I am conflicted about Gertrude Stein’s Paris France. There are some great observations in there but the writing style and most of all, the essentializing of a society are something that do not sit comfortably with me.
Stein typed up her stream of consciousness casually with little regards to punctuation. Stein appears not believing in commas no she does not believe in it although sometimes she does, and she does not believe in question mark or quotation marks or full stop as she goes on to stress the same point multiple times although there are times some points are unstressed but I could imagine easily a friend of hers would have asked but don’t you believe in structure to which she would reply but structure is structure is structure like how a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
When the back cover of the book claims Paris France is the perfect introduction to her work oh boy I said in my head what an introduction it is with long sentences where nobody is permitted to take a real or imaginary breath so much so that the readers run the risk of asphyxiation for focusing too long on a sentence that runs for what ought to be an impossible length measuring longer than the tail of a long cat or a long dog’s or a long cat’s or a long dog’s or am I suffering from dementia but I would not know but would I know but perhaps I am just frustrated with the writing style.
At times, the style of writing makes reading the book feels like reliving somebody’s fever dream as an anecdote flows into another anecdote before another anecdote takes over the narrative.
Style asides, the essentializing of the French especially of the 1900s-1930s (the book was published in 1940) offers too much generalization. Generalization of money, of luxuries, of logic, of family, of tradition and of fashion.
That got me thinking, how does one write about a society without a hint of essentialization? Maybe essentializing is a big word that I should avoid and that I should not equate it with term generalization with ease. But to write about a society without generalizing to some extent is a tall order. I thought that was something I struggled while writing The End of the Nineteen-Nineties: some form of generalization (if not essentializing) had to be made before any coherent critique could be offered in return.
Or am I too afflicted with apophenia?
Maybe. Yet a society is clearly different from one another and that differences point towards some form of way of life that is true for a particular society but not the other. What is to be written critically of a society when everything is atomized anarchically?