repetition, repression, modernism
The first story in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, “The Good Anna,” is a something like a translation of Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” adjusted for the advent of the discipline of psychology. Instead of saying once “Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour,” it says it again and again and again and again, establishing its version of the phrase (“The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life” and variations thereupon) as an index of psychological blockage rather than literary irony. In Flaubert’s case, it follows, the phrase registers low bovarisme – the pathetic or bathetic implication of life in literary models. In Stein’s case, the phrase registers tautological euphemism, when we keep saying the same thing for lack of ability to say the next thing, the true thing.
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