written for performance; formally, they both use the first- and second-person pronouns, and they focus on slightly different aspects of the “author” they address. Even though Heidsieck is the only performer in his oral poem, this work could still be described as a dialogue in which the interlocutor does not utter a word but only breathes. The poem is wholly oriented toward interlocution, showing plenty of marks of enunciation. In a one-page script, the pronoun “I” (“je”) appears fourteen times, “me” (“m’, me”) six times, and the pronoun “you” (“vous,” both in subject and complement position), eight times; “Gertrude” is addressed four times, and Alice, once. One must also add some typical conversation markers, such as “excuse me,” “my apologies” (“mille pardons”), “yes,” “see you very soon” (“à très bientôt”). The interrogations and exclamations add to the impression that a real conversation is taking place. Last, the blanks on the page (between every phrase) and the quasi silence in the performance (filled in by the sound of breathing) allow some space and time for interlocution to work properly. We can read this performance as a modern version of the antic genre of prosopopeia, when a character speaks to the dead or when a dead person speaks. Here the poet Heidsieck is literally speaking to Stein. What kind of relationship does he build in this interaction, and what does he say about her as an artist? First he confirms the impression of authority she gives, when he repeats the term “authority” when commenting on a performance that Stein is supposed to have given before he takes leave: “The neuter words crackled like clockwork and with such steadiness! Such authority! Such authority!”35 He then discusses the merits and limits of her supposed performance. He first praises her, qualifying the performance as “very efficient” (très efficace). Second, he introduces an objection: But at the same time it seems to me that behind this hammering strength those hauler voltage and volte-face . . . that behind those words . . . endlessly switched around—to the point of making you dizzy!—I thought maybe like detecting a slight frailty in suspension . . . maybe a smidgeon of polite boredom . . . (Am I wrong, Gertrude ?) or maybe a weary indifférence.36

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To attenuate the criticism—a seeming boredom or indifference, not from the viewer, but from the author performer—he puts forward a more positive hypothesis: Unless it is a supreme luxury from you the ultimate flirtatiousness! As I suspect you have a tenacious desire to convince without lyricism neither sentimentality for sure .  .  . unless, yes behind this impersonal tone of well learnt recited text would hide a voracious rage for going further and further . . . further in this well this endless well . . . as if you were taken in a quasi jubilant way!—in the interminable gears of Newtonian spirals . . . Oh! I am no longer aware of what I am saying!37

With the technical metaphor of the “spiral,” Heidsieck suggests that Stein does not control, and indeed lets go the flow of her words, to the point of being controlled by them. Nevertheless, he raises the hypothesis of a tension between a neutral and impersonal tone, and an internal “rage,” a “voracious rage” is what he calls it, this time using a physiological metaphor (of hunger) to qualify the relationship to the words. One cannot think of repetition and the abundance of words as objects, which Heidsieck dislikes. He mostly uses a poetics of list and accumulation, playing on the alternation of repetition and variation.38 The object of discussion for Heidsieck is most probably one of tone, which he says is “impersonal,” and which he associates with “frailty”—the opposite of authority. His speech to Stein, both descriptive and reflexive, though rather metaphorical, raises interesting interpretative hypotheses. After this prosopopeia as an address to a dead person, the Cadiot text, with Lagarde’s adaptation on stage, could qualify as polyphonic prosopopeia: the referential characters Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas are raised, given a body and voice, and new fictional characters are built, speaking to ghosts—especially the principal character: the fairy. Fairy queen can be seen as a dialogue between the living and the dead, and the fairy can be interpreted as a figure of the author Cadiot in the novel/play. He confirmed this hypothesis when he said he wanted to experience his “girl ego,” describing “very autobiographical things.”39 In his words, Stein takes the place of the “mean” character in his text, and he compares her character to the ones of “master” or “father” in his other book Le Colonel des Zouaves. He claims that he is trying to give “a subtle face” to the evil (Gertrude Stein), and a “very silly voice” to the “so called pure one” (the

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fairy). Cadiot thus enters into dialogue with an impressive “master,” covering many topics, poetics among them. What is at stake in these conversations? In Fairy Queen Stein features as a figure of modernism in crisis. There are three stages in the aesthetic discussion: first, Stein gives a kind of lesson to the fairy, which is criticized by the fairy and Alice; second, the fairy thinks about the performance she is going to give; third, Gertrude comments on the performance, and her comments are again reflected by the fairy and criticized by Alice. The first concept discussed is the “slalom around void.” Lesson one. Repeat everything, repeat everything, dauntless and irreproachable, at top speed, go ahead honey, telegraphic, go . . . Hop, giant slalom around anything, drive the point home, take the gates, yes-yes.40

The lesson is a variation on ideas of rotation, speed and repetition, concepts that are very important to Cadiot. Although she is not contradicted, Gertrude speaks as if answering an objection, and becomes more precise: You haven’t got a clue .  .  . you are an idiot, it is not like this, it is not a metaphysical void for countryside poets. It is an urban issue.41 Act so that, she said, act so that, behave so nothing is any longer important in the center, nothing useful in the center, the fat lady has sung, and she stands, hands lifted toward the sky.42

The notion of vacuum or void is dangerous, because it could lead to metaphysical poetry, which celebrates the void. It is important not to write like metaphysical poets. Cadiot here sticks to Stein’s ideas, and lets her explain his conception of the material, literal void. But the fairy seems skeptical and bravely starts a theoretical declamation: Sorry to start with theory, but your thing about void, this practical idea is only usable once, uncopyable, limited lifespan, a technical void, not the sidereal vacuum at 2000 billion km far upward, with a long white-bearded guy and a group of overworked angels blowing trumpets. Danger. If one lets this void exist, one might well turn around for a lifetime, with eyes bulging, I get up and imitate a procession, whips, thorns, cries, if one takes it as a model, I sit down, then there is danger again, everything becomes

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gradually regressive, baby talk, beginning of fake naivety, serial machining of idiocies, small artistic business, etc., I insist. It is really annoying. If I want to be a great performer, I need to know the history of art and make my position clear, yes I have a small problem, I continue, excuse me, I repeat louder, is she deaf? I sit down, as if deploying wings over each side of the armchair, yes, this trick of void is really annoying, it could have dreadful consequences on future generations, couldn’t it?43

This page is very explicit about theoretical problems: from the idea that Stein would adopt a poetic of (semantic) void (she actually claims to write plays about nothing), the fairy points out the limits of such a precept (“fake naivety”). The discourse of the fairy does not fight against the artistic posture of “idiocy” but warns against any systematic device. The fairy also explicitly raises the important issue of influence or literary inheritance. What is criticized, ultimately, is not Stein’s poetic but the way one receives it and copies and reproduces it without taking distance from it. Alice’s final long declamation again takes up the issue of inheritance, as she criticizes the relationship between Gertrude and young poets, and more specifically the relationship between Gertrude and the fairy. There are only descendants now, it is no longer, how shall I say, linked, there is no more wrenching from nothing, the roots are bare, old wounds? covered, stumps, like the trees pruned in city gardener’s style.44

This elusive part seems to point out the lack of autonomy of Stein’s “heirs,” who would only take the inheritance. One cannot apparently get rid of Stein’s legacy easily: “This Miss Gertrude Stein who you resemble more than you think with your modernist airs.”45 The influence seems here anxiogenic, something difficult to deal with. It is interesting to note that the issue is raised chiefly in Alice’s monologue, which was written for the play, after the narrative. It is almost as if it was to explain the presence of Gertrude Stein in Fairy queen: she is present in whatever you do, and she stays an icon of modernity, with whom you can only compromise. Finally, this narrative is a way for Cadiot to identify and take a distance from different options: the Steinian model of a text developing around a semantic void, the aesthetic of the cut-up. Fairy queen would thus seem to inaugurate

