A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color
and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not un-
ordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
These are the opening lines of the book. Contextually speaking, it could be moved to anywhere within the first part subtitled “Objects” and no one would know the difference, which is really the whole point of the book. That point is the importance of words as sounds and imagery rather than their specific denotation. If this little paragraph seems to have absolute no literal meaning or is to the point at which meaning is inexplicable, don’t worry. It is supposed to be that way. Think of Picasso and his Cubist paintings in which a female form is recognizable enough, but does not really resemble an actual female body.
Rectangular ribbon does not mean that there is no eruption it means that if there is no place to hold there is no place to spread. Kindness is not earnest, it is not assiduous it is not revered.
The book met a wide range of emotional reactions upon publication and ever since has produce equally divergent views. Some have termed it a masterpiece of modernist literature that points out the collapse of meaning in the modern world. Others are equally certain that Stein was pulling an Andy Kaufman-style intellectual prank on those with a proclivity toward taking literary criticism too seriously. Either way, actually, would make it a triumph of literature, although the latter would reveal that Stein was ahead of the modernists, a proto-postmodernist, if you will.
A PETTICOAT.
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
For the most part, associational links between words are loose at best and missing in the more extreme cases. In some very rare cases, however, it becomes a much simpler task to interpret lines contextually so to create traditional associative meaning. To call anything in the book truly descriptive is perhaps going too far, but among the closest would be this example. Even though there is nothing concretely descriptive of a petticoat in the sentence, the words do make an applicable sort of sense to that particular item of feminine attire. Of course, one can just as easily argue that there is no specific connotation connected to the sentence which has anything concretely to do with a petticoat. It becomes almost entirely a matter of perception.
