the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt eight)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

For the first time, Stein explained, individual words began to feel “more important than the sentence structure or the paragraphs.” Drawing, perhaps, on her neurological research at Johns Hopkins as well as William James’s ideas of thought as a stream of consciousness, Stein was thinking deeply about perception, and the way the brain processes language. She briefly experimented with inventing words, but soon went back to English: Stein was beginning to imagine a kind of writing so original that to read it would almost require a rewiring of the brain’s neural architecture, to unlearn all the ways we expect written language to behave. After The Making of Americans, Stein’s desire to wring every ounce of meaning from a limited set of words transformed into an even bolder ambition: to shed language of all its previous associations, so that her words would mean something fresh and specific, unique to the particular context she was giving them. In the Autobiography, Stein described this impulse as her “intellectual passion for exactitude,” and linked it to her need to realize a thought perfectly before putting it into writing: “The more exactly the words fit the emotion,” she wrote elsewhere, “the more beautiful the words.” Later, Stein defined this urge as her reaction to the falsity she had begun to see in purely representational art, and the alternative possibilities being put forward by Picasso, who was by now experimenting with geometric compositions (soon to acquire the label “Cubism”) which invite viewers to identify familiar shape but reject straightforward imitation of the object in favor of fragmentary distortions. “I was alone at this time in understanding him,” Stein wrote later, “perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.” Just as Picasso sought to convey the essence of a person or object without simply creating a replica, Stein wanted her writing to feel not like a description of sounds, colors, or emotions, but an “intellectual re-creation” of the “thing in itself.”