Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Locations

• 13 rue Ravignan, Montmartre - Picasso's studio where Stein sat for her portrait
• 20 Bloomsbury Square, London
• 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris - First apartment
• 5 rue Christine, Ile de la cité - Second apartment
• Père Lachaise - grave

Part 1: Life

1. Out of the Old World

• Noticed at Harvard by William James

2. Vita Nuova

• Stein had concluded that people's varying attention spans were a product of their "complete character" or "bottom nature", a driving force deep within them which directed everything they did. "I began," she wrote, "to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations... endlessly the same and endlessly different." There was no such thing as repetition, Stein argued; rather, the essence of human expression was insistence or emphasis. However many time a story is told, whether by different people or the same person at different times, it undergoes changes which do less to reveal what actually happened than to provide an insight into the speaker's personality.

3. Man of Letters

• Otto Weininger's system (in Sex and Character) was profoundly misogynist. Fundamental to his theory was the idea that "female" traits were passive, sexual, devoid of logic and consciousness, while "male" ones were active, deliberate and ethical. Only those with the greatest concentration of masculine traits approached his system's highest level, that of genius.
• "Repeating is the whole of living," she adds, "and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living."

4. Extreme Cubist Literature

• She attempted to empty her mind of what she called "associational emotion" - the meaning a word conventionally bears, which holds within it a memory of all the previous times it has been used in that way. "I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word," Stein told an interviewer in 1946, "and at the same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense."

5. A Puzzle Picture

• -

6. Shoving the Unshoveable

• "...paragraphs were emotional and sentences were not". While an individual sentence might express a single idea, a paragraph was more like a mood, a state of mind, or a landscape: a context in which relations between distinct, even contradictory, elements might emerge.
• While Joyce's characters, like Proust's, are saturated with their own pasts, and he charged his words with a wealth of accumulated meanings - to preserve "all the crackling short circuits of idea associations which have existed between sounds and signs throughout the long evolution of our language" - Stein (the editors argued) set out to wring those associations out of language entirely, in order to afford her words "an bsolute or static quality", and hold an exact moment in sharp focus.

7. Knockout and a Wow

• "The twentieth century," she wrote, "is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it. " (ie from above)
• "Government is the least interesting thing in human life," she argued, rising to her feet, "creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting... the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him."
• She suggested that narrative has lost its meaning in an age where newspapers, cinema, photographs, and radio bombard us with "what is happening": we don't need more stories about what people have done, she argued, when "the thing that is important is the intensity of anybody's existence".
• "The business of art," she explained, "is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present." More explicitly that even before, she laid out her theory of the function of memory in language, which she aimed to break down: that each appearance of a word, invokes, in the reader, memories of its previous uses - and the process of remembering, the mental formation of an association between the word and what it has described before, creates a gulf between the reader and the text before them, holding the word in bondage.

8. Publicity Saint

• At the heart of The Geographical History - a constantly shifting work incorporating dialogues, plays, and elements of autobiography - is a distinction between human nature and the human mind, two parts of the self which Stein insisted have "nothing whatever to do with" one another. Human nature, Stein suggested, is personal identity, assured by memory and external validation; the human mind, by contrast, stands outside of personality, and is the element capable of artistic creation.
• She had mooted the distinction a couple of years earlier, reflecting on her own writing practice, which required her to clear her mind entirely of disturbances in pursuit of clarity, such that she could forget where, or even who, she was: "Begin again," she often instructed herself when her concentration momentarily broke, refocusing her thoughts to take fresh aim at what she was trying to say.
• "I am I not any longer when I see," she had written. "This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the exact opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me."

9. To Be Historical

• "Writers only think they are interested in politics," Stein told the Partisan Review in 1939, "they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics."

Part 2: Afterlife

Reckoning

• In her writing, geniuses (like saints) are always portrayed as "most intensely alive", standing somehow outside of time due to an ability to see themselves beyond mortal existence, which she called "a future life feeling".

10. Poisoned Wheat

• -

11. Diagram Book

• What she admired in Picasso's work, and sought to emulate in her writing, was his refusal to use objects "as a point of departure" to suggest allegories or further meanings. Instead, he wanted to depict their essence, in and of itself. She connected him with Cézanne, "the great master of the realization of the object itself."

12. A Sacred Trust

• Bulleted list item

13. Chronique Scandaleuse

• Bulleted list item

14. Parades and Fireworks

• Bulleted list item

15. What is the Question?

• Bulleted list item

16. The Branches

• Bulleted list item

Epilogue

• Bulleted list item