Now That Is All

Summary

I wrote this book because I wanted to know how to make sense of the many references to life and liveliness in Stein's texts. What I hope to have mapped is a dynamic modernist understanding of life. Life, for Stein and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writer–thinkers, amounts to a differential force that counters tradition with novelty, stasis with movement. Life, I have wanted to show, is at the heart of the modernist project to make new how we write, how we think about ourselves in relation to others, how we experience time and how we relate to our surroundings.

Stein famously invites us to see life as a “thing,” which incessantly moves and changes. Framing life as a “thing” is a vintage Stein move. It is both a funny quip – life is too vast a concept to be a thing – and a sincere vantage – it really works to read Stein through the lens of “this thing life.” Seeing life as a thing, as I have shown in the first two chapters, brings life down to earth, to endless biological diversity and to the flux of historical experience. Where the question of how a scientific perspective of life relates to the actual experience of life may sound like an issue moored in romanticism, Stein's working through it gives it a distinct modernist slant. She does not lament the perceived loss of a spontaneous or intuitive life, triggered by scientific and technological developments, but sets up a hermeneutic experiment, trying to understand the life of all Americans. In doing so, she comes up with an impossible literary form, a vast typological description of all Americans, out of which emerges a long series of portraits. Stein's attempt “to make portraits of this thing [life],” in the 1910s, is where her work meets the cinema. In Chapters 3 to 5 I have traced the ways in which Stein's texts intersect with the discourse on early modernist film and theories about the nature of time and memory. The magic of film was that, for the first time, it was possible to preserve movement, to store it like a thing.