Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Introduction

1 Introduction “Announce what you see” F or Gertrude Stein, language is a living but ailing organ of our social body. Modern speech is a symptom of the way bureaucracy threatens to become fascism and conformity damages hu­ manity. Stein’s several styles of writing advocate a revision and rearrangement of fundamental orders: the syntax of English sentences, the contained and supposedly individualized selfhood of Americans, interpersonal allegiances, and social and political organization. If there is something wrong with these structures, then language can be studied to diagnose the problem, and language can serve to solve it—or change it, anyway. Stein has been canonized for her eccentricity, but that reputation may be a way of making safe—making cute and quirky—a revolutionary utopian impulse and insight, with a huge force of life behind it.1 Unlike a strict deconstructionist , who believes (or at least asserts) that “words speak us,” Stein builds on the assumption that people speak, that we can wield language however we choose (Lehman, 106); she writes on behalf of free will and selfmaking . Stein does not believe in “an exclusively linguistic universe,” as her devotion to her dogs and long walks and especially Alice’s cooking—and talk about food—suggests (Lehman, 99). At the very least, “we can say we do like what we have,” or that we don’t (Stein, “Lifting Belly,” 94).2 And words are not all we have with which to communicate; we have intonations, smiles, glances, kisses, and caresses—as Stein makes clear in three of her titles, we have “Tender Buttons” and a “Lifting Belly,” not just “Patriarchal Poetry.” Stein is not a nihilist doomsayer but rather a doctor investigating the organic functions of interactive language. How that language works and what it achieves is the essence of what happens. Stein must have been particularly sensitive to the subtle orders around her. Her writing demonstrates awareness of the unwritten rules of human social interaction manifest in the structures of turn-taking conversation, which were ignored by linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam 2 Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens Chomsky and which have come to the attention of social scientists such as Harvey Sacks only in the last few decades. Stein’s biographers attest to her tendency to overstep the silent boundaries of decorum. She was a lesbian , and she was too loud and too cheerful and too fat. She alluded to her own genius too directly. She talked too much, asked questions that were too personal, laughed too hard, and sweated too profusely. This relentless crossing of boundaries that keep people’s bodies separate and knowledge separate—keep their interiorities interior—persistently alerted her to the part that social norms play in human subjectivity, and thus in every other human endeavor.3 On the other hand, Stein’s writing is usually pure pleasure—a game— and serious only in that she’s serious about play. She mucks about with words, fools around, teases and tickles and hums. Reviewers call Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts an “untroubled really very simple pleasure” (Krutch, 75), and my child sings certain phrases with glowing delight. Another reviewer describes The World Is Round as “pure delight, simple pleasure” (Becker, 114). In 1913, Mabel Dodge Luhan—then the center of an avant-garde Greenwich Village salon and later a memoirist who worked to alter white and masculine notions of the American West—wrote that “every word lives” in Stein’s writing (153). A year later, Carl Van Vechten—a music critic later turned novelist, Harlem booster, and photographer—wrote that there is no “fresher phrase” than those found in Stein’s long prose poem Tender Buttons (158). French literary and social critic Bernard Faÿ—a friend of Stein who collaborated with her on abridging The Making of Americans and then collaborated with the Germans and was appointed director of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1940—writes that Mencken, Dreiser, Joyce, Valéry, and Gide “write as you and I take a bus,” but that Stein is “sincer[e]” and “courageous” in the “amusing game” of being a writer (59, 58, 60). “Preaching and politics,” Faÿ goes on, oblige one’s mind to take social problems profoundly seriously; they destroy the freedom of the mind, the ability to be interested in the universal and the individual. Science obliges the mind to get used to a rationalistic and systematic method that is no good for the...