PARTISAN REVIEW
287
the
I
who creates discourse. Her genius, as William H. Gass suggests in his
introduction, was to recognize at the start of her career that the flaw in
Henry James's
The Golden Bowl
extended into the entire realm of
fiction. As early as 1910, struggling through the naturalistic schema of
The Making of Americans,
she had seen that the subject of narrative
could no longer be a world restored, that any story told in a linear and
orderly manner described an attitude toward experience that had
become obsolete. In the age of film, the act of writing had to be
rethought. Much in the same fashion, then, that Picasso dislocated the
represented object in
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
in order to free paint–
ing, she sought in
Tender Buttons
(1914) to decompose traditional
narrative in order to liberate writing. Yet the selfless
I
that emerges in
her experimental portraiture and plays, that wholly estranged and aloof
mind repetitively justified in the
Geographical History,
is remarkably
familiar in its assumptions. She had studied under William James while at
Radcliffe, and to a large extent her criticism of the self in the
Geo–
graphical History
derives from the Jamesian analysis of consciousness in
the
Principles of Psychology.
"The identity found by the
I
in its
Me
is
only a loosely construed thing," he had written, "just like that which
any outside observer [a little dog] might find in the same assemblage of
facts." For James consciousness is always anonymous, the embodied self
always in process, never intact or unitary. Yet Gertrude Stein extends
and rephrases this analysis to such a passionate degree that the Jamesian
influence ultimately falls away and a purely American poetic voice
speaks: "What is the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up
to be a man." Or: what is the use of writing if it is only to serve the
tyrannical demand of a
telos,
the purpose of some predicated truth? So
it is that Gertrude Stein enters the problematics of modern
discourse--at once the artistic contemporary of Picasso and the cultural
peer of Walt Whitman who also leaped outside space and time.
Indeed Gertrude Stein's argument in the
Geographical History
that
the self can never be determined by its appearances, its human nature, is
an argument continually expressed in American literature. "When you've
lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell,"
Madame Merle declares in
The Portrait of a Lady,
"and that you must
take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of
circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're
each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances." To which Isabel
Archer responds: "Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me;
everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary
