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摘 要

格特鲁德·斯泰因（1874-1946），美国小说家、剧作家、诗人，以其抽象晦涩的先锋派作品而闻名。作为二十世纪初巴黎艺术圈中的核心人物，她为诸多先锋艺术家提供过资助，与立体主义代表画家毕加索、马蒂斯等建立了深厚的友谊。同时她的先锋派作品也深受立体主义绘画的影响。在毕加索进行立体主义绘画试验的同时，斯泰因也对英语语言的写作方式进行革新。

本文围绕立体主义绘画对格特鲁德·斯泰因的影响，探讨了斯泰因作品《美国人的形成》，《软纽扣》，《三个女人》和《毕加索》中立体主义绘画的艺术特征。在她的小说和诗歌中，格特鲁德·斯泰因借用了立体主义画家在创作时所使用的共时的、动态的和矛盾的视角来看待事物。本论文是关于文学与艺术的跨学科研究， 主体部分首先讨论了斯泰因在语言创新中使用的独特技巧，如词序的破碎和词语的内在节奏，之后探讨了立体派绘画中的同时性与其文学肖像中的“连续呈现”时态和重复之间的相似之处，最后对分析立体派绘画中的二维性和斯泰因的写作策略进行比较分析。

斯泰因将立体主义绘画的理念和技巧运用到文学创作的实验之中，利用不断重复又带有细节变化的语句来突出某一人物或事物的不同特点，突破了原有的写作规范。她的文学作品实验性极强，以语言文字为手段探索着新的艺术表达形式，从而实现了立体主义绘画技巧与文学作品的巧妙结合。立体主义绘画中的碎片化、对思维的重构等技法都对斯泰因产生了深刻影响。她作品中重复、持续现在时等手法的应用均受到了立体主义绘画表现风格的影响。本文将立体主义绘画的艺术手法作为研究斯泰因文学作品的切入点，结合斯泰因与立体主义艺术家之间的交流和互动，分析其语言文字实验中所体现出的立体主义艺术特点，重点探讨斯泰因的创作理念及其先锋性文学作品中的视觉艺术因素。

关键词：格特鲁德·斯泰因；立体主义；《美国人的形成》；《三个女人》；《软纽扣》

Abbreviations

LA Lectures in America.

TB Tender Buttons.

TI A Transatlantic Interview 1946.

TL Three Lives.

SWGS Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Abbreviations iv

Introduction 1

Gertrude Stein 1

Cubism 2

Literature Review 3

Thesis Structure 5

Chapter One Cubist Paintings and the Innovation of Stein’s Language 7

1.1 Breaking the Word Order in The Making of American 7

1.2 The Inner Rhythm of Words in Tender Buttons 9

Chapter Two Simultaneity in Cubist Paintings and Stein’s Literary Portraits 11

2.1 The Continuous Present Tense in Three Lives 11

2.2 The Repetition in Picasso 13

Chapter Three Bidimensionality in Cubist Paintings and Stein’s Writing Strategies 15

3.1 Limiting the Description to What is Seen in Three Lives 15

3.2 “Each Part is as Important as the Whole” in Three Lives 16

Conclusion 18

Works Cited 19

Introduction

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is an American poet, novelist, playwright and art collector. She claims herself as the most important experimental writer. She is a literary giant and a serious formal experimenter. Born on February 3rd, 1874, into a wealthy merchant family in Pittsburgh, Gertrude Stein spent much of her early life in Europe before she settled down in California. When she was twenty-nine years old, she left America and moved to Paris with her older brother Leo.

After the Steins moved to Paris in 1903, they started their art collection. As one of the leading patrons of the most radical regeneration in painting, probably she is better known for her personality and her patronage of the artists than for her novels and poems. Stein is at the very center of the artistic revolution in process in Paris. Gertrude Stein is the hostess of 27 rue de Fléurus on the Left Bank of Paris. She held a weekly salon on Saturday evening whose dedicated attendees included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gavin Williamson, Thornton Wilder and so on. The Saturday night salons are very important to Picasso because Stein is his first collector and main patron. Stein helps bring Picasso’s cubist paintings to public attention. In 1905, Picasso drew the Portrait of Gertrude Stein and Stein wrote Picasso in response to this painting. Their mutual influence is at the level of personal rapport and exchange of ideas. Mutual fascination and allegiance grow between Picasso and Stein. They remain friends until they are old and senile.

