Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/278

 "All modern writing," we are told, has sprung from "experiments" like these. One thinks first perhaps of the "masterpiece" of James Joyce. That literary physician who has lately been looking obliquely at literature, Dr. Joseph Collins, extracts some fragments from Ulysses which superficially resemble these by Gertrude Stein. That is, he declares that to the ordinary reader they mean nothing, but that to the initiated they are transparent. Though I do not profess any special psychopathic initiation, I myself find long tracts of Ulysses in which the verbal symbols seem to correspond to intelligible sensational experience with attendant mental phenomena. From this fact I infer that James Joyce is not a "modern writer" of pure derivation from the source. He therefore can shed little light on the problem before us.

As I studied Gertrude Stein's work, endeavoring to understand its purpose, I will admit that once or twice it occurred to me faintly that it might just possibly be a joke. But it is impossible to make a joke out of 419 such pages. If you set out in quest of hilarity, before you read twenty pages you are ready for hara-kiri. It is no more like a joke than the Mojave Desert or the Dead Sea. I dismissed that hypothesis.

I tried the guess that the entire book is written in a cipher of which the publishers possess a key purchasable at an enormous price, but then I thought of a man who deciphered the Etruscan inscriptions in six volumes, yet couldn't find a pub-