Gertrude Stein: Making Perception

Gertrude 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.

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