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a new poetic, one which encompasses more action and characters, more stories; poems reduced to short parts, inserted into a narrative. In an interview with critic Xavier Person, Cadiot said: “Theater played the part of critical accelerator, a revelator of the frailty of poetry—of its perishable aspect when it is inexpressible, which does not mean facile. Poetry can be disgusting when it is not exactly in the right place.”46 He does not completely reject or abandon poetry, but inserts and promotes short pieces of poetry in the middle of his narrative work. The critic must do more than merely criticize. Making fun of the character of Stein is also a way of more freely appropriating characteristics of her writing, as she becomes an authority for her successors, but in the sense of an inspiring author, not one likely to judge or disqualify Cadiot’s own production. The question would thus be, for Cadiot, how to distance himself from Stein’s influence, and reaffirm the power of the “wrenching” which Alice thinks the fairy lacks? The key issue, for Olivier Cadiot as for the other portraitists, is how to “wrench” themselves free from (a part of) their poetical tradition without eliminating or annihilating it. The portraits of Gertrude Stein, in film, essay, poem, and fiction that I have focused on engage with Stein in a very personal way in order to broach questions concerning modernist aesthetics and tradition. The artists I have considered insist on different aspects, yet all approach the icon they are dealing with in a more or less iconoclastic way. The authority Gertrude Stein, in both an aesthetic and psychological sense, invites critical dialogue. The portraits show that Stein is, literally, an artist who must be addressed. Hence, Stein’s famous complaint that “it always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work,” sounds ironic (EA 50). Portraying Gertrude Stein, French writers Heidsieck, Prigent, des Pallières, and Cadiot show, means working through/wrenching free from her poetic.

Notes 1 See Harriet Scott Chessman’s reading of Stein’s 1917 piece “The King or Something. (The Public Is Invited to Dance)” in which Stein asks “Come connect us” (GP 131) (The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989), 2). On Stein and dialogue see also: Zofia Lesinska, “Gertrude Stein’s War Autobiographies:

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5 6

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Reception, History, and Dialogue,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 9.4 (1999): 313–42 and, on gossip, see Chad Bennett, “‘Ladies’ Voices Give Pleasure’: Gossip, Drama, and Gertrude Stein,” Modern Drama 53.3 (2010): 311–31. TXT was an experimental review, and counted 31 issues from 1969 to 1993. All the theoretical texts are available online, , thanks to François Lacire. Accessed February 2015. Born in 1928, Bernard Heidsieck is a pioneer in sound poetry. He created a quantity of “poems partitions,” and some of his performances are available on Ubuweb: . Accessed February 2015. Arnaud Des Pallières, Is Dead (Portrait incomplet de Gertrude Stein), France 3 production, série “Un siècle d’écrivains” (Paris: Films d’Ici, 1999). Available online on Ubuweb http://www.ubu.com/film/pallieres_stein.html. Olivier Cadiot, Fairy ueen (Paris: P.O.L., 2002). Ibid., 71. All the translations from the French are by me and Marc Jones.The original reads: “Légendaire. / Quand ma sœur et moi nous traversions les champs en carriole le soir, nous étions légendaires, quand on se levait le matin, nous étions légendaires, même chose quand nous mangions du blé pour inventer le chewinggum, nous étions légendaires.” For recent work on Stein and celebrity culture, see: Kirk Curnutt, “Inside and Outside: Gertrude Stein on Identity, Celebrity, and Authenticity,” Journal of Modern Literature, 23.2 (1999): 291–308; Timothy Galow, “Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography and the Art of Contradictions,” Journal of Modern Literature, 32.1 (2008): 111–28; Alissa G. Karl, Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (New York: Routledge, 2009); Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2009); Deborah M. Mix, “Gertrude Stein’s Currency,” Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture, ed. Aaron Jaffe, Jonathan Goldman, and Nancy Armstrong (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 93– 104; “Celebrity Stein,” in Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, ed. Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer (Berkeley: U of California P, with the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution), 2011), 208–73; Sharon J. Kirsch, “Gertrude Stein Delivers,” Rhetoric Review 31.3 (2012): 254–70. Christian Prigent, “Petit portrait de gertrude stein en débile profonde,” TXT, #11 (1979): 45. The original reads: “Heureusement, il y a le personnage (la rue de Fleurus, Picasso, etc.) et le vedettariat mondain.” Barbara Will quotes from a 1907 notebook Stein kept during the writing of The Making of Americans: “Picasso and Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi perhaps” (Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 58).

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10 Cadiot, Fairy Queen, 7. The original reads: “écrivain célèbre, adore les chiens et les fleurs, reçoit tous les jours.” 11 Ibid., 51. 12 Bernard Heidsieck, “Gertrude Stein,” in Respirations et brèves rencontres (Paris: Al Dante, 1999), 17. The original reads: “je dois partir on m’attend je file à l’anglaise Quel monde ! Ne vous dérangez pas!” 13 For gender perspectives on Stein’s autobiographies, see, for example: Catharine R. Stimpson, “Gertrice/Altrude: Stein, Toklas, and the Paradox of the Happy Marriage,” in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984), 122–39; Leigh Gilmore, “A Signature of Lesbian Autobiography: ‘Gertrice/Altrude,’” in Autobiography and Questions of Gender, ed. Shirley Neuman (London: Cass, 1992), 56–75; Catharine R. Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992), 152–66; Margot Norris, “The ‘Wife’ and the ‘Genius’: Domesticating Modern Art in Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” in Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach, ed. Lisa Rado and William E. Cain (New York: Garland, 1997), 79–99. A particularly interesting essay is Lynn C. Miller’s “Gertrude Stein Never Enough,” in Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, and M. Heather Carver (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003), 47–65, in which she details her experience of her Chautauqua performance of Gertrude Stein (a performance in which the actor is both a scholar and a performer, “‘impersonating’ a historical figure for contemporary audiences” (47)). 14 Heidsieck, “Gertrude Stein,” 18. The original reads : “AU REVOIR, ALICE !” 15 Cadiot, Fairy Queen, 42. The original reads: “elle c’est Alice, vous connaissez déjà, ma sténo-cuisinière, elle est déjà célèbre, A.B. Toklas Inc., la meilleure marque de robot-marie qui fait aussi machine à écrire, et le café.” 16 See most notably Catharine R. Stimpson’s essay “Gertrude Stein: Humanism and Its Freaks,” boundary 2, 12.3/13.1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring–Autumn, 1984): 301–19. 17 Prigent, “petit portrait de gertrude stein en débile profonde,” 44. The original reads: “tirant une langue lourde de sa rotondité de poupée de celluloïd à peau d’ours et galure informe.” 18 Cadiot, Fairy Queen, 32. The original reads: “une femme très imposante.” 19 Ibid., 42. The original reads: “elle ressemble brusquement à un hippopotame habillé en duchesse, un congre dans une corbeille d’opéra.” 20 Ibid., 63. The original reads: “Il faudrait au moins cinq personnes pour la maîtriser tellement elle est costaude, elle se débat, elle donne un coup de chandelier à un type.”