While living in Paris, Gertrude Stein began trying to publish her writings. From 1906 to 1908, she wrote The Making of Americans (but it was not published until 1925). In 1909 Gertrude Stein published Three Lives. She began to write this novel during the spring of 1905 and the stylistic method of this book had been influenced by Cézanne's portrait. In 1915 she published Tender Buttons, which has been described as a “verbal collage”. It is accepted as a common opinion that many of the anthologized American poets and literary celebrities have a close relationship with the visual arts. As the key figure in the development of modernism in both art and literature, there is no doubt that Cubism greatly affected Stein’s literary creation. When the cubist, especially Picasso, develop their new art techniques in Cubism, Gertrude Stein is developing her new techniques of writing.

The development of Gertrude Stein's of language experiment follows the the development of cubist painting. Like the Cubists, Gertrude Stein uses signifying elements to make readers pay attention to the operation of signs. The repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks in her works are influenced by the cubist paintings.

Cubism

As one of the greatest aesthetic achievements in the early 1900s, Cubism is considered as the most influential art movement which revolutionized European painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature. The essence of Cubism is to deconstruct an object through intense observation.

Art historians divide this art movement into three phases. From 1906 to 1908 was “Early Cubism”. The representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne was one of the major cause of Cubism. It is generally believed that Picasso's Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon (1907) as the first cubist painting. This painting built on Cézanne's ideas and led to a new art movement. Georges Braque’s paintings House at L'Estaque (1908) inspired the word "cubism" in terms of a recognizable style. Pablo Picasso and Georges have been considered as the pioneers of this avant-grade art movement. The second phase of Cubism was known as Analytic Cubism between 1908 and 1911 in France. The last phase of Cubism is Synthetic Cubism, from 1912 to 1919. As an avant-garde movement, Cubism did not last a long time, but the impact of this movement was far-reaching and wide-ranging.

In Cubist artworks, the artists depict the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context, rather than depicts objecting from a single viewpoint. The objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstract form. The key characteristics of Cubism are multiple viewpoints, simultaneity, and bidimensionality. The Cubists break down the principle of linear perspective developed during the Renaissance. The traditional paintings require the artists to look at an object from a single perspective point, whereas Braque and Picasso are looking at an object from every conceivable angle in Cubism. Cubist painters represent different views of the subject pictured at the same time. Braque and Picasso divide the object into flat pieces, then reconstruct it to show people all sides of this object at once. “The term is a misnomer: there are no cubes in Cubism –– quite the opposite.” (Gompertz 165) Cubist artists is categorically not about trying to re-create the illusion of tri-dimension like a cube. Cubism acknowledges the two-dimensional nature of the canvas and puts emphasis on surfaces. To reflect a sense of the object's three-dimensional on canvas, they would paint the pieces from different views which they felt best to describe the object on the canvas in a series of interlocking flat planes.

The First World War brought an end to Cubism. Many of the central figures and powerful advocates were drafted into the army, including Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire. Although this art movement itself barely last decades, the legacy of Cubism probably lives on forever. Cubism can be found in European and American paintings and sculpture and inspire related movements in music, literature, and architecture. For example, the art deco style of the 1920s, the design style of Coco Chanel, the fragmentary modernist prose of James Joyce, the literary portrait of Gertrude Stein, the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the music of Igor Stravinsky.

Literature Review

For a long time, though her works occupy an important position in American literature in the early twentieth century, Gertrude Stein is better known as a hostess of the salon and a patron of arts, as compared to an experimental poet, playwright or a literary celebrity. There are many reasons why scholars pay little attention to her writings. Because her novels and poems are abstract and obscure, many critics try to deal with the difficulties of Gertrude Stein's writing by labeling them “meaningless”, “abstract”, or “obscure”. But such judgments often are inadequate and misleading in their failure to make some important distinctions (Dubnick 6).

Seen as a feminist and a lesbian icon, Stein was rediscovered by critics poststructuralist and feminist in the early 1980s. Many of the literary critics place her work in a context of identity politics and try to analyze her novels and poems drawing on feminism, queer theory, and minority studies. In A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental writings (1983), Marianne DeKoven discusses Stein's experimental writings together with feminism in politics. Because of her fluid identity as lesbian and immigrant, literary critics take Stein as a good example of discussing identity (Breslin 1977). To a certain extent, the discussion made by literary scholars like Neil Schmitz, Marjorie Perloff, and Harriet Chessman was conducive to raising Gertrude Stein's status in American literature.

