Oct 11, 2024 By: Jennifer Soong
Volume 9, Cycle 1
In 1910 Gertrude Stein wrote the lines, “She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.”[1] The piece was “Many Many Women” (1933), a genre-bending work featuring a series of paragraphs all describing unidentified women referred to by the pronoun “she.” Hallmarking Stein’s trademark development of abstraction and repetition in her “continuous present,” the idiosyncratic sentences invite the reader to search both anaphorically and cataphorically for the proper referents to the author’s slippery pronouns, as if to produce the feeling of forgetting itself. In choosing the present progressive over the simple present tense, Stein rejects a grammatical model that assumes a state of before/after change, induces telic events that follow one another, or gives the reader temporal perspective within the timeline that language creates. Rather, she stalls the forward movement of narrative time and action. The progressive refuses the finality of thought and generates an ongoing process of mental and physical activities that are overlapping and atelic. Forgetting, in this grammatical form, is shown to be suspenseful and dramatic. Repetition is less of a reenactment of the past than what Stein calls an “insistence”[2] of what is happening. When the remembered thing turns out to be forgetting itself—“she is remembering that she is forgetting anything”—forgetting assumes the status of a positive word that resists the conquest of memory (“Many Many Women,” 119). It refuses us its referent (Stein never retrieves the object of the forgotten “anything”) and remains a limit case for referential language, which at once becomes free-floating and excessive. The possibility of forgetting anything opens up the possibility of forgetting everything, a leap permitted by the indefinite nature of oblivion’s grammatical forms.
Such play on forgetting is only one of many instances exemplifying Stein’s life-long interest in a radical project of forgetfulness. Traditionally, the word “forget,” defined by the OED as “to lose remembrance of,” has connoted privation, defined by its opposition to or negation of other terms.[3] Remembrance is the most obvious of these terms, but the opposition between forgetting and remembering has also served as a proxy for more subtle antagonisms: forgetting and justice, forgetting and truth, and even life and death. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the concept began to acquire new conceptual capital for artists and philosophers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, figures such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Ezra Pound, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began to view forgetting as something active rather than lethargic, potentially willful rather than involuntary, positive rather than privative. On the one hand, forgetting’s antagonistic power became more relevant than ever to the revolutionary spirit of paradigmatic shifts in art and science. “A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost,” Alfred North Whitehead said.[4] On the other hand, its changing status allowed it to acquire new meanings, shifting, for instance, the problem of memory from one of conservation to selection[5] or suggesting that the things one can’t recall are in fact significant enough to be forgotten or repressed.[6] The very existence of the word “forget” even begs the question of whether “to forget” is always synonymous with “not to remember.” Grammatically and logically speaking, “not to remember” is a negation of “to remember,” but forgetting—while it may sometimes have the same meaning as “not to remember”—is itself a third term. The very fact that we have it in our language suggests that “forgetting” has some kind of independence. The word significantly reminds us that forgetting is an actual process, not necessarily just the absence of another one.
For modernist scholars, forgetting’s historical valence evokes two aesthetic strands: the poetics of nothingness by French Symbolists and the deliberate forgetting of the Futurists, who identified forgetting as a way to self-appoint cultural authority and accelerate society into what Sascha Bru, following François Hartog, has called a new “presentist regime.”[7] Not yet theorized in the postwar context of collective memory and mass suppression, forgetting at its modernist apex entailed, for a group of individuals, a shift from signifying attrition to constituting a creative principle.[8] But while forgetting generally tends to share with the modernist avant-garde the aim of making us see things anew, the stakes of Stein’s forgetting are also more specific and unique. At times connoting an avoidance of remembrance and at other times connoting attentiveness to the presence of things, Stein’s forgetting informs everything from her distrust of identity to her theory of painting—which has “nothing to do with memory” because painters “concern themselves only with visible things.”[9] In this article, I focus on one of her most singular and sustained uses of forgetting: the integration of two dichotomous traditions in modernism, writing as knowledge and writing as action.
On the surface, the two traditions of writing as knowledge and writing as action represent an unhappy marriage. Modernist action, for one, is typically conceived of as “aggressive and spontaneous,” unfettered, and “provisory and transitional.”[10] Critics have attributed these characteristics to causes as various as the desire to liberate society from increasing regularity, the desire to collapse the distinction between art and life, the drive to be “knowledge destroyers,” and even the influence of extreme velocities in modern physics.[11] An emphasis on writing’s nature as action—as opposed to as text, object, reflection, or representation—does not posit that writing is always literally an action but rather, stresses what change writing can effect. Writing as action underscores what particular dynamic experiences writing alone can generate, referring to the temporal potential out of which writing arises. Alternatively, writing that is committed to being knowledge has a much longer tradition of assuming a knowledge which is either accumulative or reflective, recalling and aggregating information over time. It presumes a return to prior places and times and a traversal of the past, from which one reconstructs a body of knowledge.
The diverging nature of the two traditions is prone to mutual critique. If writing is action, not prior to or subsequent to it, it is often said to lack the critical or historical distance to understand itself. The attack is a longstanding one, a descendent from the enduring tension between action and judgment, mind and body, vita activa and vita contemplativa.[12] In the context of modernist literature, however, it has an emphasized temporal dimension.[13] Given that action belongs to the realm of the present, the attack on presentism is usually upheld on similar grounds: modernism’s attempt to self-pronounce persists in the question What is the present?, which has been made to confront its very epistemological validity ever since.[14] The argument is that knowing the present as it is happening conflicts with the nature of knowing itself.
By contrast, writing which is committed to knowing may be cumulative and passed down, but is said to be separate from, or even antithetical to true doing, hence the performative aspects of modernist manifestoes, Nietzsche’s vitalist attack against historicist excess, and William Carlos Williams’s blunt pronouncement, “Bla! Bla! Bla! Heavy talk is talk that waits upon deed.”[15] Writing that knows may refer to, study, or recall external actions, but is not spontaneous or generative of action itself; in other words, it can represent but does not express. Articulating this as one of modernity’s paradoxes in “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Paul de Man notes: “The spontaneity of being modern conflicts with the claim to think and write about modernity.”[16] Or as Charles Bernstein puts it, a certain kind of writing can “make its own particular marks on language, allowing for greater levels of abstraction and reflection, which has often resulted in diminishing the amount of action and ‘doing.’”[17] The impossible cohabitation of literary consciousness and literary action runs parallel to the apparent impossibility of representing what is present. The representation need not be creative; the implication is that any theory or model of the present seems to take fleeting action as its content but is both lagging in time and fossilizing of action’s ephemerality.
