(What follows is taken from a considerably longer entry on Stein's long fiction in Survey of Long Fiction, Vol 6, ed. Frank Magill, Salem Press, 1983, 2505-2517.)
Achievements Whether towering or crouching, Stein is ubiquitous in contemporary lit erature. A child of the nineteenth century who staunchly adhered to many of its values halfway through the twentieth, she nevertheless dedicated her creative life to the destruction of nineteenth century concepts of artistic order and purpose. In her own words, she set out to do nothing less than to kill a century, to lay the old ways of literary convention to rest. She later boasted that "the most serious thinking about the nature of literature in the twentieth century has been done by a woman," and her claim has great merit. During the course of her career. Stein finally managed to convince almost everyone that there was indeed some point. if nol profundity. in her aggressively enig matic style. The ridicule and parody that frustrated so much of her early work had turned to grudging tolerance or outright iionizing by 1934. when Stein made her triumphant American lecture tour; for the last fifteen or so years of her life, she was published even if her editor had not the vaguest idea of what she was doing (as Bennett Cerf later admitled he had not). On the most concrete level, Stein's distinctive prose style is remarkably significant even when its philosophical dimensions are ignored. William Gass has observed, Stein "did more with sentences. and understood them better. than any writer ever has."
More important was Stein's influence on other leaders in the development of modernism. As a student of William lames, a friend of Alfred North Whitehead and Pablo Picasso. Stein lived at the center of the philosophical and artistic revolutions of the twentieth century. She was the nalural emblem for modernism, and in her person. career, and legend, many of its salient issues converged. In the light of more recent developments in the novel and in literary theory, it has also been argued that Stein was the first postmod ernist. the first writer to claim openly that the instance of language is itself as important as the reality to which it refers. Among major writers, Ernest Hemingway was most obviously influenced by his association with her, but her genius was freely acknowledged by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Ander son. and Thornton Wilder. William Saroyan explained her influence most directly when he asserted that no American writer could keep from coming under it, a sentiment reluctantly echoed by Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931). even before Stein's great popular success in the mid-1930's.
(1) a literary charlatan of the P. T. Barnurn ilk, interested in publicity or money rather than in art;
(2) something of a naive child-woman incapable of comprehending the world around her;
(3) a fiery-eyed literary revolutionary, den mother of the avam-garde; or
(4) an ageless repository of wisdom and genius.Ultimately, the reader's acceptance or rejection of these various categories will greatly determine his or her response to Stein's writing. which forces the reader to make as many cognitive choices as does that of any major writer.
Stein's many explanations of her writing further complicate its interpre tation: even her "explanations" frustrate as much as they reveal, explicitly setting her up in cognitive competition with her reader, a competition sug gested by her favorite cryptogram, which works out to read: "I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking." Stein proposes a rhetoric not of misunderstanding, but of antiunderstanding: that is, her "explanations" usually argue precisely against the desirability of explaining.
As Stein bluntly put the matter, "understanding is a very dull occupation." "Understanding" has a special denoration for Stein, sometimes meaning as little as paying attention to or reading. "To understand a thing means to be in contact with that thing," she proclaimed. Central to her mistrust of expla nations and interpretations was Stein's often anguished belief that her thoughts could never really be matched to anyone else's. She was deeply troubled by this doubt as she wrote The Making of Americans , referring in that work to "the complete realization that no one can believe as you do about anything" as "complete disillusionment in living." Starting from this assumption that no one can ever really understand what someone else says or writes because of the inherent ambiguity of language, Stein not only decided to force her readers to confront that ambiguity, but also claimed it as a primary virtue of her writing. She announced triumphantly that "if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one." Stein's focus here is on relationships or process rather than on product--on the act of trying to become one with. rather than focusing on the ultimate result of that act.
