But Angel Harper was completely like that, he would begin trying to remember his walk, or his nose or his mouth or his hair or his clothes and how tall he was and what he did with his hands and he just could not remember what Angel Harper did look like.  Entirely lacking the faculty of memory, since time runs backward, effect precedes cause, and there is no past to recall in the present, the "I" is cut off from the identity of this person whose body and mind he inhabits. The narrator watches, trapped, bemused, amoral, as the thing with a name, an identity to use Stein's terms, moves confusingly through the world. Mrs. Reynolds is Stein's earlier version of the puzzle Amis makes, though it lacks the morally redemptive satirical thrust of Time's Arrow.  When Angel Harper even considers telling his life story, he finds that "[h]e could not think in that way, he could not remember, he only remembered what he left." His past has not completely vanished; it lies in abandoned pieces behind him, "left" rather than narratively gathered up and brought with him into now: "Little by little he tried to remember what he had but he never could, he could only remember what he left" (MR, 85).
The true horror of Stein's Angel Harper is that, because he lacks the ability to forge a narrative from events, he is utterly amoral. His actions are unmotivated, and his thoughts are disconnected from those actions. As Laurence Kirmayer succinctly puts it, "[t]he moral function of memory is to compel us to confront what we--and all around us--wish to leave behind." 42 The canvas of Mrs. Reynolds is dotted with brief recollected vignettes from Angel Harper's childhood, but Angel Harper's past has for him no gravity, nor does he live in the present as though his actions will become part of a burden he must carry. Instead of providing us with explanatory frames for understanding, glimpses of psychosis or sociopathology in embryo, his memories stand isolated from the paragraphs around them and from the recollecting subject himself. The trigger for each memory is invariably nothing more than time: "When he was forty-three," a typical episode begins, "he remembered that when he was thirteen he would sit by a drain and whisper in it to some one on the other side of it" (MR, 109). The memories are often vaguely disturbing, but nothing analytically or emotionally productive arises from these disturbances:
[W]hen he was forty-four he remembered that when he had been fourteen, he played a game and each one, not he but each one around him had a knife, and each one came up to him and whispered something to him and he did not whisper anything . . . When he was forty-four he remembered about this that it had been happening when he was fourteen. (MR, 118-19)
"Enough said," the next paragraph begins, and the adolescents with their knives and their whispers fade from view. Angel Harper suffers from angst but not remorse, from unfocused anxiety but not guilt. Even recollections that, with a small degree of psychologically coherent treatment, might serve as keys to character are either simply abandoned or are turned by the narrative into occasions for wordplay:
[W]hen he was fifty-three he remembered that when he was fifteen he asked them to make a very small enclosure of stone and in that in a chair he sat alone and sometimes he let another boy sit in there with him and near him he let a little girl make a little park with flowers and when he was fifty-three he remembered all that. (MR, 276)
Echoing Stein's conundrum about the man's inability to recall the little boy who preceded him, the narrative following this memory expresses surprise that the fifty-three-year-old Angel Harper even found this piece of his childhood floating into his field of vision: "He might not have remembered all that, because when he was fifty-three there was not much to remember at, because he often felt very different from any day to any day" (MR, 276). The paragraph then takes a conspicuous turn away from analysis and toward poetry, with rhythm and rhyme seeming to determine sense. The word "Jew" (it is impossible to imagine three letters that carry a stronger ethical and political charge in the early 1940s) occurs mostly because it is a word that rhymes with so many other words. Here is more medium than message, on an occasion when a moral order would demand a message:
What shall I do he said if I am or if I am not a Jew, what shall I do he said, he was fifty-three and he was not lonesome and he was not subdued, he was very rude, not rude to himself because although he was afraid he went away to go ahead and he never never went to bed. So one at a time there was no time. (MR, 277)
There is, as Stein said of Wars I Have Seen, "something momentous happening" somewhere behind the words of Mrs. Reynolds, but, with every character and the narrative voice all being "existences suspended in time," we cannot make supportable leaps from those words to the world. In a masterful paragraph of suggestive but untranslatable comparisons, Mrs. Reynolds attempts to locate Angel Harper on an occupational spectrum, to put him convincingly next to any other person. "Nobody asked her," the passage wryly begins--why should the opinion of a Mrs. Reynolds matter?--"but what did she think of him." In the absence of an interlocutor, the occasion for speech must be rhetorical:
She thought that he was not as useful as a plumber and more dangerous, she thought that he was not as useful as an electrician but more violent, she thought that he was not as regular as a gardener but more destructive, she thought that he was more solemn than a baker but more fiery, and she thought he was not as bloody as a butcher but more deceitful, and then she burst out into hysterical laughter and Mr. Reynolds said what is it, and she said it is Angel Harper and he is fifty just fifty going on being fifty, and if, and she gave a deep sigh if he only never came to be fifty-one. (MR, 188)
Mrs. Reynolds, rarely caught in "the state of confusion between anybody doing anything and anything happening," typically concludes her musings on Angel Harper's dangerous progress with a prayer that his time run out--that he not be allowed to "go on being" whatever age he happens to be. Another way to put this is to say that Mrs. Reynolds shares her creator's skepticism, her passivity concerning cause and effect and action. For her, the present lies contiguous to but not obviously connected to the past and future.
Like Stein too, she would prefer to be disconnected from the responsibility that memory entails: "Mrs. Reynolds said she wished that she was a cow and then she would only know now, and not about the clock going back" (MR, 221). If one is lost in the beguiling pages of The Geographical History of America or in "What are Master-Pieces?" living entirely in the "now" of the human mind may seem liberating. The attempt looks somewhat different--and Stein knows that it looks different--on the pages of Mrs. Reynolds, where we discover a state of mind that is historical in spite of itself. In 1936 Stein could protest that "[t]he newspapers tell about events but what have events to do with anything nothing" (GH, 95). Now it is the early 1940s and, in a fine moment of sardonic comedy that has as its target both Mrs. Reynolds and Gertrude Stein, we hear Mrs. Reynolds talking to her husband: "Mr. Miner says, said Mrs. Reynolds to Mr. Reynolds that there is a great difference between there was an army and there is an army" (MR, 248). The problem Stein sets for herself (and for the anxious heroine of Mrs. Reynolds) is how to register the fact of this terrible difference without succumbing entirely to the newspapers, to the clock ticking regularly inside as well as outside her head, to the obligations and the false sense of agency that memory entails. How to avoid the easy, unpleasant, and unproductive slide into materialism that leads straight to the dullest forms of narrative but yields nothing of aesthetic or philosophical value?
Bearing comparison with the H.D. of "Trilogy" or the Yeats of A Vision, Stein in Mrs. Reynolds discovers that prophecy--in particular, the prophetic voices of Saint Odile and Saint Godfrey--allows time into the world she creates without requiring that she also import memory, or human agency, or a developed political or ethical system. Stein herself avidly read and recounted to her friends during the war the work of a "Leonardo Blake," an English astrologer whose two books, Hitler's Last Year of Power and The Last Year of the War provide much of the structure and rationale for Mrs. Reynolds. Both books, filled with the horoscopes of leaders and nations, are saturated with dates and magisterial pronouncements that bear particular resonance for anyone who has been reading Stein. "Men only think they are the makers of history," Blake insists, but "[a]ctually there is being staged in Europe to-day the greatest puppet-show in the history of man." 43 "For the prophet," Blake writes, "there is neither past, present, nor future. To him all Time is an eternal present. Thus, what is to come is as evident to him as what has past." 44 Writing from the perspective of Yeats's Chinamen in "Lapis Lazuli," sounding a bit like the impersonal poet in Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Blake says: "I have written this book not because I am an adversary of the Nazi regime (for the true astrologer is far removed from any kind of party politics and prejudices)." 45 "The astrologer who genuinely desires to help those around him," Blake continues, "must first liberate himself from his own ego . . . In interpreting the cosmic law, it is not a subjective perception that matters, but an objective perception of the whole secret fabric of creation." 46
The promise that Blake holds for Stein is order and answers--repose in a deeply conservative system that does not even require the knowledge, much less the assent or participation of the actors caught up in their strictly assigned parts. There is a folder among Stein's papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale University filled with typed and handwritten prophesies, copied at different times and from different sources. Two of those prophesies, those of Saints Odile and Godfrey, make their way almost verbatim into the text of Mrs. Reynolds. 47 It is fitting that Stein, in a willing abdication of her role as author, had only to act as a conduit for the wisdom of the stars, copying these maps of the future into her book. In order to clarify how fully prophecy is memory's antagonist, we might briefly consider Henri Bergson's central argument in his Matter and Memory (1896, trans. 1911). Memory for Bergson is the faculty that is "placed at the confluence of mind and matter." It binds ideas to the real; it attaches consciousness to the world with our body at that world's center:
Do we turn to memory? We note that its primary function is to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful. But this is not all. By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, it frees us from the movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity. 48
One cannot imagine a more profound nightmare for Mrs. Reynolds than this freedom from the comforting rhythm of what must be. "Dear me," she sighs late in Stein's chronicle of her days, "it is so tiresome not to know what is going to be happening" (MR, 246). Bergson's memory suspends us above time's flow only long enough for us to make a choice and then plunge willingly in again; Blake and the Saints offer Mrs. Reynolds and her creator another way out.
But what makes Mrs. Reynolds a compelling and complex portrait of "the way anybody could feel" during the war are the difficulties Mrs. Reynolds has in taking consolation from her saints. Predictions should palliate anxiety: "Mrs. Reynolds said she felt very complicated this morning and so she would calm herself by reading the predictions of Saint Odile" (MR, 277). But every calm, uncomplicated morning in this book is thrown off kilter by subsequent doubts. It is not easy to rest outside of time: "Dear me said Mrs. Reynolds if I knew how to be patient and I know how to be impatient I would know that everything is imminent" (MR, 325). Over and over, with increasing frequency as the book progresses and Angel Harper lives year after costly year, the narrator must assure us that Mrs. Reynolds's faith has not waned. "[S]he had not weakened, she was still choosing Saint Odile" (MR, 291), we learn at one of the points in the novel where Stein reveals the current date (it is 1942). It is hardly surprising that in this grim year Mrs. Reynolds confesses on the following page: "I weakened a little bit" (MR, 292). Like Stein, she finds it necessary to write Saint Odile's words over, since "when she made a copy of it she believed it all again" (MR, 233). 49 More than a decade earlier, in 1926, Stein had told the audiences at Cambridge and Oxford that "beginning again and again" was of central importance to her work. 50 In this late and guardedly historical fiction, repetition derives from the pervasive sense that nothing provides a purchase on the world. Mrs. Reynolds, having renounced the internal chronology provided by memory, has to begin every day again, trying to conjure some sense into time's passing and find some tranquility in her powerlessness. Late in the novel, long after we have heard the full text of Saint Odile's prophecy repeated several times, Mrs. Reynolds comes excitedly home to her patient, skeptical, agreeable husband:
Well said Mrs. Reynolds it is astonishing. I was so astonished that I cannot get over it. What said Mr. Reynolds. Why said Mrs. Reynolds that it is just the same I read a book said Mrs. Reynolds and it is all the same about the same date, well yes the same date and it is the same and now I am only waiting for the ting in the streets of the city of cities, to believe that Saint Odile is right and of course Saint Odile is right and it is all the same, and said Mrs. Reynolds even if it does not make any difference to me and in a way it does not make any difference to me but I have not a restless feeling but an underground happy feeling that it is all the same . . . and you are all the same said Mrs. Reynolds and Mr. Reynolds said well, and Mrs. Reynolds said yes or no, and Mr. Reynolds said yes yes, and no no, or if you like it better yes no or no yes. (MR, 294)
Stein makes narrative either something impossible to discover--in her opaque prose-poetry--or, as here, she saturates it with comedy--the often dark comedy of disjunctions arising from any structure that makes the absurd claim: "first X then Y." Instead we have X, then X again, with the corollary that we cannot keep track of the Xs, since each fades so quickly from our memory after its iteration. Each statement is wholly new, entirely and perpetually modern, though in its very novelty, its singularity, it destroys even the possibility that we might assign it a temporal position. Stein is most modern in her idiosyncratic, longstanding preoccupation with memory, forgetting, and the structures created by the endless interplay between recollection and amnesia. "Thinking," she admits, "is something that does so nearly need to be memory," but she nevertheless continues to attempt to dissever the mind from its milieus. 51 Positioning her historically requires that we honor fully her resistance to being "placed" historically at all, and we can only honor that resistance by taking it seriously enough to observe Stein's own writing of that resistance deeply into the details of her narratives.
