Stein's representation of her own subjective processes, her use of herself as an object of study, was a means of self-distancing. Stein's spectacular detachment fulfills Georg Simmel's sociological prescription for aesthetics, from
The central creation of Stein's novel is the great American writer. Stein claims supreme authority for writers. Stories are powerful. They exploit, indeed they create, the appetite for fantasy that is essential to any successful nation.
Yet how are we to take Stein's emphasis, starting with the title, on the production side of American culture? As a catalog of the seemingly infinite number of American types, Stein's book can be understood as celebrating the sheer activity of production. This is consistent with the spirit of her gargantuan 925-page book. It seems to contradict, however, her continual undermining of human reproduction and hereditary transmission. What Stein is suggesting is that this patriarchal model is becoming obsolete, the concept of fathering is losing ground to another kind of manufacture. Progress, as Stein defines it, involves the displacement of traditional forms of production by a modern capitalist ideal of production, with which the monumentally productive writer implicitly identifies. At the same time, Stein's American writer has become an active producer of selves, in the sociological vein. To this end, the novel begins with a sputtering, fantastically abbreviated patriarchal plea for the maintenance of tradition. And the remainder of the book can be read as a rebuttal of this two-line dictum.
The patriarchal figure who threatens to dominate the book is David Hersland, who closely resembles Stein's own father Daniel. In -213- contrast to the other fathers, this immigrant who made good fulfills a very liberal, very modern American pattern. He had 'gone west to make his fortune. . he was big and abundant and full of new ways of thinking.' An Emersonian type, 'he was as big as all the world about him. . the world was all him, and there was no difference in it in him. . there were no separations of him or from him, and the whole world he lived in always lived inside him.' David Hersland is the representative of the misguided dream of human transparency and uniformity. And in a sense Stein's whole book is an assault on this dream. The world, Stein argues, does not conform to the domineering unities of this patriarch. And yet the real action of her book involves not so much his discrediting as his rebirth in the form of the great American novelist. Stein's own penchant for knowing the social world, for cataloging its various parts, derives from this figure. Every restriction of this desire, every assertion that society resists knowledge and codification, is balanced by a reaffirmation of the desire to know. Though Stein readily admits that any such effort is bound to be a process of self-codification, she also recognizes this as a truth too dark to accept.
In one of the book's most brilliant passages, Stein records our stubborn inability to accept this darkness. She describes 'being with someone who has always been walking with you, and you always have been feeling that one was seeing everything with you and you feel then that they are seeing that thing the way you are seeing it and then you go sometime with that one to a doctor to have that one have their eyes examined and then you find that things you are seeing, you are writing completely only for one and that is yourself then and to every other one it is a different thing. . You know it then yes but you do not really know it as a continuous knowing in you for then in living always you are feeling that someone else is understanding, feeling seeing something the way you are feeling, seeing, understanding that thing.'
This passage is paradigmatic of Stein's vision. It reflects her preoccupation with the very processes by which human beings process knowledge, a subject as visceral as the function of the retina. Harking back to her interest in anatomy and automatic action, the passage reveals her conviction that predispositions, ideas, myths, once absorbed, are as stubborn as biology. This does not make Stein a bi-214- ological determinist. Rather she imaged ideology in physical terms as a reminder of its power. The passage is most striking in its awareness of the limits of awareness. You can know this 'truth,' about the limits of knowing, she says, you can look it square in the face, but it won't change your fundamental need to know. It won't alter the presumptuous habits that form the basis of American liberalism-that society and its members are transparent, that they are just like us.
Stein's America, a turn-of-the-century scene of immigration, scientific discovery, economic expansion, looming sexual liberation, offers an open field for the making of Americans. The typological thinking of this era reveals a moment when the concerns of American novelists were vividly aligned with those of more scientific social analysts. In keeping with the other novelists we have discussed, Stein's sustained meditations on typological thinking remind us that literature tends to absorb contemporary ideologies. But they also remind us that literature can give us insight into social categories-the historical pressures that shape them, the human beings they affect- and, in so doing, may provide a source of resistance as well as a source of understanding and critique.
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Fiction and Reform II
The second half of the nineteenth century in the United States was characterized by an enormous number of social reform movements. Indeed, roughly the last twenty years of the century have been designated by some historians as the Age of Protest and Reform. This period began around 1878, when the nation was racked by postwar financial panic and depression, and ended in 1898 with a return to 'prosperity' occasioned by the discovery of gold and by inflation related to the Spanish-American War. But even before the onset of this officially recognized period of social protest, authors were using the novel form to lodge criticisms about social injustices they felt marred American life. Among the issues that were foremost in national debate during the period are abolitionism, feminism, agrarian protest, and industrial labor conditions. Each of these issues is treated directly and explicitly in at least one of the novels under consideration in this chapter. At the same time, as will become clear, it is possible to trace relations between these works and other less obviously 'political' works of the era, and in doing so we will be able to identify the interest in social reform as not merely the discrete characteristic of a few writers and activists but rather as constitutive of an entire culture in which these persons performed their work.
If we are to understand that work fully, we must first understand what sort of undertaking is designated by 'reform.' The term is commonly used to refer to an improvement in social and political conditions that is brought about without a radical change in existent -216- social and political structures. Of course, the question of what constitutes 'radical change' is a very difficult one to answer. We may be aided here by recourse to what are
