Abstract
As Stein’s lecture tour reached its conclusion and some of her newly published books continued to sell poorly, she fell under increasing pressure from her publisher to produce another memoir. Before beginning, however, she set out to formalize her ideas in what is perhaps best referred to as a philosophical treatise entitled The Geographical History of America (1936). Free from the formal confines of the lecture format and the pressures of an immediate audience, The Geographical History returns to the obscure, but playful, meditative style that characterizes many of Stein’s earlier works, including Four in America. It also marks a return, though somewhat more tentatively, to the synthetic strategies Stein employed in that text. This book simplifies her previous formulations by recasting the opposition between “serving God” and “serving Mammon” into essentialized terms: “human nature” and the “human mind.” All people contain varying degrees of both elements and can potentially operate from either impulse, much as Stein’s earlier formulation posited that writers who understood the difference between “writing as it is written” and “writing as it is going to be written” could potentially have some control over their approach to art.
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Notes
Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), 101–08.
Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars(Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 125.
Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 176. My account of Stein’s publishing history has been drawn from a variety of sources.
For useful secondary accounts of these events, and Stein’s lecture tour more generally, see Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 543–50
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), 379–415
Linda Wagner-Martin, “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 208–20.
For published correspondence pertaining to the tour, see Edward Burns, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946, 2 vols., vol. 1 (1913–1935) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 265–432
Edward Burns, Ulla E. Dydo, and William Rice, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 3–26
Donald Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 280–99.
For several examples of the negative criticism that The Geographical History received, see Kirk Curnutt, ed., The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 100–03.
Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, 2 vols., vol. 2, Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946 (New York: Random House, 1936), 483.
Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces (New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1970), 89. Michel Foucault’s comments on beginnings in his lecture, “The Discourse on Language,” provide an interesting comparison with Stein’s formulations. Stein’s mistrust of beginnings arises from her belief in the ahistorical nature of the human mind. According to her formulation, any material or historical necessity, such as the necessity to begin or end, is a distortion of this entity. Foucault, in a similar fashion, bemoans the process of beginning, but he uses these statements to elaborate on anxieties about the historical nature of discourse, anxieties implicitly present in Stein’s text. See Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 148.
Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 209 fn. 57.
Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), 145.
Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 150.
Gertrude Stein, “Arthur A Grammar,” in How to Write (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), 81. Stein employs a similar approach in “Patriarchal Poetry,” where she juxtaposes her own playful poetic language with patriarchal language, but ultimately concludes that some elements of patriarchal poetry could be salvaged.
For a more extended reading of this piece, see Laurel Bollinger, “‘One as One Not Mistaken but Interrupted’: Gertrude Stein’s Exploration of Identity in the 1930s,” Centennial Review 43, no. 2 (1999): 231–42. Susan Schultz makes this argument again with respect to “Stanzas in Meditation,” which she reads as a necessarily failed attempt to eliminate the audience from writing.
See Susan M. Schultz, “Gertrude Stein’s Self-Advertisement,” Raritan 12, no. 2 (1992). Many critics also read The Autobiography as a text that negotiates a wide variety of contradictions.
For one provocative example, see James Breslin, “Gertrude Stein and the Problems of Autobiography,” Georgia Review 33 (1979).
Barbara Mossberg, “Double Exposures: Emily Dickinson’s and Gertrude Stein’s Anti-Autobiographies,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 1–2 (1989): 245.
For an early, predominantly theoretical, exploration of Stein’s autobiographies, see S. C. Neuman, Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1979).
For provocative readings of Stein’s lesbianism, see Karin Cope, “‘Moral Deviancy’ and Contemporary Feminism: The Judgment of Gertrude Stein,” in Feminism Beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Catharine R. Stimpson, “Gertrice/Altrude, Stein Toklas and the Paradox of the Happy Marriage,” in Mothering the Mind, Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984).
See Paul John Eakin, “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12, no. 2 (2004).
Philippe Lejeune’s famous definition of autobiography shows a particularly strong individualistic bias: “Definition: Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.” See Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 4. Only recently have critics begun to explore the theoretical implications of joint authorship.
