The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein: Race and the Shape of Modern(ist) History

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For modernism, the legacy of Enlightenment modernity was both necessary and annihilating, like Virginia Woolf's Angel in the House: without her, there would have been no Woolf and yet with her, there almost was no Woolf--so strict was the Angel's discipline of self. Just so, modernism was continually caught in a deconstructive dilemma. It aimed to break the disciplines of Enlightenment ideology on which it simultaneously depended, including, I will argue, a racial narratology. Among its other paradoxical acts, modernist fiction deflated the dream of transcendent objectivity while realizing the strangely complementary dream of a subjectivity so pervious and sensitive that it absorbs whole worlds in single moments. This tricky relationship to
Enlightenment sensibility finds a parallel in modernism's relationship to Enlightenment history: while modernism's critique of depth, "real" history, and dimensionality as coherent conditions with a "good" telos moved it toward an aesthetic of flattening and fragmentation, that aesthetic entailed nonetheless a curving back, an engagement in the history it critiqued--even a desire for that history. The collage "M" in the title of this journal captures exactly this ambivalence: a double orientation toward the rounded and the flat, history's curve and contingency's crisscross, the weight of tradition and the flight of transgression. Modernism wants both terms--the life-giving angel and the murdered angel, so to speak. And race, exactly because of its commerce with the angels of English narrative and history, shapes modernist fiction's very practice.

For in the modern West at least, race and narrative are joined at the root, creating the stem of history that would uphold the nation-state (to borrow William Wordsworth's trope), imaged implicitly as the angelic white flower of sensibility. ¹ Gertrude Stein understood this entanglement of race and narrative even as she used it to shock and attract her white readership by in effect shouting racial epithets in her stories. In the process, however, like other modernists Stein was teasing apart, as if it were a knotted rootball, the problem of race. As John Whittier-Fergusen has recently argued in these pages, the relation between Stein's "politics" and her aesthetics is too often oversimplified, given how embedded it is in a long and winding cultural history. ² Stein's work can serve to reveal the surprising ways that, indeed, modernism flowers perversely in the soil of modernity due to the mineral powers of race.

My argument highlights the origin of Western racial narrative not in imperial practices or travel narratives but rather in English revolutionary history. To start here gives insight into the hidden hybridity of racial discourses, their joining of revolutionary and imperial impulses. In the wake of England's revolutionary period in the latter half of the seventeenth century, historical, sentimental, and "realistic" narrative gave shape to crucial self-fashioning "root" myths for "Britain" and, in turn, "America." Stein's fiction, in particular The Making of Americans and Three Lives, insistently reiterates the tropes of sentiment, virtue, race, and reproduction that infuse these racial myths and nurture subjectivity in the West--allowing her at once to water and wilt the flower of modernity.

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What is race, after all? Race is a narrative concept. Whether or not it becomes the basis for social hierarchy or gets configured in binary oppositions, "race" is at base the idea that characteristics are passed from one generation to the next through time; it is the claim that behavior in the present and future is predictable because it is based on characteristics inherited from ancestors who lived in the past. Races or species may evolve, as scientists have argued for a century and a half, but to say so only reinforces the diachronic principle on which race depends. Yet within both narrative and the notions of race as they have developed in the West there lies a sharp...