So Stein wrote a lot of prose about writing, writing about writing now surprise there, in various forms. And I just thought it would be, I don't know if it'll be fun, but it'll be interesting, stimulating and maybe educational for us to go through some of her statements. One on narrative, one on noun, one of repetition, and one on composition. Let's see if we can make some sense, some Steinian sense out of these. Let's take narrative first. She says, I think one naturally is impressed by anything having a beginning, a middle, and an ending when one is emerging from adolescence. It's kind of a snarky statement, isn't it? American writing has been an escaping, not an escaping, but an existing within with the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of anything having a beginning, and a middle and an ending. What's she saying about narrative? Max, what's she saying about the narrative there? >> Well, as someone who's not too far from adolescence- >> You mean, your self? >> My self, not Stein. >> You feeling sulky? >> Yeah, I do feel, I do take some issue with this statement, and also- >> What was she saying before you take issue with it? >> Well, she seems to say the sequence of writing, or anything having a beginning and an ending, or some sort of tilos or a narrative essentially- >> That's an immature thought. >> It is an immature thought, yeah. >> That's easy early ABC's learning and stuff. >> With something that- >> You get to be an adult, you realize that hings don't really have a neat beginning, middle and end. >> Well, they all seem to coexist though, is what I'm getting from this. That she says American writing has been existing with- >> An escaping- >> An escaping from but an existing with this feeling that, that one thing has to succeed. >> She's saying that American writing has been too addicted and devoted to narrative, which is an A to B to C lockstep cause and effect, right? Anna, say more about this? >> Well, I think what she's saying is that if you're going to write in a way that's supposed to, in some way, replicate or represent life, you can't give narrative that's ABCD. >> Because life isn't lived. >> Because life for- >> Because life isn't lived narratively. >> Life isn't lived narratively, but more importantly, because I guess life technically sort of does go with the progression of time. You do get older. >> It's a progression that we impose upon it as a fiction that will suffice to explain our lives. >> But memory doesn't work that way, I don't think. If we think about someone like Lyn Hejinian who is going to write her life- >> Another chapter nine poet. >> Not in a linear sense. She's going to write it the way she remembers it as she remembers it with those associations from one event to another created by associations, like think of the color of her bedroom and then the color of maybe flowers in a field where she would go and- >> Which are two- >> Different types of- >> Disconnected memories that if you set them together seem like a sequence of a life, but in fact aren't a sequence. They aren't a sequence in memory and I would insist they weren't a sequence in life, particularly at that point. Who came first, Napoleon the First? Why did Napoleon the First come first? I'm quoting, If I Told Him Would He Like It, the Picasso portrait who came first? Napoleon the First. Why did Napoleon the First come first? Anybody know? because they gave him the name of the first, he's the first Napoleon. Who came first? Napoleon the first. Who came second? Napoleon the Second. Is there actually a natural relationship between, anybody know French History? Between Napoleon the First and Napoleon the Second? No. Except that this is the way that popes are, and presidents. That's history. History teaches that history teaches. It's kind of self-proving. And I think she's saying something like that about narrative. It's pretty radical. And Max, I'm going to give you 20 seconds to say why you're chafing against that a little bit. >> Well, I don't want to believe that with maturity, there's this sort of absolute leveling out. I want to believe that, I hope that in adulthood, where there's still some sort of chance to emerge to become, that's there's still some sort of idea of time and progress. >> Yeah, okay, I think that's good. Stein is throwing off a little insult there. She's really not saying anything about adolescence, she's saying something about American culture. >> Sure, absolutely. >> Adolescent American culture. >> I think she's actually treating adolescence positively. Or the way I interpreted it, when we're younger, we're confused, we can't string events together. We tend to think things will never end. We have less awareness of our emotions and moods as we grow older. That's when we draw this logical coherence that doesn't actually exist, it's a fiction that we cling to. And that's the escaping that she's referencing here. >> So maybe adulthood is the problem and not adolescence. >> I think so. >> Okay, cool, let's go on to the noun. A noun is a name of a thing, anything. Why after a thing is named, write about it? I love that. Once it's named, why write about it? John Ashbery, who's a chapter eight poet, big chapter eight poet for us, said of Stein in a review, he said, why write anything that can be written? What I like about Gertrude Stein is