For example, see Paul John Eakin, The Ethics of Life Writing (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 38.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993), 173. Barbara Will reads Everybody’s Autobiography in a similar fashion, claiming that “[Stein’s] story, the story of a ‘genius,’ is potentially the story of ‘everybody.’” Will’s reading is far more attuned to the nuances of Stein’s text and devotes slightly more attention to what she sees as Stein’s “anxiety about the de-personalizing and de-hierarchizing effects of the story which [she] is engaged in telling.”
Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 9, 154. My own reading differs in that I see Stein as profoundly aware of the complexities of her own position and Everybody’s Autobiography as her attempt to work with such difficulties.
Coincidentally, it is precisely this tendency to treat art abstractly that allowed Stein to make the now famous comparison between her own writing and Picasso’s early Cubist paintings. Of all the work done analyzing her comparison, Marianne DeKoven has provided some of the most consistently insightful and provocative analyses in this area. For example, see Marianne DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism,” Contemporary Literature 22, no. 1 (1981).
For an examination of ownership and identity in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, see Leigh Gilmore, “A Signature of Lesbian Autobiography: “Gertrice/Altrude,”“ Prose Studies 14, no. 2 (1991).
For a discussion of cultural difference in Everybody’s Autobiography, see Shawn H. Alfrey, “‘Oriental Peaceful Penetration’: Gertrude Stein and the End of Europe,” Massachusetts Review 38, no. 3 (1997).
Ulla E. Dydo, “Stanzas in Meditation: The Other Autobiography,” Chicago Review 35, no. 2 (1985): 4–5.
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 246.
Gertrude Stein, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 103.
For a more detailed theoretical discussion of Stein’s theories of representation, see Alan R. Knight, “Explaining Composition: Gertrude Stein and the Problem of Representation,” English Studies in Canada 13, no. 4 (1987).
For provocative arguments about Stein’s language in the context of her early experimental texts, see Cyrena N. Pondrom, “An Introduction to the Achievement of Gertrude Stein,” in Geography and Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993)
Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance (New Haven, CT, 1978).
Nancy Blake, “Everybody’s Autobiography: Identity and Absence,” RANAM 15 (1982): 138.
David E. Johnson, “ ‘Writing in the Dark’: The Political Fictions of American Travel Writing,” American Literary History 7, no. 1 (1995): 2.
Lynn Z. Bloom, “Gertrude Is Alice Is Everybody: Innovation and Point of View in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiographies,” Twentieth Century Literature 24, no. 1 (1978): 84.
For a more detailed examination of Stein’s attitude toward embodiment, see Susan McCabe, “‘Delight in Dislocation’: The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray,” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001).
Though many critics have commented on the theoretical premises underlying Stein’s use of the “continuous present,” much less attention has been paid to the specific ways in which this style shapes her texts. For a theoretical account of the “continuous present” in Stein’s autobiographies, see Shirley Swartz, “The Autobiography as Generic ‘Continuous Present’: Paris France and Wars I Have Seen,” English Studies in Canada 4, no. 2 (1978).
For an examination of Stein’s “continuous present” in relation to twentieth-century scientific thought, see Robert Chodat, “Sense, Science, and the Interpretations of Gertrude Stein,” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 4 (2005).
Linda Wagner-Martin, “Gertrude Stein,” in Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, ed. Ann Shapiro (London: Greenday Press, 1994), 436.
G. F. Mitrano, Gertrude Stein: Woman without Qualities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 136–37.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 83.
Kirk Curnutt, drawing on a similar sense of Stein’s disruptive narrative techniques, refers to this autobiography as a “haphazard picaresque.” Kirk Curnutt, “Inside and Outside: Gertrude Stein on Identity, Celebrity, and Authenticity,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 2 (1999): 304.
Stein’s awareness of the potential obscurity of everyday language could offer another useful connection between her work and that of Ernest Hemingway, who was briefly a member of her artistic circle. For useful accounts of Stein’s influence on Hemingway, see Charles Harmon Cagle, “‘Cezanne Nearly Did’: Stein, Cezanne, and Hemingway,” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 23, no. 3 (1982)
Susan J. Wolfe, “Insistence and Simplicity: The Influence of Gertrude Stein on Ernest Hemingway,” South Dakota Review 35, no. 3 (1997).
Lansing Warren, “Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics,” New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934, 9.
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© 2011 Timothy W. Galow
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Galow, T.W. (2011). After the Tour: Naturalized Aesthetics and Systematized Contradictions. In: Writing Celebrity. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119499_4
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