66. Emery, "Olympia-1909! Des Femmes! . . . Rien que les femmes," Comoedia (2 January 1909), 3.
67. Drawing by F. Fau, Le Rire (26 May 1900).
68. Jean Cocteau, Portraits-souvenir, 1900-1914 (Paris: Grasset, 1935), 63.
69. Jean D'Arc, "Le Concert du 7 mars à l'Elysée-Montmartre," Courrier Français (11 March 1894), 6.
70. Jules Renard, "Pierre et Berthe," Le Rire 180 (16 April 1898), 2.
71. Willette's drawing appeared in the Courrier Français (4 January 1903), 12.
72. "Rire noir d'outre-mer," Le Rire 23 (13 April 1895), 11.
73. Harry R. Trémont, "Negroes of the Theater," Fantasio 97 , 27.
74. Raoul Ponchon, "Boumboum," Courrier Français (15 September 1889), 2.
75. Henry T. Sampson, The Ghost Walks: a Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), 28.
76. Louis Veuillot, Odeurs de Paris (Paris: Palme, 1867), 144-5.
77. Vaucaire, "Les Cafés-concerts," 131-2.
78. Le Rideau de Fer, "Concerts-Ambassadeurs," Courrier Français (12 May 1895), 8. The attraction of Phenomena remains strong, and also produces the same effect of fright, madness, and laughter: on the same bill, "the Edoardo-Monition introduced their new creation, a dance of Hunchbacks, a dance [that] is part nightmare, part insanity, and it's very funny."
79. Le Rideau de fer, "Aux Folies-Bergère," Courrier Français (22 September 1895), 9.
80. Montorgueil, "Le Café-Concert," 17.
81. The Cake-Walk originated on ante-bellum Southern plantations as a parody of the Master's dances by the slaves who danced it. The original parodic nature of the dance was unknown to French audiences and to white performers. It is thus ironic that the Cake-Walk has been seen as a display of black, regressive traits, and doubly ironic that the white imitation of a black dance imitating upper-class white dancers should be labeled dangerous in regard to unconscious imitation and contagion. Moreover, the specific type of Cake-Walk that was imported into France was not the more graceful walk around, but the type known in America as the comic or eccentric Cake-Walk (documents of both examples can be found in the film archives at the Library of Congress). The Cake-Walk was first presented in a white musical production in the United States in 1883, and by 1898, according to Tom Fletcher, "all of the big colored shows and black minstrel companies featured it" (cited in Jean and Marshall Sterns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance [New York: Da Capo Press, 1994]).
82. Cocteau, Portraits-souvenir, 73-4.
83. The Elks were white Cake-Walk dancers, while the other couples were black. Like Cocteau, the Courrier Français reviewer focused on the Elks. "Of the couples who stood out the most, the Elks were peerless; their science of choreography, the diversity of the poses and the elegance of the postures caused a sensation" ("Au Nouveau-Cirque," Courrier Français [2 November 1902], 10).
84. See, for example, Méliès' "Le Cake-Walk infernal," Pathé's "The Dwarf's Cake-Walk," , and the Lumières' "Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau-Cirque," .
85. M. B. Curtis Afro-American Minstrels & Variety Company 1899 program, reproduced in Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 189.
86. Sampson, The Ghost Walks, 193-4.
87. Trémont, "Negroes of the Theater," 27.
88. The advertisement appeared in the Courrier Français (22 July 1900), 10.
89. Le Rire 296 (4 December 1897).
90. Le Rire (7 December 1901), 3.
91. Raoul Mayence, "The Black Peril," Le Rire (15 January 1898), 8.
92. Lucien Perrin, "The Trial of the Week," Courrier Français (3 January 1892), 6.
93. Sidis, "Doctrine of Sensory Elements," Psychological Review 15 51.
94. Raoul Ralph, "Théâtres, Bouffes-Parisienne," Courrier Français (1 February 1903), 4.
95. Raoul Ponchon, "Le Cake-Walk," Courrier Français (1 February 1903), 2.
96. Le Rire (7 February 1903).
97. Jacques Redelsberger, "Pavane et Cake-Walk," in a special edition of Le Rire devoted to the Cake-Walk (14 March 1903).
98. The wild Bal des Quat'z Arts thrown annually by the students of the École des Beaux-Arts ended in spectacular fashion in 1903: on 25 April, five hundred drunken and dancing revelers descended from the Butte Montmartre back to the school on the rue Bonaparte. There "they burned a black-tinted mannequin who had first been pierced through several times with a lance. This Negro was none other than Mr. Cake-Walk, to whom the Ecole des Beaux-Arts has just given the coup de grâce" (Paul Delay in the Courrier Français [3 May 1903], 4). In fact, several new dances were introduced in 1903 in an attempt to replace the Cake-Walk.
The Nouveau-Cirque, who had launched the black dance phenomenon in Paris now tried to top the colossal success of the Cake-Walk, opening its 1904 season with "Modern-Sports," a nautical pantomime with new American dances. "The two new dances are to the Cake-Walk what poetry is to prose, the Boston-Ball and the Trans-Atlantique (which) possess as much fantasy, but have much more charm, elegance, and correct manners. . . . exquisite amusements and which are in good taste" (Courrier Français [3 January 1904], 8). These dances did not achieve the success of the Cake-Walk. Thus, in 1905, the Nouveau-Cirque brought back the Joyeux Nègres revue, calling it "The Joyous Negroes with the Real Cake-Walk," just to remind the public that everything began here, and other venues had only copies, not the true article. Over 400 performances of the Joyeux Nègres had failed to dampen their enormous success. The 1905 show contained several new attractions, including Foottit and Chocolat hilariously performing the dance. But notice how the criticism has softened into unmitigated praise: "The public again enjoyed watching this show whose charm is so picturesque and so thrilling: surprised and amused once again, they took pleasure in the primitive and engaging poetry of this choreography, sometimes strange, but with a vivacity, a fantasy, and a gaiety without equal. . . . [It is] an amusement that is unique in all the world. The enthusiastic public applauded, and frenetically cried Bravo! and Encore!" (Courrier Français [16 March 1905], 4).
99. Armand Sylvestre, "Anthropologie galante," L'Echo de Paris (28 February 1892), 5.
100. Notions about atavism were founded as much on degeneration theory as on anthropology.
101. Léon Nemo and Jules Gondoin, "Emilienne d'Alençon," La Vie en rose 54 (26 October 1902).
102. François Caradec, Feu Willy (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1984), 169-70.
103. Willy liked Colette and Polaire to dress as twins: strolling down the avenue, they were sometimes referred to as Willy's pet monkeys.
104. Raoul Ponchon, "Polaire," Courrier Français (2 February 1902), 2.
105. Hugues Delorme, "Polaire," Courrier Français (9 February 1902), 4.
106. Polaire, "Résponse de Polaire," Courrier Français (16 February 1902), 2.
107. Polaire (Emilie-Marie Bouchaud), Polaire par elle-même (Paris: ière, 1933), 81.
108. Appearing with Polaire and two other chanteuses épileptiques at the Ambassadeurs in 1893 was Brunin. Then came Spanish dancers, and finally African dancers from Dahomey. All of the acts surrounding the Epileptic Singers were exhibitions of strangeness. . . . But, then, so were the performances of the Epileptic Singers. Cultural historians have begun to explore the impact of Darwinism on popular culture. I unfortunately learned of Jane R. Goodall's Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (London: Routledge, 2002) after this essay was completed.
109. Nemo and Gondoin, "Polaire," La Vie en rose 54 (26 October 1902).
110. Colette, My Apprenticeship and Music-Hall Sidelights (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957), 99.
111. Jean D'Arc, "Mlle Polaire aux Ambassadeurs," Courrier Français (22 April 1894), 9. Henceforth abbreviated as "MPAA."
112. Nemo and Gondoin, "Polaire," La Vie en rose (26 October 1902), 9; my emphasis.
113. "Peintes par elles-mêmes," Comoedia Illustrated (12 June 1909), 313.
114. Interview with Polaire, Fantasio (15 November 1909), 272-3.
115. For more on Julia Pastrana, see Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: ring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
116. Dossier Polaire BnF, Département des Arts du spectacle.
117. Raoul Ralph, "Théâtres-Moulin Rouge, 'La Belle de New York,'" Courrier Français (7 June 1903), 2 and 4.
118. W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip-Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 15.
119. In L'Amant des danseuses (Paris: Dentu, 1888), Félicien Champsaur describes the star-making machinery of the press, underlining that Parisian stardom is the equivalent of universal taste. "Glorious flesh, saluted in electric and Parisian apotheoses, the preoccupation of the entire boulevard press, . . . the material synthesis of universal taste . . . that was what the Barnums of America demanded, a gallic triumph" .
120. Parallels between the careers of Polaire and Elvis Presley spring to mind: they exist not only in performance style and media coverage, but in public reaction to their relationship with black music.
121. Sem was not immune to the unconscious imitation I have underlined elsewhere in spectatorship: Cocteau observed Sem drawing or "biting into" the physiognomy of his subjects: "Sem was a ferocious insect. . . adopting, as he went after them, the tics of his victims" (Cocteau, Portraits-souvenir, 88). The caricaturist himself was transformed by another artist a few years later: Paul Colin, in the 1927 album of 45 colored lithographs, Le Tumulte noir (Paris: Succès editions, 1927). Colin's depiction shows him so much under the influence of "Negromania" that he has regressed to become a monkey.
122. Sem, (Album) Le Vrai et le faux chic (Paris: Succès, 1914), 2-4.
123. Sem, Le Vrai et le faux chic, 6-7.
124. Fougère's statement raises the question of incorporation and exchange explored by Lhamon in Raising Cain.
125. Russo, The Female Grotesque, 86.
126. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 151.
127. The intense fascination in France for the black Other may well carry a specificity in addition to that of colonialism. The emotions aroused by the performances I have discussed must have included a tension between the ideal of republican Universalism in the third republic and this Other which seemed impossible to assimilate. This is an aspect I have not undertaken to explore here, but which certainly merits more reflection. I would like to thank the members of the history symposium at the University of Georgia, Athens, the colloquium of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Connecticut, and Rutgers University faculty members for their valuable comments when versions of this paper were read. Thanks also to Tammy Berberi, my research assistant in May 2001 at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal for her excellent work, and finally to the University of Connecticut Research Foundation for the grant I received for this research.
. . . illustration is so dull because you remember what somebody looked like and you make your illustration look like it. 1
Gertrude Stein's texts have attracted a considerable number of book illustrators. Before she acquired fame as a writer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German Jewish expatriate whose gallery promoted young artists such as Picasso, Braque, Léger, Gris, and Masson, published two of her texts perhaps in homage to an informed collector. Much later in her career, her children's book, The World is Round, will require mimetic imagery suitable for young readers. 2 When, long after her death, she had become an avant-garde icon, experimental artists saw in her a kindred spirit. In this respect, she rivals other modernists such as Joyce, Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Eluard, and Ponge whose challenging texts have attracted avant-garde illustrators. The presence of Gertrude Stein in this predominantly French group need not surprise us granted the number of translations of her texts available to French readers.
Thanks to the publication of A Book Concluding as a Wife has a Cow and The Village , Gertrude Stein found herself in good company, for the perceptive Kahnweiler had chosen as collaborators for his painters soon to become famous writers such as Apollinaire, Artaud, Jacob, Leiris, Malraux, and Reverdy. 3 Juan Gris, a close friend of Gertrude Stein, who had acquired several of his paintings, contributed a cubistic accompaniment to her subtly erotic text. Rather than reacting to the text, he provided a kind of monument in honor of an art patron. 4 The neglected Elie Lascaux transformed The Village into a stele. 5 In his lithographs, he never forgets to treat The Village as a play. In the first plate, he makes the village with its church steeple, houses, and streets, fully visible as an architectural stage set enhanced by decorative representations of the sun, clouds, and birds suspended from above. In subsequent plates, the village functions simultaneously as a backdrop, a curtain, and a frame for Stein's brief drama. Lascaux' contribution consists in theatrically enshrining Stein's text in a manner reminiscent of medieval illumination. The fact that he provided a suitable village setting for the play suggests that he responded to the title rather than to the hermetic English text.