In her "Epilogue" to Mrs. Reynolds, immediately preceding her final sentence tying history to a "state of mind," Stein describes how "the shadow of two men" (Hitler and Stalin) "gets bigger and then blows away and there is no other" (MR, 331). No legacy, then, of the War--nothing to remember, no stories really worth telling. If we care to, we can read the newspapers. Of course she knows that most of us will not or cannot let the past simply blow away. She knows, too, since she herself is not consistently able to turn the world and its activity into shadows or puppet shows, that we will continue to worry, as will she, over politics and the shape of our futures. But she believes her most important labor to be elsewhere--on a project so different from our current preoccupations in the academy that it proves difficult even to discern or credit. Stein aspires to live in what Eliot described, in the greatest modern poetic treatment of memory and the possibilities of living within and outside of time, as "the unimaginable / Zero summer"--where, in her own phrase, "everything is imminent" and nothing is happening.
The critical practice that promises to situate a text most firmly, most literally in time is textual scholarship. Think of Ulysses or, their every word plotted on a retrospectively assembled The Waste Land calendar of composition. Jerome McGann concludes The Textual Condition proclaiming that all events "[localize] human temporalities." "To the interpreter," he writes, "texts often appear as the images of time; to the maker of texts, however, they are the very events of time and history itself." 52 The finished text constitutes, in its procession of letters across the page, a memorial to time's passing in the life of its author. Drafts of that text offer an even more obvious witness to temporality. As the textual critic makes an ordered gathering of earlier versions, he or she fully exposes the diachronic nature of writing. McGann reminds us that "[v]ariation . . . is the invariant rule of the textual condition." 53 Like markings on the face of a clock, variants provide us with a way to calibrate the author's labor and to tie her changing words to time. But Stein proves every bit as difficult to fix on any textual clock as she is resistant to location in occupied France. When we turn to her drafts, prompted by a desire to glimpse the author at work, what we find disrupts one of the founding premises of textual scholarship: that texts evolve over time. On this most fundamental level--the level of writing itself--Stein forces us to consider the philosophical and procedural difficulties attending all epistemologies that privilege temporal, historical categories of understanding.
Mrs. Reynolds provided us with a textual locus for examining Stein's complex positioning of a subject in historical time. To focus my discussion of her equally complex and closely related compositional practice, I turn to a long essay she sometimes called "Phenomena of Nature," sometimes "Natural Phenomena." She composed the essay in 1925-1926; it was first published posthumously in the Yale Gertrude Stein . I choose this essay in large part because we are fortunate to have, among Stein's papers at the Beinecke library, textual witnesses from each of her three characteristic compositional stages. These stages have been described with admirable clarity by Ulla Dydo, a pioneer in the study of Stein's manuscripts. 54 For "Phenomena of Nature," an essay that has received very little attention in print, we have eight surviving carnets--the small copybooks in which Stein composed the earliest drafts of her work. 55 We have a complete set of twenty-five cahiers--larger notebooks that contain a manuscript transcription of the essay. And we have the full typescript, used to set the text for publication in 1955. Though Stein wrote this piece twenty years before writing Mrs. Reynolds, and though she, her writing, and the world changed enormously in the intervening years, the means by which she builds "Phenomena of Nature" are directly and revealingly comparable to the way she tells her anti-temporal historical narrative of the Second World War.
Stein's career has been more or less usefully divided into phases by a number of her critics. 56 In her autobiographical writings, Stein herself energetically promoted this practice of partitioning. And these divisions can come to seem like uncrossable borders to Stein's critics: what has her work of the mid-1920s to do with a novel composed in the early 1940s? But "Phenomena of Nature" and Mrs. Reynolds belong together in a discussion of Stein, memory, and critical locations of her in "place, time, life, history, materiality." 57 A writer's habits of work reveal fundamental assumptions about the world and the place of the writer and her writing in that world. In Stein's case, the way she writes, the way she moves through successive versions of a text, constitutes the methodological foundation of her assault against the reign of memory, the tyrannies of time.
By way of illustrating the challenge Stein presents to textual scholarship, I quote three sentences from the first portion of "Phenomena of Nature" for which we have draft evidence.  In what way is this their seat and seated. Believing in chance" (92:1716). Here are those sentences in their final, printed version: "They hate sitting, sitting where, sitting there and being allowed to sit anywhere. In what way is this their seat and seated. Believing in chance." 58 We can find twenty-eight draft passages for "Phenomena of Nature" scattered among the eight carnets. We can count on one hand the instances of deletions at this earliest compositional stage. There are virtually no instances of interpolations. Even the tiniest details of punctuation and capitalization are, for the most part, set from the start. Except for what seem to be occasional slips of the pen, the text as it appears in the cahiers is identical to the published version. It is difficult to convey fully how odd these notebooks first appear to one accustomed to making discoveries in drafts. The term "draft" itself, though useful as a term to distinguish Stein's first, handwritten copy of a text from a later, printed version, is misleading insofar as it implies a preliminary sketch or rough version. 59 This is an archive filled with mirrors rather than windows.
In an essay on Virginia Woolf and textual criticism, Brenda Silver remarks that "[o]nce seen, once read, the words and images found in the previous versions shadow and illuminate the impressions we receive from the familiar words on the well-thumbed page and create something new." 60 Stein's essay startles because its drafts cast almost no shadows, because we discover, when we fix our attention on what preceded the present text, sameness rather than difference: Narcissus staring in the silvered pool; Echo following in the track of every prior utterance. There are, it is true, slight variations at each of the essay's stages of composition. Carnets, cahiers, typescript, and typeset versions each posses significantly different bibliographic codes. 61 And the carnets are filled with a complex assembly of other writings to which I will return. But I dwell first on the extraordinary unnaturalness of "Natural Phenomena" in its earliest form. The sentences in their first and final versions, ending as they began, complete a circle that obscures from our view evidence of the author's earliest intentions and of changes to those intentions; of problems encountered and overcome or left unresolved in the course of composition; of expressive alterations in the design of details or of the whole. They leave us with a starkly simple text that speaks of presence rather than growth. "Phenomena of Nature" is, in an important sense, an essay without a past.
Dydo has pointed out that Stein herself claimed "she did not believe in revision, for if writing involved the perception of the here and now, revisions were bound to force a text into a different here and now, which required different verbal forms." 62 But Dydo's own work, particularly her discussion of "Stanzas in Meditation," dwells on Stein's comparatively few but powerfully significant revisions, and Dydo assures us that "[e]ven pieces that show no evidence of revision were not tossed off without the hard work and concentrated effort that Stein called meditation." 63 Dydo's defensive pronouncement demonstrates, among other things, how much traditional scholarship relies on drafts to document an author's worth. Evidence of extensive labor helps guarantee the value we ascribe to the final text. The criticisms brought against Stein during her lifetime and after her death--we need only think of Wyndham Lewis, sneering at the "sodden lustreless heaping up of sheer meaningless material"--could be so much more easily dispensed with if there were some equivalent to the forty-nine notebooks marshaled behind the published Finnegans Wake. 64 But it is perhaps necessary to add, before I turn to a detailed description of the textual witnesses for "Phenomena of Nature," that I do not intend to propose evaluative judgments of Stein's work based on her compositional practices. Her improvisatory method does raise important questions about how audiences determine aesthetic value and how we might interpret writing that reaches publication without evidence of revision. But my primary concern here is to examine and explain the epistemological convictions that underwrite Stein's way of making "Phenomena of Nature." It should also be understood that Stein does not write all of her work in the same fashion. She generally composes her more accessible, more openly referential writing in a manner familiar to textual scholars. She works from notes through changing drafts to a final version. "Natural Phenomena" provides us with an unusually rich illustration of an alternative path to completion--a path Stein tends to follow as she creates her less referential texts.
"Phenomena of Nature" is a little over twenty thousand words in length. It is reasonable to suppose that Stein drafted the entire composition in carnets before she and Alice Toklas copied the material to cahiers. The eight relevant carnets contain a total of twenty-eight sections from the essay--some as short as forty words, most falling somewhere between two and four hundred words. Interspersed with these pieces of "Phenomena of Nature" are love notes and drawings to Alice; miscellaneous lists--lists of names, of the day's necessary groceries, of titles; various addresses; agendas for the day or the week; reading notes; sums; drafts of letters; and pieces of other compositions that Stein was concurrently writing: "Business in Baltimore," "A Novel of Thank You," "A Third." 65 Alice often responds to Stein's notes; she also occasionally uses the carnets for her own lists and daily jottings.
The writing in the carnets is usually inverted about halfway through each notebook: the reader must turn the notebook over at the midpoint and begin afresh from the other end. Sometimes there will be a page in the middle of a carnet where the two halves of the book meet and the inverted writing lies interlineated, like Leopold and Molly Bloom in bed. While Stein does not break sections of "Phenomena of Nature" at these points of inversion, she may continue composing the same text after turning the carnet over and beginning to work her way toward the middle of the notebook from the other cover. 66 The sequence of sections within each carnet rarely follows the sequence in the final "Phenomena of Nature," and the material from a given carnet, if that carnet contains more than one portion of the essay, can be distributed over anywhere from two to eight pages of the final text. 67 This is an essay assembled at the level of the cahiers, built like a mosaic out of the tesserae that are the short bits of prose selected from the carnets. We have at most a third of the carnet witnesses for this text. As Stein pieced "Phenomena of Nature" together, she would have been choosing passages from a large stack of little notebooks, each of which already constituted an extraordinarily heterogeneous collection of writings. I cannot imagine the essay coming from fewer than twenty carnets; there could conceivably have been twice that number. Joyce's large envelopes stuffed with disparate material for chapters of Ulysses come to mind, as do Woolf's 1930s scrapbooks that lie behind The Years and Three Guineas, but these famously scattered archives ultimately yield wholes, even though those final texts are in part designed to let readers see that the book they read was built from snippets. Stein's mosaic does not produce a picture of anything, nor does it reveal a pattern. We must read as she wrote, moving from one small unit to the next, never trying to back up far enough that we can forget the compositional medium and dwell instead on any resemblance to something we might vaguely denominate "life."
In a fine and utterly characteristic moment of straight-faced, provocative comedy from The Geographical History of America, Stein wryly expresses her lack of interest in totalities:
I found that any kind of book if you read with glasses and somebody is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something.
Very regrettable but very true.
So that shows to you that a whole thing is not interesting because a whole well as a whole there has to be remembering and forgetting, but one at a time, oh one at a time is something oh yes definitely something. 68
Stein's discovery of a method for disassembling books as she reads will come as "regrettable" news to all the readers and writers who prefer that language remain subordinate, in the service of narrative. It becomes clear, when working segment by segment through the carnets (particularly if one is transcribing every word), that Stein composes in these little books partly to frustrate any impulses she might have toward forcing her words to amount to something grand.
