Narration (2 page)

L
IESL
M. O
LSON

(Endnotes)

Special thanks to David Pavelich, Reference and Instruction Librarian at the Special Collections Research Center, and Bibliographer for Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the University of Chicago Library, for his help in contextualizing Stein’s
Narration
lectures.

1
For a complete itinerary of Stein’s American tour, see William Rice, “Gertrude Stein’s American Lecture Tour,” in
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
, ed. Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

2
Edward Burns, ed.,
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten
, vol. 1,
1913–1935
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 277.

3
Fanny Butcher, Diary, December 1, 1934. Fanny Butcher Papers, Midwest Manuscript Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago.

4
See my longer article on Stein’s visits to Chicago: “‘An invincible force meets an immovable object’: Gertrude Stein comes to Chicago,”
Modernism/Modernity
16, no. 4 (November 2009).

5
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,”
Longman’s Magazine
4 (September 1884),
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html.

6
In a letter, Toklas mentions the titles of the lectures as follows: “The American Language and How It Is Made,” “Narrative in Prose and Poetry,” “Is History Narrative,” and “Is History Literature.” See
Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
, ed. Samuel Steward (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 125.

7
These newspaper articles are reprinted in
How Writing is Written
, vol. 2, ed. Robert Bartlett Hass (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974).

8
How to Read a Book
is the title of Adler’s 1940 best-selling guide to reading comprehension.

9
Gertrude Stein, “Pathé,” in
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
, ed. Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 351.

IN NOVEMBER
of 1934 Miss Gertrude Stein delivered before an audience of five hundred students at the University of Chicago the lecture on “Poetry and Grammar” which is now printed in the volume entitled
Lectures in America.
At the invitation of the University she returned in March, 1935, to read before approximately the same audience the four lectures contained in this volume. In addition ten conferences were arranged during which Miss Stein amplified the ideas contained in these lectures by means of general discussion with some thirty selected students.

There are a number of ways in which these lectures may be approached. In the first place they are in themselves models of artistic form. The highly individual idiom in which they are written reposes upon an unerring ear for musical cadence and upon a conviction that repetition is a form of insistence and emphasis that is characteristic of all life, of history, and of nature itself. “If a thing is really existing there can be no repetition…. . Then we have insistence insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same not even when it is most the same that is when it has been taught.” In the printed version of the lectures the individuality of the idiom has been enhanced by the economy of the punctuation, which has been explained by Miss Stein as being a form of challenge to a livelier collaboration on the part of the reader. “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it…. . The longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I
had following one another, the more the very many more I had of them I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma…. . A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make yourself know yourself knowing it.”

Another approach to these lectures lies in seeing them as object-lessons of the teaching method. Nothing is learned save in answer to a deeply lodged and distinctly stated question. Beginning with a calculated simplicity, these lectures first prepare and provoke the correct questions in the listeners’ minds. One is irresistibly reminded of the request that Dante put to his guide, and which might serve as a motto for all education:

…io pregai che mi largisse il pasto
    Di cui largito m’aveva il disio.
…I prayed him to bestow on me the food, for
    which he had already bestowed on me the appetite.

These are real rewards, but the great reward of these lectures lies in the richness and vitality of the ideas contained in them. We soon discover that we are not to hear about narration from the point of view that the rhetorics usually discuss the subject. We hear nothing of the proportion of exposition to narrative, of where to place a climax, of how to heighten vividness through the use of illustrative detail. Here we return to first principles, indeed: “Narration is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen, that has happened or will happen in any way.” There is an almost terrifying exactness in Miss Stein’s use of the very words that the rest of the world employs so loosely: everybody, everything, and every way. Consequently the discussion leads at once into the realms of psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics, to a theory of knowledge and a theory of time. These matters are
treated, however, not in the Latinizing jargon of the manuals, but in the homely language of colloquial usage. The great and exhilarating passage in the third lecture, describing the difference between “existing” and “happening,” that begins: “The inside and the outside, the outside which is outside and the inside which is inside are not when they are inside and outside are not inside in short they are not existing, that is inside…. . ”—such a passage might have been rendered in terms of “subjective and objective phenomena”; it might have been more academically impressive; it could not have been clearer; and it would have lost that quality of rising from the “daily life” and from our “common knowledge” which is the vitalizing character of Miss Stein’s ideas.