Gertrude Stein's publications would have remained without further adornment—apart from documentary photographs in her two autobiographies and wartime texts—had she not composed two books for children: The World is Round, and The First Reader, published posthumously in 1946. 6 Skillfully alternating between a decorative and a theatrical style, Sir Francis Rose's drawings for The World is Round, published in London the same year as the American edition, hardly depart from humorous vignettes and culs-de-lampe. No less than Lascaux, he has provided ornamental settings. A similar approach marks his accompaniment to The First Reader. ( 1) 7 Thanks to the persuasiveness of William R. Scott, her New York publisher, Stein actively collaborated with Clement Hurd, a pupil of Fernand Léger who specialized in the illustration of children's books. Not surprisingly, Hurd provided the only closely programmed not to say mimetic rendition of a Stein text. While insisting on the visual consistency required in children's books, he showed originality in combining striking imagery with imaginative page settings.
The World is Round displays many of the usual features of Stein's style. 8 The title may strike grownups as no more than a truism but for young readers, to whom the world's sphericity appears far from obvious, it promises an initiation. As the narrative unfolds, Rose, an insecure nine year old, plays an increasingly heroic part while her self-assured cousin, Willie, remains steadfast throughout. As in most of Stein's fictions, the key role invariably belongs to a female. The author's well-known avoidance of stasis and containment results in a multiplicity of outer-directed anecdotes. In rapid succession, she tells condensed stories featuring chain enumerations. She thereby expresses acceleration in time and extension in space while reminding the reader that the world remains stubbornly round and suggesting that it whirls as in a round dance.  Dominant at first, circularity eventually shares the limelight with other directions. When Rose succeeds in arduously climbing a mountain, her upward mobility somehow neutralizes the roundness that obsesses her.
Shapes and directions prevail throughout, and color plays a highly significant role. Stated in Stein's signature sentence at the very beginning of the tale: "A rose is a rose is a rose" (TWIR, 1), the word designates a flower, a color, and a child. Misgivings and reassurances concerning her colorful name and her identity recur throughout. Rose repeatedly shows a preference for blue. She has blue eyes and drags a blue garden chair to the summit of a blue mountain. We can construe her eagerness to reach the very top both as an idealistic aspiration as well as a compulsion.  She thinks, she talks, she sings, she cries. Elation and worry succeed one another. Stein has made Rose's songs, invariably followed by lamentations, an essential part of the text. Indeed, they provide lyrical interludes while stressing the importance of sound. Music joins forces with noises, for instance the noise of her poodle lapping water. Sound patterns based on rhyme and alliteration recur as frequently in The World is Round as in other of Stein's poetic texts: "Dear me hair chair ran man" (TWIR, 31), "blue just blue" (TWIR, 32), " . . . so it was a very long way to go even if a mountain does not grow even so, climb a mountain and you will know even if there is no snow. Oh no" (TWIR, 37). The O's shape conjoins with sound. Indeed, this visible phoneme echoes the earth's rotundity.
We may wonder to what extent Clement Hurd's illustrations conform to Stein's disturbing and subverting writing. And how could he possibly represent reiterated distinctions between body and mind hardly appropriate in a children's book? The sound effects and phonetic play, so intimately linked with other verbal aspects, show considerable independence in regard to syntax, logic, and structure. She favors a language full of vitality and apt to astonish her readers. The pink paper and blue print chosen by Gertrude Stein herself pleasurably disturb our reading habits while reinforcing the heroine's presence and even adding to her substance. Hurd's designs, scenes, and landscapes strike us as flat and streamlined, in keeping with imagery suitable to young readers as well as with Stein's persistent present. He conveys rotundity by a round dance where several animals, all of them featured in the text, step forward or backward to participate in a moving circle. Although he represents the animals according to different scales, he carefully preserves their chief characteristics: the endless neck of the giraffe, the sturdy shape of the elephant. The vitality of the imagery and its affinity with Stein arise from a multiplicity of curly lines: spiral fragments counter balancing simple linear contours.  This first illustration encompasses to a large degree both the metaphoric and the anecdotal sides of the story while foretelling many of the playful gestures characteristic of Stein.
Round shapes and signs appear more intermittently than in the text, modified as spiral and elliptic objects, each one assigned a specific role. On two occasions toward the end of the book, a round shaped map-like re, echoing the text, makes an appearance. The blue chair Rose takes with her in her ascent appears as far more than a mere object in Hurd's interpretation. In its repeated recurrences in the illustrations, this object becomes a personified spiral stage prop fully involved in Rose's adventures.
Rose and Willie always appear separately in the graphics. We see Rose in the opening illustration surrounded by wild animals and in close proximity to a lion shaped, if not colored, like her poodle. We first see Willie in a meditative posture, his back turned to an enlarged lion's head undoubtedly groomed in the same parlor as Rose's dog. In Hurd's representations, trees play a more important part than in the text. They punctuate Rose's trajectory to the summit, and the most rotund among them proudly carries the circular inscription of Rose's name. ( 2) Not only do these trees measure the little girl's ascent, but seem to protect her from encroaching night before their replacement by a dark irregularly shaped cloud abundantly sprinkled with stars.
We can hardly overlook the humor that Hurd derives from Stein's text. In the opening illustration, his comic display of animals performing in seeming unison even though they do not turn their heads and tails the same way relates to Stein's personifications by bridging all categories and barriers. ( 3) When Hurd on the back cover shows the hindquarters of the two lions, moving away from their owner and the reader, they remain recognizable by the vibrations of their curly hair. By behaving like circus performers or toys, his animals will never threaten the most timorous child.
In collaboration with Clement Hurd, Arion Press published in 1986 a limited edition of The World is Round. Instead of reproducing the 1939 drawings, they transformed the Linotypes and woodcuts Hurd had produced for the 1967 edition into photo-engravings. 9 Andrew Hoyem's departure from earlier editions consists in producing a perfectly circular volume housed in a metal box and accompanied by an inflatable pink balloon. ( 4) Thus, bookwork matters most of all, for a circular volume demands considerable expertise in the placing of both the text and the illustrations. Not only does circularity suit to perfection Stein's title and themes, but it wheels the book away from convention and speeds it toward adventure. When opened, the book presents a succession of facing round pages containing either a text or an illustration— one per chapter. Deprived of images and margins, the text requires a much tighter printing texture than in the 1939 and 1967 editions. At the beginning, circular and spiral shapes occur quite frequently: the circular or elliptic dance of the animals, the irregularly shaped cloud, the lion attaining a global rotundity by moving from a profiled to a frontal view. In keeping with the circular pages, the revised graphics put all the emphasis on the prevalence of roundness in Stein's text. Compared to Hurd's 1939 illustrations, those of the Arion Press show a greater attempt at stylization. Clouds, stars, and sun, present in the first edition, give way to less representational forms. The fur or hair of the animals in the 1986 edition would hardly arouse tactile desire. Featureless blue faces undermine Rose's and Willie's identity. And as Hoyem reduces the color scheme to blue, white, and black, rose, the featured color in the pink-papered original edition, appears only in the accompanying inflatable balloon and the binding. By thus eliminating details and colors and placing the emphasis on circularity, Hoyem has somehow succeeded in increasing the reader's awareness of the upward movement prevailing in the text. In carrying ever upwards the spiral shaped chair, the heroine becomes more and more lively and purposeful. As a result, she shows greater ability to move in the landscape. Striking us as increasingly dramatic, concentrated, and powerful, the scenery reaches its climax when Rose confronts the waterfall. The vegetation has ceased to function as a mere accompaniment. Whereas in the original version the leaves of grass and branches sprout gently from the ground, in the circular volume they vigorously form labyrinthine clusters.  Moreover, the dynamic and impinging waterfall and, later, the intense light beam assailing the climber transform the landscape into a menacing presence. (This refers back to 4)
Hoyem's transformation of Hurd's illustrated edition into an artist book provides a middle ground between mimetic and performative illustration. A number of artists, most of them with French connections, but with little else in common than their deep involvement in visual interpretations of literary masterpieces, have provided new settings for, and found new meanings in, Gertrude Stein's often hermetic texts. Martine Saillard whose Edition Traversière specializes in avant-garde texts, persuaded a team of five international postmodern artists, all of whom assemble and disassemble Stein's words in various ways, to react to Une Pièce circulaire . 10 They are Jiri Kolar (Czech), Tom Phillips (British), Albert Ayme (French), Arthur Aeschbacher (Swiss), and Brion Gysin (American). 11 Aurélie de Nemours, a French hard-edge abstractionist, Mathew Tyson, a British minimalist residing in France, Irma Blank, an Italian whose rhythmic writing deconstructs conventional meaning, Shirley Sharoff, an American etcher and bookworker residing in Paris, Barbara Fahrner, a German who has illustrated Schwitters, Celan, and Cage for Granary Books, and the American Susan Weil, an illustrator of Finnegan's Wake, who studied painting at the École Julian in Paris before joining the Black Mountain group, have achieved remarkable results in accompanying texts by Gertrude Stein.
Initiated by Edouard Manet in 1874, the Parisian "livre de peintre" has recently become an American institution. Granary Books, Kaldewey, Vincent Fitzgerald in New York, Arion, Brighton, Lapis in California have, among others, produced many innovative limited editions featuring graphics by major artists. Moreover, these publishers have insisted on letterpress, fast becoming an endangered craft in France. The Fitzgerald/Susan Weil's edition of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, no less than other productions of this press, provides interpretive displays worthy of the literary masterpieces they accompany. 12 The binding with its strategic insertions of seven etched vignettes, the elegant and eminently readable letterpress, the plates framed in perfect squares divided into nine equally square etchings, and the various vignettes skillfully collaged on the printed pages convey a sense of order contrasting with the apparent randomness of Tender Buttons. We can assume that Weil and Fitzgerald have sought to reveal the hidden tightness of Stein's organization.
In some respects, we can regard Weil's graphics for Tender Buttons as programmed insofar as she has provided readily recognizable, if fragmented, representations of objects featured in the text. But in all other respects, her graphics in this carefully produced American "livre de peintre" clearly emphasizes performance notably by means of visual quotations. By including details from Picasso's famous portrait she alludes to cubist influences in the poetry. Moreover, she dwells repeatedly on Stein's eyes and hands as though to insist on observation and manipulation not only on the part of the author of Tender Buttons but of her own critical activity in reacting to the poems. In any case, Weil goes beyond the target text in order to take into account such biographical considerations as Stein's rapport with Picasso and her patronage of art. Nor do the etchings neglect other aspects of Stein's existence, notably her relationship with Alice B. Toklas covertly evoked in Tender Buttons, perhaps even in its potentially erotic title. 13 Indeed, the sensual coloration of the binding, the set of flesh colored etchings appearing early in the book, the brightly colored plates corresponding to the section on Food, and the photogravures of Rooms evoke the more intimate aspects of the poems. And in the very first plate of Rooms, we can identify the two faceless women as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Stein's division of the book into three separate but nonetheless interrelated sections may have led to Weil's division of the plates into nine perfect squares, a procedure that has allowed her to frame programmatic elements within modernist grids. Walker has clearly explained the division of Tender Buttons into three parts: "From the external objects we see and touch, the text moves inward to the substances we ingest and, in the final section, outward again to the spaces that surround us" (MOAM, 127). Weil's graphic accompaniment moves in the same direction insofar as the etchings in the first section emphasize linear precision, the enticing colors as well as the presence of digestive organs in the second suggest ingestion, and the framed photogravure portraits in the third require a surrounding space. However, Weil's regularity hardly corresponds to Stein's uneven alignment of texts ranging from one or two lines to several pages. The first plate assembles fragments of portraits, derived not only from Picasso's but also from photographs representing the author. Weil has felicitously juxtaposed and harmonized details or fragments of these portraits so that the plate as a whole evokes a cubist engraving. A similar maneuver operates even more tellingly in the plate immediately preceding Objects, no doubt because the things displayed in these linear etchings, e.g. fragments of an umbrella, clockwork, a chair, a cup more clearly approximate cubistic themes than do parts of the body such as eyes, a nose, or hands. ( 5) More painterly than those that precede, the second plate in the Rooms section distances itself somewhat from cubist etching. Stein's frequent mentions of boxes and other containers amply justify Weil's constricting squares. In any case, the artist has elaborated an original rendition of cubist substitution and displacement. The final plate in which nine photogravures replace etched fragments features framed pictures, including portraits of Gertrude Stein, art patron and framer of words, while referring to the cubists' practice of overdetermining inner framing within their paintings.
