A Contemporary Continuous Present: Revisiting the Work of Gertrude Stein
By Emilee Prado •
The writing of Gertrude Stein, although idiosyncratic in genre and subject matter, might be best distinguished by its style. Both her poems and her longer works have been called literary cubism. They are impressionistic, introspective, and irreverent. They utilize repetition, tongue-in-cheek humor, and—like other works of twentieth-century avant-garde art—they exhibit contention between mental experience and external time. Stein’s abstract approach to writing often divides readers into those who are intrigued by feeling or sensing her words, those apt to regard her work as nonsense, and those who see it as something that needs to be decoded. I’ve found myself oscillating between all three.
In “Composition as Explanation” (a 1926 lecture later published in essay form), Stein presents a long run of observational declarative sentences that elucidate the creation of her work and, more generally, the creation of all art as she sees it. In the essay, she notes a phenomenon she calls both “a prolonged present” and “a continuous present.” The form of the essay—true to its title—gives readers an example of what she’s talking about. So what exactly does Stein do by utilizing a continuous present? And how might looking through the lens of a continuous present impact contemporary and ongoing interactions with art?
Stein was a prominent art collector as well as a poet, novelist, and playwright, so when in her essay she refers to “the arts,” “works of art,” and “artistic composition,” Stein is addressing a community that includes but is not limited to literary artists. For Stein, art has a consistently circular relationship with time. She writes, “It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.” With this circularity and the overall message of “Composition as Explanation,” we might understand that Stein believes art is always of its era and that it reflects the human perspective of that era. The only constant quality in art is that it always changes as artists learn how to live in their era while simultaneously learning what art their era creates. Stein insists that this art-time circuit is not a manufactured or taught process, but one that occurs naturally. When reflecting on the writing of her previous books, Three Lives (1905) and The Making of Americans (1911), she writes, “In these two books there was elaboration of the complexities of using everything and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again. In the first book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again.” We could, therefore, consider a continuous present to be a process of starting and then going back to push the beginning forward.
Stein seems averse to using imagery to communicate her ideas, perhaps because images solidify what is abstract. Abstraction leaves ample room for interpretation, which is one way of opening a work to a wide readership and inviting a multiplicity of perspectives. However, continual abstraction also obfuscates and creates the sensation that something is forever slipping through a reader’s attempts to understand it.
At the risk of affronting Stein’s writing and perhaps the avant-garde itself by trying to make things too concrete via analysis and interpretation, over the next several paragraphs, I’ll offer two discrete analogies that might be placed over Stein’s explanation of a continuous present. This layering effect will hopefully propagate Stein’s ideas while making them more tangible to contemporary readers.
In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein mentions both lists and series as she describes books she created using a continuous present: “In this natural way of creating it then that it was simply different everything being alike it was simply different, this kept on leading one to lists. Lists naturally for awhile and by lists I mean a series.” Lists and series have a beginning (the first item) and then continue without a definite end. (They could end when the last item is truly the last, but it is theoretically possible to make an infinite list or series). In this sense, the creation of art is inevitably connected to the art that came before it, whether there was a direct influence between artists or whether the connection is that of afterness alone—all art is linked. Perhaps then, a continuous present could be pictured as a chain. Each link might be the cycle of an artist’s career or lifetime. Or the chain could be the connected cycle of art within and between generations of artists. Either way, with Stein’s insistent use of the term natural, art must be a circuitous series connected to the life-growth-decay-death-creation-life cycle of humans and the universe in which we live.
Through her looping language, Stein seems to attempt a fight against linear progression. Would she flat out object to a continuous present as a chain because of the straight line it implies? What if we pictured the connections to spread out to each side as well, more like a chain-link fence? Is this still too two-dimensional? Let’s look at something else.
Stein delivered “Composition as Explanation” in lectures at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the wake of World War I to audiences still influenced by wartime mentality, and she acknowledged how the unprecedented technology of the early 1900s changed the battlefield in the same way new technology has always impacted methods of art-making and the subjects of art. She writes: “And now after that there is no more of that [war] in other words there is peace and something comes then and it follows coming then.” Here, Stein alludes to cycles of creation and destruction and the lulls that inherently occur in between. War produces a tumultuous uproar in society, a state of chaos that later settles into equilibrium. This idea invites us to look at a continuous present using more liquid language, an image that also accommodates undulating rhythms caused by repetition in Stein’s work.
What if we visualize the continuous present as the process of fermentation? In simplified scientific terms, fermentation is the anaerobic transformation of organic compounds (usually starches or sugars) into acids, alcohol, and gases. In a more allegorical sense, it’s a liquid process in which breaking down and creation exist concurrently; it is continuously evolving while it is also beginning. What’s interesting is that the term fermentation, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, can also mean “unrest.” And according to Oxford English Dictionary, it can be defined as “a state of agitation tending to bring about a purer, more wholesome, or more stable condition of things.” Therefore, fermentation as a continuous present evokes both the war/peace cycle and the growth/decay cycle of life. Here, we can see that a continuous present doesn’t mean starting over at the beginning or never moving past a beginning, but instead, it suggests a method of nonlinear development.
Stein’s lifetime, 1874 to 1946, predates almost all technology that impacts modern-day art, and as she notes in “Composition as Explanation,” art is inherently of the era that produces it. If writers today were to actively utilize the style of Stein’s continuous present in their work, the results might be impossible to publish, seen as unmarketable, dismissed as nonsense, and/or deemed derivative. However, the concept of a continuous present is still compatible with contemporary art even if Stein’s particular mechanics are eschewed. Let’s turn our focus from what forms a continuous present might take back to the more abstract ideas within the concept.
Today, literature cannot be separated from digital technology, even for those of us who still love to hold physical books and turn tangible pages. Whether it is the marketing of new material, book recommendations among networks of like-minded readers, or shorter works (like this essay) that exist only in digital format, the distribution and discourse of literature today are dependent on social media. Most major social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement by keeping us moving forward via their linear layouts and timelines. It is this linear aspect that—despite all social media’s goods and ills—perpetuates surface-level engagement with the culture of the moment and encourages immediate reaction rather than ongoing contemplation. Scrolling has us forever looking for what’s next, what’s next, what’s next? A question that is annulled by the fermentation-like process of the continuous present.
Arguably, much of our social/cultural/political discourse could benefit from art that openly engages with a continuous present. For example, being woke (no matter how you define or feel about this concept) suggests a binary relationship, a switch that toggles only in two directions—a before and after—and this dichotomy inevitably creates opposing sides. But what if we viewed ourselves as constantly waking? Okay, that’s hard to picture. Should we return to imagining a sort of fermentation? What if we engaged with everyday culture while seeing ourselves as continually growing, as having a beginning that develops within an era, and then grows over itself, era after era? It would be living simultaneously looking back and reliving onward. How could engaging with this perspective change how we act?
If we keep bringing to mind the concept of a continuous present and consider the artistic process as that of always starting something new in each moment of development, we might encourage a deeper engagement with art itself. For artists, a contemporary continuous present might also ward off the despair that comes with feeling ephemeral. Hope for impact and meaning fade if we see art as something lost to the endless abyss of the internet and valued or devalued by follower count. If artists urge themselves to think in terms of a continuous present, every day could be today and with today a next beginning.
EMILEE PRADO is an essayist and fiction writer. Her work appears in The Cincinnati Review, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. She received the 2023 Bacopa Literary Review’s honorable mention in fiction, and her writing has been nominated for Best Microfiction. Emilee has lived in Asia and South America. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona. Connect with her on social media @_emilee_prado_.
Featured image by Patrick Tomasso, courtesy of Unsplash.
