PARTISAN REVIEW
285
disrupt the presence of a referential author, an
I
who situates and defines
the text.
In
short, she abandons the discursive quest for the "bottom
nature" of persons and things, unknowable origins and identities, for the
modest realm of the known: language. "What is necessary now,"
Gertrude Stein asserts in the
Geographical History,
arbitrarily scrambling
her chapter headings, "is content without form." Or to put it dif–
ferently: discourse that stands for nothing but itself. Because "there is
no real reality to a really imagined life any more," the sourceless text can
now amiably generate a multiplicity of relative meanings, float free as
nothing more than a discernible object in a world streaming with objects,
no more or less privileged. Regarded from this perspective, her formless
writing thus seems no longer a scandalous affront to the reader, an
impossibly surreal diary closed to observation, but instead a precocious
research of the problematics of discourse, writing as self-effaced play
within the finite and yet inexhaustibly rich field of signification. "The
only thing different from one time to another is what is seen," she once
shrewdly observed, "and what is seen depends upon how everybody is
doing everything."
Composed in 1935 shortly after the pressures and discoveries of her
American tour, the
Geographical History
is a particularly useful text in
coming to terms with what is now to be seen in her writing.
In
its
recurrent questioning of the "use of the human mind and its connection
with what is being written," the book at once reveals the risk and
significance of its experimental discourse and reflects her understanding
that the questions asked in it are essentially American questions.
Throughout the
Geographical History,
as we shall see, this comic para–
dox repeats itself: the writer states her identity by constantly denying its
ground. There is
no
relation between human nature and the human
mind, she would insist, none, and yet in looking down on the widespread
terrain of the United States from the air (her first flight), she had seen
everywhere the locus of her sensibility, the featureless face of the
American self: "only flat land a great deal of flat land is connected with
the human mind and so America is connected with the human mind, I
can say so but what I do is to write it so. Think not the way the land
looks but the way it lies that is now connected with the human mind."
The "use" of the human mind in writing, then, is the historical "use" of
geographical America: both confer the absence of identity, freedom
from history. "No one knowing me," she advises, "knows me." And in
that instant she is curiously manifest.
I am I because my little dog knows me, even if the little dog is
a big one, and yet the little dog knowing me does not really make
