The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Stein
From Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, editors. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Book. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1984, pp. 195-207. [Red numbers
in brackets indicate page numbers in this book.]
READING STEIN
(We asked a number of writers to respond to the three
short selections from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
(1914) quoted below—to give their sense of the ways of reading
this text—what it means, how it means, & in what ways
it might seem relevant to their own concerns in writing. What
follows are the Stein selections and the replies.)
from TENDER BUTTONS
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange
a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.
All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The
difference is spreading.
GLAZED GLITTER
Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.
The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has
come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and
that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime
there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very
charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is
handsome and convincing.
There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be
breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color
chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps
washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps
if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.
[196]
ROASTBEEF
In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening,
in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.
In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting,
in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation,
in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence
and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have
streamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow
has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes
sand. Very well. Certainly the length is thinner and the rest,
the round rest has a longer summer. To shine, why not shine, to
shine, to station, to enlarge, to hurry the measure all this means
nothing if there is singing, if there is singing then there is
the resumption. The change the dirt, not to change dirt means
that there is no beefsteak and not to have that is no obstruction,
it is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference.
The difference is that a plain resource is not entangled with
thickness and it does not mean that thickness shows such cutting,
it does mean that a meadow is useful and a cow absurd. It does
not mean that there are tears, it does not mean that exudation
is cumbersome, it means no more than a memory, a choice and a
reestablishment, it means more than any escape from a surrounding
extra. All the time that there is use there is use and any time
there is a surface there is a surface, and every time there is
an exception there is an exception and every time there is a division
there is a dividing. Any time there is a surface there is a surface
and every time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and
every time there is silence there is silence and every time that
is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always,
not particular, tender and changing and external and central and
surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface
and the circle and the shine and the succor and the white and
the same and the better and the red and the same and the centre
and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether.
. . .Gertrude Stein
ON READING STEIN
Stein has been haunted by two antithetical criticisms. One proposes
that her writing is all play, that it derives strictly out of
her early [197] researches with William
James and motor automism and was later invigorated by Cubist formalism.
The other proposes that Stein is a kind of hermetic Symbolist
who encodes sexual and biographical information in complex verbal
machines which contextualize their own environments. Both views
operate on either side of a referential paradigm; one wants her
to mean nothing and the other wants her to mean intrinsically.
But what makes Tender Buttons so vital is not the strategies
by which meaning is avoided or encoded but how each piece points
at possibilities for meaning. Unlike the Symbolist who creates
beautiful detachable artifacts, Stein's prose is firmly tied to
the world—but it is a world constantly under construction,
a world in which the equation of word and thing can no longer
be taken for granted. "The difference is spreading"
not only foreshadows deconstructive thought; it recognizes that
between one term (a carafe) and a possible substitute (a blind
glass) exists a barrier, not an equal sign, and it is this difference
which supports all signification. Stein interrogates this barrier
in order to break open the imperial Sign and leave "a system
to pointing," a language that no longer needs to contain
the world in order to live in it.
What's the good of all this? Obviously we know what a carafe
is or nickel or roast beef, but Stein doesn't much care whether
these things are self-evident. She does care that we've come to
regard writing as the discovery of concrete counters for feelings,
objects and places, that human memory is valorized over human
mind in the act of creation. "A name is adequate or it is
not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it . . ."11
she writes, inveighing against the noun's authoritarian stasis.
What she wants is movement, a shifting of words among other words
not to erase their ability to refer but to make that act as polymorphous
and perverse as any sexual play. Tender Buttons as a
title suggests words binding the fabric of language together but
also the sexual (clitoral) excitation potential in all linguistic
play.
Each of the pieces in Tender Buttons seems, at some
level, to refer to Stein's decontextualizing strategies. "A
Carafe, That is a Blind Glass," is "about" the
difference between a term and its multifarious substitutes ("a
blind glass," a "kind in glass," a "spectacle")
or its attendant qualities ("a single hurt color," a
"difference . . . spreading"). The unitary object is
dispersed among words in "an arrangement in a system."
