“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern art is all bosh, isn’t it?” “Great bosh.” “Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns, and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand.” Evelyn Waugh, from ‘Brideshead Revisited’ Meanwhile, Gertrude Stein was pondering the artistic representation of reality, and trying to justify her enormously long unpunctuated sentences by claiming she was making “a whole present [itals mine] of something that it had taken a great deal of time to find out.” With ambitions like that, Gertrude should really have majored in photography, and her persistent attempts to create an immediate picture of a “whole” object using language was always going to be difficult. But then, she was the soi-disant "creative literary mind of the century.” For a start, language is, as we saw in our look at the stream of consciousness, necessarily linear when printed as a text; one thing follows on from another, so the representation of simultaneous events or perceptions is problematic, particularly if you want the reader to perceive them simultaneously. If you’re going to use traditional sentence structures, this will only make the act of perception seem only more linear as one sentence succeeds another. So Gertie was pondering two fundamental issues here: Þ how, as a writer, do you create the illusion of simultaneous perception, of perceiving the object or situation as a whole all in one go - and not just its outward circumstance but its essence too; Þ and, while we’re at it, how do you communicate depth, that third dimension which gives a rounded depiction of external reality; And she approached the problem using a variety of strategies. First came the long sentences in which she tried to say everything she wanted to say without an over-reliance on the distorting hierachies of grammar, syntax and punctuation. By spewing out language, without pausing, she reckoned her descriptions were more ‘present’ than if they were subjected to ordering of any kind. You literally wrote what you saw, thought, heard - whatever - as it occurred to you. And this is more than stream of consciousness - it’s more like a stream of subconsciousness. The closest analogy I can think of is that wonderful period between sleep and waking when your thoughts go into free-association mode and all sorts of weird combinations of images pop into the brain, seemingly without any conscious intervention on your part. It’s not quite dreaming, but it’s definitely not ordered or structured. So in her early novel ‘The Making of Americans’ (1906-8), Stein wrote: Now I will tell of the meaning to me in repeating, of the loving there is in me for repeating. Sometime every one becomes a whole one to me. Sometime every one has a completed history for me. Slowly each one is a whole one to me, with some, all their living is passing before they are a whole one to me. There is a completed history of them to me then when there is of them a completed understanding of the bottom nature in them of the nature or natures mixed up in them with the bottom nature of them or separated in them. There is then a history of the things they say and do and feel, and happen to them. There is then a history of the living in them. Repeating is always in all of them. Repeating in them comes out of them, slowly making clear to any one that looks closely at them the nature and the natures mixed up in them. This sometimes comes to be clear in everyone. Often as I was saying repeating is very irritating to listen to from them and then slowly it settles into a completed history of them. Repeating is a wonderful thing in living being. Sometime then the nature of every one comes to be clear to some one listening to the repeating coming out of each one. This is then now to be a little description of the loving feeling for understanding of the completed history of each one that comes to one who listens always steadily to all repeating. This is the history then of the loving feeling in me of repeating, the loving feeling in me for completed understanding of the completed history of every one as it slowly comes out in every one as patiently and steadily I hear it and see it as repeating in them. This is now a little a description of this loving feeling. This is now a little a history of it from the beginning. And so on . . . A long quote, but all in a good cause. Perception is a function of repeating and a gradual adding and accretion over time, as if the mind’s eye is circulating above its object in a kind of holding pattern, going round and round at different heights and angles until it has sampled reality from so many different perspectives that not just a rounded picture but a rounded understanding is achieved. Yet it’s not necessarily understanding on an intellectual level; it’s a lot less conscious than that. By emphasizing the word “loving”, I reckon Stein’s talking more about empathy than anything else; it’s more like the repetitive qualities of a mantra, where the brain’s logical faculties go AWOL and you’re left in a state of being that’s both powerful and rivetting - but for reasons you can’t