In Stein's follow-up article, "Cultivated Motor Automatism," she included more subjects. This investigation of automatic writing delineates two personality types (foreshadowing her classification of human character in The Making of Americans): Type II, as she calls this personality, is more prone to automatism and "is much nearer the common one described in books on hysteria" than Type I. 48 Assuming a kind of Charcotian role, Stein oscillates between guiding the hands of her Type II subjects and releasing them to their own impulses. She choreographs or "cultivates" the "decidedly rhythmic character" of motility:
At first there was a continued return to the old movement or to no movement, but gradually came an aimless indefinite movement, then again the old, then the new, and then again an uncertain movement, then a more decided revision of the new, then a slight return to the old, like the struggle between two themes in a musical composition until at last the new movement conquered and was freely continued. ["CMA," 28; emphasis added]
Another of her Type II, protohysteric subjects verges on slapstick, dynamized by mechanical automatism: "He had a spontaneous movement of a circle made with the swing of the whole arm. He began these circles, gradually increasing in speed, not breaking into any other movement, just a continued rush of circles" ("CMA," 32).
"Real automatism," Stein and Solomons assert, occurs "whenever the attention is sufficientlydistracted" ("CMA," 14). Hysteria becomes thereby truly the disease of a modernity characterized by the onslaught of shock experience. Furthermore, if hysteria, as Stein and Solomons reiterate, is a "disease of attention" ("MA," 26), then film becomes an aesthetic equivalent by its paradoxical capacity to hypnotize and to diffuse sensory experience, to hold and to divert attention. Accordingly, Stein and Solomons summarize their findings: "Our problem was to get sufficient control of the attention to effect this removal of attention. In hysteria this removal of attention is effected by the anesthesia of the subject. We would not, the histerique can not, attend to these sensations" ("MA," 25). In its distinction between willed and involuntary loss of attention or anesthesia, the article points towards the avant-garde's purposeful oscillation between "derangement of the senses" (to invoke Rimbaud's influential aesthetic) and control. As "operator," Stein and Solomons will their own distraction, yet suggest that "habits of attention" often partake of the unconscious or appear involuntary, a dialectic that will underpin Emak Bakia and "Mrs. Emerson." 49 These experiments afforded Stein an early opportunity to visualize and construct the dislocated body that will animate her poetics.
Jean-Martin Charcot's Tuesday lecture/performances of hysterical bodies suffering the "disease of attention" at the Salpetrière Hospital deflect narrative, and revolve around the nonpurposive gesture characteristic of what I am calling modernist comedy. Elisabeth Bronfen summarizes Charcot's reading of hysteria as "somatic performance of traces of a psychically traumatic shock" that reveal the "hysterical" body as disruptive of coherent plot: "It articulates through an unjust image, speaking deceptively, obliquely" (KS, 175). The body abstracts itself as it articulates "the radical nothing that experiences of loss entail" (KS, 188). It is this "radical nothing" that converges with the comic mode typified for avant-gardists by Chaplin in his "resistance to meaning." Suggestively, the second phase of the hysterical attack, as mapped by Charcot, is the "period of grands movements, of contortions and body dislocations," what he "came to call the clown phase [période clonique]" (KS, 180). (Stein's experimental subject, detached from purpose, rapidly swinging his arms, comes to mind.) The hysteric body, formalized and framed by Charcot and his followers, becomes interchangeable with the comic body in modernist cultural discourse.
Henri Bergson's extended essay, "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic" , confines itself to the theater for its exempla, but nevertheless reveals how these two bodies, the comic and the hysteric, overlap in the cinematic aesthetic of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray. 50 (Bergson, incidentally, had been among the attendees at a Charcot performance.) As if echoing Stein's essay with Solomons, he considers the comedic body's capacity for repetition and automatism as signifying the loss of an otherwise necessarily "constant alert attention" to the needs of the moment, as a slip into absentmindedness (L, 22). In such a state, the body abjures its "tension and elasticity" and so partakes of the unwilled mechanical. Bergson elaborates, "The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine" (L, 32). (Chaplin in The Rink turns his cane into a crank, a prosthetic extension of his body, using it to wind up his rival as if both bodies are mechanical.) Comedy, he contends, "consist[s] in looking upon life as a repeating mechanism, with reversible action and interchangeable parts" and persists only as life "forgets itself" (L, 94).
As I have already noted, Stein often poses as an amnesiac, using repetition to foreground dissociation: "Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches," she writes in "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso." 51 The joke here relies on the way her repetition undermines itself as the sentence jerkily springs back to its initial iteration. In the same piece, she refers to a camera's attentive "selection" of images: "Shutters shut and open so do queens.  The shutters "shut and open" just as the film shot both reveals and covers in the crisis of a continuous present. Experimental film--and Stein's writing--foregrounds this activity, otherwise unnoticeable in conventional narrative film, which as Garrett Stewart (Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis) puts it in another context, represses the material joining of images in a "successive overlapping flow." 52 The present urgency of "[n]ot to-day" ("Mrs. Emerson") as well as the phrasing of "[s]hutters shut and so and so" ("A Completed Portrait of Picasso") accommodates the "[c]lick, clack, lack--in that double absentation of the forgone and the just gone past." 53
With the bodily pun of "shudders," Stein's portrait of Picasso emerges in autonomic flickers: "He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he" ("CPP," 23). Incremental repetition of this kind calls for supreme attention by the reader and threatens a comic forgetfulness, the consequence of slipping up by covering the same ground. Yet in repeating, Stein mimics the infinitesimal recuperations necessary for slapstick. (Think of Chaplin's classic clown fall, legs over the head, followed by his springing upright in opening road shots in The Tramp.) Bergson sums up how such useless activity turns comic, albeit abyssal, if still pivoting on a "radical nothing" of hysteria: "To cover a good deal of ground only to come back unwittingly to the starting-point, is to make a great effort for a result that is nil" (L, 80).
Similarly, the opening of "Mrs. Emerson," both abstract and irregular, requires our "distracted attention" in its reiteration of "the regular way" or the hazardous twists and turns of the moment:
The regular way of instituting clerical resemblances and neglecting hazards and bespeaking combinations and heroically and heroically celebrating instances, the regular way of suffering extra challenges, the regular way of suffering extra changes the regular way of submitting to examplers in changes, the regular way of submitting to extraordinary celebrations, the certainty, because centre well half full whether it has that to close when in use, no not repeatedly, he has forgotten. ["ME," 23]
In "celebrating instances" and "neglecting hazards," the unanchored subject in this prose poem paragraph "has forgotten." The repetitions compel attention to "suffer" and "submit" to "extra changes"; the wayward circle closes just when the "way" has been forgotten.As with Stein's rhythmic discontinuities in the above passage, Chaplin's seeming forgetful body is strategic miscoordination; "neglecting hazards," he ignores the ever present possibility of falling apart or stumbling into an unexpected abyss.
Such deliberate aimlessness expresses itself in the partiality of gesture, which Bergson defines as that which expresses "without aim or profit" and which "slips out unawares, automatic . . . [as] an isolated part of the person is expressed, unknown to, or at least apart from the whole of the personality" (L, 129-30). Stein's teacher, William James, likewise emphasizes "parts" in his delineation of empiricism: "[It] starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection" ("SC," 10). Perhaps more illuminating to Stein's poetics is James's protofilmic foreshadowing of Eisenstein's notion of disproportionate intervals: "When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different paces of its parts" ("SC," 178). The interest lies between shots, within the gaps between "paces" and "parts" that disrupt the illusion of spectatorial wholeness; narrative coherence relies on concealing the transitive acts of connection. A close-up of these stepping-stones in "semi-grammatical" structure (to use DeKoven's sense of Stein's experimental writing) short-circuits linear narrative. 54 By repeating articles and divesting a sentence of a subject in, for instance, "And also and so and so and also," Stein enacts a comic rhythm that suspends resolution; there is perhaps no surprise in finding "so" in "also" but in sequencing and parsing these phrases she makes deliberately unexpected re-turns. Emak Bakia, as does "Mrs. Emerson," similarly interprets "the sentiment of movement" as serial and fractured in a turn away from mimetic expectations. While not overtly comic, the avant- garde film diverts itself in the fragment, "turning a corner, then another, and another."
Finally, in the bodily syntax of hysteria, like that of the comic gesture, the part becomes detachable and reiterable as, according to Grosz, "[t]he intensity of one zone is displaced onto another bodily zone" (VB, 77). For her, "[t]his implies that there is a lability of meaning for the various bodily organs, zones, and processes. Any one zone of the body can, under certain circumstances, take on the meaning of any other zone" (VB, 78). Such transposition between bodily regions suggests forgetfulness, or a kind of anesthesia, that acts as the bodily equivalent to aesthetic dislocations, or "the coming together of disparate surfaces," made possible by experimental montage (VB, 198).
In the same issue of Close Up which features Stein's "Mrs. Emerson," Man Ray describes Emak Bakia as adamantly serial and partial, a "series of fragments, a cinepoem with a certain optical sequence [that] make up a whole that still remains a fragment" ("EB," 40). In language reminiscent of the shutter action of the camera, he explains "its reasons for being are in its inventions of light-forms and movements, while the more objective parts interrupt the monotony of abstract inventions or serve as punctuation" (ibid.). Body pieces will punctuate, as it were, other defamiliarized images. One sequence features a close-up of a series of walking women's legs, seen only partially; as if to disembody their movement, we then see a quick ghost image of the same legs. Man Ray visceralizes the fragment in another instance in which Kiki's poised lips punctuate less recognizable shapes. Immediacy is invoked and then undercut to foreground the mechanism of repetition and sequencing.
After its swirling title shot, Emak Bakia begins with a side-view of a man looking through a camera, one with several lenses that rotate and which are here superimposed on the front of the image along with the cameraman's physical eye directed at us ( 3). Immediately, Man Ray calls attention to the fact, as Sitney observes, that "films are shot through lenses," the world seen "through layers of glass"; multiple lenses and filters intervene between eye and object (MM, 29). The camera does not see or attend, but disassembles. The film "invents" almost every cinematic device possible to degrade the mimetic image and to underscore its mechanical materiality, its moment-to-moment piecing through superimposition, out-of-focus, animation, film reversal, double-exposure, and rayograms. 55 Throughout, "revolving kaleidoscopic" movement (to reuse James's descriptive phrase) decenters the camera eye as it hypnotizes the viewer to the point of dizziness or anesthesia and each film rhythm correlates as gestural fragment.
The rapid motion of the camera, sometimes spun or shaken, denotes a body both willing its convulsivity and "neglecting hazards." Man Ray turns the ocean upside down, showing Kiki apparently dead, eyes painted on her eyelids (replicating the camera's multiple lenses); as she wakes and her head spins upside down in the last shot of the film, Man Ray scripts Emak Bakia as "dreamed" rather than willed. As she opens her eyes, he raises Kiki ratively from the dead. She has been an unconscious automaton, now upsetting our expectations of bodily inertness, she partakes of a doubling of the self that Stein refers to in cases of hysteria. And, as Benjamin suggests, we become implicitly such automatons when viewing a film and are subject to a "disease of attention." Emak Bakia, like other experimental films, thus both "cultivates" and resists psychical displacement by underscoring the very motor impulses that make the viewing of a film possible. Paradoxically, the film distracts while it hones our attention.
Emak Bakia foregrounds the cinema as the machine of our time: capable of rendering simultaneous experience, testing the threshold of interior and exterior realms, and producing the mechanically-lived body through motor impulses anchored--but not quite firmly and cohesively--in consciousness. What can the body do without full volition, as a mechanized and fractured surface? Notably, Man Ray describes his film risks in Emak Bakia as bodily ones--vacillating between chance and conscious volition--in the following account of filming while being driven in his patron's racing car:
I was using my hand camera while [Rose Wheeler] was driving eighty or ninety miles an hour, being pretty badly shaken up, when we came upon a herd--why not show a collision? I stepped out of the car, followed the herd while winding up the camera and set it in movement, then threw it thirty feet up into the air, catching it again. . . . There were other more carefully planned sequences; a pair of lovely legs doing the popular Charleston dance of the day, the sea revolving so that it became sky and the sky sea. [SP, 220]
As Stein and Solomons argue in "Cultivated Motor Automatism," automatism refers to the disjunction between motor impulses and the consciousness of them as both voluntary and willed. Emak Bakia enacts the detachment of automatic gesture both from consciousness--the legs mechanically doing the Charleston--and from linear narrative, making for a belatedness of recognition. As in the earlier example of double-exposed, spectral legs, the image recurs in its disappearance.
