The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century) by Linda Voris (PDF)

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This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Stein’s work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Stein’s radical approach to meaning and knowledge. Inspired by the immanence of landscape, both of Provence where she travelled in the 1920s and the spatial relations of landscape painting, Stein presents a new model of meaning whereby making sense is an activity distributed in a text and across successive texts. From love poetry, to plays and portraiture, Linda Voris offers close readings of Stein’s most anthologized and less known writing in a case study of a new method of interpretation. By practicing Stein’s innovative means of making sense, Voris reveals the excitement of her discoveries and the startling implications for knowledge, identity, and intimacy.

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⭐Works Discussed in the Book:Composition as Explanation and An Elucidation (Chapter 2)A Sonatina Followed By Another and Didn’t Nelly And Lilly Love You (Chapter 3)Lend A Hand Or Four Religions, and Tender Buttons (Chapter 4)Why Are There Whites To Console. A History In Three Parts, and Subject-Cases: The Background of A Detective Story (Chapter 5)If I Told Him A Completed Portrait Of Picasso (Chapter 6)A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story (Chapter 7)Linda Voris is painstaking in her analyses and descriptions of what’s going on with Gertrude Stein’s writing during the period of the 1920s for seven whole chapters. Erudite, academic, philosophic, and enthusiastic, Professor Voris clearly offers new and refreshing perspectives on Gertrude Stein’s artistry in the context of her most challenging and difficult compositions, thereby deserving huge applause and credit for even attempting such a gargantuan and bold task.The foundation for many of the claims she makes about Stein’s writing, however, is not without mellifluous malarkey, is unstable with missing pieces, and therefore is not unlike Stein’s explanations though much more intellectual and academic, and almost near to convincing as is some of Stein’s own confounding ruminations.In giving the book qualified but high praise, I need to emphasize that there is no book better out there that gets to the marrow of Stein’s intentions and gives a gloss to Stein’s theories, challenges, tasks, experiments in my opinion. Not Marjorie Perlman, not Richard Bridgman, not Wendy Steiner has the breadth, depth, and detailed accuracy that Professor Voris brings to her subject. No offense to the previous pioneers who tried to discover Gertrude Stein’s “secret.” They earned their stripes in this battle against Stein’s near-incoherency.No reader will come away disappointed because of having gained little knowledge or understanding of Gertrude Stein’s writing.What hasn’t any guaranty is the reader being able to come away from the experience of reading this book with a higher value of appreciation for Gertrude Stein’s artistry than he or she had before embarking upon these pages.While Professor Voris tirelessly and admirably vocalizes how stunning, remarkable, complex or playful Stein’s difficult texts really are, that these evaluations are also at the same time highly subjective is a fact that each reader has to confront for himself or herself, which can be summed up as a matter of “nerve.” What seems moving and playful to one will be tedious and dull to another. There is just no getting around this with Stein.Here’s an overview of what’s new and refreshing about Professor Voris’s well-founded claims:(1) Professor Voris announces that Gertrude Stein’s development as a writer, as an abstract artist or Cubistic writer, can best be understood only if one reads Stein’s texts in the chronological series in which she composed them since each development of her style and technique builds upon prior efforts. To skip the chronology and focus only on the genre of different works or to overlook the series of texts in their order of composition makes the work of understanding Gertrude Stein that much harder. (It goes without saying, however, that if Gertrude Stein hadn’t written her secondary works, lectures and explanations, even if one read Stein’s texts in a chronological series at Professor Voris states, one would face a bewildering, uphill task, almost impossible to climb. So Gertrude Stein did all of us a favor by writing more simply at times so the reader might get a handle on where she’s coming from.). Ms. Voris completely succeeds in convincing the reader of this necessity and well supports her claim with good evidence.(2) Professor Voris states that the plays Stein began composing in the 1920s come out of a “landscape homology,” painting scenes with words much like Cezanne paints a landscape and experimenting with frames, dissolving frames, as well as reversals of foreground and background. Stein uses the landscape homology to evoke presentational force in lieu of having no plot and no representations. In making this claim, the book takes up two full chapters, and they are the most dense, most exacting, and even the most tedious of all the chapters in the book, though the author rewards the reader for making the effort by successfully proving her insight holds up without question.