The Globe is All One:
Stacy Lavin is an independent scholar from Durham, NC, where she received a PhD in English in 2008 from Duke University for a dissertation entitled
This is the source
noisyframeworks, which shapes the purpose and form of Stein's notoriously difficult prose poem,
Stein takes on information overload.
The Globe is All One:
Organization is a failure and everywhere the world over everybody has to begin again.Gertrude Stein,
When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass…. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, [the human mind] snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.Vannevar Bush,
In the final passage of one of her last brief essays,
as destructive as all that(i.e. the atomic bomb), Stein implies that atomic military technology has drawn much
if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.Thus, as if to account sociologically for what must now be deemed merely
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
The vagueness of Stein’s reference to everybody
get it?) throws into relief the sense
of sheer listening
that everybody gets
This great quantity of information, moreover, is what
alienates one from constitutive elements of self, namely common
sense
and being natural
(human nature, perhaps?);
according to Stein’s logic in this essay, this alienation of one’s
common sense
leaves one susceptible to an overwhelming fear,
which results in one becoming preoccupied with the atomic bomb. As if in an attempt
to remedy this alienating effect, Stein redirects both the essay’s topic as well as
its reader’s attention with her last sentence. This is a nice
story,
she writes, indicating with what at first seems to be a
non-sequitur, that neither a bombardment of information, nor its destruction of one’s
common sense,
can undermine the cheerful, intractable,
utterly human practice of narration.
It would seem that, as long as there is a mode of narrative capable of comprehending and inoculating the human mind against modernity’s ever-widening informational flow, Stein fears no evil. In this paper, I argue that Stein’s last memoir of the war years,
nineteenth century,whose science, politics, and literature saw the globe as a canvas of commodities to be controlled and stabilized, Stein finds the
twentieth century(whose commencement she dates irreverently to approximately 1942) to be characterized by a global interconnectedness so thorough that the question is not how to stabilize meaning but how to maintain identity
The kind of rhetorical maneuver that Stein performs in her remarks about the atomic
bomb would lift easily into the vernacular of our twenty-first century in which
steady streams of news and entertainment cross the globe and travel into our homes
and personal electronic devices along numerous channels of communication each and
every day. In its current phase of morphogenesis, the dominant usage of
most evident in the rising fear of job skill obsolescence
that has induced a marked increase in experienced workers going back to
school — often community colleges — to upgrade their skills for a rapidly
changing work environment
so
much information
and overly indulgent in habits of listening, with a loss
of common sense
and the failure to remember to be natural
? What context shapes and expresses Stein’s recognition of
interest
in the atomic bomb enacts a secondary
vaporization
of the corporeal subject. On another level, the
attention she pays to the human mind
also attests to
anxieties about subjective composition that were contained by the discourses of
science and technology at the end of World War II.
If Stein invokes nice story,
Stein highlights a destabilization of the boundary separating communication
technologies and human life — a destabilization that literary and historical
narratives would later situate in the advent of the cybernetic worldview. The project
of cybernetics and Stein’s (especially later) writing, moreover, reflect common
cultural concerns and experiences situated in the changing scientific, military, and
political practices of the Second World War. If the structure of literary narrative
was altered by the cybernetic desire to view the human being as simply one module in
a web of communication systems without stable hierarchy or linearity — i.e., in a
As a response to the realization that human minds had begun to be inundated with information, Stein enacts in
genius, of being most intensely alive
to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if there were one thing.It is as if, she suggests, there were always at least an implied listener for every speaker and vice-versa, a dynamic communication channel formed by dialogue (even if intrasubjective) rather than just one
thing.When, at the conclusion of her brief essay, she writes
This is a nice story,she retroactively imbues the text with a dialogic voice, proving that
In one sense, Stein’s essay succeeds in evading its own topic, subverting the
referential function of writing by becoming a playful meta-commentary upon the
essay’s narrative potential. For Stein, that is, to reflect on the atom bomb is to
reflect on
While disturbingly ironic, the dismissive tone of Stein’s
…the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to thetotal extinction of human civilization .
bombardreaders with the sense of the military campaign’s overwhelming strength. Governments in both the U.S. and Japan quieted questions about the mysterious
disease x,symptoms of which would ultimately be diagnosed as radiation poisoning from atomic fallout, but stories of the bombs’ terrifying power were constructed and disseminated freely in Allied news reports. After the Hiroshima bombing, President Truman broadcast a message threatening utter destruction for Japan unless the country’s leaders surrendered unconditionally. The message, which would be excerpted in western news channels in the following days, reached Japan on the day of the Hiroshima bombing and stated that the U.S. was
…now prepared to obliterate rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have....It was to spare the Japanese from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on earth.
explodedin what must be seen retrospectively as more than an extended metaphor; this news explosion was a sign of the strategy of fear tactics enabled by atomic power and international communications technology, a strategy that would pervade the Cold War era.