Interdisciplinary study is always regarded as an important perspective of the studies on Stein’s works. Series of works mainly are undertaken from the perspectives of art history and theatre and performance studies. A number of studies have explored the relationship between Cézanne and Stein’s works, as she herself has frequently suggested affinities between her own works and that of the painters she knew and whose works she collected (Dubnick 14). Dubnick argues that Stein's two types of verbal obscurity parallel the development of the analytic and synthetic phases of Cubism ultimately rests on accepting another pair of analogies. Taking “the art collection of Gertrude Stein” as an example, the research addresses how Stein arranged her collection within 27 rue de Fléurus in Paris, France. The role Spanish painter Picasso played in Stein's collection examines how collecting functioned in the economy of Stein's artistic success (Tirza 18). The studies on Stein’s novels and poems have indeed been associated with a fair amount of research in modern art history. Over the most of her writing career, she engaged in the practice of portrait writing. Her literary portraits help her to establish the relations and making social bonds with the artists, and this, in turn, becomes the fundamental of the distribution of her writing (Daugaard 112). Not only her personal exchanges and collaborations have to be very seriously in relation to her works (Will 31), but also her close engagement with the visual arts and with the connections as well as the differences between the medium of painting and the medium of writing is a crucial aspect of her poetics (Daugaard 22).

In recent decades, a near consensus has been reached in the regard that her vision during writing novels and poems does indeed share much commonness with that of the Cubists, and the recognition of Stein's affinities with the visual art of Cubism can help the reader to better understand the larger argument about her language experiment and cubist expression (Ford 102). Nevertheless, when a systematic account of the Cubism impacts in Gertrude Stein's working is sought, extant studies seem to be fragmented in texts. While some studies have been generated on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and the early-20th-century avant-garde art movement, a more comprehensive recognition of the cubist painting features in Gertrude Stein's works is still in need.

As a matter of fact, little attention has been paid to Gertrude Stein studies in China. Only a small amount of researches are dedicated to the relationship between Stein and cubist artists. Among the current studies, some of them highlight gender issues focusing on Stein's identity as a feminist and an expatriate. The research focuses on the feminist narratology in her literary works. (Sun 119) The majority of the studies in China focus on Stein's art of language. The studies discuss the language features of her literary works (Shu 33) and explore the creative techniques of her novels (Long 48).

There seem to be a gap in relevant researches, since fewer scholars has yet paid attention to the close relationship between cubist paintings and Gertrude Stein's works. In fact, as Stein acknowledged Cubism as one of the most influential factors of her literary works, it might be a better perspective to explore the relationship between her writing and cubist paintings. Thus, comprehensive research on the cubist painting's features in Gertrude Stein's works is both feasible and significant.

Thesis Structure

In light of what is stated above, this research will start from the artistic features of cubist painting to study the literary works of Gertrude Stein. This study focuses on communication and interaction between Stein and cubist painters. And attempts to analyze the artistic features of cubist paintings in Stein's works The Making of Americans, Tender Buttons, Three Lives and Picasso.

This thesis focuses on the discussion of Stein’s techniques to present in her poems and literary portraits. Three main chapters will be devoted respectively to explore how Cubism and cubist painters influenced Gertrude Stein in her innovation of language, her literary portraits and her writing strategies. The first chapter focuses on Stein’s work and discusses how the cubist paintings influenced the innovation of Stein's language. The second chapter explores the impact of simultaneity in Cubism on Stein’s literary portraits. This chapter analyzes the techniques of the repetition in Picasso and the continuous present tense in Three Lives to discuss the cubist means of artistic expression in Stein’s portraits. In the literary portrait of Picasso, Gertrude Stein sees things in the same simultaneous, dynamic and contradictory way as Picasso does in his paintings. The last chapter illustrates how Stein's writing strategies are connected with the bidimensionality in cubist paintings. Gertrude Stein is obsessed with Paul Cézanne’s idea of composition, and the story “Melanctha” in Three Lives is the best illustration. This chapter argues that the point of view is flattened in both cubist paintings and Stein's works through the analysis of her novel Three Lives.

Through the critical analysis of the three chapters above, it can be concluded that Gertrude Stein's writing is to some extent influenced by cubist paintings. She is inspired by visual arts and put artistic theories into her literary creation. She is aware of the ways in which Cubism practices in its artistic expression could also be applied to literature. She makes use of the same simultaneous, dynamic and contradictory way as Picasso does in the cubist paintings to describe things in her writing. Therefore, this research should be seen as an attempt to help people make a systematic discussion about the cubist paintings’ features in Gertrude Stein's works and may contribute to helping readers have a better understanding of Stein's works.