No doubt the repetitions of recognizable fragments from one plate to the next correspond to Stein's incessant verbal reiterations, substitutions and exchanges. Even more obviously, the fragments displayed in the graphics correspond to the various objects and foods mentioned in Tender Buttons, notably in the titles of individual poems. Words such as "time," "hour," and especially "change" become visual in the bits of clockwork that reappear in several plates. Preserved forever in the etched squares, these clockwork fragments, these frozen moments suggest measured and spatialized time rather than duration in the Bergsonian sense of the term. Nonetheless, Tender Buttons also involves experienced time together with instances of a simultaneous present more easily expressed in music than in graphic art. Painting as well as cubist collage can show precise moments in time rather than its passage. It would seem, therefore, that Weil has captured the immobilized essence of Stein's text and derived from it a compelling work of art comparable to the early cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque. Moreover, by restricting to some extent identity and memory, Weil's fragmentation would facilitate—and certainly not preclude—the creation of masterpieces. 14 However, two fragments featuring handwritten words partly obscured by shadows clearly introduce process and duration. And the flesh-colored plate in which the etched fragments tend to infringe upon one another's borders, clearly imply movement, all the more so because of the presence of birds in flight, a constant theme in Weil's if not Stein's repertoire. Here at least, the artist asserts herself alongside the writer while expressing movement in time. Seven of the etchings, repeated in the first plate, adorn the binding. The face and hands of Picasso's portrait appear on the back cover while etchings borrowed from other sources surround the embossed title on the front cover. We have the distinct impression that these fragments represent the five senses: seeing, smelling, and tasting on the front cover, touching and hearing on the back. And why would Stein close her eyes if not to hear music? The five senses play conspicuous parts in Tender Buttons.
Although Tender Buttons clearly shows the influence of early cubism, Stein, according to Walker, owes just as much to Picasso's and Braque's collages of 1912 and 1913 that included pieces of newspaper, oil cloth, tickets, cut-out pictures: mundane objects lifted from the "real" world (MOAM, 130). The surprising insertion of heterogeneous found objects into a painterly order has much in common with the verbal jumbling characteristic of Tender Buttons. Thus, this most orderly and precise "livre de peintre" takes into account Stein's decentered and decentering texts. Susan Weil's and Vincent Fitzgerald's bookwork consists in part of the systematic displacement of graphics submitted to geometric constraints.
Whereas the graphics for Tender Buttons and the two versions of The World is Round overtly relate to the text, we can hardly make the same claims for the other works we discuss. Spiritual values and personal feelings inform the works of abstractionists such as Kandinsky while an inner sense of proportion marks the work of a minimalist such as Elsworth Kelly. 15 Since outside objects and events impinge only indirectly on their paintings and graphics, we can treat their art as a kind of performance not unlike music. Minimalists and abstractionists have illustrated literary works with built in programs but so have composers.
In 1988, Mathew Tyson, like his father, Ian, a noted book artist, accompanied Gertrude Stein's Five Short War Poems with five "minimal" hand drawings. 16 Written in conversational style, these texts dwell typically on an all encompassing present. As usual, numerous personal pronouns deliberately elude unambiguous references to specific people, objects, or places. And Stein relies once again on repetition, alliteration, and rhyme. As the title indicates, the poems involve war and, if we take a recurrent language barrier into account, the relationships between American soldiers and French people—particularly French women. Instead of providing direct descriptions of such obvious characteristics of warfare as horrendous destruction, heroic deeds, and heart-rending lamentations, Stein by indirection points to recognizable aspects of the situation of American troops at the front in World War I. More often than not, she leaves to our imagination whatever horrors may have happened at the front. In "An "Incident":
Do not be harsh to the misses
I am full of kisses
As the soldier said in English the
Nurses did not understand. 17
We can perhaps define the speaker as a battlefield casualty presently under the care of French nurses. Stein keeps war at a distance in a systematic state of denial. Nor can we know for certain whether "misses" refers to "mademoiselles from Armentières" or to bullets that missed their mark. In other texts, notably "America," Stein relies on questions: "Are we brave," "Are we true," "Have we red cross." 18 Although the personal pronoun refers to American soldiers, the identity of the questioner remains at the very least complex insofar as the American warriors may, indeed, have asked themselves these questions in response to French observers, the poet all the while functioning as an unreliable interpreter, sometimes relying on clichés. In several of the texts, weather plays an important part. Instead of describing the utter misery of foot soldiers living and dying in muddy trenches, Stein in "Can you imitate disaster" needs only to mention "Verdun" and "weather." 19 In "America," the suffering and dangers of long marches leading to confinement in flooded trenches make their presence felt as "A great many people speak of feet/And socks." 20 "Won," which may or may not allude to a triumphant attack by American forces, features "Aunt Pauline" running out of oil. 21 This "Aunt Pauline," the only actant mentioned by name, may designate the Ford car Stein had ordered from America and that she and Alice Toklas had put to the service of France. In brief, Stein dwells on warfare while minimizing its brutal effects. Full of surprises, war nonetheless always remains the same.
No less than Stein's poems, Tyson's minimal drawings involve warfare. Indeed, they evoke the fundamental horror the poet had so carefully left in abeyance. The pitch black drawings aggressively connect with atrocities, in the ordinary as well as the etymological meaning of the term. ( 6) The very blackness of the thick drawn lines intensifies their stark evocation of barbed wire, crosses, and death. The illustrations begin and end with a perfect circle, not as an indication of the circularity of Stein's world, but of a kind of illusory completion as negative as barbed wire. We may wonder why Tyson photocopied and collaged the printed texts onto thick cardboard paper instead of inscribing them directly on the pages as he had the drawings. The typography resembles a typescript rather than proper printing. It puts into sharp relief the minimal drawings that somehow contain the enshrouded meanings of the poems. The artist has collaged the titles of these texts at the top and the extreme right of an otherwise empty page as though to emphasize the typographical poverty of the following texts, obliged to face the sinister blackness of the drawings. The artist has avoided all biographical and bibliographical references concerning the composition and previous publication of the five poems. In keeping with Stein's pervasive present, Tyson substitutes for an irrelevant past the omnipresence of death. While evoking implements of mortality on the battlefield, the drawings have much in common with penmanship. The hand-drawn and scripted images visually overwhelm the neutral typescript.
In spite of all these differences, author and artist stand in relationship to war and reality at about the same distance. Tyson's minimal drawings and Stein's understated texts have little in common with descriptive representations of World War I, either graphic or literary. But artist and writer display similar powers of evocation and may have provided the reader with a deeper understanding of war than many a blow by blow account.
A "minimalist" quite different from Tyson, for she favors pure color, Aurélie Nemours, a well known painter who exhibits at the Denise René gallery in Paris, chose "Early and Late," a poem written in 1925 and published in 1953 in Bee Time Vine. 22 The graphics consist of seven "Bleischnitte," similar to woodcuts: four large squares each of a single color: blue, black, yellow and red, two small black and yellow squares placed side by side, two small blue and red squares placed one above the other, and a large square assembling the four small squares. However attractive, these colorful squares have very little in common with Stein's repetitious and rhythmic writing, particularly in evidence in a free verse poem such as "Early and Late." Nonetheless, the four colors may correspond to the four characters who play the most important roles in the poem: Celestine, Paul, Eugene, and Esther. Mentioned only once, Odile, Bonnington and Jo, by joining the four protagonists, attain the number seven thus accounting, so to speak, for the seven engravings. We may discover a deeper correspondence between the images and the poem in the fact that all the squares, even when printed on the same page, never touch one another. This deliberate separation corresponds to "Early and Late" where separation predominates, particularly in the wording of the title, often repeated in the text. Moreover, Stein multiplies divisions and separations not only in time but in everything else. And to complicate matters still further, she introduces a number of contradictions and paradoxes. Two words: "bridge" and "connect" provide, or so it would seem, a mitigating factor insofar as they run counter to separation. However, bridging and connecting must inevitably fail in a poem entitled "Early and Late." They perform asymptotically in their failure to reach their goal. In this respect, we might regard Nemours' accompaniment as anti-illustration. Indeed, she creates a kind of spiritual order quite removed not only from the real world but also from any overt meanings.
The loose leaf volume itself, and not only the imagery, emphasizes separation. Printed in small capitals and punctuated by periods, the English text on the left confronts Helmut Heissenbüttel's German translation on the right. Printed in regular typography, the unpunctuated German text defies convention by eschewing all capital letters. However, indentations indicate the divisions into paragraphs and sentences of Stein's poem. By a strange reversal of normal indentation, each new paragraph starts far back in the margin. Grouped together, the colored squares follow the English and German texts but precede de la Tour's French translation, the only text printed in the expected manner. In other words, separation and differentiation characterize the various aspects of the volume that by means of clever bookwork becomes an ideal recipient for "Early and Late." Rather than referring to the poem as such, the four colors may represent the four creators: Stein, Heissenbüttel, de la Tour, and Nemours herself. However, by frustrating an analytical approach in favor of a meditative appreciation, Nemours' colored squares may induce a receptive mood on the part of readers of Stein's hermetic text.
Irma Blank, a prolific book artist, published in 1994 in Livorno No Words, a small book, tightly bound, in which the abundant whiteness of both the binding and the Japanese folded pages contrasts with black typography and illegible script. 23 As her other books demonstrate, the artist shows an irresistible attraction toward Mallarmé's blank pages. Based on Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, No Words, elegantly printed in Garamond lettering by a skilled typographer, qualifies as an artist book insofar as Blank has assumed multiple tasks. 24 In addition to functioning as inventor and designer, she performs as a reader and a writer—as a reader because the pages on the left side display selections from Gertrude Stein's second autobiography, as a writer because she transcribes on the right side what we as readers identify with Stein's texts as a wordless and illegible but highly regular script. ( 7) An Italian translation of the Stein selections appears at the end of the book as though Blank wanted her Italian readers to know something about Everybody's Autobiography. The colophon mentions 963 available volumes in arabic numerals and 36 in Roman in addition to an original work by Irma Blank, thus confirming her identity as an artist.
Everybody's Autobiography provides voluminous accounts, personal historical, and sociological. It features strong contrasts while conveying a wider field of awareness than the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 25 Everybody's Autobiography might at first seem incompatible with Blank's miniature and impersonal volume which has inherited some of Mallarmé's transcendentalism. The Italian artist usually selects short passages from the autobiography without disturbing the author's order, thus assuring a rather unified and one directional process. Although the chosen passages, paragraphs, and sentences reveal the breadth of Stein's interests, Blank tends to omit narrative and reduces the anecdotal and even the ironic side of the autobiography. Moreover, the personalities of the artists frequented by Stein fade into the background. Judging by Stein's title alone, one might infer that individuality and identity rather than universality form the crux of her autobiographical book, an inference that the extracts fail to confirm. Reflections on artistic production as well as comparisons between writing and painting surface here and there in No Words. It would seem that Blank appropriates Stein's text by stressing what she considers essential and by assuming the role of "Everybody" while asserting herself through daring and skillful manipulation. She joins Gertrude Stein's "Everybody" while creating her own unrepeatable style of continuous, letterless, wordless but rhythmic penmanship. Curtailment has resulted in radical changes by giving greater esthetic consistency to a text that deliberately proceeds in a multiplicity of directions and indirections. Willfully or not, Blank, even if she has disposed only of the left sides of the pages, has created her own emphasis and shifted toward her own credo. In addition to challenging Stein's loquacious sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with her brief selections or digest, she has substituted for Stein as an author writing in a readable language an illegible continuum. Perhaps she has striven for a non-referential language, far closer to graphics than to prose or poetry. In her own script, she has forsaken any possibility of linking up with Stein or even with "Everybody."
Can we consider Blank's inscription an attempt at modernization by its quasi mechanical regularity? Such an attempt would mean that she has distanced herself from the original text even further than Broodthaers in his reduction of Un Coup de dés to a byplay of concealing lines. 26 The transformation of an autobiographical text into an unrelieved visual continuum has limitations insofar as Blank, while distancing herself from the literary and linguistic side of Stein's text, may have deliberately neglected to assert herself fully as a visual artist, either modern or postmodern. She has merely appended a signature that prolongs itself as long as the author's words move along on the opposite page. Its inevitable curtailment abolishes Blank's ambition to make No Words at once "Everybody"'s and her own autobiography. In so doing, Blank has revealed in her own way the meaning of Stein's title: an author who attributed her creativity alternatively to Alice B. Toklas and to "Everybody" although we can hardly regard the lifestyle of this self-proclaimed but ironic genius as modest and self-effacing. Whereas Hurd, Hoyem, Weil, and even Tyson, in their interpretations of Stein's texts, aimed at showing some sort of correspondence between text and image, Blank pursued a quite different goal, that of appropriation, in turning a radically reduced text into a new book.
