Reading Gertrude Stein Reading Henry James, or Eros Is Eros Is Eros Is Eros

Reading Gertrude Stein Reading Henry James, or Eros Is Eros Is Eros Is Eros by Charles Caramello, University of Maryland I Few deny tiie difficulty of reading Henry James, and fewer still deny the difficulty of reading Gertrude Stein. Most attribute James's difficulty to an indifference toward the reader, or, alternatively, an excessive demand upon the reader, combined with an indifference toward the portrayal of common human experience, or, alternatively, an excessive concem with literary technique. Even James's most ardent modemist admirers qualified their praise when speaking of his later phase. Pound, for whom James's was "great art as opposed to over-elaborate or over-refined art" ("Henry James" 298), nonetheless recognized James's demon as the "cobwebby," a term Pound used ten times in his "Baedecker" to the "continent" of James's oeuvre; Eliot, who commended James's focus on "a situation, a relation, an atmosphere," nonetheless ceded that such focus made "the reader, as well as the personae, uneasily the victim of a merciless clairvoyance" ("Henry James" 151); and Forster and Leavis, with far stronger disapproval, protested that James's fervor for "pattern" and "technique" muffled die human dimension of his material and sharply diminished his reader's ability to apprehend that material (see Forster 153-64 and Leavis 154-72). ' James's detractors, meanwhile, had reached the consensus that enabled Stephen Spender flatly to declare that "most criticism of James boils down to saying that he is unreadable" (104). Most critics of Stein add to the charges already brought against James the harsher indictment of an obscurantism so egregious as to mean hostility toward the reader combined with an aestheticism so intransigent as to produce unreasonably self-referential texts. Pound, witii characteristic shrillness, wrote to Cummings that it was "ever a pleasure to have something to decipher that ain't dear Jim [Joyce] or oedipus Gertie," and to Wyndham Lewis tiiat "this flow of conSquishousness Girtie/Jimee stuff has about FLOWED long enuff"; and Eliot, with characteristic equivocation , portrayed Stein's work as "at once original and obscure" and pronounced it, so Stein reports, "very fine but not for us" (see Pound/Joyce 255-56; Eliot, rev. of Composition 162; and AB 248).2 Even such an admirer as Edmund Wilson, meanwhile, interrupted his discussion in Axel's Castle of Stein's The Making of Americans to "confess that I have not read this book all through, and I do not know whether it is possible to do so" (239).3 It is a telling confession from a critic who presumably could read all through A la recherche du temps perdu, Ulysses, and what was then appearing as Work in Progress and would soon become Finnegans Wake. Yet Wilson was far from alone in declaring Stein impossible to read but, somehow, important in spite of this. Indeed, his response so typifies the history of Stein's reception that to read Stein reading James would almost seem an exercise in reading the unread in pursuit of the unreadable. James and Stein, I would argue, show neither indifference nor hostility toward tiieir readers, though they do demand of them what Leavis, speaking of James, justly termed "a close and unrelaxed attention, an actively intelligent collaboration" (156); and tiiey show neither an unseemly concern with technique nor a pure aestheticism, though they do reveal in their texts what Marjorie Perloff, speaking of Stein, termed a "tension between reference and compositional game, between a pointing system and a selfordering system" (72).4 James and Stein, in other words, differently present acute cases of the dialogic situation inherent in all literature and salient in modernist literature; and they differently present acute cases of the tension between referentiality and reflexivity that has haunted formalist aesthetics in music, painting, and literature for more than a century. They are difficult, in sum, for the same general reasons that most modernist writers are difficult. The particular reasons for James's difficulty do not concern me directly in this essay; those for Stein's difficulty I would trace to three distinct but interdependent sources: the surface complexity of her texts, the conception of subject in her texts, and die intertextual matrix defined by her...