Books like The Making of Americans

"I am all unhappy in this writing. I know very much of the meaning of the being in men and women. I know it and feel it and I am always learning more of it and now I am telling it and I am nervous and driving and unhappy in it. Sometimes I will be all happy in it." p348This is not the novel I thought it was. At least, I chose to read it as other. This is the voice of uncertainty, of isolation and confusion, of a desperate attempt to understand through categorisation. The narrator is caught between a desire to map out the "kinds" in people, to delineate and "tell" the arrangement of discrete pieces which comprise Being, and the recognition that this is impossible. " Alas, I say then, alas, I will perhaps not ever really ever be knowing all the repeating coming out of each one….I am desolate because I am certainly not hearing all repeating." There is a mania here. And a despair. "It makes me a little unhappy that everything is a little funny. It makes me a little unhappy that many things are funny and peculiar and strange to me. It makes me a little unhappy that everything and everyone is sometime a little queer to me. It makes me a little unhappy that every one seems sometime almost a little crazy. It does make me a little unhappy that every one sometime is a queer one to me. It does make me sometime a little uncertain, it does sometimes make me very uncertain about everything and always then it is perplexing what is certain what is not certain, who is a queer one, what is a funny thing for some one to be wanting or not wanting or doing or not doing or thinking or not thinking or believing or not believing. " She has always already failed in her self-appointed task. At times I thought of "Not I" by Beckett. The voice here is certainly a speaking one. Hearing it in my head as I read made the process much more bearable."Always repeating is all of living, everything that is being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding. Each one then slowly comes to be a whole one to me, each one slowly comes to be a whole one in me, slowly it sounds louder and louder and louder inside me through my ears and eyes and feelings and the talking there is always in me, the repeating that is the whole of each one I come to know around, and each one of them then comes to be a whole one to me, comes to be a whole one in me. Loving repeating is one way of being. This is now a description of such being." She is a finder of patterns, a watcher and a recorder. She is separate. She is alone. There is much anguish here, a fact which those who accuse her of arrogance or superiority simply fail to understand. This is a text of madness. A text of genius, yes, but not one in full control of itself. What does it mean for someone without a family to write so extensively about the familial? Remember Stein's mother died when she was 14, her father when she was 17. As a lesbian, of course, in 1900, she was severely isolated from "ordinary" men and women. Her preoccupation with death, with "dead ones" at the end of the novel is surely no coincidence. "Perhaps no one ever will know the complete history of every one. This is a sad thing. Perhaps no one will ever have as a complete thing the history of any one. This is a very sad thing....This is very discouraging thinking. I am very sad now in this feeling." And we are always in the moment in the melancholy, all these present participles, passive verbs, and intransitives means that this Being is always a doing, an extension out into time. We are in the midst of a failing, we are listening to a failing and a breaking: "Every one has experiencing in being one being living. I am saddening with not feeling each one being experiencing as each one is having that living. I am saddening with this thing. There are so many being in living and there are so many that I am knowing by seeing and hearing being in living and each one of these is experiencing in being living and I cannot be feeling what way each one is experiencing, I who am suffering and suffering because of this thing. I am in desolation and my eyes are large with needing weeping and I have a flush from feverish feeling and I am not knowing what way each one is experiencing in being living and about some I am knowing in a general way and I could be knowing in a more complete way if I could be living more with that one and I never will live more with every one, I certainly cannot ever live with each one in their being one being living, in my being one being living. I tell you I cannot bear it this thing that I cannot be realising experiencing in reach one being living, I say it again and again I cannot let myself be really resting in believing this thing, it is in me now as when I am realising being a dead one, a one being dying and I can do this thing and I do this thing and I am filled then with complete desolation and I am doing this thing again and again and I am now again and again certain that I will not ever be realising experiencing in each one of the very many men and very many women…" ********************This was the hardest book I have ever read. And, to put it in context, this means she is competing with Finnegans Wake, Miss Macintosh, Being and Time and the complete works of William Gaddis and Joseph McElroy.Its difficulty comes not from the language really, and certainly not the words (which are short and simple) but from the shear SLOG of the whole thing. I was, at times, bored with it. This may well be my fault. It is a great work of art, for sure, and one I am very glad I read, but certainly not one I will be traveling through for a second time...That is fails is part of the point, as