The Making of Americans as conceptual art - I have already made several diagrams

Sometime I will be able to make a diagram.  I have already made several diagrams.  I will sometime make a complete diagram and that will be a very long book...  (580)

I am going to write about The Making of Americans as conceptual art, art where how it is made is a central part of what the work is.  Art that, strangely, does not necessarily have to be experienced like less conceptual art (I do not think there can be such a thing as non-conceptual art, but there is a moreness and a lessness).  Books that do not need to be read to be understood, films that do not need to be seen.

A couple of works I had in mind while reading The Making of Americans, and while wondering why I kept reading it, were George Seurat’s monumental painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) and Andy Warhol’s eight hour single-shot film Empire (1965).

Seurat’s painting can be experienced instantly by entering its gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, and is full of delightful details worthy of more attention, but for the viewer interested in technique it is also a demonstration of what was once an innovation, pointillism.  After a year of preparation, much of Seurat’s time was spent mechanically filling in the grid.  I had the sense that Stein was doing something similar.  Not that the artist, or the viewer, cannot take pleasure in the work of the moment, the brushstrokes and sentences.  "There are some pretty wonderful sentences in it and we know how fond we both are of sentences" (letter to Sherwood Anderson, p. xiii of the Dalkey Archive edition).

I was also wondering why Stein’s book was so long, and why Seurat’s paintings were so large.  What would the difference be if  La Grande Jatte were 10% smaller?  What if Stein’s book were 725 pages rather than 925 pages?  Of course the case of Seurat is more poignant because he died at 31, meaning he spent four years of a short career producing two paintings.  If only there were a third. Heaven knows we have plenty of Gertrude Stein’s work.

Warhol’s Empire, by contrast, a single shot of the Empire State Building filmed for eight hours and five minutes, does not need to be seen at all for the concept to be clear.  A description and a still pretty does the job.  Like so many museum films, even those much shorter than Empire, there is no expectation that anyone watches the whole thing.

Not to deny anyone’s experience of these pieces.  I am just saying that the conceptual aspect, pointillism or repetition or stasis, is easily detachable from the work itself which becomes in that sense arbitrary.

The Making of Americans feels somewhere in between to me.  Anyone interested in how far the novel can be pushed should read some of it.  Ten pages somewhere in the middle?  Finnegans Wake is similar.  Reading a few pages, maybe the first few pages and the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section, quickly shows a lot of what Joyce is doing.  Not everything, but a lot, while Ulysses does not reveal itself in the same way.  Most readers of either book will quickly know if they want more or have had enough, thanks.

I guess The Making of Americans had just enough variation of style for me to keep going, or to feed my neurosis.  James Elkins has written a related piece about not finishing Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965), a genuine descendant of Stein’s book, although longer and a full half-pound heavier.  I have seen a number of people on Twitter enjoying Miss Macintosh.  They will be ready for the Dalkey Archive reissue of The Making of Americans currently scheduled for September 2025.  Plenty of time to finish.  The William Gass and Steven Meyer introductions to the Dalkey edition are excellent, with Gass interested in style and Meyer in the process of creation.

I likely spent thirty hours reading The Making of Americans.  I could have watched Empire three times!  Or made it halfway through Fallout 4.  The recent marathon reading of the novel at Paula Cooper Gallery took 52 hours.

I will note that soon after Stein finished The Making of Americans she wrote Tender Buttons (1913), a radical move in the opposite direction, 78 little pages, compressed, filled with plain, material words.  “Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal” (58), the words recontextualized, perhaps pushed towards nonsense and abstraction, but also inescapably things, or names of things.  Miss Macintosh appears to blend the concepts of the two books.  Maybe I will read it, or look at it more, someday.

