When the Time Came

Abstract

My original ambition was to take the first chapter of Ida & go thru it showing how the construction of Stein’s sentences & paragraphs is twinned to what it is she is saying; how, in short, her saying says. I’d thot ‘first chapter’ because in an earlier essay (‘Some Sentences, Paragraphs & Punctuation on Sentences, Paragraphs & Punctuation’¹) I’d gone into the first page of Ida fairly thoroughly, albeit from a different point of view, & the sheer symmetry of moving from the first page to the first chapter definitely appealed to me. The reality of what I’m going to do has turned out differently from its intended reality largely because of the approach I elected to take, which is to say the approach I elected to try (& I’ll put the emphasis there — I’m going to try) — to deal thoroughly with the first five pages of Ida. I want to deal with Stein’s writing in its real context which is the flux & flow of her actual texts.