If I Told Her Analysis

Originally referring to the advance guard or “the part of the army that goes forward ahead of the rest”, the term avant-garde usually indicates to the idea that artists, with social power within their work, are “leaders of a new society” (Tate). Avant-garde artists of the cubist movement focused on alterations of form and innovative perspective. An advocate of the avant-garde, Gertrude Stein’s poems “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass” and “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” were heavily influenced by her personal life and the artistic movements of the time, as seen by the grammatical and psychological approaches she takes in her writing. Furthermore, through the selection of very specific words, Stein manages to explore distortions
and the importance of differences in life. Stein’s upbringing in America and Europe, close connections with prominent intellectuals and artists, and interest in humanity influenced her writing as she worked to incorporate her experiences and outlook on life. Though born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants Stein and her family moved around to Vienna and Paris in the first few years of her life where she became fluent in German and French. By the age of twelve, both of Stein’s parents were deceased and the five-orphaned Stein children moved from their Oakland home to San Francisco. In her adolescent years, Stein found herself very lonely and puberty brought Stein a resented but unavoidable weight gain. She moved to Baltimore with two older siblings to live with her mother’s family and after a few months surrounded by family and a positive atmosphere, she found her self “having become more humanized and less adolescent and less handsome” (Gould, 69). With her newfound enjoyment of life, she took some classes at Radcliffe College without the intention of receiving a degree. While at Radcliffe, Stein befriended William James, her professor and notorious philosopher and psychologist of the time. James influenced her ways of thinking and literary career. He pushed her to further her educational journey, so Stein enrolled at the Johns Hopkins’s medical school. However, she soon became bored with the curriculum and moved to Paris with her older brother Leo. The two siblings became close companions with the celebrated artist Pablo Picasso. Stein and Picasso perceived each other to be artistic geniuses and made each other the focus of some of their art. Also while in Paris, Stein met and fell in love with Alice Toklas, who became her lifelong companion. Being an outcast and differing from the social norms throughout her whole life- orphan, homosexual, overweight, and an expatriate- the cubist art movement appealed to Stein with its atypical elements and depiction of life’s variability. The Cubist art movement of the early twentieth century greatly influenced Stein’s “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass” and “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” with its tendency to stray from traditional structure and ability to portray the many perspectives and abstractions of an object or person.
Cubist literature explores the stream of consciousness and “fragmentation of the individual” often through erratic words and sentence structure (Neuffer). Gertrude Stein incorporates this artistic movement into her poetry as she takes control of the English language, morphing it into something nearly unrecognizable. Her poem “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass”, shifts from the description of a physical distortion to distortions in language and syntax in order to explore the connection “between what is perceived and the person who perceives it” (Wasserstrom 92). The glass is described as a “spectacle” as it serves as a lens for one to view the world through but is a “single hurt color” due to the dark liquid that fills it (Stein, “Carafe” 1,2). The light that passes through the carafe refracts due to the opaque liquid and creates a “not unordered in not resembling” reflection as the observed world seems different but still retains order (Stein, “Carafe” 3). Once someone notices the warped nature of consciousness, “the difference [spreads]” and things that at one time seemed familiar and steady now seem different and almost foreign (Stein, “Carafe” 3). Tender Buttons and “A
Carafe, That is a Blind Glass”, in particular, are an “embodiment of differences” that are impacted by “the constant pressure of chaos” (Hadas 70, 63). The chaos is translated through the use of atypical syntax and language as the reader works to comprehend reality. Through her alterations of language, Stein demonstrates how reality is not susceptible to only one perspective, as is the goal of most cubist artwork. Cubist artists “dissected or analyzed” figures and objects “into a multitude of small facets” in order to completely encapsulate the being of their subject (Rewald). “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” is broken into nearly one hundred sentences, many of which are only one or two words and are seemingly meaningless. By doing so Stein manages to create a completed depiction of Picasso, approaching him and his character from every angle as each fragment “[decentralizes] the composition” from the straightforward appearance (Guerra de la Torre 90). The collection of short sentences that construct “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” are largely in part repetitions of one another. With each repetition, the reader is reminded of how things and people are endlessly the same yet endlessly different. Repetition is a “system of differences” through which “self similarity” is discovered and “[creates] a special perception of the object or person rather than merely to perceive meaning” (Guerra de la Torre 92, 91). Similarly, cubist portraits depicted their subjects in a unique, creative way that dissects their appearance and personality into a multitude of shapes and angles. As painting was Picasso’s medium, the English language and poetry was Stein’s medium. Gertrude Stein studied the etymological meanings of words in order to give her writing very specific and meaningful implications.