A BBC news story of 9 August 1945 similarly conveyed an image of information
bombardment: More than three million leaflets were dropped over the country
today from American aeroplanes warning the Japanese people that more atomic
weapons would be used
again and again
to destroy
the country unless they ended the war forthwith.obliteration
of every productive enterprise
of the nation as a whole, and the
performative bombing
of the land with a redundancy of print
messages — on leaflets,
as if to call to mind the
individual-oriented practice of reading a book or newspaper — constitute a two-front
psychological assault on both the agency of the collectivity and on that of the
individual.
The leaflet bombing
was an accessory to the unprecedented
display of power to end or sustain life of which the nation had just proven itself
capable. And by deploying her theory of genius
in
geniusas an heuristic model for writing, I contend that
geniusemerges here.
emergence of a public audiencefor Stein’s writing after the publication of
passivesyntax of the translations, to be Stein’s shift away from her
complex sense ofgeniusas a guiding aesthetic principle
Though she often intimated her commitment to teaching her readers and audiences how
to cultivate and maintain genius,
she rarely indicated
genius
was
something the twenty-first century will readily recognize: information. Stein, whose
humanism depended on the concept of genius,
as she
defined it, was like an early information theorist in that she was committed to
understanding and elucidating the way in which the human mind makes sense of and uses
information.
The salient issue raised by considering Stein’s experimental writing in conjunction
with the information theory of the 1940s lies in the way that both projects began to
model communication on the constituent technologies of everyday practices: In Stein’s
case, these were literary and artistic, and in Claude Shannon’s and Norbert Wiener’s,
they were electrical and computational. But both would reflect a growing conception
of
Stein, through her radical literary experiments like
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
The capitalized heading preceding the paragraph pretends to draw the reader into a
familiar hermeneutical process. It seems as if to say, The
paragraph will consist of the author’s description of the object referred to in
the heading.
The familiar referential design instructs the eye (as
traditionally do the titles of works in the pictorial arts, which of course heavily
inflected Stein’s writing experiments) to regard the heading as the primary, or least
ambiguous sign of the
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.As Peter Schwenger has suggested in a reading that correctly challenges an interpretation of
senselessmateriality of words existing on their own, a carafe is plausibly, in fact,
a blind glass.Unlike its
cousin,the drinking
glass,the carafe has a flared lip, which
makes it extremely difficult to drink from….TheThe carafe, a vessel ofeyethat is the vessel’s opening has, then, a certain negative quality that might be equated to blindness.
hurt color
kindof
blindanimal represented
in glass.The overdetermined nature of the object in this stanza works to figure it as
an arrangement in a system to pointing,
nothing strange,and while unusual and unfamiliar,
not unordered in not resemblingwhat the reader expects to find in poetry. Like the
WAY LAY VEGETABLEof
suppose it is ex.That is, the reader can only suppose that the vegetable garden will be waylaid for any number of things, such as a visit from
sam,or preparation for a
meal; or the vegetable might be saved this ambush by
a cakeeaten before the vegetables can be picked and thus not harming the
nervous bed rowsfor another day (yet another
new mercy).
supposesense:
If comparing a piece that is a size that is recognized as not a size but a piece, comparing a piece with what is not recognized but what is used as it is held by holding, comparing these two comes to be repeated. Suppose they are put together, suppose that there is an interruption….Is there an exchange, is there a resemblance to the sky which is admitted to be there and the stars which can be seen. Is there. That was a question. There was no certainty. Fitting a failing meant that any two were indifferent and yet they were all connecting that.
This passage outlines the processes involved in Stein’s theory of writing. The
habitual repetition of an unfamiliar comparison of two words can produce qan interruption
of the sense one or both of those words make.
Words can exchange
their resemblance
to things
— abstract concepts, x-rays, or, like
the sky, the vault of empty space which lacks particular location — for resemblances
to things which can be seen
and mapped (even if only as
the trace of their, perhaps, now extinguished presence). Stein finds, in
indifferentthat they are exempt from the system
connecting
failingand
fittings— as in the knowledge gained having tried on a dress in the wrong size. What Stein sees, when she looks at objects, food, and rooms, is the uncertainty underwriting the process of sense-making; like a question, the act of reference implies uncertainty.
Three years after Stein invoked system to pointing.
The fundamental problem of communication is that of
reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at
another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or
are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual
entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the
engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one
selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to
operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be
chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.
In a sense, Shannon seeks to generate a mathematical system of communication akin to
Stein’s theory of language. To ensure proper operation, the message, for Shannon, had
to remain a question of possible selection, since at the time of
design,
the electronic receiver could not know which would constitute the
consequential bit
of information transmitted. Shannon’s
work drew from the technical definition of information,
which, as I stated above, had been worked out by his predecessors at Bell
Laboratories. In what may have amounted to a trivial decision, Hartley substituted
the word possible
messages
which the receiver can select.
