The Story of one: Narrative and Composition in Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

The most common readings of The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (first published in Paris, 1925) contend that Gertrude Stein's 900-page novel deconstructs the role narrative plays in constituting identity by employing an indeterminacy that challenges readerly subjectivity. Whether taking up issues of race, gender and sex, class, or the very complexity with which all these factors combine in constructing identity, critical readings usually focus on the iterative repetition Stein uses in the text as a means for deconstructing narrative and confusing the reader's experience (Taylor 27; Doyle 250; Wald 295). Whether arguing that its repetitive structures function on a micro level—like frames in a movie reel in which "each picture is just infinitesimally different from the one before" (Wald 295)—or on the macro level, where dizzying narrative shifts invoke a kind of tilting-windmill stupor (Ngai), critics agree that the reader's usual processes of making meaning through narrative are rendered useless while reading The Making of Americans. From this perspective, a reader's sense of frustrated agency in the meaning-making process becomes an important aspect of the text's overall project of deconstructing identity formation. On the other hand, seeing this complicated text as highly constructed enables a new reading that is based on the manner in which expectations are stabilized by the novel's structure. From a perspective afforded by digital tools, and in contrast to critical readings in which The Making of Americans is a postmodernist and chaotic text, I posit that it is a mimetic, modernist text that has been misread as indeterminate.

I. Background: Theory and Method

Most postmodernist readings of The Making of Americans rely on a central premise: readers experience a tension created by frustrated expectations that result from the text's progressive disbandment of the story and, ultimately, the discourse. James Phelan theorizes that a narrative can proceed by means of either story or discourse, or progress along both, but that these elements are always working in tandem toward "developing wholes"; tensions created by instabilities in the discourse create a disrupted sense of "value, belief, opinion, knowledge, expectation—between authors and/or narrators on the one hand, and the authorial audience on the other" (15).

Making is useful for reflecting on Phelan's theories concerning the ways in which such progressions toward a "whole" develop and are disrupted. Stein uses similar language to discuss her goal in writing The Making of Americans:

I wanted to find out if you could make a history of the whole world, if you could know the whole life history of everyone in the world, their slight resemblances and lack of resemblances. I made enormous charts, and I tried to carry these charts out. You start in and you take everyone that you know, and then when you see anybody who has a certain expression or turn of the face that reminds you of some one, you find out where he agrees or disagrees with the character, until you build up the whole scheme.

("How Writing Is Written" 492)

In accordance with this idea, the narrative in the first half of Making (chapters 1 through 5) is fairly straightforward: it is the story of both the literal and figurative "progress" of two families, the Herslands and the Dehnings, both immigrant families of European descent who have settled in the United States to increase their financial means. Both families produce children in America, two of whom—Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning—get married. The marriage takes place within the first 200 paragraphs of the text. The non-narrative prose accompanying these passages comprises diegetic and exegetic passages that use repetitive phrases to describe or analyze the characters and events that are part of the narrative passages. In this way, the text's early paragraphs represent a whole family history, list by list.

As the text progresses, however, and the non-narrative passages predominate, the nature or function of these passages in relation to the developing history becomes more obscure. The reader's sense that the...