Against this context, however, Stein’s work marshals forth the idea that the two traditions need not be antagonistic or mutually exclusive and can in fact be wedded to constitute writing’s very duality with the help of a vital third term: forgetting. As an aesthetic and compositional tool, forgetting initiates new forms of present knowledge that are non-accumulative and non-progressive, while defining aesthetic action as something that does not take the past as reference but is in constant, ongoing formation. For Stein, forgetting extends beyond mere desire to break with literary tradition; it is also an ontological and epistemological issue. Rather than being an obstacle or error in cognition, it marks an epistemological shift from memory’s usual kinship with knowledge and becomes an alternative mode of knowing. Forgetting the past is not just about the prioritization of the present per se, but also of presence, as it relates to the possibility of knowing what is before one’s self. However elusive and slippery an aesthetic term, “presence” denotes the ability to create a sense of immediacy and contact. This is significant because Stein’s knowledge is not brought about through critical or historical distance, but rather its precise opposite: proximity. “To understand a thing means to be in contact with that thing and the human mind can be in contact with anything,” she writes in The Geographical History of America.[18] Forgetting the past brings one closer to the “exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing [is] really knowing it knowing anything.”[19] When Stein argues that “knowledge is not succession but an immediate existing,” she suggests it has a presence that is active, emphatic (“knowing really knowing it”), living, and “immediate” rather than successive.[20]
As forgetting gives Stein the means to attend to what is before her—to move away from memory towards attention, learning to unlearning/genius—it gives knowledge the temporal advantage of action.[21] The coexistence of knowledge and action in the ongoing present lies at the heart of writing’s dual nature: writing as knowing must know itself as it is being performed or acted out. Grasping the depth and layers of this claim depends on understanding Stein’s specific theory of action. For unlike more masculine, notions of modernist action as a heroic deed or historical accomplishment, Stein’s sense of action arises out of forgetting and is often ongoing, incomplete, and mental, related to modes of feeling and knowing. Therefore, while the first half of this article will flesh out forgetting’s contribution to writing as knowing, the second half will rethink writing and knowing as forms of atelic action—specifically as states and activities. For Stein, a writing which knows must also exercise itself as a practical knowledge rooted in doing, and a writing which makes something happen must also be knowing of itself in the act.
II.
Readers of Stein are no strangers to the epistemological implications of her experimental writing. Where Linda Voris has shown how “knowledge is an embodied process for the radical empiricist,” Johanna Winant and Jennifer Ashton have also offered successful accounts of Stein’s respective investments in the “possibility and the problems of explaining based on inductive reasoning” and categorization: how to “know the whole of the person” and consequently “turn from a phenomenological model of wholes to a logical one.”[22] Critics have also been attentive to Stein’s temporal poetics, how she viewed individuals and their personalities as “fundamentally rhythmic,” how habit-formation was at once a protection against the shocks of history (Liesl Olson) and an adaptive process of assimilation (Omri Moses).[23] Building off these accounts, as well as two other noteworthy pieces of scholarship—Sharon Kirsch’s chapter on forgetting’s relationship to rhetoric in Stein’s work and Elizabeth Freeman’s work on Stein’s revision of pathologized and atelic concepts such as “chronicity” (here, the pathological realm of forgetting includes amnesia and aphasia)—I discuss how an epistemological and temporal poetics of active, atelic writing come together in forgetting.[24] As a shaper of time and tense, forgetting works in Stein’s vision of writing, first as an exposé of the limitations of memory, then as a compositional method aimed at attuning the author to a new kind of knowledge based on inference, clarity of distinction, observation, and presence.
In Wars I Have Seen (1945), Stein’s memoir about life during the Second World War, the author begins with the conundrum, “I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember.”[25] Stein locates the question of knowledge within the project of writing. The things that Stein does not remember, however, are not necessarily forgotten; rather, like one’s birth, they enter a category of facts that are historically true but not verified by one’s memory. She writes, “To begin with I was born, that I do not remember but I was told about it quite often . . . The next thing I heard about myself was that I was eight months old” (Wars, 3). In the following pages, the author accumulates a variety of mental experiences that invite us to question the project of memoir: the speaker can recall the place of an event but not the actual event; the speaker describes the specific stage in her life when she “really did begin to remember,” implying an earlier period of lesser or false remembrance; and the speaker notes how there were things she “could be helped to remember by hearing them told again and again,” emphasizing the role of external aids in strengthening one’s mnemonic faculty (6, 4).
Repeatedly acknowledging while using memory’s fallibility as the basis for writing, Stein does not make her primary concern memory per se, but rather, how knowledge can be acquired outside of the remembering faculty. Writing becomes a means of knowing the limits of memory while also trying to bypass them. The attempt to circumscribe memory is partially motivated by the belief that remembrance is privy to the problems and risks to which imagination is similarly subject in classical philosophy: that of trying to represent what is absent by creating semblance or “false” likenesses. Unlike the conventional understanding of imagination, however, the stakes of memory are such that it lays claims to knowledge. Much of traditional western thought attests to the positive collaboration of memory and learning.[26] In the Aristotelian model of recollection, for instance, recollection is an investigative, logical, and effortful recovery of prior knowledge necessarily conditioned by the lapse of time.[27] Though based in images, Aristotelean recollection extends beyond the mere sake of remembering past episodes or events. It also passes into and reinforces scientific knowledge, even when the beholder of knowledge may not necessarily recall the learning process or moment of acquisition.
For Stein and many at the turn of the twentieth century, this precise yoking of knowledge and memory is to be disbanded.[28] Memory does not enable but precludes the obtainment of knowledge. In the author’s 1937 account of why flying in a plane instills little to no fear when compared to climbing a mountain, she notes that even though one is certainly higher up in a plane, “everybody knows that somebody has fallen from any cliff and not been killed so anybody can remember that but anybody falling from the air is killed so no one can remember that.”[29] In her playful and arguably facetious account, Stein differentiates between subjective experience and objective knowledge, what is episodic (time-stamped and related to personally experienced events) and what is semantic (factually and more generally known through concepts and ideas). Semantic knowledge—which is marked by its unchangingness—is best achieved by sidestepping memory altogether. In the specific example of flying, memory of being in a plane does not produce the “right” knowledge, but instead, produces a kind of absurdism, a false belief in the relative dangers of being on a cliff and being in an airplane. Memory no longer bears the “scientific” logic implicit in Aristotelian recollection but is instead associated with a kind of logical fallacy.
Ironically, the epistemological limitations on memory are its intellectual value. The problem of remembering accurately produces seemingly objective statements about subjective fallibility. On Stein’s epistemology, Winant has shown how Stein’s writing reasons inductively while encountering the conundrum that for all the empirical facts one acquires over time, one can never be sure that one has all or enough of the facts. What one might add to this account is how Stein’s work re-inscribes this very problem of insufficient evidence as a self-evident truth capable of producing more claims. I will give here two examples. Writing on time and genre in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Stein notes, “Really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right” (emphasis added) (Everybody’s Autobiography, 70). Here, remembering right and being right (“it is not right”) are mutually exclusive, precisely because Stein wants to detach epistemology from the past. As a poetics, being right is associated with sound, not only as an aural presence but also as soundness, common sense. Being or sounding right emphasizes the presence of the present.[30] The retroactive project of autobiography, by contrast, is a mode of written remembrance incompatible with any possibility of being or sounding right. To “remember right” is not to remember things accurately, but to remember in the true nature of remembrance, which inevitability entails unreliability.