The objects themselves are commonplace—as common as the
carafes, bowls and guitars of Cubist still lifes—but Stein's
disjunctive prose removes them from their commonality and accentuates
the gap between object and description. "[It] is so easy
to exchange meaning," she says under the heading "Roast
Beef," "it is so easy to see the difference." What
links roastbeef to such remarks is the idea of transformation
and [198] change present in foods
and language alike. Roastbeef exists as the sum of many processes,
some of which involve cooking, preparing, eating and digesting;
it is the least permanent of things, and yet for the creator of
literary still lifes, it is expected to stand in an eternal brown
glaze on the verge of being carved. Stein's carving exposes the
fallacy in a whimsical rhetoric of permanence: "in the inside
there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning
there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling." Without
knowing what is "outside" or how meaning relates to
"morning" or "evening" to "feeling,"
we are at sea, but by creating a larger grid of specious comparisons
and fake equations, Stein undercuts all logical continuity. The
logic is entirely her own, and the shifts of predication and assertion
(the very stuff of reasonable discourse) serve to expose the mutability
which lies at the heart of consumption, whether of food or of
language. What this implies for the act of reading is that there
are no longer any privileged semantic centers by which we can
reach through the language to a self-sufficient, permanent world
of objects, foodstuffs or rooms. We must learn to read writing,
not read meanings; we must learn to interrogate the spaces around
words as much as the words themselves; we must discover language
as an active "exchange" of meaning rather than a static
paradigm of rules and features. The question is not "what"
she means but "how." If such activity is difficult it
is only because our habits of reading have been based on a passive
acceptance of the criterion of adequacy; Stein undermines the
model with the simplest of language only so that we may read for
the first time—again.
Michael Davidson
A CARAFE ... GLAZED GLITTER ROASTBEEF (through a glass darkly)
Ok murky in after all end, unpredictable day, with rain shine
any degree night, the sun kin warm and hot. Enough stone or other
jugs lineup of whatever is In Through Out That's light as much
as known Differences evanesce Like, where and/or what on the equator
might be french or spanish Longitude and latitude, yep yep sure
Americana
But could someone mobile with us sleep downstairs, in case of
some needs? The amount of variety, seen small, or a knockout maybe
[199] in fact. Going deep and strong
suddenly three times, though not any more in a while. Mystery
on occasion frightens, hurts what you don't know. Sleep came and
nothing in square feet changed and later morning is too again
there.
And however long the new days all. Every new second minute at
least. But the more there is the less you have in common, knowledge
of pieces, experience taken in. Bit by bit or in what or how many
dimensions. Is there any further inch to a holograph of a spread?
Lightning's fast in bed or anyplace. Monuments mixed in haystacks
lost.
Nothing is too dull.
Larry Eigner
Writing is intentional denotation (you choose words)
and reading mirrors that, is read as denotation and intention
(mix of the words/what the author is 'trying to say', technique
composition context). Of course, strict denotation is a myth:
ambiguities/extracurricular meanings can attach to any word(s)
read. But it's a myth reinvented at every word ("If not,
why use words" — Zukofsky): "breakages" mean
breakages, "Japanese," ditto.
The (A) point of Tender Buttons is the play between
what the pieces are said to mean (the objects, the titles, Stein's
theories, Paris Impressionist through Cubist still life) and how
the words exist and interact in saying what they do say.
She insists on an (intuitive) identity between her portraits
& the objects, arising from avoidance of memory, breaking
through crust of habit to actual perception, seeing something
continually for the first time. And it's done with words:
"I became more and more excited about how words which were
the words that made whatever I looked at look like itself
were not the words that had in them any quality of description."
(Portraits and Repetition; my italics)
She's proving that she's seeing it by a continual athleticism,
leaping free of the gravity of the familiar. Yet "words that
make what I looked at look like itself were always words that
to me very exactly related themselves to that thing . . . ."
