When trying to answer this question all I could notice was the similarity between situations. Apart, both sides of the arguments seem legitimate, but together there exists an incongruity.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Like Sara, the discussion on the normal vs. abnormal really got to me. I find Gertrude Stein to be an abnormal person, especially after hearing her unusual test taking technique and understanding her view on medical school. Because Gertrude Stein considers herself normal, I can only conclude that she deems the rest of us, the mainstream, atypical. How can such a unique and eccentric person be normal and the conventional be abnormal? A second, subtler contradiction came to mind when pondering this one. In reference to the long hours of staring at Gertrude for the completion of her portrait, Picasso says "I can't see you any longer when I look" (p.53). If Gertrude Stein realizes that such repetition erases meaning, then why does her poking fun at the typical autobiography occur on nearly every page of her most commercially successful novel? According to her own philosophy, that would ruin the "joke." Since Gertrude Stein is clearly smarter (she is a genius...if none of you caught that the five times it was mentioned) than to contradict herself, there must be some explanation. Does anyone have an idea of what that explanation could be?
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Stein's very layered perspective on any and every issue seems to break her personal rules as well as everyone else's. You said earlier "...that such repetition erases meaning..." but I would contend that it dissociates a concept from a meaning rather than erasing it; it's breaking the word away from the rules that restrain it. Incidentally, Stein is forcing the reader to see issues with layers as well: first the face value, than the defamiliarized version, next a word simply as a structure, etc.
In a similarly bizarre way, Stein's self-mockery with regards to her autobiography has the most ironic punchline of all: the book sells. Despite the fact that she exposes an autobiography as a self-promoting tool for ego building and moneymaking, people still accept it, almost ignoring what it is to get at he substance of the text. Naturally, we must ask ourselves, are we intellectuals or dupes when we pay for an anti-autobiography. It begs the question.
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