This quick overview seeks to demonstrate the way Emak Bakia incarnates a dislocatory consciousness. Like Man Ray's film, Stein's "Mrs. Emerson" reads as a "cinepoem," demanding that we attend to the piece's mechanical apparatus, and to her insistence upon nonpurposive circularity. Rejecting transparency for the opacity of a screen, she writes, "I will repeat I will not play windows" ("ME," 25). With the heightened self-consciousness of the experimental filmmaker piecing together the film, Stein counterpoints what she "means" and "believes" and "wills" (words repeated throughout) with disjunctive "shock" images, as with the gender subversive, "I mean to believe that soldiers order pearls" ("ME," 28). Delighting in dislocation and multiple lenses, she breaks up attention: "They remembered mentioning, they saw eight angles, they meant to do mending" ("ME," 29). "Mending" is willed stitching that offers only intermittent remembering; the fragment thrives. Stein's physical engagement involves "mounting" a series of inconclusive resembling shots, as in this telling passage:
I thought that I would state that I knew certainly that she was so seen that if her eyes were so placed not violently not verbally so placed. She is not agreeable. She is not so agreeable. I think it is what I said what I recognized in mounting her. I mounted her there. Deliberate. She has a son not a son he was a thicker one. I go on. Begun. Bessie is like Bertha. ["ME," 24, 25]
Where is the there or body being mounted? The passage will "go on." Stein retracts, modifies and then returns to a deliberate groove of sonic (and comic) gesture--"son" "son" "one" "begun." Carolyn Burke has pointed out the sexual overtones of "splice" in relation to Mina Loy, Stein, and Marianne Moore in its "modalities of joining and separation, union and disunion." Here, similarly, the embodied, erotic act of "mounting" suggests the positioning of a camera on a tripod and the deliberate work of editing. 56
What is "placed," as Stein puts it, displaces Ralph Waldo Emerson's "transparent eyeball" (alluded to by her title), initiating one in a series of mis-recognitions or slippages in attention. Rather than mounting a singular subject, "Mrs. Emerson" introduces a number of resembling and reassembling shapes (as does Emak Bakia, even in its semianagrammatic title): "Mrs. Evangeline Henderson went in. She said that the morning. She said that in listening. No I will not be funny" ("ME," 23). Such comic sentences pivot upon language as mechanistic and serial: "Please copy this. Others able to copy this. Others able to copy this after" ("ME," 26). Stein deflects the purposive so that she can combine "the sentiment of movement" with the "sentiment of getting nowhere."
"I cannot see I cannot see I cannot see. I cannot see" ("ME," 24), she reiterates. The "I/eye" founders so that she returns to unilluminating fractured refrain--as in the celebrated scene in The Circus when Chaplin is lost in a fun house of multiplying mirrors. One of Stein's fun house mirror sentences reads, "I say I do know Bessie. Bessie resembles Bertha. Paula resembles Bessie. Bessie resembles Bertha Bessie resembles Bertha. I do not offer to determine whether Paula and Bertha and Bessie are distinctly separate" ("ME," 28). 57 The spring in this genealogy loses its tension and elasticity in willed autonomic gesture and retraction. (When Chaplin exits the fun house to evade the police, he camouflages as a mechanical adornment.) Continuity, red through disavowed kinship, flickers forth in hysteric jerks: "My sister she is not my sister she is my sister" ("ME," 24).
 It is natural without children natural. They didn't expect that Hannah would be in it. They didn't expect that he would seem to be sat upon a single piece of cardboard box" ("ME," 27). Is this the Emersonian father as tramp who "would seem to be sat upon"? The piece accelerates in this centrifugal revolving: "One of his brothers the man was descending by his brother. They thought nothing of it naturally one would have objected. They seemed searchful.  Which brother is which? A typical comic scenario of doubling and searching abandons plot to mechanistically give us "some kind of arrangement," "fathers" that are "brothers," words refracting in resemblance and deflating the paternal, "I do not care to remember what I do not feather. I do not remember whether a flavour is farther" (ibid.). The text recalls itself in its father-feather-flavour-farther rotation (producing something akin to the rotating prisms in Emak Bakia). By not building towards resolution, "Mrs. Emerson" wills forgetfulness rather than temporal legacy.
Like Man Ray's manipulations of "light forms and movements," as he calls them, Stein yokes incohesive bodily parts and sensory experience through synesthesia. She crosses, for instance, erotogenic zone with color: "I do not say that green is believed to be that color. I do not say that green makes lips." Or, alternately, she compactly registers the ephemera of movement, the contiguous scraps within "décor": "Water is coloured by the sudden departure of all the interested readers of a newspaper." 58 In another passage that mimics automatic writing, Stein's roving subject displaces the visual and confesses, "I can't help it. I can't help hearing carrots. I do help it, I do help it fastening chocolate. A secret time in spinning." 59 The humor of what can't be helped emphasizes the automatic, the way sensory experience (and the chocolate "fix") provokes and can unravel bodily reflex even as the mind desires control: "I hope that I select that I retain" ("ME," 25).
While "Mrs. Emerson" dramatizes the effort of consciousness to will selection, Stein insists upon wandering within kinaesthetic mapping, "I do not select to have similar sounds. Bertha can be surrounded. Bertha can be surrounded by so much saliva" ("ME," 26). The unexpected jump to "saliva," to a sign of autonomic, Pavlovian process that "surrounds," counterpoints Stein's willed, "selective" arrangement. Mechanical gesture or utterance here draws into the forefront the choreography of "kin-aesthetic" experience, its lapses and recoveries. What Stewart calls "continual splicing on the run," or "cinema's intrinsic dismemberment," becomes realized as the body simultaneously forgets and recalls its temporal viscerality. 60
The last lines of "Mrs. Emerson" provide what could be the scenario for a short abstract film with its "delight in dislocation," its comic, nonpurposive, shot-by-shot measure:
I wish I had a certain rain.
Then a little barometer.
Then a dry cellar.
Then a dog which means to be old.
Then all the exceptional white.
Then a climbing bell.
Then more water.
Then all over it.
I wish I had to go and get her.
Stein makes physical motion, serial and suspended, stand out against "exceptional white." Desire ("I wish") and volition ("to go and get her") constantly resume. It is as if she is thinking of the dislocated body, red here as a Pavlovian dog, responding to "a climbing bell," its response beginning again and again "all over it." In The Fireman , a bell similarly automates Chaplin's mechanical body usually to no avail; his body remembers its reflexes even as he forgets their purpose. And, again and again, Man Ray's camera animates a detached motion--Kiki's eyes opening and shutting, for instance--only to join it with another gestural fragment.
Finally, what Bergson found comic in the theater--the use of the mechanically repeated fragment or monomaniacal trait--takes on new valence in Stein's cinematic enactment of the modern crisis of embodiment. Apparently disavowing "the voice" of theater in favor of the silent film's dislocative body, she declares in "Mrs. Emerson," "I do not see why a voice is necessary." She also refers to "silent rugs" and "late carpet," evoking the tactility of a film screen and the mounting of fabric ("ME," 26). These references resonate with her favoring silent film over theater (in the context of Chaplin); the former "could change the rhythm but if you had a voice accompanying naturally after that you could never change the rhythm you were always held by the rhythm the voice gave them" (MM, 160). Stein's allusion to "voice" here suggests that it inhibits the rhythmic discontinuity of experience, attempting to provide the hysteric body with a coherent plot.
Stein and her generation were, therefore, not only "bound by the period of cinema and series production," but by the fluctuating body of a continuous present. Stein consciously perceived herself as writing a form of divagatory cinema with the body as comic/hysteric "repeating mechanism," her crisis of embodiment bridging the experimental aesthetics of Man Ray with the popular icon of Chaplin's dislocated body. Film's spasmodic dance away from causal plot thus reverberates in Stein, unhinged from destination, a gestural body of malleable mechanics that interrogates its volition and processes of attention.
Susan McCabe is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her essay is part of a book-in-progress entitled "Cinematic Modernisms: The Embodied Poetry of Stein, H.D., Williams, and Moore."
1. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetitions," in Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 177; hereafter abbreviated as "PR."
2. Kenneth Macpherson, Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Jane Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 14; hereafter abbreviated as CM.
3. "Mrs. Emerson" was written in 1914 as one of Stein's "portraits." Her portraits of "Matisse" and "Picasso" were published in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work in 1912, and were followed in 1913 by her "Portrait of Mabel Dodge." In "Portraits and Repetitions," she writes that her portrait writing "was like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis" ("PR," 195). Emak Bakia first screened in 1926.
4. Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation," in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 499; emphasis added.
5. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo, 61; hereafter abbreviated as MA.
6. Maya Deren, "Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality," in The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 64.
7. While beyond the specific focus of this essay, Stein's negotiation of trauma and memory manifests itself in her "war poetry." Stein and Alice B. Toklas volunteered for the American Fund for the French Wounded in 1916; transporting the wounded, they were face-to-face with the physical effects of war, yet Stein renders eyewitness events from a dissociated, disjointed perspective. Stein and Toklas spent 1915 to 1916 in Majorca in retreat from the war, but it remains in view: "Sometimes we look at boats. When we read about a boat we know that it has been sunk." Gertrude Stein, Lifting Belly (1917; Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1989), 1-2; hereafter abbreviated as LB.
8. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 207.
9. Sergei Eisenstein, "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form," in Film Form, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 48; hereafter abbreviated "DA." Eisenstein's essays, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" and "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form," were translated in Close Up in 1929, but his montage theories had already been formulated and enacted in films, particularly his Battleship Potemkin .
10. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 192; hereafter abbreviated "SM."
11. Benjamin's "conveyer belt" manifests itself vividly in Modern Times , where Chaplin's body becomes coextensive with the factory machine. Stein alludes to the potentially anaesthetic effects of repetition without variation in Making of Americans : "If they get deadened by the steady pounding of repeating they will not learn from each one even though each one always is repeating the whole of them they will not learn the completed history of them, they will not know the being really in them" (MA, 61). At this juncture, Stein still aims towards "completion" rather than the fragmentary which, under the shadow of her "failure" to produce "a complete history of every one who was or is or will be living," becomes one of her keynotes. She begins her portrait writing in 1908 when she starts to doubt the idea of producing the "complete history."
12. Man Ray, "Emak Bakia," Close Up 1, no. 2 , 40; hereafter abbreviated as "EB."
13. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie, 1914), 58.
14. Gertrude Stein, "What is English Literature," in Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 42.
15. Luke Carson, Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 69.
16. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17.
17. Margaret Dickie, "Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism," in The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 241. See Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) for excellent readings on Stein's foregrounding of the sensual and material aspects of language.
18. Gertrude Stein, "Mrs. Emerson," Close Up 1, no. 2 : 28; hereafter abbreviated as "ME." Stein's writing has multiple sexual and lesbian overtones; exploring these, however, is outside the scope of this essay. Here I write under the assumption that Stein's sexual body purposefully resists codification; her aesthetic relies upon textual immediacy and the "intensity of movement" she finds in cinema ("PR," 183).
19. Inez Hedges, "Constellated Visions: Robert Desnos's and Man Ray's L'Etoile de Mer," in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 99; hereafter abbreviated as "CV."
20. Neil Baldwin, Man Ray: American Artist (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1988), 134.
21. P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 153; hereafter abbreviated MM.
22. Man Ray, Self Portrait (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), 259; hereafter abbreviated SP.
23. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), 51.
24. Chaplin's reciprocal competition with Stein continues in his 1954 talkie, Limelight, where he quotes in a half-ironic homage the well-known Steinism "A rose is a rose is a rose."