The
content of communication in this model is possibility to select. While one cannot
say, despite her transgressions of conventional word usage, that Stein obviates or
ignores semantics, it is fair to say that her use of syntax was self-consciously
informational,
in the sense of Shannon’s theory of
communication.
That Stein and the cyberneticists demonstrate congruent theories of information
belies the distance between experimental writing and scientific research at
mid-century. This is not to say that there was collaboration or even recognition
across the two cultures in this instance. In fact, the only recognition that Stein
received from the sciences occurred when, in 1934, B.F. Skinner patently
automatic writing.However, Stein not only denied that she wrote in this mode but also claimed such writing to be impossible. Unlike Solomons, Stein did not believe in automatic writing:
There are automatic movements but not automatic writing. Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically
[the human mind] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
web-like, associational human mind that Bush envisioned his
recordof all extant scientific knowledge. In describing the organizing principle of what now sounds uncannily like the modern personal computer, Bush’s verbal schema of the Memex could have as easily described the organizing principle of Stein’s experimental (
Stein’s informational treatment of language and meaning reemerged in prose as she searched for an appropriate form by which to describe global connectivity in the twentieth century. While Stein’s discovery of the informational nature of language in
In the early pages of
the gradual domination of the globe as piece by piece by piece it became known and became all of a piece….The totalization of the globe through colonization, translation, assimilation, and electronic communication technologies, for Stein, characterizes
the 19th century,which, however chronologically denoted, anachronistically includes the period of the two World Wars as well. Only in 1943 would she concede that the
19th centurywas coming to an end because
[n]ow they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one….For Stein, the century
turnswhen geopolitical and technological mobilization make the globe a known object and render obsolete any
dreams of a single language.
all one.
While Zamenhoff’s Esperanto may offer Stein a working symbol for the logic of 19th-century
global connection, she spends the rest of the
memoir mining her experiences in occupied France for a similarly objective correlative,
as it were, for the logic of 20th-century global
connection. The most consistent theme to emerge from her records, however, is
uncertainty. On one level, Stein draws our attention to the uncertainty she and
fellow French countryside villagers felt about what course the war would take, who to
trust, and what the world would look like after the war. On another level, the
uncertainty is about Stein’s ambivalent national affiliation and moments of
alienation from her American and Jewish identities. Though Stein might have composed
19th-centurycertainty, Stein hopes to find that her ruminations, her encounters with French villagers, Vichy officials, and, finally, American GIs, will perform the pattern of identity-production and global contact characteristic of the yet unknown postwar world order.
At stake in approaching Stein’s memoir as a cultural inscription of the experience of
a global network is the assumption that such experience did not demand a new
narrative form until complex negotiations between what Manuel Castells calls the Net and the Self
became the main source of meaning for
individuals. Leaving this assumption untroubled encourages one to seek for the
network narrative’s formal prototype, as it were, in postmodern texts like Thomas
Pynchon’s
in the United States, and to some extent in California
Reading
Stein’s disembodied words inhabit the enchanted forest ofAs You Like It , where figures join and part, marriages are made and unmade, names and identities change naturally. Free to change their referential ties, Stein’s texts are written in the language of true comedy, where nothing is absolute, hierarchies are not respected, roles and indignities can change, andthe only authority is the wide democratic freedom of the word that can move, make, and remake itself .
Disembodied wordsenjoy a
conjugalfreedom, in which a
naturallyendowed instability of identity translates into
the wide democratic freedom of the word.I would by no means disagree with Dydo’s claims that Stein’s poetics push against the boundaries of verbal convention to the extent that her words play with, more than they submissively
respect,any hierarchies of order. But in glossing Stein’s poetics as a
democraticchallenge to anything
absolute(except, perhaps, for the absolute
freedomof movement of the Steinian word), Dydo commits her reading to a literary theory which appears tenuous when confronted by the ideological differences animating the respective political agency of Dydo and her subject, especially considering the deeply entrenched political ambiguities of Stein’s historical situation during World War II.
The way that Stein scholarship has developed since 1996, moreover, has especially
vexed the question of what it means to see politics in Stein’s poetics. Wanda Van
Dusen’s outing
anti-patriarchalpoetics. Van Dusen’s Stein writes in thrall to reified images of the national leader, for whom she willingly erases any trace of her Jewish and lesbian identity, and whom she allows to eclipse her antipatriarchal poetics in a fetishized image of the masculine war hero.
As Van Dusen’s paper implies, it is almost as difficult to account for these radically different Steins, presented by the juxtaposition of the author of
presymbolicor the
choraldisruption of the symbolic register, then, circumscribes Stein’s writing with a formula in which mobile, disembodied words that act to dissipate the sense of subjective presence in the text are equated with a certain degree of freedom or agency. This renders a nuanced analysis of her political investments problematic at best.
