From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein Anthropoetics XV, no. 2 (Spring 2010)
Adam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518
"Transcendence" stands for what subsists, stands behind, and provides a continuing reality to phenomena. The equivalent of "transcendence," for Gertrude Stein, was "continuous present," a term she used in various ways and used to produce many maxims of thinking, writing and art—maxims ranging from the seemingly obvious to the awkward and counter-intuitive. In "Plays," Stein writes "The business of Art . . . is to live in the actual present, that is the completely actual present, and to completely express that completely actual present" (Lectures in America, 104-5). She is referring us here to "Composition as Explanation," where she associates the "continuous present" with "beginning again" and "using everything." Stein seems to be aiming at a kind of pure horizontality here—without the vertical, everything is equally related to everything else, and each moment of composition completely different from the previous one—but at the same time, completely the same, except for the composition. The horizontality of the continuous present (perhaps it would be better, and even more Steinian, to say "continuous presencing") can replace the vertical because Stein's horizontality is not the horizontality of symmetrical desires in the confrontational stance prior to the deferral effected by the sign; rather, it is the horizontality of that instant on the originary scene prior to its closure, where the only thing sustaining the sign is the incalculable possibility that some next member will take it up. The symmetry of the participants at this instant is exactly the same as in the previous instant, when they were poised to annihilate themselves and each other, except for the composition, that slight rerouting of the gesture through its visibility. As Stein says, "The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything" (Writings and Lectures 24).
In other words, the continuous present doesn't exist outside of the activity of sustaining it, whereas transcendence implies an existence apart from that activity. I will explore this distinction by addressing Stein's maxims, or at least what I will read as her maxims. I take a maxim to be a statement on the boundary between the declarative and the imperative, a generalizable claim which can only be grasped and assessed through some singular practice, a practice advised or urged by the maxim itself. So, in "Plays," Stein asserts that "The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say it is always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience" (Lectures 93). Stein suggests that finding this out "makes one think endlessly about plays" (93), and one could see that the only way of making sense of such a maxim would be to inhabit oneself as a spectator in some play and hypothesize that moment in which one's emotions were "syncopated." The problem with the maxim is that the advice it would give us seems to skip a step—you will know that your emotion is, to continue with Stein's discussion, "always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening" once you have decided to make sense of your emotion during the play in precisely those terms: there is no difference between being syncopated and knowing you are syncopated. In other words, Stein's maxims do not posit a mode of "verification" that could be shared.
This direct route to the ostensive, bypassing a shared mode of verification is very well illustrated in the following anecdote:
Ms. Stein, the story goes, was giving a lecture at a prestigious Eastern university. In the discussion period following her lecture, a young man and woman, college students, arose to ask a question. They were respectful. They were earnest. They were holding hands.
"Miss Stein," the young man said, "you write books that are very hard to understand. Many of us have worked hard at trying to understand your writing, and we still find it a puzzle. Can you tell us please what you are trying to say?"
"Well," said Ms. Stein after thinking a moment, "what I'm saying is that everything changes and everything stays the same."
The young man and woman reddened and smiled nervously at each other.
"Miss Stein," the young man said again, "if you will forgive us, that's just what we mean. Nothing changes and nothing stays the same. What does that mean?"
"No," Ms. Stein said, "not nothing changes and nothing stays the same. Everything changes and everything stays the same."
"But what does it mean"?
"Well, take you two, for instance," Ms. Stein said. "You are a perfect example of this."
And then she sat down.
Stein, first of all, corrects the students, insisting on the difference between "everything changes and everything stays the same" and "nothing changes and nothing stays the same," regardless of their reversibility, and then answers the students' request for meaning by "pointing" to them as a "perfect example of this." A perfect example, presumably, of what "everything changes and everything stays the same" means. In a sense, Stein complies with the normal grammar of the "example" here—presumably, we ask for examples when the declarative statement is insufficient. But the students have asked for a second declarative statement, not an example—they apparently don't understand the first statement well enough to know what would count as an example, or to use an example to supplement their understanding. The general statement, in other words, is too idiosyncratic to go right to an example from. But that, then, is what Stein is insisting upon—finding your way from the idiosyncratic statement to, not only an example, but yourself as an example, and yourself as an example insofar as you want to, but cannot yet, make sense of that idiosyncratic statement. That is, the students are a perfect example of "everything changes and everything stays the same" insofar as they are poised to find the right way to look at themselves as exemplary and thereby do everything differently by looking at what they are doing. And finding yourself—always finding yourself—to be a perfect example of everything changes and everything stays the same would be something you could think about endlessly.
