Abstract
As I anticipated in the introduction, if nearness of experience is the broad category of modernist fiction’s engagement with news discourse within their shared media ecology, then war reporting is a limit case. In this chapter, I trace the implications of endings in Gertrude Stein’s final memoir, Wars I Have Seen, through its close relation to the vivid and descriptive war reporting of World War II. Just as Everybody’s Autobiography is a species of autobiography that attempts to reconfigure its genre as a narrative of existing rather than of events and happenings, Wars I Have Seen operates as a species of war reporting that reflects Stein’s desire to represent war beyond the level of “happening,” which she sees as a limitation of war reporting. Instead, she develops an experimental form of reportage that attempts to represent “being existing,” during wartime. In her third “Narration” lecture, Stein argues that the ability to represent “being existing” rather than mere “happening” hinges crucially upon beginnings and endings: “if there is a beginning and ending to anything then it destroys the simplicity of something always happening.”1 Stein’s observation seems simple: the news never ends. As she writes, “there is no beginning and ending because every day is the same that is that every day has anything that it has happening.”2
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Notes
Gertrude Stein, “Narration, Lecture 3,” in Writings 1932–1946, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 350.
Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 100.
See also David M. Owens who argues, “It is a story of lovers existing in a time and place of war. The poem reflects how the war affects their lives and how they cope with the anxiety of it.” David M. Owens, “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Lifting Belly’ and the Great War,” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (Fall 1998), 608.
Gertrude Stein, “Lifting Belly,” in Writings, 1903–1932, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 415.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Writings, 1903–1932, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 815.
Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
Phoebe Stein Davis, “‘Even Cake Gets to Have Another Meaning’: History, Narrative, and ‘Daily Living’ in Gertrude Stein’s World War II Writings,” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998), 568–607.
Zofia Lesinska, “Gertrude Stein’s War Autobiographies: Reception, History, and Dialogue,” Literature Interpretation Theory 9.4 (April 1999), 313–342.
Liesl M. Olson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,” Twentieth Century Literature 49.3 (Fall 2003), 328–359.
Jill Purett, “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Emotional Autobiography’: A Body in Occupied France,” in New Essays on Life Writing and the Body, ed. Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 58–69.
Ibid., 26–27. Compare to Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), 50. There are several negligible misquotations in Malcolm’s version.
Gertrude Stein, dustcover of Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945).
Joseph J. Mathews, Reporting the Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), 193–194.
Ernie Pyle, “Battle and Breakout in Normandy,” in Reporting World War Two, Part Two: American Journalism 1944–1946, eds. Samuel Hynes, Anne Matthews, Nancy Caldwell Sorel, and Roger J. Spiller (New York: Library of America, 1995), 194.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. Selected Writings, Volume 4 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 396.
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© 2011 David Rando
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Rando, D. (2011). War. In: Modernist Fiction and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119666_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119666_6
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