should be clear from the quotes above, but at times it is simply too much to take... Regarding all the repetition (as this is probably the most commented upon factor), it is useful to note her own comments here: From Stein's lecture On the Making of the Making of Americans: "I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different...... When I was up against the difficulty of putting down the complete conception that I had of an individual, the complete rhythm of a personality that I had gradually acquired by listening seeing feeling and experience, I was faced by the trouble that I had acquired all this knowledge gradually but when I had it I had it completely at one time. Now that may never have been a trouble to you but it was a terrible trouble to me. And a great deal of The Making of Americans was a struggle to do this thing, to make a whole present of something that it had taken a great deal of time to find out, but it was a whole there then within me and as such it had to be said" ***********From page 343 - an example of the difficulty and the beauty and the psychology/philosophy: "The way I feel natures in men and women is this way then. To begin then with one general kind of them, this a resisting earthy slow kind of them, anything entering into them as a sensation must emerge again from through the slow resisting bottom of them to be an emotion in them. This is a kind of them. This bottom in them then in some can be solid, in some frozen, in some dried and cracked, in some muddy and engulfing, in some thicker, in some thinner, slimier, drier, very dry and not so dry and in some a stimulation entering into the surface that is them to make an emotion does not get into it, the mass then that is them, to be swallowed up in it to be emerging, in some it is swallowed up and never then is emerging. Now all these kinds of ways of being are existing and sometime there will be examples of all these ways of being, now all these ways of being have it in common that there is not in them a quick and poignant reaction, it must be an entering and then an emerging mostly taking some time in the doing, the quickest of these then are such of them where the mud is dry and almost wooden, where the mud has become dry and almost wooden, or metallic in them and it is a surface denting a stimulation gives to them or else there is a surface that is not dry and the rest is dry and it is only the surface of the whole mass that is that one of which there has been any penetrating, and in some in whom the whole mass of the being is taking part in the reaction in some of such of them habit, mind strongly acting can make it go quicker and quicker the deep sinking and emerging. This is then a kind of them, the resisting kind of them, and there are many kinds of that kind of them. This is a very sure way of grouping kinds in men and women. I know it and I see men and women by it. Mostly to any one new it means nothing. I will begin again then this explaining. "**********************There is also, as one would expect, some good gender politics in here too, and some excellent analysis of certain kinds of male-ness. From page 87: "A woman to content him could never be outside him, she could never be an ideal to him, she could never have in her a real power for him. With men, outside him, there was for him a need in him to fight with them. A woman could never be for him anything outside him, unless as one who could in a practical way be useful to him as his sister Martha had always been and now she had been useful to him and made a marriage for him, had found a wife for him who was pleasing to him, who had come out with him to Gossols to content him. Such a woman as his sister was for him, was like any other object in the world around him, a thing useful to him or not existing for him, like a chair in his house to sit in or the engine that drew the train in the direction in which he needed just then to be going. Such a woman as his sister Martha, as a woman could never be interesting to him, nor any other woman who remained outside him, either when she could be to him an ideal for him or a power in any way over him, not that some women with power in them were not attractive to him, but with such a kind of woman, and he met them often in his living and they had power with him, such a woman always did it for him by entering into him by brilliant seductive managing and so she was a part of him, even though she was apart from him, and so she had power with him. Such a one until he would be an old man and the strength in him was weakening and the things he had in him did not make inside him a completely tight filling and so things outside him could a little more enter into him, until he would come to be an old man and the need in him would come to be more a senile feeling, an old man's need of something to complete him, such a one could never come to be a wife to him, could never be a woman to be his wife and content him. He needed such a woman as his sister Martha had found for him, a woman who was to him, inside him and appealing, whose power over him was never more than a joke to him, who sometimes when a sense for beauty stirred in him was a flower to him, whom he often could forget that she was existing, who never in any big way was resisting, and so she never needed fighting, was always to himself a part of him and inside in him, and so in every kind of way she was contenting to him. " ****************In summary, if the quotes above have interested you, I would certainly suggest giving it a try - it seems that either she clicks with a reader or she does not...But I certainly do not think her work should be ignored or casually dismissed.