| | | Finding and Not Finding Voice:
Gertrude Stein's Three Lives
What Gertrude Stein embraces in Three Lives is the range of feelings, including conflicts and contradictions, inherent in each of us. Gone from this text is the character as a symbol, representing a certain set of qualities: good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, deserving of our sympathy or scorn. This is a more honest unraveling of story without the common resorting to sentiment so expected. It's an almost scientific probing, an objective reporting, that allows Stein's characters to exist as they are, "each one as she may," without their needing to merely embody the qualities necessary to satisfy a type. This is achieved with an acceptance on Stein's part of her characters' language as a means of revealing, rather than a reliance on the authorial presence commenting on the action.
In other words, Stein is not judgmental. She doesn't abuse the author's position of power to pass judgment on her characters' inefficiencies, or to say this one is better than this one. She's accepting of them. When she says Melanctha is "still too complex with desire," this accepts the fact and doesn't condemn the woman for not being in control. This seems to me a radically different approach than the romances preceding this book's 1905 publication, where the reader is meant to become sympathetically involved and whose sentiments are manipulated by the author. In this book we're no less involved or no less sympathetic for the characters, but our reading is informed with a more rational objectivity as sentimental attachment is thwarted with cold facts. We're not permitted to go ga-ga over any character: "Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress." Contradictions are included as simple fact to dispel myths of hero or villain, to show that a character is a multitude.
This acceptance allows Stein to focus on ordinary characters, for her intent here is not to tell a fabulous story, excited with action, but to profile a few common people; to reveal, to explore, and to show what's special in the ordinary, to sing the "pleasures of the actual," as critic Leon Katz puts it. (Katz, Leon, introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and other early writings, by Gertrude Stein, Liveright, NY, 1971, p. xlii)
Stripping away action and descriptions of physical surroundings, Stein zeroes in on the psychological landscape: the intensity of feelings and interrelationships. As Katz points out, "she pass[ed] beyond the practical acquaintance with human being which anyone can have to a total description of human being such as no one before her had dreamed of formulating . . . [to get to] the underlying struggle and the maddening obfuscation at the bottom of all relations." (Katz, p. viiii–x)
Stein's exploration was aided by many factors. William James' investigation of consciousness had exposed Stein, at Radcliffe, to the distinctions between streams of substantive and transitional thoughts. He'd emphasized awareness of the connectives "if" and "and" and "but" and "whether". As a student of intellectual processes, of the way humans consciously and unconsciously process thoughts, Stein had even been involved in the publication of a paper, "Normal Motor Automatism," in a 1896 issue of the Psychological Review, though she later admitted (in Everybody's Autobiography) that her partner in the project, Leon M. Solomons, was more responsible than she for the reporting of their findings. This project reported the results of experiments Stein and Solomons made in automatic reading and writing.
Donald Sutherland, in Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, makes the point that this investigation led Stein to discover that Aristotelian grammar, even with its equipment of subordinate clauses, ellipses and qualifications, was no longer capable of containing the illogical jumps of an expression attuned to consciousness and trying to keep up with it. "The simple faith in reason or emotion as the base and meaning of writing, as with classicism and romanticism, was no longer possible," he says. (Sutherland, Donald, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1951, p. 4)
Going on to make the distinction between Stein and other pioneering writers of the turn of the century attuned to similar pursuits in the "stream of consciousness"—Proust, Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf—Sutherland points out that Stein differs from them in her conception of time (that she doesn't pursue linear time) and her "methods of forcing the words and compositions to encompass or express the subject." (Sutherland, p. 4) That is, whereas the others, even in their inner monologues, maintained a logic in their sentences—the logic of consecutive narrative—Stein adheres to an expression closer to actual consciousness, with its disjointed, at times, impenetrable, uninterpretable, sense (or lack of sense). She also is more focused on the actual act of thinking. "The vital consequence of this new position for literature was that the consciousness was no longer a receptacle with one or many contemplated things with their qualities sitting in it at a time; the consciousness was now an activity going on. Relations were more important to it, more essential, now, than substantives." (Sutherland, p. 6)
Another factor in Stein's development of the "continuous present," Sutherland points out, was her frequent attendance, during her Radcliffe years, at opera performances. Opera, with its "constant present activity," where outcomes matter not so much as the action on stage at the moment. This also validated Stein's feel for prioritizing qualities—an appreciation of the moment and a reveling in its details—over a need for event.
Stein had no need for what might be called a "macho" assertion of narrative as a way of controlling events. The narrative structure, with its sequence of episodes each put into motion by the previous, flatters us into thinking we actually have a say in their outcome. Sutherland makes the case that Stein breaks from that tradition of universal inclusion which is compelled to find order in the universe by "bringing everything under a closed system and within reach of the authorities." (Sutherland, p. 42) Stein apparently felt more at home in the universe than those who needed to be assured of their place in it. She was able to accept things as they were rather than needing to fit one piece into another (as in a search for divine arrangement).
