3.5
The Making of Americans
ByPublisher Description
The Making of Americans is not really a novel, as Gertrude Stein's narrator says-"not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you"-but an attempt at a thorough and exacting distillation of the essential properties of peoples' behavior. Through sentences that seem to repeat themselves, we are presented, on the surface, with a portrait of the "simple middle class monotonous tradition" as enacted by generations of the Dehning and Hersland families and their acquaintances. Underneath this is a slow, sieved attempt at something like total knowledge, an excavation of an overwhelming impulse "to understand the complete being in each one and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling...anything in them that gives to them inside them the feeling of being distinguished to themselves inside them."
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Making of Americans Reviews
3.5
“on The Making of Americans
written 2024.05.11–18
[note: my unabridged essay—at least, the current iteration of it (i may return to it later)—came out to 16 pages—6,400 words—and as such i cannot fit all of it here. perhaps i will publish it elsewhere sometime. for now i've loosely assemblaged its most representative passages. ellipses signify redacted content.]
_
modus
Polysynthesis
There's a word in Hungarian that is somewhat often brought up (via route of administration, most probably, of https://64.media.tumblr.com/03a2f596f6c268f9c8ac6953ebae7d9b/tumblr_o5o4f31G201uj5kzto1_540.jpg ) in linguistics circles as being a humorous example of the agglutinative morphology to which that language and others of its typological classification adhere; it is effectively never used outside of reference to itself insofar as it is known for being the longest word in its lexicon. [...] The word in question is megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért: (as the image states) due to [you all's] cannot-be-desecratednessousings, or due to [you all's] repeatedly not being liable to be desecrated. This (the latter phrasing in particular) very closely resembles the manner in which Gertrude Stein writes throughout The Making of Americans.
Levy hierarchy
The work has been pretty uniformly relegated to the absolute fringes of avant-lit by both academics and bibliophiles, citing a purported quality of impenetrability re: its peculiar application of the English language, but I don't think that this is a representative assessment at all. You're probably far more likely than not to find at least one of its many drawn-out stretches of anxious socioanalysis tedious, yes—especially after 925 octavo pp. (44 lines each) [...]—but the aggressively forward-thinking manner in which Stein brandishes the mangled corpse of a language so largely semantically impotent when it comes otherwise to permitting the expression of higher-order logic almost guarantees that there just as well lie rich deposits of vast beauty to be excavated here.
[...] One need only a cursory glance at any manifestation of the popular opinion alone surrounding the text to deduce why [its] kind of experimental prose has been ill-replicated: the book is not well-liked, the logic behind which fact itself is probably still trivial to understand; the reason why almost nobody has ventured to tackle it (with very few extant print runs and under 600 ratings on this website as of 2024, less than half of whom, apparently, ended up completely finishing it if the content of the even more scant review pool is to be taken into account) external to Gertrude Stein literati, despite the fact that she's one of the better-known and more well-covered of authors within the Western canon—it is a difficult fiction which only becomes more so as it approaches its conclusion. I was evidently the first person to actually read my copy (its spine creasing in direct correlation with my progress), whose price was aggressively marked down in obvious desperation by the bookstore selling it. [...] [Even with all of that said], most single instances of the vocabulary inherent probably fall into the top thousand (even 500) most common words by global usage frequency, to the point that reading it often feels like being narrated a mythologically grandiose bedtime story. Stein's persona within the boundaries of its universe offers some explanation for this in the Alfred Hersland chapter:
I may know very well the meaning of a word and yet it has not for me completely weight and form and really existing being. There are only a few words and with these mostly always I am writing that have for me completely entirely existing being [...] In writing a word must be for me really an existing thing, it has a place for me as living, this is the way I feel about me writing. (p.540)
I would say "I can only surmise that most people aren’t really occupied with praxis to that extent," but I know that this is so, and has been for centuries. This evidently did not concern Stein. In this confrontation of that literary zeitgeist, she indicates comprehension of something—more than just oft-neglected, very important—about how most emotively to sequence language, and that is the distinction between logos and pathos.
Anti-Howe
The Making of Americans, at its core, would appear to be an attempt to categorize—to categorize "all of the different ways there are of being in men and women." Entrusted with the consummation of this duty is Stein's theory of 'dependent' and 'independent' types, according to which people are principally defined by their bottom nature, an essence that can be derived as a function of either independent dependent (loose translation: submissive) or dependent independent (dominant) being. These naturally make of one either an attacking or resisting one, respectively. A lesser author would be expected to approach this premise with the kind of rigid structuralism which engenders that culture of strata which Stein likely sought to criticize; she, however, even ignoring that signs point to this kind of thinking constituting her Narrator's fatal flaw being a deliberate inclusion, does not terminate here and I will assert proceeds to plot ahead of them a course of enlightenment stationed in diametric opposition to that rigidity. She commences by introducing new classifications, e.g. of instrument (subconsciously receptive to instruction) and earthy (having “common natural sense”) nature. Before long, she has acknowledged the existence of naturally attacking dependent independent types and naturally resisting independent dependent types, declaring being distinct from feeling (à la Kant). She eventually abandons the constraints of her own system and begins referring to substance in people utilizing descriptors like murkily engulfing and dried up into a grey brown one after another after another until her original definitions mean almost nothing in a manner I feel could be best described as akin to being let loose into a field of diverse flora and assembling a bouquet or twelve; it is vivacious and really quite wonderful. All of this notwithstanding, however, the obsession with typification renders fulfillment of the ultimate step of the enlightenment—of eroding that foundation upon which she has propped her entire sense of security—impossible, and Stein seems to be aware of this. One may thus come to regard TMoA as a work of proto-postmodernism of that sort of critical, deconstructive flavor whose explorations therein were at least a good half-century ahead of their time.
