from Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science

©Steven Meyer

In a conversation with John Hyde Preston which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly shortly after she concluded her six-month lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935, Gertrude Stein responded to Preston's confession of just how "miserable, despairing, self-doubtful" he still felt about his writing. Drawing on half a century’s experience in her chosen medium, she counseled him to write

These remarks may well appear unremarkable, for Stein is articulating a version of the Romantic commonplace that some two decades later—already forty-five years ago—M.H. Abrams would term "the expressive theory of art." According to Abrams, such theories hold that "poetry is the overflow, utterance, or projection of the thought and feelings of the poet; or else (in the chief variant formulation) poetry is defined in terms of the imaginative process which modifies and synthesizes the images, thoughts, and feelings of the poet" (pp. 21-22). Stein's subsequent comment to Preston that "when one has discovered and evolved a new form, it is not the form but the fact that you are the form that is important" would seem to confirm that her theory of art is expressive and none too original at that. Still, there is something peculiar going on here, as Stein's example of James Boswell—she calls him "the greatest biographer who ever lived"—demonstrates. She is not speaking of self-expression, of the writer expressing himself or herself, but of the expression of someone or something apart from oneself. It is this phenomenon which she had in mind when she spoke of her writing, as she often did, as a form of portraiture. The writing comes "out of you" and "out of the pen," yet it is neither you nor the pen; nor does it merely reflect, phenomenologically, the consciousness of the individual portrayed. Hence Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, "discovered [Samuel] Johnson's real form which Johnson never knew." Stein doesn't stop with this provocative claim, however, but concludes the conversation with Preston by remarking that

With that retort, Preston observes, "Gertrude Stein laughed enormously and went [back] into the hotel with the crowd"—"a modern and post-modern Medusa," as Catharine Stimpson has aptly characterized her in the context of this exchange ("Humanism and Its Freaks," p. 316).

Not only does Stein substitute writing for form in this aperçu but, in addition, she replaces the Romantics' (and Abrams') emphasis on poetry with a corresponding emphasis on writing, as I shall do as well in examining the complex interweaving of writing and science in her compositional practices. In this way the traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century "contradistinction . . . of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science," as Wordsworth put it, is elided (LB, p. 254). No serious literary work, whether a composition of Stein's or of Wordsworth's, permits an exclusively formal reading, isolating it from "matter of fact." On the contrary, any reading that befits the text involves situating it in a larger textual context, that is to say, in an important and illuminating part of the textual nexus from which it has emerged. Consequently, my invocations of Wordsworth and Sterne, and George Eliot and Pater, in the first two chapters of the present study are not just readings of these figures; they are also readings of Stein's writing in relation to texts which form the contours of her compositional practices and bear a more than analogical relation to her own writing. Stein's compositions are especially interesting in this regard because she so successfuly rid them of overt literary allusions, among other forms of referentiality. I have endeavored here neither to produce a source study nor to situate Stein in a context, or series of contexts, only externally related to what she was actually doing in her writing. Instead, I have sought to show how she queries various sources that remain implicit in her texts, making them over in her own image, as it were. It is this emphasis on the active transformations involved in her compositional practices which distinguishes my readings both from traditional source studies and from a good deal of contemporary cultural studies. The basis for my own practice of reading, then, is a conviction that texts exist in relation to other texts or they do not exist at all, and that it is in uncovering these relations that the activity of reading proceeds. More purely formal readings are in fact instances of what Alfred North Whitehead called "misplaced concreteness," relying no less on such nexuses but abstracted from them, and in this sense idealizing the work of writing as well as the work of reading (SMW, p. 3). I try to keep the historical development of a work's formal significance always in mind, that is, its origins within a temporal framework which it partly creates—perhaps an impossible task but surely a useful methodological aim. One may ask whether on the basis of such an account one can ultimately distinguish Stein's writing from other writing. In an ultimate sense, the answer is probably "no"; as poets have always done, Stein renders features of writing explicit which are ordinarily ignored yet are present all the same. Where her writing differs from other writing is the extent she requires the reader, and herself, to be conscious of such compositional features in order to understand and enjoy the writing as fully as possible.

