I'm sure I'm not alone when I say it's difficult at times to understand why Stein writes the way she does. As mentioned in an earlier post, the long chapters and fragmented writing create a situation in which there is no good point for the reader to stop. The effect of this is that the book seems to be moving endlessly ahead, with little time for introspection or reflection. Since we know that Stein seemingly crafted every sentence and every word for a precise purpose, I believe that she structured the chapters in a way to project the momentum and excitement she felt at the time.
Another aspect of form I wanted to comment on was the crafting of the individual sentences themselves. Stein writes complex sentences and often removes the cues we are accustomed to using to decipher their meaning. Sentences with dialogue can be especially confusing, as there are never any quotation marks used. The descriptors she uses in the middle of the sentence are often ambiguous. By crafting her sentences in such a way, Stein is forcing us to be critical readers and to establish meaning and judgment independently. In challenging the artistic norms of the times, both Stein and Picasso are encouraging the individual to focus on form and structure, and to be more critical.
On a side note, I really liked the image on page 90 where Eve, Piccasso, Alice, and Stein are walking down the street and see the cannon:
"All of the sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait ca, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified."
While much of the beginning of the book is filled with the possibilities (in a good way) and eagerness to be in a new different modern era, the image of the cannon camouflaged is as shocking to Picasso as his works must have been to people in that New York show discussed in class. Even though he considered himself on on the forefront of new ways of modern thinking, the world was moving quicker (like in Henry Adam's law of acceleration). Anyways, I thought it was a cool image.
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Thanks to this post for snapping me back to reality. I had been wandering through the narrative as whimsically as she wrote it. I was reading it as a story, and not as a Gertrude Stein work. You remind me of a great point, Gertrude Stein is a very deliberate writer. She thought about sentences constantly, right? You say she leaves little time for introspection, and so we can assume that is intentional. I wonder if she has reticence to write about herself from the point of view of herself. All of her works are portraits of other people, so why would she stray from the style that works best for her? I don't know if it is easier for objective analysis to write about herself from someone else's point of view, or more tolerable to a reader who hates to hear someone talk about themselves all of the time.
ReplyDeleteSo, thanks for reminding me not to get too complacent in the image Stein has manufactured.