MFT: Gertrude Stein - Five Words in a Line

If you ever happened to wander through the barely penetrable debris of the least helpful archive of experimental art of old known as UbuWeb - you might have taken a walk through the jungle of the conceptual writing section. There are lots of interesting things that would have been even more interesting if this whole goodness was properly presented and thoroughly commented. But that's needless nuances, who cares about it... 

Anyway - near the end of the selection there is a piece written by one and only Gertrude Stein. It is extremely short and rather obviously undermines the entire selection of the pieces by its callous tongue-in-cheek nature. Here it is:

Five Words in a line.

It is taken from a poem "Five Words in a Line" which is a little bit longer but not really because the rest of the text dances around the statement "Five Words in a Line" but not really because the rest of the text is just there, hanging around, having a good time letting you to read it. Why? Because reasons. It is self-explanatory language play that goes for an elaborate cognitive dissonance mambo ribbing akin to "The Treachery of Images". The trick is that there is no trick. It is really a sentence with five words that describe "Five Words in a Line". Because it is amusing and kinda funny. Among else - there are also "Four Words in a line" and "Six words in one line", both of which actually consist of "Five Words in a Line". (chuckles-chuckles).

"Five Words in a Line" stems from an observation. Gertrude once noticed that she can fit five words in a single line on the page of her notebook. It seemed rather fascinating to her and so she played with it. The poem was written around 1929-1930 and published later in 1930 in the first issue of Pagany magazine. It was accompanied by an essay about Stein's poetics written by William Carlos Williams. The juxtaposition is quite ironic. It actually ridicules an essay. Since the poem is rather mean-spirited mockery of overt explanations and far-reaching interpretations - to pair it with a glib example of such analysis is rather elegant way of rolling an index finger around the temple while excessively smiling and rolling eyes. Imagine yourself reading a magazine, reading that particular essay and then getting to the poem. I guess it might be a little bit too perplexing and off-putting.

As any other poem by Gertrude Stein "Five Words in a Line" is an assault at habitual relaxed reading. It is filled with word jamming. It is more of a cipher than an actual text - the experience of getting through it is actually an intended piece. There are lots and lots of look-alike or sound-alike words paired together in a semi-coherent strings. Together they forge comedically non-sequitir images and construct cutaway narrative stylized after stream of consciossness. Except it is filled with throwaway simple words and commonly used nothing-phrases stuck in cancellarists hard-edges sentence structures.  

"Five Words in a Line" is designed to nullify attempts at analysis. You can do it - but it will not affect the piece. Your understanding of it will stay the same if not even more enigmatic. It is hard to do a roundabout arabesque about it without acknowledging the fact that the whole affair is merely a vain bout of apophenic pareidolia. And since this is the whole point of the piece it seems obvious that by design it states "nothing is true, everything is permitted" in relation to the whole concept of "interpretation". Except it is not - because it is just about "Five words in a line" and other funny things that come with it.