Chapter One Cubist Paintings and the Innovation of Stein’s Language

With Second Industrial Revolution, technology and economy developed at an alarming rate in western countries from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. During these decades, western society witnessed more technological progress than in the previous four centuries. With the dawn of a new era, photography had begun to replace traditional paintings as the tool for documenting the objects. The artists try to find out some new ways of seeing and expressing—not only for representing their feelings and emotions, but also for dealing with the new age's challenge and trying to reflect the modernity.

As the pioneers of the avant-garde art movement, Cubist artists develop a series of experimental art concepts and techniques. At the same time, with the further deepening of connections with Cubists, Gertrude Stein finds that the new ways of expression and descriptions which cubist pioneers developed could also be applied to language and literature. Stein “not only attempts to escape the confines of denotative language but also risks ‘sense’ for a more democratic prose.” (Marchiselli 4) Influenced by cubist paintings, she started her innovation of language in The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons.

1.1 Breaking the Word Order in The Making of American

To face the challenges posed by the appearance of photography, painters have to abandon the old traditions of realistic art continuously since the Italian Renaissance. The artists didn't intend to try their best to make their works look like the real objects like before, because no matter how hard they tried, it would not be better than the photos taken by cameras. The Cubist attempted to change the traditional known forms of paintings to develop a new way of seeing and expressing which can reflect the modern age.

It becomes a question for the painters that how to reflect the modernity of the era using the tired traditions that had served art for the last four centuries. Georges Braque, the pioneer of Cubism, has deconstructed the object into several pieces and then reassembled it in loosely the correct shape, with each element depicting a different viewpoint. This is not the sort of straightforward representation a camera could produce, or the mimicry of previous art, but a totally new way of portraying and seeing objects (Gompertz 167). This new way of seeing and portraying the world was an admirable responsible to the groundbreaking developments in science and technology in the early 1900s.

Meanwhile, under the influence of Cubism, Gertrude Stein also tries to seek out avant-garde ways for the innovation of her language. She (in a letter from Gertrude Stein to Rousseau Voorhies, March 14, 1934) claims, “I was trying to escape from the narrative of the nineteenth century into the actuality of the twentieth”. (qtd. in Daniel 78) Just like the changes what Georges Braque does in paintings, Stein attempts to make daring and strange changes of sentences and words in her book The Making of Americans. Stein not only disrupted the causality in this book, but also disrupted the order of word and dropped punctuation in sentences. In her writing, Stein attaches more importance to the simple words such as pronouns and conjunctions. In The Making of Americans, Stein uses a large number of conjunctions to sculpted massive paragraphs:

More and more then there will be a history of many men and many women from their beginning to their ending, as being babies and children and growing young men and growing young women and young grown men and young grown women and men and women in their middle living and growing old men and growing old women and old men and old women. (SWGS 86)

In this long sentence with only one comma, Stein used 13 “and” to put all the individuals together. Stein’s changing of conventional word order allows a deep conceptual and moral vagueness in her writings. The using of connective words in these sentences suggests that the relationship between people can be represented by the relationship between words. What’s more, the disruption of the rules of language helps Stein to implicitly express the disruption of social order.

On one hand, Gertrude Stein’s disruption of causality makes uncertainty about the future an explicit part of the reading of the novel The Making of Americans, reinforcing the thematic uncertainty about what the future holds for Americans. On the other hand, she changed people’s perceptions of the coherent literary world by breaking the syntactical structures and forced the readers not only to take a more active role in struggling to understand the sentence structure but also to reconsider how language actually constructs the world we know. Stein’s changing of conventional word order was intended to question the usefulness of such convention and order in describing the world. In her view, she was unable to express herself effectively in a traditional fictional idiom, she preferred to shape her own word order that was infused with the language of science. The innovation of language in her novel was a great change of stereotyped expressions in writing, just like the completely new way of seeing and portraying the world made by cubist painters.

1.2 The Inner Rhythm of Words in Tender Buttons

Because cubist painters intend to create a new way of seeing and portraying, sometimes the objects in their paintings are not always as same as their real prototypes. The objects in their paintings turn into abstract symbols which can be understood only by the author of this work. As pioneers of the new art movement, the cubist artists did not want their works to be understand so easily like those traditional paintings in galleries or museums. As an experimental writer, Gertrude Stein's innovation of language does not aim to make her writing accessible or pellucid.

Before Picasso put letters into his painting, art had always been about images, but no letters. In Picasso’s work Ma Jolie, he put the words “MA JOLIE” near the base of the canvas. This word in his painting is considered as an abstract symbol to decorate the whole picture, but not a referential word simply means “my pretty girl”. Through the language experiments in her writing process which suggest the impacts of Cubism, “Stein herself came to regard words as things in themselves, she enjoyed not the meaning of a word but the way it sounded.” (Fitz 9) Both she and Picasso don’t enjoy the meaning of a word but considered the words as abstract symbols.

