Reading the Gertrude Stein piece “If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso” was a very strange experience.  I came into the reading with some reservations, which were mainly the result of hearing the professor say that her previous classes often became frustrated by the readings.  It only took one line to understand what Professor Kaufman meant.  From the first line, “If I told him would he like it.” I noticed that the punctuation was off.  Why did the author put a period where there should be a question mark?  That’s one of the very first rules of learning how to write in English, yet it was completely violated. I raised an eyebrow and shrugged it off, I ultimately continued through it. Mentally and automatically, I put question marks in place where I felt there needed to be question marks.

The second sentence seemed to be a play on words, simply forming a statement by switching words to say something similar.  However, by the second line, I completely lost the vibe that the author intended to play around with a single sentence, and actually began to question what her intention was.  Not only was the third statement poorly constructed, but it wasn’t even a sentence.  I read it once, and was confused. I felt my tongue tripping on itself. I tried it again, it had the same effect.  Then there was the fact that the name “Napoleon” came out of left field.  At this point, I decided to look up information about the author and I found out that she worked alongside William James, one of the first American psychologists.  Then I read about “automatic writing” and “stream of consciousness.”  At this point, I probably got even more confused.  Why would she be thinking about Napoleon of all people or things?

I had no idea, and still have no idea what she meant by her repeated statements involving “now” which were pretty contradictory. Honestly, at that point, I had given up hope in trying to find a deeper meaning.  I didn’t want to bother trying to crawl inside of the head of a mad-woman. No rhyme, no reason, and I can’t even see an association of thoughts save for a possible link between “Napoleon,” “kings,” and later a mention of “queens.”  But shutters? Couldn’t understand that in the slightest. The repetitions of these unrelated terms made me even more bewildered.  At that point I was stumbling and stuttering my way through it.  I was hacking my way through the poem–butchering it, as Stein hacked through my conventional knowledge of the English language. Unfortunately for me, there were more repetitions of seemingly unrelated terms (exactly, resemblance, he, and, as, is, presently, proportions, land).  No more understanding, no more trying to find a meaning, I just read it (as disjointedly as the poem) until the end.