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21 Heidsieck, “Gertrude Stein,” 17. The original reads: “J’avais le sentiment d’être en face . . . d’un téléscripteur” and “c’était du marteau-pilon à haute dose!” 22 Christian Prigent, Une erreur de la nature (Paris: P.O.L., 1996). 23 On Stein and authority, see, for example, Anna Linzie, “‘Between Two Covers with Somebody Else’: Authority, Authorship, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” in Authority Matters: Rethinking the Theory and Practice of Authorship, ed. Stephen Donovan, Danuta Fjellestad, and Rolf Lundén (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 141–62. 24 “Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses” (ABT 671). 25 Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius,” 137. 26 Ibid., 71. 27 For example, “Before anything you write had commercial value you could not change anything that you had written but once it had commercial value well then changing was not so important” (EA 39). 28 Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius,” 137. 29 In Gertrude Stein Reads from Her Works, Caedmon Records, 1956. 30 See section six in Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). 31 Prigent, “Petit portrait de gertrude stein en débile profonde,” 44. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. The original reads: “le plaisir (le sien, le nôtre), vient de . . . cette capacité à se désimpliquer d’autant plus de ce que joue l’énonciation que l’énoncé semble plus impliqué (autobiographique).” 34 Ibid., 45. The original reads: “Et puis on peut penser que Gertrude Stein fait beaucoup de volume(s) pour peu de choses ; que, quant au théâtre de la grammaire, Cummings c’est beaucoup plus fort ; . . . et que le projet de neutraliser l’effet littéraire par l’imitation besogneuse d’une syntaxe présumée « populaire » ne boxe que peu le sac de sons du parlaire populé, nombreux et ouïssant. Mais, pour ça, faut être fort de la glotte, et ce n’est pas de là que Gertrude est musclée.” 35 Heidsieck, Respirations et brèves rencontres, 17. The original reads: “Les mots neutres crépitaient comme une mécanique de précision et avec quelle sûreté ! Quelle autorité ! Quelle autorité !” 36 Ibid., 17. The original reads: “Mais en même temps il me semble que derrière cette force de martèlement ces vire-voltages et volte-faces . . . que derrière ces mots . . .

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38 39

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Gertrude Stein in Europe inlassablement permutés—à vous en donner le tournis !—il m’a semblé déceler une légère fragilité en suspension . . . peut-être un soupçon d’ennui poli . . . (Ai-je tort, Gertrude ?) ou d’indifférence lasse . . .” Ibid., 18. The original reads: “À moins que ce ne soit de votre part un luxe suprême une ultime coquetterie ! Car enfin, je vous soupçonne d’une envie tenace de convaincre certes sans lyrisme ni sentimentalité . . . à moins, oui que derrière ce ton impersonnel de récitation bien apprise ne se terre une rage vorace d’aller toujours plus loin . . . plus avant dans ce puits . . . ce puits sans fond . . . comme si vous vous trouviez prise—de façon quasi jubilatoire !—dans un engrenage interminable de spirales Newtoniennes . . . Oh ! Mais je ne sais plus ce que je dis !” See Vadus, book with CD published at Editions Al Dante, recording available on Ubuweb Accessed February 2015. Interview conducted by me with the author on July 2006: “Nous étions légendaires: un entretien avec Olivier Cadiot,” [avant-poste], #6, January 2008, 244. Cadiot, Fairy Queen, 32–3. The orginial reads : “Première leçon. / Répétez tout, répétez tout, sans peur et sans reproche, à toute pompe, allez-y ma cocotte, télégraphique, c’est parti. / . . . hop, faites le slalom géant autour de n’importe quoi, enfoncez le clou, prenez des portes, yes-yes.” Ibid., 36. The original reads: “Vous n’avez rien compris . . . vous êtes idiote, ce n’est pas ça, ce n’est pas un vide métaphysique pour poète de campagne. C’est un problème de ville.” Ibid., 37. The original reads: “Act so that, dit-elle, agissez comme si, conduisez-vous de telle manière qu’il n’y ait plus rien d’important au centre, rien d’utile au centre, la messe est dite, elle se lève bras dressés vers le ciel.” Ibid., 35. The original reads: “Désolée de me lancer dans la théorie, mais votre truc de vide c’est une idée pratique juste faite pour être pensée une seule fois, incopiable, durée de vie limitée, un vide technique, pas le vide sidéral à 2000 milliards de km de haut, avec un type à grande barbe blanche et groupe d’anges surmenés à trompettes. / Danger. / Si on fait exister ce vide, on risque de tourner autour toute sa vie, les yeux exorbités, je me lève et imite une procession, fouets, épines, cris, si on en fait un modèle, je me rassois, alors là danger aussi, tout devient progressivement régressif, parler bébé, début de la fausse naïveté, usinage en série d’idioties, PME artistique, etc., j’insiste. / C’est très embêtant. / Si je veux devenir une grande performeuse j’ai intérêt à connaître l’histoire de l’art et à prendre des positions claires, oui j’ai un petit problème, je reprends, excusez-moi, je lui dis plus fort, elle est sourde ? je m’installe, faisant comme si je déployais des ailes de chaque côté du fauteuil, oui, le coup du vide c’est ennuyeux quand même, ça peut avoir des conséquences redoutables sur les générations qui suivront, non ?”

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44 Olivier Cadiot, “Alice,” in LEXI/textes 8 Inédits et commentaires (Paris: L’Arche. P.), 266. The original reads : “il n’y a plus que des descendants, ce n’est plus, comment dirais-je, relié, il n’y a plus d’arrachement avec rien, les racines sont à nues, blessures anciennes ? recouvertes, moignon, comme les arbres taillés style jardinier de la Ville de Paris.” 45 Ibid. The original reads: “cette miss Gertrude, à qui vous ressemblez plus que vous ne croyez sous vos airs modernistes.” 46 Xavier Person, “Un terrain de foot” (interview with Olivier Cadiot), Le Matricule des anges # 41 (2002) : 22. The original reads: “Le théâtre a joué un rôle d’accélérateur critique, un révélateur de la fragilité de la poésie. De son côté périssable quand elle n’est pas dicible, ce qui ne veut pas dire facile. La poésie peut être écœurante quand elle n’est pas exactement bien placée.”

14

Gertrude Stein Grammaticus Jacques Roubaud, translation by Jean-Jacques Poucel

Montréal, 25/08/08

preamble 1 In 1966, I had completed a book of poems whose title is the mathematical symbol for belonging to in set theory: ∈. That book kept me busy the years required for me to detoxify from the “stupefying image” (Breton) and to remove myself from various trends teeming on the corpse of surrealism (Lilies that fester smell much worse than death). 2 On one of my first trips to the USA, I made a stupefying discovery: in the midst of the twentieth century, within the language of this vast country, American-English, there was a poetry that wasn’t a mere continuation of Whitman, of Pound, of the Spoon River Anthology, of Carl Sandburg or Hart Crane, nearly all the authors of whom I was aware at the time. Howl, Zukofsky, other Objectivists, and many others, landed somewhat randomly on my table, where “with wild surmise” I contemplated the new continent offered up for exploration. 3 Two or three years later, without paying it much attention, I must admit, I would happen upon the name of Gertrude Stein. 4 In 1970, called upon to lecture for one semester as a visiting professor on the Troubadours at Johns Hopkins University, I was given an office in the basement of Milton Eisenhower Library where I enjoyed undisputed access to the books bequeathed by the great medievalist Leo Spitzer who,