25. Sabine Hake, "Chaplin Reception in Weimar Germany," New German Critique 51 (Fall 1990): 88; hereafter abbreviated as "CR."
26. Walter Benjamin, "Chaplin in Retrospect," in Selected Writings,Vol. 2: 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 222-3.
27. Robert Aaron, "Films of Revolt," in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 432.
28. Jean Epstein, "Magnification," in French Film Theory and Criticism, 238.
29. Louis Aragon, "On Decor," in French Film Theory and Criticism, 167.
30. Walter Benjamin, "Chaplin," in Selected Writings,Vol. 2: 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 200.
31. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 169-70.
32. Nicholls, Modernisms, 25.
33. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 128; hereafter abbreviated as VB.
34. Djuna Barnes represents the slippage between a Victorian model of character and the modernist one as a study in nonsynchronistic delay in the gait of her Guido, married to the militaristic Baroness Helga Volkbein: "He had tried to be one with her by adoring her, by imitating her goose-step of a stride, a step that by him adopted became dislocated and comic." Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 235. Guido's "historic" dislocation mirrors Chaplin's retrograde costume updated through the wearer's incongruous body that does not seem able to fill it completely.
35. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 253.
36. Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 88; hereafter abbreviated as SC.
37. SC, 89. Kerr gives as example in the "celebrated scene in the Pawnshop" where "aclock--unlikely object--can be a baby, a can of fish, an open mouth, a bolt of cotton--anything" (ibid.).
38. Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 176; hereafter abbreviated as KS.
39. Stein's early years in Paris brought her into the circles of prominent avant-gardists, among them Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Picasso, and under their influence, she "moved increasingly toward the surreal." Linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 112; hereafter abbreviated as FS. But Stein never aligns herself with the "school" of surrealism, and in fact, espouses notably nonsurrealist tactics, such as sobriety: "I must be sober. It is so much more exciting to be sober, to be exact and concentrated and sober" ("PR," 198). Furthermore, even as she invokes the re of the hysteric, Stein never acknowledges the psychoanalytic model of the unconscious and the primacy of dreams so pivotal to André Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism" . Contrastingly, Man Ray is much more closely affiliated with the surrealist version of the unconscious; his work, nevertheless, draws upon the mechanistic vision of the body I trace in Stein.
40. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, "A Study of Temperaments," in Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes,vol. 1, trans. W. Horsley Gantt (New York: International Publishers, 1928), 375.
41. Lisa Ruddick reads "Melanctha" as "so close, in its characterizations, to James's theory of the mind as to approach psychological allegory." Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 15; hereafter abbreviated as RGS). In particular, his notions of the emergence of "selective attention" or "habits of attention" in order to cope with undifferentiated and overwhelming sensory impressions find a counterexample in the character of Melanctha. Ruddick writes, "James uses the term mind-wandering, or wandering attention to describe such a receptiveness to sensation--and wandering is also Stein's word for her heroine" (RGS, 18), and as such "Melanctha's pathological forgetfulness is of a piece with her mind-wandering" (RGS, 19). In this way, wandering also makes Melanctha a flâneuse, enacting the rhythmic divagations of the body moving in space.
42. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography, 79.
43. Gertrude Stein and Leon M. Solomons, "Motor Automatism,"in Harvard Psychological Review (New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1969); hereafter abbreviated "MA."
44. The model of the body as impossible machine (a kind of film apparatus), freakishly capable of engaging in multiple tasks appears in one of Marianne Moore's delightful footnotes; her Eve "able to write simultaneously" is inspired by an article that could have been authored by Stein for all its quirkiness, entitled "Multiple Consciousness or Reflex Action of Unaccustomed Range" from Scientific American (Jan. 1922):
Miss A--will write simultaneously in three languages, English, German, and French, talking in the meantime. [She] takes advantage of her abilities in everyday life, writing her letters simultaneously with both hands; names, the first, third, and fifth words with her left and the second, fourth, and sixth with her right hand. While generally writing outward, she is able as well to write inward with both hands. [The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Penguin, 1967), 271].
Reminiscent of Stein's exploration of reflex action, Moore's quotation links writing with motor automatism. The body marks a threshold, Merleau-Ponty's "flesh" that signals "being's reversibility . . . a dual orientation inward and outward" (VB, 100).
45. Stein will blatantly disavow repetition--"I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition" ("PR," 166). Nevertheless, she relies upon its rhetorical doubleness, as both present and absent, as that incremental variation that occurs with each new articulation or "insistence": "insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating" ("PR," 171).
46. Marianne DeKoven considers Stein's most "successful experimental writing" to be composed of "semi-grammatical phrases." Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 11.
47. William James, "Stream of Consciousness," in Pragmatism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 180-1; hereafter abbreviated as "SC."
48. Gertrude Stein, "Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in its Relation to Attention," in Harvard Psychological Review (New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1969); hereafter abbreviated as "CMA."
49. Walter Benjamin asserts this apparent contradiction between distraction and habituation: "The distracted person, too, can form habits" and further that "[r]eception in a state of distraction . . . finds in the film its true means of exercise." "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, 240.
50. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Claudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (1911; Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 1999), 22; hereafter abbreviated as L.
51. Gertrude Stein, "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso," in Portraits and Prayers (New York: Random House, 1934), 25; hereafter abbreviated as "CPP."
52. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 24.
53. Ibid., 7.
54. The interest in "parts" over the whole corresponds to the simultaneous focusing of attention and break within narrative coherence made possible by a film close-up. Using the narrative example "of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit his crime," Hugo Münsterberg points to the power of the close-up: "[o]ur attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand" where "[i]t is as if this one hand were during the pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything else had faded away." Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Appleton and Company, 1916), 86; on the stage "nothing can really fade away" (ibid.).
55. Rayograms are Man Ray's apparently accidental (read automatic) process of developing images. He was able to create striking defamiliarized effects without a camera by throwing concrete objects such as nails upon photographic paper and exposing it to light.
56. Carolyn Burke, "Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference," American Quarterly 39, no. 1 : 100.
57. Bertha is the name of Stein's older sister, and with the death of their mother, Bertha took on the traditional female role of caretaker. As Wagner-Martin indicates, "[w]atching Bertha taught her that she would rather not lead a woman's life" (FS, 23). Bertha in this piece becomes a cipher, or sign of the hysteric.
58. "ME," 25. As Aragon writes in his review of Chaplin's The Vagabond, "Film extends the art of Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris in the use of 'scraps' of everyday material: Today these courageous precursors, painters or poets, witness their own triumph, they who knew how to be moved by a newspaper or a packet of cigarettes" ("On Décor," 165).
59. "ME," 29. "[S]pinning" and "fastening" suggest the spinning of film on the projector's wheels and the manual fastening required by editing as well as the "rotoreliefs, " the turning discs used by Duchamp and Man Ray in their pun-filled film, Anemic Cinema (1924-6).
60. Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 24.
"I was just thinking of a good title for an art book. From Bismark to Hitler." 1
It is an unlikely title for a history of art, and yet, if we had read it when and where it first appeared, in England, in mid-June of 1940, in a little volume by Gertrude Stein called Paris France, we would perhaps have given it our grim approval. 2 Paris had just fallen to the Germans, who now occupied virtually all of Northern and Central Europe. A couple of weeks earlier, a quarter of a million British soldiers had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and Germany's designs on England were obvious. German militarism and the ambitions of its leaders had done much to twist the century into its misshapen, modern form. We could have agreed that "From Bismark to Hitler" was an apt title for a great many books--even those concerning subjects that writers of an earlier era might not have thought belonged under the aegis of a chancellor. Nevertheless, we should pause over the deliberate and forceful incongruity of Stein's wry suggestion. Particularly coming from this writer who had lived so fully, for so much of her life, in contemptuous disregard of explicitly political matters and the business of governments, who openly maintained her scorn for the "gross têtes," the "big heads [who] are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people," the idea that Bismarck and Hitler might preside, not only over millions of people, but over her discussion of art, seems to constitute a terrible concession by Stein of her aesthetic domain (PF, 28).
But over the course of her life, Stein comes to understand how the story of art is also the story of armies, how accounts of artists and "gross têtes" belong together on the same vexed page. She spends the last years of her life living in wartime, musing on the causes and effects and experience of war, and working war into her art and her theories about art. 3 I focus in this essay on three selections from her extensive writings about the second world war of her lifetime, conscious all the while that leaving any of Stein's war writings out of my discussion means that I have not addressed the full complexity of her response to that war. 4 My selections, nevertheless, are Paris France, written before the German invasion of her adopted country, and two pieces she wrote after the defeat of Germany: an essay for Life magazine titled "Off We All Went to See Germany" , and her final composition, published posthumously in the Yale Poetry Review, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb" . Although the works are written for different audiences, and although they bracket the war's beginning and ending, they all display Stein's understanding of war as an especially vehement and large-scale manifestation of difference. Literally, of course, those differences are geopolitical and military, and they occur between and within nations. But when Stein writes about war, other differences become crucial as well--between private and public spheres, between past and present, between childhood and adulthood, between her own and others' points of view. Words themselves take on different meanings.
I frame my discussion of Stein's World War II writing by first looking briefly at concepts she develops before that second war, in texts written during the 1920s and 1930s. The peculiar view of World War II through Stein's eyes cannot be understood without first understanding her often anguished meditations--composed for the most part following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933--on audience and intimacy, on self-possession and the self dispersed, on writing with and without reference, on being read by a necessarily alien public as well as by the few who know her. Insofar as Stein's war writings have received attention at all (and that attention has, with a few exceptions, only begun within the past few years), this late work has been insufficiently linked to her earlier texts. There has also been an understandable tendency to read Stein's war work in terms that, while of great importance, are ultimately limiting. Recent discussions of Stein in France have rested on attempts to decide and evaluate what political position (or positions) she held during the war. Readers in our own time generally want first to determine which side she took (or why she refused to take sides), and how extensively she benefited from the protection of the Vichy government. They ask whether aspects of her own theory and artistic practice can be said to carry political meaning. And how fully does she reflect the continually shifting attitudes of the French themselves--as collaborators, resistors, and the majority of those who stood equivocally somewhere in between? 5 I by no means want to foreclose reading Stein's wartime writing as part of an important contemporary exploration of the problems of allegiance in occupied France, but I want also to expand the terms of the discussion of these texts beyond specific, historical questions of collaboration. For Stein, the phenomenon of war is a manifestation and crucial cause of the excitements and horrors of modernity. These excitements and horrors are as much aesthetic and ontological as they are sociopolitical and military. And in her intimate conjoining of the realms of war and art, Stein displays her modernity every bit as fully as she does in her gnostic, avant-garde writings.
War emerges with startling centrality in "Composition as Explanation"--Stein's lecture delivered in 1926 to undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. There is little in Stein's preceding work, or in immediate, contemporary circumstances to explain the pivotal presence of war in this speech. Ulla Dydo suggests that Stein makes her analogy between aesthetic and martial innovation in an effort to close "a generation gap between her audience and herself," but I do not find this explanation convincing. 6 It is more plausible to understand the introduction of the Great War not as a bid for the attention of the young so much as a carefully thought-out explanation for the shape of society and the domain of art in the years after 1919. For Stein, modernity and the war that brings the twentieth century wholly into "the modern composition" derives from conflict, when a peaceful, homogeneous state is broken by the introduction of something different: "Everything alike naturally everything was simply different and this is and was romanticism and this is and was war" ("CE," 501). "Romanticism," in addition to referring somewhat loosely to early-nineteenth-century English poetry, names the fact of division, the introduction of difference into any system--aesthetic, political, psychological. It is important to understand that she connects these systems. The writer who would name her art history "From Bismark to Hitler" is the writer who insists that changes in one sphere mean changes in others.
Her Lectures in America will show Stein developing at great length a geographical history--the phrase is hers--that ties the characteristics of a nation's art closely to the exposure of that nation to difference. 7 In her explanatory narrative, most extensively laid out in the lecture titled "What is English Literature," England grows less and less self-contained as time progresses, beginning to enter its modern state of being with the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. By 1815, "England" no longer designates an island and the comparatively homogeneous group of people living within that island's limited bounds but points instead, disconcertingly, to an empire either being built, or maintained, or falling apart far beyond the island's shores. English writing consequently suffers, because it now needs to answer to so many different demands.