Shirley Sharoff harmoniously combines abstract etching with intricate bookwork. Her endeavor in "Procession" strikes us as somewhat more complex than those of other illustrators insofar as she succeeds in deriving from a short text a full-fledged artist book departing in new ways from standard practice. 27 Accompanied neither by a definite or indefinite article, the title discourages the reader from singling out a specific procession or looking for a representative model. Rather, the unaccompanied noun multiplies possibilities while discouraging description. Far from programming scenes and pictures, the title word immediately joins forces, either by sound or etymology, with terms such as "possession" and "process." Such alliances and affinities mark the poem throughout for Stein has indeed created a progression of rhymes and repetitions.
Like several texts of Tender Buttons, "Procession" compounds prose and poetry without subscribing to the usual practices of prose or poetry. Nor does it proceed in a linear or other predictable fashion. Readers will at no stage focus on a given procession. The very first word, an imperative, "proceed," will, when obeyed, set the whole process—we the readers included—into motion. Movement, of course, inevitably functions as an indispensable aspect not only of processions, but also of writing and reading. The initiating command will soon give way to spontaneity, the triumphant other, in Gertrude Stein's work, of ordering. So as to adjust to Stein's processional procedures, we have to abandon all hope of finding a fixed location or a reliable point of view. Alternating between the one and the many, Stein's procession generates movements in a multiplicity of straight, bent, circular, and zigzag (in)directions. Faced with the improbability that immobility has set itself in motion, we can assume that Stein has secretly maneuvered among several processions in space and time both as a viewer and a participant. Additions, substitutions, adjustments, and even defections function as basic elements in a procession. But the question of multiplicity and singleness, so Stein suggests, involves various presences and absences within the procession. Plurality implies at the very least the possibility of arrivals and departures, full, partial and/ or intermittent, dependent and/ or autonomous. The author looks at, speaks about, views, and catches many participants in the parade. Everyday consumer products such as "oil" and "cheese" intersect and interact with concerns about language.  A crowd of personal pronouns which, more often than not, avoid specific designations of people or objects, serve mainly to increase and expand relationships. By performing both as a direct and an indirect voice in the poem, the author plays an assortment of active and passive roles, and nothing prevents her from substituting one personal pronoun for another. The participants designated by nouns and pronouns do not necessarily belong to humanity. Sheep, even furry sheep, as well as other animals provide suitably woolgathering examples. This neglect of barriers adds ironic twists and turns to the procession. Family relationships and even surprising political accusations involving warfare compound the range of possibilities. The parts of the poem, whether divided or not by numbers, bear little resemblance to each other. Numbers suggest an operative organizing principle, but it so happens that Stein herself deliberately undermines every expectation of continuity and coherence with the notable exception of sound patterns that transform the procession into a mock-processional.
Rather than a coherent chronicle of an outward event, Stein provides us with suggestions concerning her struggle as a writer, a sporadic and always unfulfilled but nonetheless satisfying battle. Occurring far apart from one another, "bestow" and "possession" increase our awareness of the impact of Stein's procession of words always surging into view but always lagging behind, necessarily overtaken, outstripped, and otherwise removed by an absolute present. Throughout the poem, the author proposes and immediately discourages the establishment of expected or even unexpected links between past and present. Occurring toward the end of the text, the terms "success" and "succeed" appear particularly revealing. Although they invariably question or postpone meaning in relation to events or situations, these two terms as well as "follow" and "replace" ironically assert their double allegiance. From the standpoint of creative affabulation, such deliberate hesitations and shifts lead to the opposition or reconciliation of "fact or fiction." Truth can never accede to certainty. Fumbling for expressions and shuttling between different possibilities always raise new counterproposals and retorts far more evocative than direct solutions that might put an end to the esthetic search. Energy will prevent the arrest and confinement of the animated procession. "Procession" gives evidence of the special kind of realism that, according to Lynn Hejinian, marks the writing of Tender Buttons. Elements of a felt and perceived reality and words considered an "order of reality," all of them placed on the same footing, assemble and march along in "Procession." 28
Printed on vélin d'arches, Shirley Sharoff's Procession displays many features of "livres de peintres," including a detailed colophon. Housed like many "livres de peintres" and a few artists' books, Shirley Sharoff's edition of "Procession" demands on the part of the reader and viewer attentive care in opening it. Sharoff rightfully implies that far from reducing our viewing and reading of such a book to a casual encounter, we should wind our way toward it. Refraining from binding the text and the engravings together, the artist has enclosed loose leaves in a solid box. She no doubt felt that a glued or sewn text would hardly suit Stein's loosely formed, detached, and free moving procession. Although the text never departs from the one originally printed in Programme, it strikes us as quite different. Intricate typography and spacing replace ordinary linear printing. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence has freed itself from the conventions of continuous alignment. Each passage imposes its own spacing and, thereby, its own shape, thus avoiding any resemblance to a typical page image. Not only has Sharoff added etchings to the text and, in collaboration with the master printer Da Ros, created unique typographical arrangements in shaping a unique kind of artist book, but she has included a French translation. While making the book available to a French public, it also extended the typographical domain of Sharoff's Procession as the setting of the French text by no means follows that of the English. While the translator has semantically and even phonetically done full justice to Stein's writing, the French no less than the English text asserts its own patterns in harmony with one another. By behaving like dancing partners keeping in step with one another, they form an ordered procession contrasting with the seeming disorder of Stein's text. Indeed, we can hardly regard Sharoff's postmodern bookwork as subservient.
Almost every page displays an etching accompanying a printed section. The book features five black and white grids inscribed directly on the page and all of them, with the exception of the slightly truncated final one, complete and nine mostly colored fragmentary images printed on small squares of paper and pasted onto the page. Varying from etching to etching, coloring serves to highlight the separations between the different patches whereas the black and white grids show greater unity and cohesion because of the relative absence of open or blank spaces. Two or three assemblages of fragments precede the completed etching as though in the act of forming a procession or moving toward it. We might infer that the embedded grids firmly etched into the page mark a fixed emplacement within which the mostly colored and purportedly mobile fragments seek a location. Perhaps they metamorphose into the embossed white lines seemingly tracing pathways through each completed engraving. Etchings placed within a book in relation to the given text appear to function as illustration. But in Procession, we can hardly trace back any of the images, whether complete or fragmentary, to a given passage in the poem. Indeed, we can hardly consider any of them visual equivalents of verbal constructs. We may wonder, however, whether the very avoidance of objective references in the poem's various levels of concreteness finds an echo in the complex lines and map-like designs as well as in the repeated numeration and lettering of the etchings. The numerals and letters we can so easily identify in the engravings flaunt the same lack of referentiality as Stein's personal pronouns. But perhaps letters and numbers substitute for the various aspects of reality positively or negatively alluded to in the text. In any case, we search in vain for people and sheep, for oil and cheese in these abstract graphics where jumbled numbers and letters fulfill at the very least a visual function.
Sharoff has emphasized repetition in her graphic accompaniment. Although hardly identical to one another, the black and white etchings display many similarities. A comparison among them reveals intricate patterns of changing lines and movements as well as different divisions. Because the density of lines, hatchings, letters, and numbers varies from plate to plate, we might even see them as a juxtaposition of regions through which the procession must proceed. Nonetheless, the etchings may very well combine the procession with its succession of emplacements since we may regard the fragments themselves as locations set in motion. The lack of clearly definable barriers between place and procession appears highly suitable to a poem that so often negates the constructs it has just proposed. Moreover, within the completed plates an emphasis on straightness contrasts with the irregular curved embossing dividing each one while gaps tend to separate fragments from one another. In comparing these fragments to the complete engraving where each one will relocate, we immediately realize that the placements of the former within the glued on square in no way correspond to their final black and white insertion in the completed plate. And it takes a rewarding effort on the part of the viewer to follow each fragment to its final destination. We might even claim that the twisting and turning progression of the fragments characterizes the twists and turns that mark Stein's procession and process, which must of course come to an end if not a conclusion. Sharoff shows her awareness of this inevitable outcome by ending her graphic accompaniment with a cutout, also suggesting absence, through which emerges a section of Da Ros's typography. ( 8)
We now return to the very beginning of Procession which, as soon as we remove the loose-leaf volume from its red enclosure, greets us with cutouts of a different sort. ( 9) At first we view, in lieu of a proper title page, Procession printed in large ornate characters setting an elegantly meandering itinerary from top to bottom and from left to right. This title occupies parts of six sinuous strips of paper, three of which unfold at the top of the book and three on the left side. We can still read the title with the left strips unfolded but in three different types consisting of the four remaining ornate capitals, of two roman capitals, and of three lower case roman letters. It so happens that this "title page" cut from two sheets provides a preview of the entire volume. The divided title moves from a striking design to a surprising assemblage of conflicting but nonetheless meaningful lettering. The six sinuous strips evoke a procession moving in different directions. Viewed as a whole, these strips not only display the title, but the numerous divisions thus formed have much in common with the shaped fragments in search of an emplacement.  And thus, even [Begin Page 697] before we reach the first page of the volume, we realize that we cannot view a page as a unity and that we shall have to deal with complexity and multiplicity.
All aspects of the book—the title page, the plates, the typography, the accompanying translation, and even the final cutout—refer in one way or another to a procession without any need to mimic the various scenarios of Gertrude Stein's poem. Moreover, the ever moving plates, by the denial of the inevitable fixity of book illustrations and by the interference of a French text, simultaneously reproducing and differing from the original, somehow remain in keeping with Stein's quirky but marvelously effective approach to writing. Shirley Sharoff has converted Stein's methodology and modernist liberation from conventions into a graphic performance consisting of a coherent series of abstract constructions.
Barbara Fahrner has contributed her share to the development of "livres de peintres" in America by illustrating texts by Schwitters and Celan for Granary books. Her graphic accompaniment of 4 Poems of Celan consists of a transcription and mise-en-scène rather than an illustration of the texts. 29 In her one-of-a-kind book devoted to "Parlor," Fahrner has in a similar manner provided a mise-en-scène and staging of Stein's short play. 30 As a dramatist, Stein more often than not dispenses with the usual accoutrements of playwriting such as dialogue, plot, clearly defined characters and recognizable settings. By mentioning the two spellings of "parlo(u)r" she insists on the importance of writing. Rather than as theater, we can define them as plays on words and situations. The title lends itself to semantic displacements. It can refer to a typical lower middle-class parlor located in Lynn, Massachusetts, belonging to two sisters who presumably receive therein cousins and friends. But it can also refer to a "parloir", for instance the one belonging to the convent of "Les Surs de Saint Vincent de Paul," located rue du Bac next to "Le Bon Marché"—a short walk from Stein's apartment rue de Fleurus.
Although the two New England siblings named Earle have little to do with convent sisters, Stein constantly throws them together only to pull them asunder a sentence or so later. Nonetheless, they do share certain characteristics: the Earle sisters, who hardly belong to the aristocracy, face poverty while the nuns have vowed to remain poor. But we cannot limit the meaning of parlor to emplacement since the etymology of the word stresses conversation. In many convents, the nuns could converse only in the "parloir." In any case, Stein throughout the play compounds the spatial and conversational meanings of "parlor" in the same way that she lumps together the inseparable Earle siblings and a community of "Surs de la Charité." As sundering and joining together mark the entire play as well as Fahrner's mise-en-scène, parlor functions in the manner of a pun whose dissonant meanings preclude stability. Thanks to the substitution of "and" for "de" the saintly founder of "les surs de la charité" divides—or proliferates—into two saints: Vincent and Paul, who, with "Sister Peter," provide masculine names for three of the nuns. Moreover, all these disparate sisters can metamorphose into roses: "The seven sisters." By such means, Stein has eliminated any danger of stability and fixity. In this respect, she emulates Saint Vincent de Paul whose nomadic nuns did not at first reside in a convent or need a "parloir." Seemingly arbitrary, but nonetheless relevant displacements of various sorts, predominate. We learn, for instance, that "Louise Henry Earle was not born in Texas but in Lynn Massachusetts." And just before evoking the nuns, Stein interpolates: "I am grateful to the Uruguan. This is a saying." Does the author show gratitude for a geographical or a verbal displacement or reveal once again the self-referentiality of her composition? In any case, spatial and verbal accumulations and dispersions follow one another during the entire play. We move from the restricting quarters of a nondescript New England parlor circa 1897 to the equally restrictive but nominally far more charitable "parloir" in a convent. But the movement itself—the displacement—matters most of all because of the mercurial interrelationships brought about by language, the only operative commodity. As usual, Stein adds inner displacements to the more overt sort by bringing in failures of memory: "The Earle sisters have now been forgotten just as a memory." And memory produces a displacement by ironically creating a cleavage between the performative play and the situation of the writer: "It is difficult to remember anything oh how difficult."