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in the thirties, had found refuge there. More than sixty years earlier, Stein had studied medicine in the same university. I hadn’t a clue. 5 I’m no longer sure which allusion by which poet—undoubtedly David Antin—in which journal, led me to open The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Reading it enchanted me. 6 So I decided to begin reading Stein, impelled by one of her remarks: “yes Braque and Joyce,” she says, “they are incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand.” Braque aside—he interests me no more than Picasso—the judgment thrilled me. 7 In those years, Tel Quel, the French pseudo-avant-garde, swore only by Joyce, crowing especially over Finnegans Wake. I found it difficult to share their enthusiasm. I had already spent several years studying and working on mathematical theories of syntax in natural languages, particularly Chomsky’s version, and the pretense that Joyce had created a new, sublime language made me quietly giggle. 8 The conception of language realized in Finnegans Wake is purely lexical. That book is one fat puncake. What one finds “below the surface” is the good old English sentence in its most classical, most grammar school form, flavored with rhetoric. 9 Stein is the only one, among the modernist monsters, to have acted in and on all of language’s elements, and foremost upon syntax. 10 Once I read Stanzas in Meditation, which I take to be a masterpiece, I set out to acquire and read as much of Stein’s work as possible, taking cues from Richard Bridgman’s chronological enumeration Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970). 11 What might be called Stein’s General Program of Composition starts to take shape in the process of writing The Making of Americans. 12 In this program, Stein fashions a new, personal form for each possible genre—the novel, poetry, theater, etc.—annexing each of them to her own body of work. 13 After twenty years of strenuous and uninterrupted work in this direction (I’m simplifying), she began reflecting on what she had done and was continuing to do. She pursued this contemplation for about eight years, from 1926–1932. Several of her conclusions, the simplest ones, appeared in 1934 in Lectures in America, after her first trip back to the USA, a trip triggered by the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

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14 I made every effort, in the 1970s, to understand Stein’s works in thinking-writing on syntax, which she calls “grammar.” It is in this spirit that I studied most of the texts that Bridgman lists from those years. 15 Primary List, in chronological order, more or less 1926 i br 339 – Composition as Explanation ii br 342 – An Acquaintance with Description 1927 iii br 345 – Patriarchal Poetry iv br 346 – Regular Regularly in Narrative iva br 362 – Lucy Church Amiably 1928 v br 364 – Finally George A Vocabulary Of Thinking vi br 368 – Arthur a Grammar vii br 376 – Sentences 1929 viii br 384 – More Grammar Genia Berman ix br 385 – Saving the Sentence 1930 x br 390 – Sentences and Paragraphs xi br 399 – More Grammar For A Sentence xii br 400 – A Grammarian xiii br 418 – Narrative 1931 xiv br 429 – Forensics xv br 434 – Winning His Way. A Narrative Poem of Poetry 1932 xvi br 447 – Short Sentences xvii br 451 – Stanzas In Meditation 1934 xviii br 469 – Lectures In America: Poetry and Grammar

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16 GERTRUDE STEIN GRAMMATICUS (I) : THE STEIN-SENTENCE (or, s-sentence) (1981) : résumé @ 1 Axiom 1: Prose is made up of sentences @ 2 Axiom 2: Sentences are the atoms of expression of a logical language : prose. @ 3 Very well: what are sentences? @ 4 (Letter to Sherwood Anderson 1929) “I am writing fairly steadily on the sentence. I am making a desperate effort to find out what is and what isn’t a sentence, having been brought up in a good old public school grammar and sentences are a fascinating subject to me. I struggled all last year with grammar, vocabulary is easier, and now I think before more grammar I must find out what is the essence of a sentence. Sometimes I almost know but not yet quite. @ 5 What is the essence of a sentence? what is the essence of a sentence? what is the essence of a sentence? @ 6 Excursion on repetition: The third Rose @ 6 1 Repetition and insistence: there needs to be a distinction. Should you ask someone who doesn’t know, or barely knows Stein’s work, they’ll generally respond by saying: A rose is a rose is a rose. @ 6 2 Skipping the third rose is typical. @ 6 3 Recalling Lewis Carroll (The Hunting of the Snark): “I’ve said it thrice. What I tell you three times is true,” and further: “and what I do not say three times is to be questioned.” @ 7 What makes up a sentence? @ 8 This we know, for the ‘Bard’ has spoken: “words, words, words” @ 8 1 Constance Bennett said to Misha Auer what Shakespeare said and he, Misha, answered “oh money, money, money” @ 8 1 1 Who is your favorite impressionist? Oh Monet, Monet, Monet @ 9 Axiom 3: A sentence is made of words between two full stops @ 10 between two ‘periods.’ Sentences are periodic. @ 11 Nothing but words inside a sentence. @ 11 1 Axiom 3 1 Nothing but words and the typographical spaces between the words. Nothing else. No punctuation @ 11 2 Axiom 3 2 A sentence begins with a capital and ends with a period.

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@ 11 2 1 Perhaps one day capitals will be deemed useless “Slowly and inevitably just as with horses capitals will disappear” @ 12 Sentences that are the atoms of prose are made of words. In elementary grammar you study word parts of speech. Which ones play a role in the sentence? @ 13 All of them? No. The sentence according to Stein, the Stein-sentence, or S-sentence is no school sentence. @ 14 Theorem Nouns, common nouns, are of no importance to the sentence. @ 15 First reason. @ 15 1 A sentence need not have a noun. A noun must much sooner not be named. @ 16 “Saving the sentence” implies understanding why nouns are of no importance to the sentence @ 17 The reason is clear: “Nouns are Names.” “October is a name. A Noun is the name of anything.” “A noun is the name of everything.” Common nouns are proper nouns. @ 17 1 What is a noun a noun is a name (. . .) @ 18 And “names,” proper nouns, are what make poetry. @ 19 And yet Axiom 4 Prose is made with sentences. @ 20 Corollary 1: Poetry is not prose. @ 21 Corollary 2: It follows that “names,” thus “nouns” do not count in sentences, prose being made up of sentences. @ 22 Nouns should not interfere with sentences. @ 23 There are sentences without nouns. @ 24 Let’s return to Theorem 1 Nouns, common nouns, are of no importance to the sentence. Second reason. @ 25 “What is a noun. A noun is made by stretches. From then to then is a noun.” Stretching; period. @ 26 “Nouns” being “names” are spaces, plains, fields, folds in time; they lead from one “then” to another. @ 27 Corollary 3: “Nouns” stop sentences. It’s their crime. @ 28 Possibly to exist in the sentence the noun must repent, be inoffensive, be invisible @ 28 1 like children; worse, nouns should neither be seen nor heard @ 28 2 “A noun should never be introduced in a sentence” @ 29 Let’s quickly review the other parts of speech; they’re addressed in Lecture in America

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@ 30 Adjectives: “After all adjectives affect nouns and as nouns are not really interesting, the thing that affects a not too interesting thing is of necessity not interesting” @ 31 Ok, so what is interesting? @ 32 Verbs and adverbs: “verbs can change to look like themselves or to look like something else; they, are, so to speak, on the move, and adverbs move with them” @ 32 1 Remark: nouns are not verbs and, being names, proper names of things, do not change. They are rigid designators (Kripke) @ 33 Furthermore, verbs make mistakes: “it is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make” @ 34 Axiom 5: s-sentences move. The Stein Sentence is moving. @ 35 Movement implies errors; a sentence is in motion; errors are what give sentences life. This is one condition of the putting into motion of the logical atoms of prose that sentences are. It’s the Steinian “clinamen.” @ 36 The true heroes of the Steinian sentence are “little words,” also prone to err @ 37 Prepositions, for example “can live a long life being really nothing and absolutely nothing but mistaken” @ 38 prepositions conjunctions, relative pronouns, etc. articles @ 38 1 “if a is an article an is a temporal wedding” @ 38 2 very important: “yes is an article.” @ 39 In fact any word can be called an article. @ 40 Theorem 2 The s-sentence is made of articles and of verbs. @ 41 Scholium: The s-sentence moves and advances and the force that puts it into motion is error. Sentences advance by making mistakes. @ 42 But what of poetry, seeing that it is not prose? @ 43 “Poetry is concerned with using with loving with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun” @ 44 “Poetry is doing nothing but using loving refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing the noun” @ 44 Keyword: “betraying.” @ 45 Axiom 6 The s-sentence advances by mistake, poetry does so by betrayal @ 46 Theorem 3: Poetry is discontinuous (see Winning His Way). @ 46 1 why? because nouns are names and no two names are continuing, overlapping or concealing each other. @ 47 Axiom 7: Sentences are continuous