Additionally, despite her unstructured syntax, she utilizes grammar to lock her chosen words into place and to influence the reader to revert to deeper roots and significance. The rigidity of her writing- narrowing in on specific definitions- greatly contrasts the wide range of interpretations that stem from it. Iconic language conveys meaning and for Stein’s writing, “the iconic nature of language” shatters the “symbolic (conventional, habitual)” definitions (Kaufmann 449). In “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass”, Stein’s selected words battle between their iconic and symbolic connotations as she describes the shape of a carafe, isolating it so that its singularity engages with the multiplicity of reality. The poem is “not a re-creation of a carafe, but an anatomy of language and culture” in which language “is no longer an instrument of perception but has become an instrument of culture that obscures perception” (Kaufmann 452, 448). Benjamin Whorf created the concept of linguistic determinism- the hypothesis that claims, “language determines the way we think” (Myers 379). Though Whorf’s idea may be a bit extreme, language does influence the way we think. The “restricted vocabulary” in Stein’s equation of Picasso to Napoleon in “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” ensures that Picasso will be thought of having the transcendent qualities
that those living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries understood Napoleon to have (Blau 139). Though it is titled as a completed portrait, the composition of Stein’s poem primarily focuses on “its processual unfolding” rather than the end product (Reed 111). The never-static and constantly developing portrait is kept in motion thanks to the lyrical rhyme scheme. The ceaseless flow of rhyme, repetition, and words reflects the passage of time that will continue into the future. Because of this, Stein ironically concludes the poem with “History teaches” so to show that the moral of history cannot and will never be decided (Stein, “Picasso” 107). Gertrude Stein also explores the effect of surroundings on interpretations and how one’s outlook on society and culture changes through life. However, she not only focuses on the exterior as she uses poetry as an opportunity for self-actualization to mark her place in society as a genius. After studying psychology and medicine, Stein “had been absorbed by the study of the ‘insides of things, of people, their character and what went on inside them’” so she decided to “describe the inside as seen from the outside” (Wasserstrom 102). One of her influences, William James, was a founder of the psychological school of functionalism that explores how the not-necessarily-observable consciousness affects people’s lives (Myers 4). By providing a fractured display of a carafe, Stein challenges the reader to consider the ways in which language establishes one’s world and in turn, the ways in which one’s language and the way they interpret language reveals their innermost being. Stein’s construction of Dix Portraits, the collection of her literary portraits including “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, gave her the power not only to depict artists and their character but to reflect her “understanding of the role of the modern artist and her self-presentation with respect to the other artists” found in the gallery (Blau 130). Appearing as the narrator in first person, Stein levels the power dynamic between her and the artists she portrays so to establish herself as an artistic genius of the twentieth century. By the time of her death in 1946, the seventy-two-year-old Gertrude Stein was not only an international celebrity but also a significant innovator in American literature. Her bizarre use of language and questioning of the narrative norms influenced many other great American writers, challenged “her readers’ preconceptions about language and narrative”, and served as an experiment to reveal deeper truths about human nature (Simon). Because Stein did not restrict herself to one genre she was able to reach a wider horizon of readers in which she could share her opinions and outlook. In all, her strong personality and desire to break convention led to her lasting impact on modern literature.