 

Stein's style - Mostly no one will be wanting to listen, I am certain

Not many find it interesting this way I am realizing every one, not any I am just now hearing, and it is so completely an important thing, it is a complete thing in understanding, I am going on writing, I am going on now with a description of all whom Alfred Hersland came to know in his living.   Mostly no one will be wanting to listen, I am certain. (595)

The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress is built on gerunds and participles.  There are two just in that title.  People do not have “life” but “living,” not “existence” but “being.”  Poor David dies young, so he was “being a dead one” who was not living past “the beginning of his middle living.”  Stein’s novel is sometimes like an academic work with a specialized vocabulary.  What is the difference between “independent dependent living” and “dependent independent living”?  The terms are explored in some depth.  The influence of Stein’s teacher William James is visible.

The gerunds accumulate.  Or participles.  There are sentences whose meaning depends on figuring out the part of speech.

He was being living every day.  In a way he was needing to be certain that he was being living every day he was being living.  He was being living every day he was being living.  He was being living every day until he was not being living which was at the ending of the beginning of the middle of being living.  He was being living every day.  (862)

Etc.  Assume that every quotation is from a paragraph that goes on for a while longer. 

Stein is also attracted to other “-ing” words like “thing” and “something,” both for the assonance and the abstraction.  David, who is doing the “being living” above, is a sensualist compared to his siblings, interested in “feeling,” “smelling,” “eating” and so on as part of “being,” with never a hint of what he feels, smells, or eats.  Everything is subsumed under the gerunds.

To my surprise I found David’s death (the quotation above is pulled from several similar pages in some sense describing his death) somehow moving, at a fairly abstract level, in part because after 800 pages I had found a way to read Stein.  Close reading did not get me too far.  No, I found a voice, a kind of chant, helped by her ancestor Walt Whitman and one of her descendants, the composer Frederic Rzewski, particularly his 1973 “Coming Together” (the link goes to a recording of the piece) which takes a text by an inmate of Attica and builds Stein-like repetitions from it, with an increasing intensity of meaning.  Rzewski takes the title, gerund and all, from the prisoner’s text, but also I now see from Stein:

This coming together in them to be a whole one is a strange thing in men and women.  Sometimes some one is very interesting to some one, very, very interesting to some one and then that one comes together to be a whole one and then that one is not any more, at all, interesting to the one knowing that one, that one then is shrunken by being a whole one, some have not that happen to them by being a whole one, some are richer then, all are solider then to those knowing them when they come together inside them.  It is very strange this coming together to be a whole one.  (382)

Tomorrow I will dodge the question of why I read, or finished, this book by rambling about conceptual art.

everything in a being is always repeating - reading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

Since I actually read the thing for some reason I will write some notes on Gertrude Stein’s enormous The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925).  It is a monster.  Why did I read it?  No, that is not the right questions.  There are good reasons to read it.  Why did I read all of it?  Let me defer that question.

The Making of Americans is 925 big, big pages of avant garde novel-adjacent text.  Stein wrote it over several years, mostly after Three Lives (1909), when it quickly evolved from a relatively conventional family narrative with a plot and characters and the usual thing into a more purely stylistic work of conceptual art.  It is a bit like James Joyce’s move from Dubliners to A Portrait of the Artist to Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, each time paring away more of what is conventional to fiction and emphasizing what is stylistically new.  Except that Stein’s started with Portrait and moved straight to Finnegans Wake, all before Joyce published anything.

Stein finished writing, and Alice Toklas finished typing, the beast in 1911, but no one wanted to publish any of it until Ernest Hemingway brought some of it to Ford Madox Ford in 1924.  The world had caught up with Stein; Modernism had happened.  Not too much later Stein would write a big bestseller.

The Making of Americans is nominally about three siblings, Martha, Alfred, and David Hersland and the people around them, parents, spouses, and friends.  Here Stein begins a new section, about Alfred Hersland and his wife Julia Dehning:

I have been giving the history of a very great many men and women.  Sometime I will give a history of every kind of men and women, every kind there is of men and women.  Already I have given a history of many men and women.  Sometime I will be giving a history of all the rest of them.  This is now pretty nearly certain.  I have been already giving the history of a very great many men and women, I will now be giving the history of a number of more of them and then of a number more still of them and then still of some more of them and that will be a long book and when I am finished with this one then I will begin that one.  I have already begun that one but now I am still writing this one and now I am beginning this portion of this one which is the complete history of Alfred Hersland and of every one he ever came to know in living and of many others I will be describing now in this beginning. 

