Our second meeting during this semester
was devoted to Gertrude Stein’s short novel Ida.
Published in 1941, the book touches on the notion of publicity and continues to
puzzle readers and critics alike.
It can be read as a story about a woman in the age of celebrity, as a story about the struggle for identity, as a comedy of language, and as a feminist manifesto. Ida speaks at once in so many contradictory voices, both denouncing depth and limiting itself to the surface level of language. Is Ida an actual person or just the writer’s simulacrum? We discussed all of these issues during our meeting, examining Ida in the perspective of both modernism and post-modernism.
It can be read as a story about a woman in the age of celebrity, as a story about the struggle for identity, as a comedy of language, and as a feminist manifesto. Ida speaks at once in so many contradictory voices, both denouncing depth and limiting itself to the surface level of language. Is Ida an actual person or just the writer’s simulacrum? We discussed all of these issues during our meeting, examining Ida in the perspective of both modernism and post-modernism.
"Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature— and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read." - Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (1931)
by Małgorzata Olsza
