Curtis Faville sent the following thoughts
concerning my comments on Ulla Dydo’s reading of Stein.
Stein: Now there's a psyche to
conjure with! Re: Your blog for November 19th. In reviewing the sequence of
Stein's early career, we see that she is first preoccupied with abnormal
psychology, then straight narrative, then early abstract Modernist painting,
then "anti-"narrative, then a long series of "abstract"
prose documents interspersed with some fairly "literal" autobiographical
panels (if you will), and lectures "explaining" her abstractNESS. The
key development is her perception of painting as an "objectification"
of reality, and the way in which non-referential (accretion of paint, words,
some SUBSTANCE) matter is a "profile" of a feeling or one's sense of
a person, place or thing (that's a Shapiro title!). The avant-garde taught her
audacity — how the insistence on a non-sequitur would be perceived as an
opacity rather than as a transparency (or, a perfect transparency showing
nothing but the age of reason's "sensible emptiness"). That opacity
could justify any representation as self-referential, complete, and profoundly
resistent to traditional explanation (external reference) — i.e., one of the
cornerstones of Language School
writing. Clearly, in Stein, as unlike Pound (who on some level does actually
want you to know all the history and theory he refers to), there is no desire
or concern that the reader know anything whatsoever about the hermetic
"secrets" of the text's hidden narrative (code). A "portrait"
may be a "letter" to Alice about
how satisfying her morning bowel movement was, but there is no literal evidence
of this in text. Stein stayed stuck in this rut for about 30 years, and her
writing appears not to have undergone any major shifts thereafter. An American
soldier is a rural church is a carnation. The Autobiography is another example
of the objectification of "material" neither more nor less
"true" than her "abstract" writings. It makes a painting of
her life in the same way that Picasso and Gris would have, and had done circa
1910. [The shifting viewpoint and disintegration of consciousness implied in
Duchamp's demonstration of Bergson's impressionism in Nude Descending are
post-Steinian.] And that's the same loop Hemingway became stuck in when he
perceived her "cubistic" phrase-making and turned it into the Big
Two-Hearted River (sorry to wander here). The key perception for me is that for
Stein language can be a nest in which to shelter from distraction, and
simultaneously a (public) work of (abstract) art, perfectly opaque,
"beautiful" and even redemptive while owing nothing to
["the"] world and its attractions and partisan forces. So there!
I countered
that “Your argument differs from Dydo
precisely in that she does see change in Stein's writing & can articulate
it pretty clearly,” to which Curtis then replied:
Dear Ron:
The "changes" are
mostly in execution — i.e., autobiography, lectures, etc. — rather than in
position. That's easy to see and not particularly perceptive. It seems that
GS's sense of her own place in the world changed during the 1930's and '40's.
The Depression and War, chiefly, gave her a sense of participation in
"actual" event which she felt a new license to celebrate. Conversing
with her during the 20's in the Paris
atelier would not have been materially different than talking with her in Chicago 15
years later. She was writing less as time went on, but the technique didn't
change much. The Yale material volumes, especially the later ones, seem to me
an elaboration of earlier ideas, in the same way that Coolidge's late works are
to his first efforts (Ing, Space, Quartz
Hearts). It is unlikely that GS would have done any more significant
executions had she lived, say, an additional 15 years. Three Lives to The Making
to Tender Buttons to Geography to Bee Time Vine — it's ALL there.
Make of it what you will.
Curtis