To take another example: in "What are Masterpieces and why are there so few of them," Stein contends that "the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening" (Writings and Lectures 148). Again, the problem is, what can one do with this? This is Stein's way of speaking about the difference between human nature, or identity, and the human mind, responsible for creation—masterpieces, products of the human mind, sustain the continuous present, there is no remembering or consideration of any audience: "If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a masterpiece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a masterpiece is not" (Writings 152). So, a masterpiece is something one enters by stepping outside of everything else—when you are outside of the masterpiece it is not clear, even if it seems clear, but when you are inside the space or continuous present composed by the masterpiece it is clear. How this presumed unity of vision with the creator, where both will experience the same thing, but that same thing will be incommunicable to anyone outside of that space while not needing to be communicated to anyone in it, can't be explained any more than the way we recognize someone we know can, or needs to be, explained.
The argument makes sense, then, but the maxim—the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening—may not. It's hard to read it metaphorically because it's hard to get a sense of what it would mean literally. Even if the one talking is the same as the one listening—and that Stein is not merely referring to the process of thought here is made evident by her observation elsewhere that it is a very difficult thing "to listen to anything and everything in the same way any one is telling anything and at the same time while you are listening to be telling inside yourself and outside yourself anything that is happening everything that is anything" (Narration 34)—how could one talk while listening and listen while talking. The expression of simultaneity here makes enough sense for us to see that it can't make "complete" sense—you could try and listen while you are talking and talking while you are listening and by noticing that the listening always comes just after the talking, imagine the possibility of "catching up" and attaining what would be an originary experience of language: that is, an experience of language that is simultaneously ostensive and a model for other experiences. This possible experience would be known as such after the fact, in the internal balancing of the sentence that would be an event of knowing in itself: "And in knowing anything you know it as you know it, you know it at the time you are knowing it and in that way the way of knowing it" (20).
Stein's focus on grammar and the sentence enables us to make the distinction between transcendence and the continuous present on that level as well. A sentence effects transcendence if it makes us stand before a reality that is, at least until the end of the uttering of that sentence, beyond the power of any imperative to alter. I would propose calling this a sentence organized around a commanding name: a noun, a subject, that has its own substance to be unfolded in the predication—the name is commanding in the sense that the object world or field of semblances it opens up is invulnerable to our grasping, at least insofar as we "understand" the sentence. Reality is transcendence embodied, and it is in the grammatically correct sentence that this embodiment is registered. A sentence participates in continuous presence, on the other hand, insofar as it puts forth grammatical possibilities that it doesn't itself exhaust—in Stein's style, the grammar of presence includes, as has been often noted, rhythm, alliteration, internal dialogues regarding the composition of a sentence ("stage directions," so to speak), sentences repeated over and over again, sometimes with very slight modifications, the organization of patches of discourse around relative and demonstrative pronouns, sentences in which the same word can be both subject and direct object and subject of another sentence, and so on. The idea is to generate as many grammatical possibilities as possible, and to sustain the text by realizing as many of those possibilities as possible while not exhausting them and continuing to generate more.
Let's return to the vertical-less originary scene I posited earlier: rather than transcendence embedded in but beyond and above the central object, we have the participants on the scene arrayed in relation to the central object. Instead of seeing or intuiting something through the object, each participant sees everyone else as equidistant from the object. Not literally equidistant, but equally likely, or unlikely, to abandon their equipoise and reverse the reversal of their adoption of the aborted gesture of appropriation—"meaning" is everyone stripped of every intention other than to convey their acceptance of the gesture with as much certainty as possible. We could call the resentment of the center this view of everyone dispossessing themselves of everything that might suggest a renewed striving toward the appropriation of the object—each participant takes on the resentment of the center by seeing everyone else as equidistant from that center, which is the way the center itself would have it.
In this equipoise and equidistance we can see a grammar of the scene—the gestures put forth by all members of the group would not be identical, even if they are all imitating the same gesture. This is because each not only imitates but inflects and accentuates from their own position on the scene: someone who was about to grab a chunk would have to sign differently than one who was engaged in the beginnings of combat with another, and a third member, who was lagging behind, would have yet another way of signing on. The scene is the articulation of all these gestures, and the transition into the sparagmos, towards consuming the object without renewing the mimetic crisis, would likewise require a continued articulation and calibration of this array of gestures. Even more, all the possible gestures and expressions in the pre-human repertoire of the group and of each member undergo a similar "abstraction"—that is, whatever any member could do "naturally" can now be broken down into a collection of gestures that can be combined in various ways. Continuous presencing, then, is sustaining the resentment of the center by maximally abstracting all elements of language, from the most elemental phonemes and morphemes to sheer grammatical connections devoid of meaning (for example, using a noun that rarely is used adjectivally as an adjective, and using it to modify a noun that is the nominalization of a adjective never used that way, and selecting for this operation two words without any discernable relation to each other in any combination, presents the articulation of noun and adjective without the interference of the "commanding name" embedded in an already shared and connoted reality).
