Narration

by Gertrude Stein

  Sometime anybody can get tired of it and when everybody who is anybody does get tired of it then that is the end the natural end of that way of telling it.

  That is what happens what has happened when everybody begins to think in a kind of a way which is a different way and that can happen of course it can. Feelings may have something to do with it or they may not have anything to do with it. Let it alone if you like let anything alone if you like but feelings are feelings and they are always there but anybody can have any way of telling anything they are telling about it. That makes a narrative and does a narrative have to have a beginning and an ending.

  To know about this you have to look at country to see what it looks like, since land and water looks not like itself but is the whole of it, and therefore is there any beginning and ending to it. Is there, are there not two things to think about it are there not, about beginning and ending but later very much later we will go into that but now to consider the perfectly ordinary ways narrative has been written, newspapers, novels, detective stories, biography autobiography history conversations, letter-writing whatever kind of way any of these things are written makes no difference a narrative is any kind of way of trying to tell anything anyone has to tell about anything that is or was or will be happening, and any kind of telling is the telling of what is happening inside or outside but is the telling the natural the immediate the necessary telling of anything that is happening. Now the newspapers have been and are very interesting as being one way one variation of one way in it if you like but one way of telling anything of telling everything of telling something.

  What do the newspapers do and how do they do it, and what is the matter with it that is if there is anything the matter with it.

  But to go back again just a little again to the way anybody or everybody tells anything anything about anything that is happening all the various ways there is of doing it and all the different ways anybody that is everybody can or cannot get tired of listening to it.

  Think about it anybody listens to it as you yourself tell anything and as you yourself or anyone listen while you yourself or anyone tell anything. It is extraordinary how few and how many ways there are of telling anything listen to yourself and you will know something of all about it and how few and yet how extraordinarily varied ways there are of listening or of getting tired of listening to it.

  All this makes anything written interesting to anyone interested in it the number of ways anyone tells anything theatre novels history poetry biography autobiography newspapers letter-writing and conversations and the number of ways anybody that is everybody gets tired of listening to it. Everybody always has to be listening to something, that is the way it is always anybody has to be listening to something that is what makes life lived the way that is what makes anybody who they are what they are, of course it does any of you think of your life the way it is, you are always listening to some one to something and you are always telling something to some one or to anyone. That is life the way it is lived.

  I once said and I think it is true that being a genius is being one who is one at one and at the same time telling and listening to anything or everything.

  Any of you try it and you will see what a difficult thing it is to listen to anything and everything in the way anyone is telling anything and at the same time while you are listening to be telling inside yourself and outside yourself anything that is happening everything that is anything. That is what genius is to be always going on doing this thing at one and at the same time listening and telling really listening and really telling.

  That is the reason why so often people have genius when they are twenty one, talent when they are thirty one, repetition of this talent when they are forty one and then nothing of anything that can make anyone listen to any of them after forty one. This is of course a well known thing but if you notice any and every one you will see how naturally this thing does happen. When you are young you have an energy that makes hearing and telling beginning over all at one time, but you grow older and when you listen you can not be telling anything and when you tell anything you cannot hear anything and so then what was begun when you are young and had energy often for two things does not go on.

  This is a sad story and does happen so often that there is no use continuing to sadden anyone by going on.

  I do not cannot believe that anything is or can be more interesting than the way and the fact that everybody is always telling everything and that anybody can in their way go on listening or not go on listening. But everybody can feel about telling and about listening like that. Anybody can.

  So now about the newspapers what are they telling how are they telling what do they intend to tell about what they tell and who listens who does listen. It is very interesting.

  Newspapers want to do something, they want to tell what is happening as if it were just then happening. They want to write that happening as if it was happening on the day the newspapers are read that is not as if the thing was happening on the day the newspaper is read a little that all the same but as if the writing were being written as it is read, that is what they mean by hot off the press, but yet after all there is an interval generally six hours or so but always an interval, and that interval they try to bridge by head lines, and do they succeed, not very well I guess not very well because it is not possible to tell in the way they have to tell a thing that is told as a reality, all this has an awful lot to do with the writing of history.

  As I say what does the newspaper really want to do and what does anybody who reads the newspaper want to feel that they want the newspaper to do.