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@ 47 1 they don’t stop prior to being finished: “It is very difficult to think twice. This is very well done because it does not stop.” @ 47 2 “A sentence is extraordinarily deprived of intervals one at a time.” @ 48 Proposition: an s-sentence is not constituted of concatenated nows @ 48 1 see Aristotle on time @ 49 Axiom 8: an s-sentence is a moment not a sequence of moments. @ 50 Axiom 9: an s-sentence is made up of time @ 51 counter-axiom: Poetry is ‘now.’ @ 52 What is ‘now’ in an s-sentence? that which will have been. “A sentence is an interval in which there is a finally forward and back” @ 52 1 “a sentence is an interval during which if there is a difficulty they will do away with it” @ 52 2 “a sentence is an allowance of a confusion” (an authorization) @ 53 Trivial remark: The fundamental, the “bottom nature” of the sentence being such, it is not a plurality of words. “What is the difference between a sentence and words. A sentence has been ample.” @ 54 Let’s once again return to Theorem 1 Common nouns are of no importance to the sentence. Third reason. @ 55 Axiom 10 The sentence is made for two @ 55 1 Two: Gertrude and Alice. Alice and Gertrude. AliceGertrude&Gertrude-Alice. Pink Melon Joy. @ 55 2 “Near near near nearly pink near nearly pink nearly near near nearly pink. Wet inside and pink outside. Pink outside and wet inside and pink outside latterly nearly near near pink near nearly nearly three three pink two gentle one strong there pink as medium as medium as medium sized as sized. One as one not mistaken but interrupted. One regularly better adapted if readily readily to-day. This is this readily. Thursday.” @ 55 3 But beware of the biographical fallacy: these are S-Gertrude and S-Alice. Written persona @ 55 4 Which is why we also read Two: You and me. You and you. Whatever. As You Like It. @ 55 5 Not to mention the Geraldy aspect: You and me. The cutesy lesbian aspect. example: Patriarchal Poetry. A SONNET To the wife of my bosom

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All happiness from everything And her husband. . . .. . .. . .. . ...

How wonderfully cutesy @ 56 This particular form of the number two has its own special logic; I call it ‘biipsism.’ 56 1 each ‘one’ of these ‘two’ is the other of each ‘one’ @ 57 ‘Two’ is an island @ 58 In a Stein-sentence there are two voices. @ 59 one voice is explicit. one voice is implicit. @ 60 The second voice can be quoted. @ 60 1 “In looking up from her embroidery she looks at me” @ 61 The second voice can disapprove. approve. correct. suggest. @ 61 1 Both voices are subsumed in ‘they’ @ 61 2 he and she, he-she, she-he @ 62 dialogue. questions. explanations. Confirmations. approbations. @ 63 consequence of axiom 10.: the sentence must not be disturbed: “a sentence is a mention of their seeing silk in paper. Anyone can see that a noun means disturbance. A noun should not be in an undisturbed sentence. There can not be a noun in a sentence without there having been a disturbance in the meantime.” @ 64 “A noun provokes questions” @ 65 “Remember a sentence should not have a name. A name is familiar. A sentence should not be familiar.” @ 66 “If there is name in a sentence a name which is familiar makes a data and therefore there is no equilibrium” @ 67 Disturbance of balance. unsettling. @ 68 An s-sentence has two voices: oral, aural. @ 69 The second voice accompanies, reacts, replies. @ 70 Underneath a Stein-sentence is a Toklas-sentence, a t-sentence; and a Versailles high school. Here’s what’s important. The two voices can but artificially be separated. Words cannot be attributed to one or the other voice without the risk of error. @ 71 The second voice is the savior of the sentence. It saves the sentence by stitching. A stitch in time saves the sentence, saves nine sentences. @ 72 Axiom 11: a sentence should never think

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@ 73 Axiom 12: a sentence is its own twin. The remembering of a sentence said. The sentence said has said all that was necessary for a sentence to say. 17 GERTRUDE STEIN GRAMMATICUS (II): THE STEIN-PARAGRAPH

@ 1 The charm of sentences is that they are numerous. They form a plurality. Through repetition with insistence. @ 1 1 sentences are made wonderfully one at a time

@ 2 Sentences, S-sentences are composed one by one. @ 2 1 Numbers, too, are composed one at a time @ 2 1 1 or so it is in Peano arithmetic at least, according to ‘the successor function.” This way of seeing corresponds to the childhood experience of numbers such as it is preserved in Stein’s memory. @ 2 2 The fabrication of numbers one by one allies the fabrication of sentences to arithmetic. @ 2 3 But sentences are not numbers @ 2 4 an axiom is required. Axiom 13: a sentence is not natural. @ 2 5 However, Natural sentences do exist in arithmetic. @ 2 6 Another worry: could arithmetic be made of nouns? 2 6 1 Forget forget forget the difference between arithmetic and a noun. A noun is the name of anything. Arithmetic is added it has no need of a noun. Then there is a difference between arithmetic and a noun.

@ 2 7 An example puts the problem to rest @ 3 From this diversion into numbers, let’s retain that sentences are repeatable, repeatable in a particular way.

3 1 what is a sentence. a sentence is a duplicate. an exact duplicate is depreciated. why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. because it is a witness. no witnesses are without value. 3 2 here is yet another distinction, distinct from that between repetition and instance 3 2 1 Think well of this. you cannot repeat a duplicate you can duplicate. you can duplicate a duplicate. now think of the difference of repeat and duplicate. 3 3 Discovering this property is a source of satisfaction 3 3 1 I am a grammarian. i think of the differences there are. the difference is that they do duplicate. the whole thing arouses no contention. 3 3 3 1 (that’s how it is, like it or not) 3 4 oh grammar is so fine. think of duplicate as mine.

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3 4 1 this last sentence anchors the reasoning in the world of two. @ 4 Is it possible to stop there? Sentences, the composition of sentences one by one, repetition, insistence, duplication. Stated otherwise, the sentence being the 1 of Steinian arithmetic, can one make prose using only 1, with one and one and one solely? The answer is no, or more exactly, became no after the experience of The Making of Americans, for which the theoretical summation follows: this book explores and tries out everything that can be done with sentences by shattering all the formal duality of prose. @ 5 A second formal unit is required, one of a higher order, the way ten is to the unit, even if at first glance 10 is nothing more than “1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1.” @ 6 Discovery made, I believe, at the end of Sentences and Paragraphs (1930) @ 6 1 taking into account the experience of contemporary novelistic prose in its elaboration of the s-sentence: Lucy Church amiably.

@ 7 Axiom 14: a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is. @ 8 The modalities of this distinction must be set

@ 9 “Paragraphs are emotional not because they express an emotion but because they register or limit an emotion” @ 10 which is to say that sentences are not paragraphs @ 11 they are self-contained, evident: sentences are indubitable @ 12 2 they are repeatable, like a scientific experiment @ 12 2 1 (see the vacuum pump) – @ 12 3 they do not end anywhere: a sentence cannot exist if it does not come back no not if it does not come back. a paragraph finishes. @ 12 4 They can serve as metrical-rhythmic templates: she liked then to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune. @ 13 The realm of the sentence and that of the paragraph need to be carefully separated: think carefully how a sentence is not a paragraph should not be. what is a sentence . . . a sentence is not a paragraph and should not be. @ 14 there are language objects that are neither sentence nor paragraph: shell fish are what they eat. this is neither a paragraph nor a sentence. @ 15 a sentence can exist without being put into a paragraph @ 16 a paragraph is made up of sentences. But how? how can a paragraph be made of sentences.