Stein's thinking about understanding manifests itself in a number of dis tinctive ways in her writing, as do her theories of perception and of human psychology. Moreover. during the nearly fifty years of her writing career, her style developed in many related but perceptibly different stages. such as her "cubist" or her "cinema" phases. As a result, no single analysis can do more than describe the primary concerns and features of one of her stylistic periods. There are, however, three central concerns that underlie and at least partially account for all of the stages in the development of her style. These concerns are with the value of individual words, with repetition as the basic rhythm of existence, and with the related concept of "movement" in writing. Her artic ulations of these central concerns all run counter to her reader's expectations abom the purpose and function of language and of literature. Her writing surprised her readers in much the same w,ay that her penchant for playing only the white keys on a piano surprised and frustrated all bul the most patient of her listeners. One of Stein's goals was to return full meaning, value, and particularity to the words she used. "I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word," she explained of seemingly nonsense phrases such as "toasted Susie is my ice cream," or "mouse and mountain and a quiver, a quaint statue and pain in an exterior and silence more silence louder shows salmon a mischief intender." This sort of paratactic juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated words rarely occurs in Stein's novels, but represents a problem for her reader in many other ways in her writing. She frequently chose to stress or focus on a part or aspect of the object of her description that the reader normally does not consider. The "things" Stein saw and wrote of were not the "things" with which readers are familiar: where another observer might see a coin balanced on its edge. Stein might choose either of the descriptive extremes of seeing it literally as a thin rectangle, or figuratively as the essence of money. Characteristically, her most opaque parataxis refers to essences or processes rather than to objects or static concepts.
A related quirk in Stein's style results from her intellectual or emotional attachment to particular words and phrases at certain stages of her career. As she admitted in The Making of Americans ,
To be using a new word in my writing is to me a very difficult thing . . . . Using a word I have not yet been using in my writing is to me a very difficult and a peculiar feeling. Sometimes I am using a new one, sometimes I feel a new meaning in an old one, sometimes I like one I am very fond of that one that has many meanings many ways of being used.Stein said she had learned from Paul Cezanne that everything in a painting was related to everything else and that each pan of the painting was of equal importance--a blade of grass as important to the composition of the painting as a tree. She attempted to apply these two principles to the composition of her sentences, taking special delight in using normally "overlooked" words, arguing that articles, prepositions. and conjunctions--the transitive elements in grammar--are just as important and more interesting than substantives such as nouns and verbs. Her reassessment both of the value of words and of the conventions of description resulted in what Michael J. Hoffman in The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (1965) has described as Stein's "abstractionism." It also resulted in her including in her writing totally unexpected information in perplexingly paratactic word-strings.
A second constant in Stein's style is the pronounced repetition of words, phrases, and sentences, with no change or with only incremental progressions of sounds or associations. Works such as The Making of Americans and Three Lives contain long passages in which each sentence is a light variation on some core phrase. with great repetition of words even within a single sentence. Stein termed this phenomenon "insistence" rather than repetition, citing her former teacher, William James, as her philosophical authority. James's argu ment in his The Principles of Psychology (1890) that one must think of the identical recurrence of a fact in a fresh manner remarkably resembles Stein's contention that "in expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis." Repetition or insis tence is perhaps the central aspect of what has been called Stein's "cinema style," based on her claim that in writing The Making of Americans she was "doing what the cinema was doing." She added that her writing in that book was "like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in me."
Stein's discussion of "what the cinema was doing" appears in her Lectures in America and also suggests the third basic concern of her writing: movement. By "movement." she referred not to the movement of a message to its con clusion or the movement of a plot or narrative, but to "the essence of its going" of her prose, a timeless continuous presenl in the never-ending motion of consciousness. Stein also credits Cezanne with discovering this concern, "a feeling of movement inside the painting not a painting of a thing moving but the thing painted having inside it the existence of moving." She seemed to understand Cezanne's achievement in terms of William James's model of consciousness as an ever-flowing stream of thought. Accordingly. she used her writing not to record a scene or object or idea (products of thought}. but to try to capture the sense of the process of perceiving such things. Stein's subject is almost always really two things at once: whatever attracted her attention--caught her eye, entered her ear, or crossed her mind--and the mobile nature of reality, particularly as it is perceived by human conscious hess. In fact, Stein was usually more concerned with the nature of her own perception and with that of her reader than she was with its objects. She wanted to escape the conventions of linguistic representation, arbitrary arrangements similar to the "rules" for perspective in painting, and to present "something moving as moving is not as moving should be." As confusing as her resulting efforts sometimes are, her concern with motion makes sense as an attempt to mimic or evoke the nature of consciousness as she understood it.
