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

Once atop her mountain, though, Rose finds that she has not escaped roundness, for there "the world was rounder and rounder" (90), and from a summit nearby, Rose's cousin Willie shines a search light on her that "went round and round and it went all around Rose" (92). Just as her journey up the mountain does not result in an escape from the world's physical circularity, Rose's attempts to master the circularity of language by accumulating lists of facts also proves ineffectual: since life in a round world allows for multiple perspectives, facts themselves are subject to flux. Thus, before Rose begins her journey, she defines mountains in terms of their blueness: "[w]hen mountains are really true they are blue" (46). However, on her journey, the apparent stability of this characteristic of mountains proves illusory. At a distance, mountains are blue, but up close Rose finds that "it was not blue there, no dear no it was green there" (49).

Moreover, Rose finds that lists of facts may harbor internal contradictions. For instance, Rose's list of facts about herself presents a very disturbing incongruity: Rose describes herself in terms of her name, "Rose," but she also describes herself in terms of her favorite color, which is blue. Since "Rose" is also the name of a color, two of Rose's most important features - her name and her favorite color - seem irremediably at odds with each other. The narrator summarizes the quandary that these opposing self-descriptions present to Rose with the question, "Do you suppose that Rose is a rose / If her favorite color is blue" (51). Clearly, if even a list of one's own personal characteristics may include such a pool of mystery, then the genre of the list in itself offers no stability in a round world.

III

Rose's eyes brim with tearful ecstasy as she plans her trip up the mountain and envisions herself finally being there: "yes mountain no mountain yes I will be there. Tears came to her eyes" (49). Rose's longing to be there springs not only from her wish to arrive at a stable place in her round world but also from an existential homesickness for an end point, a point - like the period at the end of a sentence - that will constitute the boundary of her own individual story. Anthony Paul Kerby has asserted, "[i]t is ... the narrated past that best generates our sense of personal identity" (33); if Rose is able to tell her very own story, perhaps she will finally be there: at a linguistically secure sense of who she is. Moreover, since traditional narrative has an orderly "beginning, middle and end" (Kerby 39), since it places a series of events along a temporal "line," it is an especially appropriate tool for Rose to use in her struggle with the identity-obscuring semantic roundness of language.

From the moment Rose conceives of the idea to ascend her mountain, she positions herself in the temporal, linear path of narrative. At first, her plan to climb the mountain is a story she tells about her future: "I will with my chair come climbing and once there mountain once there I will be thinking ... yes mountain no mountain yes I will be there" (49). When she reaches the top of the mountain, she sings a new song, a song that describes herself in terms of the story of what she has done: "Once upon a time there was a way to stay to stay away, I did not stay away I came away I came away away away" (90). The traditional opening, "once upon a time," marks the beginning of Rose's personal story; the story itself celebrates Rose's individuality since it describes a feat that she has accomplished "[a]ll alone" (49). But despite the fact that Rose now has a story to tell about herself, the narrative path fails, after all, to lead Rose there - to the stable identity she seeks. For just as Rose's list of facts about herself contained serious inconsistencies, so Rose's story is susceptible to the shifty relativity between word and meaning. For once Rose reaches the mountaintop, the pristine certainty of being there loses significance: "oh where where where is there. I am there oh yes I am there oh where oh where is there" (90).