Ida a Novel (35 page)

In order to approach their treatment of identity and time Miss Stein made her own distinction between Human Nature and the Human Mind. Human Nature clings to identity, its insistence on itself as personality, and to do this it must employ memory and the sense of an audience. By memory it is reassured of its existence through consciousness of itself in time-succession. By an audience it is reassured of itself through its effect on another—“‘I am I,’ said the little old lady, ‘because my dog knows me.’”
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From Human Nature, therefore, come all the assertions of the self and all the rhetorical attitudes that require the audience—wars, politics, propaganda, jealousy, and so on. The Human Mind, however, has no identity; every moment “it knows what it knows when it knows it.” It gazes at pure existing. It is deflected by no consideration of an audience, for when it is aware of an audience it has ceased to “know.” In its highest expression it is not even an audience to itself. It knows and it writes, for its principal expression is in writing and its highest achievement has been in literary masterpieces. These masterpieces, though they may be about human nature are not of it. Time and identity and memory may be in them as subject-matter—as that existing at which the Human Mind gazes—but the absence from the creative mind of those qualities has been acknowledged by the vast multitudes of the world who, striving to escape from the identity-bound and time-immersed state, recognize that such a liberation has been achieved in these works.

If then Miss Stein is writing metaphysics, why does she not state her ideas in the manner that metaphysicians generally employ?

There are three answers to this question.

In the first place, a creative metaphysician must always invent his own terms. Even though his concepts may have something in common with those of his predecessors—with such concepts as subjective, objective, soul, imagination, and consciousness—he cannot in certain places employ those terms, because they come bringing associations of (for him) varying validity and bringing with them the whole systems of which they were a part. The contemporaries of Kant complained (as the contemporaries of Professor Whitehead are now complaining) that the philosopher’s terminology was arbitrary and obscure.

In the second place, Miss Stein is not only a metaphysician; she is an artist. In varying degrees artists, likewise, have always sought to invent their own terms. The highest intuitions towards a theory of time, of knowledge or of the creative act have always passed beyond the realm of “text-book” exposition. When the metaphysician is combined with the poet we get such unusual modes of expression as the myths in Plato, the prophetic books of [William] Blake, and the difficult highly-figured phrases in [John] Keats’s letters. Miss Stein’s style in this book might be described as a succession of “metaphysical metaphors.” On the first page, for example, we read:

“If nobody had to die how would there be room for us who now live to have lived. We never could have been if all the others had not died there would have been no room.

Now the relation of human nature to the human mind is this.

Human nature does not know this. . . .

But the human mind can.”

(Human Nature, hugging identity-survival cannot realize a non-self situation. The Human Mind, knowing no time and identity in itself, can realize this as an objective fact of experience.)

Similarly, further down we come upon the question:

“What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man?”

(Since the Human Mind, existing, does not feel its past as relevant, why does succession in identity have any importance? What is the purpose of living in time? One cannot realize what one was like four seconds ago, four months ago, twenty years ago. “Only when I look in the mirror,” said Picasso’s mother, “do I realize that I am the mother of a grown-up man.”)

This book is a series of such condensations, some of them, like the plays and the “detective stories” about pigeons, of considerable difficulty. These latter, it is only fair to add, have, with a number of other passages, so far exceeded the delighted but inadequate powers of this commentator. The book presupposes that the reader has long speculated on such matters and is willing and able to assimilate another person’s “private language,”—and in this realm what can one give or receive, at best, but glimpses of an inevitably private language?

The third reason that renders this style difficult for many readers proceeds from the author’s humor. Metaphysics is difficult enough; metaphysics by an artist is still more difficult; but metaphysics by an artist in a mood of gaiety is the most difficult of all. The subject-matter of this book is grave, indeed; and there is evidence throughout of the pain it cost to express and think these things. (It is not without “tears” that Human Nature is found to be uninteresting and through a gradual revelation is discovered to be sharing most of its dignities with dogs.) But Miss Stein has always placed much emphasis on the spirit of play in an artist’s work. The reward of difficult thinking is an inner exhilaration. Here is delight in words and in the virtuosity of using them exactly; here is wit; here is mockery at the predecessors who approached these matters with so cumbrous a solemnity. One of the aspects of play that most upsets some readers is what might be called “the irruption of the daily life” into the texture of the work. Miss Stein chooses her illustrations from the life about her. She introduces her friends, her dogs, her neighbors. Lolo, about whom gather the speculations as to the nature of romance, lived and died in a house that could be seen from Miss Stein’s terrace in the south of France. She weaves into the book the very remarks let fall in her vicinity during the act of writing. Similarly at one period, Picasso pasted subway-tickets upon his oil-paintings; one aspect of the “real” by juxtaposition gives vitality to another aspect of the real, the created.

But why doesn’t Miss Stein at least aid the reader by punctuating her sentences as we are accustomed to find them? And why does she repeat herself so often?