Stating the problem does not resolve or exempt Stein from her own work as autobiography but it does demonstrate that given memory’s diminishing authority, the author turns to what she can explain from a position of apparent disinterest as a mode of generating literary authority. Stein’s writing, in differentiating between remembering and being, allows the poet to prioritize the presence of the present (insistence, concentration) over the presence of the past (memory) or the presence of the future (expectation). The upshot of the presence of the present is two-fold for Stein: first, writing achieves clarity when it is completely focused on the present—(“remembering is very confusing and fuzzy whereas writing is very clear,” Stein writes elsewhere)—and second, a writing of the present makes something happen, as opposed to reflecting on something that has happened.[31]
As a second example, consider the experimental prose piece A Long Gay Book, written in the period from 1909 to 1912. Throughout it, Stein depicts what it is like to be someone who is doing anything: loving, arranging, resenting, mentioning, forgetting, etc. She repeatedly concludes that in presently being a person, one had to come to be that person. It is not necessary that one remember who one was, merely that one infer it from the present. In doing anything, one had to have begun doing it at some point. Beginning anything is not the same as completely doing it or finishing it, and one knows this not because one remembers but because one is doing something, not beginning to do it:
If in having been one one was one then that one the one that one was was one having come to be that one. In having been one one who was one was one and in having been that one that one was one having come to be that one. In having come to be that one one having come to be that one was one coming to be that one.[32]
Regardless of whether the events and processes are linked by causation, the facts of the events are significantly linked not by writing-by-memory, but by writing-as-explanation. The explanatory logic is such that the state of “having been one” leads the writer to “having come to be that one” to “coming to be that one.” The progress of Stein’s description as a way of knowing “one” is thus both elaborative and regressive, but in a way that does not depend on remembering.
Stein’s way of writing, however, does more than open up, as Kirsch says, “a space to address failures of memory” (Reinvention, 76). It also provides forgetting itself with a more active role, one capable of generating knowledge and becoming an alternative, rather than an hindrance, to knowing. To ask why Stein is so invested in forgetting as a topic—that is, what forgetting allows Stein to achieve, argue, and criticize in her creative vision—is inseparable from how forgetting appears in the composition itself. In her authoritative study of Stein’s notebooks, Ulla Dydo notes that the writer intentionally crossed out the original names or nouns of persons and places, substituting them with more neutral pronouns. This act of erasing “in order to prevent attention from shifting to the reference” is, I would argue, one manifestation of deliberate forgetting as a way towards new forms of epistemological questions.[33] Forgetting, in this particular stylistic choice, loses the specificity of the referent, calling attention to how a pronoun might act as a memory trace for the reader without leading to a particular source. As evident in Long Gay Book, Stein’s works from 1909–1912 also play with generic pronouns in order for the author to move between the mutually constitutive yet distinct questions of Who is “everybody,” “anything,” or “she” (which depends on source and reference) and What “anybody,” “anything,” or “she,” as a concept or category, is. Such an oscillation depends on the abstraction that forgetting facilitates. Forgetting specific external references allows one to generalize from within language itself.
Similarly, Stein’s idiosyncratic method of counting via “one one one,” which she cites in “An Instant Answer; or, A Hundred Prominent Men” (1928), “Poetry and Grammar” (1935), and Everybody’s Autobiography, has often been read as a model of total knowledge that isn’t based on accretion.[34] It is also an example of forgetting precedence and controlling the precision and scale of one’s attention. Accumulative counting not only results in the problem of diminishing difference as one enters higher terms (e.g., the difference between five hundred and one and five hundred and two appears negligible compared to that between three and four, also known as Weber’s Law), but it also requires one to keep track of what is growing increasingly prone to miscounting and misremembrance. Counting by deliberate forgetting, on the other hand, approaches each entity by discrimination without pre-assigning the grounds or context of difference. Enumeration occurs, but no succession or addition. Where two differs from one because two is greater than and contains one—the difference is quantitative, a matter of degree—“one one one” does not define each subsequent term by its relation, or in the context, of the first. It merely suggests, on a more fundamental level, that there are specific features that belong to a thing and other features that belong to some other thing, hence making them appear as distinct entities.
Perhaps this is why the art of forgetting supplies Stein with a way of knowing that is rooted in difference, distinction, and definition rather than similarity, which is the traditional basis of remembrance and knowledge.[35] In her 1926 experimental work “An Acquaintance with Description,” Stein plays with this very idea of how to define or know a thing.[36] Opening with the one-sentence paragraph “Mouths and Wood,” while repeating the ungrammatical sentence “What is the difference between not what is the difference between,” the piece asks its audience to locate the difference between various items like “a hedge and a tree,” “forests and the cultivation of cattle,” “a small pair and that color and outside,” and “she is very happy and a farm.” Stein writes:
What is the difference between not what is the difference between. What is the difference between not what is the difference between. An acquaintance with description or what is the difference between not what is the difference between not an acquaintance in description. An acquaintance in description.
and later,
What is the difference between three and two in furniture. Three is the third of three and two is the second of two. This makes it as true as a description. And not satisfied. And what is the difference between being on the road and waiting very likely being very likely waiting, a road is connecting and as it is connecting it is intended to be keeping going and waiting everybody can understand puzzling. (“Acquaintance,” 532)
Stein draws her items and phrases from everyday vocabulary. Most readers know that three is not two, that being on the road implies movement and waiting stasis, and that “What is the difference between” seems like the complete opposite of “[What is] Not what is the difference between.” The power of such moments, however, is that the instant the writer asks her audience to uncover a difference between such disparate things, we are inclined to think there are infinite differences and turn instead to search for a similarity in order to discover some grounds for meaningful comparison. Perceiving difference, which is based on the idea of seeing difference against the terms of difference and similarity, forces the reader to forget or divest himself of the usual chains of signification. To hold onto usual associations would render such juxtapositions nonsensical. The question is not whether or not there is difference but how to meaningfully express it in order to know something. Or, as “what is the difference between” suggests, how to meaningfully measure it, how to “subtract” or divest from cultural associations until “the difference”—what makes two things distinct—is the essential remainder.
In the example of “a hedge and a tree,” it may be that for Stein the difference between the two lies in arrangement or time. While a dictionary might state that hedges are typically rows of trees or woody shrubs, Stein raises the possibility of defining a hedge or a tree through form and scale. Stand close enough to a hedge, and a single tree may be what fills one’s vision. Stand afar, and the same tree may blend into and be obscured by the hedge-at-large. Study a hedge, and it will emerge that a hedge bears no temporality, only maintenance and homogeneity, whereas a tree’s change is captured in its growth and unique formation.
