Stop the world, I want to get off! Identity and circularity in Gertrude Stein's The World Is Round

Style, Spring, 1996 by Martha Dana Rust

In her fascinating discussion of lists, Susan Stewart asserts that "numbers provide us with paradigms of linear infinity" (134). Since, as Stewart maintains, a list suggests the possibility of the "addition of an unrestricted number of elements" (135), we may argue that a list is in itself a form of counting; thus we may consider a list to have an intrinsically linear quality. One such form of linearity appears on the first page of The World is Round. There a list interrupts a sentence that would otherwise be a nearly suffocating incantation of perpetual return: "And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell everybody all about it" (8). The list - "dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children" - interrupts the sentence "and everybody all wanted to tell everybody all about it." Without the list, the words "everybody" and "all" are in apposition to each other at the beginning of the sentence, where they mirror the unity that each represents and evoke a sort of unity squared, unity multiplied by itself to infinity. Moreover, when the list is taken out of the sentence, "everybody all" appears both as its subject noun-phrase and as its object noun-phrase, thus reinforcing its circularity: "everybody all wanted to tell everybody all."

Inserted between "everybody" and "all," the list effectively shatters wholeness into particularity. It asserts that "everybody" is not simply "all" but includes a variety of unique entities: "dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children," for instance. The list also halts the redundancy of the sentence's otherwise identical subject and object; in doing so, the list affirms the possibility of individual action. For without the list, the sentence simply declares that "everybody" tells "everybody"; with the list, the sentence makes room for the possibility that a dog wanted to tell everybody all about it, that a cat wanted to tell everybody all about it, and that sheep and rabbits wanted to as well.

A second example of a list that interrupts circularity occurs in the following sentence about water:

It rises up that is when it is dew but when it falls, it is a water-fall and Rose knew all about that too, Rose knew almost everything that water can do, there are an awful lot when you think about what, dew lakes rivers oceans fogs clouds and water-falls too. (68)

Here, the list - "dew lakes rivers oceans fogs clouds and water-falls" - pits specificity against the vast natural cycle that the beginning of the sentence evokes: the cycle of water's continuous rise and fall.

Although the above examples suggest that catalogues of objects and entities operate in The World is Round as stylistic brakes against the flow of roundness, Stein's own comments on her writing suggest that such registers and tallies form an integral part of a round world. In her lecture "Composition as Explanation," Stein explains the "natural" evolution of lists in her art:

it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again ... this kept on leading one to lists.... and beginning again and again could no longer trouble me because if lists were inevitable if series were inevitable and the whole of it was inevitable beginning again and again could not trouble me. (26-27)