These ideas are presented to us in a highly abstract form. Miss Stein pays her listeners the high compliment of dispensing for the most part with that apparatus of illustrative simile and anecdote that is so often employed to recommend ideas. She assumes that the attentive listener will bring, from a store of observation and reflection, the concrete illustration of her generalization. This is what renders doubly stimulating, for example, the treatment of the differences between English and American literature, and the distinction between prose and poetry-a critical principle which from the earlier lecture has already made so marked an impression and which in the present lectures receives a further development. In the present series, however, the outstanding passages will undoubtedly be those dealing with the psychology of the creative act as the moment of “recognition” and the discussion of the relations between the artist and the audience-a subject now the center of critical speculation in many quarters and which here receives distinguished and profound treatment.

Miss Stein has said that the artist is the most sensitive exponent of his contemporaneousness, expressing it while it still lies in the unconscious of society at large. In the first lecture in this book and in the lectures she has previously given she has described the character of the new points of view of this age, the twentieth century which was made by America, as the nineteenth was made by England, and with the result that “the United States is now the oldest country in the world.” These lectures in their method and in their content are brilliant examples of the breadth and movement and energy that the perspective of time will reveal to have been our characteristic.

T
HORNTON
W
ILDER

IT IS
a rather curious thing that it should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years and that makes a grandfather a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter if it happens right and it often does about happen right. Is it the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning that they had before, it is a curious thing a very curious thing that everything is a natural thing but it is it is a natural thing and it being a natural thing makes it a curious thing a very curious thing to almost anybody’s feeling. One is always having to talk to one’s self about it that a natural thing is not really a strange and a peculiar and a curious thing. So then there we are a hundred years does more or less make a century and this is determined by the fact that it includes a grandparent to a grandchild and that that is what makes it definitely different one time from another time and usually there is a war or a catastrophe to emphasize it so that anyone can know it. It is a very strange thing that such a natural thing is inevitably to all of us such a strange thing such a striking thing such a disconcerting thing.

The eighteenth century finished with the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars the nineteenth century with the world war, but in each case the thing of course had been done the change had been made but the wars made everybody know it and liberated them from not knowing it not knowing that everything was not just exactly what it had been. I am quite sure that the world’s history the world made up of human beings is made up in this way of
about always a century and it is determined that is made by the natural filling up of time from a grandparent to a grandchild. Twenty-five years roll around very quickly but four times twenty-five years which makes a century does not really roll around at all it makes a complete change but it does not roll around at all at least not to anybody’s feeling.

That is what narrative is that twenty-five years roll around so quickly but that one hundred years do not roll around at all but that they end, the century ends in being an entirely different thing and so any century comes to begin and comes to end. That makes one of the great difficulties of narrative to begin and to end and I think it has to do with the fact that a century begins and ends but that no part of it begins and no part of it ends and this serious problem in narrative I will take up very much later but now first to know what English literature is in connection with English life and what American literature is in connection with their life and their lives because of course most literature is narrative that is in one way or in another way the telling of how anybody how everybody does anything and everything. To begin then with English literature and what it is and American literature and what it is.

But before going on to this matter I have just been thinking that the civil war in America was another case of about a century, seventeen sixty to eighteen sixty again made a grandfather to a granddaughter a grandmother to a grandson and so as usual everything changed as it always has done very likely it will do so again, very likely a century every so often will do what a century always has done.

But to commence again with what English literature has done in telling everything and what American literature has done in telling everything and how although they completely differ one from the other and they use the
same language to tell everything that can be happening it is naturally very naturally not at all the same thing.

I have already written a lot about what the English people are and what their literature is and how it changed in every century not how the English people changed the English people did not change. That is something that again we must remember as a contradiction that makes everything the same. Once a nation has lived long enough anywhere to be that nation and that commences very soon after they have come to live where they are to live the character of that nation can naturally never be changing. When they asked me when I came back to America do you find America changed I said no neither America nor Americans after all when you say changed how could they change what after all could they change to, and when you ask that of course there is no answer. How could there be any answer. After all how could they change what could they change to. Different things happen and at the end of more or less of a century the different things that have happened makes everybody do all the different things that have happened very differently, but they as a nation although they do do things differently do do those different things differently in the way they as that nation always has done them always will do them. And therefore any nation’s literature is a homogeneous thing although in every century everything is different.

I do know about English literature that it has been determined by the fact that England is an island and that the daily life on that island was a completely daily life, that they could do nothing but lead a daily life on that island and that the more they owned everything outside of that island the more inevitably and completely were they forced to live the daily life in a more daily way, because if they owned everything outside they could not possibly allow
themselves to confuse the inside with the outside. Every hundred years or so everything changed, that they were English people living on an island did not change but things in relation one thing to another changed and that is what makes a century and in every century the relations of anything to anything changed and this change is what makes history, and really this is a thing for all of us to remember and to realize because it is going to make very clear the interesting thing that mostly history is not literature that literature is not history.