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  • An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans
  • Barrett Watten (bio)

I tried in Making of Americans to make any one one.

Gertrude Stein 1

Socially reflexive subjectivity is what The Making of Americans is about and what it makes as well. Seeing the work in terms of such a social reproduction of subjectivity, however, is very different from the canonical view of The Making of Americans’ epochal horizon shift, its move from social narration to material textuality at the emergence of American modernism. Stein did an injustice to her work in retrospectively accounting for it in Composition as Explanation as “a thousand pages of a continuous present.” 2 At the very least she discouraged generations of readers from experiencing it even on those terms. In order to make a claim for her “genius” as univocal author of The Making of Americans (necessary, in turn, for her account of it as a “masterpiece”), Stein described its monumental form as a continuous “beginning again and again” that proceeds by “included everything” (CAE, 458). By this, she could incorporate in her masterpiece the false starts and revisions of the first sections, the changes of horizon as she worked through her scientistic project of observing and categorizing types of personality, and the final meditations on identity and nonidentity, being and time with which she draws the work to provisional closure. Along the way, the work proceeds through a series of what I term “horizon shifts” of its own historical understanding, in which its initial developmental narrative is [End Page 95] transformed, in a careful sequence of revisions, into the horizon of language that Stein would later call the “continuous present” (CAE, 458).

To do justice to the micropolitics of Stein’s textual unfolding, a close reading of The Making of Americans is necessary, even as it risks taking up as much textual space as the work itself in an analysis interminable of Stein’s thematic and formal development. What follows, therefore, will be a discussion of a sequence of key passages in the work’s opening sections to show how a notion of social subjectivity is articulated in its unfolding horizons of narration and self-consciousness. These passages describe a movement from Stein’s famous opening Oedipal anecdote, in which “I did not drag my father beyond this tree,” toward social horizons in which the character of the father is distributed through multiple characteristics that form the basis of a social typology to be worked through over the hundreds of pages that follow. Stein’s crucial rewriting of the Oedipal mother in terms of a social matrix allows her successfully to develop a non-Oedipal model of social subjectivity. This reading will attempt to demonstrate how Stein’s masterpiece, in her terms and arguably as well in ours, is a social text in which processes of identification and loss are worked through in a narrative of family history. What results are not only Stein’s famous style of metalinguistic repetition but also a poetics of identity as a construction in which, as in her title, Americans are made.

1

Stein’s opening gambit in The Making of Americans is to offer a paradigm for the narration of the making of Americans that ironically suggests its own negation, an overturning that will be necessary so that its initial assumptions may be overcome:

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” 3

Stein is proposing an Ur-narrative for the social reproduction of subjectivity that may be labeled the “Oedipal anecdote.” Some unpacking of Stein’s paragraph is necessary to draw out the Oedipal resonances from this admittedly comedic invocation. In this version, son succeeds father by controlling his desire to kill him just as the father controlled his desire to kill his father before him. For Jessica Benjamin, the continuity of these murderous impulses from father to son is the basis for the transmission of authority in the “effort to escape the necessity of destroying the father.” 4 Crucial to this chain of succession is the repudiation of the mother...

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