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@ 17 Axiom 15 a paragraph is made of sentences that are reliable. @ 18 Axiom 16 a sentence is the hope of a paragraph. @ 19 a paragraph is more important than a sentence. it is a superior level of unity. @ 20 Axiom 17: a paragraph can do what a sentence can do. @ 21 Axiom 18 a paragraph is not a division it does not separate. @ 21 1 a paragraph is not pressed for time. ever. @ 22 What is a paragraph: a unit of evidence. a paragraph is. because it says it is. @ 23 this is a paragraph because it says so. do you see. it says so. if do you see and it says so. yes we do see and it says so. a paragraph says so. a sentence if it is round would it says so. would a sentence say so. if it said so would it have it as if it had it as said so no. a sentence has not said so. a paragraph has said so. @ 23 a paragraph is a liberty and a liberty is in between. @ 24 What then is prose? Prose is made of paragraphs which are made of sentences. @ 25 Prose serves for example in the making of novels @ 26 the example of Lucy Church amiably –

Amiably: with kindness A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature which Looks Like an Engraving Advertisement Lucy Church amiably. There is a church and it is in Lucey and it has a steeple and the steeple is a pagoda and there is not reason for it and it looks like something else. Besides this there is amiably and this comes from the paragraph. And with a nod she turned her head toward the falling water. Amiably. Amiably is the adverb that turns it into a paragraph and lends it ‘emotion’; emotion of all books. p. 69 Very pale blue in the distance very pale blue in the distance very pale blue in the distance and she says she agrees to it to that. There is a very great happiness in not doing it twice. Twice is once.

@ 27 What is the emotion circumscribed by paragraphs of prose? @ 28 L’amour. Love. @ 29 Love, the engine of sentences, of prose. As in the Comédia.

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@ 30 Such as stein-prose. S-prose is the language of the stein island, the stein-toklas island, the model in the logical sense, the possible language world of biipsism. @ 31 @ 12 On stein-island two voices are heard making sentences, playing sentences. They build a world of and in language. @ 34 This is a language-game. Wittgenstein-stein. The moves in the language game are the sentences. Paragraphs are games @ 35 sentences, that is s-sentences look alike. They show family-resemblance. @ 36 sentences are the bricks of the house that Stein and Toklas built. Bricks the house of prose is made of. @ 37 Prose is a form of life. Life on their island.

18 GERTRUDE STEIN GRAMMATICUS (III) FROM “EXPLANATION” TO “MEDITATION” (brief sketch) a: how do you recognize the s-sentence? the s-paragraph? nearly impossible. S-sentences and s-paragraphs form a finite corpus: what has been written. I think Stein is coherent and that one can get an idea of the “style” of the sentence and the paragraph by way of examples and what I’ve called her axioms. b one task that I did not undertake and that would have been extremely time-consuming is to chronologically retrace the model throughout the years beginning with Composition as Explanation through Stanzas in Meditation. c At the end of 1931 Stein comes more or less to the end of her contemplation and devotes herself to an entirely passionate endeavor: the making of narrative poetry. In this pursuit she employs what characterizes for her, on the one hand, narration, the s-sentence, and, on the other hand, poetry, verse; and, the result is the extraordinary Winning His Way, A Narrative Poem Of Poetry. i – lines cut by periods. lines cut into numerous segments. each segment potentially a line beginning with a capital and ending with a sentence. ii – number of segments: from 1 to 13. each measure present? iii – n  umber of syllables in a segment: from 1 to (?) ; number of syllables of a line: from 1 (?) to (?) iv – category of words present: all, excepting adjectives ? v – notice for ABT?

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vi – ending with Stanzas In Meditation from the great theoretical period inaugurated in 1926 with Composition As Explanation and An Acquaintance With Description vii poem foretelling the glory of Stein

Examples: i – But why will they be away when they are at an advantage. To stay, and be welcome. (segment of 15 syll. a comma in the second segment of the line.

ii – He knew That. Roses. Are. Red. And. Roses. Are. White. And Roses. Are Rose. Colored. (measure 11 ; line of 19 syllables)

iii – Or her way. (line of one segment)

iv – It is in this way.. . . (measure 13)

v – They will call louder.. . . (measure 10)

vi – Be careful of borrowing.. . . mes.12

vii – Secondly no success.. . . m.16

d in 1932, having completed the theoretical work to their satisfaction, Stein writes her masterpiece of pure poetry, Stanzas in Meditation.

Coda. How to Read? Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz

Jacques Roubaud’s text is a love story, of sorts. It shows how a casual encounter can lead to passionate engagement, how someone else’s struggle to try and understand the world may fall in line with one’s own, and how this may luxuriously and amiably overcomplicate things. Provoked by Stein’s cocky cue that Braque and Joyce are “incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand” (ABT 869), Roubaud set about studying her work in the early 1970s. That in itself was almost rebellious. Joyce was considered the king of vanguard linguistic experiment by the influential French Tel Quel magazine (1960–82). Yet where Joyce’s writing soars with lexical dexterity, packing layers of history into structures not used to that weight, Stein strips. She dares language to confront the abyss of its logic. And on Roubaud that had the effect of someone opening a window in a room where too much talk had made the air go stale. As William Carlos Williams had already noted, Stein unburdens language from all the “pap” that generations of writers had been depositing in it.1 Roubaud, whose own work explores the use of systems for writing, from the formal constraints of old literary genres such as minstrel poetry over mathematics and computer science, follows Stein in her search for how grammar or syntax operate and what they mean. This is not a sterile exercise. The patterns and rhythms operative in language infect life, and vice versa. For every s-sentence, Roubaud notes, there is also a t-sentence. Stein and Toklas made a life together, made love and language together. Yet as soon as love enters the picture so does the threat of betrayal. “Betraying,” for Roubaud, is the keyword in Stein’s definition of poetry in “Poetry and Grammar”: “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns” (LIA 327). For Michel Foucault, life itself amounted to error.2 That is also what Stein found out through her

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meditations on language: language will always spill and leak. No sentence means exactly what it says, no love is absolute. For Stein, error, Roubaud recognizes, is what triggers motion: “errors are what give sentences life. This is one condition of the putting into motion of the logical atoms of prose that sentences are. It’s the Steinian ‘clinamen.’” Of all the texts collected here Roubaud’s is the one that is most in tune with the vitalism of Stein’s project. Such a vitalism is not about safeguarding the mysterious sanctity of life from “non-natural” interferences or of returning life to its original contours. Quite to the contrary, it celebrates the tendency of systems to run wild, of the organic and the non-organic to combine and to multiply. With respect to language, then, such a vitalism does not elevate literature into a zone where a pure poetic speaking may resonate. Literature, rather, becomes a place for testing the many ways in which language differentiates. Roubaud’s own project is so important with respect to Stein’s legacy because it shows that the many tricks one can use to get language to disperse, the formalist constraints or numerical grids that the literary neo-avant-gardes turned to in order to evade expression, are not straightjackets or means to keep life out of literature. Rather, they are tools to stir up energy. On his own fascination with numbers, for example, Roubaud notes: “if I submit myself to my passion for numbers, even so it involves an unbeliever’s submission; I have no blind faith in them, I’m a numbers agnostic despite everything. This, in no way, detracts from their importance.”3 Patterns are inescapable, rules must be formulated, but they don’t serve a laying down of the law. When Stein published her volume How to Write in 1932, she did not tell anyone how to write. The book, rather, is a relentless self-reflective study of the craft of writing. Stein dissects sentences and paragraphs, grammar and narrative. And always life intrudes and messes up conclusions. In a sense How to Write is a brilliant response to our current climate with its overload of howto-books telling us it is time to find our true voice, job, pet, dress style, yoga position, cupcake. Stein pokes fun at us, for thinking we could or even should be “one.” If there is any secret to life it is that of “[o]ne and one and one and one and one” (LIA 325). How, then, to read Gertrude Stein? Read her like Roubaud, whose attempts to explore the grids of language and memory belie the smothering call of any pre-linguistic comfort zone; read her like the German director Heiner Goebbels, whose stage productions based on Stein, such as