explain. Of course, this approach does have its downside, in that it tends to drive the reader insane (even Stein admits it can be “irritating”), so Gertie came up with a revolutionary modification of this style which involved - wait for it - short sentences. In her 1911 publication ‘Tender Buttons’, she collected a series of ‘still life’ portraits of objects which she had filtered through her unique consciousness. These short chamber pieces resemble a sort of Tourette’s syndrome approach to meaning - whatever associations the physical object raise in Gertie’s brain she vomits forth into the text as if it’s an involuntary act. Take her description of an apple, for instance; Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, coloured wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. Believe it or not, this is one of her more comprehensible outpourings. And one thing’s for sure - no-one else would describe an apple quite like that. It’s an absolutely singular vision, the very opposite of a dictionary definition. Stein characterized this method of seeing as “looking at anything until something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way that actual thing would come to be written.” In other words, what she’s trying to do is ‘lose the noun’, focussing once again on the essence of the apple as expressed through its outward appearance, and then as she witnesses it through her senses. So what we get is Gertrude Stein’s apple. She’s not actually changing or distorting the apple itself by describing it in this way; rather she’s collaborating with it to create her own sense of “apple-ness”. In abandoning long sentences for short phrases, she was essentially leaving prose behind and entering the sensibility of the poet, detailing the inner life of the world rather than hugging its outside contours. And that concision of expression so essential to poetry was, she felt, the way forward to help her create the sort of meaning she wanted. And while I find her work nigh on unreadable, it did prove hugely influential, not least on writers like Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, who fashioned her principles into more reader-friendly forms. But amid all the verbal dislocations in Stein’s writing, it’s important to remember that her observations, however fractured, always took their initial cue from physicality - and while her writing may superficially resemble the chaos of the Dadaists, or the “cut-up” techniques of William Burroughs (which we’ll come to later), Stein’s aim wasn’t principally to affront the bourgeoisie by being stylistically outrageous. Rather she is genuinely probing the human act of perception and representing it as accurately as possible in her art. For all its oddity, the origins of Stein’s art lie in the world we all experience every day of our lives. We all know what an apple is. What we didn’t know, before she tried to tell us, was Gertrude Stein’s take on the apple. There are, of course, loads of other ‘experimental’ schools of writing dating from this period which we won’t pursue here because they share the same root system - attempting to create meaning that appraised reality from a variety of perspectives, both physical and essential, using techniques which place often huge demands on the reader’s concentration and responsiveness. But what these stylistic complexities commonly imply as they tread on each others’ toes is that form and meaning exist in a much more involved relationship with one another than had hitherto been thought. But let’s continue . . . and move on to the writer’s inner world, which focuses more on MOOD than PHYSICALITY. What artists define as their inner world is a huge subject which we’ve only the space to skirt round here. It’s a bit like Dr Who’s Tardis; it’s a lot bigger on the inside than you’d think. It’s not bound by fact or probability; or, indeed, many constraints at all, and by the end of this section, meaning will have completely slipped its moorings in the substantial world. And that’s because we’re passing from one dimension to another; to use another nerdy sci-fi image, it’s like those parallel universes Captain Kirk and his gang were always discovering that looked plausibly like our own, but which were just plain weird once you peered beneath the surface. Really what we’re doing is willingly suspending our judgment; refusing to allow our appreciation of meaning to be diluted or curtailed by rules or standards that apply outside art. In short, we’re letting the writer slip his lead. We’re allowing him to boldly go etc., etc. And it’s no coincidence that most of the literature we’ll be examining from this point onwards is poetry, since poetry has been viewed as the language of the subconscious since the time of Plato. As we approach the condition of Significance on our Meaning Line, so disruptions of grammar and syntax are more regularly demanded by writers who have grown impatient with the formal constraints and expressive limitations of prose. So as we venture further into the writer’s interior landscape, the more they reckon it gives them carte blanche to get weird on us. As we’ll see.