In Stein's case, the textual context of her work is not just literary (Laurence Sterne et al.) but also philosophical (Emerson, Whitehead), psychological (William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein) and neurophysiological (Lewellys Barker, Gerald Edelman, Francisco Varela). Of course, these categories themselves overlap; with the exception of Barker, associate professor of anatomy during Stein's first years of graduate study at Johns Hopkins, each writer fits comfortably under several headings. It is this fact which compels an interdisciplinary and comparative study both of them and of Stein. Nonetheless, the various writers differ according to the primacy of one or another category in their work; and Stein differs from the others, as I argue, largely in the extent to which the four categories function in tandem in her writing. In order to read James, for example, one can readily bracket the literary aspects of his philosophical and psychological studies (with "literary" understood broadly as marking explicit references to writing as well as implicit self-consciousness with respect to one's writing practices); in order to read Wordsworth one can ignore the neurophysiological basis of the plotting of his poems. Something is lost, yet one's reading remains relatively unaffected by the loss. I have attempted to demonstrate that Stein's compositions, by contrast, demand equal attention to all four components. That she herself often emphasized the literary aspects of her writing needs to be understood in a historical context in which first her brother Leo, then prospective publishers, and finally reviewers insisted that it wasn't writing at all. It is only because the inevitable first question posed by readers of her work is "Is it writing?" that it is reasonable, although certainly not necessary, that the literary, philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological contexts of the writing be addressed by someone whose principal training has been in literature. Yet I also believe that the practice of reading is never restricted to any particular field, and always occurs between fields. Consequently, I have tried to draw connections among these domains of knowledge, connections which, in their own ways, figures ranging from Emerson and Eliot to Whitehead and Donna Haraway have already made, implicitly and explicitly.

In the course of the broad revaluation of Stein's career which follows, I situate her both within the lineage of such Romantic poet-scientists as Wordsworth, Goethe, and Shelley, and in an important line of speculative thinkers that extends from Emerson to James and Whitehead, emerging today in figures as disparate as the bioaesthetician Susanne Langer, neuroscientists like Varela and Edelman, and Haraway, doyenne of contemporary science studies. These two lines share the perspective James designated radical empiricism. After reviewing, in Chapter 1, the multiple points of contact between Stein's evolving writing practice and radical empiricism in its more traditionally scientific as well as its poetic guises, I examine (in Chapter 2) the ways that the formulation of the neuron doctrine in the 1890s motivated her subsequent "autopoietic," or self-organizing, writing, which is both premised on and exempifies an organicism divorced from traditional notions of organic form. This nonvitalist organicism is similar to that analyzed by Haraway in her 1976 study, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology, and serves as the hallmark of the neurophysiological imagination exhibited by all these figures. In the next two chapters, loosely tied together under the heading "The New Organism," I am especially concerned with the correlations which exist between Stein's understanding of writing and the speculations of Emerson, Whitehead and Varela on the mechanisms of life and of consciousness. From here I proceed to four linked chapters (Chapters 5-8) which focus on Stein's literary practice in light of its development from James's physiological psychology as well as from his studies in psychical research. I argue that the radical reconceptualization of consciousness articulated by James in his 1904 essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" proved decisive for Stein's writing; even so, a full range of differences emerged between Stein and her mentor with respect to automatic writing, the relation writing bears to consciousness, the extent to which the act of writing is reducible to subsequent acts of reading, as well as the nature and desirability of self-consciousness. In the next-to-last chapter of this section I juxtapose Stein's perspective on these and related matters with that of the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for whom, rather unexpectedly, James's speculations played no less central a role than they did for Stein. Finally, in an extended analysis of a 1935 recording of Stein reading her work aloud, I offer a material overview, as it were, of the phenomenon I am calling, after Emerson, "irresistible dictation."

The key difficulty I have faced from the outset of this project has been to talk about Stein in a way that doesn't reduce her to a version of some other writer, while still focusing on her correspondences with, and ties to, such a wide range of figures. It would be misleading to begin the book, for example, with the portrait of Emerson I sketch in "The New Organism" (which emphasizes the radical empiricism that replaced his early naturalistic idealism), because it is crucial for my study that he be read in the context provided by Stein no less than that he contextualize Stein. This would be all but impossible were I to open with him. I have attempted to resolve this difficulty by invoking, at the outset, the broadest possible context in which to address the relation between science and literature while at the same time remaining true to Stein's own experience: hence the movement in Chapter 1 between Sterne and Wordsworth, on the one hand, and contemporary neuroscience, on the other, with James's radical empiricism providing a way station. Then, in Chapter 2, I procede to Stein's more immediate context of Pater and George Eliot as well as her extensive training at Johns Hopkins in laboratory technique. Only after I have established these histories, broad and narrow, do I introduce the pair of chapters concerned with the Emersonian background, foreground, and prospects of her writing: that is, with Emerson himself, with Whitehead, and with the Emersonian biology theorized by Varela. These chapters in place, it becomes possible to address the details of Stein's relation with James without either getting lost in them or falsely generalizing from them.