Another major factor in her development was Stein's contact, beginning in 1903, with the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In his paintings she saw how a work of art needn't suggest a story anymore, how a work of art needn't serve as a catalyst to personal, historical associations. With the breaking up of the surface plane Cezanne refused the viewer's attention to a reinterpretation of objective reality, induced a re-examining of the world, and alerted the receptive viewer to a new way to perceive. The painting is no longer a mere representation but an actual re-presentation. With Cezanne, the scene became material to work with, not merely duplicate.
With the scene broken down into its elementary geometric blocks, with the physical reordered, we can see various sides at once—the breakdown of linear narrative begins. Stein took these visual developments and applied them to the telling of tales. Jayne L. Walker, in The Making of a Modernist, quotes Stein "looking and looking" at Cezanne's "Portrait of Mme. Cezanne" while composing Three Lives. Stein was able to use the painting as a model for what she needed to achieve, reaching back to the fundamentals, questioning the structure and recognizing, as David Antin points out: "that it is necessary to begin from a radical act of definition or redefinition of the domain of the elements and the operations of the art or of art itself." (David Antin, quoted in Walker, p. xvi)
Walker, as well as Sutherland, also credits Flaubert's use of discontinuous episodic narrative as a stylistic influence, as well as his short, even one-sentence, paragraphs to create a slight disunity of action. Katz mentions that this was also the time when Stein was sitting for her portrait by Picasso [now in the Metropolitan Museum] (Katz, p. xxxvii), so that contact with Picasso's visionary take on reality, his transformation of the seen into the envisioned, would also validate Stein's own explorations past the mirroring of reality.
Cezanne's activation of the picture's surface enabled Stein to abandon the concept of the artist's obligation to simply paint things as they are. His work, in its reaching to the fundamentals of visual components, showed Stein how constructing from the basic particles of speech and written language can free the language, how respecting the syntax frees one from the obligation of making it familiar. It's another approach to growth. the familiar is limited because there can be no growth within its confines. It's conservative, a stasis. As Stein herself said, "Cezanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously, and it impressed me so much that I began to write Three Lives under this influence . . ." (Stein in "A Transatlantic Interview 1946," quoted in Walker, p. 13)
Leon Katz points out that while living in London in 1902, lonely and miserable after the disintegration of her affair with May Bookstaver, Stein entered into a rigorous and systematic reading of several hundred English narratives, major and minor. From this study Stein "'settled' into her style; its originality was the inadvertent consequence of trying to describe relations and events synoptically without losing traditional narrative's feel for the thick flow of time." (Katz, p. xix)
It isn't merely time that Stein is refusing to comply with, however. She directly confronts the reader's expectation of a narrative that shows events sequentially and delivers a conclusion that tidies all the loose ends. Stein was more interested in the process than the actuality of the action. In order to accomplish this refocusing, she would subvert her sentences, her paragraphs, to redirect attention away from the outcome, away from the predictables of a simple story-telling. She's breaking with traditional models. She's not attempting to duplicate what's already been done in literature, a body of writing she is well acquainted with. Stein knows how to write a descriptive passage, she knows that is the norm for the novel form. A character walks into the room, you describe the room, etc. Stein makes a deliberate break with this system. She has no intention of appealing to those sensibilities looking for comfort in the familiar routines, in the usual, polite acquaintance.
The traditional dependence on narrative sequence was inadequate for Stein. It moved at too slow a speed for her and she didn't feel particularly obligated to satisfy the form and therefore be restricted by its limits. Stein abandoned the restraints of conventional narrative form because it was a burden, an obligation to staid principles of form that could only allow perpetuation of the myths and assumptions she wished to transcend. Her agenda in leaving simple storytelling narrative behind was to unshackle herself from the necessities of that form. She had more than stories to share, more than relationships to examine.
Stein's reassembling of grammar is a revolutionary move. It declares her independent from the restrictions of simple telling of tales. It enables her to examine the ways we use language and, in playing with those structures, to force a reevaluation. She does more than put a fresh coat of paint on the shabby surface. She's rearranging the molecular structure in order to bring a new range of perspectives.
She was capable of standing alone, she was sure of her project, persisting in her forging into new territories, challenging expectations, refusing to bend her methods to satisfy the customers eager for further examples of themselves. this exploration is absolutely a sign of her respect for her audience in that she wished to propel them/us beyond the ordinary, expected thrills of romance into the thrills of artistic creation, into the pleasures of the processes, methods and structures of writing; a writing that, in Three Lives, enabled her characters' fragmented spoken speech to parallel her play with written sentence and composition.
Her insistence on repetition and her honestly recreating the disjointed, fragmentary way her characters speak, slows our reading down and gives the opportunity to feel the joy of the encounter—with the characters themselves and with the grammar Stein gives them (puts in their mouths and consciousnesses) and the grammar she uses at the same time in the process of sustaining the moment. We almost get lost in the enthralling way Stein stretches sentences or accents a thought by putting a clause in the unexpected place. We're permitted acquaintance with her characters in a more intimate way than formerly as we spend more time with them. We can feel Stein's pleasure in depicting in a way that allows her to linger, to look at things and speech in several different ways, to get in closer and closer, to reach for meaning, to experience the mind's processing and interpreting of sensory phenomena, to share in her character's strivings. Melanctha and Jeff Campbell's 120-page affair—a sequence with very little description, allowing their dialog to replace a detached narrative of even with a penetration into the soul's recesses provided by the participants themselves—is an amazing attempt by two individuals to find meaning in their relationship, to examine their essences.
