World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Back in France she tried to digest the lessons of her fame. A woman and artist who had been for much of her life without self or audience, she now had both; but what, after all, did it come to—this self she was famous for? In Vogue’s “Impossible Interview,” Gracie Allen is made to say: “Now Gertie, don’t you start to make sense, or people will begin to understand you, and then you won’t mean anything at all.” These reporters, followers, and friends—they were merely hearts that spaniel’d her at heels … She’d looked back, snuffled at her roots, found, seen, felt—nothing.

  The Geographical History of America is a culminating work, though not the outcome of her meditations. Those she summed up in an essay, “What Are Masterpieces?” written a year later. This book is the stylized presentation of the process of meditation itself, with many critical asides. In the manner of her earliest piece, Q.E.D., it demonstrates far more than it proves, and although it is in no sense a volume of philosophy (Gertrude Stein never “argues” anything), it is, philosophically, the most important of her texts. If we follow her thought as Theseus did the thread of Ariadne, I think we find at the end the justice, if not the total truth, of her boast that the most serious thinking about the nature of literature in the twentieth century has been done by a woman.

  Life is repetition, and in a dozen different ways Gertrude Stein set out to render it. We have only to think how we pass our days: the doorbell rings, the telephone, sirens in the street, steps on the stairs, the recurrent sounds of buzzers, birds, and vacuum cleaners; then as we listen we suck our teeth; those are our feet approaching, so characteristic the tread can be identified, and that’s our little mew of annoyance at the interruption, too, as well as the nervous look which penetrates the glass, the fumble with the latch, the thought: I must remember to oil this lock; whereupon we are confronted by a strange man who is nevertheless saying something totally familiar about brooms. Suppose he is truly a stranger. Still, we have seen salesmen before, men before, brooms; the accent is familiar, the tone, the tie, the crooked smile, the pity we are asked for, the submissive shoulders, yet the vague threat in the forward foot, the extended palm like the paw of a begging bear. Everything, to the last detail, is composed of elements we have already experienced a thousand and a thousand thousand times. Even those once-in-a-lifetime things—overturning a canoe in white water or being shot at, pursuing a squirrel through the attic, sexual excess—are merely unusual combinations of what has been repeatedly around. Our personal habits express it, laws of nature predict it, genes direct it, the edicts of the state encourage or require it, universals sum it up.

  The range of our sensations, our thoughts, our feelings, is generally fixed, and so is our experience of relations. Make an analysis, draw up a list. Life is rearrangement, and in a dozen different ways Gertrude Stein set out to render it. We are not clocks, designed to repeat without remainder, to mean nothing by a tick, not even the coming tock, and so we must distinguish between merely mechanical repetition, in which there is no progress of idea, no advance or piling up of wealth, and that which seriously defines our nature, describes the central rhythms of our lives.

  Almost at once she realized that language itself is a complete analogue of experience because it, too, is made of a large but finite number of relatively fixed terms which are then allowed to occur in a limited number of clearly specified relations, so that it is not the appearance of a word that matters but the manner of its reappearance, and that an unspecifiable number of absolutely unique sentences can in this way be composed, as, of course, life is also continuously refreshing itself in a similar fashion.

  There are novel sentences which are novel in the same old ways, and there are novel sentences in which the novelty itself is new. In How to Write she discusses the reason why sentences are not emotional and paragraphs are, and offers us some sentences which she believes have the emotional balance of the paragraph.

  a. It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident.

  b. A dog which you have never had before has sighed.

  c. A bay and hills hills are surrounded by their having their distance very near.

  Compare these with Sterne’s:

  d. A cow broke in tomorrow morning to my Uncle Toby’s fortifications.

  Or Hawkes’s:

  e. It was a heavy rain, the sort of rain that falls in prison yards and beats a little firewood smoke back down garret chimneys, that leaks across floors, into forgotten prams, into the slaughterhouse and pots on the stove.

  Or with this by Beckett:

  f. Picturesque detail a woman with white hair still young to judge by her thighs leaning against the wall with eyes closed in abandonment and mechanically clasping to her breast a mite who strains away in an effort to turn its head and look behind.

  All right, we have answered the bell. Suppose we broke that action into parts: opening the door, coming down the stairs, mewing with annoyance, and so forth—how easily we might combine them in other ways, in new sentences of behavior, new paragraphs of life.

  Mewing with annoyance reflects a state more subjective than the others. Mewing with annoyance is an event of lesser size, though it, too, is divisible. All are audible acts, unlike the secretion of saliva. Our sentence must manage them—their motion, weight, size, order, state of being—must be themselves events, must pass through the space the way we pass when we skip down the stairs to the door.

  Let’s begin with a sentence without any special significance, selected the same way you might curiously pick up a piece of paper in the street.

