Gertrude Stein's Unmentionables

The World is Round speaks, like a fairy tale, to our deepest emotions. In fact it is a story about emotions, about human feelings and the tears we find in the nature of things. Children understand these tears very well, being for the most part people who cry frequently and easily, and, as Stein knew, people as much unlike the optimistic adult projection of child-nature as possible. But although it was written for children in strikingly simple diction, and in the childish rhythms of the lisping three-year-old, it isn't a simple story. And that, I believe, is the point of it all. It concerns a quality of the world, and how could that be simple? The world, she says, one's experience of reality, and not the earth in any objective or scientific sense. We watch the narrator feeling about herself, one fact at a time, in order to gain and convey a sense of knowledge of the world, and although this way of knowing sometimes works, it is often hilariously "inaccurate," as when Willie and Rose are thinking. Sometimes facts lead only to confusion, as in Rose's first song:

I am a little girl and my name is RoseRose is my name.Why am I a little girlAnd why is my name RoseAnd when am I a little girlAnd when is my name RoseAnd where am I a little girlAnd where is my name RoseAnd which little girl am IAm I the little girl named RoseWhich little girl named Rose.¹

Children need to know where they stand and how to stand, but making one's platform an accumulation of facts is often only deceptively simple. That the world is round, for instance, is at first the most innocuous of statements, and eventually the most terrifying. Facts by themselves are hopelessly inadequate. Perhaps that's why Stein omits the central fact, or will not name it. She finds it all very funny in its way, but she is also serious about examining the possible errors, diminutions, losses, and terrors involved in making the ambiguous concrete, in trying to know generalities through particulars.

In folklore, naming is a means of coping with unknown quantities that threaten to be overpowering: when the maiden names Rumpelstilskin, for instance, she is able to rid herself of his demonic power over her. We control things around us by naming them and thereby putting them in their places. But Stein was suspicious of naming because she knew that to name something may be to limit it to less than it truly is, to make it too literal. She resented nouns because they are "so completely unfortunately the name of something. . . . They the names that is the nouns cannot please, because after all you know well after all that is what Shakespeare meant when he talked about a rose by any other name."² Nouns do not move or change: they are dead. They are dead because they suggest less and less all the time. And of course Stein always wanted to suggest more, rather than less. Like so much of her work, but in this case very particularly, The World is Round is about complexity, about ambiguity: in the emotional life, in nature, in growth and in language. You could say that it is about propositions and certainty. Propositions may be "true," names may be the right ones, one may come close to an approximation of reality, but there remains a magical richness, a suggestiveness, a transformativeness, in this world, which belie the limitations of specifics, of concreteness, of saying something one way and believing it to be true. The child needs facts to control his or her environment to a certain extent, surely, but too much control is bad, as when Rose tries to control the black dog Pepe and ends up making him miserable and getting bitten into the bargain. Similarly, a general suspicion of evil may be more informed than a knowledge of evil specifics.

Rose's story begins in an almost Edenic way. There...