From James at Harvard and possibly from Henri Bergson in Paris, Stein had learned that the best model for human consciousness was one that stressed the processual, ever-flowing nature of experience. She added to this belief her assumption that the essence of any subject could only be perceived and should only be represented through its motion, echoing Bergson's claim that "reality is mobility." Unfortunately, this belief led her writing into one of its many paradoxes: she could only attempt to represent the continuous stream of experience through the segmented. inherently sequential nature of lan guage. Streams flow; words do not. Instead, they proceed one by one, like the cars pulled by a train engine. While James would certainly have objected to Stein's sequential cinema model as an approximation of the stream of consciousness, her motion-obsessed writing probably suggests the flow of consciousness as well as does any literary style.
Written in 1903. but put out of her mind until 1932, and not published until 1950, Stein's Quod Erat Demonstrandum (first published as Things as They Are) is her most conventional novel. Its sentences employ no unexpected syntax or diction, its central concerns are clear, its time scheme is linear, and its characters are conventionally drawn. If anything. Stein's style in this first novel is markedly old-fashioned, including highly formal sentences that fre quently sport balanced serial constructions. "Adele vehemently and with much picturesque vividness explained her views and theories of manners. people and things, in all of which she was steadily opposed by Helen who differed fundamentally in all her convictions, aspirations and illusions." While its conventional style (crudely reminiscent of that of Henry James) is com pletely unlike that of any other Stein novel Q. E.D. is a very significant work for the consideration of Stein's career. Apart from convincingly refuting the suspicion of some of her detractors that Stein was incapable of rational writing, this book establishes her preoccupation with psychological typecasting and vaguely hints at the importance of repetition in her thinking and writing.
Q.E.D. charts the growth, turbulence, and eventual dissolution of the relationships among three young women: Adele, the book's central con sciousness, an obviously autobiographical figure; Helen Thomas, the object of Adele's love; and Mable Neathe, Adele's calculating rival for Helen's affection. These three characters closely parallel Stein, May Bookstaver, and Mabel Haynes, and the story. of their relationship is the story of Stein's first, agonizing love affair. While the novel follows these three young women for three years, not much happens. Most of the book relates conversations and correspondence between Adele and Helen, showing Adele's torment first from her not yet understood desire for Helen, then from her growing real ization that she is losing Helen to Mabel. Of principal interest to the reader is Stein's self-characterization in her portrayal of Adele.
Three Lives is easily Stein's best-known and most respected piece of:fiction. Technically three novellas, this work is unified by its three subjects, by its central concern with the nature of consciousness, and by its attempt to blend colloquial idioms with Stein's emerging style. here based largely on her under standing of Cezanne's principles of composition, particularly that "one thing was as important as another thing." "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena" are the three sections of this work. Anna and Lena are poor German immigrants who patiently work as servants in Bridgepoint. Baltimore: Melanctha is a young black woman who discovers sexuality and love, then turns from a frustrating relationship with a sincere young black doctor to a dissipative affair with a gambler. Since all three women are essen tially victimized by their surroundings and die at the end of their stories, this work is deterministic in the naturalist tradition, but Three Lives marks the transition from naturalism to modernism as Stein departs from nineteenth century literary conventions. She abandons conventional syntax to try to follow the movement of a consciousness rather than of events, and she devel ops a new narrative style only partially tied to linear chronology. The result is an interior narrative of consciousness in which Stein's prose style serves as the primary carrier of knowledge. Through the rhythms of her characters' speech and the rhythms of her narration, Stein gives her reader a sense of the basic rhythms of consciousness for these three women--what Stein would elsewhere refer to as their "bottom natures."
Possibly Stein's most widely celebrated piece of writing, "Melanctha" recasts the anguishing love triangle of Q.E.D. into the conflict between Melanctha and Jeff Campbell, whose inherently conflicting "bottom natures" or personality types parallel the conflict between Helen and Adele in the earlier work. "Melanctha" has been praised by Richard Wright, among others. as one of the first realistic and sympathetic renderings of black life by a white American author, but Melanctha's race is actually incidental to Stein's central concerns with finding a style to express the rhythms of personality and the frustrating cycles of love.
Brooks Landon