With a carnet open before her, she could never even see more than twenty or thirty words at one time. Switching from one work-in-progress to another, and frequently shifting registers entirely (sandwiching, say, a menu for tomorrow's dinner or a love note with an accompanying page of sketches between part of "Phenomena of Nature" and "Business in Baltimore"), she would find it virtually impossible to establish a narrative line. Stein demarcates sections of her works with short title headings--"P. of N ." or "N .P ."; "B. in B ."; "Novel"; "A Third"--that already signal a breakdown of wholes into parts. We find no regular order and no set length of the sections. Stein occasionally superimposes one section title on another, changing her direction the way an improvising musician may suddenly change key or tempo. Sometimes the superimposition occurs in an obviously different pencil: she may have returned to an already drafted section and reassigned its location; she might have left a heading for herself that she later decided not to use; she might simply have changed her mind as she was picking up another pencil. She had a definite but shifting sense, as she was writing, of what she wanted to be composing, and the carnets allow her to honor the vagaries of her desire, their rules of assembly insisting all the while that the desire remain vagrant. 69 Though there are instances where the ending of one section has obviously triggered a word or phrase in the next, there are not overarching themes or even substantial and sustained verbal echoes binding sections together. 70 Carnets have the unity granted them by the physical fact that each is a separate book, but they are not collections of fragments shored or bound together--not a Waste Land or Wake, not Cantos, certainly not Quartets.
Or perhaps, if we were so inclined and if Stein did not warn us so vehemently against the activity, we could make these little notebooks cohere as fully as do any of those differently disheveled monuments. When we see words in a book, we move naturally and expediently to connect them with one another and to have them point to something. The fact of that pointing itself then bespeaks unity of purpose and design. The problem of referentiality--and for Stein it is a problem precisely because readers remain incorrigibly interested in words' capacity to evoke images of "whole things"--haunts the interpretive history of Stein's opaque writings and is staged as both problem and blessing with extraordinary vividness throughout the carnets. Once we have read the carnets for "Phenomena of Nature," particularly when we have discovered the notes between Gertrude and Alice, it is difficult to read the published essay only as Stein wants us to, concentrating on words "one at a time," without any "remembering or forgetting." The unrevised manuscript origins of "Phenomena of Nature" present us with a powerful witness to Stein's attempt at banishing memory from the process of composition, her refusal of what McGann calls "the textual condition." But we find these portions of "Natural Phenomena" adjacent to very different kinds of writing. At the farthest extreme from the polished surfaces of "Phenomena of Nature" are Stein's notes to Alice, which exhibit language in its most deeply and privately referential aspect. Stein's meditative writing for publication is the product of the human mind; love letters are, of all kinds of writing, the genre belonging most fully to human nature, predicated as they are on memory and voice, designed expressly to evoke the absent beloved. Filled with both kinds of writing, the carnets simultaneously celebrate and eschew reference.
I do not turn to Stein's private writing so that I may crack the code of "Natural Phenomena." I am not interested in cross-referential interpretations that will uncover love letters in Stein's public works. The particular importance of the carnets as I read them is that they reveal Stein moving among various linguistic registers, considering different ways of deploying words, and they thereby constitute a crucial, underutilized locus for observing her shifting as a writer between human mind and human nature. In addition to reading her pronouncements concerning the differences between these two states of being, we can observe her negotiating their different demands on the pages of these little books.
The notes to and from Alice do not remain neatly cordoned off from the other writings in the carnets, though one might suppose they do from Dydo's description of them in "Reading the Hand Writing":
Often (Stein) began work in a carnet by pencilling little love notes, jingles, intimate addresses, and sometimes drawings to Toklas. These notes are written in a tiny, thin, "secret" hand to offset them from actual compositions. None are literary. 71
What is in fact most provocative about this intimate writing to Alice is that it spills over into adjacent sections. It is by no means always written in a "secret hand"; there are no dependably consistent, convenient graphic signals that warn us when we have moved from literature to love, from "actual composition" to something more private. The notes do regularly occur as invocations at the beginning of a carnet (or at both beginnings, since the inverted writing in the carnets can be said to give each notebook two beginnings), but they can turn up anywhere between the covers. When we have read a handful of these notes, becoming steeped in their characteristic turns of phrase and attuned to their typical vocabulary, we cannot read the public "Phenomena of Nature" or the private letters to Alice without hearing echoes between theoretically distinct kinds of writing. Human mind and human nature, it turns out, share a good deal of the same vocabulary. Even if one reads word by word, determined to look neither forward nor backward for wholes, language is a vexing medium for the human mind to use. Paint or sound seem inherently more promising. Words are like burrs: they stick so readily to the fabric of the world, to our lives, our recollected pasts, our vividly experienced presents, our imagined futures. Stein treats her medium in the carnets as an improvising musician treats notes--building without erasure or backtracking (except as repetition with change constitutes a form of serial revision in which the earlier version also remains present on the completed page). But insofar as her reader holds the carnets in his or her memory, parts of "Phenomena of Nature" can carry complex attractive charges, recalling adjacent and differently directed writing from the carnets. I said earlier that the drafts for "Phenomena of Nature" cast no shadows. That was not entirely true. Those drafts are surrounded by shadows--writing that remembers, writing that recalls and anticipates items, places, people, ideas, the body, the presence of the beloved. To read the carnets is to watch Stein (and to imagine Alice) crossing the vaguely demarcated boundary between referential writing and the writing without precedent or elsewheres that is "Natural Phenomena."
Consider two pages from one of the carnets. Stein has been composing "N.P.": "She does not like a flower to droop its head and so instead she pours a little water in its bed. And she noticed it and told me and I was pleased to hear about it although just then although just then" (1734; NP, 194). The next page begins with a parenthetical aside to Alice (and perhaps, as a reminder, to Gertrude as well)--"(this is separate)"--followed by a brief, typical "note to tell my wifie that I can quote and that I wrote and that she will have come out a cow now now how, sweetly" . The parenthesis claiming separation is necessary only because the passage from "Phenomena of Nature," in its preciousness, its intimate focus on nurturing, on conversation, on giving and pleasure, slips easily into the genre of the love letter as Stein's practice in the carnets has defined it. But these qualities of intimacy that I have ascribed to the passage from "Phenomena of Nature" must always remain purely potential and must depend on what any reader chooses to remember from the drafts, and who we imagine the audience of these words to be. The words will never simply and purely possess their possibly intimate inflections on the pages of "Phenomena of Nature," if only because Stein worked diligently and explicitly, in theory and practice, to unsettle interpretive arrivals and resolutions, especially resolutions that produce a body, a personality, an identity as the endpoint of reading.
It is mistaken to propose, as Dydo does, that "a full study of the Stein autograph notebooks can make works accessible that have been considered hermetic or incomprehensible." 72 Nor, I think, should we use the drafts to discover, at a particular moment in a published text, that "[p]lainly Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas are quarreling," or to find that "'Natural Phenomena' . . . ends with a tiny dialogue that is undoubtedly an exchange between Stein and Toklas: 'I choose you. I choose you too.'" 73 When she uses the carnets as a key, Dydo confounds different orders of writing. These words might once have formed part of an exchange between people, and the carnets--hybrids of journal and draft--encourage reading across genres. But when Stein folds "I choose you" into "Natural Phenomena," the possibility that she spoke these words to Alice gets us almost nowhere in the interpretive thicket of Stein's text.
Or nowhere legitimate: manuscripts for radically challenging texts invariably tempt us with the lure that we will uncover intelligible guides to the whole at an earlier compositional stage. And yet we should recall A. Walton Litz's admonition in the preface to his book on Joyce's writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In 1961, having already spent considerable time in the Joyce archives, Litz confesses:
I have long since relinquished the comforting belief that access to an author's workshop provides insights of greater authority than those produced by other kinds of criticism. The irreducible gap between the creator and his work faces one at every turn. Indeed it now seems to me that the controlling design--the "re in the carpet"--lies always in plain view, not in the dark corners explored by the genetic or biographical critic. 74
This warning fits Stein's case just as perfectly as it does Joyce's. Like Joyce in his late work, Stein concentrates on linguistic surfaces in a great deal of her writing, and finding sources for verbal details, while it may prove satisfying and may even offer spurious comfort in the face of mystery, will never compel the words before us to arrange themselves in a referential order. The carnets hold a vast array of samplings from all the kinds of language we use to bind our lives together, and Stein picks from among those languages as she practices her art. But the carnets, when placed beside her finished work, do not give us plain quarrels in that work, or transcribed conversations, or circumstances formerly concealed, or readings that are, at last, true and wholly accurate to a world lying somewhere off the page. One can, of course, weave snippets from the public work back into an account of Stein's daily, private life. 75 Her words and phrases are available for this more lucid use. One of the chief lessons of the carnets, however, lies in the proximity of different kinds of writing and in our desire, when confronted with these various writings, to seek out references and make narratives, even after Stein has told us that she has little interest in narrative lines or in words pointing to things.
We can find evidence of this desire at work in Alice Toklas herself, as she read and transcribed from the carnets in the days following Stein's nocturnal labor. Clearly Alice expected both manuscript texts and notes from her lover. Part of the intrigue for her as a reader of these notebooks would have been the uncertain aura of many passages--love letter or word-by-word writing? Both? As she turned pages she would suddenly find words for herself. "You write a note to me," Alice plaintively demands at one point. "I do I have," Stein responds , and it is possible to see in Stein's terse rejoinder a comment about the way she can be writing in part to Alice even if the heading on a page reads "P. of N." or "B. in B." I often found myself uncertain, as I transcribed carnets, about what kind of writing I was reading and to whom it was addressed. Here is an exemplary passage, chosen almost at random: "And when she likes it when they do do it it is when they do do it that she likes it. It is when she likes and she has the way of having heard that she was satisfied with what had been heard earnestly" . Two pages before these sentences, Stein has written "A Third" as a heading, but the words on this page might also find a private and particular reader.
For Stein, though, as for Nietzsche before her, to be a modern who can write or read master-pieces, one must cultivate the "power of forgetting, or, in more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling 'unhistorically.'" 76 She would have us suppress our editorial training, our inclination to unsnarl manuscript tangles, draw diagrams, place texts carefully in historical time. She would teach us not to concern ourselves with finding love letters buried in her public writings, not to chase after the scent of reference in the hopes of catching real people, tangible places, actual things hiding in their lairs. The carnets for "Phenomena of Nature" provide us with a text framed by temporalities but also outside of time.
Throughout the carnets and in Stein's more public texts, we find a talismanic sentence whose changing meanings speak to how Stein's ideal, empty writing and perfectly forgetful audience might come gradually into being: "When this you see remember me." The injunction--so old, so often repeated that it cannot be said to have an author--belongs especially to the folk-art tradition of the sampler. It was stitched into countless borders, usually by children and adolescent girls, and often made one line of a brief verse concerning mortality. A characteristic example, dated 1739, tells the reader,
When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones be rotten
When this you see remember me
That I mant be forgotten. 77
Many such verses also had the sampler-maker's name appended. But what do names and dates mean when tied to such conventional and endlessly reiterated writing? As the sampler leaves immediate kin for wider and more temporally distant worlds, "when this you see remember me" turns from a prayer for remembrance into a memorial to forgetting, a monument to the absences of author and recipient. The phrase becomes an emblem for words' tendency to lose their private resonances for more public, general meanings. Language does tend to evoke the world, but it proves a porous receptacle for intimacies. Given a little time, even the poignant injunction to "remember me" can become an assembly of letters on a piece of cloth--simply language.
If we read Stein's "Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain" in the context of the contemporaneous Mrs. Reynolds, with an understanding of Stein's deep, interconnected skepticisms concerning the operations of memory, historical narratives, explanations of political and military events, and stories built around the development of character, we discover something much more complicated and peculiar than another instance of "modernism's complicity with conservative--even fascist--impulses." 78 Van Dusen's familiar indictment, her ready association of modernism and fascism, recurs often today, as critics attempt to assess the politics of texts written between the Wars. She falls into the common error of historical "foreshadowing," as it is astutely described by Michael André Bernstein in his essay "Foregone Conclusions: Narrating the Fate of Austro-German Jewry." 79 Foreshadowed history collapses the vast array of possibilities, the range of plausible alternative directions that might follow from any particular moment in time, and gives us instead a history inflected in its every detail by our own privileged knowledge of what did in fact happen after that particular moment.