  Really what the newspaper does really want to do and what the reader of the newspaper wants the newspaper to do is to know every day what happened the day before and so get the feeling that it has happened on the same day the day the newspaper appeared the day the newspaper reader reads the newspaper and not on the day before. If they did not want to do and to have this thing the newspaper reader and the newspaper writer then they would not mind so much reading the newspaper of the day before and anybody knows that anybody who reads newspapers always objects to reading the newspaper of the day before.

  Well there are two things about it, the newspaper reader wants to read the newspaper every day because he wants the idea of happenings happening every day and if there is a day without the happening of that day which is really the happening of the day before then the newspaper reader feels that it is like the sun standing still or any abnormal thing there is a day and nothing has happened on that day.

  That makes anybody feel that you cannot call a day a day if it is not a day if nothing that had been happening has happened on that day.

  That is really what the newspaper has to say that everything that has happened has happened on that day but really this is not true because everything that has happened on that day on the newspaper day has really happened the day before and that makes all the trouble that there is with the newspaper as it is and in every way they try to destroy this day the day between the day before and the day the newspaper day. Of course by day I naturally mean night too but the newspaper really does not know and so it cannot really say that there is really any difference between the night and the day. That is another of the difficulties they have in face of the real trouble that the newspaper day is always the day before the newspaper day and yet that is what they really have to say that the newspaper day is the day it is, which of course it is not.

  And so everything in the newspaper begins with its not being so and that like everything complicates and makes difficult telling and listening, it may complicate and the newspaper does by making it too easy, so much do they have to deceive the reader into feeling that yesterday is to-day that they have to make it too easy and in making it too easy they do do something they had not intended to do they make it no longer an exciting thing to do because they have commenced to do too well what if they did have it to do it would be impossible to do.

  Do you see what I m
ean.

  It is very interesting.

  And it has an awful lot to do with everything.

  There are so many things to say at one time and this is one of them. Beginning and ending in writing anything is always a trouble of its own and it is a great trouble to anyone doing any writing. That is where the newspaper is interesting, there is really of course no beginning and no ending to anything they are doing, it is when it is and in being when it is being there is no beginning and no ending.

  That is because it exists any of every day and any of every day is not mixed up with beginning and ending.

  That is a very interesting thing in writing in a newspaper in a newspaper being existing there is no beginning and no ending and in a way too there is no going on. One really has to think of everything as one thinks of anything and that is one thing.

  I love my love with a b because she is peculiar. One can say this. That has nothing to do with what a newspaper does and that is the reason why that is the reason that newspapers and with it history as it mostly exists has nothing to do with anything that is living.

  I said newspapers make things too easy and I said that once to a reporter and he said you have no idea I am sure how terribly hard we work. Yes I said but after you have done all that hard work you have to write it up as it would be if you had known it all beforehand and that is what really makes it too easy. There is no discovery there is mostly no discovery in a newspaper or in history, they find out things they never knew before but there is no discovery and finally if all this goes on long enough it is all too easy.

  I cannot come back too often to telling and hearing to talking and listening, to repeating and changing to knowing and remembering to having an intention of intending something or to have anything happening, all these things are as they are and one of them can never be another one of them no matter how commonly anyone that is every one is in any confusion about them. I tell you and I cannot tell it to you too often although I may not tell it often enough as anybody even I can change about something I cannot tell it to you often enough that confusion is either making things easy by knowing beforehand how it is going to be done or by mixing up talking and listening, remembering and knowing not beginning and ending, and that is a very interesting thing think of that that there is really no confusion in mixing up beginning and ending no none at all.

  And so now that we have gotten here that is now that we are not only writing the newspaper as well as reading what it writes what is it that it does do that makes it too easy to do and to read what it does do.

  You see there is no beginning and ending because every day is the same that is that every day has anything that it has happening.

  Now that is the difference between existing and happening.

  If you exist any day you are not the same as any other day no nor any minute of the day because you have inside you being existing. Anybody who is existing and anybody really anybody is existing anybody really is that.

  But anything happening well the inside and the outside are not the inside and the outside inside.

  Let me do that again. The inside and the outside, the outside which is outside and the inside which is inside are not when they are inside and outside are not inside in short they are not existing, that is inside, and when the outside is entirely outside that is is not at all inside then it is not at all inside and so it is not existing. Do you not see what a newspaper is and perhaps history.

  No matter how hard you work the result that you have is that the outside is outside and when it is outside it is not begun and when it is outside it is not ended and when it is neither begun nor ended it is not either a thing which has existed it is simply an event.

