Gertrude Stein's Atomic Bombs: Her Pacific War

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

—Gertrude Stein¹

Shortly before her death in 1946, Gertrude Stein wrote a fragment titled "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb." "They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb," she recounts. "I said I had not been able to take any interest in it."² This was not the first time Stein had written in so agnostic a voice about so charged a subject. Eighteen years earlier, before the emergence of the nuclear age proper, a question not so different from the one above had been posed in her libretto Four Saints in Three Acts: "If it were possible to kill five thousand chinamen by pressing a button would it be done." There too her protagonist Saint Therese is "not interested."³ True to Saint Therese's response, the moment is never mentioned again in the opera.

My argument here traces this curious genealogy of the bomb in Stein's career. In their totality, her statements on leveraged destruction converge on the figure of China as a generalized Orient, and extend towards the United States's use of the atomic bomb in the Pacific theater of war in World War II. These ambivalent withdrawals mark a contradiction inherent to her writing on war writ large: although these texts differ from her wartime writing from her place (both physical and psychic) in the European and Anglo-American theaters of war, I focus on her writing on the Pacific theater to describe some structural elements of her political conservatism. In so doing, I aim to reassess the question of personal complicity dominating the critical conversation on Stein in recent years.⁴ More than a site for the displacing and securing of the western subject, Stein's Pacific Orient is shot through with the annihilated future of the atomic bomb.

The argument takes place in three moves. In readings of, first, "Let Us Save China" (an undated and little-read text only recently found amongst Stein's papers in Yale's Beinecke Library) and second, a minor late essay, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb" (1945–46), I trace a logic of economic self-interest underwriting both texts. Yet it is Stein's unusual disinterest that is most potent: forging an unlikely kinship between modernist boredom and post-war paranoia, Stein's "Reflection" willfully divests from the economic relation she affirms in "China." Lastly, I explore how that crisis-thinking is anticipated by moments in Four Saints in Three Acts (1927–28) and Everybody's Autobiography (1937). Through this retrospective analysis, the atom bomb emerges as the reified future of a thought experiment, highlighting a conservative pacifism conditioned by her Pacific war.

One initial result of this argument is to unfold the more radical implications of Stein's Orientalism, stemming from a formal and logical consistency between an economic-liberal "interest" and the conservative "disinterest" in the atom bomb.⁵ To map the bomb's relationship onto existing work on Stein's Orientalism, I have had to negotiate with the schizophrenic workings of Orientalist thinking as it tropologically conflates China with Japan. As Josephine Park confirms, Stein's attitude towards her many Orients is carelessly conflating even in its liberal pragmatism, complaining about her "Chinese servants" (they were Vietnamese) as a "[p]eaceful penetration—nice words and quiet words and long but not too long words" (Everybody's Autobiography, 10).⁶ This is a "peaceful penetration" even on the level of a "Steinese" language in times of war.⁷ Adding the atom bomb into this equation then reconfigures Stein's Orientalism in a startling form: if her pragmatist peace has a future, it is the event of atomic death.

Yet Stein's atom bomb operates beyond the historical context that serves as its referent, developing her pacifist "not interested" into a peculiar grammar of the future. I argue that the bomb offers a mode of speculation not typically connected to economic tropes of interest and divestment; it offers an assured destruction that still paradoxically solicits, maintains, and indeed guarantees speculation and counter-speculation...