Jayne L. Walker points out that Stein's use of dialect in these stories calls attention to itself as a linguistic artifice. It would be too restraining to enclose her character's speech in quotation marks, to package it so neatly. Walker says the character's syntactical deformations "overflows the quotation marks."
In her use of dialect, or "uneducated" speech, Stein was able to do away with the pretensions of "literary" writing, she could give up the illusion of sounding informed, sophisticated. She was freed from the restrictions of "polite or cultivated writing" (Sutherland, p. 48), a restriction that would have necessitated her pleasing those conventions, for that audience (educated), which she had every intention of transcending, of broadening, of moving away from or past.
The use of repetition and dislocation that this focus on actual speech renders, emphasizes the word's actual meaning. Stein is trying to steer our attention to the words as they go by in our reading of her sentence, as opposed to our more traditional racing past to get to an action's resolution.
That Stein allows this to happen is a sign, ultimately, of her respect for her characters and their speech, as inadequate as that speech might be. Walker, i.e., blames Lena's limited command of the language as the reason why Lena can't adequately defend herself against the verbal assaults of everyone around her and who "becomes the passive victim of the desires, and the discourse of others."
I disagree. While it's true that no one could listen if Lena wouldn't speak, I don't think it's merely Lena's difficulty with language that forces her passivity. I think she's destroyed because there's no one around her to validate her sense of what is going on. There's no one sympathetic enough or who respects her enough to allow Lena's feelings any room for growth. She hasn't got a confidante, someone she can reveal her feelings to without that person imposing their own values on what's best for her.
Mrs. Haydon isn't conscious of the persistent contradictions of her purported concern for Lena and ignores Lena's lack of enthusiasm for the plans she has for the girl. Mrs. Haydon's speeches and harangues are filled with enough judgmental words to illustrate the force of her stance and her abuse of position, "enforcing the dominant values of a community."
These assumptions of power and position are precisely what Stein attempts to expose and attacks. Words such as "stupid" and "disgrace" are used to bludgeon Lena and Herman into a marriage neither of them wants.
The book is filled with characters intolerant of others. Characters impose their wills on others by raising their voices, by abusing positions of power, by taking advantage of underlings and dependents. The "Good", though insufferable, Anna, i.e., just can't digest that her friends and acquaintances have agendas that differ with hers and because her feelings go unexpressed they become perverted into resentments as she feels personally affronted. Stein offers the opportunity for a reexamining of these forces. She champions the weak who haven't found their voice or who struggle in their discovery of one. The contemporary writer, bell hooks, in her book Talking Back, talks about the fear of one's deepest emotions being dismissed, the fear of young girls keeping diaries having their innermost feelings being exposed and ridiculed. She states emphatically: "holding and hiding speech, seems to me now one of the barriers that women have always needed and still need to destroy so that we are no longer pushed into secrecy or silence." (hooks, bell, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, South End Press, Boston, 1989, p. 7)
Of course, the "Gentle" Lena lacked contact with anyone who might suggest this to her. Her entire existence was an adherence to the passivity she'd been trained to obey and not question. Lena, with her silence, attempts to resist but it is not enough against the insistent onslaught of Mrs. Haydon's plans for her. Lena allows herself to become trapped into marriage with Herman because she respects the "alleged" authority of her adult acquaintance. She lacks the courage necessary to respect her own needs and to resist the path to fulfillment imposed by her supposed guardian.
Stein, in the infancy of psychoanalysis, recognized the importance of reaching voice, of the individual finding expression. In Three Lives she presents the fates of characters unlisted to. She uses the word "repression" at one point which stands out in the text, outside the flood of her character's speech. She recognizes the absolute necessity that each of us find the ability to express, be given the opportunity to express. She wants us to recognize the result of not standing up for oneself against abusers of power. I believe it's clear to her that not respecting a person is a matter of an assumption of power. As bell hooks says, "I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair . . . To those who wield oppressive power, that which is threatening must necessarily be wiped out, annihilated, silence." (hooks, p. 8)
Lena would likely have been saved if there were someone to hear her. Herman is finally forced to find enough voice to oppose his mother's domination. This saves him. He is at least able to find fulfillment. Lena, unable to relate to her husband or children, unable to express anything of her desires or needs, becomes more isolated and alienated and withers away.
Bibliography
hooks, bell, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, South End Press, Boston, 1989
Katz, Leon, introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and other early writings, by Gertrude Stein, Liveright, NY, 1971
Mellow, James, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, Avon, NYC, 1974
Sutherland, Donald, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1951
Walker, Jayne L, The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1984
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