But Stein is nominally an American, and she tours her native country with a lecture on the problems of English literature in part so that she can offer to her audiences the answer to modernity provided by their own writers, their own culture. Since America is not an island and since, in Stein's telling of history, it is not a country engaged in the exhausting, impossible labor of maintaining an empire, it has never had to deal with the traumatic violation of inside by outside. Immigration leads to incorporation; it does not result in a nation divided against itself. Clearly, Stein is telling her lettered audience of students, patrons of art, intellectuals, and members of the social elite a comforting story about unity across classes and cultures at a time still cast in the shadow of the Great Depression in a country ferociously divided by difference. 8 Her description of America as having been always and fundamentally alone, disconnected from the rest of the world, also suits the isolationist temper of the decade. 9 Here is a nation that cannot but be uninvolved in the world's increasingly troubling affairs. And for Stein herself, whose anxieties surrounding exposure and connectedness to a general public are so powerful as to bring her writing career to a crisis following the widespread success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 10 a claim of her American heritage stands as a bid for remaining unassailably beyond everything:
the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something was the American one. . . . Some say that it is repression but no it is not repression it is a lack of connection, of there being no connection with living and daily living because there is none, that makes American writing what it always has been and what it will continue to become. 11
Ironically, of course, the very fact that Stein gives this talk and the other five that she assembles under the heading Lectures in America to audiences nationwide--audiences that subject her to nonstop, if largely adoring scrutiny during her tour--demonstrates how extensively she is connected to her public. Her overwhelming interest in the issues attending embodiment makes perfect sense. Her second autobiography, Everybody's Autobiography , centrally concerned with "What Happened After The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" (the title of the book's opening chapter) and with the American tour, reveals on virtually every page Stein's sense of exposure, particularly as she traveled in her native land. 12 She remains always on display, in texts that can be read and reread by strangers, and in her own person as she stands before those strangers. The fact and conditions of her lecture tour create a principal subject for those lectures. 13
We cannot forget, further, that Stein lives in France rather than England or America--on the European continent, not on an island or a landmass effectively protected by oceans. If we return to her discussion of war and modernity in "Composition as Explanation," we realize that, far from living composed in an "American" state of removal from connections of all kinds, Stein has experienced most of this century in what she calls her "romantic" country rather than the one where she "belongs"--center stage in the theater of world war--and war remains the most appallingly powerful means by which difference is made violently manifest on a large scale (PF, 2). The "romanticism" of 1914-8 has brought her brutally into modernity. There is much in "Composition as Explanation" that might be read simply as aesthetic theory, but we can feel the sharp edge of Stein's satirical characterization of her century as she describes how war dragged millions of people to an unarguably modern state:
And so there was the natural phenomenon that was war . . . [which itself] became completely contemporary and so created the completed recognition of the contemporary composition. Every one but one may say every one became consciously became aware of the existence of the authenticity of the modern composition. . . . And so war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years. ["CE," 501]
Stein utters these sentences to men of ting age, in a community decimated by the Great War, in a climate filled with the most scathing reflections on the pointlessness of the global conflict of a decade earlier, started and scandalously mismanaged by old men from another era altogether. We recognize here the same dark wit that would lodge Bismark and Hitler in the title of a book on art. What has been "advanced" to "every one"--notice the understated comedy of the emphasis Stein places on "every one" ("but one may say every one")--is the violent understanding of difference as it manifests itself in invasion, attack, conflict ending in death, the redrawing of maps, cultural and political revolution, and social and aesthetic change of unparalleled rapidity and scope.
The painful challenge that wartime conditions force on Stein is in important respects a challenge that she has been struggling with ever since the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Does she choose to stand before an audience, uttering explanations and opinions and answers, exposing herself to queries, engaging in conversations, using language primarily as an instrument for communication? Or does she refuse to debase her medium and to violate her privacy, writing instead purely with the aim of putting words in lively combinations on the page, purging her mind--and, ideally, the minds of her readers--of thoughts about what these words mean, whether they make a story, how they relate to our ordinary world? She pursues both courses, often in dizzying alternations on a single page. And the stakes attending this double choice are extraordinarily high. By the summer of 1940, invasion and occupation are no longer only psychologically inflected res for the experiences of writing and being read. Outside breaks in; Germany overruns France. Although Stein continues to believe that her highest calling is the writing she does without reference to daily living, from 1939 through 1945 she works under the inevitable pressures placed upon a writer to respond to the threat and then the actuality of invasion and the newly importunate facts of daily existence that follow. She now feels compelled to bear some kind of witness, to tell her story about the war she sees, and to satisfy an American public--brought largely into being by The Autobiography--with accounts of life in occupied France. 14
Stein's vacillation between reference and antireferential writing constitutes one of her idiosyncratic strengths as a writer about war, even as it leaves her vulnerable to charges of carelessness in the face of urgent, demonstrable human suffering. All of her texts written during World War II are marked by an aesthetically, morally, and emotionally volatile instability. Examples are everywhere; I offer one from Paris France:
I like words of one syllable, and it works out very well in the French order for general mobilization. The printed thing gives all the detail and then it says the army de terre, de mer et de l'air. That is very impressive when you read it in every village. 15
It "works out very well" if one reads this proclamation of nationwide conscription purely as a collection of words on a government notice (and if the reader is not a man of conscriptable age). Here, as is so often the case, Stein courts furious accusations from readers who are more directly caught up either in the machinery of war itself or who will resent as unpatriotic this aesthetic attention to words instead of a more direct embrace of their stirring reference to battle. She sustains criticism from both groups throughout the war. 16 But she deliberately refuses to be "mobilized" herself by the government's martial rhetoric. She maintains a skepticism about the act of making war and the ways language can be used to promote war. She recognizes facts about life in wartime that an ardent defender of any particular side or cause might not see or might not allow him or herself to register in writing. Her careful observation of the details of life in occupied France constitutes an unusual and important act of witnessing, without the obtrusive presence of the author guiding us through an illustrated argument. As she stares at this "printed thing," she is not attempting to explain, shape opinion, appeal to familiar systems of ethics, influence political or military choices. In this particular form of disengagement, her work is unusual among war memoirs.
Stein's body of work on the war matters in part because it explores, in the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable, a late and especially explicit iteration of a modernist aesthetic dream: the creation in language, by an author who has effectively vanished--inviolate behind the words on the page--of a system of relations that does not tell a story, of words moving but never falling into narrative and never, therefore, pulling us into the human, all-too-human world where cause and effect brings with it responsibility and anxiety and hope and, ultimately, mortal ends. Stein's war writing also matters for the opposite but profoundly allied reason that we can discover on her pages powerfully realized portraits of life in wartime. And the final irony pertaining to Stein's divided aims and her writing that is often so utterly at odds with itself lies in the fact that every writer's attempt to narrate purposefully experience during war founders as it confronts events that cannot be told, experiences that refuse grammatical parsing and the shapes of narration. 17 Her reasons for joining this numerous company of necessary failures are idiosyncratic in the extreme. And yet there on her pages are the rhetorical effects she regularly achieves in her misshapen, interrupted, jarringly framed and therefore deeply expressive sentences about World War II.
Written in the bizarre months of late 1939 and early 1940, during which her adopted country declares war in September and then waits for an attack that does not come until the following May, Paris France stands in many respects as the war book of Stein's that captures the most recognizably widespread sense of the times in France. 18 Once France falls to the Germans, Stein's perspective on events grows increasingly personal, though it remains accurate to the peculiar experience of life for the French after armistice, under occupation. Following the Allies' declaration of war against Germany on 3 September, the fall and winter in both England and France--a period journalists soon named "the phony war"--was marked by a surreal combination of normalcy and frantic preparations for battle. Expecting immediate German air raids, both countries placed themselves under blackout, pursued plans for evacuations of women and children from major cities, restricted civilian movement and issued gas masks. They changed radio programming to music interrupted only by occasional announcements, set up home defense squadrons, had city inhabitants digging trenches for shelter, and made numerous other provisions for self-defense. 19 But the expected attack failed to materialize and restrictions relaxed. Life shifted, as the fall progressed, to a strange mixture of waiting in anxious preparedness and resuming something like ordinary daily living. Though a great many sentences of Paris France take an ironic inflection and can even seem grotesquely off the mark when the book is read after its publication date in June of 1940--the Nazis having entered Paris on the fourteenth of June--Stein writes her book when France is living in this indeterminate time before the arrival of the Germans. War is a fact, but it has not yet fully arrived. Poland falls by October, Finland ts the Soviets through the winter, the German army invades Denmark and Norway in April, but France remains untouched. "Paris, France," she tells us in her first sentence, "is exciting and peaceful" (PF, 1). Ever since Three Lives, Stein has been composing sentences around the copula that splinter when we arrive at their predicates. Briefly, now, she is just describing the way things are. She has spent much of her writing life considering how often a single subject comprises contradictory states of being, reflecting on the plural and uncertain ways we occupy any temporally located moment. She proves astonishingly well prepared to describe the limbo of the phony war as many lived it in France.
The country that takes shape on the pages of Paris France seems virtually immune to the motions of time. Stein writes to assure herself and her readers that little has happened or can ever happen in this place, as though she were performing a comforting stroll through an undamaged garden between dramatic but ultimately inconsequential storms. Hers is a pre-industrial, agrarian France that follows rhythms too deeply ingrained to be affected by mere politics or the martial doings of certain men. "[W]hat is was and what was is," she insists: "the season and fashions that exist with the seasons are the things France lives by, the earth has its seasons and the people who live on that earth have fashions and that is all" (PF, 24, 28-9). Imbued with the rhythms of Ecclesiastes, Stein's sentences inflexibly connect the French with the earth and with the least instrumental, least necessary human pursuit imaginable: fashion. French people in this book are either absorbed in attending to their most basic physical requirements--procuring food, clothing, and shelter--or they are deliberately preoccupied by the most frivolous concerns--the design of hats, say, or the ways of their dogs. Fashion, the behavior of animals, and the needs of the body matter enormously to Stein and to the French because these things are still disconnected from the emergencies of the time (though this disconnection will not be sustainable once the invasion begins). "Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden wrote in February of this same year 20 --a time when the laws of cause and effect themselves at times seem weirdly suspended--and Stein celebrates a disengagement that has long been considered the province of the aesthetic: "Now all these dogs being of no use can be made fashionable, because fashion must never be useful, must very often be exotic, and must always be made to be french. That is what fashion is and it must change" (PF, 35). For the first half of Paris France, fashion seems to be the only thing that changes--or the only change that is worth noticing. When those changes come, furthermore, they arise essentially without agency. Like all of the productions of genius in Stein's scheme of the world's operations, fashions cannot properly be attributed to conscious design. 21 They happen almost by accident, as natural phenomena occur, regular as the seasons--predictable, mildly surprising in their minute variations, and consoling: "And so there is no use going on, except that the summers follow one after the other and the fashions go with the seasons" (PF, 28). "Fashion" comes to mean a great deal more, too, than the way clothes hang on a body. Stein increases the domain of fashion, of perceived form, so radically in Paris France that wars themselves somehow seem like hemlines or the cut of a man's jacket--cyclically linked, following a design, echoing one another in a way that brings a dark kind of comfort to the stolid, stoical French. The fall days of 1939 are shadowed by those of 1914. Resigned, the French find pattern, not progress, repetition rather than evolution: "And now it is once more an August and September and there is once more a crisis and once more the farmers the gentle farmers talk about life as it is" (PF, 27). This is a land that cannot be understood in historical terms. It is instead a place of the perpetual present tense: "And so France cannot change it can always have its fashions but it cannot change" (PF, 33).
