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  • “The Physiognomy of the Thing”: Sentences and Paragraphs in Stein and Wittgenstein
  • Steven Meyer (bio)

“Why,” Wittgenstein asks himself, early in part two of Philosophical Investigations, “does it sound queer to say: ‘For a second he felt deep grief’?” The tentative response that follows (“Only because it so seldom happens?”) seems to posit an empirical basis for the impression. Yet the full “remark,” or Bemerkung, suggests that the oddity is due not to empirical limitations but to logical and grammatical ones: “‘For a second he felt violent pain.’ —Why does it sound queer to say: ‘For a second he felt deep grief’? Only because it so seldom happens?” 1 The syntactic similarity of the two utterances juxtaposed here—“For a second he felt violent pain,” “For a second he felt deep grief”—turns out to be misleading, because “the concept of grief” is used differently, and therefore differs grammatically from “the concept of a sensation” like pain. Wittgenstein explains: “‘Grief’ describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life. If a man’s bodily expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say, with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy.” (PI, 174e) Grief just isn’t the sort of thing that possesses the regularity of the ticking of a clock, which can be timed to the nearest second, as a sensation may be measured. This account certainly does get at some of the queerness of “For a second he felt deep grief.” Even so, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein offers a better, albeit a complementary, explanation, one that is more radically grammatical and hence, in the end, more Wittgensteinian. [End Page 99]

“A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is,” Stein famously wrote, arriving at this gnomic conclusion, which served as the subtitle of her 1930 study in grammar, “Sentences and Paragraphs,” in the course of meditating on sentences that sound queerly like Wittgenstein’s: “He looks like a young man grown old.” “It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident.” “A dog which you have never had before has sighed.” “Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close.” 2

“For a second he felt deep grief.” In her recent study of Wittgenstein as literary modernist, Marjorie Perloff demonstrates how for each of these sentences of Stein’s, a narrative context may be devised in which it would make sense for someone to utter so extraordinary a remark. 3 Of course one would have to wait a long time for the appropriate situation to arise. As Wittgenstein observed, “it so seldom happens” that one finds the occasion to say, for instance, “He looks like a young man grown old,” and not turn out to be misspeaking, or speaking inexactly. In composing sentences like these, however, Stein was no more interested than Wittgenstein in narrative completion. Rather, she was interested in how the grammar of such sentences enabled them to form emotionally resonant wholes—as sentences in ordinary prose cannot—even as her well wrought compositions-in-minimum remained unmoored and open-ended, so obviously, deliberately, incomplete.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas provides a charming account of Stein’s “discovery” of the precise manner in which sentences and paragraphs differ:

We now [the spring of 1929] had our country house, the one we had only seen across the valley and just before leaving we found the white poodle, Basket. He was a little puppy in a little neighborhood dog-show and he had blue eyes, a pink nose and white hair and he jumped up into Gertrude Stein’s arms. A new puppy and a new ford we went off to our new house and we were thoroughly pleased with all three. Basket although now [the summer of 1932] he is a large unwieldy poodle, still will get up on Gertrude Stein’s lap and stay there. She says that listening to the rhythm of his water drinking made her recognise the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional that sentences are not. 4

Stein had...

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