Barbara Will, who entered the conversation on Stein’s Vichy
collaboration
in 2004, considers the alarming passivity of
the translations themselves as the sign of Stein’s recognition of the
riant
or otherwise). The literal renderings of French
syntactical constructions which Will highlights in manuscripts of the translations
attest, she argues, to a passivity implying the defeat of Stein’s
In 1999, John Whittier-Ferguson had made a stronger challenge to the portrait of Stein as the fascist mouthpiece swooning in the presence of French figures of authority. He claimed that Van Dusen assimilates the identity politics of the 1990s to the political climate in which Stein wrote, committing the same conceptual archaism characteristic of the fascist ideology she perceives inscribed in Stein’s
politicspossesses for Stein’s historical moment compared with that of a student like Van Dusen.
materialistanalysis, Whittier-Ferguson writes,
…the very familiarity of Stein's failings to Van Dusen — and the utter familiarity of the terms in which Van Dusen finds fault with Stein — ...betray Van Dusen's by no means uncommon abridgment of time's passing….The political ruler Van Dusen applies to Stein is calibrated for 1996:politicsis a practice that begins and ends with a forthright assertion of one's identity and involves a careful measuring of one's socioeconomic, racial, and sexual positions vis-à-vis the dominant sociopolitical order…. Even before we turn to Pétain and Stein, we should understand that being a Jew in occupied France, rather than encouraging a public declaration of solidarity with marginalized populations or recriminations against France's puppet government, would have been more likely to encourage Stein in her longstanding preference for avoiding risky, public, political stands
In her reading of the introduction to the translated speeches of Marechal Pétain, Van
Dusen sees Stein’s expression of national affiliation as reified and essentialized;
Will and Whittier-Ferguson would like to comprehend her relationship to
nation
as a more complicated condition of her writing during
the forties. Building upon their inquiries, the analysis that follows suggests that
Stein’s last memoir expresses the complicated condition of deriving meaning at a time
in which not only national identity but also modernity itself became tenuous
ontological categories.
The daily experience of living through World War II, with its unpredictable
disappearances, incessantly shifting political boundaries, and increasingly prominent
aural communications media (especially radio), destabilizes the structures of the
material and cognitive environment in which Stein writes. Following
Whittier-Ferguson’s continued work on Stein’s war writings, I agree that war must be
understood as a conscious factor in Stein’s compositional theories and practices. One
does not do enough merely to take war as a crucial
… the phenomenon of war is a manifestation and a crucial cause of the excitements and horrors of modernity. These excitements and horrors are as much aesthetic and ontological as they are sociopolitical and military. And in her intimate conjoining of the relations of war and art, Stein displays her modernity every bit as much as she does in her gnostic, avant-garde writings.
intimate conjoining of the relations of war and artwhich, like her more
gnostic, avant-gardeexperiments, seeks to divine and represent the mechanisms and processes by which the mind forms like a pearl around the grain of the word. But the experiences which Stein records in this memoir reveal that it is no longer simply art and words that circulate in unpredictable oscillations of pattern and randomness; rather, the categories by which one might define oneself during war — enemy, ally, American, French, German — begin to quake and crumble into pieces which Stein reconstructs into a network of significations and identities which admit of no rest, no comfort, no essences, only encounters with possibilities of meaning which can be neither anticipated nor stabilized. Departing from Whittier-Ferguson, however, I believe that Stein ceases simply to
display[] her modernity; in
By the time Stein wrote of her experiences in World War II, she had already
interpolated war into her theory of the modern composition
and
its expression in the writing of the period. The First World War had accelerated the
literary and artistic modernist revolution and had created conditions of aesthetic
appreciation such that, as Stein said in her interwar lecture,
...we who created the expression of the modern composition were to be recognized before we were dead….And so war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years.
the contemporary composition.It is important to note that, by
composition,Stein signifies not how one sees the world or what there is
whatDuring World War I, as Stein explains, disillusionment with an older faith in reason and progress modulated knowledge production and accelerated epistemic change such that thoseis seen.
who created the expression of the modern compositionwould gain recognition in their lifetimes.
But if Stein’s 1926 lecture demonstrates the modern composition in terms of the
systematic, rational process of explanation,
her 1945 memoir
demonstrates it in terms of the unpredictable, shifting knowledge and experience she
accrues during her peregrinations through occupied France. Just as her prose poetry
in
certainknowledge. She writes,
…when I was a baby and then on to fourteen, the nineteenth century was full on. In the nineteenth century, there was reading, there was evolution, there was war and anti-war which was the same thing, and there was eating.
