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Gertrude Stein - From Proust...
p144 Before Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde artist, she was a scientist. Her first published piece of writing was in the May 1898 edition of the Psychological Review. The article summarized her research in the Harvard psychology lab of William James, where Stein was exploring automatic writing... Stein wanted to write down whatever words first entered her mind.The result was predictably ridiculous... Stein concluded that... [her writings] didn't mean anything. Her experiment hadn't worked...
p145 But Stein's experimental failure got her thinking. Even when she wrote about absolutely nothing... her nothingness remained grammatical. The sentences were all meaningless, and yet they still obeyed the standard rules of syntax... "There is no good nonsense without sense," Stein concluded,
"and so there cannot be automatic writing."... what she ended up discovering was the constraint that can't be escaped. Our language has a structure, and that structure is built into the brain.
Well, hold on a second. Unless this means that the brain is trained by schooling and thus "built" I don't see that this is true since not everyone, even when they are trying, can follow the standard rules of syntax.
It would be another decade before Stein converted her experimental conclusions into a new form of literature... The sentences she wrote in the laboratory inspired her lifelong obsession with words and rules, with how language works and why it's so essential to the human mind...
Tender Buttons, written in 1912... is divided into three arbitrary sections, "Objects," "Food," and "Rooms." "Objects" and "Food" are composed of short, epigrammatic pieces with titles like "Mutton" and "An Umbrella." But these objects are not Stein's subject. Her subject is language itself. The purpose of her prose poems, she said, was "to work on grammar and eliminate sound and sense." Instead of a plot, she gave us a lesson in linguistics.
p146 Stein, as usual advertised her audacity. The very first page of Tender Buttons serves as a warning: this is not a nineteenth-century novel. In place of the customary scene setting, or some telling glimpse of the main character, the book begins with an awkward metaphor.
A CARAFE THAT IS A BLIND GLASS
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.
This tricky paragraph is about the trickiness of language. Although we pretend our words are transparent -- like a layer of glass through which we see the world -- they are actually opaque. (The glass is "blind.") Stein is trying to remind us that our nouns, adjectives, and verbs are not real. They are just ordinary signifiers, random conglomerations of syllables and sound. A rose, after all, is not really a rose. Its letters don't have thorns or perfumed petals.
Why then, do we invest words with so much meaning? Why do we never notice their phoniness? Stein's revelation... was that everything we say is enclosed by "an arrangement in a system." This linguistic system, although invisible, keeps words from being "not unordered in not resembling." Because we instinctively "arrange" language, it seems like "nothing strange." Stein wanted us to acknowledge these hidden grammars, for it is their structure that makes language so meaningful and useful.
But if Stein wanted to talk about grammar, then why didn't she just talk about grammar? Why did she have to make everything so difficult? ...
It's like he read my mind. Maybe because she had seen what a mindfuck reading Saussure was?
p147 Reading Tender Buttons, with its "grammar trips" and "incongruous vocabularies," is often an experiment in frustration. [These are terms William James used to describe an experiment "...whereby a mind can be made aware of the structure underneath our words..."] She wants us to feel the strictures of the sentence, to question our own mental habits. If nothing else, she wants to rid us of our "drowsy assent," to show us that language is not as simple as it seems. And so she fills her sentences with long sequences of non sequiturs. She repeats herself, and then she repeats her repetitions. She writes sentences in which her subjects have no verb, and sentences in which her verbs have no subject.
But the secret of Stein's difficulty is that it doesn't drive us away. Rather, it brings us in. Her words demand a closeness: to steal sense from them, we have to climb into them... When suffering through her sentences, we become aware, she says, of "the way sentences diagram themselves," of the instinctive nature of syntax... Stein wrote, "but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really exciting thing was diagramming sentences." In her writing, Stein wanted to share the thrill.
... in 1956, a shy linguist named Noam Chomsky announced that Stein was right; our words are bound by an invisible grammar, which is embedded in the brain. These deep structures are the secret sources of our sentences; their abstract rules order everything we say...
Picasso's Portrait
[At medical school] ...Instead of studying organic chemistry or memorizing her anatomy lessons, Stein stayed up late reading Henry James. She was inspired by the first murmurings of modernism...
In 1903... Stein moved to Paris. She settled in with her brother Leo... Leo had just purchased his first Cézanne painting...
p149 Her early work was influenced by the artists who lingered around the apartment. Three Lives was inspired by a Cézanne portrait. Her next book, The Making of Americans, emerged from her relationship with Matisse. But Stein was closest to Pablo Picasso. As she wrote in her essay Picasso (1938), "I was alone at this time in understanding him because I was expressing the same thing in literature."
Their relationship began in the spring of 1905, just as Picasso was becoming bored with his blue period. Gertrude Stein asked him to paint her portrait. The painter couldn't say no; not only had Stein's Saturday-night salons become a magnet for the Parisian avant-garde (Matisse, Braque, and Gris were normally there), but Gertrude and her brother Leo were some of his earliest benefactors. Their walls were lined with his experiments.
I'm reminded of the bright young things Henry Ryecroft (Gissing?) so detested perhaps a decade earlier.
Picasso struggled with Stein's portrait... Day after day, Stein returned to Picasso's apartment... They talked while Picasso carefully reworked the paint on the canvas. They discussed art and philosophy, William James's psychology, Einstein's physics, and the gossip of the avant-garde...
p151 ... When... [Picasso] returned to Paris, [after a trip to Spain] he immediately began to rework Stein's portrait... and the painting became even more similar to Cézanne's painting of his wife, which Picasso had seen in Stein's apartment. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."
Picasso was right. After he painted Stein's face, [makes it sound like face painting] she began writing in an increasingly abstract style. Just as Picasso had experimented with painting -- his art was now about the eloquence of incoherence -- Stein wanted to separate language from the yoke of "having to say something." Modern literature, she announced, must admit its limits. Nothing can ever really be described. Words, like paint, are not a mirror.
...If "Egg ear nuts" is interesting, it is only because we have stopped understanding it one word at a time. An egg is no longer an egg. For Stein's writing to succeed, the sentence must become more than the sum of its separate definitions. There must be something else there, some mysterious structure that transcends her individual words... [How is Stein translated?]
The James Brothers
p152 ...Before Gertrude Stein converted cubism into a literary form, Henry James, William's younger brother, made a career out of writing famously verbose and ambiguous fiction. Nothing in James's later novels is described straight or directly. Instead, his prose constantly questions its own meaning. Everything is circumscribed by words, words, and more words, until the original object vanishes in a vapor of adjectives, modifiers, and subclauses. The world is swallowed by style.
p153 ..."You see." Stein once said of Henry James, "he made it sort of like an atmosphere, and it was not the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing." ... "Henry James was the first person in literature to find the way to the literary method of the twentieth century." She called him "the precursor."
...he was the first writer to deprive the reader of the illusion that language directly reflects reality. In his novels, words are vague symbols that require careful interpretation... A perfect truth or final reading always eludes our grasp, for reality, Henry wrote, "has not one window but a million . . . At each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes."
...In... The Principles of Psychology, William [James] declared that "language works against our perception of the truth." Words make reality seem as if it is composed of discrete parts -- like adjectives, nouns, and verbs -- when in actual experience, all these different parts run together. William liked to remind his readers that the world is a "big blooming buzzing confusion," and that the neat concepts and categories we impose on our sensations are imaginary... "it is, in short, the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press the attention."...
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