Although my emphasis on James's radical empiricism accords with his own sense of things, it has been overshadowed in the twentieth century by two complementary reductions: James as father of a distinctively American psychology and midwife of the equally American philosophy, pragmatism. My work is part of a current reassessment, in literary studies due largely to the efforts of Richard Poirier, and outside literary studies attested to in superb recent works on James's psychological investigations by Eugene Taylor and Edward Reed. These authors portray James the radical empiricist rather than James the pragmatist. To be sure, Poirier tends to speak of James as a pragmatist, but the pragmatism he has in mind is radical empiricist through and through. (As James insisted, and, as the "new pragmatism" of the 1980s and 1990s amply testifies, pragmatism may take many forms, not all of them radical empiricist.) It is here, in the context of Stein’s scientific training and the Emersonian/Whiteheadian strain of radical empiricism, as well as of the literary tradition of a science consistent with poetic values, that my study most directly revises current Stein scholarship, since I am concerned to demonstrate the ways she developed a more radical empiricism than James was able to, owing to her greater concentration on her compositional practices.

In the work that has ensued, I place greater emphasis on what might be termed Stein's poetics than on individual works of poetry (often composed, in her case, in prose). Although I tend to focus on discrete paragraphs in my readings of particular compositions—the paragraph offering, according to Stein, the minimum unit of composition in prose, an aspect of her poetics I discuss in Chapter 7—there are extended readings of individual works as well, as in the treatment, in more or less chronological order, of "Two" (in Chapter 1), "Old and Old" (Chapter 2), Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein (Chapter 3), "Mrs. Emerson" (Chapter 4), "Wherein the South Differs from the North" (Chapter 6), and "More Grammar for a Sentence" (Chapter 7). My aim is principally to make the reading of texts like these a more manageable undertaking for other readers, not to do their reading for them. The first order of business, then, is to clarify a number of Stein's more gnomic statements about her writing (statements which, as often as not, appear transparent at first glance), by juxtaposing them with her literary practices or by calling attention to the literary qualities they themselves display. This has the double function of demonstrating not just what she meant but also that she really did know what she was doing.

In fact, my study has two complementary motives: to explicate Stein and to bring Emerson, James, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein, as well as aspects of late nineteenth-century physiological psychology and late twentieth-century neuroscience, "into focus through the lens of Stein's writing," as one of the anonymous readers of the manuscript for the Stanford University Press aptly phrased it. If, along the way, I propose that the neuron doctrine played a crucial, and among major American writers, a unique role in the development of Stein's compositional practices, I am not thereby arguing that experimental writing, Stein's or anyone else's, reflects experimental science nor that in her writing Stein automatically (that is to say, unthinkingly) applied the scientific doctrines she was exposed to as a young woman. Her writing no more reflects the neuron doctrine than it reflects particular psychosocial or psychosexual discursive formations or than any of her portraits of Picasso can flatly be said to be "about" her great friend. (Nor, of course, does this last observation imply that "If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso" could just as well be a portrait of Matisse as of Picasso, or that when you've read one work of Stein's you've read them all.) Such assertions attribute too passive a role to Stein's compositional practices, which are experimental in a way that other experimental writing isn't. Instead of being modeled on scientific experimentation, her writing turns out to be a form of experimental science itself. It is not just that her ideas about writing were influenced by science; she reconfigured science as writing and performed scientific experiments in writing.

I recognize that this is a provocative claim, and it is the burden of my first two chapters to justify it. Here I will just remark that Stein spent her first decade of sustained intellectual and emotional independence—from the age of twenty to twenty-eight—doing experimental work in the leading psychological laboratory and then in the leading medical school in the United States, and only subsequently turned from a scientific to a literary career. This is the fact which animates my study, not the neuron doctrine per se; and the question I ask is, what constitutes this shift? What role, or more exactly roles, did Stein's scientific training, first at Harvard and then at Johns Hopkins, play in her compositional practices in the ensuing decades? I find answers in the works she composed, works which, in proving to be more than these answers, remain opaque although not unintelligible. My use of the term opaque may seem puzzling, for I regard it as a positive quality, and aim in my readings to respect the integrity, or opacity, of these dense texts. Too often readers of Stein have attempted to render her compositions transparent, to crack the code. Such interpretations merely invert the mistaken accusation that her writing lacks any sense at all. Stein's writing operates in another register than ordinary communication with its ideal of transparency; instead her compositions function as what James called "irreducible and stubborn facts." No less than James in his psychology or Whitehead in his philosophy, Stein displayed a "passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts"; only in her case the objects of radical empiricism were extended to the words on the page (SMW, p. 3, emphasis added). Consequently, in my readings I focus on this relation, so as to convey both the process and the results of Stein's rigorous meditations, concluding, as she does, with principles and facts still in play, neither reduced to the other. As I asserted at the outset, I am concerned here with meanings that emerge between texts and not with the endeavor, entirely appropriate in other contexts, to fix the meaning of particular texts.