(3) The author asserts that Gertrude Stein’s portrait writing underwent a significant change during the 1920s, in a period that might be termed “the second portrait” period. Less reliant on connotation or biographical references, her second attempt at making portraits relies heavily on her perceived success in composing landscape plays, and utilizes the techniques and “memes” from prior work to make her return to portrait-making unique and original. There’s room for doubt after the reader digests Chapter 6 that her claim is well evidenced and arduously but passionately proven.(4) Professor Voris wholly denies Ulla Dydo’s claim that all of Stein’s writing has meaning only with reference to Stein’s biography and living circumstances. Again, the author proves her assertion through the entire text, so there is no question she is right. Stein is not the least bit a representational or biographical writer during the 1920s. All one need do is read Professor Voris’s exploration of a terrifying experiment known as “Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story” to understand Gertrude Stein’s interest in thinking about composition, time and language as ends in themselves, as language, without any human referent involved at all.(5) Professor Voris makes it pretty clear, though she doesn’t state it directly, that Stein works with language exclusively. She writes because she sees words as objects, bits of grammar as objects, and is always fascinated by how language is both a choice and yet full of chance, with unsuspected possibilities inherent in each word.What I found implausible, subjective, or not so well founded was Professor Voris’s claim that Stein had an epistemology that is evident in her writings, even a “radical epistemology.” All she really says about it is that it is non-rational. She never defines this epistemology in any systematic or even coherent manner, and she never advances to the reader any glimpse of what “knowledge” might be gained through hanging in with Gertrude Stein’s most difficult writings, although she claims Stein had “knowledge” since Stein was always interested in knowing what a thing is or what anyone is, etcetera. Gertrude Stein said “Knowledge is what you know,” and after you read this text, you will have no more “knowledge” about what knowing is than before you began this intellectual voyage. Knowledge is because knowing is and knowing doesn’t have to be gradual; it can be “all at once.” This is not an epistemology, radical or otherwise. It’s just intuition or opinion and bringing in the great philosophical guns of the French philosopher and theorist, Gilles Deleuze, as the book does for discussion, does little to expand these tiny threads of insight on a subject that the author has barely defined or only shallowly outlined as an important claim.“. . . by insisting that these texts are portraits,” the author writes in Chapter 5, “Portraiture After Landscape,” Stein challenges us to examine the concept of knowledge underlying representation, and explore what constitutes a portrait when knowing is not a summary of characteristics but a compositional event.” Stein challenges the reader to examine the concept of knowledge? Stein doesn’t deal in concepts at all. Even to suggest that Stein examines any concept is to reify representational thinking in some regard. Stein refuses to. This assertion from the book is what I call lovely, mellifluous, academic malarkey.Another one is “. . . sense is expressed when the denotative aspect of the serial elements is crossed by the shifting sense of ‘as’ (italics in the book) in its variable operations indicating manner, time sense, and modality.” This lofty piece of academic deviltry comes from the same chapter mentioned above. It looks like an explanation, even sounds like one, and yet it actually has very little denotative weight. It’s an opinion, a subjective viewpoint dressed up as fact. (On page 156, again in Chapter 5, Professor makes one stunning claim that is absolutely noteworthy for its brevity, clarity, and outright representational conceptualization: “In sum, the Van Vechten portrait is much occupied with the compositional problem of writing a second portrait.”)Lastly, professor Voris makes the claim that Stein’s difficult writings can serve as a model for future writers, but with Stein’s “method” exposed and clarified by book’s end, the reader can only wonder how this can be without the prospective follower being a mimic or a copycat, with the final question being: why would anyone really take on Stein as role model for originality and creativity when so much of work is unreadable without expert tour guides.In conclusion, there is no book better out there that gets to the marrow of Stein’s intentions and gives a gloss to Stein’s theories, challenges, tasks, experiments during the 1920s, in my opinion, and I don’t think there will be another critic who will do better. This book has all the earmarks of a definitive study of Stein’s most difficult work, one that has little malarkey and subjective conjuring — in the vein of Richard Bridgman’s “Gertrude Stein In Pieces” but with even more understanding and more completeness than that seminal work.

⭐

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