Stein Stein Stein

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. NY:Vintage, 1990.

This may remain the ultimate history of the Lost Generation rive gauche avant garde in Paris around WWI and through the 1920's. I'm tempted to pluck a bouquet of bons mots and tidbits about favorite artists and authors, but surely that's been done elsewhere.

The book could give gossip a good name.

Otherly, this is probably the most accessible extant example of Stein sentences, a matter worth study. It's also a useful though limited revelation of Stein's intentions in her other well known works, The Making of Americans, 3 Lives, Stanzas in Meditation, Tender Buttons, and Geography and Plays. This contains as extensive and accessible set of reflections as any I've seen by Stein on her relationship with publishing and the general difficulties of the public with most of her work.

"[Stein] says that listening to the rhythmn of [Basket the poodle's] water drinking made her recognize the difference beween sentences and paragrpahs, that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not" (248).

This is deliberately provocative, impossible in the literal, and worthy of study.

"Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result, the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality" (211).

One might ask how anything without emotion might render either an inner or an outer reality. But Stein's intentions might (I can only surmise) be approached by pulling apart the distinctions between incidental sentiments that relate to an author's circumstantial relationship to historical events, and the passion involved in a recognition of the ubiquity of such relationships, and the music or dance of their so relating.

In my long experience as a thoroughly failed author and poet, one way that one may thoroughly fail is by mistaking one's emotion for the readers' emotions, one's relation to the text for the readers' relation to the text.

I feel certain that this is what T.S. Eliot, for example, tried to get at with his theory of the objective correlative. Yet I have still nowhere seen this expressed in a way that satisfies me, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable that one baffles students in trying to express it. The thing is that what's intended by this POV and what's intended by the Romantic and Post-Romantic insistence that the acme of art is the expression of the author's inner emotion are not contradictory, and yet the words in which these things get couched most definitely are.

I think that the refinement needed to resolve this falls along these lines Yes, the writer's relationship to Universe or common concern resembles the readers' almost exactly; however, it differs in matters of the specific case. And the writers' POV of these matters, filtered through the readers' POV does not equal the readers' POV itself.

To avoid the distortion in this, the author cannot simply gush forth emotion. What results inevitably contains the emotion, the objects that provoked the emotion in their temporal array -- the history, in other words. Expunging these may provide relief to the writer; they don't provide this as well to the reader, who has experienced another history. However, that business of relationship is experienced by both parties. That retains public value. And it's not so much that having to hear personal details dilutes that value; we're happy enough to hear personal details properly framed. It's that changing the music or the structure to match the incidentals of one's own experience of Event distorts the experience of relationships otherwise offered.

Otherwise, the more emotion involved the better, and we shall call it passion instead of sentiment. As Louis-Ferdinand Celine quotes the biologist Savy, "Everything is emotion." I should think these poles are equally true.

It was at that time [of travelling in Granada] that Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed. She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their chracter and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she firstfelt a desre to express the rhythm o fthe visible world" (119).

For this kind of writing, see particularly Stanzas in Meditation, from Sun and Moon, as well as Tender Buttons.
Here's a passage I will have to read Picabia to judge:

"Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be teh result of conceiving the human form and the human fac in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied" (210).

This should be compared to Olson in "Projective Verse."

Ach, no end to Stein. But I will have more opportunities with The Making of Americans shortly.

Linda Hutcheons

Hutcheons, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. NYC: Routledge, 1988.

Loose Notes --

For 6 chapters, Hutcheons approaches a description of the postmodern, avoiding definition. Chapter headings describe the arc of her approach: Theory, politics, difference from modernism, contexts, and history.

Like so:

Theory -- Hutcheons would mix semiotics with her politics.

" . . . what I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resulutely historical, and inescapably political. Its contradictions may well e those of late capitalist society, but whatever the cause, these contradicitons are certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of 'the presence of the past'" (4).

Politics -- The MO is reform thru parody.