(P's & R's)
So, related (a kind, a cousin), but at a necessary distance
(not resembling), breathing room for the object to exist (the
difference). [200] Anomaly needed
to keep us awake (a kind in glass, not of; a system to pointing).
In A Carafe I see her saying she sees and seeing to it that she
says so.
But this sounds like systems of more or less stretched metaphor.
Occasionally, yes, "the round rest has a longer summer"
(round, resting on a platter, roast, summer, opulence, flavor)—I
can hook up my intuition with what I guess was hers. But often
there's no 'very exact [outward] relation' I can see. First 2
phrases of Roastbeef, yes, rest of paragraph, no. Rocking along
on the sound, patterning, slides into lecture against memory:
mounting, resignation, recognition, recurrence, mistake, pinch,
wake up.
In places I wonder if she hears/sees/thinks the word just before
or as she writes—or only after. Does she 'mean it', or is
it just prattle (singsong, babyish joy in denotation [standards,
streamers, curtains, bed linen], grammar becoming a 'weak force').
But "it is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to
see the difference" and on through the rest of the excerpt
is definitely not babytalk, is exemplary in its variety of use,
surface, suggestion.
Can't pin down what puts her on the interesting side of language's
openness. At best her words displace all others. From Cups: "The
best slam is utter."
Bob Perelman
TRANSLATIONAL RESPONSE TO A STEIN SINGLE
a carafe that is a blind glass
she types clarity
relations to a scene
a seen in
zero
queer ones in the pain
of pattern
wheeled directions to
a fullness
[201]
that negated more to
more what chaos enters in
no one same article
unlike a wide.
Steve McCaffery
WHOLE HALVES
Bisection, leaving one half hanging over, the drapes are clean.
You look as if you need the third from the bottom, the keyhole,
nicely in a row. That brings up heat, McCartney's words are blue.
It's sort of molded into a mountain. South socks all metal by
air sideways, the trim set back from the teeth, the white trim,
beginning to stand there. What's back is clear, gently crumpled
without creases. White line leads to ferrous flair to private
stuff side by side and side by side side by side invitation to
an address. Lines rise. Pillow's overtime. Questions: round blue
orange white yellow thin and horny. Once top on another without
looking very far up. If they stay up, moving in up, and the board
leads line a tongue right this way. And then the tongue two three
four. Stripes are everywhere, some hanging down or looking up
face down or up and left open ready to be lit: answer. The face
got a new invention. Buttons no longer don't make any noise. Because
what's switched also's identified. And instead of going straight
on a round surface straight means the French word for alright.
Right it the middle you get wet. Then people save you. Green spots
connection. New buttons never have to curl over one another. The
old rigidity, the old holes the fading tension aware of its collaboration,
the new tension, uncovers the covers. What's a head no longer
needs what's ahead because more and more buttons are right to
be pressed, propulsion hovers on exhibit. It's stacked, easier
to lose the thought of finding, insulatable craft against the
checks. The rivers that run to the sea oh boy, use the floor as
a step out the door. What's discolored indicates the presence
of routine, suddenly the hard weight of the sun becomes mold,
mold molding the frame, frame framing the water, water drying
up. And ancient actress sees at once. To occupy, having an erection
nothing is the same nothing is the name nothing is the frame.
Pursuit is as temporal as openings and closings buttons relieved
pacify. No one seems to know [202]
the right hand way to go, going down, which leaves the middle
and the left facing the trees and the hills and the local stuff
and the cagey touch flame away from glass. To be here now means
how can no one respond to buttons. They all have to be accounted
for. When you work in countries the next step is staying home,
using buttons, could be in the air like the old Chinese pool hall.
Nobody's outside without a shirt not moving lips without saying
speed. Before there was even a black hole a table right beside
it. A chair. A pair of reroutings means inside. Outside's very
tangible, actual, substantive, understood, outside's very material,
always there to be reached trying to be touched. Adhesives as
well as collections and bone as well as plastic and current as
well as fastening and sewing, the next step's stamping. The next
step's diffuse. Solid. Volume descends to Richard's only throne.