  In the middle of the market there’s a bin of pumpkins. Dividing this sentence as it seems natural to do, we can commence its conquest:

  a. There’s a bin of pumpkins in the middle of the market.

  b. There, in the middle of the market, is a bin of pumpkins.

  c. A bin of pumpkins? There, in the middle of the market.

  d. A bin of … pumpkins? There? In the middle of the market?

  We can make our arrangements more musical:

  e. In the middle. In the middle of the market. In the middle there’s a bin. There’s a bin. In the middle of the market there’s a bin.

  f. In the middle. In the middle of the market. In the middle of the market there’s a bin. A bin. In the middle of the market there’s a bin. In. A bin. In. In the market there’s a bin. In the middle of the market—pumpkin.

  g. Middle of market. Middle of. Middle of. Middle of market. Middle of bin. In the middle of market a middle of market, in the middle of market there’s a middle of bin. In the middle of market, in the middle of bin, there’s a middle of bin, there’s a middle of pumpkin, there’s a middle of in.

  h. Pumpkin. In in in. Pumpkin. In middle. In market. In bin.

  Much of this is dreadful singsong, of course, but the play has only begun. Besides, this is just a demonstration record. The words themselves can be knocked apart, rhymes introduced, or conceptual possibilities pursued.

  i. Middle of market. Riddle of. Middle of. Riddle of market. Middle of bin. Not thin when in. When hollow in huddle then kindle pumpkin.

  j. Pump. Pump ump. In the middle. P p. Um, there’s a bin. Pumpkin.

  And so on. And on so.

  Such games soon give us an idea of the centers of conceptual energies in any sentence, its flexibility, a feel for the feelings possible for it, all its aural consequences; and to a child who is eagerly looking for a skull to carve some Halloween horror on, our celebration of the sentence will seem perfectly sensible.

  The procedure is thoroughly analytical, however. It treats the elements of the sentence as if they were people at a party, and begins a mental play with all their possible relationships. Gertrude Stein’s work rarely deals very happily with indivisible wholes.

  Sometimes she treats a sentence as if it were a shopping list, and rearranges every item in happier orders, much as we might place knicknacks on a shelf, considering whether the spotted china dog might be seen to better advantage in front of the jade
lizard and nearer the window, or beside the tin cup borrowed from a beggar in Beirut.

  Sometimes she lets us see and follow every step, but often she neglects to give us the sentences she began with, and we find ourselves puzzled by distant results.

  Think next what might happen if we considered the sentence to be composed of various voices: in short, a play. For what else is a play? It simply cites the separate sources of its sentences.

  h. 1. Martha. Pumpkin.

  Mary. In in in.

  Martha. Pumpkin.

  Joseph. In middle.

  John. In market.

  M. & M. In bin.

  A musician would have no trouble in seeing how a single sentence might be treated as the consequence of a chorus, nor would a modern painter find it hard to imagine the dissolution of his plate, bread, vase, and fish, into plastic elements he then rearranged in a new, more pleasing way.

  Gertrude Stein did more with sentences, and understood them better, than any writer ever has. Not all her manipulations are successful, but even at their worst, most boring, most mechanical, they are wonderfully informative. And constantly she thought of them as things in space, as long and wiggling and physical as worms. Here is a description of some of them from “Poetry and Grammar”:

  … my sentences … had no longer the balance of sentences because they were not the parts of a paragraph nor were they a paragraph but they had made in so far as they had come to be so long and with the balance of their own that they had they had become something that was a whole thing and in so being they had a balance which was the balance of a space completely not filled but created by something moving as moving is not as moving should be.

  She understood reading, for instance. She sometimes read straight on, touching the page as lightly as a fly, but even as her mind moved there would be a halt, a turning, the eyes rising and falling in a wave, and she realized that the page, itself, was artificial, arbitrary with respect to the text, so she included it in the work as well, not as a thing or an action, but as an idea.

  j. 1. Page one. Pump. Pump ump.

  Page two. In the middle.

  Page three. P p.

  Page four. Um, there’s a bin.

  Page five. Pumpkin.

  The understanding was, as she read, not only tormented by the physical makeup of the book, it was often troubled, too, by the content, which it had difficulty in making out. The poem does not repeat itself, but I do. I read the first four lines, and then I reread the first two. Now I am ready to go on, and I jump without a qualm to the second quatrain. Soon, however, I am back at the beginning again. There are interruptions, too. Alice asks me what I would like for dinner. Company comes. Time passes. Other texts may even intervene, many strange words from all directions. Why not, she thought, formalize all this, create something new, not only from the stops and starts and quarrels of normal thought, but from the act of attention itself, and all its snarls and tangles, leaps and stumbles.

  She is not always satisfied merely to render the phenomenon. Sometimes she chooses to involve us in it. By removing punctuation, for instance. I am reading her sentence about her sentences, which I quoted above, and sliding over words as though through mud:

  … not filled but created by something moving as moving is not as moving …

  I must pick myself up. Reread until I get the hang:

  … not filled, but created by something moving, as moving is, not as moving should be.