I offer such potential interpretations only to show that Stein is not after “dictionary definition” but rather how definition or distinction occurs in the first place, prior to any recollection and association. The answer lies in forgetting. As Thornton Wilder reminds us, “words were no longer precise” for Stein, “[t]hey were full of extraneous matter. They were full of ‘remembering’—and describing a thing in front of us, an ‘objective thing,’ is no time for remembering.”[37] In other words, if memory produced a kind of imprecision in both words and the knowledge they convey, definition and clarity needed to emerge from a kind of amnesia instead. The force of this epistemological assumption is implicit even in Stein’s prioritization of syntax over diction. If the definition of words usually resides in diction—where usage is historically conditioned, transformed, and transmitted—Stein defines words through syntax. The sentence “What is the difference between not what is the difference between,” for instance, initially appears wanting; the reader feels that there ought to be a connective “and” and two items of comparison. However, when reread as “What is ‘the difference between,’ not, what is the difference between” (emphasis added)—in which the second “between” is acting as a modifier for difference—the same phrase is given a different semiotic function, thereby allowing its semantic meaning to be known in a different way. Rather than appearing ungrammatical and nonsensical, the sentence is itself an adjustment of a question: instead of asking what the difference between two items is, Stein asks what difference is in the first place. By making this shift in meaning possible through the positioning and emphasis of words in her sentence, Stein reveals a poetics that runs counter to remembrance and reference. Meaning does not emerge from recalling or looking up a word’s definition, but the present relationship between subjects and objects or prepositions and clauses.
The epistemological importance of forgetting opens up a plethora of critical possibilities beyond the scope of this article. Yet even in this space, we have shown the following: that memory for Stein muddles and interferes with knowledge of the world as it is by using what the world was as an index to which it constantly refers. Forgetfulness not only exposes the limits of memory but also allows a writer to focus on knowing present existence through non-mnemonic means such as direct observation, induction/inference, and distinction. Before the issue of action is reintroduced in this context, however, the idea of having present existence, or presence, is worth considering at length.[38] Consider Stein when she writes, “the human mind knows that it is what it is. It even knows that human nature is what it is therefore it need not remember or forget no the human mind does not remember because how can you remember when anything is what it is. Or how can you forget when anything is what it is” (The Geographical History, 385). Here, forgetfulness points to a discrepancy not between past and present, but rather, between what something is and is not. While much of identity in Stein’s work is centered on the temporal (dis)continuities between what something was and now is, the lines here indicate something else: one cannot remember the present because there is nothing to remember in the present. This is what distinguishes the human mind for Stein from human nature. The human mind “does not remember because how can you remember when anything is what it is. Or how can you forget when anything is what it is” (385). In other words, forgetting occurs when something is absent, but if the present is present, what is there to forget?
This is not simply linguistic theatrics. Knowing by attending to the present means concentrating on listening and seeing, not listening or seeing as. The move away from listening/seeing as towards listening/seeing proper is as much a move away from knowing-as-remembrance as it is writing-by-metaphor, given that seeing as entails recognition, producing similitude, and matching objects up with preexisting schema. As metaphor first suppresses difference on a logical plane in order to draw connections on a higher, figurative plane, it ultimately prioritizes a victory of similitude over difference, predicate over subject, genus over species. Metaphor, like memory, results in a recognition where a thing is not perceived directly, but perceived as or in terms of something else. This move away from metaphor in fact follows a much earlier argument in literary history that metaphors, unlike similes, confuse distinct entities and indicate that a writer’s emotional state and involvement has colored the accuracy of perception.[39] Stein revises this point of view, however, by asserting that one can know and perceive something correctly precisely because of present feeling as opposed to in spite of it. A direct feeling into objects and into herself is a method of paying attention that brings her closer not further from things as they are.
Describing the category of men who are “being living” in A Long Gay Book, Stein writes: “He has in him his being certain that he is being one seeing what he is looking at just then, he has in him the kind of certain feeling of seeing what he is looking at just then” (20). The author associates perception with epistemic certainty as well as the immediacy of knowledge in “being” and “feeling” as a subject. What is perceived by the senses is not (as Yves Bonnefoy would later say) appearance or likeness, but presence—presence of an object and a subject. Stein continues:
In all men in their daily living, in every moment they are living, in all of them, in all the time they are being living, in the times they are doing, in the times they are not doing something, in all of them there is always something in them of being certain of seeing the thing at which they are looking. (20)
Stein’s increasing sense of knowledge is matched by an intensity of scale: “all men,” “every moment,” “all the time,” “there is always something.” Attentiveness by Stein not only penetrates through perception to feeling, but also attempts to reach a level of conviction. Certainty arises from a kind of passionate feeling: passion neglects the past because as a presence, it engrosses on the scale of totality, being monarchial and isolationist; the present object of concentration and feeling supplants all others. Stein overturns earlier somatic conceptions of forgetting as being a symptom of lethargy, suggesting that forgetting is no longer the deterioration of willed activity but how the subject wills excitation, the opposite of a defunct relaxation. It is one of the ways in which arousal, hence poetic pleasure, is possible and compatible with knowing.
III.
For Stein, forgetting marks a temporal shift in how to know: writing through direct observation, contact, and feeling reverses the hegemony of memory in the world of cognition. By moving away from recollection and reflection towards immediacy, the writer reverses knowledge’s reliance on the past and places it in the same realm as action: the present. Yet forgetting also shapes Stein’s poetics of action to make it compatible with knowing. When the poet says in “Stanzas in Meditation,” “How do you do how do you do / And now how do you do now / This which I think now is this,” she not only seems to repeat her question out of a kind of forgetfulness but also literalizes the colloquial greeting by asking what means and methods produce action in a constantly shifting deictic present.[40] The question “how do you do?” leads us to investigate the nature of this doing: If writing is knowing and writing is action, what is the precise relationship the two? And if knowing is a kind of action when writing is involved, what does knowing exactly do?
Even a preliminary answer to such questions requires the initial step of observing Stein’s conception of writing as action in her writing about action. The concept appears as a subject matter most explicitly in Stein’s “historical” works. Given that historical writing takes recollection as its basis, narrating great or at least completed, past actions, the genre provides an apt opportunity for Stein to position aesthetic action and forgetting as both distinct and prior to remembering and historical action. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein writes specifically about and against historical action by the military, beginning with how the war had “nothing to do” with her and Picasso’s evolving friendship:
The war had nothing to do with that of course not. Wars never do, they only make anybody know what has already happened it has happened already the war only makes it public makes those who like illustrations of anything see that it has been happening. . . . Everything has been done before the war and then the war makes everybody know it and then everybody acts as if they were doing something but really they are only carried on by momentum. (Everybody’s Autobiography, 76)
Right away, Stein introduces the idea that wars are irrelevant to everyday living because they do not enact any real change. Despite the traditional nature of war as being accomplishment and deed-oriented, Stein views war as having no connection to what is happening because “[e]verything has been done before the war.” In other words, war is not synchronous with, or constituted by, action, but rather, serves as action’s aftermath. War merely offers an illustration, an appearance or public visibility that references and recalls what has already occurred elsewhere, often inside a given individual. Though Stein does not explicitly mention forgetting, questions of knowledge, tense, and memory are implicit: wars seem to produce a kind of knowledge, but one that is problematically out of synch with actual doing. By the time knowing is publicized, it becomes representational and is already on the path towards boredom or dullness.
