Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, and: Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (review)

In Irresistible Dictation, Steven Meyer offers a fascinating, cogent examination of correlations between late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature, philosophy, psychology, and neurophysiology as exhibited in Gertrude Stein's theories of writing and in her writing practices. The book is an important contribution to critical appreciation of Stein's work and to interdisciplinary studies. In part 1, Meyer shows connections between Stein's writing experiments and scientific experiments performed at Harvard Psychological Laboratory and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where she studied and worked. At Harvard, Stein was influenced by her work with William James, whose radical empiricism emphasized "the decisive role for processes and procedures, of conjunctive as well as disjunctive relations, in the composition of experience" (13). At Hopkins, Stein was involved in neuroanatomical experiments that led her to contemplate the processes of the brain and nervous system involved in the act of writing. Meyer argues convincingly that these scientific experiments led Stein to experiment with "compositional procedures in the dissociative writing she produced between 1912 and 1933" (54). In short, Stein's scientific training and experience provided her with theories and models for experimental writing that sought to make both writer and reader acutely aware of the mental and physical processes involved in the act of writing. For the reader, this experience often proves disorienting precisely because the meaning of Stein's writing can only be understood through the reiterated practice of her writing. In his discussion of what Emerson refers to in his essay on "Fate" as "irresistible dictation," Meyer explains that, for Stein, "[t]he only adequate explanation of a piece of her writing is that realized in the act of composition itself, in the autopoietic process whereby the composition ‘understands itself.'" Likewise, "Stein's reader is obliged to reproduce self-consciously, neuraesthetically, the recursive act of reading inherent in any act of writing" (122). As a way of demonstrating this process, Meyer makes use of a series of "intonational diagrams," modeled after traditional sentence diagrams, to scan the "intonational contours" of Stein's prose. The results serve as evidence that the very processes that Stein had in mind and that Meyer labors so successfully to explain are those of an artistic genius.

In many ways, Berman's study of modernist fiction is a feminist response to Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. But whereas Wilson examines the works of Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein in light of the symbolist themes and techniques of Yeats, Valery, Eliot, and Joyce, Berman aligns Proust and Stein with Henry James and Virginia Woolf to explore the relation between modernist fiction and twentieth-century politics. Beginning with an overview of "cosmopolitan communities," Berman argues that the technical and epistemological dislocations that characterize modernist fiction, "with the constant making and un-making of human inter-connections," also provide "the means by which these narratives will construct radically modern versions of community" (6).

The chapter on Henry James addresses the cosmopolitanism in his late fiction, particularly The Ambassadors. Berman argues that "[Lambert] Strether's narrative creates a sense of identity, understanding, and connection based in an essential incompleteness and fragmentation, yet firmly grounded in national belonging and loyalty. By tarnishing the image of the self-complete ambassador as invincible representative of his country, James rejects the perpetually determined and unified nation, and replaces it with its ideally feminized counterpart" (64).

In the chapter on Proust, Berman explores the extent to which the Dreyfus affair forced Proust to construct "a subtle new mode of belonging, one predicated on the insight that comes from standing at the margins, from forging new community identities out of conscious pariahdom" (73). She reads A la recherch&eacute...