Paris France, Gertrude Stein

The name Gertrude Stein is one of which I have become acquainted with over these past few months. She is constantly mentioned in secondary literature, particularly in the modernist genre, of which I have read many due to my studies with Joyce, Proust, etc. Due to the recognition of her name, I purchased Paris France in a bookstore with the intention to familiarise myself with her works, after all, the blurb did state that it was “the perfect introduction to her work.”

My expectations of this text were virtually none; I knew she was heavily influential in the French/Parisian modernist movement, so I assumed she would be some great experimenter, a deep thinker paving the way for new writers. Yet these assumptions, at first, seemed wrong. She assumes an almost child-like narrative voice throughout the entire text. The language is very simplistic, too simplistic, as this is where it becomes almost difficult to read. The writing is no doubt stream of consciousness-esque. The simplistic language, coupled with the lack of punctuation, increases the speed of the narrative voice, but one finds themself with hardly any time to grasp what the sentence is about, often conducting several rereads of lines which one would assume had a greater meaning, but were rather simple. In short, the reader is left thinking the sentence should offer more than it does.

Take this sentence, for example, the opening in Part III:

“An American who read as far as this, as far as it had been written, said to me, ‘But you do not mention the relation of French men to French men, of French men to French women, of French women to French women, of French women to French children, of French men to French children, of French children to French children.’”

I found myself reading that five times over and wondering, “What the hell is this?” And then I noted to myself: this is modernism, obviously! “Steinese,” I believe they call it. I have subsequently learnt that “Steinese” refers to Gertrude Stein’s radically experimental use of English, a style that breaks grammar, repeats words obsessively, and treats language as a material like paint. Stein believed that every repetition doesn’t repeat; as the meaning of the context shifts, the rhythm becomes the meaning. So, in our long and initially confusing quote above, we can then, speaking fluent “Steinese,” deduce that an American reader, presumably a fan, questions her, interrogating why she doesn’t describe relationships in her works, for example, stories between people, human emotions, etc. This I cannot answer and didn’t assume until this point, as this is the very first piece of hers that I have read.

This new look into her work explains her affinity with Pablo Picasso, whose Cubism in paint mirrors her Cubism in prose. Just as Picasso fragmented form to show multiple perspectives of a single subject, Stein dismantled syntax to reveal the shifting layers of consciousness within language itself. Both artists rejected linear representation, preferring to present perception as process rather than product: Picasso made the act of seeing visible, while Stein made the act of thinking audible. The flattening of grammatical hierarchy in her writing parallels the collapse of spatial depth in his canvases; everything exists simultaneously on one surface, each word or shape equally real and equally present. In this sense, “Steinese” is painterly, a linguistic collage that, like Cubism, refuses imitation in favour of pure creation. And that is why I love modernism.

To be “fashionable” seemingly was to be everything for Stein. To be fashionable and to be logical. This is where Napoleon enters, as her perfect example of that union. He is, in Stein’s eyes, the French ideal human, the embodiment of a nation that values precision, order, and grace above all else. His life is an act of arrangement: his battles, his empire, even his downfall unfold with the symmetry of design. He is logical in the way a tailor is logical when cutting and shaping until the suit fits. For Stein, this makes him both admirable and tragic. His perfection becomes his flaw; his clarity, his undoing. Napoleon, like the France she describes, is too neat to survive chaos, too logical to live without control. He becomes the final expression of Stein’s vision of French fashion, a beauty so exact that it cannot bend, only break.

This mystifies my opinion on Stein. She has such a strong sense of patriotism, but with self awareness (which I think is lacking in today’s world), she describes this perfectly with her analogy to German dogs and French dogs. The German dog, she writes, obeys because it has been told to, while the French dog obeys because it understands why. It is the difference between discipline and comprehension, between submission and style. And in this, her patriotism becomes philosophical; she admires her country but also its way of thinking.

Although, this image of the German and French dogs cannot be separated from its historical moment. ‘Paris France' was published in 1940, the very year of the Nazi occupation. Stein’s metaphor, whether consciously or not, mirrors the atmosphere of a continent under authoritarian control. The German dog, obedient simply because it is told to be, evokes the blind submission that had come to define Nazi Germany, a nation following orders without question. The French dog, meanwhile, obeys through comprehension; it represents a civility grounded in thought, a logic that resists coercion by understanding rather than fear. In this context, Stein’s comparison becomes quietly political. Beneath her playful tone lies an assertion of intellectual freedom, that true logic must contain self-awareness, and that the French spirit, even under occupation, would remain incapable of purely mechanical obedience.

“All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or by any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a Latin way.”

This section struck me as one of Stein’s most insightful observations on the effect of war. When she writes that “all Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three,” she marks those years as sacred, the moment when one learns how to think, how to behave, how to become logical and fashionable in the French sense. Civilisation, for her, is something learnt, almost performed, through exposure to others, an older woman, the army, a revolution, or any form of discipline. It is the point when chaos begins to form into order, when instinct becomes taste. Yet the generations who fought in the wars, she says, never had that time. Their education in civilisation was replaced by survival. When they returned, the rhythm of French life, that balance of logic and grace, had already shifted.

So when she says that these men “did not succeed in the real sense in being fashionable and certainly not in being logical,” it reads not as an insult but as a lament. The war robbed them of their initiation into civilisation. For Stein, fashion is not superficial but rather it is an outer sign of harmony, of an inner structure that knows how to balance reason and expression. To be fashionable is to understand proportion, to live within a pattern that makes sense. The war generation, having missed that formation, carried a kind of dissonance. They were out of rhythm with France itself. In her eyes, that is the true consequence of war, not just loss of life but the interruption of logic, the breaking of a national pattern that once made sense of the world.

Her life, in all meanings of the word, seemed iconic. To live in a time of such exciting change, in one of the culture capitals of the world, in a time pre-technology as we know it. Friends with amazingly influential people, whilst being a strong voice in the modernist movement. Her life, although through wars, seemed very logical and indeed very fashionable. As she herself wrote, “It is funny about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”