I’ve been thinking about that sentence where you point out Stein’s “repudiation…of the possibility of ‘repetition’ and its cousins in the philosophical lineage inherited from Plato, resemblance, representation, and reference.”

I feel like I get what you’re saying there and I think you are basically right, but thankfully Stein has made it all nicely complex as well. For instance I think a productive way to read Stein can also be to notice, instead of how she breaks with literary and philosophical traditions, how at the same time her stylistic approach as well as her thinking borrow from those traditions much more than many superficial readers initially notice. This is partly the “it’s not gibberish” argument that, unfortunately, one sometimes needs to make with Stein. But it’s also in line with one of Stein’s intuitions, as I read it, which is that it’s really just the lack of conventional frames (formal devices like plot, dialogue, etc.) that make a work hard to digest or approach, not any particular indigestibility of what’s inside the frame (something you also allude to by reminding us of Stein’s unsophisticated literary lexicon).

Thinking of Plato and Stein specifically we could look at the Parmenides, which is arguably the most gnomic of the Platonic dialogues and hence perhaps especially Steinian. As I’m sure you know that’s the one focused on the problem of the One and the Many. I’m not enough of a scholar to have discovered if there’s any evidence Stein knew that dialogue, but there are some strong formal resonances. Plato (out of Parmenides’s mouth) uses a lot of systematic repetition which barely adds to the argument or doesn’t initially seem to. Furthermore, to your point here, the repetition doesn’t add up to a conclusion–i.e. repetition doesn’t exhaust the problem, but just articulates it, “insists” on it being a problem if you will. By the end the idea that there is a One is felt to be logically impossible, but the idea that there is not a One looks equally unsupportable.

Meanwhile, “one” is one of Stein’s favorite words in The Making of Americans, and is continually opposed to the problem of others and otherness, a being having to be with and among many. To gloss it unrepentantly, you could say Plato’s concern is with the philosophical problem of multiplicity while Stein’s is with social multiplicity (the problem of being numerous), which means that while it’s certainly a break, it’s in some ways the kind of break that the “platonic” philosophic tradition values and cultivates as well.

Of course, there’s lots of other places Plato seems to be quite a bit less open-ended. But all this is maybe just to say, as I think you’d agree, that Stein like other great writers is able to do three things at once: absorb a philosophical history, exploit and borrow from that history, and suggest a meaningful break with it.