As her title indicates, Barbara Fahrner has provided a mise-en-scène and thus more than an illustration of, or, as had Elie Lascaux, a setting for, Gertrude Stein's play. This title appears all the more appropriate insofar as Stein in so many of her writings creates, as Jacky Martin states, "une mise en scène du langage" in which words operate like actants in a spectacle. 31 Indeed, Stein, notably in her plays, Tender Buttons, and "Procession," drastically reduces the distances separating words, characters, objects, and feelings. The mottled gray elongated cover of Fahrner's Parlor, stitched down the middle with black thread, suggests a stage curtain while evoking the divisions and separations prevalent in both the text and its graphic staging. The fragments of a column on the back and front covers may evoke a stage proscenium or even the theater itself. When we open the volume, we notice immediately that the gutter separating the two facing pages allows textual and graphic crossovers in keeping with Stein's numerous verbal displacements. The neatly handwritten script of "Play," moving horizontally from one side of the double page to the other, must compete with an ineligible text, couched in a sort of microwriting by the same hand, and spiraling crazily in an upward direction. However, Fahrner's name appears together with the date of composition embedded in four horizontal lines featuring incipient or minimal microwriting. We can conclude that the purely visual script bridges the gap between text and graphics all the more so because the linear drawings themselves resemble writing. Fragmented black and red lines follow, but with greater regularity, the mostly perpendicular direction of the microwriting. Together, they form porous enclosures vaguely suggesting a parlor and, paradoxically, a face, perhaps that of a sibling or a nun. (. 10 & 11) We may also regard the blotches of solid color, some of them shaped like maps, that greet the reader on each double page as marking the fleeting presence of the two Earle sisters and the three named nuns. In any case, persons and places appear to coalesce in these undefined res. Friends and cousins, together with their places of origin, emerge in the guise of partially colored blotches. Fahrner has introduced [Begin Page 700] in addition geometrical and architectural shapes in keeping with the drawing on the title page, evoking, or so it seems, aspects of a parlor, a house, a theater, or a convent.
Known as a penetrating reader of texts, Fahrner has succeeded in dramatizing the salient aspects of Stein's purely verbal play. While the blotches may refer to the indescribable characters in "Parlor," it would seem that the microwriting, in addition to its structural function, represents the unreported conversations taking place in the Earle sisters' parlor and the nuns' "parloir," and even the funeral parlor where his daughters transported Mr. Earle. And the Earle sisters may even have joined their dad: "The Earle sisters have now been forgotten just as a memory" ("P," 328). In this manner, Fahrner has succeeded in concretizing Stein's technique of compounding and collapsing persons and places. The artist faithfully copies Stein's self-referential text while repeating throughout the mute utterances of the characters. Similarly, the artist's porous enclosures combine distance and separation with close encounters in a room. Like Stein, who implies that the Earles may not have a parlor or even a house but only a vacant lot, Fahrner by means of her open-ended spaces suggests that the Earles may not have a residence of their own. And like the author, the artist equates there with nowhere and all over as well as proximity with distance.
Fahrner conveys Stein's negativity by means of emptiness. For instance, the porous enclosures contain no more than other lines and shapes repeating one another from page to page. As in the text, repetition appears everywhere in the mise-en-scène. Fahrner has inscribed her and Stein's name some six times on the first and last pages as well as on the title page and the cover. The artist has matched the author's playful sonorities by a harmonious succession of colored shapes and enclosures. And by elongating the grid, she has captured the very movement of Stein's writing. Indeed, a paradoxical sense of continuity marks the text and the graphics, both of them rich in non-sequiturs.
As had all image makers since the invention of the codex and until Sonia Delaunay's and Blaise Cendrars' La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehane de France, Hurd sought to enhance reading by providing plausible representations of some of the events and people described. 32 We usually judge these representational graphics in terms of their fidelity to the text and their artistic interest which, in some cases, notably the Curmer edition of Paul et Virginie, whose illustrators transformed Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's sentimental tale into a masterpiece. 33 Abstract and minimal graphics have a far different effect on readers. Indeed, abstract paintings— grids—erect, as Rosalind Krauss states, a wall between art and language. 34 Nonetheless, many abstractionists and even minimalists have contributed graphic accompaniments to texts, usually to the poetry they admired. Rather than representations or commentaries on the text, these graphics by disorienting at first readers and viewers tend to increase their awareness. By challenging our understanding, these abstract images induce us to decipher not only the images themselves but also to question the text. We thus must confront juxtaposed and equally hermetic signifiers. And bookwork compounds this situation insofar as both the graphics and the text play subordinate parts in an emerging structure as Fahrner in her mise en scène, Sharoff in her systematic displacements, and Blank in her radical reduction have shown. By combining abstraction with representation, Weil has succeeded in enhancing our appreciation of Stein's text without reducing its hermeticism. This purposefully elaborated structure requires increased participation and even collaboration on the part of the reader in the creating of a new and complex art form.
As a rule, artists, mimetic or other, give close readings of the texts they illustrate and thus have much in common with critics and translators. Literary critics can glean invaluable information by comparing the poem they wish to explicate to a translation. The displacements and substitutions they uncover in the translation can lead to surprising discoveries in the original. Graphic accompaniments can lead to new (mis)understandings in much the same way as translations for they thrive even more than verbal translation on substitutions and displacements while proposing, if not an equivalence, at least a meaningful dialogue between verbal and visual signifiers. While abundant mimetic illustrations such as those of nineteenth-century novels prevail upon readers to adopt the point of view of the artists, modern and postmodern graphic commentaries tend to problematize the text and thus to complicate rather than impose an interpretation.
By stressing the playfulness and astute childishness of The World
is Round for the benefit of young readers, Clement Hurd highlights
features only vaguely perceived in Stein's books for grownups, for
instance in the frequently humorous Everybody's Autobiography. The
geometrical precision and impressive craftsmanship of Vincent Fitzgerald's
and Susan Weil's Tender Buttons contrasts with the apparently
haphazard associations and puzzling syntax of Gertrude Stein's poems. By
suggesting that some hidden order underlies the texts, this "livre
de peintre" encourages a new approach modeled on Weil's systematic
displacements and exchanges of fragments which seemingly correspond to
recurrent transformations in Stein's text. Tyson's cruelly incisive lines
point to the underlying horrors of war in Stein's apparently mild war
poems while Nemours' minimalist colors and the three different printings
of the text focus the reader's attention on the divisions and separations
featured in "Early and Late." Irma Blank's radical abridgement of the
text and her wordless cursive writing radically distance themselves from
the voluble Everybody's Autobiography. The sharp contrast between
No Words and Everybody's Autobiography suggests that Stein
may have proceeded by increments without any thought of eliminating
anything whatsoever. Stein, indeed, deliberately delays completed
meaning and thus pleasurably induces the reader to discover the path
through a plethora of words. Sharoff's complex treatment of "Procession"
attracts our attention to Stein's displaced syntax which serves to bring
the world simultaneously closer and more distant. And Fahrner induces
us to see "Parlor" as a fully-fledged play performed in a theater thus
conforming to Stein's statement in Everybody's Autobiography: ". . . whenever I write a play it is a play because it is a thing I do not
see but it is a thing somebody can see that is what makes a play for me."
35
It would thus appear that visual readings can produce the same sort
of effects as critical commentaries while adding to the pleasures of
reading by means of inventive bookwork.
Renée Riese Hubert, Professor Emerita, University of California, Irvine has published Surrealism and the Book, Women, Surrealism and Partnership, The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists' Books (with Judd D. Hubert, Professor Emeritus, U.C. Irvine) whose recent publications include Metatheater: The Example of Shakespeare and Corneille's Performative Metaphors.
1. Gertrude Stein, What are Masterpieces (Los Angeles: The Conference Press, 1940), 90.
2. Gertrude Stein, The World is Round (New York: William R. Schott, 1939). Pictures by Clement Hurd; The World is Round (London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1939), Illustrations by Sir Francis Rose. Henceforth abbreviated as TWIR.
3. Gertrude Stein, A Book Concluding as a Wife Has a Cow (Paris: Kahnweiler, 1926), lithography by Juan Gris; The Village: Are You Ready Yet Not Yet (Paris: Kahnweiler, 1928), lithographs by Elie Lascaux.
4. For a fuller discussion of this book, see Renée Riese Hubert, "Gertrude Stein: Cubism and the Postmodern Book," in Marjorie Perloff, Postmodern Genres (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 96-125.
5. Stein wrote a particularly compelling prose poem about Lascaux, republished in Reflections on the Atomic Bomb, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), 59, henceforth abbreviated as ROTAB.
6. Stein, TWIR and The First Reader (London and Dublin: Maurice Fridberg, 1946)
7. Stein had commissioned Rose, an old friend whose paintings she regularly bought, to adorn The World is Round. She had devoted three short texts to this painter, republished in ROTAB, 56 and 60.
8. See Richard Bridgman's illuminating commentary on this work in Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
9. In The World is Not Flat which accompanies the Arion Press Edition of The World is Round, Clement Hurd's wife, Edith, clearly explains the transformation from one edition to the next. Gertrude Stein, The World is Round, pictures by Clement Hurd, and bookwork under the direction of Andrew Hoyem; its companion volume by Edith Thatcher Hurd, The World is Not Flat (San Francisco: Arion Press, 1986).
10. Gertrude Stein, "Une pièce circulaire," traduit et préfacé par Gérard-Georges Lemaire (Paris: Edition Traversière, 1985), illustrations by Arthur Aeschbacher, Albert Ayme, Brion Gysin, Jiri Kolar, Tom Phillips. "A Circular Play" can be found in Last Operas and Plays, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Rinehart, 1949).
11. As its title indicates, "A Circular Play" emphasizes rotundity no less than The World is Round. One of Kolar's illustrations consists of a printed paper apple described by Martine Saillard, the publisher, as "tête de mots" [head of words] and "pomme de lettres" [apple of letters]. The preferred copies provide a shaped paper apple whose sphericity rivals Hoyem's inflated balloon. For further discussion, see Hubert, "Gertrude Stein: Cubism and the Postmodern Book."
12. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Vincent Fitzgerald & Co., 1999), etchings by Susan Weil.
13. In Women of the Left Bank, Shari Benstock states: "In Tender Buttons, Stein creates a woman's world; she renames and thereby reacquires the objects that surround her, including Alice Toklas, who has now become an object (of love) in this homemade universe." Benstock, Women of the Left Bank. Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 162. Jayne L. Walker has also stressed the feminine aspects of Tender Buttons in The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 127ff. Henceforth abbreviated as MOAM. See also Lyn Hejinian, "Language and Realism," Temblor 3 , 128-39.
14. See Stein, "What Are Masterpieces and Why There Are So Few of Them," in What are Masterpieces, 83-95.
15. For a theoretical discussion of minimalist and abstract art, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), especially Chapter 7, "Ut Pictoria Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language," 209-33. Illustration by means of minimal or abstract graphics further complicates their relationship with language. We have tried to bypass the issue by stressing the idea of performance.
16. Gertrude Stein, Five Short War Poems (London: Imprints, 1988). Original drawings by Mathew Tyson. First published in Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).
17. Gertrude Stein, "An Incident," in Five Short War Poems.
18. Gertrude Stein, "America," in Five Short War Poems.
19. Gertrude Stein, "Can You Imitate Disaster," in Five Short War Poems.
20. Stein, "America."
21. Gertrude Stein, "Won," in Five Short War Poems.
22. Stein, "Early and Late," in Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 242-7.
23. Irma Blank, No Words (Livorno: Belfonte, 1994).
24. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937).
25. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1932).
26. Marcel Broodthaers [Mallarmé], Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. Image (Antwerp: Wide White Space Gallery, 1969).
27. Gertrude Stein, Procession, ed. Shirley Sharoff (Paris: Shirley Sharoff, 1995). 14 etchings by Sharoff and a French translation by Françoise Collin. Typography by Françoise Da Ros. First published in 1935 in the journal Programme and reprinted in ROTAB, 89-92.
28. Hejinian, "Language and Realism," 129.
29. Paul Celan, Four Poems, (New York: Granary Books, 1999).
30. Gertrude Stein, Parlor. One-of-a-Kind Book, mise-en-scène by Barbara Fahrner, located in Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
31. See Jacky Martin, "Gertrude Stein et la théâtricalité du langage," Delta 10 (mai 1980), 108-9.
32. Blaise Cendrars and Sonio Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérian et de la petite Jehanne de France (Paris: Editions des Hommes nouveaux, 1913).
33. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (Paris: Curmer, 1838).
34. "The barrier it [the grid] has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech." Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 9. To a certain extent, a few book artists have reversed this situation.
35. Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 199.
James Joyce's "Fraudstuff." Kimberly Devlin. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. 201. $55.00 (cloth).
Joyce's Ulysses as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State. Andras Ungar. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. 154. $55.00 (cloth).
Joyce and the Scene of Modernity. David Spurr. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. 151. $55.00 (cloth).
The Florida James Joyce Series, under the general editorship of the formidable Zack Bowen, can claim much of the credit for the flourishing North American "Joyce Industry," as it is sometimes fondly, sometimes maliciously named. Both in convivial annual conferences in Miami, thoughtfully planned to coincide with Joyce's birthday in frosty February, and in the building of a Joyce list for Florida University Press, Joyce scholarship in the United States has blossomed in the last decade, a trend that shows little sign of reversal. The year 2002 saw five monographs on Joyce from the Florida series, an increase in the usual annual three. This increase is perhaps attributable to a heightened level of interest during the buildup to the Bloomsday centenary celebrations next year. Three of them are reviewed here, and each concentrates on issues currently to the fore in Joyce scholarship: Joyce's treatment of gender and sexuality; his relationship to Ireland, nationalism and postcolonialism; his position within the cultures of modernism.
Kimberly Devlin's James Joyce's "Fraudstuff"is an eagerly awaited book from one of the liveliest current thinkers on the tricky and notoriously vexed subject of Joyce's sexual politics. It indicates the level of interest in Devlin's work that four of the six chapters have been partially published elsewhere; their collection together here allows readers to appreciate the overall densely woven coherence of her argument. Devlin's notion of "fraudstuff" is borrowed from Finnegans Wake, and she takes it as shorthand for "an increasing concern of Joyce's canon as a whole, his growing interest in fraudulent being and the various theatrical props that support identity" (xi). Such a fascination with inauthenticity and masquerade develops during the later Joyce, as the writer moves away from his earlier Dubliners preoccupation with the authentic. This preoccupation is signified both in his famous declaration to reflect back to the Irish people a mirror image of their own paralysis in Dubliners'"nicely polished looking glass," and in the stories' dependence on blinding moments of authentic revelation, the Joycean "epiphany." 1 Instead, Devlin suggests, Joyce's later writing transforms that nicely polished looking glass into what Stephen Dedalus would later term "the cracked looking glass of a servant," a mirror which refracts, distorts, parodies, and celebrates its own inaccuracies of representation. 2 Devlin's hypothesis appears immediately convincing; all the more so when she applies it to that most performative of all identity poses, gender.
James Joyce's "Fraudstuff" begins with an ingenious analysis of the transition between the early Joyce fragment Stephen Heroand the novel it would eventually become, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The earlier Stephen rails against "mummery," whether he finds it in the Catholic piety or the idealistic Gaelic League nationalism of his fellow students. Accordingly, "mummery" is not a quality to be found in the self: the Stephen of Stephen Hero delivers a "seriously intended" lecture on art, and provides an eloquent undergraduate theory of "epiphanies," both intellectual stances validated by their rejection by an inherently fraudulent Ireland (Devlin, 7). Yet in A Portrait and in Ulysses, the young Stephen's reliance upon masks and disguise becomes more pronounced until he mutates in Finnegans Wake into Shem the Penman, a plagiaristic, inauthentic author-persona whose degenerate "squidself" gleefully delights in "cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the other people in the story" (Finnegans Wake, 173-4).
This first chapter acts as the overture for the rest of the book, which explores through several brilliant close readings Joyce's increasingly sophisticated exploration of what modern identity is. A genuinely fruitful use of psychoanalysis, particularly Joan Riviere's seminal essay "Femininity and the Masquerade," introduces considerations of both the ambivalent gender identity of Leopold Bloom, Joyce's "new womanly man" (U 15: 1798-9), and the strikingly theatrical manipulations of femininity performed by, firstly, Gerty MacDowell, and secondly, Molly Bloom. Devlin's reading of Gerty through her namesake Gertrude Flint, the heroine of the sentimental bestseller The Lamplighterby Maria Susannah Cummins, is particularly deft, as Devlin explores how Gerty's colored narrative artfully veers between one inauthentic intertext and another—the self-consciously artful advertizing copy of contemporary women's magazines. Devlin reads both Molly Bloom's own adroitness at putting on an act—"doing the indifferent"—and her ability to perceive inauthenticity in others in an illuminating context. She notes Molly's similarity in this regard to another of Ulysses 's conspicuously unstable personalities, the nameless and evasive narrator of the "Cyclops" episode. Two closing chapters explore Bloom's fantastic posturings beneath the imagined surveillant gaze of Dublin's ubiquitous police presence, and the perplexing blurring of both gender and sexuality in Finnegans Wake, where male sartorial exhibitionism repeatedly and compromisingly masks misshapen and taboo bodies and desires. As Devlin's elegant afterword explains, Joyce's worlds of masquerade, disguise and fraudulence are increasingly predicated upon complex conrations of the eye, the gaze and spectacle. Finnegans Wake, with its nightscape of voyeuristic scenarios and ceaselessly shifting identities, is thus Joyce's ultimate exercise in "fraudstuff."
Andras Ungar's Ulysses as National Epic offers an important investigation of the ramifications of a historical coincidence too often overlooked in Joyce studies. Ulysses 's publication in 1922 collided with the foundation of the Irish Free State, and accordingly Ungar reads the novel as an epic of the birth of a new nation. Drawing on recent critical interest in Joyce's formative years in Trieste, Ungar stresses how much of Ulysses was composed while its author also came to political consciousness lecturing and writing on Ireland for the newspaper Il Piccolo Della Sera. While Joyce's journalism and lectures reveal his acute interest in events in Ireland following the Easter Rising, particularly the rise of Sinn Féin and its policy of secession, Ungar also emphazises how Trieste's colonized status as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire provoked in Joyce an acute awareness of the political parallels between Hungary's position within that empire, and Ireland's relationship to Britain.
As Joyce freely acknowledges, such a comparison had been originally noted in Arthur Griffith's 1904 Resurrection of Hungary, where Griffith suggested Ireland look to the continent for a model for the strategy of nationalist resistance he inaugurated the following year with the foundation of Sinn Féin. Yet Ungar's rigorous close readings of key episodes in Ulysses explore how integral Griffith's Hungarian parallel was to the novel, as "the epic design of the work formulates a comprehensive reflection on the historical conjunction that in 1904 signalled the prospect of future Irish independence from Britain" . To argue for this parallel is not, as Ungar stresses, to suggest that Joyce either actively endorses Griffith's and Sinn Féin's physical force brand of Irish nationalism, or overlooks the less salubrious aspects of Griffith's program, most notably his anti-Semitism. Rather, Ulysses emerges from the "raw material" of Irish and Hungarian politics as a fable centred on Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and dramatizing through its epic form the processes both of nation formation and historiography.
This densely written study provides many startlingly new insights into the tangled relationships between fiction, history and allegory in Ulysses. Ungar's exploration of Stephen and Bloom's relationship in the context of the competing two crowns of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the crown of St. Stephen and the crown of St. Leopold, is striking both in its ingeniousness and in the common sense of Ungar's suggestion that the allegory is suggested only to imply in turn the strain of the unreal universality such an allegory requires. The tension between individual and nation, epic fable and history, is, Ungar argues, the message behind Joyce's appropriation of the Homeric genre.
David Spurr's Joyce and the Scene of Modernity seems much less coherent in its argument and focus than either Devlin's or Ungar's studies. It is, as Zack Bowen's foreword puts it, "essentially a miscellany of nine essays," a curious statement since I could only find seven. The book suffers from its miscellaneous nature, although there is much to commend in individual chapters, three of which have been published elsewhere. The first chapter on "Colonial Spaces in Joyce's Dublin" offers a deft reading of Joyce in the context of a Dublin where colonial history has been liberally inscribed through the city's architecture. To Spurr, "Joyce conceives of the city as a contested space of imperfectly accomplished colonial domination" (Spurr, 17), and his discussion of the "Wandering Rocks" episode offers a compelling interpretation of the various highly ironic and frequently misinterpreted gestures of loyalty towards the viceregal cavalcade. One chapter examines Finnegans Wake' s frequent allusions to the infamous 1887 Times forgeries of letters linking Charles Stewart Parnell to the Phoenix Park assassinations. It allows Spurr to blend historicism with a Derridean meditation on forgery to show, as Devlin shows, that questions of authenticity are at the heart of Joyce's final novel.
One of the strengths of Joyce and the Scene of Modernity lies
in its attempt to situate Joyce within an alternative continental
modernism, and, accordingly, two chapters compare Joyce with Proust
and Mallarmé. The Proust comparison is an intriguing one often
skirted around by Joyce scholars as Joyce's one encounter with Proust
was notoriously unproductive. Both men complained about their health
and denied that each had read the other's work. Acknowledging that "in
comparing Joyce's work to Proust's, one cannot speak of 'influence'"
, Spurr instead compares both writers' treatment of the relationship
between anti-Semitism and sexuality. What is otherwise a fruitful
comparison is unfortunately let down here by Spurr's lack of attention
to two excellent recent studies of Joyce and Jewishness, John McCourt's
The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 and
Marilyn Reizbaum's James Joyce's Judaic Other . Both books
read Bloom's characterization as "the new womanly man" via the sexual
politics of contemporary anti-Semitism, which, following Otto Weininger's
notorious Sex and Character , insisted upon the effeminacy
of the Jewish male. Neither are cited by Spurr, which might explain
why he reads the often-cited "Cyclops" innuendo "I wonder did he ever
put it out of sight?" not as an anti-Semitic allusion to impotence and
effeminacy, but instead as a stereotype of the Jewish male as oversexed
. Joyce and the Scene of Modernity is, however, engagingly
and fluently written, doing much to make contemporary critical theory
accessible to a wider readership.
1. James Joyce, Letters 1, Stuart Gilbert, ed.(New York: Viking, 1967), 64.
2. James Joyce, Ulysses, Hans Walter Gabler et al., eds. (London: Bodley Head, 1993), 1: 146.
There is no cybernetic system that is so constituted that it can in its totality represent both socialism and capitalism. 1
Georg Klaus, "Cybernetics and Ideological Class War"
Georg Klaus (1912-1974), a philosopher and cybernetician from East Germany, is not a re whose scientific legacy is celebrated today. He directed the Institute of Philosophy of the East Germany Academy of Sciences, worked on developing a Marxist semiotics and cybernetics, influenced East German economic reform in the 1960s, and supported the development of a microelectronics industry, the only one to develop significantly in the eastern bloc outside the Soviet Union. 2 This is an impressive list of achievements, especially when one considers the five years from 1933 to 1939 he spent as a political prisoner, two of them in the Dachau death camp, for organizing Communist resistance in upper Bavaria, his compulsory Wehrmacht service on the Eastern Front, and, multiply wounded, his internment as a prisoner of war in Belgium. 3 But they remain negligible achievements in the sense that the entire social legacy of the German Democratic Republic remains negligible after the cold war. The GDR failed on certain persuasive scales of modernity: it did not create a state based on popular legitimation, it did not accumulate the material wealth to challenge the liberal industrial model of development in the West, and it did not set new standards for the quality of life. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen caution that "When standards are chosen to assess the quality of life of people in different parts of the world one has to ask whose views as to the criteria should be decisive. Should we . . . look to the local traditions of the country. . . or should we, instead, seek some more universal account of good human living . . . ?" 4 Regarded locally or universally, the GDR offers little by way of new standards, hence the nearly unanimous judgment on its failure, and the oblivion to which someone like Georg Klaus is assigned. 5
I want to give the GDR a closer look, however, and understand it not as establishing new criteria, but as demonstrating something important about the limits of the criteria of modernity that decided (on) the outcome of the cold war and now seem so self-evident. These are such familiar criteria as openness, pluralism, experimentalism and incrementalism, the same criteria warily celebrated by Max Weber as constitutive of the disenchanted modern world view and emphatically celebrated by Karl Popper as the bulwark of the open society. 6 In particular, the GDR helps us to see that the criteria that were efficient causes in determining the cold war outcome have to be subtly distinguished from the criteria by which that outcome was subsequently judged as valid or just, and that those latter criteria cannot comprehend and supercede the distinctions relevant to the former. 7 Whether or not the GDR's standards for building and assessing a modern quality of life fit Nussbaum and Sen's view of universality, they were on the face of it congruent with the standards of the West—what was different was the social complex whose function was to maximize over those recognizable standards. The qualitative rupture that bisected cold war modernity into first and second worlds took place at the level of operative totality that I call, in reference to the cybernetic and systems theoretical traditions, "the system." The challenge that GDR modernity posed—and as a historical legacy still poses—is not the challenge of alternate criteria per se, but of understanding how roughly the same criteria could refer to two distinct systems of modernity and to the qualitative difference between those systems. 8 In a manner suggestive for the way I am addressing the specific problem here, Walter Benjamin once asked whether, after translating from one language into another, a translator could ever hope to find a third language in which the difference between the two translations could itself be translated. 9 Likewise, the res I am looking at, Georg Klaus, and the most analytically imaginative of East German creative writers, Franz Fühmann (1922-1984), are not concerned with the empirically achieved and measurable quality of daily life in East Germany, but the possibility of apprehending an underlying qualitative difference between their system and that of the West, where their system res for them as both present actuality (energeia) and future potential (dynamis).