that she wrote stuff that can't be written. All right, once a thing can be written, why do it? If a noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named, write about it? A name is adequate or it is not. Things, once they are named, does not go on doing anything to them, and so why write in nouns? Nouns are the name of anything. And just naming names is all right when you want to call a roll. But is it good for anything else? Dave, what do you think she means by that? That's pretty powerful stuff. Maybe because the world, our linguistic world is organized around nouns a lot. >> I think it's non-descriptive. A noun already carries a description with it. Once it's been named, you already have that understanding, that meaning. So if you really want to describe something, you have to approach it differently. If she wanted to describe a carafe again, she would do it differently. >> And when she says roll call, she's willingly, almost jokingly, to accept the utility of nouns in a roll call. What kind of nouns is she talking about there particularly? >> Maybe a person's name? >> Yeah, proper noun. Proper noun. Anna, so, Anna, so did you choose the name Anna? >> No. >> Okay, so you were given Anna, you're Anna, when you hear Anna, Pavlovian-like you respond. If there are four Annas in the room and someone says Anna, four people turn around. There's really no getting out of that, it's in you. You've been languaged, from the start. Anna, Anna, come crawl toward me. Anna, Anna pooped in the potty. Yay! Anna, Anna, Anna. All that reinforcement over those years. You're Anna, and there's Annaness. But there really isn't Annaness. Anna is an arbitrary, capricious, not consultative, undemocratic noun that got applied to you. But Annaness gets created in other ways. If you question every noun the way Gertrude Stein, at least at this moment, was questioning the name, you begin to wonder about nouns. So, she believes in the determinism of the noun. Can someone say something about the relationship that she stresses between the word and the thing that's different from traditional notions of word-thing relationships? Who wants to give that a try? >> Well, she's not doing the word-thing, she's doing the word-word. >> Same one. >> So if you think about the relationship between we're going with mug. Is that a mug? So that's mug. >> This is. >> Determinately. >> That's yes. But mug also has all of these other, I mean, if this was a Stein poem, this doesn't have to be mug. >> She's going to liberate it. She's going to liberate the word. So what's happening here is that she sees a word-thing relationship, thing in the world, not worded, non languaged. >> Mm-hm. >> Right? Word thing and she wants to see it as like a word-word relationship. Because once this thing becomes a word, as a noun, it gets put into language and is a word. We don't have it anymore, we just have mug. I'm hiding it, we have mug, mug-mug. So she wants to replace word-thing relationships, which in language aren't really things, with word-word relationships, that's really important. Let's talk about repeating, As I was saying, loving, repeating, being is, in a way, earthly being. In some it is repeating, that gives to them always a solid feeling of being. In some children, there's more feeling and in repeating, eating and playing and, in some, in storytelling and they're feeling more and more in living, as in growing young men and women, and grown men and women, and men and women in their middle living more. There middle living you're moving from adolescence to middle living. More and more, there comes to be in them differences in loving, repeating, and different kinds of men and women, there comes to be in some more and in some less loving, repeating, loving, repeating. Is some, is it going on, always in them, of earthly being, etc. What kind of repeating is this? First of all, aside from the statement, what is repeating in the context of language do or mean? Have we seen any repeaters in our course? Someone who repeats? Williams. >> Well his granddad, his daddy, Whitman, the repeater. What's the purpose of repeating for Walt? >> Emphasis? >> Emphasis is one. >> It creates a rhythm. >> Rhythm. Come on guys. >> Enumeration. >> Enumeration, the world is made of many, many, many people, things and places. And I want to put them all in the poem. So repeating, but in each case, you get a slight difference. So how do you get a difference in repeating? How do you create difference in repeating, we think repeating is the same but, in fact, how is it different when you repeat, theoretically speaking? >> Well maybe we can think about Duchamp in a sense, let's just say you're descending the staircase, you know, he repeats different forms but in a slightly different context in a slightly more fractured way. >> Perspective, from a slightly different perspective. >> So you get a different, maybe, feeling or you get a different kind of angle on what is the same shape. >> And presenting it simultaneously. >> And in succession. >> Yes, that's really well-said. So this has a lot to do with cubism, though it goes beyond it. So she turns and torques and twists things. Hemingway in his very early prose in a book like In Our Time described Nick Adams going camping by a river, opening a can, doing this. He did this, he did that. He did this, he