The critique is similar to Stein’s attack on newspaper writing, which cannot resolve the predicament of seemingly combining knowledge and action but in “false time.” In a lecture Stein says, “Newspapers want to do something, they want to tell what is happening as if it were just then happening . . . as if the writing were being written as it is read.”[41] What Stein is suggesting is that newspapers operate by deceiving the reader into feeling that yesterday is today. Every news day only seems to be a brand new day which has forgotten yesterday’s events. Newspapers rely on a false sense of presence and immediacy, but in fact are both too late for real life and too early for writing—that is, they write what has already happened and what they recall from memory, hence destroying all possibility of not only discovery but also writing-as-action, true forgetting, and doing. In their implicitness of “something always happening,” daily newspapers feign a synchronicity with something like Stein’s continuous present, but unlike Stein’s work, which makes something happen, newspapers describe a thing which has concluded, depriving writing of what creative force bears a certain intensity or feeling of first-hand experience (“Lecture 3,” 350). In contrast to a writing that still relies on memory, Stein’s definition of modernity entails a kind of action that runs counter to remembrance, hence representation and reflection: “We in this period have not lived in remembering, we have living in moving being necessarily so intense that existing is indeed something, is indeed that thing that we are doing” (“Portraits and Repetition,” 297). Locating action in something as ongoing and inconclusive as existing, Stein describes everyday life as an activity and state that bears the intensity or excitement that winning or losing a war, or reporting on a huge story, usually claims. Though counterintuitive, wars and newspapers for Stein have the commonality of not starting anything; they are effects of action, rather than causes. For Stein, writing can “make history” only if it replaces linear narrative with a self-referential “movement so great that it has not to be seen against something else to be known.” This movement is so great it forgets what precedes it, disconnecting itself so as to make something happen.
Stein’s sense of action shifts from those which depend on memory (the actions depicted by newspapers and historical accounts) to those which encourage a kind of forgetting, i.e., activities and states. Because they are homogenous and atelic, activities and states replace and replenish their own content without requiring the past for contrast or comparison. Forgetting encourages this repetitive nature of activities and states. As early as pieces like A Long Gay Book, Many Many Women, and G.M.P., Stein indicates an interest in how forgetting can contribute to the formal presentation of atelic action as well as how atelic actions can incentivize forgetting on the part of the reader and writer. By having activities and states feature prominently in portraiture—which usually focuses on the person as the primary holder of agency—Stein shows that she is less interested in recounting what her subjects have done (this would be the work of reportage, biographical history, or remembrance) than in how actions are integral to the intelligibility of those subjects.[42] Take, for instance, the full version of this article’s opening example. In Many Many Women, Stein writes:
She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.
She is one being one remembering that she is forgetting anything. She is one not objecting to being one remembering that thing, remembering that she is forgetting anything. She is one objecting to there being some objecting to being ones forgetting anything. She is one objecting to any one being one remembering that they are not forgetting anything. She is one objecting to any one objecting to her being one forgetting anything. She is not one remembering being one objecting to any one objecting to her being one forgetting anything. She is one remembering that she is one objecting to being one remembering that they are not forgetting anything. She is one remembering something of being one objecting to some being one objecting to forgetting anything. (119–120)
Stein’s work is hardly a traditional recounting of a person’s life accomplishments. There is nothing here that one can summarize. There is also very little that one can “remember” in the sense of creating mental shortcuts to recall information, and even less to turn into retroactive narrative, since the paratactic order of what’s happening resists “reordering.” Rather, Stein’s focus on activities and states encourages us to draw blanks at every moment, as if to clear mental room for the next long sentence, which is bound to draw upon a set of key words that keep changing their meaning depending on their context. Further, the writer puts aside that traditional projects of a history or memoir. Identification of “she” is less important in the normative sense (naming her, giving her spatial boundaries) than putting into motion the subject’s activities and states. Action is not simply a thing “she” does. It is synonymous with who she is. Whereas a woman who forgets now and then remembers later suggests a change in state, a woman who “is forgetting anything” is more like a sun that is shining: the description of forgetting is an essential quality that manifests itself experientially, in particular conditions and states. Characteristic of Stein’s work, quality here is not adjectival: Stein, who does not say “she is forgetful” uses the aspectual function of “forgetting” as a happening, an action that entails and consumes time, starting, restarting, and going on in a habitual manner. Forgetting, objecting, and remembering are as much repeated “stages” as they are constitutive elements of the subject’s existence.
The “build-up” effect of Stein’s lengthening sentences is itself an active process based in the creative power of forgetting. As early as the sixteenth century, it was noted that “a man forgets many things, or at least, some things when forced to read continuously.”[43] In the case of Stein’s continuous present, the reader is at first tempted to memorize what is happening and in what order. As intense observation or concentration draws the reader into an absorptive state located in the present, however, they are soon welcome to relinquish and forget the individual placement and meaning of words for the sake of Stein’s “gist,” since the insistence of certain phrases promises reoccurrence while the whole of the portraiture is to give way to the feeling of present existence, not to remember what happened first, second, or last in a given paragraph. Words easily pass out of memory, and the usual problems of narrative—remembering names of characters, their background, etc.—become irrelevant since writing is generative rather than reproductive, and reading is staying in time with Stein’s sentences rather than remembering previous facts. In fact, because the sentence is the main compositional block for Stein—(the question is always how to generate enough intensity and activity within a single one)—I would argue that the length of each present moment follows the duration of each sentence. Where the drama of a paragraph is in its having a beginning, middle, and end, the drama of a sentence lies in the tensions within its inherent unity. Held together by grammatical rather than narrative logic, Stein’s sentences often toe the line of coherent meaning: they appear to be simultaneously threatened and closer to fulfillment with each outward extension of Stein’s predicate.
Actions play a role in making the world intelligible not only because physical events are part of the collective and visible sphere but also because mental events give rise to subjects themselves. Forgetting the past makes an observer attuned to such present actions while also allowing the observer herself to act. In “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” Stein writes: “I began to wonder if it was possible to describe the way every possible kind of human being acted . . . and I thought if this could be done it would make A Long Gay Book.”[44] Here, the actions of “every possible kind of human being” correspond with her own making of A Long Gay Book, where Stein renders people in terms of activities and states while also rendering activities and states in terms of subjects:
Coming to be anything is something. Not coming to be anything is something. Loving is something. Not loving is something. Loving is loving. Something is something. Anything is something . . . . Being loving is happening. Being a dead one is happening. Completely loving is something that is happening. Being a dead one is something that is happening. Some are knowing all that thing, are quite knowing all that thing. (A Long Gay Book, 21, 24)
In both passages, Stein makes her subject action itself. The selected actions are those that range from emphasizing process over culmination (“coming to be”) to actions of refrainment (“not loving,” “not coming”) and states (“being a dead one,” “being loving,” “knowing”). But if the implicit question underlying each of the examples is “What is action?” the answer remains elusive, or the act of answering itself has no terminal point or conclusion. More often than not, the action at hand equals more action, as in the case of “being a dead one is happening,” or it equals the word “something,” which plays on the ongoing “-ing” of the verbs. Less definitional than it is emphatic, “is something” in these passages presents a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, the indefiniteness of the pronoun creates a certain sense of deferral, which is prolonged by its repetition. On the other hand, to be something is to have a certain integrity and to possess some sort of form or definition. It is this tension between the unknown or deferred and the known and asserted that comes to constitute the nature of writing as an expressive action that also represents the fact of the action. In other words, the nature of Stein’s content gets reinterpreted on the level of composition. Action in Stein’s portraits is not only located in the semantic content of “what happens” but also in the very temporal and formal tension of happening as the kind of activity and state that writing can be. It is also this tension that contributes to a new kind of excitement. Whereas memory and succession traditionally create suspense through elements like anticipation, epiphany, plotting, and the successful or failed execution of intentions, Stein’s forgetting presents the alternative problem of how to ever create drama from the present alone.
