288
NEIL SCHMITZ
one." The Gertrude Stein who speaks in the
Geographical History
not
only resumes the longing implicit in Isabel's assertion, she resumes as
well Isabel's ambivalence. Neither woman lights out for the territories to
give that desire its proper geographical setting. Both become instead
expatriates who settle their radiant and unknowable American
I
in the
most closely defined and historical of European quarters. When Gertrude
Stein declares "I am I" in the
Geographical History,
then, she professes
the freedom of her mind from the exigencies of time and person, but the
terror of this discourse (the emptiness of that flat American space) is not
mentioned.
In
fact few modem writers are so blithely at home in their
writing, so playfully at ease. How does it happen that in her sixties
Gertrude Stein writes the
Geographical History
rather than a new version
of
The Confidence Man?
The answer is expressed everywhere in her text. "In china china is
not china," she writes, "it is an earthen ware." In America, however, "all
who like china ... do not like to have china in china be an earthen ware.
Therefore it is not." She took an abiding delight in the arbitrary nature
of the sign. "Words are what money is," she would argue, a convention,
man-made. She had in effect reconstituted the New World in her Parisian
apartment, not the green geographical concept of America, but an
endlessly creative linguistic world in which all the words contained in
language existed solely
for
her to choose and write them. Grammar and
syntax were similarly
for
her. She would, Adam-like, consider the parts
of speech, prefer pronouns to nouns, call the comma "servile," and
cherish the preposition.
"It
is wonderful," she observes in
Poetry and
Grammar,
"the number of mistakes a verb can make and that is equally
true of its adverb." As Gass ingeniously shows in his introduction, she
regarded the sentence as a veritable fountain of possibilities and would
tirelessly generate them in her writing, playing with their grammatical
and phonetic qualities as a jazz musician turns the notes of a hackneyed
tune. The stream of her consciousness is thus always witnessed: it is the
object of her meditation, a content without form, without beginning,
middle, or ending. "I do not know where I am going but I am on my
way," Gertrude Stein writes in the middle of the
Geographical History ,
"and then suddenly well not perhaps suddenly but perhaps yes I do
know where I am going and I do not like it like that."
If
conflict exists in
this world, it occurs when the writer feels the pull toward designation,
toward rule and system.
In her approach to language Gertrude Stein did find, after all, an
identity that preserved her from the disenchantment and isolation of her
American compatriots in Europe. She had transferred the place of
American myth from landscape to language, and there, not unlike