did that. It's almost like Frank O'Hara, the chapter eight poet. He did this, he did that, he did this. It's this slight movement, a kind of repetitive multi-perspectival repetition of doing. Okay so why loving repeating? Why does she like to repeat? Why does she think we would like to repeat? >> I think we saw one of the issues with, going to bring it back to the nouns and to tie it together, was how much of a black hole a noun can be, and we fixated on those, and we tried to unpack all the different meanings of it in a traditional close-reading, and it can sort of get weighed down. But perhaps in loving repeating, she's trying to keep it moving in the way that Dave was talking about before, bringing it into the present movement, keeping it new. Or in relation, in relevance to her contemporary time. >> Why all this emphasis on men and women. >> Maybe because she's saying that repetition is like the fundamental unit of existence. Whereas when we see it in writing you excise it. Something that is repeated is something which you take out. And by tying it back to men and women, the whole idea of procreation. It's repeating and repeating and repeating of people, of things, of history. >> Repeating is creation is procreation. So loving repeating is a sexual thing. >> I mean, the idea that repeating is usually something static and, if we´re going on with the idea of progress or procreation then repeating with a difference is the goal here? >> So again, her concept of language is to take a word-thing relationship which we have collapsed because of the short hand and the hurriedness of our lives into a single thing not a relationship. We forget that the word redskin actually refers to something. We just collapse it, and we forget about the meaning. She wants us to remember there's a relationship. All word-thing relationships are a relationship. So shehe like.s it to a word-word relationship. It is essentially a copulative relationship. It's a relationship that generates. The more she circles around, in a new descending a staircase kind of way, or even a Nick Adams kind of way or a Frank O'Hara kind of way. The more we circle around and find all kinds of views of a relationship, the more multiple and meaningful and various that relationship is. So that repetition is always a difference. >> To bring it back to art history again, I mean, I guess it's a little bit relevant just because it's Stein you know. One of the major criticisms of Monet's later career was that he- >> The same water lilies again and again. >> Again and again, but- >> They're all different, aren't they? >> Because he was able to take like a series, like the poplars, for example. There you are, Dave Poplar again. [LAUGH] >> Why does Poplar always- >> Monet loved poplars. But he has like a series of 35 paintings of the same exact row of trees but he does it at just slightly different times of day. You know, maybe this is 10:05 in the morning. >> Yes, good. >> Maybe this is 10:10 in the morning. >> Good. >> Just to show you that the play of light on this particular leaf is going to be just a little bit different. And in that whole series, all those 35 paintings, you have just this incredible multiplicity. And all the different variations that are possible looking at the same thing. >> Nice, go ahead Alice. >> Also just bringing the concept of repetition back to the word, I think one of the earliest ways of disassociating a word from the object that it usually represents is repeating a word. So if you say, table, table, table, table over and over again. It starts to sound so alien. And that's definitely something that [CROSSTALK] >> Repetition creates defamiliarization. It's a really important point. >> Like primal chanting. >> And it is like primal chanting, which is why a lot of people, including critics, people who didn't like Stein, described her as engaging in childish or childlike babbling. Something so fundamental and so basic about her language. The other thing, a thought that your nice comment makes me think, is that one of the reasons I love Stein and love repeating and love repeatedly reading Stein, is that she is willing to show the effort of attempting to get it right, right in quotes. She's willing to try it this way and that way and this way and that way. And in a conventional notion of writing, we would do that draft and rip it up and throw it out and not show it. And then we do a better draft and rip it up, and we try another approach in another angle, we try first person pronoun. And we try second person plural, and then we try this and we try this approach. And then finally, we get to something that we think is finished, and we present that and we hide all the drafts. What Gertenstein is showing us is the effort at trying to get it right, to repeat this his way, try it that way, try it this way, take five, take a hundred. And so, she's willing essentially to show us all the approaches. All right, let's conclude by talking about composition. She wrote an absolutely terrific piece of pros called composition as explanation. And we're looking at a very brief couple of paragraphs, and I'm only going to pick out a very small part of that small part and ask you what you make of it. The composition is the thing seen by everyone living. In the living, they are doing. They are composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. All right, what are we going to do with that? Very important. >> Maybe the idea of who you're talking before about how everyone is educated into a linguistic community, and that's not something just natural language is not a natural phenomenon, it's culturally coded, it's socially agreed upon. And so in that way she's saying that everyone is the maker of the reality in which they live. >> Linguistically? >> Linguistically, yeah. >> Anyone? >> This is the time and this is the record of the time. >> You're quoting Lori Anderson. This is the time and this is the record of the time that the use of the Dickinsonian disk. This makes me a in her piece, My Life, which we're going to read a piece of in chapter nine. Essentially says, the self is languaged, and I am going to show you in language how the self was languaged, and that is this history of me in myself. It's almost a Stymeian way of putting it. The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing. It sounds almost Cid Cormanesque or Dickensonian in the way that the hand, the hand that is writing, maybe that's needed for two, the hand that is composing self is doing it now. Composing is living. Lets go around and get some final words on this. The composition is the thing seen by everyone living and the living they are doing. They are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living, is the composition of the time in which they're living. That last part seems to make some claims about writing as a historical record. So, who wants to start with this? Just say anything briefly. Dave, what's your thinking? >> I feel like she´s saying that nobody is a bystander to what´s going on, including language. Words are not just there, they don't mean just things. They actually have something to do with what´s going on around them. >> Terrific. Max? >> There´s an interesting, her choice of the word composing composition, I find it very interesting because a composition we think of as something that has been composed, that is finished, but at the same time we also think of the act of composition. And so she's sort of collapsing that distinction between the product and the process. And that everything is always sort of coming into being, we are always composing the composition. >> Great. Molly, your thoughts? >> And when she writes they are the composing of the composition, it makes me think each person is composing his or her own composition in our ways of building and understanding our world, and then each one of those lives is part of a larger composition that encompasses everything. >> One almost thinks that one can live and artful life, because if one is self-consciously composing one's living and realize that others are composing their living, and then together we form a kind of collective composing. One can almost live artfully, it's very interesting, an idealistic thought I think. Anna? >> I'm just really kind of drawn to the way that she is able to just turn a word and turn a phrase even within, I mean, what was that, like one sentence that you read? That there's so many different way she uses composing, living, composition, time, all those different. She does what she writes, when she writes about what she's doing. >> I was taught to write a concise sentence, and I think the images are somewhat stuck in that stasis too, but I don't want to get into that. Because the sentence was supposed to do a single piece of work, and it was suppose to do it clearly. So this is the carafe, the blind glass. This sentence is suppose to do a lot of work, and it does. It opens out, open as opposed to close. Ally, your thought? >> Yeah, I guess its difference in spreading in that way. And I also just think that by slightly changing, if you just listen to it, if you just kind of like tune it out and try not to make meaning from it and you just listen to it, it sounds very similar but different, but varying. And that also kind of echoes what she's saying is the process of composition and the differences in composing in your different times. So it's this very like potent sense of continuity. And it just has a flow that kind of, I feel like echoes like the flow of time passing. >> I think that's great, you said that last sentence almost as if you've caught yourself in being too poetic, but I think that people have likened listening to Stein's pros like listening to water music. Both proper noun, the peace water music, but also just the music of water, a certain babbling in a different sense. And that's totally relevant to water raining in tender buttons, because water is the thing that flows everywhere that spreads but also a thing that has definition if we give it form. Form, like one of these forms, can contain water, in fact it does. But let water spread, it will go everywhere. So it is both form and freedom at once. Maryse, final word. >> Going back to what Max was saying, at the end she says naturally no one thinks. And so I think it's very relevant as Ally was saying as well to call back to the notion of composition that constantly being improcessed and everyone being a subject in that process. And of thinking of language not as furniture pieces to be moved around a room, but as this idea of water, something naturally that depends on the form that we give them. >> We should all live that way.