Stein appears here to characterize time in terms of linear movements; she seems to
say that the nineteenth century was a time when evolution came into vogue and
sentiment about war was utterly conflicted. But that there was
eating
eating
in the twentieth century? Indeed, by imbuing this
temporal construction of the nineteenth century with the quotidian narrative of her
personal history (which includes unremarkable habits like eating), Stein destabilizes
the very temporal grounds on which she proposes to stand. She continues, When I was then I liked revolutions I liked to eat I liked to
eat I liked to cry not in real life but in books in real life there was nothing
much to cry about but in books dear me, it was wonderful there was so much to
cry about and then there was evolution. Evolution was all over my childhood,
walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution,
biological and botanical evolution, with music as a background for emotion and
books as reality, and a great deal of fresh air as a necessity, and a great
deal of eating as an excitement and as an orgy….
the world was full of evolution
; books, music, and walking
in the fresh air
constituted her encounters with the
real
world of narrative and emotion; and food was
merely a diversion.
The nineteenth century ends, moreover, not according to the dictates of conventional
chronology, but rather, when the aestheticist worldview, which it represents for
Stein, is killed
by war: The world comprising music as a background for emotion and books as a reality
is
both Stein’s childhood and the 19th century (It was all that
between babyhood and fourteen
), both of which, she suggests, have lived on
borrowed time ever since: [T]he nineteenth century dies hard all centuries do that is
why the last war to kill it is so long, it is still being killed now in
1942…
Though she mobilizes war to describe the anachronous temporal rift between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Stein also exposes the mutability of the
narratives underwriting geopolitical military goals. The twentieth century begins,
that is, when the global access of information through radio, undermines the
narrative seduction of territorial conquest along with the idea of
nothing more interesting in the nineteenth century than little
by little realizing the detail of natural selection in insects flowers and
birds and butterflies and comparing things and animals and noticing protective
coloring nothing more interesting, and this made the nineteenth century what it
is, the white man’s burden, the gradual domination of the globe as piece by
piece by piece it became known and became all of a piece, and the hope of
Esperanto or a universal language. Now they can do the radio in so many
languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should
not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can
hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing so what is the use of
conquering, and so the nineteenth century now in ’43 is slowly coming to an
end.
speciation
of living organisms constituted the
nineteenth-century narrative girding aesthetic appreciation and territorial
exploration to the projects of imperial expansion and colonial conquest, there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe
is all one.
Stein’s assessment of the causes of war may be naïve, however,
by exposing this naiveté she implicates herself in an intellectual movement which
sought evidence of a universal notion of humanity in deep structures; Freud’s
unconscious, for instance, can be seen as a psychological Esperanto, a structure
embedded within the mind which could facilitate an understanding of the processes and
affects of every individual Now
that they can do the radio in so many
languages,
Stein writes, such deep structures have disappeared from the
scientific and artistic narratives of the slowly-awakening twentieth century.
If Stein displays translations between science, war, technology, and social
experience, she does so to expose the absence of a new, 20th-century, narrative of
purification. Without the ability to assimilate the goals of scientists, armies, and
individuals into a single human
category, Stein cannot maintain
a sense of being modern. Rather, as she suggests by asking anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing so what is the
use of conquering[?],
the natural correspondence between science, war, and
technology no longer holds up to scrutiny. War persists, even as she writes and
despite anything the nineteenth century taught her. Thus, the first feat Stein
accomplishes within her memoir is to introduce her reader to the twentieth century,
characterized as a temporality without a story.
Stein exposes her version of the 19th-century master narrative (that progress and discovery will lead to Utopian civilization) to highlight its insufficiency as a way to represent or understand the unpredictable cultural and political circumstances of World War II. To compensate for this insufficiency, Stein, in the manner of James Joyce’s
when I was a baby and then on to fourteen...); but whereas the first few pages of the narrative appear grounded in the periodizing construct of the individual’s phases of life, the relative distance between past and present soon collapses under the pressure of Stein’s need to make sense of what she sees during World War II. The grounding construct of her narrative thus begins to look less clear. She writes,
Mediaeval means, that life and place and the crops you plant and your wife and children, all are uncertain….And now and here, it is like that, you take a train, you disappear, you move away your house is gone, your children too, your crops are taken away….So at fifteen there comes to be a realization of what living was in mediaeval times and as a pioneer. It is very near. And now in 1943 it is here….And here and now in 1943, now that the war is coming to an end, everybody that is nobody knows whether there is or is not any future and at fifteen it is like that everybody and nobody knows whether there is or is not any future.
The uncertain
state of being mediaeval
characterizes both the present moment, in which people and
things can vanish unaccountably. But it also characterizes the adolescent period in
which everything is new and unknown to one, as to a pioneer.
Stein subverts the narrative construct which gives priority to
past experiences when describing present ones –the fifteen-year-old realization of what living was in mediaeval times
is now
here
in 1943 — by bringing two stories so very near
that what stands out most clearly amid the
uncertainty of both present and future is the rhyme near/here.