neurosis
Despair
This is a criminally misunderstood work. I've heard it said that it is one of profound arrogance; while I'm not going to attempt to argue that that's not at least partially true (see?), it seems itself self-absorbed and prejudgmental a diagnosis of a book which harbors also such a wealth of implicit metatext, rich with thematic allusions to the contrary, no less while carrying (and with great consistency) a commendable amount of genuine insight:
A man having it in him to have the generalized conviction of good being as completely him and the concrete acting of being a mean spirited and tyrannical man in living and always taking everything he can that it is not dangerous for him to be taking and never giving anything that is not taken from him, one of such a kind of them can have it in him to be always speaking and very often in his talking it comes out again and again that he is a good man, and a noble man, and a very angry one whenever any one ever is doing anything that he knows of them that is not a fine action a good generous way of doing, thinking, believing, feeling [...] and then such a one would be [for himself] answering [...] don't you know don't every one always know it in him that I am a good man, you know that, and then there would be no answer that could touch him. (p.500)
There are also some passages verging upon the status of iconic which may, before long after being initially read, find themselves cemented within one's very faculties of judgment as only the best of quotes can:
There was once a priest, a good man. Once a member of his church came to him and said I have been thinking can I do this thing, can I go to a barber's shop and get shaved on a Sunday morning, is it wrong for me to do this thing. The priest said, yes he must forbid it to him, he must not go to a barber's shop on a Sunday morning and get a man to shave him, it was wrong for him to do this thing, it would be a sin in him. Two Sundays after the man met his priest coming out of a shop shaved all fresh and clean. But how is this, the man said to him, you told me that it was forbidden, you told me, when I asked you, that I should not do this thing, that it would be for me a sin. Ah ! said the priest to him, that was right, I told you I must forbid you to go Sunday morning to a shop and get some one to shave you, that it would be a sin for you to do this thing, but don't you see, I did not do any asking. (p.62)
And, of course, there is the I write for myself and strangers spiel (p.289) for which she has ironically become noted somewhat. I say ironically because these are not her words per se.
Metanoia
Reading Stein, it is perhaps not surprising that many before too long spent in her company find themselves of the camp that she was uncontestedly the narrator of the Making, but this a lot of the time seems to stem in people from a prejudice, whether rooted in sexism or not, evinced by an absence of belief in her hypothetical ability to create an ontological distinction therebetween. I was one of these people for a long time. "Yeah, right," I thought; "But I think I'll still manage to enjoy it as a vérité-style portrait of a sociopath." [...] Some conflicting evidence lies in the fact that major developments of character are undergone by the Narrator (pp.430; 708) in which they concede, for one:
[...] I am sad with this thing [diagnosing types] for certainly I will be going on with all this thing and certainly then not any one will be rightly certain about some one which kind of being that one has in them resisting or attacking and how religion is in that one. But then I am remembering that everyone being ever in living is pretty well used to this thing that some one has it to have knowing realising something and not any one else even later has that thing and so then I will go on writing, and not for myself and not for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling. (p.708)
They no longer write for themself and strangers, which, while it could be argued is instead attributable to the broadness of the timespan over which the long book (as she was known to have called it) was written (over 8 years), seems highly unlikely—why would she have published a text with the majority of which she no longer agreed if this were in earnest? It's not like she (and Toklas) hadn't tended to it studiously across that time. Regardless, it is quite striking—and depressing—to compare the manner in which the final ~225 pages are written with the remainder of the work: there is to be observed an apparent near-complete collapse of order which renders almost every statement made void of actual semantic value by its immediately being negated or inverted or contraposited, regardless of whether the operation would result in logical invalidations:
David Hersland would not be sad enough if he could be sad enough. David Hersland was sad enough. David Hersland was not sad enough. David Hersland was pretty nearly sad enough. David Hersland could be sad enough. He could not be sad enough. He could be sad enough. He certainly was pretty nearly sad enough. He was sad enough. [...] He was sad enough. He was not sad enough. (pp.840–841)
Stein writes earlier on, perhaps foretelling of this development in her Narrator:
[...] categories that once to some one had real meaning come later to that same one not to have any meaning at all then for that one. (p.440)
