The Pleasures of Solipsism for Writers and Philosophers

Abstract

This chapter is a meditation on the appeal that solipsism exerts across literature, early twentieth-century European philosophy, and gender-sex criticism. The desire to distance the world frequently belongs to worldly subjects. But whether a world-weary protagonist, a scholar immersed in the world’s primordial appearances, or the historically persecuted, none can outrun the ‘interworld’, what Merleau-Ponty philosophises as the intersubjective dimension of all human existence. Yet Gertrude Stein’s heroine Ida—a character somewhere between a Husserlian phenomenologist and Edelmanian misanthrope—leads readers along an exercise in futility for much of the 1941 eponymous novel. Itinerant, attracted to both sexes, and schizophrenic, Ida both embodies the spirit behind Stein’s most hermetic manner of writing and attempts to act out its purest expression: utter aloneness.