That is, by looping back to the experience of uncertainty
at fifteen,
Stein’s meditations on the present yield
no further knowledge but lead her into an incessant cycle of reflexivity. In essence,
Stein offers her reader a modernist narrative with a difference: She does not deploy
deep history simply to create an encyclopedic frame for modern experience, but again
shows how living through the war in occupied territory has undermined her ability to
see the 20th century as a modern phenomenon.
Like many of her contemporaries who were experimenting with narrative form, Stein
worked against the grain of received genres. Without a narrative form capable of
purifying
the admixtures of scientific and military
interests, historical and personal temporalities, Stein’s memoir devolves into mainly
a string of anecdotal stories about the direction of the war and the shape of the
postwar world. But instead of submitting completely to the whimsical narrative
hybrids of the contemporary composition, she punctuates the rumor and speculation
with compensatory passages that exude strong (albeit spurious) certainty. For
example, Stein’s narrative erupts into a strangely conclusive meditation on the
uniqueness of national aesthetics. Deprived of letters and newspapers, she observes
what she can about the world beyond her remote village in the Rhone Valley by tuning
into her wireless. As if having found a new medium on which to base an expression of
her present moment, she renders the cultural imprint that each nation leaves in its
broadcast announcement: The English always begin with Here is London, or the BBC home
service, or the overseas service, always part of a pleasant home life, of
supreme importance to any English man or any English woman. The Americans say
with poetry and fire, This is the Voice of America, and then with modesty and
good neighborliness, one of the United Nations, it is the voice of America
speaking to you across the Atlantic. Then the Frenchman say, Frenchman [sic]
speaking to Frenchmen, they always begin like that, and the Belgians are simple
and direct, they just announce, radio Belge, and the national anthem, and the
Frenchman [sic] also say, Honor and Country, and the Swiss so politely say, the
studio of Geneva, at the instant of the broadcasting station of Berne will give
you the latest news, and Italy says live Mussolini live Italy, and they make a
bird noise and then they start, and Germany starts like this, Germany calling,
Germany calling.
Frenchman,
which I find unevenly in copies issued by Brilliance
Books in 1984 and by B.T. Batesford Ltd. in 1945, to be editorial
oversights.
In the distinctness of each national personality, we learn, lies a possible
explanation as to why war persists even though the globe is all
one.
After ventriloquizing the peculiar style in which each country
announced it radio hour, she writes, In the last war I said that the camouflage was the distinctive
characteristic of each country, each nation stamped itself upon its camouflage,
but in this war it is the heading of the broadcast that makes national life so
complete and determined. It is that a nation is even stronger than the
personality of anyone, it certainly is so nations must go on, they certainly
must.
it certainly is/so
nations must go on
or it certainly is so/nations must
go on
or it certainly is so [that] nations must go
on
), the reader hears a fanatical enthusiasm for the overpowering strength
of national identity.
Though omitting punctuation is not uncommon for Stein, who is known for deliberately
leaving syntax indeterminate, we might read her failure to indicate a pause here,
before the phrases a nation is
and so nations must,
as the creation of a voice so excited that it forgets to
accent its own words. It speaks, that is, in a manner Stein had come to know as
hysterical
during her days studying under the tutelage of
psychologist William James. James based his theory of the
disintegration of ideas and functions, which, when united, form the personal
consciousness
— and remained Stein’s mentor for years after she left
Harvard Annex and then Johns Hopkins medical school. According to the study on Normal
Motor Automatism that Stein published in the late nineties, hysteria is a disease of
attention
large number of acts ordinarily called
intelligent, such as reading, writing, etc. can go on quite automatically in
ordinary people
when adequately distracted. Such automatism or non-voluntary
activity was often monotonous and marked by
its perfect ease…smoothness…perfect characterlessness, and
unaccented pencil movement
unaccented,
sentence of Stein’s
passage on nations performs this hysterical logic, in which the excitement of
realizing complete and
determined
— or perhaps
Polarizations of national identity, Stein shows us, are entailed upon the
contemporary composition (the international network) no less than they were before
the globe was all one.
Indeed, the instability of
national identity amid the dynamic international network of the 1940s becomes the
dominant theme of the remainder of
hystericalimpassivity about the strength, endurance, and determination (or determinacy) of nations is also the Stein who sees how the war has created shifting, international, political and economic networks.
The bipolar
manner in which Stein deals with the value
of national identity in the latter pages of her memoir echoes the kind of concerns
she had expressed in a series of short essays in 1936 (see
...any way it is the first of May nineteen forty four...and markers like
[i]t is now nearly the fifteenth of Maydo not undermine the argument that
determinedas the nations she hears in the radio broadcasts. Recounting a conversation she had with a friend about
after war, and the future organization of the world,Stein writes,
...I realized suddenly and completely, that really gold has almost a religious quality it really has and that this is the reason it is always the standard of money, it has to be. The reason why is this, it is the only metal in the world that is of no use.... It is really marvelous that the only metal in all this world of ours that is absolutely entirely and completely useless is gold, and therefore it must have the mystic quality of aloofness which makes which always will make it the standard of money.