The problem of whether standards can ever do justice to qualitative difference, one of the most characteristic intellectual challenges in a centrally planned socialist culture, first emerges in the simple and powerful formulation of Plato's Protagoras. 10 Inquiring into the possibility of living a consistent, holistic good life—a well-ordered life, where well-ordering implies the commensurable ranking and coordination of priorities—Socrates describes the paradox of akrasia: if I am offered a choice between two goods, where one is apparently greater than the other, would I not always choose the greater good? 11 Yet one can imagine cases where I might choose, say, one glass of wine over another more ample one, because I like the way it reflects the light. Plato resolves the paradox by explaining my choice as submission to weakness, or akrasia, because the light, an extrinsic, incommensurable quality, has distracted me from ranking my priorities with respect to a disciplined discernment of the greater and lesser good of comparable values. A science of measurement (metretike techne) would allow people to make reasonable, far-sighted choices consistently in their own and society's best interests by bringing all possible choices into relation with each other on a common yardstick and thus allowing for a rational ethical decision. 12
One socialist version of this classical problem might be apparent. In a state organized around a planned economy, a science of measurement by which individual desires are rationally and ethically coordinated would surely give the planners and their economy an edge over the non-scientifically organized capitalist competition. The version of the problem that concerns us here, however, is more existential. If there is a commensurability of values across modernity, in East as in West, socialism as in capitalism, is there room for a qualitative difference between the two systems, and how would one recognize or describe that quality in the standardized terms of commensurability? If there is no common yardstick supplied by modernity, then are there rational means for each system to establish its own qualitatively unique measure? And, finally, if each system somehow fosters its own valid measure, is there ever any reasonable way to choose among them, or are disjunctions between systems presentable only in terms of sovereignty and force?
The thesis I propose is that a modernity other than that embodied by the West is possible, one whose values set a reasonable standard for its own self-description, but which at the systemic level is separated by incommensurate elements from the familiar modernity that serves as the proving ground for our common sense decisions today. The emphasis on distinct modernities is important here, because it suggests that a consensus around rational, open, experimental, i.e., modern, categories is not enough to ensure peaceful transitions between systems and rational communication about rival values. Rather, material or qualitative differences will persist as dynamic disequilibria that always threaten force, without necessarily entailing its violent application. To demonstrate this thesis I will look at the once parallel, now ex-modernity of socialism as it was conceived and questioned by Klaus and Fühmann in the GDR of the 1960s and early 1970s. This late modernity did not succeed in setting new criteria by which it could operate as a system with autarchy, complexity and the potential to reproduce itself and its own way of seeing and parsing the world. But to establish my thesis I am content to suggest that socialism's culture, haunted by the insufficiency of its difference from the West, momentarily attested to the non-uniqueness of modernity by raising, in a rational idiom, deep problems about organizing society that are compelling, but largely invisible, to our own. Furthermore, since the end of the cold war and the demise of the eastern bloc, the issue of qualitative discontinuities between systems has refused to disappear in a liberal narrative of the end of history and perpetual peace. 13 As the problem of qualitative difference has reemerged in social relations, discourses of rational commensurability—concerning, for example, technology-driven globalization, representative democracy or international law—have been supplemented by those of sovereignty and force.
The non-uniqueness of modernity is a fundamental paradox for a technical-rational thought, hence the haunting pain of socialism's double vision of itself in its difference from the West. For modernity, if it is equal to its own description as open and experimental, is a superlative of social evolution, and the superlative is always a definite singular. According to Popper, the cold war's most eminent theoretician of science and society, modernity's openness is epitomized by its restless falsification of all its provisional truth claims, leaving only the best standing.
Modernity in the rational, progressivist account drops what fails and selects what succeeds, describing the latest and best we have: the optimum, if not the optimum optimorum, for the world. If socialism was also a rational modernity, then it was somehow once contemporaneous with the present singular modernity from which we survey our globe today; it was, then, also once a superlative of time and space, the latest and the most forward. Not an "insimultaneity of time" in Ernst Bloch's famous formulation for the imbrication of old and new worlds, but precisely a "simultaneity," simultaneous and sharply distinct. 14 It then bears asking how a position—an x, y, z at time t—that claims for itself the singularity of the most advanced and fitting could have been shared by an x', y', z' at time t' that makes the same legitimating claim?
Lest I be taken as appealing to too narrow and rationalist a definition of modernity in defining its singular, progressive path, even so forceful a critic of logical positivism and scientific reductionism as Edmund Husserl argued that "to be human at all is essentially to be a human being in a socially and generatively united civilization; and if man is a rational being, it is only insofar as his whole civilization is a rational civilization . . . ." European modernity must bear within it, according to Husserl, "an absolute idea, rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like 'China' or 'India,'" or, I might add, like the East or West bloc. 15 Can two or more proper modernities then be thinkable, coordinated within by the same rational values, but separated from each other by a gap that cannot be described, let alone forded, in accordance with those values? Are there questions that socialism—that is, modernity prime—asks of itself that are as universal as they are untranslatable into the circumstances, if not the idiom, of our most contemporaneous present? Can this briefly multiplied modernity—the existential possibility of a radically different way of answering our same urgent questions—ever be resolved back into a single immanent process, into a single open community of reason and transparency, or does modernity prime always haunt our progress as an invisible road not taken?
In 1961 at a crucial turning point for an industrial world already divided into two hostile cold war blocs, East German Party chief Walter Ulbricht ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall. With this sharp demarcation of East and West German sovereignty, Ulbricht's Politbüro felt that East Germany at last had the breathing room it needed to build socialism, and proceeded to encourage a reformist spirit to experiment with organizations capable of maximizing the GDR's potential for innovation. 16 In 1963 the Council of Ministers announced "Guidelines for the New Economic System of Planning and Managing the People's Economy" (NES). Over the next seven years, until Ulbricht was deposed by Erich Honecker in 1971, the state repeated that "the fundamental task that our Party, the GDR working class, and its allied classes must solve is mastering the socialist economy and the scientific-technical revolution." 17 Associated with this revolution was not just the development of new engineering cadre, technological processes and industrial machinery, but the scientific organization of production, exchange, administration, education and politics in a socialist society.
This task of coordinating society on a new basis ultimately fell to the emerging information science of cybernetics to solve. 18 The use of cybernetics for this purpose is not obvious, because cybernetics—a science first developed in the 40s and 50s in the U.S. by Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann—implied to many critics in the socialist world an abandonment of the Marxist vision of a practice based in the experience of class struggle in favor of "system-neutral," "value-free" technocratic reason. 19 The rivalry between technical and political rationality for preeminence in shaping socialist society was bitter. The eventual acceptance of cybernetics by the Party hierarchy in the mid-1960s meant that social subsystems would in principle be left to find their own efficient means of developing and coordinating themselves, and would not rely on steering mechanisms based outside the feedback loops of system optimization; would not, that is, rely on ideologically governed Party decisions, but on self-generated information. 20 The buzz words for ascendant cyberneticians were "self organization," "self reproduction," "automatic steering," "automatic coordination," and "goal orientation"—not exactly comforting words to ideologically oriented functionaries. 21
In the entry for "goal orientation" ["Zielstrebigkeit"] in the 1969 Dictionary of Cybernetics, Georg Klaus, then the director of the Institute for Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences, notes that "if we could observe just the effect of disruptions and the oscillation of system values around the target state (goal), it would be impossible to decide whether the coordination mechanism were a mechanical element or whether its functions were being exercised by a human-being." 22 This definition refers to Alan Turing's pioneering essays on artificial intelligence in which a machine has the capacity not only to reproduce itself, but to evolve to a higher level. 23 Klaus elaborates the definition by contrast to the Aristotelian teleological doctrine that he sees cybernetics as superceding, holding that a dynamic system is capable of realizing a potential (dynamis) not observed, measured or caused by its current state (entelecheia, energeia), but constructed solely through the reciprocal causality of system and environment (see: "Wechselwirkung"). With the Berlin Wall buffering it from overwhelming disruption by a hostile environment, Klaus and his allies in the Politbüro hoped that the cybernetic "black box" of the New Economic System would not only run smoothly, but evolve intelligently toward an interactive goal of ever more simply organized complexity, GDR subsystems regulating themselves according to their adaptive dynamics (see: "selbsttätige Regelung"). As the entry on "Trial and Error" notes: "many organic cybernetic systems have failed because they did not have time to reach an adaptation." 24 Cement Wall and cybernetic reform promised socialism that adaptive time.
Alas, the Wall did not do the trick for the New Economy. Though it seemed to protect it from "external dialectical contradictions," it could not save it from its own "internal dialectical contradictions," where "oscillations become ever stronger, eventually leading the system beyond its stability boundaries until its quality is destroyed," as Klaus' Dictionary cybernetically reformulates the Marxist notion of dialectical contradiction. 25 The contradiction that a system whose measure was meant to be the non-alienated species being of humanity should be regulated by a mechanism that was indifferently human or machine was too much for a Marxist party to adapt to: contradictions on that scale were best left for the West to choke on. So, with the abandonment of the New Economic System in 1971, "the non-political coordination of individual economic and social interests fell in favor of exclusively political-ideological steering," effectively terminating socialism's—I cite the entry for "self organization"—"capacity . . . to improve its structure either to attain greater stability or to defend its internal milieu better and more purposefully against environmental disruptions or inner depreciation." 26
In order to clarify how the difficulties raised by the New Economic System relate to the problems of rational measurement and qualitative difference in modernity, I want to consider more closely a series of paradoxes that emerged in Klaus' publicity work on behalf of cybernetics. I start with Klaus' 1960 article in the Communist Party's national press organNeues Deutschland, in which he tentatively offers a cybernetic world view to a socialist public while showing appropriate deference to the views of official materialist philosophy. Then I look at a confident interview in Einheit, the theoretical organ of the Party Central Committee, given in 1967 when the New Economic System enjoyed strong official support. I end with Klaus' embattled defense of cybernetics in 1970 when the conservative handwriting on the wall was already legible, shortly before Ulbricht's, and the New Economics System's, defeat. The paradoxes encountered at these moments describe fundamental challenges socialism poses to itself that are simultaneously unanswered challenges to our modernity. Though the systemic antinomies of socialism are radically different than those generated by the liberal market system, the value scale in which they are addressed is familiar: modernity calibrated in the rational units of equality, freedom and prosperity. Our inquiry into Klaus' predicament will help us to see the deep discrepancies these values are unable either to apprehend or to ignore.
In his 1960 Neues Deutschland article "Control Circuits and Organisms" Klaus reasons more ideologically than scientifically in popularizing cybernetics, which was still being attacked in many circles as a bourgeois pseudoscience and only just beginning to find official patronage. 27 Describing the roots of cybernetic theory in engineering technology, he goes on to explain how the technical regularities of cybernetics effectively apply to the organic world, elaborating the importance of human-like computing and feedback mechanisms for organizing complex systems. "It is characteristic of cybernetics that it subjects to quantitative observation many process that were assumed to be only qualitatively comprehensible." 28 Such technological optimism was possible in what was, after all, the dawning computer-enabled space age and the age of industrial automation, and Klaus had only to point to the success of the Soviet Sputnik to find confirmation for his hopes. The ideological task of the article, however, was not simply to commend cybernetics' capabilities for integrating technology and human society, but more subtly, to not overpraise cybernetics lest it be seen as a pretender to dialectical materialism's role as the truly human arbiter of the sciences. Throughout the article he cautions against overextending analogies between machines and human intelligence. The idea that self-regulating machines could replace government plans might easily have been seen as sacrificing the very raison d'être for a non-market economy, namely, that human priorities, self-consciously deliberated, assume control over the hitherto blind mechanisms of economics. Or, to put the stakes in terms familiar in Western debates, the risk was that cybernetics might be taken as a proposal for allowing the quantitative "system-world" to dominate over the qualitative "life-world." Thus, Klaus aims tactically to limit the capabilities that one might ascribe to smart machines: while it must be recognized that in some sense the new robots can think like humans, they nonetheless "cannot think dialectically," as he concedes. 29 They can thus serve, but, for the time being at least, not replace human dialectical materialism. Klaus' argument limits the use of cybernetics to the pragmatic goal of most efficiently realizing the party's politically determined aims.
