GERTRUDE STEIN, AUTOM ATIC

W RITING A ND THE MECH ANICS

OF GENIUS
The e¡ects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but
alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impu-
nity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.
(Marshall McLuhan)

AUTOM ATIC W RITING is usually associated with the early movement of

Surrealism, its origins typically assigned to the joint publication by Andrë
Breton and Philippe Soupault of Les Champs magnëtiques (1920). Yet more
than twenty years earlier, a young Harvard University researcher in psy-
chology named Gertrude Stein was engaged in her own experiments in
``automatic writing'', the radical implications of which arguably surpass
those of Breton and Soupault.1 For the Surrealists, automatic writing was
a ``vehicle [_] of revelation'', giving access to the ``subjective treasury''
of the psyche normally repressed by convention and ``civilisation'';2 only by
listening to what lay beneath conscious or rational communication could
the subject recover an originary, primal consciousness lost to everyday
life. ``Man, whose waking life is trapped in a morass of clichëd ideas, is
left to conceive of everything, himself included, via a dizzying series of
rapidly hidden slips, and coarsely patched up faux pas,'' wrote Breton in
The Automatic Message (AM 11). Writing ``automatically'' could make visible
the gaps wherein these ``slips'' and ``faux pas'' reside: an ironic assumption,
given that automaticity, mechanisation and technology itself were seen to
be the forces subsuming human creativity and agency in the modern
world. For the Surrealists, however, only an investigation into the automatic
could lead to a transcendence of the automatic; only a mechanical process
could release the deeper, unmechanisable ``murmur'' of human existence.
``Surrealism,'' writes Breton,``has above all worked to bring inspiration back
into favour, and we have for that purpose promoted the use of automatic
forms of expression in the most exclusive manner'' (AM 16).
As a practitioner of automatic writing in the late 1890s, Gertrude Stein
showed little interest in the question of ``inspiration'', just as throughout her
literary career she remained largely resistant to both romantic and psycho-
analytic conceptions of the subject. Indeed, what clearly occupied Stein's
attention as a student researcher in psychology at Harvard was not
the inspired or unconscious self but rather the essentially ``automatic''
self: the ``human motor'' that lay beneath the realm of consciousness.3
Unlike the Surrealists, Stein saw automaticity not as a ``vehicle [_] of
# Forum for Modern Language Studies 2001 Vol. xxxvii No. 2
170 BA R BA R A WILL

revelation'', but as the ground-zero murmur of the psyche, the sound-hum

of the human motor. To explore this hypothesis, Stein turned to the techno-
logy of writing ^ the practice of forming visible letters or characters on a
page, a practice that Stein, during this period, was attempting to isolate
from the event of meaning formation. In a series of experiments performed
with her fellow student Leon Solomons in the Harvard Psychological
Laboratory, Stein explored the possibility that writing could be divorced
from three variables, ``re£ection, judgment, and will'', and that it could be
isolated as a purely ``automatic'' impulse of the body, akin to ``undressing
without knowing it''.4 Stein's work with Solomons was to culminate in a
co-authored publication, ``Normal Motor Automatism'', which lays out
the results of self-directed experiments examining the automaticity that
lies beneath normal human functioning. Through testing each other's
propensity to``become automatic'' via acts of distraction, the two researchers
arrived at a theory of writing utterly divorced from conscious intention or
subjective agency: ``de¢nite motor reactions unaccompanied by conscious-
ness'' (MA 10). Like undressing without knowing it, they argue,``automatic
writing'' is part of a bodily habitus or tacit background of normal life,
disconnected from the domains of both consciousness and the unconscious.
A background, moreover, that functions as the normal, as a kind of neutral
screen against which cognition, imagination, desire, drive, and intention all
stand out in relief.5 And a background that yields no meaning, for ``automat-
ism'', as Stein and Solomons repeatedly assert, is something that resists
direct apprehension or knowledge, something that lies outside of any sig-
nifying system and can only be approached tangentially ^ something like
the motorised rumble of daily life. In the article, Stein and Solomons in
fact refer to automatism as ``a general background of sound, not belonging
to anything in particular'' (MA 19).
Given the fact that this experiment in automatic writing preceded the
long and signi¢cant career of one of our major modernist writers, it is
tempting to consider the possible implications of this research on Stein's
later aesthetic. Although Stein would publish only two studies in the
Harvard Psychological Review ^ ``Normal Motor Automatism'' (1896) and
the single-authored ``Cultivated Motor Automatism'' (1898), an extension
of the earlier experiment using a random sampling of young adults ^ and
would soon abandon both America and its academic institutions for a new life
in Paris as a writer and art collector, her earliest work remains potentially
highly signi¢cant for what followed. For example, the ``literary'' works that
Stein wrote in the decade after her sojourn at Harvard ^ Q.E.D., Fernhurst,
Three Lives, and The Making of Americans ^ iterate a concern with an essential
``bottom nature'' that lies within the subject and emerges through the
rhythm of the subject's automatic or habitual actions: a possible extension
of Stein's early ``scienti¢c'' convictions about human automatism. What,
after all, are Adele from Q.E.D., Nancy Redfern from Fernhurst, or the
 GERTRUDE STEIN A ND AUTOM ATIC W RITING 171