Even if Stein had not directly read or heard the news of the upcoming international monetary summit that would take place at Bretton Woods, it is hard to believe that neither she nor the interlocutor with whom she discusses gold have gathered some sense of the debate about the planned postwar currency stabilization. American newspapers during the spring of 1944 were rife with rhetoric about the proposed rehabilitation of the U.S. gold standard. One
The greatest single contribution that the United States could make to world currency stability after the war would be to declare its determination to stabilize its own currency...It could do this by balancing the budget and by announcing that the dollar was no longer on atwenty-four-hour basis,and subject to every rumor, but firmly anchored to a fixed quantity of gold.
Stein, like the
completelyconvinced that gold must be the standard of money. Stein’s
religiousappeal to gold’s
mystic quality of aloofness,and her causal fallacy (gold is the
only metal in all this world of ours that is absolutely entirely and completely useless,and so it must always be the standard of money), moreover, voices the kind of economic rumor that the gold
anchor,according to the
which makes which will always make [gold] the standard of money,in fact, mirrors the leap of faith that government advisors were taking to advocate the rehabilitation of an international economy based on the U.S. gold standard. Making his bid for the gold standard before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Princeton University professor Edwin Walter Kemmerer admitted that the gold standard had not truly been tested since 1914 even as he
declared that no other currency system would so quickly restore public confidence in the post-war world...
As Stein records her daily life following the landing of American troops on French
soil, her experiences indeed challenge the complete
and
determined,
abstracted nation depicted in the
particularity of the radio broadcast; the social and political network through which
she circulates in occupied France frenetically switches on and off not only Stein’s
national, but also religious identity. When Stein first hears of the landing,
she records her excitement, marking the day with a
fairly tenuous verbal suture: Well that was yesterday and to-day is the landing and we
heard Eisenhower tell us he was here they were here…and we are singing
hallelujah, and feeling very nicely, and everybody has been telephoning to us
congratulatory messages…
voice
of America begins to fracture as the troops draw
inland. Stein considers the shortsightedness of the American troops who, having
forwarded the request via the Swiss consul, wish to profile the population of her
village, with a moiety of both indignance and amusement: We giggled and said that is optimism. Naturally American
authorities, not really realizing what it is to live in an occupied country,
ask you to put down your religion your property and its value, as if anybody
would as long as Germans are in the country and in a position to take letters
and read them if they want to.
The optimism
at which Stein and Toklas giggle
denies Stein the sense of miraculous safety the
initial reports of their landing had represented (…we are
singing hallelujah, and feeling very nicely…
). What strikes Stein as a
funny sort of optimism illustrates the network’s power to switch on her national
identity while switching off her Jewish identity.
The local scale of Stein’s experiences, moreover, imperils even the global network’s
vouchsafing of her ability to identify as American. To be sure, the American military
forces have not yet made their way to her region of the countryside at this point in
the narrative, and the fear of occupying German troops remains strong. The threat of
German troops merges with the sense of safety promised by the imminent approach of
the Americans during one of Stein’s encounters. On one of the many long walks which
she records, Stein finds herself approached by a French woman who asks her about a
package that her husband has found dropped, presumably by a war-plane passing by.
Stein recognizes the item in question as a package of malted milk tablets and
narrates the ensuing exchange: …I told her and she said is it good and I said yes for
children have you some and she said yes she had two, well I said eat one
yourself and if it is good give it to them it will do them good, I suggested
that she try it first, because I thought it might be something bad that the
Germans had put out to discourage the people with gifts from America.
While Stein can momentarily afford to question the salubriousness of American goods,
she notes how her fellow French villagers cannot.
Following shortly upon her encounter with the malt tablets, Stein recounts her
conversation with an old man who said he had seen a lot of American airplanes flying
by that day. She writes, ...yes he said reflectively leaning on his farming implement
and I leaning on my cane, yes he said, we depend on America to pick us up out
of our troubles, we have always been friends we helped them when they needed us
and they helped us when we needed them, the English are all right but it is
America that we count on to take care of us to see we keep our colonies, to be
sure they will want naval stations and of course we will be pleased to have
them have them.
leaning
on his farming implement and I leaning on my cane,
her encounter switches
back on her American identity. To be American in the current modulation of the
political and economic network, moreover, means to possess monetary resources capable
of stabilizing a fragmenting colonial, international economy. The desire to believe
in the complete
and determined
quality of not only America, but also its economic robustness,
has been transferred to the old man who has co-opted Stein’s desire to see American
currency anchored by gold.
