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.