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.