Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of "Genius." (review)

Barbara Will seeks to define what Stein meant when she referred to herself by that rather elusive and frequently abused term "genius." Avoiding for the most part the question of whether Stein actually was a genius, and focusing instead on how the concept of genius functioned in Stein's writing, Will's study develops a two-pronged thesis that charts contradictory impulses: "While Stein throughout her life evinced a great interest in the extraordinary or ‘vitally singular' individual producing masterpieces, she also suggested that ‘genius' was a capacity anyone reading her texts could share: a decentered and dialogic, open-ended and collective mode of ‘being'" (1). Will is able to document the former conception of genius in Stein's work effortlessly, but the latter conception—which is the book's principal subject—proves somewhat more elusive and, as anachronisms such as "dialogic" in the passage just cited and later mention of "Stein's effort to deconstruct this notion [of genius]" indicate (150), there is a temptation here (not wholly resisted) to divorce Stein from her historical context and to refashion her in the mold of a contemporary academic, postmodern feminist. Will's conception of Stein is thus in some sense as conflicted as she claims Stein's conception of genius is, and her claim that Stein's arrogation of the term genius has democratic implications remains open to question. Will writes: "Stein's reformulation of ‘genius' describes . . . an uncanny ‘being' that might describe the author ‘talking and listening' to herself, but could also refer to the open-ended relationship between author/talker and reader/listener." By the end of the book, a great deal of pressure has been placed on that "could." To her credit, Will does acknowledge early on that Stein's works "point toward, but do not wholly embrace, a postmodern understanding of the subject as decentered and contingent" (14–15). She buttresses this notion in the book's "Coda," which contrasts Stein's liminal position with the full-blown banality of Andy Warhol's postmodernism, as exemplified by his portrait of Stein.

The bulk of Will's book is devoted to a study of notions of individuality and genius as they manifest themselves in a chronological series of Stein's writings, including Melanctha, The Making of Americans, G.M.P., "To Call It a Day," "Forensics," Useful Knowledge, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Everybody's Biography (a nice collection of representative and less well-known works). Perhaps the book's most compelling pages are those that trace the influence on Stein's working assumptions as a writer of her laboratory experiments under the tutelage of William James and her later reading of Otto Weininger's "notorious tract" Sex and Character (1903). Will is less successful, however, when she counterpoints Stein's work against that of male modernist writers, such as T. S. Eliot—who makes several dramatic cameos in the book, cast in the role of a kind of anti-Stein, not so much for his gender or his anti-Semitism, but, rather, for his—of all things—dangerously elitist tendencies. Will takes Stein's playful profession that her work stands, democratically, on a level with newspapers—and Henry James!—perhaps a little uncritically. Surely, if elitism and democracy are at issue, the fact that the great majority of the reading public finds Stein to be an extremely difficult and obscure writer has some relevance? One also might take exception to such a phrase as this: "For an early twentieth-century writer like Ezra Pound" (5). Whatever one thinks of Pound, surely there is no one else much "like" him, but to admit that would be to imperil the book's basic assumptions about identity and "genius."

This point leads to the book's central and most troubling theoretical weakness: its rigid adherence to a reductive social constructivist account of individuality and...