I assume that Stein's practices have an esthetic value in themselves, but my interests here lie in the way they open up language so as to generate the idiosyncratic maxims that I have been looking at, maxims advising us to make our relation to language originary. This is from Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, Part 3, Stanza VII:
By it by which by it As not which not which by it For it it is in an accessible with it But which will but which will not it Come to be not made not made one of it By that all can tell all call for in it That they can better call add Can in add none add it.
It is not why she asked that anger In an anger can they be frightened Because for it they will be which in not Not now. Who only is not now. I can look at a landscape without describing it. (76)
The first six lines all end with "it." Not only that, but these lines are concerned throughout for "it." The sixth line ends with "call for in it," and then the seventh line ends with "call add"—so, "call" brings us from "it" to "add," which dominates the next, eighth line: "can in add none add it." The next two lines then concern "anger." So, some "it" is at the center of these lines, and "it" had something to do with "calling," "adding" and "anger"—perhaps the anger concerns adding and calling it, or not adding and calling it. We have a repetition in the first line, as "by it" precedes and follows "by which"—this might also be read as a dialogue, with "by it" answering the question "by which?" following the initial "by it." "By it" recurs again in the second line, this time following what also could be a little dialogue by interlocutors with the objects in question close at hand—"as not" (as a response or qualification to "by it" from the first line), then "which not," which could be either a question ("which is not"?) or an emphatic repetition (not just that it isn't, but that it won't be), and then "which by it" which we could divide into two pieces of speech (another question—"which?"—with the answer "by it"), or read the second which as emphasizing the "which not" relative to "as not," with the concluding "by it" an insistence on the basic point here, which shouldn't be confused with any other point. On this reading, the fragments would all work as gestures, questions and commands, to look, distinguish, negate, insist.
I have suggested two ways of making sense of Stein's agrammaticality in passages such as the above—one, as declarative sentences interrupted by ostensive gestures (marked by deictics), imperatives and interrogatives; two, as the creation of novel verb, adjectival and adverbial phrases which create a liminal, evanescent reality—we could imagine, in the course of reading Stein's text sympathetically, "calling… for in it," with "for in it" representing some condition for which we could summon up a minimal sense of reality, but could not really remember. This liminal reality is only available to the extent one enters the continuous presence set up by the text.
So, what kind of contribution does this, what I am calling an originary relation to language, make to thinking? It keeps language on the threshold of feeling and sense and facilitates idiosyncratic observations, on the boundary between ultra-literalism and very stretched metaphoricity. For example, Stein keeps repeating in Everybody's Autobiography that there is "no sky" in America, "just air"—we can make some sense of this, sky is verticality whereas air is horizontality, and this would line up with much else Stein says about America in distinction from Europe; but there is an experiential immediacy to the phrase as well, which is used to describe her perception of New York in particular. And the idiosyncratic observations, to which we can give a paradoxical name like "literal allegories," generate eccentric maxims, like the definition of genius I opened the essay with. Within Stein's discourse we can posit a relation to language wherein language is both coming from and coming to us—we are listening and talking at the same time, on the condition that the subject doing the talking and listening is removed from the scene, and with her or him the anchor to transcendence in reality. The model of thinking that would result would be a marginalist, minimal one—thinking proceeding by subtracting or adding the smallest thing possible from or to a stream of habits and discourse, a subtraction or addition that insists that everything is the same by making everything different. Such thinking confers sacrality on language itself, as the means by which we sustain the infinite field of semblances, or reality, by modeling language on the sign/object complementarity constitutive of everything we see.
Stein's most powerful way of engaging the originary hypothesis, in this case, would be to forget the catastrophe that was narrowly averted, to transform every trace of its possibility into a sign of its unrepresentability, to abstract and articulate every gesture of deferral in as many ways as possible. Desires can be converted into happiness by turning objects of desire into means of personal ostentation, and this can be done by turning anyone's attention to the origins of desire in some (mistaken) gesture in which the model and object are inscribed and confused—that gesture can always be articulated with others in a new idiom, with its own generative resources. For this kind of practice and habit, this kind of ostensive gesture toward the ostensivity of the gesture and its strained inter-articulation with other gestures, Stein's continuous presencing within language will always be a model. Perhaps that is a relation between the Human Mind and Human Nature.
Stein, Gertrude. A Novel of Thank You. Dalkey Archive Press: Normal, Ill., 1994.
———. Stanzas in Meditation. Sun & Moon Press: Los Angeles, 1994.
———. Mrs. Reynolds. Sun & Moon Press: Los Angeles, 1988.
———. Writings and Lectures: 1909-1945. Edited by Patricia Meyerowitz. Penguin Books: Baltimore, 1974.
———. The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Introduction by William H. Gass. Random House: New York, 1973.
———. Wars I Have Seen. Random House: New York, 1945.
———. Lectures in America. Random House: New York, 1935.
———. Narration. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1935.