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NEIL SCHMITZ
a.... ' Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for
the first time in English poetry for a hundred years."
If
after listening to
her strange way with words, Americans did not know who she was, she
did. "Also there is why is it," she would muse in
The Geographical
History of America,
"that in this epoch the only real literary thinking
has been done by a woman." In the last decade, helped by the reissue of
a number of her important works, this Gertrude Stein has slowly begun
to emerge.
It
may well be too soon to regard her in the company of
Homer and Shakespeare where she asks to be placed: "Think of the Bible
and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me," but as a theoretician
of narrative and of writing itself, she deserves scrupulous attention.
It
is, after all, a question of identity, the question that absorbs
Gertrude Stein in the
Geographical History:
the "Relation of Human
Nature to the Human Mind." In the thirties the American public was
interested in her visible Human Nature, that embodied part of her which
she felt was "not interesting." Since her death in 1946 the Human Mind
present in her writing, the essential Gertrude Stein, has seemed inscruta–
ble largely because the proper object of interpretation for critics has
been the well-wrought urn, that form of intricately contrived art she
steadfastly refused to produce. Unlike
Finnegans Wake
or
Nightwood,
the verbal play in her writings does not derive from a coherent source or
refer to an underlying design. There is no hidden
Ur-text
to be revealed
by formal analysis. Her writing, like the famous carafe in
Tender
Buttons,
is a "blind glass," a moving surface of linguistic phenomena.
Richard Bridgman's
Gertrude Stein in Pieces
(1970), the first compre–
hensive study of her oeuvre, is thus filled with muted outcries of despair
as the oeuvre, text by text, incoherently slides past him. "So, in pieces,"
he concludes, "because no term more accurately describes Gertrude
Stein's unit of literary expression. Her compositions memorialize that
daily half-hour when she gathered what came to mind and randomly,
incidentally, shaped it into a prose that was part free association, part
mechanical variation, part revelation only partially revealed. " Yet to
state this conclusion from a different critical vantage point, that of
Jacques Derrida, "we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue of
bricolage.
In
effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new
status of discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a
center,
to a
subject,
to a privileged
reference,
to an origin, or to an absolute
arche."
It
is Levi-Strauss, not Gertrude Stein, whom Derrida discusses in
this passage, but his description of decentered "freeplay" in a world
"without truth, without origin" in the essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," generally applies to her work
which, after
The Making of Americans
(1911), continually seeks to