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

For Stein, then, lists are not the sturdy counter-balances to circularity they may at times appear to be, nor do they interrupt the "continuous present" - the "roundness" - of "beginning again and again."

Indeed, further examination of lists in The World is Round reveals that often these seemingly linear syntactic trajectories falter and curl into the service of circularity. Extrapolating from our everyday, intuitive understanding of what constitutes a list, we may observe that a "grammar" of the list-making process would prescribe the accumulation of similar grammatical elements: thus, for instance, a guest list gathers together names while a price list gathers together numbers. Many lists in The World is Round, however, depart from this ordinary "grammar of the list"; instead, these lists involve the addition of dissimilar grammatical elements, elements that only rhyme with other members of the list. Circling back upon themselves in repetitive cycles of sound, these lists may represent a circular rather than linear process.

The account of Rose's journey up the mountain provides an example of such a "circular" list. As she climbs higher and higher, Rose passes a waterfall and hears a sound: "Rose heard what she heard, dear little bird dear little water and dear little third" (68). Here the list, "dear little bird dear little water and dear little third," is syntactically positioned to interrupt the redundancy of "Rose heard what she heard," but it does not effectively counter the sentence's circularity because it draws a circle of its own. For, clearly, "third" is not something Rose could have heard; it only rhymes with something she could have heard, a "bird." Instead of creating a linear projection by conjoining similar elements, this list suggests the possibility of an infinitely continuous circular process: since it consists of rhyming but grammatically dissimilar elements, the list curves back upon itself and intimates "the inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again."

Rose's own lists reveal perhaps the most acute vulnerability to the curving influence of her round world. Rose proclaims her plan to climb her mountain with an assertion suitable to the occasion of overcoming roundness: with a song that lists the mountain's qualities, "Dear mountain tall mountain real mountain blue mountain yes mountain high mountain all mountain my mountain" (49). At first glance, Rose's song conforms to the ordinary rules for list-making since it consists, primarily, of a series of adjectives: dear, tall, real, blue, high, all, and my. The elements "all" and "yes," however, throw significant curves into the list. "All" - technically an appropriate list element since it is an adjective - effectively curves the list in two ways: phonologically it returns to the beginning of the list since it rhymes with "tall"; semantically, it returns to the beginning of the descriptive process by suggesting the mountain's wholeness rather than its specific attributes. In addition, the anomalous presence on Rose's list of the adverb "yes" creates a whole new orbit within this already kinked list, for "yes" resonates with "dear" to reveal that in addition to listing the mountain's qualities, this curling ribbon of words inscribes the cyclical, turn-taking process of an imaginary conversation that is proceeding between Rose and her mountain.