The event "that actually happened . . . exists from then on with all the weight afforded by the singularity of what we might call its event-ness." 80 The ethics of this teleologically driven historiography are frighteningly simple: "the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come." 81
On the most fundamental level, Stein's "Introduction" forces us to confront the enormous difficulties of thinking about modernism in the shadow of the Shoah. "The more devastating the event," Bernstein points out, "the greater the compensatory pressure to comprehend it according to the strictest teleological model as the climax of a grim trajectory whose inevitable outcome it must be." 82 But, he continues, in a sentence that fits well with Stein's overturning of narrative logics, "no historical event, no paradigm of struggle, resistance, and loss, can transform the death of countless human beings into a tragedy, if only because real events never happen as part of an already narrated form." 83 Understanding any of modernism's texts in political terms paradoxically requires both that we practice a laborious remembering of the contexts and motivations, the other writings and events that surrounded those texts, but also that we simultaneously cultivate a form of forgetting, a suspension of our certain knowledge of what did, in fact, transpire in the unknowable future of which that text would become a part.
Stein's lessons in forgetting, rather than being equivalent to the Nazi's institutionalized and obsessively narrativized acts of erasure and forgetting that enabled the extermination of millions of people, present us instead with a model for overturning the complaisant simplicities of histories that forget "that events now far in the past were once in the future." 84
The "Introduction" is hardly a simple paean to Pétain. He rises in Stein's third paragraph as an inert, symbolic re--a statue, an emblem of the collective imagination of the French in wartime. He has no more substance than any of the res milling about on the stage of Mrs. Reynolds:
He is very like George Washington because he too is first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, who like George Washington has given them courage in their darkest moments held them together through their times of desperation and has always told them the truth and in telling them the truth has made them realise that the truth would set them free. ("MP," 93)
Built piece by piece in a collage of clichés, this leader satisfies a public need and, in so doing, the actual old man vanishes just as certainly as George Washington did in his becoming the Father of our Country: Pétain "became not Pétain not Maréchal Pétain but the Maréchal" ("MP," 94). Temporal continuity and causality are no more pertinent to this story than they were to Angel Harper's or Joseph Lane's: "In the last war . . . was when we first knew about Pétain, and Verdun did not fall. Then for a long time there was nothing about him" ("MP," 94). When he reappears in this next War, he comes essentially without attachments: "the French people they realised that being as old as he was and not having a family, he had no future, he only had the future of France" ("MP," 94). As we read Stein's bizarre anatomy of this man who has lost his name, we understand that it is precisely because he has been made from a person into a leader that he has so little substance, is so old, so often silent, so stripped of past and future. Angel Harper did a great deal that could not be explained. The Maréchal also defies explanation, though he does virtually nothing:
And then gradually the Maréchal either did what any one and every one thought he ought to do or he did not, and whether he did or whether he did not and really nobody really knew there was one thing that was certain and that was that he never defended himself, he never explained himself, in short his character did not need any defence. ("MP," 95)
The quiet comedy latent in the word "character" surfaces as we realize that the word refers not to the richly delineated essence of a man named Philippe Henri Pétain but to the one-dimensional cutout that is the Maréchal. He is a character indeed, and in this "Introduction" he flimsily assumes his place beside the other wartime res summoned in Mrs. Reynolds.
The res around whom the emotional energies of Stein's prose coalescse in this "Introduction" are the uncertain "we" who wait, as Mrs. Reynolds waits, wondering what might happen next and how they might respond. "Always there were rumors and more rumors," Stein writes wearily; "we used to stand on the country-roads and discuss" the contest between the Germans and the Maréchal ("MP," 95). "We all talked and talked," she reports to us, and it becomes clear by the end of this "Introduction" that these "we" measure time in this war by the spinning of stories and the gradual shifting of opinions.
Time saturates this "Introduction" as it does Mrs. Reynolds, and for many of the same reasons. In the absence of any empowering sense of "somebody doing anything and anything happening," the disoriented people standing on the country roads can only trade stories back and forth--stories whose very telling bears witness to the unavoidable, overwhelming fact of waiting in ignorance as time passes. Stein sketches the genesis of one such story about the Maréchal, being careful to present the narrative so that we understand that we are not to inquire into whether it actually happened: "Gradually they began to tell that when he was asked who was going to win the English or the Germans, he did not answer and when he was pressed he touched his breast and answered Moi I" ("MP," 95). But what does the first-person pronoun mean when attached to the Maréchal in this shadowy narrative (who asked this question? when? where?)? Earlier in her brief "Introduction," Stein has already slipped the French subject from its moorings in identity: "As a Frenchman explained it to me it is not only that they do not think alike with their neighbors but they do not think alike within themselves" ("MP," 94).
We have discovered these scattered selves everywhere in Mrs. Reynolds. Memory may be able to hoodwink us into the comforting belief after the fact that we have held one opinion (or an orderly progression of opinions) through our trials, but Stein knows better, and she has tried to teach her readers so.
Prophecy, that other hermeneutic for tidying up the passage of time, is likewise qualified in this "Introduction," as it was in Mrs. Reynolds. The Maréchal seems to fulfill "the old prediction" of France's savior being "an old man on a white horse." But Stein's utterance of the prophecy begins with the defensive phrase "to be sure" and concludes with another assurance that rings as much of the need to buttress credibility as it does of certainty: "as a matter of fact he did make the armistice in front of Lyon" ("MP," 94). If it was making an armistice with the occupying army that the "old prediction" intended as salvation, this prophecy is fraught with the deepest ironies in its coming to fruition. Like any number of moments in Mrs. Reynolds, this sentence bears poignant witness to its author's desire for an orderly scheme, a story to tell as "week by week things were getting more and more terrible" ("MP," 94). The miracle of the Maréchal's presence is that, simply by being a focal point around which the "we" might circulate, passing the time in talk, he collects pieces desultorily into an unstable whole: "And so we in France . . . having seen every time that all being lost actually everything was being held together" ("MP," 95). The passive voice speaks perfectly to how little agency is required of the Maréchal. It is fitting that the occasion for this "Introduction" should be a collection of speeches. Stein demonstrates in her paragraph comparing George Washington and Pétain how quickly rhetoric collects round a public re and how the "I" behind that re vanishes in a windy fanfare of cliché. 85
There is, further, a specific reason that Stein has for wanting to present these translated speeches to the American people, and it strikes me as ironic that Stein's own, explicit historical positioning of her essay receives no notice from Van Dusen, whose attention is drawn instead to various positions she wishes Stein had taken. "I am well aware that until just now," Stein begins the second paragraph of her "Introduction," "it would have been quite impossible to interest my fellow countrymen in these words which tell so convincing and moving a story" ("MP," 91). Her next sentence repeats the locating phrase, "just now." And the third sentence in this sequence of temporal coordinates lets us know precisely that the occasion for Stein's writing this "Introduction"--perhaps its very day of drafting--is 7 December 1941: "Since the civil war until to-day, when the action of Japan has made us realize the misery the grief and the terror of war . . . we did not understand defeat enough to sympathise with the French people" ("MP," 93). Pearl Harbor has made it possible for Americans to comprehend the need for a Maréchal or a Washington. The "convincing" and "moving" story this "Introduction" promises is not so much the speeches themselves; it is the story Stein tells of a people's need for speeches, though the giver of those speeches is scarcely visible as anything other than a projection of a wounded and confused populace. This longing for speeches is a dangerous though utterly understandable need, and much of what Stein writes over the course of her long life shows us how and why we should look askance at anyone who claims that the truth will set us free. Stein's writings on the Second World War remain disturbing not primarily because of the political stances one might extract from her supple and elusive prose, but because they demonstrate the vast distances between the mind in its unsteady motions and the public, political positions individuals take in times of calamity. We conduct ourselves, in wartime, under assumed names, bearing allegiances to abstractions and res on horseback, forcing the human mind into daily, dishonest compromises. Retribution for these compromises will come in the as-yet-unwritten histories that gradually pare lives down until each fits neatly into the contours of a narrative.
In the first part of this essay, I discussed the challenges Stein presents to contemporary scholarship, bent as it is on locating texts in history and on reading for signs of the author's identity, her sexual and sociopolitical orientations, her psychological predispositions. In crucial respects, Stein is philosophically and, as we have just seen, methodologically at odds with an academy and a larger intellectual culture that currently desire her recuperation as one of the most important authors of our century. She is being remembered, in a wide variety of venues, as someone whose life and work is of enormous consequence. But the terms of that remembrance are powerfully inflected by hermeneutics that privilege historicity, by interpretive approaches that work from the author's psyche (and, particularly in the case of Stein, her sexuality) to the text. These critical valuations, crucially different from those Stein herself promoted and practiced, make it difficult for us to discern accurately or fully the nature of Stein's work. If we are to "locate" Stein in history, we should keep uppermost in our minds her adamant and repeated assertions concerning the emptiness of historical categories of understanding. If we are to assess her manuscripts--and I think it important that we do so--we should not simply read them for clues or details from the life. Stein would have those few carnets that were neither lost nor destroyed travel a route from Alice's hands toward forgetting. The trajectory would only be forlorn, the attending losses lamentable to those still snared by human nature's longing for narratives of intimacy, for stories built around recollection. If we learn to read with our minds, as moderns who have overcome the tyrannical claims of memory, everything in the carnets will look more or less the same, as a landscape appears from an airplane. 86 There will be no stories then to tell, in this steady-state verbal system, since we will know how to distribute our attention equally among all words. What is made will look like what is found. The products of human labor will be indistinguishable from natural phenomena. Differences at the level of drafts, if we can even discover them, will scarcely be worth notice or commentary, just as historical facts will matter less than states of mind. Textual study, like the writing of history and the telling of news or the recounting of biographies, will take its properly subordinate place among other sensual musics. Time will still shape the songs of dying generations, but it will concern us chiefly, however, as it measures nothing more--but nothing less--than the regular occurrence of syllables and silences.
In this quiet place, however, we will always search for signs of the author and her stories, even after we have been urged to do otherwise. The penultimate paragraph of "Natural Phenomena" exposes the question that motivates our search:
What does it mean when all of it has been put there and does not show that it has been put there has been put there has been put there too does not any of it show that it has been put there and it has been put there too has been put there too. ("NP," 233)
To offer any reading of this sentence is to ascribe a particular intent to communicate to its author and thereby to do a kind of violence to its deliberate open-endedness, since the question it frames is precisely what kinds of meaning we can justifiably attach to something if its existence offers little evidence of agency, no testimony of creative intent, no sign of having been "put" at all. Can we read it if it is a phenomenon of nature rather than a product of humankind? Do natural phenomena have meaning at all, or does that meaning follow only after we have painted the phenomena in colors provided by the imagination? Interpretation is the name for the activity by means of which we assure ourselves that "all of it has been put there." It is the name for our fond hope that we can leave marks on the world that others will take the trouble to decipher; that love letters will find recipients and encourage answers; that at least some of the phenomena we encounter derive from human consciousnesses rather than the blindly powerful forces that make hurricanes and earthquakes, tidal waves and the aurora borealis. 87 To interpret is to declare ourselves more or less at home.
Among the modernists of her generation, Stein is the most ruthless in her examination of the assumptions that underwrite the related acts of interpretation and positioning oneself in time. She is the most skeptical in her scrutiny of the subject's place in the world, the least inclined to foreclose questions, the most avid to query the suppositions that allow us to read and write. She builds up the last paragraph of "Natural Phenomena" as though she can count on nothing, can take nothing for granted: "After a little while it has been by that time by that time when by that time and when by that time and when by that time and choice. I choose you. I choose you too" ("NP," 233). We know of time's passing partly by the accrual of phrases. The paragraph contains its own clock for measuring: "by that time" gradually adds up. When "that time" has arrived--and we have been prepared by the opening phrase of the first sentence to know that the moment we await will come "after a little while"--we discover the noun ("choice") that names the exercise of will that sets human actions apart from natural phenomena. And following the nomination of this crucial human enterprise come two brief sentences built around that noun: "I choose you. I choose you too." We have already heard Dydo's confident assurance that these sentences are "undoubtedly an exchange between Stein and Toklas." But the end of "Natural Phenomena" will not be fit tidily into a domestic scene. These sentences generate more questions than answers. Is this a reassuring fragment of a conversation, a sign that we have come happily home to a place of mutual choosing after struggling through a long and challenging piece of writing? Or does the "I" designate the same person in both sentences, which might give to this ending an unsettling, open-ended twist. These two sentences could be the beginning of a list of choices by a single, polygamous "I" rather than a tiny story about reciprocated desire. The corollary question is whether the object of each sentence stands for the same person (or whether it represents a person at all). We might also wonder whether the "you" knows it has been chosen. When we come upon these sentences in the virtual vacuum of this paragraph, we should spend a good deal of our interpretive energy considering our own strategies for making narratives from pronouns and verbs.