" . . . most of these postmodernist contradictory texts are also specifically parodic . . . . When Eliot recalled Dante or Virgil in The Waste Land, one sensed a kind of wishful call to continuity beneath the fragmented echoing. It is precisely this that is contested in postmodern parody . . . " (11).

" . . . it is precisely parody -- that seemingly introverted formalism -- that paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation mwith the problem of the relationof the aesthetic to a world of significance external to itself, to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and presente) -- in other words, to the political and the historical" (22).

"In using parody in this way [ironically], postmodernist forms want to work toward a public discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization" (23).

VS the Modern -- She echoes an impression of modernism's "aestheticism," but avoids facile comparisons.

The literary and the historical are to be re-unified, per this. One does wonder when and how they might have been considered separate. Again, this seems to be glowering at the Newcrits. But then, what about all those allusions? Again, she distinguishes a PoMo method from modernism, which "attempts to separate literary language from reference" (142) -- an idea I have no way to resolve with Eliot, Joyce, Pound or even HD, really.

Histories will involve metafictions; the boundary between fiction and presumed nonfiction becomes problematized. Intertextuality obviously supplies various opportunity for parody and metafiction. Were this written later, the move onto the Net would have allowed for a ream of specultion that Hutcheon has little reason to perform in 1988.

Oh my, she's eventually showing her colors here. "This formalism is the defining expression of modernism, not postmodernism" (144). Then what comes after postmodernism? Clearly modernism, or another modernism -- since whatever it is will be, by definition, an innovation.

"Postmodernist reference, then, differs from modernist reference in its overt acknowledgement of the existence, if relative inaccessibilty, of the past real (except through discourse). It differs from realist reference in its -- again -- overt assertion of taht relative inacessibility of any reality that might exist objectively and prior ot our knowledge of it" (146).

Rather bizarre characterization. Pound, then, is postmodern, as are Eliot, Joyce, Williams, and almsot anyone writing before 1950. On the other hand, modernism returned later with people like Cage and Ashbery and movements like Oulipo. This is all just backwards. She's consistent to her idea, though. PoMo has moved past its "referential agnosticism," she quotes Norris for the term. So Bernstein and Silliman are modernists, and Pound and Joyce postmodern. Go figure.

Perhaps she means not history but the critical habit of treating the text in terms of the kinds of external information we call historical or political -- though, if so, she's answering the New Critics, and not the modernists. And, as nearly as I can figure, talking about different people than the ones that typically take the term postmodern.

Oddly, the subject remains in crisis, despite Hutcheons' assertion that form is no longer in crisis or in play. What can that mean, logically? I cannot define myself or know myself although all sensory information that said self possesses is owned by me as much as anyone. Do I just accept what others tell me I am? That seems like something that requires force. If "what novels like The White Hotel or Midnight's Children explicitly do is to undermine the ideological assumptions behind what has been accepted as universal and trans-historical in our culture" (177), then how can that possibly be done without formal innovation? Either I'm told a story that does or does not amuse me, and the structure of my ideas remains intact, or the story informs me, in which I see no reason it should be fictional. In fact, the more fictional is, teh less valid it can be in terms of accreting data in an already fixed system.

No, I don't see it. I don't think that the subject can ever be in crisis without some corresponding ripple in form. Can anybody run this by me a different way?

Hutcheon follows hard upon this with "In the postmodern 'history-like,' the ideological and the aesthetic have turned out to be inseparable" (178).

However, the postmodern for her has no particularly interesting formal concerns. Such formal concerns have left with modernist "aestheticism." Perhaps aesthetics and aestheticism are held to be opposite. As such, the crowd of conflicting politicizations are said to be postmodernism. Finally, she has to admit that "The art and theory I have been labelling as postmodernist are not, perhpas, as revolutionaryas either their own rhetoric or their supporters suggest" although she qualifies that they are not "as nostalgically neoconservative as their detractors would have it" (222).

Very well, let's not use the term neocon here; given 21st century context it has gone bitter. But this does not make sense at all. Obviously, if no important formal innovation exists, anything new has to be only the novel.