On p. 479, halfway through, this passage was discouraging.  I have added some bold emphasis to aid skimming.  Perhaps the important thing to note, aside from some evidence that Stein has a sense of humor about what she is doing, is that the repetition of words and phrases and even entire sentences is the basic compositional principle of the passage – of the entire novel – going far beyond the repetitionsfar beyond the repetitions of Three Lives.  The repetition is part of the metaphysics of the novel:

Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating.  This is now a description of my feeling.  As I was saying listening to repeating is often irritating, always repeating is all of living, everything in a being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding.  (291)

Maybe another thing to note is that, for all of the “many men and women,” the only character in these passages is the narrator.  She has a voice and an attitude; she has motivation.  She is arguably the only real character in the book, and the plot might be her writing of the book.  The only plot, really.  Martha Hersland marries a philosophy professor who leaves her for another professor.  Alfred and Julia divorce and he remarries.  David, the younger brother, dies young.  But almost all of this is presented abstractly.  I doubt there are ten pages in the book, more than one percent of it, made up of any kind of scene.  Five year-old Martha angrily throws her umbrella in the mud.  The specificity of this action, the time and place and presence of a material object, was a shock.  It is “repeating,” I guess, but psychologically.

That second passage emphasizes the aspect of the book I will save for tomorrow’s grammar lesson: the “-ing” words, the endless flow, or flowing, of “-ing” words.

Books Read in May 2024 – Some are certainly knowing what they are meaning, some are certainly not knowing what they are meaning.

A month without writing anything.  Plenty of reading, though.

FICTIONS

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), James Weldon Johnson

The Making of Americans (1925), Gertrude Stein – read over the course of months.  The quotation up above is from p. 783.  I will write about this book soon, if only to plant a flag on the peak.

All My Sons (1946), Arthur Miller

Dialogues with Leucó (1947), Cesar Pavese – a sequel to Ovid.

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1983), Ida Fink – terrible, in the “terror” sense, Holocaust stories, almost all about people who hid, or tried to hide, the camps in the distance.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), José Saramago – a romance novel.

Erasure (2001), Percival Everett – Is the Roland Barthes parody in the movie, somehow?

 

POEMS

Collected Poems 1930-1993 (through 1948) &

The Land of Silence (1953) &

In Time Like Air (1958), May Sarton – smart cosmopolitan formalism; not yet a Maine poet.

A Mask for Janus (1952) &

The Dancing Bears (1954) &

Green with Beasts (1956), W. S. Merwin – more smart cosmopolitan formalism.

Daylight (1953), Czeslaw Milosz – or whatever part of the book is in New and Collected Poems.

Grackledom (2023), Leslie Moore – a Maine poet and artist.  Just look at this book, irresistible.  I live about a quarter mile from a grackledom.

 

WORLD WAR II MEMOIRS

Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy (1978), Norman Lewis – Since he knew Italian, he was an administrator behind the lines.  Since he is a skilled British writer, his account of the post-war Italy is essentially comic, dark, dark comedy.

With the Old Breed (1981), E. B. Sledge – It occurred to me that I had read plenty about soldiers in Europe and nothing about the Pacific.  Sledge was an American Marine who fought in two nightmarish battles, on a coral island and on Okinawa.  Clearly written and open-eyed.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Journal (1943-9), André Gide

Les bonnes (1947) &

Le Balcon (1956 / 1960 / 1962), Jean Genet

Victimes du devoir (1953) &

Amédée ou Comment s'en débarrasser (1954), Eugène Ionesco

Portuguese study was all in class and in the textbook.  June’s study will be in Portugal itself.  Let’s see how that goes.