Stein gives us very little to take with us, little to remember as we work through the enormous accumulation of her writing. Drafts don't necessarily evolve. Characters don't add up to wholes by a novel's end. Events only sometimes seem to cause or to follow one another. History, insofar as we can discern it as an object of inquiry, happens somewhere else, to subjects other than ourselves. Narrative is a trickle that runs intermittently through Stein's prose; rarely does it make a stream. We are forced to carry what we know with us as we proceed and to recognize how small the bundle is that holds our knowledge: "after a little while it has been by that time." In Stein's parsimonious imagining of the subject, there is almost nothing about states of mind that can count itself historical.
John Whittier-Ferguson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound . He is currently working on a book concerning memory and modernism.
1. Richard Bridgman dates the composition of Mrs. Reynolds 1940-1943, even though the editors of the Yale Gertrude Stein dated its composition 1940-1942. See Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 324. See also A Gertrude Stein Companion, ed. Bruce Kellner (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 48-9. For the quotation from the epilogue, see Gertrude Stein, Mrs. Reynolds (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1988), 331. Hereafter cited in the text with the prefix MR.
2. T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), 49.
3. Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein: Writings: 1903-1932 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 528.
4. I am thinking of the general trend toward materially inflected historicism, as well as the widespread interest in the subject of memory--personal and cultural--that obtains in a number of fields in the humanities and social sciences today. For examples of the kinds of texts I reference, see Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History" from his monumental project aimed at recording French history and its social spaces of recollection, Les Lieux de Mémoire. His translated essay explaining the project can be found in Representations, "Special Issue: Memory and Counter Memory," 26 : 7-25. The essays appearing in Representations, as well as those in , frequently offer apt illustrations of the kind of contemporary historiography to which I refer. See also Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) for another instance of a contemporary effort at recovery that is simultaneously deeply aware of (and eloquent about) its limitations as well as extraordinarily ambitious in the extent of its retellings of the past.
5. Marianne DeKoven, "Introduction," special issue on Gertrude Stein, Modern Fiction Studies 42-3 , 477. DeKoven's work on Stein has been important to me as I worked on this project. See A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Other works that have helped me in my understanding of Stein have been Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Wayne Koestenbaum, "Stein is Nice," Parnassus: Poetry in Review 20 : 279-319; William Gass, "Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language," in Fiction and the res of Life (New York: Random House, 1972); William Gass, "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," in The World Within the Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978, 63-123); Anne Tomiche, "Repetition: Memory and Oblivion in Freud, Duras, and Stein, "Revue de Littérature Comparée 259 : 261-76.
6. Bridgman discusses the "Introduction" in Stein in Pieces, 317-18. Wanda Van Dusen's discussion of Stein's "Introduction," as well as a full reprinting of Stein's text, may be found in 3:3 : 69-96. Bridgman's account of Stein's politics (insofar as she entertained explicit, articulated political views), though it is by no means flattering, strikes me as closer to the mark than much of the later, vastly inflated estimations of Stein as a politically engaged writer: "She lacked a global imagination, and it was this provinciality that laid her vulnerable to charges of callousness and stupidity . . . She remained invincibly local, so that her emotion was reserved for those whose immediate existence possessed reality for her" . For another, more recent, informed biographical and historical discussion of the "Introduction," see Edward Burns and Ella Dydo, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), appendix ix.
7. Van Dusen, 70.
8. Van Dusen, 81.
9. Van Dusen, 74.
10. Van Dusen, 72.
11. "Memory," Michael Lambek writes, "concerns the consciousness of being conscious . . . Hence, we need to retain for memory the idea of perspective or clearing of space, the view of there from over here, of situated distance" ("The Past Imperfect: Remembering As Moral Practice," in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (London: Routledge, 1996), 241-2.
12. One of the headings in Van Dusen's essay states baldly: "Missing from the Picture: Class, Race, Gender, and Sexuality" .
13. Gertrude Stein, "Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain," first published in 3:3 , 94, hereafter cited as "MP."
14. Van Dusen, 71.
15. In her lifelong refusal of politics as it is usually practiced, we can read, among other things, a desire to avoid notice as a Jew, an outsider. The reasons for attempts on the part of Jews to remain invisible in the polis during the 1930s and 1940s--for appearing ultra-ordinary, wholly bourgeois, utterly middle-class--were, of course, terribly compelling.
16. Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Colloboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1930, 12-13.
17. Burrin, 20. For a judicious survey of the choice between de Gaulle and resistance or Pétain and collaboration, see Burrin's "Introduction."
18. Burrin, 182. Among the myriad details Burrin accumulates in his portrait of French society during the German occupation are the results from the 300,000 letters read each week by the postal censors in the free zone. The French, of course, knew that their mail was subject to scrutiny by their occupiers--one must keep in mind that Stein, too, would have recognized that Germans could read her introduction to Pétain's speeches--but the estimations of the numbers favoring collaboration up until 1942 was, "on average, between one-quarter and one-fifth of the French people in the free zone, and between one-fifth and one-sixth of the country as a whole. This would, after all, amount to several million people, many more than the membership of the small collaborationist parties" (Burrin, 183).
19. Stein, "Introduction," 95.
20. Bridgman, Stein in Pieces, 315.
21. Fäy was sentenced, after the war, to life imprisonment at hard labor. For brief biographical sketches of Fäy and Rose, see A Gertrude Stein Companion, 185-7 (for Fäy), and 246-7 (for Rose).
22. Gertrude Stein, "An American and France," in What Are Masterpieces (Los Angeles: The Conference Press, 1940), 70.
23. Stein, "An American and France," 70.
24. Gertrude Stein, Paris France (New York: Liveright, 1970). It is worth noting that Rose provides the closing illustration for Paris France: a portrait of Stein at Bilignin.
25. Stein, Paris France, 93, 94.
26. Stein, "An American and France," 70.
27. Lambek, "Past Imperfect," 248. There are a number of other texts concerning memory that have played crucial parts in my formulation of the ideas in this essay. Several other essays in the volume coedited by Lambek, (see note 11) those by Ian Hacking and Laurence Kirmayer, as well as the "Introduction" written by Lambek and Paul Antze--have been particularly important. I have also profited from William Hirst, "The Remembered Self in Amnesiacs," in The Remembered Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-narrative, eds. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995); Daniel Albright, "Literary and Psychological Models of the Self," in The Remembered Self.
28. Lambek, "Past Imperfect," 246, 244.
29. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 51. Hereafter cited in the text with the prefix GH. The question returns throughout The Geographical History of America, as well as Paris France, Everybody's Autobiography, "What Are Master-Pieces" and elsewhere.
30. Gertrude Stein, "What Are Master-Pieces and Why are There so Few of Them," in What Are Masterpieces (Los Angeles: The Conference Press, 1940), 90.
31. A lucid and provocative discussion of this dualism in Stein may be found in William Gass's introduction to Stein's Geographical History of America.
32. Gertrude Stein, "A Transatlantic Interview, 1946," in Gertrude Stein: A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), 19.
33. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), 251.
34. Stein, "Transatlantic Interview," 20.
35. Stein, "Transatlantic Interview," 20. See also Stein's discussion of newspaper writing in Everybody's Autobiography, 270-1.
36. Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 307.
37. Stein, "Transatlantic Interview," 20.
38. In a Nietzschean paragraph following this passage, Stein has the historian, in a necessary act of bad faith, embracing ignorance of the philosophical problems vexing her or his discipline: "I would rather not know than know anything of the confusion between any one doing anything and something happening. So says the historian" (GH, 133).
39. Stein writes to Thornton Wilder in 1940, "Mrs. Reynolds is such a heroine even if it is all about Hitler and Stalin" (Burns and Dydo, Letters, 277 and n. 5). See also Bridgman, Stein in Pieces, 319 and 319n.
40. In order to understand more fully how Stein imagines the simultaneously public and private, momentous and insignificant status of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds during the war, it is worthwhile to compare the status of Stein and Toklas in Paris France and in Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945).
41. William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, in Writings, 1878-1899 (New York: Library of America, 1992), 266.
42. Laurence Kirmayer, "Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation," in Tense Past, 193.
43. Leonardo Blake, The Last Year of War and After (London: Andrew Dakers Limited, 1940), 53; Hitler's Last Year of Power (London: Andrew Dakers Limited, 1939), 7.
44. Blake, Hitler's Last Year, 67.
45. Blake, Hitler's Last Year, 7-8.
46. Blake, Hitler's Last Year, 52.
47. I cite material from the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL), MSS 76, by box and folder number. The folder of prophesies may be found in Box 141, folder 3315. Subsequent citations from Stein's manuscripts at the Beinecke will be cited by box and folder number in the text. The prophesies I refer to may be found in Mrs. Reynolds on pages 47-8 (Saint Odile) and 5556 (Saint Godfrey).
48. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 240, 228.
49. See the verbatim repetition of Saint Odile's prophecy by Mrs. Reynolds on pages 160-3.
50. Stein, "Composition as Explanation," 524.
51. Stein, "What Are Master-Pieces," 91.
52. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 186.
53. McGann, The Textual Condition, 185.
54. The essays by Ulla Dydo on Stein's compositional practices are "Gertrude Stein: Composition as Meditation," in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, eds. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988,) 42-60.; "How to Read Gertrude Stein: The Manuscript of 'Stanzas in Meditation"" Text 1 : 271-303; "Landscape is Not Grammar: Gertrude Stein in 1928,11 Raritan 7 : 97-113; "Reading the Hand Writing: The Manuscripts of Gertrude Stein," A Gertrude Stein Companion; "Stanzas in Meditation: The Other Autobiography," Chicago Review 35 : 4-20.
55. Bridgman writes that "In 'Natural Phenomena' she took up the argument of 'Composition As Explanation' again, reiterating that 'everybody always is the same.' The only difference consists not in their appearance, but in the world they see--'what they look at not what they look like"' (Stein in Pieces, 174). Dydo makes passing reference to "Natural Phenomena" in "Reading the Hand Writing."
56. See, for example, the studies by Bridgman, Steiner, DeKoven, Ruddick, Dubnick.
57. DeKoven, "Introduction," 471.
58. Gertrude Stein, "Phenomena of Nature," in Painted Lace and Other Pieces (1914-1937), introd. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 172. Hereafter cited parenthetically as "NP."
59. I retain the term "draft" throughout my essay, using it to refer to the handwritten segments of text in the carnets. The term is useful since it distinguishes the carnet material from the later typescript versions; I trust my descriptions and discussions of the carnets will make it clear that I do not take "draft"--to apply in its usual sense to these first iterations of Stein's work in progress.
60. Brenda Silver, "Textual Criticism as Feminist Practice," Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. George Bornstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).
61. For the theory and illustrations of the bibliographic code," see McGann, The Textual Condition; see also his Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also George Bornstein, "Yeats and Textual Reincarnation: 'When You Are Old' and 'September 1913,'" in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, eds. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
62. Dydo, "How to Read Gertrude Stein," 286.
63. Dydo, "How to Read Gertrude Stein," 287.
64. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Santa-Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 56. A great deal was made, in the early commentary on Finnegans Wake, of the amount of labor Joyce expended on his last text. He made certain, as well, to preserve his manuscripts of "Work in Progress," partly to preserve evidence of that labor.
