Weekly Blog #5: Oh, Gertie. . .

When I first began reading this essay by Gertrude Stein, I was ferociously frustrated. It took me over a minute to get through the first beast of a sentence because I couldn't tell where one thought ended and the next began. I wanted commas; I wanted question marks; and I wanted quotes. However, Stein didn't seem to be thinking about what her audience might appreciate having in the article, which, I later came to realize, may largely have been a way of supporting her argument.

Some of Stein's points were a little difficult for me to understand given her chosen writing style, but the one that stood out most to me was her idea that recognizing who you are to another person (or to a little dog, perhaps)--in other words, realizing your identity--is what destroys creation. What I got out of this was that Stein believes that one cannot create a master-piece if one is consciously considering what others think of him/her.

On page 133 I believe Stein expands on this when she says,

"That is every one's trouble and particularly the trouble just now when every one who writes or paints has gotten to be abnormally conscious of the things he uses that is the events the people the objects and the landscapes and fundamentally the minute one is conscious deeply conscious of these things as a subject the interest in them does not exist."

To me, this seems to reflect the idea that when people are overly concerned with how others are going to interpret their work, they lose their primary interest in their work and, along with that, their ability to create a master-piece. A master-piece can only be created when a person knows not to have identity and is able to go on creating without it, which helps explain why there are so few master-pieces today.

I think that Stein chose to write without proper mechanics as a way of modeling how a creator of a master-piece should be thinking. A writer who, according to Stein, will not succeed in making a master-piece is one who chooses to consider what kind of writing would be most enjoyable for the reader. This kind of writer would use correct punctuation, keeping in mind that readers like well-formed, easy-flowing sentences. However, Stein's idea of a master-piece-maker would have complete disregard for the aspects of a writing that would make it easiest for its audience to read. This writer would be unaware of what his audience is expecting from a writer, thus not allowing an identity to interfere with his creation. It is this kind of writer, I believe, that Stein was presenting through writing her essay in this style.