By: Curtis Faville

Curtis Faville — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:14:44 +0000

Stein’s writing can be annoying. Her earlier work–specifically, Three Lives–is the only “straight” writing she ever did. The Making of Americans, in its original uncut version, kisses narrative goodbye and suggests making language itself the subject of a story, such that the “events” in the lives of its characters bear only a tangential relationship to occasion of its writing. I have made the point that the prose of Making closes the door on late Henry James and opens the way for later meta-fictions including Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, etc. Historically, I think this makes sense; a nice irony is remembering that Stein’s professor at Radcliffe was William James (Henry’s brother), who encouraged Gertrude’s interest in “automatic writing” closing a kind of aesthetic circle: Psychology and writing and feminism at one point in time. To my mind, Stein’s most interesting work follows immediately after Making. Tender Buttons, Lucy Church, Dix Portraits, Geography and Plays, How Writing is Written. Her later “experimental” pieces seem repetitive; the critical pieces and autobiographical excursions each designed to address a peculiarly synthetic sense of her public (and readership); so we come away thinking she never had a clear conception of just who the abstract works were addressed to–certainly not Alice–perhaps to Thornton Wilder or Sherwood Anderson or Carl Van Vechten (friends and supporters). Try reading some of the works of the 1920’s–can you honestly say they demonstrate anything more than a slavish, dogged, insistence on nesting and incremental variation (rather like knitting)?

By: paul

paul — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:08:35 +0000

Thanks, Rodney. I’ll check out “The Language That Rises.”

By: rodney k.

rodney k. — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:34:21 +0000

Ulla Dydo seems incapable of saying anything uninteresting about Stein.

Comments on: Making Gertrude accessible

By: Curtis Faville

By: paul

By: rodney k.