User:DeRossitt/Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein

Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein is a 1958 book by literature professor B. L. Reid.

Overview
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Reception
Norman Holmes Pearson in American Literature: What Professor Reid objects to most in Miss Stein's aesthetics is what he calls her subtractions of beauty, instruction, and passion, by which she became in his terms not the artist but the scientist, relieved of "the burden of thought and the burden of moral choice" and dependent on the "narrow resources of the idiosyncratic self."

In a newer temper of our times he represents a return to Victorian high seriousness. He is one of the new Victorians.

Hugh Corbett in Books Abroad: The book gives one a clearer understanding of Stein's unique theories and of what she labored to express and achieve. It portrays a serious, if misguided, toiler in the fields of literature.... Reid's objective survey will certainly be recognized by serious students as the most authoritative and instructive contribution yet offered.

Catherine R. Stimpson in boundary 2: To cultural enforcers, she is a study in arrested development. Perkins is a baffled rather than a punitive father. Taking on that role in the 1950s, that dear dumb decade of gender conformity, was B.L. Reid. "Disenchanted" with Stein, he declared that he would write an "essay in decapitation," surely the expression of a castrating desire that he must subliminate since Stein is only "mannish," not a man.4' For Reid, Stein is a sprawl of error. Like many of Stein's detractors, he accuses her of three cultural sins. First, she is more than difficult. She is incomprehensible. Art, to be art, must "communicate," and she does not. Monotonously un- relenting, Reid even flails out at her autobiographies. They are "para- sitical" and "exploitative" (ABS, p. 186). Such adjectives hint at the second brief: Stein is not a nice person. On the contrary, she is indiscriminate, incoherent, egocentric (ABS, p. 193). Oddly, Stein's[PAGE BREAK] detractors—even Hemingway—are discreet about her lesbianism. Not until her lesbianism became celebratory—in the women's and gay movements—did it become a genuinely open subject. Instead, her detractors display the tact of Stein's supporters and their own distaste for Stein's sexuality, a distaste so overwhelming that it chokes off direct speech, but not overwhelming enough to choke off all speech. Reid instead hints at Stein's lesbianism. She withdraws, he murmurs indirectly, into "the closet of private art" (ABS, p. 19, my italics). Finally, the fact that this aesthetically and morally suspect hulk has any support at all is a sign of a vast cultural decay. In a hysterical f!urry of metaphors of bad dreams and disease, Reid charges: "She is enormously interesting as a phenomenon of the power of personality and as a symptom of a frantic, fumbling nightmare age-our present-and it is as such that she will live. Later ages will gather around the corpus of her work like a cluster of horri- fied medical students around a biological sport. (ABS, p. 207)"

Kirk Curnutt in College Literature: Nowhere is the formalist discomfort with Stein more evident than in Reid's Art By Subtraction, a self-proclaimed "essay in decapitation," ostensibly grounded in "conviction" rather than "acrimony" (vii). As his third and fourth chapters reveal, Reid attributes Stein's inflated reputation to the allure of her celebrity; by claiming to ignore the distraction of her authorial presence he can attack the texts themselves as bereft of structure, theme, and aesthetic complexity. The sheer malevolence of his tone, however, suggests that his antipathy toward her fame shapes his reading. Indeed, in several passages, he contradicts his own formalism by attributing her stylistic "indulgences" to character faults.

Jennifer Ashton in ELH: however, the early, dismissive accounts of Stein become especially useful as markers in an extended critical tradition, if only because they are so consistent with their later counterparts in the stylistic features they single out as evidence of Stein's fundamental unintelligibility. For examples of contemporary accounts that establish this tradition, see especially Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993); Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932); Desmond McCarthy, Criticism (London: Putnam, 1932); B. F. Skinner, "Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?" The Atlantic Monthly January 1934: 50-57; Kenneth Burke, "The Impartial Essence," The New Republic 3 July, 1935: 227; and B. L. Reid, Art By Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 195

Carolynn Van Dyke in Texas Studies in Literature and Language: Those who disagree with Skinner's particular explanation and assessment have nonetheless focused, as he did, not on what she meant but on why she is unintelligible. For Michael Gold, Stein was a self-indulgent bourgeois artist who wrote solipsistically; for B. L. Reid, she was a self-deceived experimenter who believed that she could re-fashion language single-handedly.2

G. Thomas Couser in Texas Studies in Literature and Language