In her speech “Portraits and Repetition”, she claims, “I found that I was for a little while very much taken with the beauty of the sounds as they came from me as I made them.” (LA 196) She is kind of obsessed with the inner rhythm of words. Stein regards words as pure sound. In Tender Buttons, which has been described as a “verbal collage”, Stein tends to let her readers pay attention to the inner rhythm of the words, for example in her poem Orange In:

A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since a no since. (TB 51)

In this short poem, the two simple words “no” “since” keep popping up and makes the meaning of the sentences seem complicated. The repeated “no since” could be considered as “nonsense”, “nuisance”, “innocence” or “no sins”. Because of the inner rhythm of words, these two simple words bring about various meanings.

In her experiment of language, Stein made lots of efforts to remove the meaning of words and tried to draw readers’ attention to the inner rhythm of the words by playing with the sounds of words. She uses puns, half-rhyme, homonyms and near-homonyms, edging outwards from intelligibility into some other work of consciousness, imaginatively questioning the meanings of words. Rather than being battened down, the meaning of words began to slip in and out of view. Over several decades, Tender Buttons has been seen as an obscure and abstract book, and readers need an extraordinary amount of explication to understand such short texts in Tender Buttons. The idea behind it is that Stein considers words as abstract symbols and focus on the inner rhythm of the words. What Stein intends to achieve is when people see the words in her poems, they could focus on the rhythm and sound of them rather than the specific meaning.

Chapter Two Cubist Paintings’ Simultaneity and Stein’s Literary Portraits

It is known that, the Cubist analyzes the object from many different viewpoints and reconstructed these viewpoints within their canvas. Simultaneity in Cubism means that the artist would simultaneously show views of the same subject from different viewpoints—these viewpoints would not normally be able to be seen together at the same time in the real world. In the picture the crossing and merging transparent planes are a more complicated application of the same idea.

Portraiture is a major concept in Gertrude Stein's writing. Stein had written the first of her abstract portraits in words in 1908 and between 1908 to 1912 she wrote 25 literary portraits. In these portraits, Gertrude Stein sees things in the same simultaneous, dynamic and contradictory way as cubist painters’ vision in their paintings. The Stein mode of simultaneity is that a thing not accreted through time, but composed instantaneously of its various, interchangeable and equally important parts. (DeKoven 11) In Stein’s literary portraits, simultaneity reflected in the repetition and continuous present tense changed how we read and what we thought.

2.1 The Continuous Present Tense in Three Lives

The traditional perspective paintings require artists to look at an object from a single perspective at one point in time, whereas cubist painters abandon the tradition of perspective drawing. Braque and Picasso reconstruct several pieces, which are viewed at different times and from multiple angles, into one plane. Before cubist artists change the subversive way of seeing, painters could only portray how an object looks at a certain time, it is not easy for artists to fulfill the representation of dynamic aesthetic in drawings. In cubist paintings, the concept of separate spatial and temporal dimensions was comprehensively challenged. Stein's close engagement with the visual art let her expressing the same thing in literature as what cubist did in painting.

At the same time, as Stein’s language experiment went on, the “continuous present” became the major stylistic implement of her works. In Stein's literary portraits, she explicitly related the sense of time to multiple perspectives. Just like multiple views at different times reconstructed at one plane, in Stein's literary portrait, a series of individual present actions of the character make up the “continuous present”. To avoid the corrupting influence of time on her writing, Stein devised the ‘continuous present’; “a state in which each moment has its own emphasis and each word lacks eternal reference.” (Rubery 1) Stein claims that every action and thought of people is happening in the present, no matter how long the span of time has been covered in her works. She suggests that only the present tense is valid and exciting, because with the past flowing into the present and the present merging into the future. In “Melanctha”, the second story in Three Lives, the continuous present tense is used to reflect the characteristics of Melanctha:

Melanctha acted now the way she had said it always had been with them. Now it was always Jeff who had to do the asking. Now it was always Jeff who had to ask when would be the next time he should come to see her. Now always she was good and patient to him, and now always she was kind and loving with him... Now she did these things, as if it was just to please her Jeff Campbell who needed she should now have kindness for him. Always now he was the beggar, with them. Always now Melanctha gave it, not of her need, but from her bounty to him. Always now Jeff found it getting harder for him.

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