Previous - 144. Gertrude Stein
Stein & Chomsky
I'm not going to talk about Skinner's behaviorism or Noam Chomsky's attack on it. There is also an interesting passage about how children create language (sign language and creoles) that all have similar syntactical rules. But I do want to include this,p163 ... Just as Stravinsky had exposed the conventions of music by abandoning the conventions of music, so Stein demonstrated the power of grammar by abandoning grammar...
p164 ... Stein always said that the only way to read her writing was to proofread it, to pay acute attention to all the rules she violates. Her errors trace the syntactical structures we can't see... Stein showed us what we put into language by leaving it out.
The Meaning of Meaninglessness
The problem with difficult prose is its difficulty... Before Stein's sentences can be understood (let alone enjoyed), they require a stubborn persistence on the part of the reader. They demand time and more time... Although Stein is often funny, she is rarely fun...
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p165 Stein's own literary legacy has been shaped by her difficulty... If she is remembered today outside college campuses and histories of cubism, it is for a single cliche... "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."... it now represents everything she wrote. This is the danger of avoiding plots.
...she hoped that her literature would save the English language. "Words had lost their value in the nineteenth century," Stein lamented, "they had lost much of their variety and I felt that I could not go on that I had to recapture the value of the individual word." ... First, she would show us that words have no inherent meaning... a "rose" is not a rose... Stein wanted to separate the signifier from what it signified, to remind us that every word is just a syllable of arbitrary noise... According to Stein's scheme, this act of deconstruction would allow us to reconstruct our language, to write without lapsing into cliche...
p166 But Stein's grand plan ran into a serious problem... The rose never surrendered its stale connotations... The words of English easily survived Stein's modernist onslaught...
...Because words are always interconnected by syntax, they can never say nothing. Meaning is contextual and holistic, and no word exists alone... In a 1946 interview given just a few months before her death, Stein finally admitted defeat... "I found out that there is no such thing as putting them {words} together without sense... Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them."
...the structure of language... is part of the structure of the brain... The innate grammar that Chomsky would later discover was the one instinct that not even Stein could write without. "How can grammar be?" she asked herself in How to Write. "Nevertheless" was her answer.
My least favorite chapter so far. And how could he never mention Saussure? Then again, who would want to get into that if you could avoid it?
I would suggest that any number of 19th and 20th century philosophers have managed the trick of "putting them {words} together without sense" by the simple expedient of making up most of the words.
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