Life and Writing with Stein, the James', and Hemingway

II.

           

            Most recently in my academic career, not in including this assignment, I’ve been assigned to imitate two writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Vladimir Nabokov. On the exterior, their writing styles could not be any opposite; one is aggressive, while the other is more poetic, respectively. But their thought processes are in fact more similar than one would think: the two are both pretentious (often consciously).  And despite the differences in their voice, the voice they are projecting is their honest, everyday one. I personally believe I write more like Nabokov than Kincaid. Evidently our skill levels are vastly different, master vs. beginner, but there’s a sense of didacticism and lyricism present in both of our writings. I share all this because as I read Henry James’ piece, “Occasional Paris”, he too enjoys explaining things, often using “one” to make the information more universal, but also directing the reader as “you” as though we are in dialogue with him. James’ approach to writing is carefully constructed and analytical. Though his works are long and dense (Velvet Grove being the more tricky of the two), James’ is economical with the words and information he chooses to include and exclude—everything has a purpose.

This past winter break—a time I will surely reference time and time again—I would spend my days writing about myself through a second person point of view, much like in “Occasional Paris”. I realize at first read that sounds selfish, and in a way it was, but I did this because it is easier for us, self-conscious and emotional beings, to believe and respond more positively to another’s words versus our own—an extremely silly and contradictory phenomena, if you think about it. Anyways, typically I’d start the piece with an “I”, for one, on the top right corner, skip a line, and begin. Sometimes I’d know exactly what I’d want to write about, other times I would have no prompt—but learning something was always the end goal. Neither of those approaches follow a strict a, b, c blueprint, but rather my points flow continuously one after the other, following the natural movement of my thoughts. Because of this, there are instances where my works can seem confusing, only because everything is happening simultaneously. When I first started writing, the disorder of my emotions and thoughts frustrated me, but with the more practicing I did, I learned to work with them and untangle them. I learned that it’s okay to reflect and doubt a decision seconds after making it. I now use this same approach and philosophy with perhaps the biggest, most personal concept of all time: life. Though in life, we don’t have the luxury of a backspace/return button, we can still correct our wrongs and past-doings, simply by changing our approach, behavior, or whatever factor it was that created the mistake in the first place. As Stein states in her piece, “Composition as Explanation”, “if every one were not so indolent they would realize that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic”. Life and writing are chaotic, but we accept that, and continue to work towards creating something positive.

Life, besides the natural course of aging—infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood to elder-hood—is not entirely linear; it’s an amalgam of unpredictable highs and lows, a majority of the choices made and the events that take place often derive from erratic, heat of the moment decisions. It’s bewildering: we all see the exact same things, but how we see them is different; we’re all experiencing a present, but how we’re experiencing will never be the same as someone else (this concept of everything being the same but not is closely related to quantum mechanics and its relation to life: the source of everything at the end of the day is “one energy”, therefore everything is actually the same at the core… but anywho…). One could even apply this to the experience of studying abroad. There are 30 of us, perhaps less, perhaps more, and though we are all in Paris, studying at the same small school, none of us share the exact same feelings and thoughts on the experience. Though we may all enjoy it, the levels of enjoyment differ from person to person. We are all in Paris, living a different Paris. Moreover, there is no “first, next, then last,” but instead “a right now, and what happened before now”. Future isn’t included in that timeline because it has yet to happen, so it’s simply an abstract concept, and when it does happen, it’s no longer the future, it’s the present. Gertrude Stein also delves into the concept of a continuous present in “Composition as Explanation” as the most natural approach to time. She admits it’s not easy to understand, and she too struggled to fully comprehend it, but the mindset came to her the most naturally. Naturally, Stein’s explanation exhausts the word “naturally”, amongst many others, but despite exhausting the word, the reading of it is informative and rhythmic—hypnotic almost.

            The stress on the “natural” is prominent not only in Stein’s thinking, but also both James brothers, and Hemingway. Ironically, each individual, though it’s the same word, approaches “natural”, in different ways that work harmoniously. For Hemingway, the sense of being “natural” comes through in his unadorned and simple writing style. Extremely observational, Hemingway does not spend time elaborating descriptions of what he sees, rather he provides readers with a more explicit visual experience. He and Stein relate in this way, because the two are less concerned with seeming aesthetically pleasing, and more focused on conveying a clear image. For William James, “natural” is how he describes certain behavior and responses to a wide spectrum of subjects, from religion to tolerance. And more importantly, “natural” as the truth, and truths “lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from eccentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking”. Though, he too believes the notion of the “same life, but different life” mentioned earlier: “[truths are made in the course of human experience] and beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure”—we are all living in this one life, but differently. And then, Henry James was an important figure of the literary realist movement. The objective of literary realism is to report things for what they actually are. James and Hemingway are both describing everyday life, but in different ways. James is simply more poetic, and Hemingway is straightforward. One could say James romanticizes reality, but that’s simply an individual’s interpretation of it; the content of his works are realistic, and the way he presents it is James’ “natural”.

            Ultimately, life is an experience that is always experienced in the present. We can’t go back to the past, nor can we fast-forward to the future. Unlike the future, the past has happened but in the present, in the “now”, it’s just a memory. And the future is not a memory but a concept. There is one present, but there are 7.12 billion people experiencing it in their own way. This is because each and everyone is an individual with their own set set of constructed ideologies, likes and dislikes, fears, and aspirations. Carly Sitrin from BU wrote in her piece, “Making Making Sense: Decoding Gertrude Stein”, “an object is not the sum of its parts, but rather every atom of an object within it is the essence of the whole—and therefore can be rearranged at will while still maintaining the overall sense of the thing”, a notion followed by Stein and Hemingway in their writing, Jamesian in his philosophy, and even Picasso in his art—cubism. It is one concept, adopted by several people and executed in several ways--again, like life.