  It is very curious in a newspaper that sometimes really sometimes a personality breaks through an event, it takes a tremendously strong personality to break through the events in a newspaper and when they do well it is soon over it is soon smoothed over and even history wishes to change it into something that anyone could recover from.

  In a novel in a play no matter what it is that happens it is hoped that nothing will be smoothed over that every minute of that novel there is a beginning and ending that always any personality that anyone has there is one that no one can ever change into something that anyone can recover from.

  And the reason why is this. The more a novel is a novel the more a play is a play the more a writing is a writing the more no outside is outside outside is inside inside is inside.

  I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.

  There is something very odd that has happened in all this in connection with detective stories and now listen.

  As I say beginning and ending has something to do with everything that is anything and so listen.

  In real life that is if you like in the newspapers which are not real life but real life with the reality left out, the reality being the inside and the newspapers being the outside and never is the outside inside and never is the inside outside except in the rare and peculiar cases when the outside breaks through to be inside because the outside is so part of some inside that even a description of the outside cannot completely relieve the outside of the inside.

  And so in the newspapers you like to know the answer in crime stories in reading crime and in written crime stories knowing the answer spoils it. After all in the written thing the answer is a let down from the interest and that is so every time that is what spoils most crime stories unless another mystery crops up during the crime and that mystery remains.

  And then there is another very peculiar thing in the newspaper thing it is the crime in the story it is the detective that is the thing.

  Now do you begin to see the difference between the inside and the outside.

  In the newspaper thing it is the crime it is the criminal that is interesting, in the story it is the story about the crime that is interesting. Now think, you will perfectly realize that the newspaper practically never tells anything about detecting, a little in the case of Dillinger, a little in the case of Hauptmann but still really very little and in lesser crimes not at all the emphasis is entirely upon the crime and not upon the detecting and in the written story it is impossible to hold the attention by telling about the crime you can only hold the attention by telling about detecting. All this is very interesting most most interesting and has to do with what the newspaper has to say and what it has not to say and the fact that in the long run one might say practicaIly any day the newspaper is not reaIly exciting.

  I have said that the business of the artist is to be exciting and it is his business and if he is an artist whatever he does reaIly does is reaIly exciting. By exciting I mean it really does something to you really inside you.

  Now is it the business of the newspapers is it the business of an historian to be exciting weIl I do not think so that is I do not think that it is the business of the newspaper to be exciting and I think in their hearts they reaIly know this thing they know it is not their business to be exciting.

  About the historian, the biographer and the autobiographer that is another matter and pretty soon later we will have to go into that.

  What is it that is exciting, and how can exciting be soothing if it looks like excitement and is therefore soothing or if it is exciting and is therefore soothing or if it is as if it were exciting and is therefore soothing or not soothing, all these things have to be a great deal thought about if you are to understand anything if I am to understand anything about newspaper writing about any writing about anything being or not being written.

  It is a very curious thing that a story told by anyone about anything that has not reaIly been exciting is exciting and a story told about anything that reaIly has been exciting is not exciting.

  It is a very curious thing this thing.

  In thinking about plays I came to the conclusion that in real life the climax of a really exciting scene is completion and the climax of a made up exciting thing a written exciting thing is a relief and that it is not
really possible to remember the climax of a real scene because you can not remember completion but you can remember relief.

  Now the same thing is true when the newspaper tells about any real thing, the real thing having happened it is completed and being completed can not be remembered because the thing in its essence being completed there is no emotion in remembering it, it is a fact like any other and having been done it is for the purposes of memory a thing having no vitality. While anything which is a relief and in a made up situation as it gets more and more exciting when the exciting rises to being really exciting then it is a relief then it is a thing that has emotion when that thing is a remembered thing.

  Now you must see how true this is about the crime story and the actual crime. The actual crime is a crime that is a fact and it having been done that in itself is a completion and so for purposes of memory with very rare exceptions where a personality connected with it is overpowering there is no memory to bother anyone. Completion is completion, a thing done is a thing done and so it has in it no quality of ending or beginning. Therefore in real life it is the crime and as the newspaper has to feel about it as if it were in the act of seeing or doing it, they cannot really take on detecting they can only take on the crime, they cannot take on anything that takes on beginning and ending and in the detecting end of detective stories there is nothing but going on beginning and ending. Anybody does naturally feel that, that a detective is just that that detecting is just that that it is a continuity of beginning and ending and really nothing but that.