Action thus not only manifests itself on the level of semantic content, but also constitutes language’s nature as a medium.[45] While writing about action, Stein generates a process of writing that equally mirrors such active qualities. One way of moving between these two levels in a text like A Long Gay Book is through the grammatical choice of the present progressive, which merges the infinitive (being) with a chosen verb (doing). As linguists have noted, progressive verbs are somewhat paradoxical in that they are at once indicative of temporariness and ongoingness, representing the present neither as instantaneous nor subordinate to the infinite regress of the past or infinite advance of the future. They possess an internal structure that is durational, and implicit in this duration is an expectation for change. Present progressives in particular build upon forgetting and its recursive temporal nature. The tense is one that resists recourse to deep history.
Beyond questions of duration, however, the present progressive has raised for linguists problems of knowledge. John Goldsmith and Erich Woisetschlaeger, in their influential essay “The Logic of the English Progressive,” argue that progressives in the English language denote a difference in knowledge-type from that of the simple present tense.[46] The simple present tense states the structure of things (which may change) and is propositional. The progressive, on the other hand, is phenomenological and descriptive. The sentence “The engine doesn’t smoke anymore” entails a structural claim of change (we infer that something like repair or a changing of the engine’s parts has occurred), whereas “the engine isn’t smoking anymore” is observational and conditioned by some sort of physical proximity.
Using Goldsmith and Woisetschlaeger’s study, we can return to a set of Stein’s sentences like “Being a dead one is happening. Completely loving is something that is happening. Being a dead one is something that is happening.” On the one hand, the phrase “Being a dead one is something” makes writing seem propositional. Stein “tells” us it, and like other sentences that follow a similar structure, it has a stately posture and a sense of finality, denoting a particular ontological status. On the other hand, “is something that is happening” bears a phenomenal structure. Writing which appears to be ontologically stable becomes processual and unfolding. The progressive invites the reader to interpret the depicted actions as contemporaneous with the time of speaking. Ironically, the combination of what “is happening”—which often refers to what is perceived in the present—and something like loving which is not literally perceivable but interior creates the peculiar sense that Stein is both observing and inducting at the same time. This is possible because Stein replaces the reflective quality of remembrance with the observation of her own thoughts. The thoughts may rely on memory, but the important thing is that the observation doesn’t. In other words, the movement between semantically knowing something and experientially knowing something reflects the way in which writing works. By observing itself as it is describing a given subject’s actions, writing produces a second knowledge, which is not merely knowledge of its content, but of its own nature as an activity and state.
For Stein, then, writing itself is like an activity in the progressive tense and a state of being. The event of writing and discovering what is being written is as much as something that happens to Stein, a state she finds herself in, as it is a thing that happens by her, an activity she generates. The significance of this self-referentiality and mixed agency is not unlike the ambiguous nature of forgetting itself. It is also key to understanding Stein’s writing as a way of both doing and knowing. In “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein describes her passionate relationship with active present verbs in the following terms:
I have told you that I recognize verbs and adverbs aided by prepositions and conjunctions with pronouns as possessing the whole of the active life of writing. . . . A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it. (320–1)
For Stein, the “the active life of writing” and the life of knowledge are not antagonistic. In fact, knowing a subject’s actions is not enough—what is important is to be in this state consciously and to be in it consciously means putting knowledge into present action itself: “make you know yourself knowing it.” The implication of this is not simply that objects of knowledge have to be animated into mental processes in order to be thought. Rather, it suggests that language “makes” something happen: it “makes you know yourself knowing it.” The writer who organizes language into form as an exercise of her own will experiences, in turn, the imperative of the “long complicated sentence.” Yet, what seems involuntary at times (the sentence “forces” itself on you) is in fact mixed in agency. Even non-observational knowledge has to become quasi-observational since the key to writing-as-action and writing-as knowing is to pay attention to yourself as you are knowing something. The elevation of what you know into knowing what you know is precisely the activity that writing does and the state it espouses. Knowing what one knows might seem like a mere tautology, but what it really refers to is the experience of performing knowing as a phenomenon one is aware one is having. This means that it is different from experiences of coercion or hypnosis, where one has the feeling of someone else performing the action for him or her.
To write for Stein is not only a physical activity of the hand, but also one of raising the fact of an occurring action to the foreground of consciousness, which is always existing and happening in the present. One may be in a state of excitement or may be performing the activity of “loving completely.” By themselves, these may remain unconscious, but when made into art, writing makes recognizable or conscious that, “one is feeling anxious,” or that “one is being one loving completely.” When Stein writes, “I was created in my writing by simply looking,” she suggests that unlike mere seeing, looking at—or paying attention to what one sees—makes conscious of the fact that one sees, and also makes recognizable to oneself what one sees. Perception comes in contact with perception-that, and present phenomena once again leads to propositional knowledge, which is actualized or experienced through the activity of knowing. The ever-present propositional nature of writing is why writing for Stein can never be automatic.[47] To know how to write is to exercise a practical knowledge of it, to be one writing, while knowing how one is writing, as well as that—and what—one is writing.[48]
To think of the Stein’s radical use of forgetting is, among other things, to think of knowledge as something other than the afterlife of action and action as more than a spontaneous occurrence of instinct, indifferent to knowing. Through forgetting, Stein surprises readers by documenting the interactions between the two, revising knowledge’s nature as cumulative and action’s definition as being sudden. The states and activities featured in her work are by definition ongoing, but what is immediate is the knowing of these states and activities, a knowing which relies on a constant forgetting of what might distract or confuse one’s concentration of the ongoing action. Because one can neither know the present nor make anything happen with writing if the past remains its point of reference, forgetting becomes a way to decouple knowledge from memory. It is a negative response to changes in modernism—answering to a growing skepticism of historical knowledge and writing—but it also functions asymptomatically, becoming a generating force in the active life of writing.
On the level of style and technique, Stein’s use of erasure, her emphasis on syntax over diction, her choice of juxtaposing language over associative language, and her employment of the present progressive (which emphasizes ongoing and present action over past, completed action) have all come to feature as ways of forgetting. But these compositional tools also add to Stein’s use of forgetting as a critical tool and concept that allows the writer to make particular critiques and promote different aesthetic ideas, including the argument here that writing can be knowing and doing at the same time. To have a writing that is both knowing and doing is to understand the duality of Stein’s writing itself, as something that both exists, like a fact, persisting through time so as to seemingly exist outside temporality, as well as something that happens or occurs, like an event, temporal by nature. Stein’s knowledge is to a degree semantic, marked by its unchangingness and independence from memory, but experiential observation of oneself as something is being known is also key to Stein’s writing as action. A writing which knows must not only refer to its content as it is being written but also be a practical knowledge of itself, a practical knowledge which is at all possible because it is rooted in doing. Writing is the activity of not only forgetting in order to discover external objects of knowledge, but also linking them with a secondary knowledge, in reference to the knower. It presents the semantic fact of its occurrence. For Stein, it is this raising of its own experience to consciousness that marks writing’s action as intentional rather than automatic. Writing as knowing does the very thing of causing or making Stein know herself as she is in the very act of writing.