  By the time I understand what she means, I have been composed. Thus the repetitions which mimic my own when I read make me repeat even more when I read them written down.

  Listen. We converse as we live—by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world. Gertrude Stein had a wonderful ear and she listened as she listened to Leo—for years—not so she could simply reproduce the talk, that sort of thing was never her intention, but so she could discover the patterns in speech, the forms of repetition, and exploit them. At first she saw these shapes as signs of the character of the speaker, but later her aim was to confer upon the words themselves the quality she once traced to the owner of the tongue. That was Cézanne’s method—the method of the human mind.

  We not only repeat when we see, stand, communicate; we repeat when we think. There’s no other way to hold a thought long enough to examine it except to say its words over and over, and the advance of our mind from one notion to another is similarly filled with backs and forths, erasures and crossings-out. The style of The Geographical History of America is often a reflection of this mental condition.

  Repeating is also naming. Pumpkins have names. They are called pumpkins. But what is the word ‘pumpkin’ called? Not Fred, not William, not Wallaby, but ‘pumpkin’ again. And so we seem to be repeating when we are speaking in the metalanguage, or the overtongue. A division of ‘pumpkin’ into ‘pump’ and ‘kin’ is not a carving of pumpkin. Nor is the finding and baking and eating of one any damage to the word. An actor’s gestures name the real ones. Suppose, behind your back, I am making fun of you by imitating your hurried, impatient, heavy-shoed walk, or like an annoying child I echo your talk as you talk; then a round is being formed, a ring made of reality and its shadow, words and their referents, and of course I can dance with my image or with yours very well, mock my own methods, and suddenly discover, in the midst of my game, a meaning that’s more than a vegetable’s candle-lit face.

  The ice cream eaten is desired again, the song sung is re-sung, and so we often say things over simply because we love to say them over—there is no better reason.

  Furthermore, Gertrude Stein knew that masterpieces were, like life itself is everywhere, perfect engines of repetition. Just as leaves multiply along a limb, and limbs alike thicket a trunk, a work of art suffers simultaneous existence in many places, and eventually is read again and again, sometimes loved by the same lips. As Borges has demonstrated so well, when that inspired madman, Pierre Menard, succeeded in writing a chapter or two of Don Quixote, word for word the same, his version was both richer and more complex than that of Cervantes. The reverse can also be the case: Three Lives, written by any of us now, would not be nearly so remarkable as it was then.

  4

  How pleasantly a doll can change its age. I do not even have to dress it differently. My eye alters and a few rags bundled about a stick assume a life, a life at any point or period I like, with any sex and any history I choose—pets, presumptions, peeves—mortal or immortal ills. Whether I imagine it’s a swatchel or a queen, the stick with its scrappy sleeves remains and is like another Homer to me, focus for my fancies; yet when I open an old album and find my photo, what tells me what the image is, since I’ve no faithful wad of fabric or enduring spinal tree to fix on?… a lingering resemblance? am I that solemn little moon-faced boy in the ribboned hat whose photographic stare is as dumbly inked upon its paper as these words are? am I that weak-eyed, pork-cheeked creature?… possibly; but is it a likeness which leaps out at me, one I feel, or do I have to hunt for it, piously believing that a resemblance must be there, and easily fooled by a substitute, a switch, because a dozen other boys that age may look more like me now than I do then. A sentence with such moods and tenses shows in what strange ways our lifeline’s twisted, how precariously it passes from one pole of recognition to another, because, as Hume reported:

  For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.

  I may dress Shakespeare, like my dolly, in the costumes of other centuries, interpret him according to the latest scientific myths or social magics, nevertheless there is something—some pale t
ext—some basin, bowl, or bottle I am peeing my opinions in; but as I turn the album pages—black not without a reason—I only dimly remember the bow and arrow in one snapshot, the knickers in another, or the man who was my father holding me wearily in his arms at the entrance to Mammoth Cave. The little boy I was is no longer living with me. Of course, we say that some people never grow up, but the little boy I am at forty is actually the little man I am at forty, no one else.

  Rilke’s celebrated remark about Rodin sums up what Gertrude Stein’s American trip taught her:

  Rodin was solitary before he became famous. And Fame, when it came, made him if anything still more solitary. For Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.

  Or work of art. It is the same.

  When Gertrude Stein wrote that there was little use in being born a little boy if you were going to grow up to be a man, she did not intend to deny causality or the influence of the past. She did mean to say that when we look at our own life, we are looking at the history of another; we are like a little dog licking our own hand, because our sense of ourselves at any time does not depend upon such data, only our “idea” of ourselves does, and this “idea,” whether it’s our own or that of another, is our identity. Identities depend upon appearances and papers. Appearances can be imitated, papers forged.