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 the midst of the chaotic syntax of this passage, markers such as "and now" and "Rose is beginning" provide the listener with a thread with which to make causal connections between events. Thus, a listener may discern from this passage that something began, and that, whatever it was, it made Rose feel funny.

Although oral discourse markers do provide The World is Round with a narrative thread, these markers in several ways are also thoroughly wound up in roundness. First, in addition to guiding the listener through the story's enigmatic episodes, they comprise one of its most strident reminders of circularity. Indeed, the statement "the world is round" is repeated sixteen times in this short story. Second, oral discourse markers also frequently give way to repetitive sound patterns and thus shirk their guiding function in the interest of repetitive play. Thus, in the following sentence, the oral discourse marker "well anyway" yields its directive force to a larger pattern of sound: "Well anyway just then the hay went away, hay has that way and the water went away and the car did stay and neither Rose nor Willie were drowned that day" (15). Where a practical narrator might have followed "well anyway" with a perfunctory "everything turned out alright," in The World is Round the narrator drops the authority of "well anyway" to join in a dance of "ay" sounds. But, third, the narrator's ultimate act of collusion with roundness occurs at the end of the story. Throughout the book, the little boy named Willie has been identified as Rose's cousin, but in the end, "Willie and Rose turned out not to be cousins, just how nobody knows" (94). Since they are no longer cousins, Rose and Willie marry and have children, and they "live[d] happily ever after" (94). Because Stein passes lightly over the mystery of this sudden change in Willie's identity, her narrative sleight of hand flies in the face of the conservative standard of "truth" we expect from narrative even as it seems to provide the tidy closure we expect from a story for children.

The abrupt alteration in Willie's identity also calls into question the possibility of arriving at a fixed and settled sense of self. For if one of the purposes of the narrative mode is to provide an individual with a stable, unique identity, a narrative in which an individual's identity changes so capriciously not only fails to fulfill its function, but also threatens to undermine our sense that it is ever possible to know our "true" selves. If even our narrator thus colludes with roundness, a listener may well ask, as Laura Hoffeld does, "[i]f the world goes on being round, how could [Rose and Willie] live happily ever after?" (53). Indeed, how can any of us live happily ever after on such a slippery planet? The answer to this question, I would argue, lies in the juxtaposition of roundness and linearity found in the last sentence of The World is Round: "they lived happily ever after and the world just kept on being round" (94). Blending traditional closure with an affirmation of Stein's "continuous present," this sentence marks a dynamic truce between linearity and circularity. Even though the world is round, even though identities are unstable, and even though stories may never tell the "truth," Rose and Willie do live happily ever after. Their stories blend into the pleasurable, unknowable "continuous present" in which fictions, as Frank Kermode has observed, provide ways "for finding things out" and "change as the needs of sense-making change" (39).(3) Linear processes - like the stories we tell about ourselves - may be swept into larger circles of return; nevertheless, they are a pleasurable aspect of a round world. Indeed, as The World is Round concludes, its linearity is itself swept into a circular narrative discourse. Since it is a picture book for children, we will inevitably begin it again and again.