But a realm locked this completely into timelessness can become difficult to distinguish from a land of the dead. Paris France is haunted by death, which exists as an imminent possibility and an immanent fact of life in wartime. French life exhibits much of the changelessness of a work of art or, more particularly, a monument. Its people move as though choreographed, caught in the earth's ritual embrace. We find ourselves pondering a country that has already lost the war because resisting seems beside the point. France has resigned itself to invasion, given itself over to a life that exhibits few vital signs:
And then the way they feel about the dead, it is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock. There is no difference between death and life in France and that too made it inevitable that they were the background of the twentieth century. [PF, 13]
In this eternally ancient nation from which the twentieth century grows, among the fatalistic citizens who will pass mildly away, children become the locus for Stein's characterization of the costs and the effects of war. When Paris France shifts from descriptions of the country and its place in history to an attempt to address the experience of wartime more directly, Stein turns our attention to a little girl who lives near her in the village of Bilignin. 22 She makes the shift to childhood for several reasons. Her understanding of space and time has long deliberately retained something of the flexibility, the synchronicity of a child's. 23 Those who live in the state of temporal suspension that characterizes late 1939 and early 1940 in France live to some degree outside of time's ordinary progress, as children do. They seem to be equally helpless, as well, unable to control whatever is about to happen. This village girl also allows Stein to examine her own earlier days as a writer. Using the girl's name as a trigger for her backward glance, Stein returns, in a textual representation of memory, to a prior form of art--what has become, by 1939, one of her most famous instances of avant-garde, noninstrumental writing--now measured against words differently employed. One of Stein's strategies for assessing the meaning of the coming of war is to see what happens when a word slips from a wholly linguistic field of play into a time, a place, a body.
The word is "Button." It has gone from part of a title--Tender Buttons--to a girl's last name: Helen Button. But before we listen to Helen's wartime experience, we must first recall the sketch that famously opens Tender Buttons, under the heading "Objects."  All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. 24
The tensions between the familiar and the strange in this passage will return to haunt Helen Button. Even the ordinary attributes of this carafe have turned unsettling: the adjective "blind" disconcertingly suggests the possibility of the object becoming a subject capable of returning our scrutiny, just as "hurt" may point ratively to color but gestures also toward a body. Though this object is "not unordered in not resembling," though it has discernible form, is an "arrangement in a system to pointing," we are not initiated into the design of that system, the category in which its lack of resemblance would seem merely another instance of order. Different from expectations, familiar as kin and cousin might seem, but also, if looked at again or awry, less than kind, less known than novel, this carafe is a spectacle whose hard-edged indeterminacies threaten to overwhelm the observer and the observer's methods for making sense: "The difference is spreading."
Before we watch Helen Button staring at a kindred object in Paris France--as though she were looking at one of the items from Tender Buttons transposed, twenty-five years later, on the eve of the next war, to a village in Southeastern France--we witness her transformation from a little girl to a character in a story by Stein: "We have had here in the village a little girl and her name is Hélène Bouton, Helen Button" (PF, 80). 25 Hélène Bouton's imperfect reflection in Helen Button signals the difference between life and narrative and inaugurates a double act of recollection--of a French girl and of a highly charged English word from Stein's prior text that shares Helen's last name. Stein undertakes the complex act of recollection emphasizing that all portraits should take the measure of and unfold self-consciously in time, particularly when time carries such heavy freight: "because after all this war is not war," she adds in her opening, "it is war-time" (PF, 80). This war is "not war" because it has commenced without fully, violently beginning in earnest for the French. All of Stein's writings about war will explore the myriad ways in which the state of wartime itself can at once seem all-encompassing and wholly irrelevant to anyone living during war. Every sentence in her work that measures the full effect of living under war's terrible dispensations is followed shortly by a companion sentence that shows the subject virtually untouched by circumstances we associate with conflict. And not only does Stein underscore her subject's divided modes of being in time. She also encourages us to look beyond particulars, so that the local Hélène becomes the more general, more textual Helen, who lives not simply in late 1939 but in a widespread historical condition we call "war-time," stretching back even to the Iliad, where we will also find this girl's name. "She lived somewhere," Stein impatiently assures us, knowing that we will naturally gravitate toward the pathos of a specific case history and thereby be likely to miss the even more sobering truth that there are millions of Helens existing in time and space, their fates echoing across the centuries like the ticking of a clock. "[B]ut the thing that is important is that she lived during war-time. There is a great deal of war-time in history and Helen Button lived in it" (PF, 81). Stein introduces her portrait as a story about "what a child's feeling about war-time is" (PF, 80). Helen Button, we find, has spent many of her days and nights anxiously immersed in history.
Stein's story of Helen occupies ten enormously complex pages of Paris France, and yet it is with the first, deliberately framed narration of an event in Helen Button's life that her last name and the event together recall Tender Buttons. Stein now restages the opening of her earlier work, providing us with an object and a perceiving subject:
Helen Button started out with her dog William. As they were walking along suddenly William stopped and was very nervous. He saw something on the road and so did Helen. They neither of them knew what it was at first and at last as they approached very carefully they saw it was a bottle, a bottle standing up right in the middle of the road. There had been something in the bottle but what, it looked dark green or may be blue or black, and the bottle was standing up in the middle of the road, not lying on its side the way a bottle on the road usually is.
William the dog and Helen the little girl went on. They did not look back at the bottle. But of course it was still there because they had not touched it.
That is war-time. [PF, 82]
The passage resists reading as forcefully as did its antecedent in Tender Buttons. And this kindred moment is explicitly concerned with the effects of that resistance on two emblematical interpreters who share nervousness though their differences from each other extend even to their species. The familiar open vista of the road suddenly contracts around an object needing to be deciphered, threatening in its pure opacity. That mere object, the bottle of indeterminate color, demands interpretation because Helen and William are searching for what Stein, three paragraphs earlier, has called "signs" that will orient them in their ominously unfolding presents. The somehow crucial difference--that this bottle stands up rather than lying on its side--seems fraught with meaning in part because there is so little to interpret, so little to hold on to in this scene that epitomizes Helen and William's continually menacing, largely uneventful lives in wartime.
The difference, too, between this nonincident and "A CARAFE THAT IS A BLIND GLASS" augments its already considerable power. When Stein's object returns on this road, changed but related to a precedent object in Tender Buttons, and when we watch this girl and her dog equally though differently afraid of its possible significance, we confront a representative anxiety about failing to make meaning. Circumstances demand interpretation but leave us with insufficient points of reference by which we might venture to make sense of things. Tender Buttons does not stand as a key in relation to this later scene; the echoes do not help us read this different world. Our own acts of recollection simplify nothing. Brooding over history is as existentially mystifying to Stein as is being in the present, but those twin mystifications are most upsetting and most obvious during war. The comforting appositives, "the dog" and "the little girl" try, with only partial success, to reassemble William and Helen after their misadventure. But the bottle, Stein carefully insists, opening a space in her narrative for memory's continued, hysterical workings, "was still there because they had not touched it." Helen and William do not look over their shoulders, but the narrative glances back, forcing us to acknowledge that the impervious object remains to be recalled. Being in wartime exacerbates the tendency for the subject to fall into a seemingly infinite variety of disorders, leaving the inner and outer interpretable worlds incoherent, filled only with difference and unspeakable absences. The faculty of memory allows (or is condemns a better word?) the repeated return to these moments of difference, just as this brief scene circles back on itself. Stein's sketch of the displaced Helen and William holds out to them and to her readers the possibility, at once terrible and promising, of recollection. Not looking at the bottle but seeing it all the same, they know that there is something--a world--still there "because they had not touched it."
As the story of Helen Button in wartime continues, Stein displays, in the compressed narrative of her character's life, experiences and patterns of thought that will characterize her subsequent writing about the war. Helen's is a world where no relation--between people, with animals, with objects themselves, and even with the ostensible enemy--can be relied upon; where the urge to embrace prophecies, or hold to any system of signs that will allow the comforting sense that the future is foreknown and follows a plan is continually offset by even the most ordinary, expected events going wrong; where the laws of cause and effect seem suspended; where the familiar turns horrific and the anticipated nightmare does not materialize. Helen watches her friend Emil's dog, Ellen, "changing and her fur turned into large baggy trousers and her head turned into a large shaggy head and it was a man, an enemy man" (PF, 86). 26 She clings to her Aunt Pauline, who knows what the future holds--an extremely consequential gift of sight in these days, since "in war-time anything might happen so it was very necessary to know it" (PF, 87). 27 When the unexpected does occur (Aunt Pauline's lucidity has no observable effect on this story), consequences remain puzzling. Helen's dog is hit by a car: "The automobile came on, it went over William and Helen screamed and William was down and then he was up and then away he went, oh how he did go" (PF, 89). Shortly after this misadventure, a wagon comes by, carrying an unidentified "animal": "nobody had ever seen any animal like it before, it was enormous and it was dead. . . . The enormous animal did not have a tail and it did not have any ears. It was an enormous animal and it was war-time. Helen did not really see it but she told herself about it" (PF, 89-90). The last event in the story of Helen Button's life is, fittingly, her encounter with the enemy. Modernity and life within "the modern composition," to use Stein's phrase, means living exiled from the quiet confines of an imagined and secure self, without an island haven, lacking words alone. To be modern is to be forced, perhaps as one writes for a general public or gives lectures before anonymous audiences, often by the frightfully effective mechanism of war, into contact with the irreducible mystery of others. It is to live always in the state of wondering "who goes there?" Helen and Emil, her French friend with the German name, see a young man on a nearby hill with a spy glass. They decide on a patriotic course of action:
Emil went up to the man. He said to him.  I am not, said the man. If you are not what is your name said Emil. My name is Henry said the man.
There they stood and the snow in the fields and the water splashing and the man in wooden shoes, looking through his spy-glass at something.
What should they do.
It really was war-time.
They all went away always looking behind.
Very soon then there was nobody anywhere.
This is war-time.
Helen did not know why but this was the first thing in war-time that had made her cry. [PF, 91-2]
She grieves for herself and her precarious condition, for the vacuity of a crowded world. She knows that looking back will no more resolve the question of this stranger's allegiance than it will establish the meaning of the bottle in the road, and that going away makes as much sense as any other choice she and Emil might have taken, though it accomplishes nothing. She is still young, and the war continues, but she now understands all that can be known of her condition, "So for her," Stein explains, "war-time was over" (PF, 92). In the same bleak but resolved frame of mind, Stein casts a glance back over what she has just written and concludes, "So this is the twentieth century" (ibid.).
One of the most terrible aspects of Stein's portrait of Helen Button is that the girl vanishes in tears from Stein's narrative, never to reappear. Triumph over the enemy does not form part of her story. Stein, on the other hand, experiences the complex euphoria of liberation. I turn now to two pieces she wrote after V-E Day, one describing a trip she takes to Germany with the United States Army, the other containing her thoughts about the atomic bomb. Jean Gallagher who, in The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, discusses a number of Stein's World War II writings, argues that, "In Stein's postliberation writing, not only do we see a marked turn toward more detailed visual description and a willingness to interpret visual data for readers, but we also see how Stein participates in a militarized gaze." 28 It is certainly true that Stein's Wars I Have Seen records the coming of the Americans in greatest detail and vehemently celebrates the Allied victory. I do not agree, however, that she allows herself to see more clearly or with increased specificity--in this text or in others written in 1945-6--than she did before the arrival of her countrymen. Nor, I think, does Stein consistently write with an interpretive certainty she lacked before the defeat of the Germans. Rather, I suggest, the United States press catches her up in its representations for the American public of the liberation of France. Her writing about the war and her attitude toward the coming of the Americans make national news. So powerful are the public narratives of victory, and so compelling is the story of this artist's liberation, that Stein finds herself speaking (and being quoted) in public venues that discourage ambiguity, even though she herself continues to interrogate the war and its legacies. 29 The war correspondents, Eric Sevareid and Frank Gervasi, report Stein's "liberation" to the American press; stories about her are carried in many American periodicals; Stein herself makes a broadcast to America. 30 A continual stream of American officers and enlisted men come to her house in Culoz for visits. 31 She appears in a film, A G.I. Sees Paris. 32 Coming out of her necessary retreat in the French countryside during the war, Stein is thrust back into the public eye as fully as she was after the Autobiography was published. And she measures that publicity and the consequences of victory every bit as thoughtfully as she weighed the success and the effects of her own prose in the mid-1930s. She lives now, at the end of the European war, in a time of resolutions, when so many are busily providing answers and explanations and retrospective interpretations. Her own project in this last year of the war becomes a questioning of conclusions. What she demonstrates again, in this next phase of her writing about the war, is her ability to capture the essential oddity of war and its aftermath. Few writers can speak with such peculiar authority about the surreal in the ordinary and the ordinary in what we thought was apocalyptic.
