Barnes & Ignoble

I came across this in the LRB, 15 December 2005:

"Gertrude Stein ... wrote a word portrait of Braque in her finest mode of clotted twaddle. (Perhaps it was meant to be Cubist prose. If so, a bad idea - brushstrokes may slip representationalism, but words do so at their peril.)"

Julian Barnes and I have two things in common - we both took the same Eurostar train (he had the BBC camera crew following him up the platform and I didn't) and we both worked for the Oxford English Dictionary. How someone who has been so close to words can have such a reductive sense of language escapes me.

Let's have a dose of Charles Bernstein by way of an antidote:

"Yet my own primary and continuing response to Stein's poetry is one of intense pleasure in the music of the language: of hearing a palpable, intense, I'm tempted to say absolute sense-making: you can almost taste it; a great plentitude of meaning, of possibility for language, in language." ('Professing Stein/Stein Professing', p 142-3)

So, Barnes or Stein? I know which I'd prefer.