65. "A Third" was first published posthumously in As Fine As Melanctha: 1914-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); "Business in Baltimore" first appeared in Useful Knowledge (New York: Payson and Clark, 1928); A Novel of Thank You was published posthumously in the Yale Gertrude Stein volume of the same title .
66. For an illustration of this phenomenon, see the carnet in folder 1720, in which Stein is writing "Phenomena of Nature" up to the point of inversion and then begins another section of "Phenomena of Nature" as the first section of the inverted carnet.
67. From the eight carnets and the twenty-eight sections contained in those carnets, there are six instances of sections used sequentially in the final text. These six instances involve a total of thirteen sections. Five are cases where Stein uses two sections contiguously; the sixth consists of a string of three sections. For an example of the scattered distribution of carnet sections, see page 191 of the published "Phenomena of Nature": the contiguous paragraphs beginning "What is the difference" and "Only only very nearly" and "He knew how to look at a lake" follow each other in carnet 1721, though the first is separated from the second two paragraphs in that carnet by miscellaneous other writing. But the next paragraph (beginning "if they tap and do so too") comes from carnet 1735.
68. GH, 143. For a lucid and extensive discussion of wholes in Stein's work, see Jennifer Ashton, "Gertrude Stein for Anyone," ELH 64 : 289-331.
69. Illustrations of these superimposed section changes, sometimes written with a different pencil, may be found in carnet 1721 at three points; there is one such point in carnet 1733.
70. See, for example, carnet 1721, where the phrase "what is the difference" shows up in a section of "A Novel" and then in a part headed "P. of N." In this same carnet we find "I was watching" is a phrase that Stein deletes from a section headed "A third" but then uses in "P. of N.": "Phenomena of Nature all around I was watching." See also 1733, where "A third" ends with musings on the number "thirty-three" and "P. of N." begins with "Thirty three and numerous makes mountains."
71. Dydo, "Reading the Hand Writing," 87.
72. Dydo, "How to Read Gertrude Stein," 271.
73. Dydo, "Stanzas in Meditation," 9; "How to Read Gertrude Stein," 277.
74. A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), v.
75. Stein's biographers do this, of course. See John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1987). Bridgman's critical text, interspersed with interpretive biographical commentary, does a generally convincing job of interleaving biography and Stein's texts.
76. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 6.
77. Virginia Churchill Bath, Needlework in America: History, Designs, and Techniques (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 189.
78. Van Dusen, "Portrait," 87.
79. Michael André Bernstein, "Foregone Conclusions: Narrating the Fate of Austro-German Jewry," 1.1 : 57-79.
80. Ibid., 59.
81. Ibid., 60; the emphasis is Bernstein's.
82. Ibid., 59.
83. Ibid., 59.
84. Ibid., 63.
85. It is worth comparing Stein's collation of Washington and Pétain with Ezra Pound's Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley Nott, 1935).
86. I use one of Stein's favorite res for writing of the human mind. The view of landscapes from the air organizes much of The Geographical History of America. For contextualization of the re, see Laurence Goldstein, The Flying Machine in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
87. The cahiers for "Phenomena of Nature" have covers that depict various natural phenomena: volcanoes, earthquakes, lightning, the aurora borealis.
for Miriam Bratu Hansen
You should be reading this with something in your hands besides a journal. And something, really, besides a pencil or pen. Something like an empty glass, a rubber band, a paper clip that you can rub between your fingers, that you can twist and bend back and forth. For the idea is to wonder whether--while concerning ourselves with one or another crisis of the subject--we haven't also been in the midst of an effort to think about the object, if not indeed to liberate material objects. The comic version of this effort would resemble a scene from the Mork and Mindy show: when asked what could have happened to all the sponges in the kitchen, the alien (Robin Williams) proudly announces, "I took them to the river and set them free."
A somewhat more serious version can be found in the work of Jean Baudrillard, who denounces the way that the object, because it is considered "only the alienated, accursed part of the subject," has been rendered unintelligible, "shamed, obscene, passive." Undoing the privilege of the subject is not for him a matter of attending to the subject's fraught, fragile, and divisive constitution. It is a matter of imagining how the "destiny of the subject passes into the object," of naming the object "sovereign," of celebrating the crystal's revenge, indeed "crystal revenge." 1 And yet, of course, the luminous transparency of the crystalline object, its auratic singularity, can only impoverish other objects, material objects, or material understood as itself an object--not shimmering, exquisite crystal, let us say, but glass that is nothing but glass. Is it not the very splendor of the object that allows objects to disappear so readily in Baudrillard's subsequent work, evaporating into one or another version of the hyperreal?
No less than the tradition he writes against, Baudrillard seems to suffer from what Theodor Adorno called the familiar "allergies to entity," a chief symptom of which is the failure to recognize that there can be no "primeval history of the object," only a history "dealing with specific objects." The passage into materialism, as Adorno came to describe it, requires acknowledging "things" outside the subject/object trajectory, which means thinking sensation in its distinction from cognition. For the "dignity of physicality" is indissoluble in, and not exhausted by, the subject/object relation, epistemologically or phenomenologically understood. 2 Still, if "things" are indeed not exhausted by that relation, it is only in the subject/object nexus where they occur, or where they can be narrated as the effect (not the ground) of an interaction at once physical and psychological, at once intimate and alienating. To the degree that the "thing" registers the undignified mutability of objects, and thus the excess of the object (a capacity to be other than it is), the "thing" names a mutual mediation (and a slide between objective and subjective predication) that appears as the vivacity of the object's difference from itself. What happens, should we drop the crystal, should it shatter, and should we glance at the bits of glass that, though they are nothing but glass, captivate our attention? What happens when we deauraticize the object (that is identifiable only within a fundamentally static structure) and begin again with the vertiginous banality of things--with some sense of the curious thingness of those objects we incessantly if unconsciously touch, the objects we see without ever looking? What if we looked?
In fact, "things" seem to have achieved a new discursive visibility. From the disciplines of anthropology and history, as from the interdiscipline of "material culture studies," important anthologies summon us to attend to things: The Social Life of Things , Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter , History from Things , The Sex of Things . These volumes assume the task of denaturalizing consumer practices, of tracing (both within and between cultures) the work of exchange and consumption: the way economic value is created in specific social formations, the way cultural values become objectified in specific material forms, the way that people shape, code, and recode the material object world, the way they make things meaningful and valuable. Just as such analysis exposes the politics that underwrite our most daily acts of exchange, as Arjun Appadurai would have it, so too, in Victoria de Grazia's words, this type of analysis "responds to the imperative to know about material needs, wants, and desires." 3
But is it things that these volumes constitute as the object of their address? For the degree to which the essays trace generalizable circuits of exchange and consumption is the degree to which they can address no thing at all, but only objects, if you will allow me to pursue my axiomatic distinction. The sort of objectification that takes place during those operations that produce use value, sign value, cultural capital will never produce a thing. Producing a thing--effecting thingness--depends, instead, on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is. Thingness is precipitated as a kind of misuse value. By misuse value I mean to name the aspects of an object--sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic--that become legible, audible, palpable when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes (in whatever time it is) for an object to become another.
This distinction brings a kind of instability into focus wherein the thing becomes manifest between multiple objectifications. Within the shimmering splinters of glass, glass can become something else. Or, to offer another narrative example (of what can be exemplified only syntactically, only in time): in the process of using a knife as a screwdriver, of dislocating it from one routinized objectification and deploying it otherwise, we have the chance (if just a chance) to sense its presence (its thinness . . . its sharpness and flatness . . . the peculiarity of its scalloped handle, slightly loose . . . its knifeness and what exceeds that knifeness) as though for the first time. For the first time, perhaps, we thus also sense the norms by which we customarily deploy both knife and screwdriver. My concern, then, is not to unveil the meaning of things in their proper thingness, nor to describe the fate of pure objects abstracted from their use, and neither is it to privilege the thing (das Ding) over things (die Sachen). 4 For the life of things made manifest in the time of misuse is, should we look, a secret in plain sight--not a life behind or beneath the object but a life that is its fluctuating shape and substance and surface, a life that the subject must catalyze but cannot contain.
* * *
My title, "the secret life of things," no doubt brings to mind a line from William Wordsworth or Percy Shelley, or one of E. T. A. Hoffmann's uncanny tales, or one of several surrealist images--if not Tristan Tzara's "the knives are on their feet," then perhaps Louis Aragon's "bunch of keys [humming] to themselves jingling a song of the good old days." 5 Though such animation is not my concern in the following pages, I will in fact be preoccupied by the 1920s, the decade when things emerge as the object of profound theoretical engagement in the work of Georg Lukács, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, and which is the decade after objects and things are newly engaged by (or as) the work of art for Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Williams, Gertrude Stein.
The record of Virginia Woolf's engagement with the relation between objects and things appears in a very short story she titled "Solid Objects." It is in fact a story not about solidity, but about the fluidity of objects, about how they decompose and recompose themselves as the object of a new fascination. It is about the materials that make up the material object world, about the transvaluation of those materials into less and more than their familiar properties. It is about dislocating material--nothing but glass--from an instrumentalist teleology and into an aesthetic scene, though not one authorized by the dictates of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction or Baudrillard's System of Objects, but content instead with intensely private, inconspicuous display.
Woolf began to write the story in November 1918, at the close of World War I, and she published it in Athenaeum in 1920. The story concerns a man named John who, discovering a smooth lump of glass on the beach, brings it home and places it on the mantle, using it as a paperweight. The discovery incites him to seek out other objects that remind "him of the lump of glass," anything "so long it [is] an object of some kind, more or less round . . . anything--china, glass, amber, rock, marble," the paradigmatic shape and size in fact bringing the specificity of the material into question. 6 At first studying the objects displayed in the windows of curiosity shops, he becomes increasingly obsessed and finally roams London with "a bag and a long stick," ransacking "all deposits of earth," searching "all alleys and spaces between walls," in his search for discarded objects that might become for him "specimens" (HH, 85). As he discovers other remnants--pieces of broken china, a bit of iron--his collecting impulse becomes, from his friends' perspective, pathological. Before long he abandons the life he has led as a politician on "the brink of a brilliant career," a man standing for Parliament (HH, 82). Indeed, in most respects he abandons his life, "devot[ing] himself more and more resolutely to the search," suffering "fatigue and derision," but still "consumed by [the] ambition" to add to his little collection (HH, 85).
The story has hardly fascinated Woolf's readers, who have been far more captivated by the life of the subject, the fate of individuality, and the vicissitudes of consciousness in her fiction. A small, critical consensus, however, reads "Solid Objects" as a cautionary tale warning against aesthetic absorption at the expense of the practical, the ethical, the political. 7 Woolf, let us say, managed not to succumb to what Clive Bell disparaged as his contemporaries' "metaphysical-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and the thing in itself." 8 But her own boredom with politics-as-usual, what she called her "natural disposition to think Parliament ridiculous," would suggest that the moral of the story might not be read so unequivocally. 9 She herself stopped accompanying her husband Leonard on his political campaigns in 1919. At the end of the war, she wrote of the war that "the whole thing [was] too remote and meaningless to come home to one either in action or in ceasing to act" (D, 215). She also was eager to eschew conversation about the "bitter, impatient, powerful" lower classes (D, 220). Such comments suggest that one might say of the story what Bell said of art more generally, that "no one could be much worse placed than the political moralist for seeing whatever there may be to be seen in what is, at once, strange and subtle." 10
What is strange and subtle in Woolf's story, however, is the way it bears witness, however unconsciously, to the political economy of Great Britain during and immediately after World War I. In other words, I want to point out how John's encounter with these material fragments--a piece of glass, of broken china, and of iron--is not just embedded within a trajectory of English aesthetics (John Ruskin to Roger Fry) or a genealogy of modernism (say T. E. Hulme's "poetics of sensual immediacy and fragmentary vision"), but also embedded between the domestic crisis of wartime scarcity in London and the postwar industrial crisis provoked by the British commitment to free trade. 11 Though the fragments may thus be thought of as souvenirs of the unreal city, their very collection erases that context from the narrative as such. 12 But elsewhere, Woolf makes it clear how the war impinged on the material practice of art. She writes to Vanessa Bell about the problem of securing her paint, "the difficulty about paints is that they're made with oil, 'Now you may not know [a merchant has explained to Woolf] that every gun when it's first cast has to be dipped in a bath of oil.'" 13 She records in her diary the physical threat to art posed by the raids on London, "The Academy is storing its precious pictures, only 18 in number, in some Tube. They are told to expect immense bombs at the end of the month, which will dig 20 feet deep, & then explode" (D, 138). Yet "Solid Objects," without ever invoking the war, provides instead an account of the aesthetic--or an account of what we might call the relation between aesthetics and politics, between art and the economy--that is a history of the senses fundamentally altered by the facts of wartime scarcity and postwar depression. One might argue that the story's displacement of the psychological with the materiological is Woolf's uncharacteristic exploration of the antihumanist modernism advanced by Hulme. But her capacity to narrate a new subject/object dynamic seems catalyzed instead by the transgression of economic habits, both domestic and international--in a word, by the western world's misuse of material for martial ends, by the transposition of material into matériel.
