Stein composition as explanation pdf

There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again. Having naturally done this I naturally was a little troubled with it when I read it.

I became then like the others who read it. One does, you know, excepting that when I reread it myself I lost myself in it again. Then I said to myself this time it will be different and I began. I did not begin again I just began. In this way, she performs the converse of what her title suggests by establishing explanation as composition. It is an enormous poem quoting itself, a non-reasoning creature capable of speech. The fluttering of its pages made a monotone of sound, a sound so prolonged that it seemed like one long vacillating thought.

It was an unmanageable but inevitable series interspersed with ancient pages — on which were written ninety-nine indefinite stanzas, one hundred and four lines in red and black paint, an outlawed history, pallid and ludicrous portraits of melancholy, a continuous dialogue between anybody and everybody, and an ecstatic geography of intuition. From page to page, there was a groping for life as if the book — which had an intense frenzy not for identity but for repetition and variation — determined to have the self-consciousness of a catalectic window.

For this I made troublesome step-ladders that lead from a cautious future to its requisite pretext, or less pedantically, from a beautiful picture to its tempestuous frame. I determined to place a deepening impression on impossible paper — just as the amused world rendered the inarticulate difference between words and other words as a vigorous and ominous jest.

It was then that I wrote desire while meaning desideratum, that I prepared to seek — or should I say borrow — the modus operandi of radical combination.

What I have termed subjects are really depressions, memories of a lonely idea beginning to rhyme. This inevitably led me to a long, groping analogy that allies spirit with sonorousness, you with another world, and the sensitive reader with the sad and placid variations of the day.

A wandering vowel is now expecting the pages and is tapping continuous trochees upon my door. As is supposed, the ordinary will continuously advance toward the first unusual instance but not find it — like the way life always seems to know but misrepresent the equilibrated design of the living. So one finds oneself, pen in hand, before the smiling casement of the paper, beginning an indolent stanza, seeking ungainly admission into its emblematical forest of oddity.

And if one does not enter, the portraits of the dead will make an immediate and ghastly volte-face. Perhaps there is nothing to be done in this discarded atmosphere but irritating their dark, mathematical eyes — the very place, the confounded locale, where all works of art should begin. Gertrude Stein, movement and media By Elena Johnson.