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Hashirigaki and Songs of Wars I Have Seen, stress the reading experience itself, and the inconsistencies and transparency of her writing, allowing the reader to follow the process of her thoughts unfiltered, with all her fears and repressions exposed; read her like the Dutch composer and poet Samuel Vriezen, whose explorations into the relation between Stein’s syntax and rhythm make us hear and feel her literary thinking; read her like the Nederlands Dans Theater, whose dancers breathe the slips and errors of (her) language; read her like Abigail Lang and Thalia Field in their A Prank of Georges, whose roguish heterolingual elegance courts Stein’s arrogance. Read her, she’ll make you want to write.

Notes 1 William Carlos Williams, “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael J. Hoffman (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986), 56. 2 In the introduction to Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault writes: “For at life’s most basic level, the play of code and decoding leaves room for chance, which, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something like perturbation in the information system, something like a ‘mistake.’ In the extreme, life is what is capable of error” (Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 21–2). 3 Roubaud, quoted in Jean-Jacques Thomas’ “Swing Troubadour: Roubaud’s Self Portrait,” in The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud. A Casebook, ed. Peter Consenstein, a Dalkey Archive Press online casebook, . Accessed February 2015.

Index Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations.  “a rose is a rose is a rose”,  Christiansen’s score for  239 Action Française  89 agrammaticality  133–8 American English  133–5 Anderson, Sherwood  174, 276 anti-Semitism  86 anti-text,  and anti-body  224–5 Apollinaire, Guillaume  217, 242 Aristotle  4 Artaud, Antonin  15, 219, 234–5, 259 Ashbery, John  56 Austin, J. L.  235 avant-garde  1–3, 16, 48, 72, 80–1, 85, 130, 203, 213–17, 221, 224, 233–6, 238, 258 avant-garde, Nordic  15, 233–50 avant-garde theater,  Stein and  216–18

Bernstein, Charles  6, 132 Berry, Ellen E.  37 Beuys, Joseph  241 Blanchot, Maurice  114 Bloom, Harold  261 Blum, Léon  87, 89 Bogart, Anne  213 Bouveresse, Jacques  138 Bowers, Jane  215 Bowles, Paul  78 Braque, Georges  201, 203–4, 206, 274, 287 Brecht, Bertolt  15, 205, 207, 209–10, 218 Breton, Andre  160, 217 Bridgman, Richard  78, 87, 274 British English  133–4 Brøgger, Stig  245–8 Between Road and Grass  247, 248 The Digital Mona Lisa …  245, 246 Bürger, Peter  215

Ballet Mécanique  146–7, 155–6 Barney, Natalie  85, 88 Barthes, Roland  191 Baudrillard, Jean  37 Bay-Cheng, Sarah  216–17, 221, 224–5 Bazin, André  180 Beach, Sylvia  85 Beckett, Samuel  15, 131, 195, 209, 211 Benjamin, Walter  96, 146, 149, 170–2 “The Work of Art… ”  96 Bense, Max  236–7 Benstock, Shari  5 Bergson, Henri  4, 10, 13, 107–20, 123, 146, 150–1, 155, 166–9, 180 Creative Evolution  151, 155, 166 The Creative Mind  110, 112, 114–15, 120 Laughter: An Essay …  114 Time and Free Will  114, 120

Cadiot, Olivier  16, 253–9, 262–6 Fairy queen  254–6, 264–5 Cage, John  132, 235 Carroll, Lewis  276 Cézanne, Paul  27, 30, 32, 34, 41, 47, 64, 90, 94, 203, 206 Chaplin, Charlie  13, 145, 156 Christiansen, Henning  238–43, 249 A Rose for Miss Stein  238 cinema  13, 145–9, 151, 153–8, 165–7, 169, 172–3, 176, 180, 245 cinematograph  160, 166–7, 176 Clemenceau, Georges  87 Close-Up  147 concrete poetry  15, 201, 233–6, 239, 240–1, 245, 249 Cope, Karin  11 Crevel, René  86

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Index

Croix de Feu  89 cubism  2, 14, 47, 50–1, 202–3, 206, 208, 210 Cummings, E. E.  129, 132, 137

Guattari, Félix  129, 131, 137, 139 A Thousand Plateaus (with Deleuze)  133, 137

Dada  48, 55, 216, 217, 225, 235 Davidsen, John  243–5 de Gramont, Elisabeth  12, 85–9, 91, 97 Le Chemin de l’U.R.S.S.  89 de Saussure, Ferdinand  74 deconstruction  5, 15, 201–3, 208–11, 214, 216, 221–2, 225, 227–8 DeKoven, Marianne  95 Deleuze, Gilles  9, 13, 27, 129–40, 166, 169 Cinéma  13 A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari)  133, 137 Derrida, Jacques  207 des Pallières, Arnaud  16, 253, 255, 257–8, 260–1, 266 Descartes, René  29 Duchamp, Marcel  12, 48, 51, 53–4, 56–9, 62 Nude Descending a Staircase  54 translation of stein’s “preface”  51, 53, 56–7, 62 Duncan, Isadora  170–1, 217 Dydo, Ulla E.  78, 90, 156–7

Handke, Peter  15, 205–7, 211, 214 Hartley, Marsden  222 Heidegger, Martin  165 Heidsieck, Bernard  16, 253–4, 256–9, 262–3, 266 Heissenbüttel, Helmut  236–7 Hejinian, Lyn  56, 60, 64, 123 Higgins, Dick  233, 240 Hugnet, Georges  93, 98, 151–2, 156 Husserl, Edmund  12, 27–30, 33 hyperdialectic  26, 35–7

Eisenstein, Sergei  174–7 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  107, 118–20 Epstein, Jean  157–8, 160 Fahlström, Öyvind  234–5, 242 fascism  87, 96 Faÿ, Bernard  3, 6, 11, 12, 85, 91, 93, 96, 152 and Elisabeth de Gramont  86–90 Fluxus  233 Foreman, Richard  211, 213–14 Foucault, Michel  287 Fried, Michael  216 Front Populaire  89 Fuchs, Elinor  225 Futurism  235 genius  11, 257, 259–60 Goebbels, Heiner  15, 213–14, 223–4, 228, 288 Gomringer, Eugen  235, 239 Greenberg, Clement  32 Grotowksi, Jerzy  15, 211

