Stein constructs a cubist portrait or skewed biography of Ida, who was born with a twin, Ida-Ida, to kind parents. “It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other. her parents went off on a trip and never came back. That was the first funny thing that happened to Ida.” Odd, sad and happy events populate IDA’s pages, while doppelgängers lurk everywhere: Ida becomes Winnie, because she’s winning; characters like parents to Ida come and go, and men who may, or do, become her husbands appear, disappear, reappear. Ida herself leaves and returns, she’s often going to another state (a place or state of mind). A reader experiences the pull of freedom, and Ida’s contradictory desires — wanting a home, needing to escape; wanting to be known and not. Her identity is in doubt and it’s not.
With these radical changes, there’s a bounty of tension and release. Words appear and reappear — like her husbands — but syntactically differently, scrambling meaning and Ida too. There’s psychological and logistical weight on Ida: whom does she know; what does she know; which dog has died, and where will she live, with whom. Most urgently, who knows her and what does that knowing do.
Ida sat on. She said to herself. If a great many people were here and they all said hello Ida, I would not stand up, they would all stand up. If everybody offered me everything I would not refuse anything because everything is mine without my asking for it or refusing it.
There isn’t a better description of celebrity affect.
Release from textual and narrative tension comes, in part, through Stein’s remarkable voice, as well as internal and external rhymes, some so childlike one might be listening to a book read aloud. “Well what did Ida do. / Ida knew just who was who. / She did. She did know. There are so many men. What do you call them there. They did not know Ida. / Now then.” Also, Ida frequently rests, and “when anybody needed Ida Ida was resting. That was all right, that is the way Ida was needed.” I read the word “rest” again and again, and had a weird sensation. The story would sort of stop, and a space opens up where I could disappear like Ida, or stop too. Also, it provides a rest, as in music.
IDA wanders from its theses in its second half. Interrupted by allusions to, and fragments of other texts Stein had written before or during the writing of IDA, such as “Superstitions,” the novel turns into a repository of fleeting images and ideas that protagonist Ida might hold. Something feels missing and amiss, much as Ida bemoans and muses on missing. “Everybody began to miss something and it was not a kiss, you bet your life it was not a kiss that anybody began to miss. And yet perhaps it was.” I love the insertion of “You bet your life.” My own insertion was Ida became a pronoun and verb: I da won’t, I da will, I da wanna.
Stanzas in Meditation fulfills Stein’s great ambition. It’s an amazing work, a modernist epic, and Stein is at her playful, philosophical, poetic best. It’s a lively, imaginative work, riffing off Tennyson, Shakespeare’s sonnets, nursery rhymes, the cultural gamut. Joan Retallack’s rich introduction, “On Not Not Reading Stein: Pressures and Pleasures of the Text,” reckons creatively and helpfully with the problem I’ll call “Who’s Afraid of Gertrude Stein?” Retallack also presents Stein scholar Ulla Dydo’s important textual discovery: Stein’s lover/wife, Alice B. Toklas, forced her to change the verb “may” to “can.” May Bookstaver was Gertrude Stein’s first lover, and Toklas was enraged finding her name so many times in the manuscript of Stanzas in Meditation. (Apparently, Toklas had no trouble reading Stein.) In the new Yale edition, “may” has been returned, according to Stein’s original manuscripts. The Stanzas’ editors, Suzannah Hollister and Emily Setina, literary sleuths, have done significant work restoring it.
Gertrude Stein suggested that becoming a classic could kill a work of art. I enjoy Gertrude Stein most as a theorist, her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear. (I call myself an inexpert.) Readers’ responses should shift, like Ida, with changing times, to make a book new(er), otherwise it doesn’t truly live in the present. If Stein becomes an endpoint for literary invention — a classic — her work can’t be read in the present tense. I figure that if Gertrude Stein were alive now, she’d be rambunctious differently. Literature can’t stop, and can’t rest on its laurels.
And she wouldn’t be writing like Gertrude Stein.
Pastoralia
The Puritans proved their worth in the New World by achieving worldly success that, they hoped, demonstrated God’s love. But since the Bible told them the meek shall inherit the earth, wealth was an uncertain sign. God could be ambivalent. Failure, like the Devil, could masquerade in a wicked variety of disguises. Anxiety and guilt drove the Puritans, and those were their psychological gifts to America’s future. It is this punishing legacy that shapes the wacky world of George Saunders’ story collection, Pastoralia.
Saunders’ exuberantly weird stories recount Americans’ mostly futile attempts at self-improvement, the terrible dread of failure — or damnation. His stories appropriate behaviors and institutions that already seem parodies of themselves. They respond to an America where men running for president cite Jesus Christ as their favorite philosopher, either to curry votes or because they haven’t actually read any philosophy, and where women vie to marry a multimillionaire on television. They speak about the most prosperous nation in the world, whose citizens don’t have adequate health insurance and worry about being too fat to be loved but not about being too self-involved to consider the pain of others.
Saunders showcases Americans’ fears, shames and need to be accepted — all resonant reminders of this country’s neurotic origins. In Pastoralia, his frantic characters move through defamiliarized terrain. They anxiously await punishment for nonexistent crimes and imperfections, suffering for the strange sin of wanting to be happy. His losers are threatened with losing even more — jobs, sexual attractiveness, their illusions, just about everything.
In this collection’s title story, a woman named Janet and an unnamed male narrator worry about losing their jobs playing cave people in a historical theme park. The pair are not allowed to speak English: “I make some guttural sounds and some motions meaning: Big rain come down, and boom, make goats run, goats now away, away in high hills.” Janet speaks English anyway, among other rules she breaks, and the narrator protects her from the boss. The boss punishes him by withholding their daily food. “I go to the Big Slot and find it goatless.”
In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his first collection, Saunders also represented America as a kind of Disneyland and relied on repetitions and other stylistic devices to hammer home the poverty of a simulated existence. He stripped down his sentences to convey the inadequacy of language to capture the zeitgeist. His insistence on these effects sometimes turned smart into merely clever, inventive into predictable.