gentle Lena from Three Lives, if not distinct, unvarying types, fated to
inscribe the unchanging rhythms of their bottom natures on a harsh,
uncomprehending world? More automatons than individuals, they move
through their worlds in a constant state of re£ex motion, unable ultimately
to control or dictate the terms of their environments. As their relentless,
meaningless journeys toward death make clear, these characters are neither
romantic nor heroic: they are ``normal'', or ``typical'', and nothing more.
There is no ``subjective treasury'' behind their automatic actions: only
a humming motor.
Beyond the potential impact of ``Normal Motor Automatism'' on Stein's
¢rst literary characterisations, however, there exists the even more interest-
ing possibility that Stein's mature aesthetic might be centrally informed by
the early experiment's conclusions about writing itself. Simply put, Stein's
early interest in a writing that is neither intentional (conveying meaning),
nor a technique of communication with the unconscious, but rather a direct
inscription of the human machine as it rumbles beneath the surface of
conscious thought, might be seen as foundational to her later literary
experimentalism. The Making of Americans, for example, which appears ini-
tially to be a fairly conventional narrative of realist ¢ction, soon evolves
into an exploration of the process of writing as it is taking place, becoming
thereafter ``[a] thing not beginning and not ending''.6 This turn away from
``narrative'' toward ``writing'' in The Making of Americans might be seen
in the terms of the early scienti¢c work: as an investigation of ``motor auto-
matism'', registering and recording the vibrations of the writing arm as
it moves across hundreds and hundreds of pages, as in this example from
the end of the text:
Any one can begin again doing anything, any one can begin again not doing
something. Any one can go on not doing something. Any one can begin not
doing something. Any one can have heard everything. Any one can hear every-
thing. Any one can not like anything. Any one can know anything. Any one can
go on hearing everything. Any one can go on having been hearing everything.
Any one can hear anything. Any one can hear everything.7

Here, possibilities proliferate (``any one can'' do or not do ``anything'') but

meaning itself remains irresolute, dispersed by an apparatus of repetition
that both ``makes'' and ``unmakes'' its own premises at each new moment
of the composition. This is a form of writing that is neither ``progressive''
nor epiphanic but stuck in a kind of restless movement of beginning
again and again, as though what mattered were not the verbal ``content''
but the mechanical process, the hypnotic ``background of sound''. In the
end, this writing points to nothing but the rhythms of its own ever-erratic
repetitive process: an ``experimental'' writing that echoes in profound ways
the psychological experiments of the 1890s. ``We may sum up the experi-
ments,'' Stein and Solomons write, ``by saying that a large number of acts
172 BA R BA R A WILL

ordinarily called intelligent, such as reading, writing, etc., can go on quite

automatically in ordinary people'' (MA 24). The Making of Americans could
be said to demonstrate the very same premise.
Yet the potential correlation between Stein's ``literary'' work and her
``scienti¢c'' experiments in automatic writing is both fascinating and inev-
itably reductive. Seen as simply a mechanical process generated by re£ex
movements of the body, Stein's literary Ýuvre becomes nothing more than
a laboratory curiosity. Such, indeed, was the claim of one of Stein's harshest
critics, the psychologist B. F. Skinner, who, coming across the out-of-print
``Normal Motor Automatism'' in 1934, decided to expose the ``secret'' of
Stein's method to a public newly intrigued by The Autobiography of Alice
B.Toklas. In his denunciation, Skinner accused Stein of having spent a life-
time writing ``automatically and unconsciously'' in the vein of the early
Harvard experiments. Referring to her writing as ``capricious'' and ``cold'',
``spring[ing] from no literary sources,'' ``show[ing] no sign of a personal
history or of a cultural background,''8 Skinner stressed the dehumanised,
mechanical nature of her textual experiments. In response, Stein would
write to her friend Lindley Hubbell in 1934, ``No it is not so automatic as
he thinks [_]. If there is anything secret [in my method] it is the other
way [_]. I think I achieve by xtra [sic] consciousness, excess.''9 Curiously,
here, Stein does not refute Skinner ^ my writing is ``not so automatic as he
thinks,'' she suggests, leaving open the possibility that her writing is auto-
matic, to a degree. But what she clearly wants to privilege in her own work
is what goes ``the other way'': ``xtra consciousness'' or ``excess''. This late
description of her aesthetic method is of crucial interest, since it seems to
be making reference to a complicating dynamic in the early scienti¢c work
that bears upon the mechanics of automatic writing, and thus by extension
upon Stein's later literary method.
Rereading ``Normal Motor Automatism'' with this proviso in mind, it is
possible to see what Stein means. For alongside the article's insistence upon
an essential automatism that lies at the bottom of ``bottom nature'', refer-
ence is also made to a strange doubling that emerges from the human
motor during the process of automatic writing. Thus in their discussion of
the supposed distinction between hysterical automatism and normal
automatism, Stein and Solomons insist that the two phenomena are essen-
tially identical except for one key di¡erence. While neither the normal
person nor the hysteric can help performing in automatic ways, the
normal person, even in a state of distraction, does have a certain control
over attention that is lacking in the hysteric, enabling her or him to per-
form automatically while at the same time remaining ``conscious'' of this
process. The article states: ``Nothing is more di¤cult than to allow a move-
ment of which we are conscious to go on of itself. The desire to take charge
of it is almost irresistible [_]. But a trained subject can watch his automatic
movements without interfering with their complete non-voluntariness''
 GERTRUDE STEIN A ND AUTOM ATIC W RITING 173