Stein's most explicit return to her mass audience occurs in her appearance as an official witness of the Allied victory before the readers of Life magazine in August of 1945. 33 She begins her essay, "'Off We All Went to See Germany,'" with the insistent invitation of a corporal:
I think you'd better come and make a trip over Germany said Bob Sweet. Bob Sweet is a corporal in the 441st Troup Carrier Group and he is full of ideas and I usually do whatever he tells me to do. [Life, 54]
There is a great deal of humor in this essay, and it is humor of a kind that is likely to meet with the approval of Stein's American readers: "But Bob, I said, I don't like Germans, I saw enough of them in France I don't want to see them at home" (ibid.). She assures us, by the end of the first paragraph, that we need not be concerned that we will hear too much about Hitler's defeated nation: "And I really pretty well forgot about Germany and the Germans in the enormous pleasure of living intimately with the American Army" (Life, 54). The essay already begins to complicate its ostensible purpose. This will be a visit to see Germany in which not many Germans and not much of the country needs to be seen. She reduces that country to a nonentity in prose that is startling in its simplicity, as innocent of martial fervor or vengeful pleasures as the musings of Helen Button or her friend Emil. The editors of Life smile at her throughout, adding a section heading, for example, to her observations about the effects of Allied bombs on Cologne. "Roofs are important, yes," the editor of Stein's essay agrees with Stein, in pleased condescension at her own description:
Cologne was the most destroyed city we had seen yet, it is natural, of course it is natural to speak of one's roof, roofs are in a way the most important thing in a house, between four walls, under a roof, and here was a whole spread out city without a roof. There was the cathedral but it looked very fragile as if you pushed it hard with your finger your finger either would go through it or it would fall over. [Life, 56]
But Stein maintains her own integrity, her distinction from the editorial point of view, simply by recording her observations in her own style--a style that continues to demonstrate how tentative is the act of witnessing, how little we can harvest from our gleaning of the world. With the victory of the Allies comes an endless string of documentary accounts and photographs and films that promise to bring us closer to the facts of the war in Europe. Stein is a cautious, canny member of this documentary assembly. The photograph that introduces her article weirdly illustrates the questions, at once visual and ethical, raised by much of her writing about the war ( 1). How much does this witness see? How much does she know about the surrounding world, and how fully does she respond to that world? Stein and Toklas "see the Rhine," the picture's caption assures us, but due to an accident of lighting, we see not the view from a window but a framed, black square. The image provides an unsettling introduction to a piece built around observations of a foreign country. In a furious response to the predominantly unperturbed tone of Wars I Have Seen, a reviewer in The New York Times wonders, "Didn't Miss Stein ever see the harried, beaten, ragged refugees in Paris from 1933 on? . . . Where are Miss Stein's eyes, those eyes that can so unerringly discern the value of a Picasso?" 34 It is precisely these canny aesthete's eyes, however, through which Life proposes we glimpse Germany. Reinforcing in the strongest imaginable terms a divide between the terrifying world of men in destructive action and these two older women who have given their lives to art and to a sheltered, somewhat unorthodox but fundamentally bourgeois domesticity, this article presents us with a deliberate respite from anguished journalism. In its place we are given a small collection of impressions and disarmingly direct commentary on the causes of and antidotes to war from one of the very first postwar tourists in Germany. Stein herself comes to understand her unique status shortly after her arrival in Frankfurt, as she discovers the Germans looking not at the American soldiers but at "Miss Toklas and myself":
First I was puzzled and then I realized that we were probably the very first ordinary civilian women with American soldiers, not looking official, just looking like American women . . . and [the Germans] realized for the first time that there were going to be thousands of civilians coming there just to look as we were looking. [Life, 54]
And while she is "looking," her special abilities as a collector of art are by no means to be replaced by more predictable capacities for moral outrage. Her aesthetic judgments are exactly what Life requires:
we soon came to the house where Göring's works of art were temporarily housed. . . . It was exciting to see all those pictures but it had nothing to do with Göring, there was no personal taste, he had excellent advice apparently. [Life, 56]
In an eerie, war-inflected reprise of her return to Oakland in April 1935, when she found "no there there," the central purpose of Stein's trip to Germany is to discover emptiness, to find no record of titanic personalities, to see only surfaces and hollow shells of bombed-out buildings, to take a tour, yes, but to find virtually nothing on the trip. 35
Modris Eksteins has recently published an essay on war tourism, focusing primarily on tour guides and accounts of travel after the First World War. Eksteins documents the phenomenon of postwar tourists and tour promoters, arguing that "the sight of civilization in ruin produces . . . an interesting mix of piety and titillation, of rumination and excitement." 36 Stein's quick trip to Germany cannot offer such sublime and suspect emotional satisfactions, since she finds little in the faculty of memory worth attending to--of what use, then, would ruins be? Whatever titillating horror this journey does have to offer must come when Stein reaches her journey's destination--Hitler's mountain retreat in the Alpine town of Berchtesgaden. 37 The photograph of her in this spot comes at the close of the Life essay ( 2). To understand this photograph and the account Stein gives of the occasion it commemorates, we should remember that, in 1945, there were a number of senior Allied officers and intelligence staff who feared that Hitler and his remaining followers would make a last, bloody stand in the "Mountain Redout" of Berchtesgaden. The town and Hitler's sanctuary had become saturated, in the imaginations of soldiers and civilians, with the horrors of the Third Reich.
It is the aura of this place that allows Stein her metonymic description of the next stage of her journey: "off we went to Hitler" (Life, 57).   It was funny it was completely funny, it was more than funny it was absurd and yet so natural. [Ibid.]
Stein's long-famous simplicity of diction now serves as a measure of the Allied victory. So completely has Hitler been defeated that where he once ruled soldiers can become children again, and aging women find ordinary comfort. The prepositions, "up and around and on top," speak of liberation and the license to be in places formerly forbidden, places grown-ups aren't usually allowed to go. Stein cannot avoid calling attention to the wonder of this scene--Mother Goose and her gay charges in the now-domesticated heart of darkness--"it was more than funny it was absurd."
This self-consciousness becomes literally manifest in the moment we see frozen in the photograph. As though the pressure of absurdity strikes the whole company simultaneously, Stein reports that "we all got together and pointed as Hitler had pointed" (Life, 57). Their collective pose not only mimes the commanding gesture Hitler might have made as he surveyed his country (and, by implication, the world far beyond his field of vision). The angle of their raised arms and outstretched hands also suggests the Sieg Heil salute itself--one of the most powerfully iconographic gestures of the past century--now turned into the merest assumption of an attitude. As Gallagher points out, this gesture displays "an impulse toward mimetic and iconographic outrage," but she adds that "Stein allies herself visually not only with the victorious American soldiers but also with the stance of victory itself," and thus "the female observer's vision is effectively absorbed into the trajectory of the military gaze." 38 I suggest that Stein by no means fits so easily into the soldiers' company, much as she takes pleasure in horsing around with them in the photograph. Her very next gesture sets her apart again, as she continues to skew the signs of war in the souvenir hunting that follows this anti-salute:
What I wanted was a radiator, Hitler did have splendid radiators, and there was one all alone which nobody seemed to notice, but a radiator a large radiator, what could I do with it, they asked put it on a terrace and grow flowers over it, I said. [Life, 57]
The elegiac associations that might cluster around these future flowers are largely negated by the strikingly odd choice of an object for them to adorn. A radiator remains, however, just the thing that the author of Tender Buttons might be expected to try to carry away from this place. But it is not June of 1914, not the summer when Tender Buttons made its fairly muted debut on the stage of the avant-garde. This short excursion in Life, undertaken in a profoundly different time, before millions rather than hundreds of readers, depends for its success on Stein managing to retain her identity as a famously incomprehensible artist, while also giving a convincing performance as an unremarkable, middle-class American tourist. The critical, satirical edge to the piece--evident in the poses Stein assumes before the Germans and the GIs alike--derives primarily from the odd fact that these two identities exist together in this one radical, ordinary woman.
Near the end of her essay, when she and Alice Toklas are flying back to France with the GIs, Stein comments wryly on her plane's new cargo:
the boys showed us all the things they had acquired. Where they had acquired, what they had acquired, better not know. There are three million American soldiers there and each one of them has to have at least six souvenirs. Dear me. They call these objects liberated. This is a liberated camera. Liberated they are. [Life, 58]
As is the case in all her writings about American soldiers, Stein is entranced by the GI's English usage, the way her native language is changing under the pressures of war.  It is a word that exemplifies and characterizes Stein's lifelong project to shake words loose from their referents, to pry words apart from things. Like "exciting and peaceful" in Paris France, or dozens of other words and moments in this body of her writing, "liberated" belongs in Stein's lexicon of words that reference wartime while also refusing to be only about the war. Helen Button might cry at the end of this piece too, in spite of its cheeriness, since it gives us so little to hold on to. It liberates its readers, finally, from a world that is too strange, too filled with the evidence of past trauma but without the cause and effect, the inquiry into motivation that might make that trauma fit into an explanatory narrative. We see Stein in the photograph from Berchtesgaden liberating a sign associated with Hitler. 39 Whether this liberation is successful we will have to determine for ourselves. While the meanings of that sign may ultimately be as resistant to moving as Hitler's radiators, Stein is conducting an experiment, in the image and the prose she attaches to that image, to determine how far a public moment and an historical gesture can be dislocated. Gallagher, writing about this photograph in particular, and about Stein's post-liberation point of view, finds that "the image is a visual representation of the 'liberation' of Gertrude Stein from a set of wartime political loyalties and representations riven by contradictions, doubts, ambivalences, and from the continual deferral of political interpretation of visual and other evidence." 40 But for Stein, victory does not bring unambiguous clarity, reassertions of meaning, an end to confusions and problems of reference. It brings only the unsettling facts of liberation.
"Off We All Went to See Germany" appeared in Life on 6 August 1945, the day that the United States dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. This coincidence serves as well as any single event might to characterize the state of the world that receives Stein's work. Photographs of the devastation in Japan will appear within two weeks in Life. 41 It is difficult to find a newspaper or magazine published in the United States in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War that does not run a series of essays on the meanings of having entered what is already being called the "atomic age." Stein dies on 27 July 1946, but shortly before her death she, too, privately joins this conversation about the Bomb, with a three-paragraph essay, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb," published in December of 1947 in the Yale Poetry Review. The editors give the piece its title and a gloss: "This is the very last piece that Miss Stein wrote before her death in 1946." 42 It is quintessential Stein:
They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.
I like to read detective and mystery stories, I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there is nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. 43
Romanticism and its sociopolitical agent, war, find their apotheosis and their conclusion in this new invention--so completely destructive that it lacks meaning. With her phrase "what is the use," she signals the collapse of the poles of her art: poetry and history, pure and instrumental language, private and public worlds. One cannot measure difference or weigh winner and loser when there is "nothing left." Who can discern dichotomies in this obliteration? Who will there be to recognize this next form of the modern composition, she wonders: "Sure it will destroy and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction." There are, of course, two enormous "lots" of "living" who would have taken issue with Stein's assessment, however philosophically apt we might find it from our own temporal distance: the wounded, dying, and defeated Japanese and the enormously relieved Americans who had been granted a reprieve from the nightmares of island invasions.