Notes
[1] Gertrude Stein, “Many Many Women,” in Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein: With Two Shorter Stories (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000), 117–198, 119.
[2] Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 287–312, 288.
[3] OED Online, 1897, s.v., “forget, v.”
[4] Alfred North Whitehead, “The British Association at Newcastle. Section A. Mathematical and Physical Science: The Organization of Thought,” Nature 98, September 28, 1916, 80–81, 81.
[5] For an expanded discussion of this, see Messay Kebede, “Action and Forgetting: Bergson’s Theory of Memory,” Philosophy Today 60, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 347–70.
[6] For more on this, see Thomas Ogden, Subjects of Analysis (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994).
[7] Sascha Bru, “Avant-Garde Nows: Presentist Reconfigurations of Public Time,” Modernist Cultures 8, no. 2 (2013): 272–87, 273. Mallarmé’s work is particularly invested in forgetting’s vagueness and void-like nature, its transcendence of being into a pure poetry of nothingness. Forgetting belongs in a constellation of tropes, including smoke and fog. Thierry Davila, who writes about Mallarmé and Duchamp’s shared affinity for the ambience created by pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, notes that these objects were more than mere accessories. For Mallarmé, the pipe participated in “the work of memory,” specifically, the swirling diminishment and dispersion of it. The pipe’s smoke, Davila notes, was alone “capable of making him forget for an instant what he referred to as ‘the important books I had to write,’” transporting him to another realm. Once, Mallarmé wrote to Villiers de l'Isle-Adam “I was dumbfounded by your letter because I really wanted to be forgotten” (Thierry Davila, “Duchamp with Mallarmé,” trans. Nicholas Huckle, October 171 [2020]: 3–26, 16; Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose [New York: New Directions Press, 1982], 86). In 1913 Gino Severini pronounced under the dictum of forgetting, “We must forget exterior reality and our everyday knowledge of it in order to create new dimensions,” echoing Umberto Boccioni’s claim that “we deny the past because we want to forget, and in art to forget means to renew.” (Gino Severini, “Plastic Analogies of Dynamism: Futurist Manifesto,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Christine Poggi, Lawrence Rainey, and Laura Wittman [1913; rpt., New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009], 165–169, 165); Umberto Boccioni, “The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting,” in Futurism: An Anthology, 139-142, 139. In 1915 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote that Futurist theater would not “dwell on the historical theatre, a sickening genre already abandoned by the passéist public,” but be able to exalt its audience, “that is make it forget the monotony of daily life” (Bruno Corr, F. T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws [1915; rpt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000], 191–196, 191). “He who does not forget his first love,” the Hylaea Group had declared elsewhere, “will not recognize his last.” (D. Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Victor Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912-1928, ed., trans. Anna M. Lawton and Herbert Eagle [1912; rpt., Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2004], 51–52, 51). Statements like Marcel Duchamp’s in 1954—“Francis [Picaba] had the gift of total forgetting which enable[d] him to launch into new paintings without being influenced by the memory of preceding ones”—officially secured forgetting as part of Modernism’s legacy (Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1973], 167).
[8] The growing status of forgetting can also be attributed to shifting ideas of history during the modernist period, in which historical accounts, formerly magistra vitae, became no longer instructive of action, but actually obstructing of it. Behind this dismantling of history’s didactic potential was the replacement of history’s repetition with its singularity, its sequencing of distinct, individual events. Unlike the nineteenth century, which Stein viewed as outdated because it conceived of history as progressive, hence connected and linear (“a sense of anything being successively happening”), the twentieth century emphasized the loss of progressivism and its replacement by the singularity of the event and non-successive nature of knowledge as non-historical. The preoccupation with “make it new” thus mapped onto the demand to actively “make history.” Given that the rise of reproductive means such as the gramophone and color reproduction during this time made possible an instantly accessible past, the actual act of recollection was also problematized: with no temporal distance to traverse, hence discover, one had to figure out how forgetting could create a present that was not its past. The rising status of forgetting as a new conception of history itself is part of the influence of Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Disadvantages of History.” Here, Nietzsche’s interest in will is motivated by the prioritization of action, which is nothing less than the foundation of history-making rather than history as a preservative or memorializing account. For Nietzsche, the preservation of the past bars the capacity for cultural imperative, whereas “forgetting belongs to all action.” Forgetting rises to the status of an “art” or “power” (that is, something made, willed, or intentional), as an answer to the problem of historicist excess.
[9] Stein, “Picasso,” in Stein: Writings 1932–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 495–553, 507.
[10] Examples include everything from Ezra Pound’s interest in the ideogram’s verbal idea of action to Charles Olson’s disposition of energy as an exercise in willing inert material into action. Action is also present in Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought” (where he speaks of “the poem’s action” and “the power of verbal action”), the language of mechanical models, and thermodynamics in William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley on action and movement, and later on, in the “I do this, I do that” poetry of the New York School [Ian F. A. Bell, “The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clark and Linda D. Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 114–125, 124]). Much of Harold Rosenberg’s understanding of action painting likewise stems from this modernist tradition (Jane Beckett, “Dada and Surrealism,” in The Art Press: Two Centuries of Art Magazines, ed. Trevor Fawcett and Clive Phillpot [London: The Art Book Company, 1976], 33–40).
[11] Ronald Martin goes so far as to describe writers of modernist action as “knowledge destroyers,” though the destruction is often bound to a desire for the creation of new knowledge. In his account of Williams, “every common thing has been nailed down, stripped of freedom of action and taken away from use” because of “rationalist inquiry” (Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991], 4, 274). Elsewhere, Henri Lefebvre writes, “There is certainly a major problem here: how are we to recapture the natural and spontaneous life forces dislocated by the society of the machine, dissipated by the division of labour, and lost by the processes of accumulation (technology, knowledge, means of production)?” The youthfulness of Modernity “is the opposite of the experience which is gained through accumulated knowledge. From this angle, human life would appear to be a process in which, rapidly or slowly, spontaneity and presence waste away: a squandering of youth” (Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore [London: Verso, 1995], 159). See also Joel Nickels, Poetry of the Possible: Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago, IL: University of Press, 1998).
[12] See Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[13] In his own account of the militaristic BLAST, for instance, Ezra Pound notes that in its publication, it “was regarded as manifesto, as an action, which it was,” but that the “excessive preoccupation with that particular part of its function obscured the more durable elements, the level criticism.” The reception is telling. The two functions of action and “level criticism” are separated, among other reasons, along their implicit temporal divergence (Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965 [New York: New Directions Press, 1973], 455).
