Gertrude Stein’s Radical Grammar

The talks are not just about language, of course, but now that Eats, Shoots & Leaves has stimulated a renewed appetite for old-world grammar and diction, we need to look at the tasty morsels that Stein had to contribute on that front. In Lectures in America, Stein expounds on nouns, adjectives, punctuation, and sentence structure in a way that grabs the rules of writing and shakes them by the tail.

Stein was passionate about grammar. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” Stein said. She found parsing sentences to be “completely exciting and completely completing.” I completely agree. One line for subject, two for predicate, three for object. Wiggly lines for something. My favourites were the triangular brackets—I just can’t remember what they were for. The exercise taught me about the construction of language as a system of coding. Stein probably didn’t see it that way, of course; for her, it seems to have had something to do with finding the underlying logic of language, its inner mechanics, and with working out how language could be reconfigured to suggest new ways of thinking. Stein seems to have instinctively understood that language is an invented thing, floating free of the world, and that we are at liberty to bend it to our impulses and needs.

In prose, Stein wanted her sentences “to go on,” reflecting the stream-of-consciousness process that she had learned as a student of William James. She therefore abolished nouns from her prose because they nail things down. What, after all, are nouns besides the names of things? “A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not.” Instead, she constructed sentences from “verbs adverbs prepositions prepositional clauses and conjunctions.”

In poetry it was different, as poetry essentially has to do with vocabulary. “Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun,” Stein wrote. So when she wrote her famous motto, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (which Toklas embroidered in a circle on Stein’s handkerchiefs), she “caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.”

In addition to her abhorrence for nouns, Stein had still more philosophical trouble with nominatives: “People if you like to believe it can be made by their names. Call anybody Paul and they get to be a Paul call anybody Alice and they get to be an Alice.” Her analysis was prescient. We are now in a moment when one-dimensional designations are obsolete; meanings are fluid and porous, and they change with history and culture. And because nouns are so static, they have to be ceaselessly rejuvenated: “That is the reason that slang exists it is to change the nouns which have been names for so long.”

For the same reason, adjectives are as useless as nouns: “Of course the first thing that anybody takes out of anybody’s writing are the adjectives.” Other aspects of sentences that Stein reviled include question marks, which she found “positively revolting” and never could bring herself to use. For Truss, “it does matter that there’s no question mark on a direct question. It is appalling ignorance.” Stein, on the other hand, saw the interrogative sign as unnecessary and ugly, and “anyway what is the use, if you do not know that a question is a question what is the use of its being a question.” Question marks were only interesting upside down, possibly as cattle brands.

The same goes for quotation marks and, especially, exclamation marks. Stein was convinced that everyone agreed with her, and I must say that I always have. Recently I saw a sign that said “Burgers! Shakes! Fries!” I could only ask: what other rapturous enticements might this joint possibly offer? Or more abjectly: how are burgers, shakes, and fries exciting in any way? My friend commented that at least they weren’t also in quotation marks, causing us to suspect that “burgers,” “shakes,” and “fries” might be euphemisms for something more sinister.

At the same time, Stein was onside with Lynne Truss about apostrophes for possession. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Truss is apoplectic about the incorrect use of apostrophes. She spends a paragraph on the film title Two Weeks Notice, recalling that a bus poster for the film caused her to freeze in her tracks, rendering her “unable to move or, indeed, regain any sense of perspective.” Slightly more sanguine, Stein viewed the “possessive case apostrophe” as a “little punctuation mark one can have feelings about.” For Stein the possessive apostrophe “has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to definitely decide to do without it.” But unlike Truss, Stein is against the use of the apostrophe alone, outside the plural word (as in Two Weeks’ Notice) and in that case feels no regret; but inside a word, “perhaps it does appeal by its weakness to your weakness.”

I can’t help but admit that the incorrect use of apostrophes, as in its’ when it should be it’s, or it’s when it should be its, irritates me. I find myself incapable of letting my students make what I consider a serious mistake—even though Stein more liberally suggests that she finds herself ” letting it alone if it has come in and sometimes it has come in.”

On the other hand, Stein found verbs and adverbs far more interesting. Verbs and adverbs are engaging because they are active and their great quality is that “they can be so mistaken. It is wonderful the number of mistakes a verb can make.” The wretched noun is rarely mistaken, but the verb can enrich the language in its infinite flexibility. Parts of language are interesting, for Stein, precisely because of their risk of failure. For that exciting quality—the possibility of error— she liked prepositions best of all, because of all the parts of a sentence they can be the most mistaken.