A great many authors have lately become impatient with the inadequacy of punctuation. Many think that new signs should be invented; signs to imitate the variation in human speech; signs for emphasis; signs for word-groupings. Miss Stein, however, feels that such indications harm rather than help the practice of reading. They impair the collaborative participation of the reader. “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should live it. . . . A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make yourself know yourself knowing it.”
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The answer to the charge of repetition is on many levels. On one level Miss Stein points out that repetition is in all nature. It is in human life: “if you listen to anyone, behind what anyone is saying whether it’s about the weather or anything, you will hear that person repeating and repeating himself.” Repeating is emphasis. Every time a thing is repeated it is slightly different. “The only time that repeating is really repeating, that is when it is dead, is when something is being taught.”
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Then it does not come from the creating mind, but from unliving forms. Sometimes Miss Stein’s repeating is for emphasis in a progression of ideas; sometimes it is as a musical refrain; sometimes it is for a reassembling of the motifs of the book and their re-emergence into a later stage of the discussion; sometimes it is in the spirit of play.

But if this book is about the psychology of the creative act, why is it also called
The Geographical History Of America
?

Miss Stein, believing the intermittent emergence of the Human Mind and its record in literary masterpieces to be the most important manifestation of human culture, observed that these emergences were dependent upon the geographical situations in which the authors lived. The valley-born and the hill-bounded tended to exhibit a localization in their thinking, an insistence on identity with all the resultant traits that dwell in Human Nature; flat lands or countries surrounded by the long straight lines of the sea were conducive toward developing the power of abstraction. Flat lands are an invitation to wander, as well as a release from local assertion. Consequently, a country like the United States, bounded by two oceans and with vast portions so flat that the state boundaries must be drawn by “imaginary lines,” without dependence on geographical features, promises to produce a civilization in which the Human Mind may not only appear in the occasional masterpiece, but may in many of its aspects be distributed throughout the people.

Miss Stein’s theory of the audience insists upon the fact that the richest rewards for the reader have come from those works in which the authors admitted no consideration of an audience into their creating mind. There have been too many books that attempted to flatter or woo or persuade or coerce the reader. Here is a book that says what it knows: a work of philosophy, a work of art, and a work of gaiety.

From Gertrude Stein,
The Geographical History Of America
Or The Relation Of Human Nature To The Human Mind
(New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 7–14

Gertrude Stein Makes Sense

(1947)

Thornton Wilder

Miss Gertrude Stein, answering a question about her famous line,
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
,
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once said with characteristic vehemence:

“Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t say ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’”

She knew that she was a difficult and an idiosyncratic author. She pursued her aims, however, with such conviction and intensity that occasionally she forgot that the results could be difficult to others. At such times the achievements she had made in writing, in “telling what she knew” (her most frequent formulization of the aim of writing), had to her the character of self-evident beauty and clarity. A friend, to whom she showed recently completed samples of her poetry, was frequently driven to reply sadly: “But you forget that I don’t understand examples of your extremer styles.”
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To this she would reply with a mixture of bewilderment and exasperation:

“But what’s the difficulty? Just read the words on the paper. They’re in English. Just read them. Be simple and you’ll understand these things.”

Now let me quote the speech from which the opening remark on this page has been extracted. A student in her seminar at the University of Chicago had asked her for an “explanation” of the famous line.

She leaned forward, giving all of herself to the questioner in that unforgettable way which endeared her to thousands of students and to thousands of soldiers in two wars, trenchant, humorous, but above all urgently concerned over the enlightenment of even the most obtuse questioner:

“Now listen! Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say ‘Oh, moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn out literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale, literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. You all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line of mine because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”

There are certain of Miss Stein’s idiosyncrasies which by this time should not require discussion, for example, her punctuation and recourse to repetition. The majority of readers ask of literature the kind of pleasure they have always received; they want “more of the same”; they accept idiosyncrasy in author and periods only when it has been consecrated by long accumulated prestige, as in the cases of the earliest and the latest of Shakespeare’s styles, and in the poetry of [John] Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or Emily Dickinson. They arrogate to themselves a superiority in condemning the novels of [Franz] Kafka or of the later [James] Joyce or the later Henry James, forgetting that they allow a no less astonishing individuality to Laurence Sterne and to [François] Rabelais.

This work is for those who not only largely accord to others “another’s way,” but who rejoice in the diversity of minds and the tension of difference.

It is perhaps not enough to say: “Be simple and you will understand these things”; but it is necessary to say: “Relax your predilections for the accustomed, the received, and be ready to accept an extreme example of idiosyncratic writing.”

A brief recapitulation of Miss Stein’s aims as a writer will help us to understand her work. She left Radcliffe College, with William James’s warm endorsement, to study psychology at Johns Hopkins University. There, as a research problem, her professor gave her a study of automatic writing.
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For this work she called upon her fellow students—the number ran into the hundreds—to serve as experimental subjects. Her interest, however, took an unexpected turn; she became more absorbed in the subjects’ varying approach to the experiments than in the experiments themselves. They entered the room with alarm, with docility, with bravado, with gravity, with scorn, or with indifference. This striking variation re-awoke within her an interest which had obsessed her even in very early childhood—the conviction that a description could be made of all the types of human character and that these types could be related to two basic types (she called them independent-dependents and dependent-independents).