Stein’s imagined co-optations of American products and anxieties (respectively, the
malt tablets and the resurrected gold standard) foreshadow a scene that replays her
uncanny orientation toward American identity. For, after the Americans have finally
arrived in the region, Stein has returned to meditating on the differences and
similarities between what she has seen in this war as compared with the last. And,
now that the American army is in town, Stein begins a series of musings on what makes
this army distinct not from the other national armies but, rather, from the American
army which she saw in the last world war. Entrusted with the job of chaperoning the
daughter of a French friend to meet the American soldiers, Stein again finds herself
positioned to be the bearer of a distinctly American experience. The little girl in
question has been praying every night to meet an American soldier and her mother asks
Stein to help answer her daughter’s prayers. Stein gladly accepts her charge and, in
considering the gift of chewing gum which Stein sees the soldiers give the little
girl, records how proud she is that, in their particular sweetness toward children,
this army is no different than the last. Yet upon cautioning the child to make sure
only to chew but not to swallow the gum — for she would not, Stein guesses, be
familiar with the peculiarly American product — Stein experiences a modulation of her
own identity. For the little girl replies, Oh yes I know…How do you know that I asked oh she said because
when there was the last war my mother was a little girl and the American
soldiers gave her chewing gum and all through this war my mother used to tell
us about it, and she gave a rapturous sigh and said and now I have it.
In reproducing the kindness to children that had constituted Stein’s impression of
the last American army, the soldiers of WWII inadvertently spoil Stein’s opportunity
to represent herself as the bearer of a distinctly American product and experience.
Thus, the story she would tell herself killed
from 1914 on proves a
suitable transgression of conventional historical chronology; for the uncanny
encounter with a deracinated cultural product, which Stein records here, had already,
in a sense, been prescribed in the French mother’s American
experience
instantiated when she was a child in the first war and
reproduced in her child during the second.
Stein closes her memoir with yet another performance of the desire to maintain a
stable sense of national identity and a temporal partition between the past and the
present. She meditates on what makes the soldiers of this war so different than those
of the last, and in her last words she parodies the very notions of national
determinacy and modernity that lured her into the untenable narratives she has
attempted in vain to construct for herself. The American soldiers of this war, she
notes, are interesting, optimistic, show a marked curiosity for new knowledge,
whereas their World War I counterparts had been, to her view, rather dull, given to
excessive drink, and suspicious of foreign habits. One of Stein’s French
acquaintances suggests that it must be the cinema that has made them men of the world.
Some of the soldiers themselves suggest
that it is the radio (and especially the quiz shows) that convinced them that they
might as well be intelligent rather than dull. Still others cite the country’s bold
emergence from the depression as the source of their sureness, conversational savvy,
and urbane poise. Stein, however, offers her own theory of what has produced the
difference. She decides that the salient factor in understanding what makes these
Americans so complete and determined,
and so distinct
from their predecessors, is their belated possession of a unique national language.
As if to explain, Stein writes, I think of the Americans of the last war, they had their
language but they were not yet in possession of it, and the children of the
depression as that generation called itself it was beginning to possess its
language and in dominating their language which is now all theirs they have
ceased to be adolescents and have become men…they have become more American all
American, and the G.I. Joes show it and know it, God bless them.
Reducing the distinctness of Americans,
and particularly
those of 20th century,
Stein again exposes the insufficiency of the
19th-century
narrative paradigm. While conquest and
domination
provided the previous century with a way
to purify the hybridized techno-scientific and military cultures of Europe and
America into a single human
contemporary composition
are all-together trickier and more
transitory categories than they were for the 19th
century.
If Stein’s relationship to chewing gum, malt tablets, and gold
are any indication, the GIs will not be able to possess
their new All American
language absolutely.
But does Stein leave the 20th century nothing but a deconstructed 19th century? No.
By recording the bipolar relationship between identity and an ever shifting network
of international political and economic interests, Stein gives her reader a glimpse
of the mode of social production of meaning that would come to dominate the late 20th
and early 21st centuries. Her very failure to devise a story that could cognitively
partition the practices of international and temporal hybridization from those of
purification, moreover, signals the passing of a modernist paradigm. If we return to
one of Stein’s 1936 essays on money — again, I suggest that Stein’s concerns over the
value of money are symptomatic of the author’s broader anxieties about globalization
and cultural change — we learn that, even before the outbreak of World War II, Stein
sees a paradigmatic narrative shift on the global horizon. Noting a contemporary
tendency to value the machinery of industrialism over free will and thought, Stein
writes, That is the logical end of organization and that is where the world is
today, the beginning of the eighteenth century went in for freedom and ended
in the beginning of the nineteenth century that went in for
organization. Now organization is getting kind of used up. The virgin lands are getting kind of used up, the whole surface of the world
is known and also the air.... Organization is a failure and everywhere the world over everybody has to
begin again.
begin again
meant sacrificing a stable sense of
nationality and modernity to the network narrative.