Clear as Mud, by Way of Introduction

Summary

I said in the beginning of saying this thing that if it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving. This is what we mean by life and in my way I have tried to make portraits of this thing always have tried always may try to make portraits of this thing.

Gertrude Stein

[D]ifference is not a determination but, in its essential relation to life, a differentiation. Differentiation certainly comes from the resistance life encounters from matter, but it comes first and foremost from the explosive internal force which life carries within itself.

Gilles Deleuze

For Gertrude Stein, life is what literature should portray. Life, of course, is literature's perennial problem, but what sets a modernist understanding of life apart is an interest in life itself – not the good life or someone's life, but life as ongoing, all-encompassing movement. That is how I read the quotation above, which I take from Stein's lecture “Portraits and Repetition.” What “we,” or Stein and her modernist contemporaries, mean by life is a movement that is “lively enough” not to be dependent on something else (“not […] to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving”). A movement, in short, that “exists completely.” That deceptively straightforward statement counts as the prompt for this book. I wanted to know what it meant for Stein as a modernist author to think of life as this complete and lively thing.

While, initially, the parameters of Vital Stein seemed clear – it was to be a book about Stein, modernism and life – the ground these terms covered and the relations between soon revealed themselves to be “clear as mud,” to quote Stein's generously ironic description of her own work. But mud is not a bad place to start when you are dealing with life.

Who, first, is Stein's modernist “we”? Stein may have hosted a famous salon frequented by the crème de la crème of the early twentieth-century Parisian artistic scene and in her work she often strategically spotlights her ties with Picasso, but she was also very eager to distinguish her work from what others were doing.