I do not think this logorrhea-as-zenith-of-cognitive-decline is unintentional, but rather a conscious reflection of Stein's own mental breakdown which she was said to have begun experiencing years prior and was likely still experiencing at the time of writing. It has been suggested (by Janet Malcolm in her excellent "Someone Says Yes to It", written for the New Yorker in 2005, and which I highly recommend reading) that this writing was a necessary exorcism for her and that the joviality for which she would become best known would not have been possible to arrive at without its privilege. Yes, the Narrator is an iteration of Stein, but it is one obfuscated—subjected to a degree of fictional embedding—which she is herself viewing from the outside of that fiction, dissecting, and scrutinizing as if through a lens, exposing her (very real) most imperfect nature. She is actually more sick and tired of herself than are those detractors of any perceived egomania in her, and uses the Narrator as a means of coming to terms with this dissonance. By the David segment, the Narrator has found themself arrived at a crossroads predicated by awareness of their condition, presenting them with a critical decision between accepting it and morbidly clinging; awareness of, it should need not be said, a lot more than their author is typically given credit for. She in her own life would appear to have wisely set down the path of the former; her surrogate character, on the other hand, chooses otherwise in the text and suffers immensely deeper for it. She writes of emotional maturation, in which:
[...] the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a dim possibility for a big or small reality. (pp.436–437)
Contrast this level-headed foreshadowing with the mostly contentless almost hypergraphia exhibited by a late-novel Narrator who has damned themself to rot on the wrong face of that big "or:"
He certainly was one going on being living then, sometimes almost knowing this thing then. He was doing some things then and some others were doing some things then and he was doing some things and some others were doing the things he was wanting to be doing some things he was needing to be doing then and [...] some others were doing things and some others were going to be doing things and some others were wanting to be doing things and some others were doing things and some others were needing to be doing things and some others were doing things and some others were doing things. (p.802)
In their stubborn refusal to reject structure, they have paradoxically become rendered further subjugated by it; a husk of their former self, who at one time had demonstrated such potential within the fragile chrysalis of arriving at ‘understanding’, whatever that may once have entailed.
For those pages anterior to the pivotal crisis, this recognition does not suppress the exhibition of brilliance; indeed, this may still be a book that one is read by more than they find themselves being the ones reading it. It is clear that Stein actually has much experience with (and as such is quite good at) the whole knowing kinds in men and women thing. Of course she does—the novel is about the negative impacts of this upon her. Often her observations can be like staring into a mirror:
It is very wonderful how much courage it takes to buy bright colored handkerchiefs when every one having good taste uses white ones or pale colored ones, when a bright colored one gives you so much pleasure you suffer always at not having them. [...] It is a very difficult thing to have courage to buy clocks and handkerchiefs you are liking, you are seriously liking and everybody thinks then you are joking. It is a very difficult thing to have courage for something no one is thinking is a serious thing. (pp.463–464)
Some know what they want to be and can build it up by little pieces and do again and again. Some know what they are and see it as a complete thing and make that thing in daily living. Some know what they are and are always cutting and fitting and fitting and cutting and painting and sometime they come to be that thing in dressing and daily living and then they can lose that thing. Some cannot see the thing they are in daily living and in dressing nor what they want to be in daily living and in dressing. Some see what they want to be in daily living and in dressing and then they are a little less than that thing so that they will not be queer to any one. (p.644)
Stein makes no effort to convince in favor of her positions, only because she realizes not that this is something like impossible (as is that sorting people by kind which her Narrator has been engaging in), but that it is inherently a futile endeavor:
[...] the noblest words and the best acts, never, in any kind of a distrusted person, give any evidence against his condemnation. It is never facts that tell, they are the same when they mean very different things. It is never facts that can make a man feel anything to be made different to him when he has any kind of a judgment in him. Facts can never tell him anything truly about another man in his opinion. (pp.26–27)
She would seem to have quite a high degree of self-awareness for someone so purportedly egotistical, no? That is because, if it wasn't abundantly clear by now, this is not a voice of egotism; it is one of despair. Stein has effectively articulated here by proxy of the Narrator an immutable tragedy of never being able to know or experience everything [...] and more directly via her other characters any number of different (but associated) struggles accompanying living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (see the David Hersland Jr. arc) at least 35 years before the publication of any of Aaron T. Beck's relevant work.
Eschatos
[i go on to cite and expound upon specific examples, which I can't fit here (they're on pages 449, 729, 730, and 743, if you're curious)]
I will remind everyone that this condition is still widely misunderstood and stigmatized today, let alone the status of its popular favor circa 1925, which makes it no more surprising that Stein was (and remains) frequently labeled according to any multitude of real clinical diagnoses only to the extent which concerns their capacity to be weaponized as expressions of derision in the form of harmful epithets (or, god forbid, as hysterical) for this publication.
The logistic map
[gushing about my love of labyrinths and the allure of the rabbit-hole.]
Martha; 0
[i then discuss Stein's close kinship to the character Martha and the overbearing prevalence of hopelessness and death in the novel's final chapters, which many others have thankfully also covered.]
_
Monumental.
My new favorite novel.”
“Hilarious because, while I did not finish it, I've found myself drunkenly quoting it on multiple occasions.”
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