(MA 12).``The hysterique,'' on the other hand,``is unable to attend to the sensa-
tion [_]. It is his anaesthesias which make automatism possible. What in
his case is done for him by his disease we had to do by acquiring a control
over our attention'' (MA 18). In contrast to the hysteric, therefore, the
``trained'' normal individual can both be conscious of his automatic move-
ments and at the same time will himself not to interfere with them. But
what is ``consciousness'' here ? Earlier Stein and Solomons had asserted
that automatic writing lay outside the sphere of consciousness: that to be
conscious of one's automatism is to arrest it, for the moment that conscious-
ness ``take[s] charge of '' something, automatism disappears. In this latter
passage, however, Stein and Solomons seem to be suggesting that there is
a form of consciousness that can accompany the practice of automatic writ-
ing, given training ^ a consciousness, they write, that is ``purely cognitive''.
This is a consciousness that is not controlling but passive and ``watchful'',
resembling something like an attentive inattentiveness. Hence, for Stein and
Solomons, ``Our problem was to get su¤cient control of the attention to
e¡ect [a] removal of attention'' (MA 25).
In the ``successful'' experiments, they note,``One watched his arm with an
idle curiosity, wondering whether or no [a] word would be written'':

This, in fact, was the general condition of things through the greater part of the
experiments, after training was well under way. The same sentence might be dic-
tated to the subject over and over again, and at the end of the series he would not
know what it was. Yet not a single instance of what we have called unconscious-
ness occurred during this interval [_]. [R]eal unconsciousness appeared, not as
a last stage of this, but as an altogether di¡erent phenomenon coming quite
suddenly, and under di¡erent conditions. The consciousness without memory
seems to approach as its limit, simply a condition in which the subject has not
the faintest inkling of what he has written, but feels quite sure that he has been
writing. (MA 17)

``Consciousness without memory'' describes a state neither unconscious nor

amnesiac but divorced from the ``inhibitive or controlling'' functions of con-
sciousness, as well as from a sense of temporal continuity that provides what
Stein and Solomons call ``the feeling of a personality''. It is a form of con-
sciousness achieved through distraction, in which ``the subject has not the
faintest inkling of what he has written, but feels quite sure that he has
been writing.'' The machine-like hands of the writer are here coupled with
a mildly curious but ¢nally rather indi¡erent ``watchfulness'': a ``conscious-
ness'', in short, that accompanies automatic writing while not arresting or
controlling it.10
Through this notion of a ``consciousness without memory'', the terms of
Stein's 1934 response to Skinner become clearer. By claiming that Stein's
literary work could be reduced to automatic writing, Skinner failed to grasp
the point of Stein and Solomons' ``training'' in distraction. It is not the
174 BA R BA R A WILL

automatism achieved in the experiment which is the ultimate ``secret'' of

Stein's aesthetic, but what goes ``the other way'': the ``xtra'' consciousness
that cannot be reduced to automatism. And yet the ``consciousness without
memory'' that ``Normal Motor Automatism'' discusses is not, ¢nally, tran-
scendent of automatic functioning, but emerges always in and through this
functioning. It is not the counterpart or even the ``spirit'' of the human
motor, but rather its residue, or as Stein claims, its ``excess''. The by-product
of automatism that also bears witness to automatism, Stein's ``consciousness
without memory'' exists in dynamic, dialogic exchange with the human
motor. The terms of this exchange in turn allow for a way of reconsidering
Stein's later aesthetic that pushes far beyond the Skinnerian critique.
Three decades after the Harvard experiments, when asked why she
wrote the way she did, Stein answered that she was a genius and proceeded
to de¢ne ``genius'' in the following way:

One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most
intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening.
It is really that that makes one a genius. And it is necessary if you are to be
really and truly alive it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing
both things, not as if there were one thing, not as if they were two things, but
doing them, well if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving,
they are part of the same thing.11

In this crucial statement of her aesthetic method, Stein transforms the

dynamic psychotechnology of ``Normal Motor Automatism'' into a techno-
logy of literary production, as the very basis for creative e¡ort. Indeed,
what Stein calls ``genius'' ^ ``talking and listening at the same time'' ^ reiter-
ates in almost identical terms the subjective dynamic of ``Normal Motor
Automatism''. The ``automatic writing'' of the scienti¢c experiment has
become the ``talking'' of genius; the ``consciousness without memory'' has
become genial ``listening''. That Stein articulates this dynamic through
reference to mechanisation is highly signi¢cant. Internal ``motors'' charac-
terise both automatic writing and automobiles; ``genius'' is the total unit, the
``car'' carried along by its human motor. Automatism and ``excess'' con-
sciousness are here coupled in intimate, inseparable relation; and this
relation in turn serves as the foundation for the process of writing.
It is perhaps curious that Stein reverts to a romantic trope ^ ``genius'' ^ to
articulate this complex coupling, especially given her early preference for
a mechanistic model of the psyche over a more idealist one. Like Breton,
Stein here seems to locate transcendence ^ via the privileged signi¢ers of
``inspiration'' or ``genius'' ^ at the horizon of automatic writing. Yet while
Stein may indeed have associated ``genius'' with transcendence at various
moments over the course of her career, in this central instance Stein deploys
``genius'' against itself, connecting it not to transcendence but to the
dynamic of a profoundly split and mechanised writing subject.12 Closer to
 GERTRUDE STEIN A ND AUTOM ATIC W RITING 175

Marshall McLuhan than to Andrë Breton, Gertrude Stein here approaches

a postmodern, anti-idealist engagement with the mechanics and technolo-
gies of everyday life, insisting that art exists through its ``encounter'' with
technology and technological e¡ects on sense perception, an ``encounter''
that is also of necessity an implication and an involvement. To this extent,
the ``serious artist'' only ¢nds her ``voice'' at the moment in which she
appends herself to a machine. Or rather, at the impossible moment of self-
doubling in which she becomes conscious that she ^ in her unremarkable
``normality'', in her automatism, in the very act of writing ^ is the machine.
BA R BA R A WILL
Department of English
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
USA

NOTES
1
Much of the material for this essay can be found in expanded form in my book, Gertrude
Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of ``Genius'' (Edinburgh, 2000).
2
Andrë Breton, The Automatic Message, trans. D. Gascoyne, A. Melville & J. Graham (London,
1997), p. 26. Subsequently referred to in the text as AM.
3
For an essential analysis of mechanisation in turn-of-the-century social discourse, see Anson
Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990).
My analysis is also indebted to Mark Seltzer's notion of ``the body-machine complex'' in turn-
of-the-century American literature: Bodies and Machines (New York, 1992).
4
Gertrude Stein & Leon M. Solomons, ``Normal Motor Automatism'', Motor Automatism
(New York, 1969), p. 9. Subsequently referrred to in the text as MA.
5
Stein's interest in ``the normal'' as an object of inquiry and as a term of self-identi¢cation
would continue throughout her career. Thirty years later, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
``Alice'' reports that Gertrude ``always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says
the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting'' (Gertrude Stein, The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [New York, 1933], p. 102). Priscilla Perkins, in ```A Little Body with
a Very Large Head': Composition, Psychopathology, and the Making of Stein's Normal Self '',
Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 42 No. 3 (Fall 1996), concurs that ``Stein's ideologies of [_] normality
rarely have a stable value'' (p. 532).
6
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (Normal, IL,
1995), p. 701.
7
Ibid., p. 914.
8
B. F. Skinner, ``Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?'', in: Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael
Ho¡man (Boston, 1986), p. 67. Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly 153 (January 1934),
50^7. For a more extended analysis of the Stein^Skinner debate, see Tim Armstrong, Modernism,
Technology and the Body: A cultural study (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 204^11.
9
Stein^Hubbell correspondence quoted in Steven Meyer, ``Writing Psychology Over: Gertrude
Stein and William James'', The Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995), 141.
10
Friedrich Kittler gives a suggestive rendering of this scene: ``Gertrude Stein watches her
hands like separate machines with a modicum of curiosity rather than commanding them to write
particular signs'' (Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer [Stanford, CA, 1990], p. 229).
11
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (London, 1988), p. 170.
12
Wendy Steiner, in Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein
(New Haven, 1978), gives an alternative account of the mechanics of Steinian ``genius'' when she
describes the idea of ``talking and listening'' as ``someone talking into a microphone connected to
ear phones which he himself is wearing'' (p. 44).