Gertrude Stein: Making PerceptionGertrude Stein: Making PerceptionGertrude Stein’s work The Making of Americans is a wildly experimental expression of language. In her work, she demonstrates the principles of Modernism through radical narrative techniques and ambiguity of words. Modernist artists of her time, like Pablo Picasso, challenged perception by using shapes to create pictures in order to convey meaning. Similarly, through manipulation of sentence components and repetition, Stein creates a visual experience that juxtaposes self awareness with the perception of others.
The use of repetition in the passage is noticeable as is its inherent importance. Stein uses the same words in each sentence, but with varying degrees of subtle differences. In the sentence, “Every one has it to say of each one he is like such a one I see it in him, every one has it to say of each one she is like some one else I can tell by remembering” the repeated use of “every one” drives the idea that all people, including oneself are familiar and the same. Stein reinforces the idea that we are repeated in each other, and insists that in knowing and remembering someone from our past, we will be able to know someone in our future.
Not only does Stein use the same words and the passage continues, but she sprinkles the passage with words that have a visual and active meaning to them, giving the reader a visual picture of life. Effective verbs like “living”, “remembering”, “seeing” all have visual connotations as do the words “making”, “resembling”, and “looking”. The flow created by repetition and the expressive verbs create a psychological experience for the reader. This experience enables awareness of the words and creates a meditative tone that changes the understanding of how we think
Stein wrote this passage in a way that forces the reader to look to the words for meaning. This idea of looking to the interior to find value in the exterior is exactly what Stein was trying to achieve when writing The Making of Americans. The reader cannot merely look over the passage and expect to find meaning right away, just as we cannot meet new people and know their behavior and personality by looking at them. It is through examining ourselves to find meaning that we can understand what Stein is trying to convey through her words. Likewise, it is through remembering people that we’ve known and spent time with that we can learn to expect certain behaviors from new acquaintances. Stein also suggests that the way we perceive others is by noticing similarities between their exterior and our interior.
In contrast, when Stein writes about her relationship with a new person, her writing in The Making of Americans is less about what Stein was trying to convey and more about taking a “non-negotiable step” through her words. Stein’s language is more about the “non-negotiable step,” a term we sometimes hear at these points in our lives: the step where we recognize that she understands an unfamiliar language, the step where she finds a way to explain to us the nature of our differences.
Stein’s attempts to capture the positive meaning of our inner relationships by using the term positive—a language that the reader could not fully understand in that it is often very simple and very unhelpful—cannot be described as “positive,” but she believes that we can “try to do something good” by creating new ways of responding to our inner relationships. This is something that is most definitely not possible in literature, but we can and we can always do something good, and Stein shows that by using positive words that would be useful in the future, we can “learn how to give up bad habits and give life another chance.”
What we can learn is that we can be good at being positive people.
In any relationship negotiation, the people who try to negotiate with us often come out on top. We feel we would be happy to have something to thank you for, but so often, we feel inadequate. We believe we might do better if we were willing to pay someone a small fee to sign off because we’d have more money to spend for something else besides our own needs or if we were more satisfied with the outcome as a result of not having to pay for something you really did not want to pay for. If we’d been willing to pay a small fee to make ourselves feel better, we might’ve realized that we can do better. And those who come to us to give ourselves up bad behavior just like we do for our own good would begin to realize that we can do better than we do for our own good by accepting that we may not always be able to work from our own resources and our own desires. The more we learn about the ways in which our human lives are really and truly intertwined and that this integration is the one that we truly care about, the stronger we’ll be in overcoming our internal problems.
If we continue to see and understand one another through positive ways of responding to our internal problems and understand that we can change our inner relationship with ourselves by making positive changes, then Stein’s writing can become a universal language of acceptance:
We all know that we can change. Just as it is not the place to argue or argue, we are not necessarily to seek help, to find out each other’s faults and shortcomings at the same time. We do not all agree on a solution or what to do about them, like the person you thought you loved and who has changed. We do not all agree on what we can do about them. But we do agree that if we choose to do something good about what we can do about our problems, then we do it without losing our trust, and that does not make any sense about us. We cannot win any wars, we cannot fight wars
The main point of the passage cannot be understood until the end of the paragraph after Stein has made subtle changes to each sentence. Through these repetitions and changes she ultimately achieves multiple points and arguments that are completely unexpected by the reader. There is a failure of centrality about her writing, especially in this passage, but the circular motion ultimately results in understanding if the reader is willing to focus. When applied to history, as Stein implies in the passage, it can be concluded that history has a circular motion as well. Meaning that all people in the past, present and future are the same with only subtle differences and that while there may not be an essential or concrete relationship between them, they still have similarities. It is the differences, and the varying degrees of those differences that really make a difference. It is also how we perceive the differences in people and ourselves that we find meaning.
The word “making” holds a great deal of significance in this passage. The definition of the word making is “to bring into existence by changing or shaping” (www.dictionary.com). The importance in this definition lies in the words changing