Ibsen, Henrik  210 identity  2, 4, 13–14, 39, 92, 94–5, 97, 134, 146, 156, 159–60, 191, 210, 226–7, 243 as relational  7–9 intermediary,  and mediator  10 intuition,  Bergson’s understanding of  113–17 James, William  3, 4, 10, 13, 28–30, 35, 107–14, 116–19, 122–3, 132, 146–7, 167, 209 and Bergson  108–14 A Pluralistic Universe  3, 110, 112 Pragmatism  108, 110–11 The Principles of Psychology  28, 108, 116–17 pure experience  29 The Varieties of Religious Experience  108 Jameson, Fredric  37 Jarry, Alfed  217 Je Sais Tout  89 Joyce, James  16, 274, 287 Kafka, Franz  129–30, 132, 135–6 Kandinsky, Wassily  220 Kenner, Hugh  1 Kittler, Friedrich  147–8, 155 Kostelanetz, Richard  174, 223 Kracauer, Siegfried  172–3 Kristeva, Julia  73, 80 Lacan, Jacques  14, 146, 159–60 Landow, George P.  9

Index landscape theater  225–8 Latour, Bruno  7, 9–10 Le Radical  89 Lehmann, Hans-Thies  218–19, 221 Lukács, Georg  167 Mallarmé, Stéphane  236, 259 Marey, Etienne-Jules  151–2, 155, 167 Matisse, Henri  47–8, 64, 201, 203, 206, 234 Maurer, Alfy  222 Melville, Herman  129, 131, 139 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  12, 26–7, 29, 33, 35–7, 39–41 flesh of the world  29, 39 Phenomenology of Perception  35 Meyer, Steven  116, 119 modernism  2, 10, 12, 109, 134, 136, 174, 215–16, 237, 249, 264 modernity  30, 146–7, 154, 158, 265 Mondrian, Piet  14, 203, 206–9 Müller, Heiner  15, 207, 214, 218 Münsterberg, Hugo  146–7, 167 The Photoplay: …  147 Muybridge, Eadweard  167 naming  118–21 Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT)  38, 41, 289 Neoplasticism  208–9 network,  as relational  9–11 Nielsen, Hans-Jørgen  235–40 patois  136 Paulhan, Jean  116 Perloff, Marjorie  73, 81 Pétain, Philippe  3, 6, 87, 98 phenomenology  12, 27, 29–30, 35 Picabia, Francis  12, 47–64 Picasso, Pablo  1, 4–5, 11–12, 30, 38–9, 41, 47, 49–51, 64, 72–80, 145, 160, 170, 201, 203, 234, 253, 256, 274 Pickford, Mary  157–8 politics  2, 4, 85–7, 94–8 Pollesch, René  15, 213, 227 postdramatic theater  220–1 Pound, Ezra  132, 176–7, 273 pragmatism  2, 5, 12, 111–12, 114 Prigent, Christian  16, 253–4, 256, 258–9, 261–2, 266

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Proust, Marcel  88, 169 Puchner, Martin  215, 218 Rabelais, François  234–5 Rimini Protokoll  213, 223 Robbe-Grillet, Alain  240 Rosenberg, Léonce  51 Roubaud, Jacques  11, 273–86, 287–9 Satie, Erik  241 Schwitters, Kurt  234–5 Shakespeare, William  234, 276 Showalter, Elaine  25 Sitwell, Edith  12, 71–82 Façade  12, 79, 81–2 “Jodelling Song”  73, 81 Soupault, Philippe  156 Spahr, Juliana  9, 96 Spitzer, Leo  273 Stanislawski, Konstantin  205 Stein, Gertrude,  The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (ABT)  1, 5, 10, 27, 47–8, 50, 54–5, 58, 60, 73, 79, 87–8, 107, 119, 130, 132, 136, 138–9, 155, 157, 189, 192, 194, 236, 245, 253, 256–9, 274, 287 and Taken Care of:  79 “Bernard Faÿ”  91, 93 Brewsie and Willie (BW)  6 “Capital Capitals”  88 “Composition as Explanation” (CE)  3, 30, 121, 149, 169, 180 Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights  191, 196, 226 Everybody’s Autobiography (EA)  10, 48, 63–4, 89, 97, 121, 136–7, 158, 220, 254, 260–1, 266 “Film”  155–7, 160 Four Saints in Three Acts  7–8, 88, 201–6, 217, 226 The Geographical History of America (GHA)  94–5, 98, 156 Geography and Plays (GP)  138, 173, 175, 189–91, 193, 225 How to Write (HTW)  246–7, 288 How Writing Is Written (HWW)  150–2, 158, 160, 211 “I Came And Here I Am”  158 Ida. A Novel (I)  195 “If I Told Him”  73, 75, 77

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Index

Ladies’ Voices  80 Last Operas and Plays (LOP)  191, 196, 202–3, 206–8, 236 Lectures in America (LIA)  8–11, 13–14, 25, 27, 30–1, 33, 35, 40–1, 74, 88, 90, 92–3, 107, 118, 120–1, 123, 140, 145, 148–3, 165, 169, 177, 179, 193, 219, 223, 241, 243, 274, 287–8 “Lifting Belly”  78 Listen to Me  201, 206–11 The Making of Americans (MA)  7, 27, 40, 71, 88, 107, 121, 149, 167–9, 177, 179, 211, 214, 259–60, 274 “Melanctha”  133–5 The Mother of Us All  6 “A Movie”  153–6 Narration: Four Lectures (N)  9, 32, 90 Operas & Plays (OP)  145, 153–4, 156 Paris France (PF)  3, 87 Picabia’s portrait of  49 and Picasso  5, 11, 72, 74–7 Picasso (P) 30–  2, 37, 39 “A Political Series”  95 Portraits and Prayers (PP)  38–9, 75, 78, 91, 242 “Preface” for Picabia catalogue”  52, 56 A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (PGS)  25–6, 32, 37, 40, 75, 90, 152, 159, 174 Stanzas in Meditation (SM)  12, 47–50, 56, 59–63, 181, 274, 284–5 Tender Buttons (TB)  3, 25–6, 32–4, 37, 71, 81, 108–9, 118, 121–3, 177–8, 205, 237, 240–1, 245 Three Lives (TL)  26, 133, 135–6 translating Stein  187–98 Wars I Have Seen (WIHS)  87, 107, 140, 154, 254–5 What Are Masterpieces? (WAM)  7, 32, 95, 97 Steiner, Wendy  81, 92, 94, 173, 176 The Steins Collect  11 Stendhal, Renate  6

Stevens, Wallace  25 Stravinsky, Igor  217 Strindberg, August  210 Surrealism  158, 160, 217, 234, 273 Le Minotaurei  160 Sutherland, Donald  33, 47, 50, 54, 58, 60, 69, 201 ta  239 Tel Quel  16, 274, 287 temporality  82, 146, 180 Thomson, Virgil  86, 88, 217 Toklas, Alice B.  3, 5, 10, 73, 85–6, 130, 154, 156, 263, 287 translation  4, 6–7, 9, 11, 14–16, 51, 53, 56–7, 59–60, 62, 87–9, 98, 110, 129, 151–2, 156, 189–92, 195–8, 225, 236 Twain, Mark  193 Tzara, Tristan  217, 224–5 Vertov, Dziga  177–8 vibrant line, the  53–5 Viot, Jacques  158 vitalism  288 Volupté  53 Wagner-Martin, Linda  87 Waldman, Milton  146 Walton, William  79, 81 Whitehead, Alfred North  1, 107, 236 Whitman, Walt  120, 129, 273 Wilder, Thornton  88–9 Will, Barbara  6, 10–11, 87, 98, 259 Unlikely Collaboration  6 Wilson, Robert  15, 201, 203, 205, 211, 213–14, 223, 226 Wirth, Andrzej  8, 11, 201–11, 214, 220–1, 225, 227 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy  15, 210, 220 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  107, 207, 240 Worthen, William B.  215, 218, 220