Yet there is a deep implication to Klaus' argument. What is it about dialectical thought that is not matched by cybernetic feedback circuits? The dialectic of quality and quantity, significantly, begins Hegel's Logic. 30 Being, according to Hegel, begins as quality given to the senses without mediation. It assumes its first mediation as a specific quantity of what is apprehended. Quantity, however, always threatens to negate Being as purely external to it. Hegel writes: "Number is a thought, but thought in its complete self-externalization. Because it is a thought, it does not belong to perception." 31 Only in a dialectical third term—measure—do qualitative perception and quantitative apprehension overcome their opposition.
Measure, where quality and quantity are in one is thus the completion of Being. Being, as we first apprehend it, is something utterly abstract and characterless; but it is the very essence of Being to characterize itself, and its complete characterization is reached in Measure. Measure, like the other stages of Being, may serve as a definition of the Absolute: God, it has been said, is the Measure of all things. 32
By conceding dialectics to humans, in this case, to the Communist Party, Klaus suggests that cybernetics, while it is driven by information, quantification and coordination, still needs to seek its valid measure outside itself. That measure is given by the Party; a society organized on socialist party principles, therefore, has no reason to fear cybernetic technocracy. The crucial question left hanging, however, is exactly how the Party is to find modernity's truly universal measure, the synthesis of what is qualitatively new about socialism and what is quantitatively commensurate across its various social tasks; for if Hegel's Absolute is too mystical a yardstick for the Party's materialism, then the question of where the Party can ground a universal, socialist measure, which is also technically precise in the most modern sense, is unanswered.
By the time of his 1967 Einheit interview, Klaus is ready to set a more ambitious agenda for cybernetics. He emphasizes the urgency, and the opportunity, of establishing what he calls "a new style of thought. . . corresponding to the time and the concrete requirements of the plan-based application of modern sciences, especially mathematics." 33 After touching on the importance of developing a "Marxist semiotics" in order to make socialist ideas "maximally effective," Klaus turns to cybernetics as the key to realizing Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. "In that we maximally scientifically shape the activity of human beings, we fill the imperative Marx set out in his famous Feuerbach theses: the philosophers have only variously interpreted the world, the point however is to change it." 34 With all the maximization involved in Klaus' rhetoric, it seems that technical reason is winning the upper hand over dialectical reason, an appearance confirmed by Klaus' recasting of Marx's thesis in terms that sound suspiciously technocratic. Here, Husserl's famous critique in The Crisis of European Sciences of the reduction of the life-world to the terms of the system-world illuminates the problem Klaus is heading toward. "The material plena—the 'specific' sense-qualities—which concretely fill out the spatio-temporal shape-aspects of the world of bodies cannot, in their own gradation, be directly treated as are [ideal geometric] shapes themselves. Nevertheless, these qualities, and everything that makes up the concreteness of the sensibly intuited world, must count as manifestations of an 'objective' world." 35 Contrary to Hegel, Husserl believes that the progressive subordination of the world to a Platonic "metretike techne," a science of measurement, leads not to overcoming the opposition between quality and quantity, but to the effacement of qualitative experience in the name of a spurious objectivity.
Klaus, however, now serving as the GDR's philosopher-in-chief, confidently reclaims socialism's proper measure from the all-too-human Party for the mathematized world of cybernetics. "The relationship between quantity and quality is described exactly by mathematics and logic," according to the Dictionary. 36 Thus, Klaus observes to his interviewer that "in the complex intersection of nested cybernetic systems" which make up the emerging socialist world, only cybernetic theory truly addresses "the unity of laws of socialist development." 37 Such an assertion of cybernetic sovereignty can be followed by the interviewer only with an awed question about cybernetics' insight into "the essence of socialism's social laws." 38 Klaus answers by describing a once insurmountable philosophical paradox that socialist cybernetics now dissolves. On the one hand, the individual human is the subject of objective laws; in a modern society, the laws of information, coordination and control. On the other hand, the free individual creatively participates in shaping these laws. 39 For Klaus, cybernetics is able to dissolve the ancient paradox and simultaneously illuminate the essence of socialism's social laws by recasting the dialectic of necessity and freedom in game theoretical terms. At socialism's core, then, is a resourceful game in which each player follows a five-year plan and at the same time creatively shapes the plan in anticipation of the other players' decisions. For him, no high-spirited game could be more different from capitalism's hostile, chaotic, and counter-productive competition, whose rules, precisely because they are unplanned, are the equivalent of natural laws to which the individual is merely subject.
The resolved paradox of necessity and freedom gives way, however, to another paradox, that of continuity and discontinuity. 40 On the one hand, cybernetics is a "more exact and modern mode of thought," (EDHS, 165) and Klaus everywhere emphasizes its precision. Its goal is to mathematize social processes, as the ideal form of quantification, so as to control them more exactly, and, ultimately, to coordinate them as a single non-self-contradictory process, namely, as socialism, with humanity at its base. As we have seen, Klaus is quite willing now to suggest that dialectics can be mathematized; that the organic-robotic split of the 1960 Neues Deutschland article no longer applies. "Mathematics," he now believes, "can well grasp and represent the essence of things, the quality of things." 41 On the other hand, the very precision and mathematical exhaustiveness of cybernetic control is designed to produce a discontinuous leap—"eine sprunghafte Steigerung"—in human potential. 42 That is, the intensification of quantification in each aspect of life, plus the homogenization of measurement across subsystems, leads not to mechanistic stasis, but on the contrary to a discontinuous release of potential that is essentially qualitative and, as such, unquantifiable ("transformation of quantitative change into qualitative"). 43 This problem of exactly how, when and where a qualitative leap occurs becomes a central theme of socialist self-observation, especially in its literary culture. It also has another paradoxical dimension in that it appears that the transition from one state to the next involves an irrational flash somewhat like a religious conversion. Such apparent leaps between continuous systems are as unacceptable to dialectical materialists as they are to rational realists like Popper and Imre Lakatos. Popper admits "that an intellectual revolution often looks like a religious conversion." Yet it would be "simply false to say that the transition from Newton's theory of gravity to Einstein's is an irrational leap and that the two are not rationally comparable." 44 The transition of an entire social system to a new qualitative level appears even more mysterious than the transition across intellectual programs.
As if these aporias of cybernetic socialism were not enough, as the New Economic System comes under increasing ideological pressure shortly before the removal of Ulbricht, Klaus finds himself having to defend cybernetics from two related charges—that it promotes value-neutral social science, and that it implies in its neutrality that system optimization is tantamount to system convergence; in other words, that cybernetics, as opposed to Marxism, is not partisan in its application, but constructs a unitary, technocratic modernity. In the 1970 Einheit article, Klaus responds to these accusations in two ways, one substantive and one stylistic. Cybernetics does not efface differences between socialism and capitalism, he argues, because of "the opposition of their goals," and more importantly, because of "the way in which the elements and individual laws of cybernetics are applied to reach the goal." 45 Cybernetics, he claims, only maximizes systemic potential over a certain quality of relationships and values. "Capitalism, for example, forms a social system with a corresponding class content, class ideology, etc. Its subsystems by no means function to promote an optimization of the whole system. In the socialist system, by contrast, the human stands in the middle point and the development of each subsystem always proceeds with reference to the whole." 46 The paradox here is that for all of cybernetics' precision and mathematical abstraction, there is still at its core a qualitative value, a subjective qualia or an Aristotelian entelecheia, that gives the absolute measure of its coordinated functions: namely, the human. Not God, but as Protagoras claimed, "man is the measure of all things." 47 Capitalism, for Klaus, as much as it strives for efficiency and optimality is merely maximizing profits, not people. Cybernetics is now conceived as a useful instrument, applied to systems that themselves are not spontaneously generated (autopoietic) organizations, but represent and maximize certain incommensurable realities. The distinct identity of each system derives from the qualitative difference of its underlying value-giver: and this qualitative discontinuity vouches for the partisan incommensurability of capitalist and communist systems, even as they share the project of measurable optimization.
As humanistic as Klaus' sentiment is here, he knows his New Economic System is under threat, and responds with a correspondingly militant rhetoric, writing that cybernetics is "a weapon in the hands of the victorious revolutionary working class and its allies . . . a means for developing its offensive in the struggle against imperialism." 48 Cybernetics and its scientific values are transformed in the crisis of the New Economic System into a weapon of metaphorical violence. They are offered allegorically as a way to carry on class war by other means, means appropriate to an enlightened social formation: by virtue of superior human potential. This potential, however, remains crucially unquantifiable and revolutionary: a discontinuous leap. Precisely cybernetics, which coordinates, measures, mathematizes, cannot articulate the discontinuity of the human quality whose liberation is its reason for being: except, that is, in this metaphorical violence. Of the paradoxical inability of a new paradigm—or, in this case, an entire new social formation—to ground its values in its own commensurable terms, Thomas Kuhn writes that "in a debate over choice of theory, neither party has access to an argument which resembles a proof in logic or formal mathematics . . . their recourse is to persuasion as prelude to the possibility of proof." 49 The violence of Klaus' otherwise so measured rhetoric exemplifies a switch from a realm of syllogistic reason within a system to a realm between systems, where values can only confront each other with persuasive force, what Plato called rhetorical peithos in contrast to the episteme of science that relies only on the gentle coercion of the better argument. 50 For rhetoric serves its end where there is no common standard of validity, and according to Plato, "when you call things fair, such as bodies and colors and res and sounds and institutions, you must do so surely with reference to some standard." 51
Klaus' advocacy for cybernetics, as it is pushed up against the wall, hints at the uncanny double reference in socialism's self reference, a doubling that haunts the otherwise familiar values of socialism's pragmatic rationality. Because the vocabularies of modern scientific rationality are modest in their ontological commitment to the measurable evidence of daily life, the chasm of immeasurable violence that separated the socialist and non-socialist worlds remained perforce inarticulate in the idiom of daily trial and error. Socialism's insecure culture, however, unlike that of the confident, even solipsistic West, characteristically doubted its underlying structural integrity—its differentia specifica—just seriously enough to throw into question whether or not it was really—qualitatively, quantitatively and dialectically—distinct from capitalism. It needed to pose to itself the question of difference and its trepidation and vehemence cast into deep relief the ghostly menace of the imponderable abyss between worlds.
If Klaus' desperate apology takes on a touch of the comic in its grandiloquence, our subsequent reading of a comic story by Franz Fühmann is rather more eerie. Where Klaus' technophilia presents a red reflection of our blue-blooded modernity with deadpan literalness, Fühmann's fiction recognizes the aporias, the undecidability that his society has opened in modernity without being able to close again. His story does not so much mirror similar genre pieces in the West with symmetrical values, but, because socialism never secured itself as an autarkic alternative, its literature reflects, as scarcely another does, the intensity of a system whose simultaneously real and impossible difference from modernity causes the violence of sovereignty to turn in on itself.
I heap up monstrous sums, Pile on the millions,
I set time upon time
And world upon world in a heap,
And when, from dizzying height,
I look again toward you:
All the might of number,
Multiplied a thousand fold,
Is not even one part of you.
Albrecht von Haller, 1736 52
"The Heap", like many Fühmann stories, seems remote from GDR politics and Cold War conflict. 53 Its theme is the classical Greek paradox of the sorites: if an element of a heap—say, a grain of wheat—is a discrete quantity, then the gradual addition of one discrete element to another discrete element can only add up to a discrete quantity and never to a heap. In terms of mathematical induction: since two are few, and three are few also, and since for any number n that are few, n+1 are few also; then, a thousand are few as surely as are two. The ancient physician Galen, accordingly, concluded "there must not be such a thing in the world as a heap of grain, a mass or satiety, neither a mountain nor strong love, nor a row, nor strong wind, nor city nor anything else which is known from its name and idea to have a measure of extent or multitude, such as the wave, the open sea, a flock of sheep and herd of cattle, the nation and the crowd." 54 Yet socialism—Fühmann's historical reality—is existentially predicated on the possibility of a qualitative distinction in modernity, a class consciousness, a species being, a secular redemption in human life. How then do the relentless quantities of daily perceptions precipitate suddenly into a socialist quality?