[14] For a critique of presentism, see François Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). For theories of the present, see Michael North, What is the Present? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Benjamin Morgan, “Scale, Resonance, Presence,” Victorian Studies 59, no. 1 (2016): 109–112.
[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (1874; rpt., Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980); Williams Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell, in Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), 3–31, 17.
[16] Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), 142.
[17] Charles Bernstein, “The Art of Immemorability,” Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 6 (2006): 30–40, 33.
[18] Stein, “The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 369–488, 380.
[19] Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 311–336, 334.
[20] This is not to say Stein did not experiment with putting words in succession. Rather, it points to the distinct but inseparable nature of the process and activity of knowing versus knowledge itself.
[21] See Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994) for more work on Stein and genius.
[22] Linda Voris, The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing (Washington, D.C.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 25; Johanna Winant, “Explanation in Composition: Gertrude Stein and the Contingency of Inductive Reasoning,” Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 3 (2016): 95–113, 95; Jennifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 35, 52. See in particular “Gertrude Stein for anyone,” 33–36, and “Making the rose red: Stein, proper names, and the critique of indeterminacy,” 67–94.
[23] Elizabeth Freeman, “Hopeless Cases: Queer Chronicities and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Melanctha,’” Journal of Homosexuality 63, no. 3 (2016): 329–348, 337; Omri Moses, “Gertrude Stein’s Lively Habits,” Twentieth Century Literature 55, no. 4 (2009): 445–484; Liesl M. Olson, “Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,” Twentieth Century Literature 49, no. 3 (2003): 328–359.
[24] Sharon Kirsch, Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014). Focusing on rhetoric, Kirsch illuminates how Stein’s articulation of forgetting is also an articulation of thinking about the narrative function of memory. She remains more bound to forgetting as the articulation of memory than this article would nevertheless like to espouse. While it is inseparable from the problem of memory, understanding forgetting on its own terms critically opens us to a realm beyond mere negation and allows us to make the additional bridge to knowledge and action.
[25] Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945), 3.
[26] For an example from literary history and one from psychology, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Gabriel Radvansky, Human Memory, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017).
[27] David Bloch, “On Memory” and “On Recollection,” in Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 58–71, 72–73.
[28] The admittance of forgetting follows the general reprioritization of discovery over recovery during modernism, and the rise of a knowledge that’s paradigmatic and revolutionary in nature, rather than developmental or, as Stein would say, “progressive.” As memory, and thus historical knowledge, become at the turn of the century indirect, the idea of direct observation, along with its implicit forgetting, begin gaining prominence in and beyond the natural sciences, which had been vital in Stein’s academic training between 1893 and 1902, first as a student of psychology, then as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University. The split between direct and indirect knowledge, memory and perception, is inconceivable in Aristotle’s model, since memory for him is still a sense-perception faculty. Move into the twentieth century and memory and perception no longer vary in degree but rather in kind and ontological status.
[29] Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937; rpt., Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993), 197.
[30] Elsewhere, Stein writes, “That is what makes today today that there is very little remembering done” (Everybody’s Autobiography, 142).
[31] Because the present is seen and heard but not remembered, remembering not only prevents the creation of masterpieces and carries with it the danger of overdetermination, but is fundamentally antithetical to the clarity that writing must espouse. Such language of forgetting in order to make poetry “clear” rather than “confused” is both what Stein revises and inherits from the eighteenth century philosophies of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, which were being revisited by Charles Peirce and appropriated by poets during Stein’s own time. For these figures, as well as for Stein, clarity has nothing to do with being able to understand something because it is familiar or recognizable by others. Rather, it is closer to the notion of distinction, which I temporarily bracket and return to later in this paper.
[32] Gertrude Stein, A Long Gay Book, in Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein With Two Shorter Stories (Mineola: Dover, 2000), 11–116, 41.
[33] Ulla Dydo and William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 39.
[34] See Birgit Van Puymbroeck, introduction to Gertrude Stein, “‘Let Us Save China’: Gertrude Stein and Politics,” PMLA 132, no. 1 (2017): 198–203, 201.
[35] Following the various associationist accounts given by David Hartley and later figures William James and Sigmund Freud, Umberto Eco posits that mnemotechnics, or the art of memory, is essentially a connotative semiotics rooted in drawing similarities. See Eco, “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!,” trans. Marilyn Migiel, PMLA 103, no. 3 (1988): 254–261.
[36] Stein, “An Acquaintance with Description,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932 (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 530–565.
[37] Thornton Wilder, introduction to Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), vii.
[38] To clarify, presence precedes “presentism” in the sense that it has not yet named itself; to grasp the presence of something is to go behind any name that would usually signal its existence.
[39] I am thinking in particular of John Ruskin’s employment of metaphor/simile in his distinction between “reflective” poetry and “creative” poetry and Edmund Burke’s similar distinction between clear and strong statements. See Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1872) and Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (Boston: Wells and Lily, 1826), 217.
[40] Stein, “Stanzas in Meditation,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 1–145, 94.
[41] Stein, “Lecture 3,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 337–351, 343.
[42] See Wendy Steiner for a theory of a three-stage portraiture development (“The Steinian Portrait,” in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael Hoffman [Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986], 1308–9).
[43] In his treatise on how to study Cicero, Orazio Toscanella continues by commenting on how the visualization of writing can counteract forgetfulness: “by seeing the anatomy of every word,” he notes, one can “discern every last detail without any trouble and thus he can study it diligently.” See Toscanella, Modi di studiare le pistole famigliari di M. Tullio Cicerone, quoted in Lina Bolzoni’s The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 51.
[44] Stein, “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” in Stein: Writings 1932–1936, 270–286, 279–280.
[45] Even in her most “historical” works set during wartime, Stein’s texts focus on eating, trading, and walking on roads but without the plot development found in nineteenth century social/family novels or the historiographic function of retelling events by their causes and connecting them in a way that forms a logical pattern where nothing is left as accidental. With no completion of a dramatic sequence, the actions in Wars I Have Seen, for instance, are hardly connected in a way that provides continuity between present, past, and future. There are no chapters, no formal stopping places except for paragraphs. Dates are occasionally mentioned but these mentions are irregularly paced; when indicated, they usually demonstrate the disjuncture between regularized calendar time and the irregularity of long or short mental states and activities such as feeling hope, dread, excitement, or boredom.
[46] John Goldsmith and Erich Woisetschlaeger, “The Logic of the English Progressive,” Linguistic Inquiry 13, no. 1 (1982): 79–89.
[47] Responding to B. F. Skinner’s 1934 article “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” Stein denounced the very possibility of true automatic writing. See Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 135–136. In an interview with Robert Haas, she notes of her writing: “I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible. Any human putting down words had to make sense out of them” [Gertrude Stein, “Gertrude Stein Talking—A Transatlantic Interview,” by Robert Haas, in Gertrude Stein A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Haas (1962–4; rpt., Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 11–35].
[48] For more on practical knowledge, see Gilbert Ryle, “Knowing How and Knowing That,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46 (1945–6): 1–16.