But Stein herself realizes that, in the wake of this second world war, she has very little to say. It is essentially a problem of scale, of calibrating words and things. If the Great War, with its ten million dead, brought us into modernity, what do the fifty million dead in its sequel bring? Why should she continue her demanding, risky search for an appropriate register in which to write about this new form of modernity? The history of her own art ends not with Hitler after all, but with Harry Truman and the invention he authorizes for use. Her last reflection on writing is almost as simple as saying nothing. Here is the whole of her final paragraph:
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Three weeks before his own death in 1939, W. B. Yeats wrote to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." 44 Stein was probably not aware that she had cancer when she wrote her final sentence, and had she lived she would no doubt have found a way to continue using language. And yet this paragraph stands as an end of writing, not a beginning. Like the patient farmers in Paris France, like Yeats in his final days, Stein imagines living in a way that renders words as incidental as the weather. There are no winners and no losers. Only the simplest forms of narrative, the least ambitious kinds of naming (if the fraught activity of naming is even necessary at all), and the last liberation offered by nature.
John Whittier-Ferguson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is currently working on a book about World War II and modern memory, with particular focus on the war writings of Gertrude Stein.
1. Gertrude Stein, Paris France (New York: Livewright, 1970), 63; hereafter abbreviated as PF. The spelling of Bismarck's name, without the "c," is Stein's. I wish to thank here Daniel McKenna, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, for discovering and tracking down a great deal of the periodical literature I discuss in this essay. I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues at the University of Michigan--particularly Kerry Larson, John Kucich, Tobin Siebers, Valerie Traub, Susan Scott Parrish, Carla Mazzio, Michael Schoenfeldt, George Bornstein, and Marjorie Levinson--for helping me with this essay. I have been fortunate, too, in receiving help from my colleagues in the Military Studies Seminar, under the direction of Jonathan Marwil.
2. For a discussion of the publication of Paris France, see A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with Example, ed. Bruce Kellner (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 54.
3. I do not attend to Stein's work around and about World War I, though Vincent Sherry, in a forthcoming book on modernism and the Great War, makes a convincing case for the importance of that war to Stein's mature understanding of language. One of the best recent discussions of the politics of Stein's wartime texts is by Phoebe Stein Davis, "Even Cake Gets to Have Another Meaning," Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 : 568-607.
4. I have written elsewhere on Mrs. Reynolds, which I consider in many ways Stein's most complex text about World War II. See "Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, Memory," 6, no. 1 : 115-51.
5. Wanda Van Dusen's essay, "Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein's 'Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain' ," lies as a provocation for a great many of the recent discussions of Stein's politics. Her essay appeared in 3, no. 3 : 69-92. Stein's "Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain" appears in the same issue, following Van Dusen's essay. I discuss Van Dusen's essay, and Stein's "Introduction" in my "Stein in Time." Another foundational text for the study of Stein and the war is Jean Gallagher's The World Wars Through the Female Gaze (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).
6. Ulla E. Dydo, from her introductory notes to "Composition as Explanation," in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 494; hereafter abbreviated as "CE." I do not find this argument convincing because in her various public utterances Stein does not seem much concerned with a "generation gap" (witness her Lectures in America--a great many of them given to University audiences--which do not show concerns about such a "gap"; think too about her various prolonged exchanges in both World Wars with soldiers, with whom she clearly felt unusually comfortable.) Speaking to the young does not seem to have posed particular problems for Stein. Nor is Dydo entirely clear as to how bringing up the subject of war will make Stein fit more easily with her audience (Dydo makes a passing reference to a "post World War I audience, including some veterans"). Surely, insofar as the war was on the minds of Stein's young listeners (veterans would not have been students in 1926), nothing in contemporary English intellectual culture would have suggested the waste and horrors of World War I as a likely re for cultural progress. The ironies of invoking an English "victory" to Oxbridge undergraduates would have been overwhelming by the mid-1920s. It does Stein a disservice to assume, as Dydo does, that she would not recognize these ironies, building this portion of her essay around the analogy: "As one who has won the battle for the new, she speaks to those who have won on the battlefield." (ibid.).
7. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, Or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, introd. William Gass (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973). The Geographical History of America was first published in 1936, and it clearly belongs with the Lectures in America as a consideration of the relations between place and writing, engagement with and freedom from the world, the "human nature and the human mind," to use her terms. See William Gass's introduction to The Geographical History. See also the essay on related concepts in Stein by Nancy Blake, "Everybody's Autobiography: Identity and Absence," Recherches Anglaises et Américaines 15 : 135-45. The strongest discussion of the philosophy of identity as Stein explores it in her Lectures in America is by Jennifer Ashton, "Gertrude Stein for Anyone," ELH 64, no. 1 : 289-331.
8. I base my general sketch of Stein's audience largely on my reading in newspapers of a good many accounts of her lecture tour. Many articles on her appearances around the country devote significant space to describing the attending audience. Clearly, in 1934-5, it was a social coup merely to be seen at a Stein lecture. See, for some examples, "Reporter Tells in Stein Style the Stein Style," Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 October 1934, 17; "Gertrude Stein Arrives and Baffles Reporters by Making Herself Clear," New York Times, 25 October 1934, 25; "Gertrude Stein: Her Words 'Do Get Under Their Skin'," Newsweek, 4, no. 24 (27 October 1934), 24; "Miss Stein Speaks Today to Bewildered 500," New York Times, 2 November 1934, 25; "Princeton Dazed by Gertrude Stein," New York Times, 6 November 1934, 23; "American Opera Luncheon Today," Chicago Tribune, 6 November 1934, 17; "Audience Eyes a Simple Gown at Stein Opera," Chicago Tribune, 8 November 1934, 19; "English Letters to Flower Next in U.S.: Gertrude Stein," Chicago Tribune, 26 November 1934, 4; "Gertrude Stein Comes Home," The New Republic 81 (5 December 1934), 100. Good discussions of Stein's tour are Bryce Conrad's, "Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace," Journal of Modern Literature 19, no. 2 : 215-33; Robert M. Post's, "'An Audience is an Audience': Gertrude Stein Addresses the Five Hundred," The Kentucky Review 13, no. 1/2 : 71-83; and Anne Herrmann's chapter on Stein in Queering the Moderns: Poses/ Portraits/ Performance (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
9. For a germane discussion of American isolationism, see Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), ch. 20.
10. For discussions of Stein's fears of publicity following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, see first Stein's own account of her crisis, "And Now," from Vanity Fair, (September 1934), reprinted in Vanity Fair: Selections from America's Most Memorable Magazine: A Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s, ed. Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee (New York: The Viking Press, 1960): 280-1. See also Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 235. See also the essay by Robert Post, cited above, "Gertrude Stein Addresses the Five Hundred"; and Catherine N. Parke, "'Simple Through Complication': Gertrude Stein Thinking," American Literature 60, no. 4 : 554-74.
11. Gertrude Stein, Writings: 1932-1946 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 222; hereafter abbreviated as GS, II.
12. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1993).
13. Reading the newspaper accounts of her tour quickly demonstrates how minutely and how searchingly Stein was scrutinized. Everything--her clothing, her mannerisms, her texts, her psyche--is fair game for journalists, who often find themselves more comfortable talking about Stein than about the details of her lectures.
14. Her wartime writing is read in France and England as well, but it is most often directed primarily toward American readers, and when it is published in periodicals, those periodicals are American. The important exception to this generalization is Paris France which, in its conclusion, calls explicitly upon England to intervene in the plight of Europe (recall that this book was first published in England). It is important to note, too, that this writing is comparatively widely circulated and read. Stein makes money writing for The Atlantic or Life that she could not make in more exclusive periodical territory. Her second bestseller in the United States, after the Autobiography, is Wars I Have Seen. Davis, "Even Cake," 592.
15. (PF, 65). Elsewhere in Paris France, Stein characterizes the French themselves as taking comfort from language itself: "The French do love to say a thing and say it completely. That is the reason that once a thing is completely named it does no longer worry them.  That is their logic fashion and civilisation" .
16. See, for an example, the letter from an angry reader of "The Winner Loses" in The Atlantic: "[T]he Germans ought to pay her top propagandist wages for her passivist view that whatever is is best so long as she can continue to get meat, butter, a little gasoline--and substantial checks in dollars from American publishers.   (See news reports in the daily papers. . . .)" (Carlton Wells, Letter to the Editor, The Atlantic 166, no. 6 (December 1940). Soldiers occasionally write to the editor following any of her periodical publications during the war. Though some object to various assertions she makes, a roughly equal number praise her work.
17. An extensive discussion of the problems of narrative shape and the experience of trauma may be found in Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). The essays collected in the anthology, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (New York: Routledge, 1996), are also important. Two crucial studies of writing and World War I are Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), and Samuel Hynes's A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991). And for an utterly different, down-to-earth account of attempting to describe untellable moments in war, compare E. B. Sledge's With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); or perhaps the most well-known example from the Vietnam War, Tim O'Brien's, "How to Tell a True War Story," in The Things They Carried (New York: Penguin, 1990).
18. For discussions of France in World War II, see Phillip Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1966). See also Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), and Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, ch. 23. Also see the documentary film on occupied France, The Sorrow and the Pity. Director Marcel Ophuls made this documentary in 1971. The film was originally banned from French television; it shattered the myth of a united French front against the Nazis, showing French people to be much more complexly motivated (as Stein describes them in Paris France and "The Winner Loses") and often to hold a more resigned attitude toward their occupiers than the postwar mythologies would have us believe. I have benefited from Richard Golsan's discussion of the issues surrounding the French national memory of the Vichy years, "History and the 'Duty to Memory' in Postwar France: The Pitfalls of an Ethics of Remembrance," in What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. Howard Marchitello (New York: Routledge, 2001). See also Bertram M. Gordon, Collaboration in France During the Second World War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Discussions of Paris France that have helped me in my reading are Zofia Lesinska, "Gertrude Stein's War Autobiographies: Reception, History, and Dialogue," LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 9, no. 4 : 313-42; Shirley Swartz, "The Autobiography as Generic 'Continuous Present': Paris France and Wars I Have Seen," English Studies in Canada 4, no. 2 : 224-37. See also the more general discussion of Stein's war writings, Maria Diedrich, "'A Book in Translation about Eggs and Butter': Gertrude Stein and World War II," in Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (New York: Berg, 1990).
19. Stein gives us a glimpse of the lack of information on the radio in a wry passage connecting war and music: "war naturally does make music but certainly this war with everybody really everybody listening to the radio, there is nothing but music" (PF, 38).
20. "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," in W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). Mendelson gives the date of composition as February, 1939 .
21. The most important text by Stein discussing her understanding of genius is "What are Master-pieces and Why Are There so Few of Them," in Gertrude Stein, Writings: 1932-1946. Her The Geographical History of America is also crucial on this subject. The most extensive discussion of Stein and genius may be found in Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For important background on the origins of the modern idea of genius, see the discussion of Proust in Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
22. Stein and Alice Toklas, after a frantic 36 hours in Paris in 1939, where they gather papers, clothes, and a few paintings from their quarters at 27, rue de Fleurus, spend the war in the Département of the Ain, in Southeastern France, living first in the little town of Bilignin and then, when their lease is cancelled in 1943, moving to the nearby town of Culoz until the end of the war. They return to Paris in December of 1944.
23. This resemblance has been most famously and cruelly discussed by Wyndham Lewis in his chapters on Stein in Time and Western Man; it had become a commonplace by the 1930s, repeated often, for example, in reviews of her lectures in America. It is also invoked usefully by Ben Ray Redman in a piece that appeared in The Saturday Review, praising Wars I Have Seen. Redman concludes "The Importance of Being Earnest," his essay on Stein's memoir, by saying that Stein dares to be "as simple as a child, pointing straight, going straight to the heart of a subject, to its roots; pointing straight, when and where adults would take a fancier way than pointing, because they had not learned to point." The Saturday Review 28, no. 10 (10 March 1945), 30.
24. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, n.d.), 9.
25. Stein wrote this "Helen Button" section of Paris France some time before beginning Paris France itself (and before "war time" had literally commenced). As with so much of Stein's ostensibly autobiographical writing, this fact complicates any understanding we might have entertained about this narrative as a record, a witnessing of events (see Bridgman, Stein in Pieces, 298 and note).