As literary criticism wrestles itself out of the homogenizing habits of new historicism and the heterogenizing habits of cultural studies, one version of a new materialism asks how material culture impresses itself on the literary imagination. Another asks how literature itself works to imagine materiality; how it renders a life of things that is tangential to our narratives of modern production, distribution, and consumption; how it can contribute to a materialist phenomenology that does not bracket history, but asks both how, in history (how, in one cultural formation), human subjects and material objects constitute one another, and what remains outside the regularities of that constitution that can disrupt the cultural memory of modernity and modernism. If Simmel was right to argue, circa 1900, that the increased access to things that characterizes modernity results in the loss of the thingness of things, then we should recognize how various aesthetic practices work to compensate for that loss. Indeed, it would be perfectly reasonable to account for the recent academic attention to objects (not to say things) as a reaction against the declaration of--if not some compensatory response to the fact of--the further disappearance of the object within an increasingly mediated (indeed digitally mediated) universe.
Woolf's story might thus be read as moralizing against such materialist fascinations, if it does not rather, as I'll suggest, investigate a different kind of fascination, indeed a kind of fetishism that seems like an alternative mode of inhabiting modern culture. By consecrating the valueless material object, such fetishism confounds political economy's account of value, alienates itself from any enlightenment horror of waste, and settles happily into an unhuman (not antihumanist) history. "Solid Objects" manages to revise the question of the object and the question of things while clarifying the risk of that revision, which is always a risk to what Woolf's story narrates as the aesthetic subject. "One day," the narrator explains, "starting from his rooms in the Temple to catch a train in order to address his constituents, his eyes rested upon a remarkable object lying half-hidden in one of those borders of grass which edge the bases of vast legal buildings. . . . [He] drew the piece of [broken] china within reach of his hands. As he seized hold of it he exclaimed in triumph," missing his train (HH, 82-3). Such exhilaration, staged in relation to the emblems of modernity (the train, the legal buildings, parliamentary democracy, the commuter temporality) is irreducible to consumer desire or the structure of cathexis described by psychoanalysis; it instead testifies to the enigmatic excess that characterizes the physical world, especially its bits and pieces, the discarded remains of modern objects. Insofar as the aestheticization of this refuse leaves John in a condition of social sclerosis, however, "aesthetic autonomy" manifests itself here not as the object's distance from consumer culture but as the utter isolation of the individual (the aesthetic subject). Some other reading of the story might indeed argue that John's obsession with inorganic objects is in fact inseparable from what Freud described, in his own postwar text, as the drive toward the inorganic that is the drive toward death.
* * *
Let me turn now to a clarifying disjuncture in William James's psychology--clarifying because it temporalizes, narrating the interaction between the somatic and the cognitive--to offer some handle on the object/thing distinction. Working within and against the associationist tradition, James points out, in his chapter on the perception of space, how the coalescence of our sensations in and as a thing depends on habit. This means that we grant to objects that we merely see their full physicality because we are accustomed to doing so. Real form, what Edmund Husserl would come to call the inauthentic image as opposed to the authentic image we actually see, is habitually conjured up. In his somewhat prescient understanding of mind as matter (with which he works to refine the Humean position), James argues that habitual objects "plough deep grooves in the nervous system," so that there is a path of least resistance through which, for instance, our sensations of grayness and thinness and length become the apperception of a knife. 14
In his chapter on the "perception of things," however, he tells the story of what happens when our habits are broken, when for instance we look at a landscape with our head upside down or when we turn a painting bottom upward: "the colors grow richer and more varied, we don't understand the meaning of the painting, but, to compensate for the loss, we feel more freshly the value of the mere tints and shadings" (P, 727). James understands perception and "naked sensation" as different cerebral conditions that cannot take place at the same time, since sensations in themselves do not add up (P, 727). One might say, rather, that we need to understand two distinct, dynamic, intertwined materializations: one where we seem to begin with sensations, which precipitate perception; and one where the proximate sensuous engagement lies between one and another perceptual horizon. The viewer's perceptual "failure" (as in the case of nonrative painting) prompts a different kind of attention; but, in the routine of daily life, perception perpetually forecloses sensuous experience in order to render the material world phenomenal, which means rendering it inhabitable. What I want to underscore is how in James the difference between the apperceptive constitution of the thing, in what I would call its objecthood, and the experience of the thing, in what I would call its thinghood, emerges in the moment (and no doubt only as a moment) of reobjectification that is a kind of misuse--turning the picture bottom up, standing on one's head. The point may be less that "sensation is one thing and perception another," and more that the experience of sensation depends on disorientation, both habit and its disruption (P, 727).
In the case of Woolf's story, the point is not that the familiar object has been defamiliarized into unreconstituted fragments (which is to say discrete, fragmented sensations), but rather that literal fragments become objects without any of the coherence or familiarity we associate with objects. Peripatetic though he is, John resembles less modernity's flâneur than the bricoleur, "speak[ing] not only with things . . . but also through the medium of things," reordering debris the way a kaleidoscope, to borrow Lévi-Strauss's re, transforms bits of glass into a "new type of entity." 15 But if John perceives new structural patterns, along the way he manages to experience texture and shape in such a way that materials themselves, unchannelled through the habitual object, become the objects of his fantasy. Familiar materials--glass, china, iron--are debanalized, appearing all but magical: "it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone" (HH, 80). Not objects, but materials--"nothing but glass"--have been released from any readiness-to-hand. Free from their incorporation into the familiar object world, they seem to assume lives of their own as John grants them a kind of agency. The piece of broken china
looked like a creature from another world--freakish and fantastic as a harlequin. It seemed to be pirouetting through space, winking like a fitful star. The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world, let alone to stand upon the same narrow strip of marble in the same room. The question remained unanswered. [HH, 83]
By not answering the question, both John and the narratorial voice grant the materials their sovereignty, but they do so not, as Baudrillard would have it, from a state of abjection, but in a state of wonder.
Woolf's story might thus be located within a continuum of modernist attention to materials, from, say, Otto Wagner's 1895 vision of a future architecture dominated by "the prominent use of materials in a pure state," to F. T. Marinetti's futurist cult of metals and Ernst Jünger's "poems of steel," to Donald Judd's 1965 description of the "aggressive" specificity of materials and the "objectivity" that inheres in the "obdurate identity of a material." 16 In closer proximity to Woolf, her friend Roger Fry, in the manner of Ruskin, repeatedly argued on behalf of the aesthetic importance of compositional substance, singling out the fate of china. He objected to Wedgwood (by now the preferred cornerstone in accounts of eighteenth-century consumer society) because it set "a standard of mechanical perfection which to this day prevents the trade from accepting any work in which the natural beauties of the material are not carefully obliterated by mechanical means." 17 Whereas Fry's answer to the problem was replacing mechanical production with craftsmanship, "Solid Objects" answers the problem of mechanical perfection by introducing the imperfection wrought by accident--by engaging the shard. At times, Woolf clearly shares Fry's fundamental aesthetic judgment. In Orlando, the men of genius Orlando accompanies in the eighteenth century (Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift) collect "little bits of coloured glass," demonstrating a kind of restrained appreciation for material that stands in contrast to the monumental accumulation of Victorian clutter--"crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths . . . telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments"--a rubbish heap of Victorian history, a pile of "heterogeneous, ill-sorted objects" perceived by Orlando as a "garish erection." 18 "Solid Objects," however, suggests that the residues of such clutter, the object decomposed into little bits, as it were, can still compel us in their rudimentary substantiality, conveying both the natural and unnatural beauties of material.
Writing in Athenaeum the year before Woolf's story appeared there, Fry laments the fate of materials within the Victorian object. Describing the inappropriate use of material to fashion all the Victorian objets that "gratify fatuous curiosity," and appeal to "social emotions" rather than "aesthetic feelings," he concludes that "the use of material at this period seems to be the least discriminating, and the sense of quality feebler, than at any previous period of world history." 19 The familiar Bloomsbury dismissal of Victoriana here achieves a materialist specificity inherited from the likes of William Morris, but Fry stops short of wondering what might in fact be learned about "social emotions" from the ill-suited use of materials. His role as artist and art critic no doubt prevented his taking an interest in the kind of disjuncture between material and form that captivated Benjamin as a legible sign of utopian longing. With a logic learned from The Eighteenth Brumaire, Benjamin imagines that the decorative use of iron, rather than its structural deployment, marks the way novelty first emerges in and depends on residual form, which is the way social dissatisfaction with the present expresses itself in a citational longing for the future, a longing that cites a past that is anterior to the recent past: "These tendencies direct the visual imagination, which has been activated by the new, back to the primeval past." 20 Whereas Ruskin believed the "constant use of cast-iron ornaments" marked the "degradation of our national feeling," Benjamin read it retrospectively as marking an otherwise unexpressed desire to abandon a degraded present. 21
If for Benjamin the point of considering such disjuncture is to imagine how a collective unconscious "thinks" forward by thinking back to a classless society, for Woolf the point is more the way attention to the substance of iron, for instance, can provide access to a "primeval history" that is no longer anthropocentric. The story begins to answer the question of how we could bring materials into history as something other than the history of their use, in industry or art. When John, perpetually scouring the crannies of London in his quest to add to his collection, finds a piece of iron under a furze bush in Barnes Common, his sense of time becomes cosmological:
It was almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of the moon. It weighed his pocket down; it weighed the mantelpiece down; it radiated cold. And yet the meteorite stood upon the same ledge with the lump of glass and the star-shaped china. [HH, 84-5]
The passage is mobilized by a dialectic of proximity and distance, familiarity and alterity, that is at once spatial and temporal. The utterly ordinary, which is also otherworldly, can be pocketed and domestically displayed without ever being domesticated. Woolf records not only what it would feel like to desire material per se as a personal possession, but also how such a possession might change the scale of one's historical imagination, how the cosmological might insinuate itself into the daily. To name the scrap of modern iron a "meteorite" is to dislodge it from the homogeneous structure of time, and to say not that the distant past lingers within the present, but to insist that this past is present as a kind of surface with which we can make intimate contact, as though touching one history in and as another. 22 If the story's temporality seems somewhat abstract or confused--"Day after day passed. He was no longer young" (HH, 85)--this is because John's archeology of the modern, his engagement with material as an end (not a means), has dislodged him from the temporal dictates of modern life. The vie privée of things becomes something other than the history of the object's production and exchange, and something other than its representation in, or transformation into, the work of art.
