Gertrude Stein’s Machinery of Perception

Abstract

The emergence of cinema can be shown to have been heralded — in France as nowhere else — as the salvation of a literature which, according to Georg Lukács, was ‘based on ad hoc observation’ and ‘must perforce be superficial’.¹ If Naturalism was the misguided attempt ‘to make literature scientific, to transform it into an applied natural science, into sociology’ (p. 140), then cinema, belonging technically to that ‘scientific’ paradigm, might relieve literature of its ‘paltry and schematic’ descriptive vocation, and liberate its humanistic potentials once more. Certainly for André Gide, the newer recording media prompted a radical reconsideration of the novel’s properties:

Just as photography in the past freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so much pride in. Outward events, accidents, traumatisms, belong to the cinema. The novel should leave them to it. Even the description of the characters does not seem to me properly to belong to the genre. No; this does not seem to me the business of the pure novel (and in art, as in everything else, purity is the only thing I care about).²