26. This scene is particularly terrifying in the context of Stein's work, since through the mid- and late-1930s she has used the phrase from the nursery rhyme, "I am I because my little dog knows me," as a focal point for thinking about the problems of identity. Now, the tables turned, Helen does not know a supposedly familiar dog who seems, also, not to know her.
27. In her own wartime reading, Stein regularly returned to the prophecies of a "Leonardo Blake." I discuss his work and the importance of prophecy to Stein in the context of my presentation of Mrs. Reynolds in "Stein in Time."
28. Gallagher, World Wars, 144.
29. Some examples: "The Liberation of Gertrude Stein," Life 17 (2 October 1944), 83-4; "Gertie and the G.I.s," Time 45, no. 16 (16 April 1945), 26-7; see also a mention in the "People" section of Time 44, no. 11 (11 September 1944), 48. Her postwar portrait of U.S. soldiers, Brewsie and Willie, receives a number of notices. See "A GI is a GI is a . . . ," Newsweek 3, 4 (3 September 1945), 30; and "GI Novel Written By Gertrude Stein," New York Times, 25 August 1945, 13. See also the later account, by Frank Gervasi, of finding Stein in France after the war's end, "The Liberation of Gertrude Stein," Saturday Review 54, 34 (21 August 1971), 13. Gervasi also has an essay in Life, "The Liberation of Gertrude Stein," Life, 17 (2 October 1944), 83-4.
30. The text of this broadcast is reproduced in Eric Sevareid's Not So Wild a Dream (New York, A. A. Knopf, 1946), 461-2. Sevareid also describes in some detail his "liberation" of Stein in Culoz in this book (457-62).
31. See the account in John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 378-84. An account of her trip to Germany with the 441st Troup Carrier Group may be found in Brinnin on pages 392-4. See also the photographs from this trip (not the same as the ones published in Life) in Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures, ed. Renate Stendhal (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1994), 246-54.
32. I have not been able to locate this film; it is referenced in the caption to a photograph of the film being made, in Stein in Words and Pictures, 254. Attached to the photograph is a note from the Associated Press, saying that the film was made for "A U.S. Army Information and Education Course."
33. Gertrude Stein, "Off We All Went to See Germany," Life 19 (6 August 1945): 54-58; hereafter abbreviated as "Life." The soldiers in charge of Stein and Alice Toklas's trip to Germany were part of the 9th Army Air Force. The 441st Troop Carrier Group was part of the 50th Troop Carrier Wing in the IXth troop carrier command. The Army Air Forces In World War II, vol. 3, ed. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951), 113-4.
34. Libby Benedict, "The Disillusionment That Calls Itself Objectivity," The New York Times Book Review (20 May 1945): 4.
35. Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 298.
36. Modris Eksteins, "War, Memory, and the Modern: Pilgrimage and Tourism to the Western Front," in World War I and the Cultures of Modernity, ed. Douglas Mackman and Michael Mayes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 153.
37. Hitler had a villa at Berchtesgaden and a retreat--the "Adlerhorst"--above the town as well. The photographs accompanying the Life piece show Stein on the balcony of the villa, not at the "Eagle's Nest."
38. Gallagher, World Wars, 146, 147, 148.
39. A more contemporary experiment that bears comparison with Stein's gesture here is the Occupations series of Anselm Kiefer, the German artist who had photographs of himself taken giving the Nazi salute in various culturally resonant sites in Europe (the Coliseum in Rome, for example). See the discussion of his work by Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also the chapter on Kiefer's work in Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), ch. 11.
40. Gallagher, World Wars, 148.
41. "The War Ends: Burst of Atomic Bomb Brings Swift Surrender of Japanese," Life 19, no. 8 (20 August 1945), 25.
42. Yale Poetry Review, no. 7 , 3. The editors of this short-lived journal are Rolfe Fjelde, Thomas McMahon, and Harvey Shapiro. They take the essay from the Yale archive, with the permission of Carl Van Vechten. There is no evidence that Stein wrote the essay for this journal, and the "they" in her opening sentence is thus somewhat mystifying in its reference. I read it as her expression of a general sense of the widespread asking of questions about the Bomb. Presumably the Review's editors received the information that the essay was Stein's last completed work from Van Vechten. Richard Bridgman calls it her "last composition" (Stein in Pieces, 339 n). The editors of the Library of America Writings also cite this as her "last piece of writing" (GS, II, 840).
43. Gertrude Stein, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb" (GS, II, 823) (New York: Library of America, 1998), 823. All citations from this brief essay come from this single page in Stein's Writings.
44. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 922.
What follows is a position paper, although it contains a number of modernist specimen cases upon which, as if they were park benches, it comes momentarily to rest. In the early pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, itself a modernist test case of sorts, Wittgenstein proposes a language game consisting of a single word--"slab"--shouted out as bricklayers build a foundation and a house of language. 1 Think of this essay as akin to the slab game, a somewhat deliberately crude attempt to set up a way of talking about the larger foundation of our enterprise as critics of modernism and modernity, instead of an elegant perambulation within modernist textual spaces. Skirting the perimeter of modernism's walls, my polemic addresses the critical superstructure surrounding modernism's revival, probing its brickwork and sounding its slabs. These slabs, serving as the park benches I invoked above, are different in kind; one is a material conceit coming from the ground literally, while the second offers a critical concept taken from Ernst Bloch as a metonymic bench. Interspersed are leaves drawn from several modernist artifacts, while the entire essay rests on economic metaphors from speculative finance. Bubbles and slabs are antithetical, yet both can refer to critical discourse, in the first case as a speculative investment in value, in the second (slabs) as an antifoundationalist foundation for critical practice.
I'll trace out a conceit through much of the argument, borrowing an analogy from another cultural arena also subject to speculative bubbles. "I speak," to cite Miss Prism in TheImportance of Being Earnest, "horticulturally." Consider the following remark, on its face yet another frenzied, fin-de-siécle denunciation of alterity: "It is impossible to deny that the blending of foreign blood has seriously impaired the value of the pure strains. Many of the continental sorts lack cleanliness and when they crop up amongst their purer sisters their appearance at once betrays them." We imagine we know the discourse of empire, with its binaries of contamination and purity, self and other, so well we could gloss this in our sleep. Yet the excoriation of sordid miscegenation with pure native stock emerges not from imperial apologetics, nor from the popular press, but from a troubled report put out by the beleaguered British tulip growers association, circa 1900. The once majestic Royal National Tulip Society, representing the aesthetic and taxonomic elite of the tulip industry, a society which was down to two members when it tried to confer its varietal prizes in 1926, makes an eerie parallel to the fates and fortunes of the modernist critical industry. 2 The Royal National Tulip Society--which waned altogether in 1936--had been the arbiter of excellence in all things tulip for centuries, at the forefront of aesthetic and horticultural innovation in the United Kingdom; and had an eclectic membership made up of hobbyists, botanists, aristocratic gardeners, and garden-variety tulip fanciers (TT, 247). The creations of the Society, given the name "English Florist's tulips," sprang up as one-of-a-kind marvels in country estate gardens as well as in humble plots cultivated by the side of the railways. Again for centuries, English Florist's tulips were judged semiannually in well-attended meetings held by convention in public houses. There individual tulips, among them the feathered Bizarre, "George Hayward," the soft, yellow "Mrs. Moon," the resplendent "Bronze King," and the Bybloemen tulip, "Princess Charlotte's Cenotaph," went head-to-head for prizes and approbation, their decapitated petaled tresses uniformly inserted into three-inch-tall brown beer bottles.
What had interfered with this long reign of horticultural glory, not to say purity? In a sense mass culture was the villain, the same foe slinking down the pike and gunning for modern(ist) literature and the arts, at least in commonly-held versions of modernism. The first insidious notion capable of shaking the foundation of the Royal National Tulip Society's authority came, not surprisingly, from the United States, that bastion of sleazy mass culture. In the early-nineteenth century an American gardener had planted and raised tulips en masse as bedding plants; the discovery failed to catch on commercially at that juncture, but at the turn of the century Dutch tulip entrepreneurs--who had a long history of making guilders off the backs of tulips--systematized and mass-marketed the American tulip bed invention. The resulting bed or plot of tulips became not only mass culture, but mass spectacle. The pivotal World Exposition held in Paris in 1889, itself a design monument to modernity, where the Eiffel Tower was erected as sheer public spectacle, introduced the first world exhibition of massed tulips as spectacular eye candy. The great Dutch tulipiere, E. H. Krelage, filled the beds of the Trocadero Palace during the fair with what a current newspaper editorial disparagingly called the "bang in the eye" of thousands of planted tulips (TT, 223). Tulips en masse surrounded the base of the iconic apex of modern urbanism, adding a horizontal, floral modernism to the Eiffel Tower's vertical modernist spectacle.
The mass cultural sea of tulips Krelage had planted was comprised of no ordinary or anonymous tulip legions. As another first, these were brand-name tulips, the "Darwin" brand to be exact. Krelage had the creative and marketing genius to buy the rights to the name from Charles Darwin's son, Francis (TT, 259). "Darwin" was an apt new brand-name for a diverse collection of pink and purple tulip bulbs he had bought at a vast tulip close out sale in Flanders, as that region ceased growing tulips commercially (TT, 262). The individual botanical and varietal names of the motley collection were excised; Darwin tulips were collectivist, a brand instead of a taxonomic variety or florist's name for a unique type. Once branded "Darwin," tulips became modern commodities--not because they were being sold and traded on the market, which they had been for centuries before--but because they now were cultivated to be planted en masse, and given a brand name accordingly: tulips became a modern, or even modernist, floral genre--tulips had truly evolved.
Subsequent to Krelage's breakthrough on the tulip branding front, tulips also entered modernity as a pivot of the modernizing tourist industry. In order to replenish consumer wonderment at the spectacle of tulip fields in bloom, thousands of bulbs were given away as municipal marks of esteem, as awards for heroism, and even in exchange for arms at the outset of World Wars I and II (TT, 268). Tulips shared another feature of modernism in their internationalism and cosmopolitanism. An international floral currency, the tulip began to be grown commercially in far-flung places, such as Japan in the 1920s. The Japanese deplored tulips as unrefined and vulgar, but overcame these aesthetic objections since they had the ideal climatic conditions for their cultivation and export to less-refined, tulip-hungry Western nations (TT, 268). Tulips acted as the thin edge of the economic wedge in complex colonial situations, at times valuable as a raw material for "extraction," at other moments important as a symbolic show of imperial floral might. Hardball economic battles waged by Britain over its possession and control of colonial tulip bulbs echoed the violent, and ultimately successful, mid-nineteenth-century struggles of the British empire to wipe out the indigenous Indian textile industry. British women's clothing transmuted the often bloody suppression of Indian weaving into flower-strewn calico cloth, its innocuous floral prints masking a secret history; so too did brand-name tulips flower on the foreign, colonial soil whose native tulip bulbs had been confiscated. 3
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a celebrated Irish gardener, William Robinson, who proposed an anticolonialist twist in modern tulip display. In The Wild Garden, Robinson argues that tulips should be set out in masses, but not in delineated beds (TT, 259). Instead they should be planted in nooks, on hillsides, or across a lawn, where they will appear to have sprung up randomly in the wild. Robinson articulates an anti-Plantation explosion of tulips beyond the pale of the garden plot, and transforms the most cultivated, artificial, and man-made flower in European history into a simulacrum of wildness. Only the modern fashion for a Gustave Le Bon-like crowd of tulips--that is, the brand-name cultivars Krelage and others had taught the masses to see and revel in en masse--makes it possible for a subversive gardener to achieve its antithesis, the aesthetic effect of rogue tulips springing up wildly yet beautifully over a "natural" landscape. Robinson poeticized the crowd of tulips by embracing their previously suppressed wild side, in an act of colonial (Irish) mimicry of the English Florist's tulip so strategic, his tulips could be called Bhabha hybrids avant la lettre. By dint of a speculative bubble afloat on the material froth of history, making a nearly circumferential global orbit, and scattered by economic, aesthetic, and political revolutions alike, the tulip had traced its way back to a faux sauvage fashion identity.