* * *
With James's help, we can redescribe the modernity that Simmel renders--where the ability to dominate things is coupled with the inability to establish contact with things--as the intensification of a basic perceptual process, or as a perceptual process that has become a social logic. In the 1920s this sociopsychological, sociosensual problematic achieved its full theorization. On the one hand, Lukács asserts that reification "conceals above all the immediate--qualitative and material--character of things as things." On the other, Heidegger, without ever specifying Lukács, complains that such arguments always fail to describe for us what "we are to understand positively when we think of unreified Being." And Benjamin, in a much-quoted passage from One Way Street (providing a non-Heideggerian response to such a complaint) describes how children's engagement with the material world reveals the capacity to transform things, bits of cultural detritus, into new things--a kind of recycling that never replicates the world as it is, but rather reminds us, in the mode of spontaneous collage, that things might be other than they are. 23
"Any object," Woolf writes, "mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain" (HH, 82). This activity of recomposition, which moves John's encounter from the sensuous and material to the phenomenal and the psychological, returns to the material by granting him a different mode of engagement with the city. That is, just as John mediates the transformation of the lump of glass into a "precious gem," so too the glass transforms his relation to urban space. It provokes him to walk through London with "his eyes upon the ground," especially attracted to the alleys where "such objects often occurred"--"thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded" (HH, 82). To say that objects occur is to suggest that objects have a temporality; they don't happen to be there so much as they happen. And the way that they happen distorts John's pedestrian quest to match the shape of the smooth lump of glass; instead, he seems propelled only by a new responsiveness to form as such. The broken piece of china "as nearly resembl[es] a starfish as anything--shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points" (HH, 83). His new optical, tactile consciousness does not permit him to leave a curious object behind; he misses a meeting in order to secure the shard. John may exhibit the typical passions of the new collector, but one can't quite say just what it is that he collects. And he makes no effort to express himself in his exhibition; rather, the lives of these things--the glass contemplative, the china vivid, fitful, surreal--overwhelm his life.
In his essay on surrealism, Benjamin confidently proclaims that the poet too perceives the immense force, the revolutionary energy, that resides within discarded artifacts, those "enslaved and enslaving objects." But in the more telegraphic "Traumkitsch," where he imagines a history of dreams, the unconscious seems severely limited; the dreams of today, he writes, are a "short cut to the banal," in our dreams "there is a gray layer of dust on things," and in dreams we touch objects "precisely where they are most worn," where they are "eroded by habit." The dreamwork fails to recapacitate us as children, who never (according to habit) "take hold of a glass but [instead] reach right in." 24 It is a kind of misapprehension, an untoward reobjectification, a kind of misuse that clears the dust away.
It was with the "impulse of a child," Woolf writes, that John slipped the lump of glass inside his pocket "promising it a life of warmth and security" (HH, 81). When on the beach, and having left off a political argument with his friend Charles ("Politics be damned!"), John distracts himself by "burrow[ing] his fingers down, down into the sand," his eyes becoming "clear transparent surface[s] . . . expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display" (HH, 80). Such rhetorical recourse to the child, rative or literal, also helps Roger Fry in his essay on "The Artist's Vision" to taxonomize the "economy" of the senses, as he called it, and above all to differentiate between looking and mere seeing. Though it is children who genuinely "look at things with some passion," the adult retains "something of this unbiological, disinterested vision," the testimony to which he finds in those collections of objects (like John's) that are otherwise unremarkable but "which have some marked peculiarity of appearance that catches his eye." 25 This essay, also published in Athenaeum in 1919, provides the simplest theorization of what Woolf is up to in her story. It is as though Fry has translated James's psychological point (which originally stumbled onto the aesthetic, onto questions of landscape and painting) and transformed it into a point about the aesthetic and nonaesthetic subject. "We were given our eyes to see things, not to look at them," a fact that he takes to be a biological necessity since the "very considerable ignorance of visual appearances" becomes a practical matter. 26 When Woolf writes about "The Cinema," which, according to the surrealists, disclosed in the photogenic object the fact that things have lives of their own, she describes its ability to provide audiences with a new field of sensation. She reiterates Fry's point, but she also nationalizes it, describing "the English unaesthetic eye" as "a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes." 27
If the unhabituated child perpetually appears in contrast as the engaged aesthetic subject (although Benjamin calls attention not to a disinterested appreciation of the material world, but to an interested, spontaneous reconration of that world), this is not a reinstallation of the Wordsworthian subject, for whom nature and not the detritus of culture exists as the fully engaging aesthetic object. Still, Woolf's story, because the child appears only as a vehicle for describing John's reactions, poses a complex of inescapable questions. Is John's response childlike in the profundity of its willingness to see and to feel the material world anew or is his behavior a lamentable, childish retreat? Is this an inspired act of transgression or simply a regression? Is this a regrettable withdrawal from politics or the recognition that politics need to begin elsewhere, with some experience of the profound otherness of the everyday?
The story's ambiguity has everything to do with the proximity or specularity of, on the one hand, the life of things, and, on the other, commodity culture as usual. For John is in what would be recognizable as the throes of consumer desire--"the determination to possess objects that even surpassed these tormented the young man"--were it to have appeared in Emile Zola's Au bonheur des dames or Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (HH, 85). His desire anticipates a later moment in the history of bourgeois consumerism where consumption and collection seem increasingly conflated. Any newly purchased object, not just the Hummel rine but also the bottle cap and the Beanie Baby, can be declared by the manufacturer to be collectible. If, writing of the early nineteenth-century interior, Benjamin could imagine that the collector's responsibility was "the Sisyphean task of obliterating the commodity-like characters of things," and of freeing things from "the drudgery of being useful," in the late twentieth century the preservation from this drudgery has been the means of increasing consumer desire. 28
So too, of course, the secret life of things--whether it is the fitfulness of a piece of broken china, or knives standing on their feet, or sponges swimming free at last on the river--might be declared a literalization of our alienation as Simmel described it, where, "by their independent, impersonal mobility," objects "complete the final stage of their separation from people." 29 And yet, it is precisely by giving into--thinking or working through--reification and alienation, and by identifying a profounder separation (not of objects but of things), that Adorno came to re-identify ethical possibility: "If a man looks upon thingness as a radical evil . . . he tends to be hostile to otherness, to the alien thing that has lent its name to alienation, and not in vain" (ND, 191). For Simmel, the problem of modernity can be characterized by the fact that "objects and people have become separated from one another," that objects can no longer be "assimilated by the individual" (PM, 460). For Adorno, the problem has become the very will-to-assimilation. He designates the happiness of philosophy, over and against the "imperialism of annexing the alien," as residing "in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different" (ND, 191). Were we to grant "Solid Objects" a place between Simmel's sociology and Adorno's philosophy, we would read it as a narrative of things accumulated but not arranged, intimate but unassimilated, "extimate" in their simultaneous proximity and distance, accreted as vivacious fragments that belong to no whole. The ethics of the story thus reside in Woolf's depiction of an experience--of experience--that activates for the fragment a life of its own.
* * *
Though "Solid Objects" narratively and, thus, ambivalently engages topics conceptualized elsewhere, Woolf's diary during these years hardly records any consistent concern for material objects. We read other diarists, after all, to hear about things. She writes about reading and thinking and talking and writing. Just as, in Orlando, the young nobleman's "disease of reading" can temporarily turn all his riches--"carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold"--into mist, so too in Woolf's own daily record, her reading and writing tend to obscure any encounter with the physical world (O, 75, 74). If she writes about objects, she tends to write about them as signs, in the effort to determine how possessions characterize those who possess them: "art lamps and iridescent plates," for instance, seem to demonstrate the gentility of one "farmer husband" (D, 248).
In her stories, however, material objects seem a condition of narratability. "Moments of Being" records the thoughts of a woman in search of a lost pin, the finding of which puts a stop to the story. "The New Dress" records the way social anxiety is most keenly mediated by material possessions. The point of "The Lady in the Looking Glass" is that possessions that apparently reveal a life in fact keep it concealed from view. An extraordinary dangling modifier in the story suddenly shifts the burden from the unnamed narrator to the possessions themselves, as though they spent their time contemplating the woman who possesses them: "Under the stress of thinking about Isabella, her room became more shadowy and symbolic; the corners seemed darker, the legs of chairs and tables more spindly and hieroglyphic." 30 It is as though the object world, by concerning itself with human subjects, becomes both more and less legible, clearly significant but indecipherable.
Though the novels never think through artifacts so exclusively, they continue to foreground the way objects mediate human relations, including the self's relation to itself. Orlando's past returns to her in the twentieth century through her former possessions, housed in a museum. In Night and Day, when Mrs. Hilbery exclaims "Dear things! Dear chairs and tables! How like old friends they are," the dearness resides in the family history that the objects express, in the objects' august legibility, a result of the fact that "We live in things," as Mrs. Swithin explains to the man who "fingers sensations," in Between the Acts. 31 Those novels construct a universe where, as Benjamin would have it, interiors are legible in traces left by their occupants, and where collected objects contain for the collector elaborate narratives of their collection. In Woolf's version of the argument, within our houses, within our rooms, we are "surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience." Thus a whole morning spent in Italy, the iron table and the breeze and the vines and the pillars, "rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece," a bowl purchased during an Italian holiday. 32
But the fragments collected in "Solid Objects"--which, the more one reads Woolf, seems itself to be an unrepresentative fragment--have only a fantasized and fantastic provenance: perhaps the lump of glass is a gem "worn by a dark Princess," or perhaps it is from an Elizabethan treasure chest (HH, 80-1). The fragments express the oddity of someone else's temperament: John imagines that the shape of the china shard depends on the "conjunction [of] a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below" (HH, 84). As compellingly as this scene may describe a woman's frustration with the objects that materialize her domestic confinement, the scene results from John's mere conjecture. In other words, the difference that "Solid Objects" insists on is a difference that comes from dislodging objects from a history of their proximity to subjects, from liberating artifacts out of their status as determinate signs, from rendering a life of things that is irreducible to the history of human subjects.
Yet the pathos of Jacob's Room, among other novels, depends precisely on that reduction, on the symbolic and metonymic power of objects. The novel displays the evanescence of the protagonist's life as a relation to the material object world. Woolf's poetics of space is in fact a poetics of the object. We first read about the boy climbing on rock, "one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive," and then about him lost at the beach and "sobbing, but absent-mindedly" running "farther and farther" to discover just what it is that he has glimpsed "among the black sticks and straw." 33 Despite his family's insistence, he refuses to give up the sheep's skull, whitened by water and wind; he sleeps with it at the foot of the bed. The boy's attachment to the natural object that most readily suggests permanence, rock, becomes instead an attachment to bone, the quintessential memento mori that expresses the proximity between the animate and inanimate.
A child's fascination with the natural world--children collecting beetles and butterflies in chapter two--devolves into more mundane arrangements, such as Jacob's room at Cambridge, with its "round table and two low chairs," with "yellow flags in a jar on the mantelpiece" (JR, 38). The novel gradually taxonomizes the adult fascination with objects. Consumer desire keeps Fanny captivated by "Evelina's shop off Shaftsbury Avenue" where "the parts of a woman were shown separate," skirts and boas and hats and shoes displayed without the logic of the ensemble (JR, 121).  But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity" (JR, 131). A recognizably Romantic sensibility compels Jacob himself to cherish the Acropolis. In the midst of these competing modes of cathexis, the narrator offers a fully thematizing, ambiguating account of the relation between things of the world (actions) and things in the world (mere things) as Jacob begins to think seriously about his future, about going into Parliament, perhaps, about the question of the British Empire, the question of Home Rule in Ireland: "For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things--as indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware" (JR, 139). Once immersed in mere things, Jacob is about to immerse himself in things, as his new possessions testify. He is cut off from aspiring to the political life and the sense of political economy that John willfully abandons in "Solid Objects." The concluding tableau of the novel, then, evolves less from the idea of absence (Jacob's death in the war), and more from a lingering presence, all the unburied remains, those possessions no longer possessed. A room lived in and permanently left is not haunted, but uncanny: "One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there" (JR, 176). The overwhelming question for those left is what to do with the objects that linger; holding out a pair of Jacob's old shoes, his mother asks "What am I to do with these?" (JR, 176). If, as Baudrillard would maintain, the subject's destiny passes into the object, what is the object's destiny beyond the life of the subject? What sort of obsolescence is this?