Division of the aspect into verb as seeing progressive form point-action
verbs indicate is waking up is working out. Think of it as a as:
my whole life has change. In between the round ups everything
happens. Billy the Kid counts peas. Rock forms. PVC does not burn.
But as we entered the harbor some kind stuck, made stucking sounds.
Three bars equals ten dollars. Three buttons means one is missing.
That means make it tighter and only maybe somebody'll have to
wait. One more thing, light. Looking closer or closely looking
used to mean less light. To be precise include everything. Listening
used to mean use your head. Then Picasso said even here means
a lot of work. Even here being hear, you mean there Alice said.
Here here refers to there, permission prohibition, love marriage,
button unbutton, press release release press. To be precise precision
excludes almost everything, what's left, under the light, clean
dirty, includes everything. In the north in the potato country
roads are there when you're there or when you're here. Here roads
are here wherever you are.
Peter Seaton
READING A SELECTION FROM TENDER BUTTONS
I start reading "A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS."
I go from word to word, seeing the shapes of the printed words,
hearing the sounds inwardly, noting rhymes, assonances, alliterations.
Where an image is suggested, I see it inwardly. I hear the alliteration
"kind," "cousin," [203]
"color," with the near-alliteration "glass."
The rhyme in "strange" & "arrangement."
The alliteration of s's: "spectacle," "strange,"
"single," "system," "spreading."
The assonance of short i's that binds the three sentences ("system,"
"this," "difference") as does the ending of
each sentence with an "ing" (which is reinforced by
the short e's in "resembling" & "spreading").
There are also the 2nd sentence's rhymes ("ordinary,"
"unordered") & the alliterative sequence "spectacle,"
"pointing," "spreading." The three sentences
are a bound system of sounds. But can I specify anything beyond
the sounds? To use a phrase I first heard from Spencer Holst,
it gives "the sensation of meaning," but can I connect
the meanings of the words as readily as I find their sounds connected?
Beyond the obvious fact that the carafe is made of glass, I can
see only certain connections of meanings: "a blind glass,"
"a kind in glass" (I didn't notice consciously the "blind"-"kind"
rhyme before), & then "a spectacle" (something seen
or to be seen, but also "spectacles" are "glasses").
Then "nothing strange," "not ordinary," "not
unordered," "not resembling," & "difference"
form a meaning sequence. Another sequence of meanings: "blind,"
"spectacle" (with the intervening "glass"'s
causing the ambiguity of "spectacle" which might not
have been as apparent without them), & "color,"
that seems to carry over to "arrangement," "pointing,"
"not unordered," "not resembling," & even
to "spreading." The sequence "kind" (with
its two meanings), "cousin," "nothing strange"
seems opposed to "not ordinary," "not resembling,"
& "The difference is spreading.": a meaning movement
from near-sameness to greater & greater difference.
"A single hurt color" is the most emotional phrase,
altho "blind glass" with its implied oxymoron (glass
is usually transparent—at least we first think of transparency
when we hear the word "glass"—& when it is
made into spectacle lenses, it helps people to see better) is
perhaps even more so. Maybe the "single hurt color"
is the blackness of blindness. The whole poem suddenly seems to
be about seeing!
But what of the "carafe" that starts it all? Why is
it "a blind glass"? Ordinarily a carafe is one of the
least "blind"—that is, the most transparent-of
glass containers. It usually contains plain water. The OED defines
it as "a glass water-bottle for the table, bedroom, etc."
Its Romance forms (F. carafe, It. caraffa, Neapol. carrafa (a
measure of liquids), Sp. & Pg. garrafa, Sicil. carabba) are
related by some authorities to the Pers. garabah, a large flagon,
& the Arabic gharafa, to draw or lift water.
Why, then, is this carafe a blind glass?
[204] Is the whole poem then a
"pointing" from the ordinary transparent carafe ("nothing
strange") to one "not ordinary"—one that
is "blind"—an orderly ("not unordered")
movement "spreading" from transparency & clarity
thru the "single hurt color" to the implied darkness
& opacity of blindness, a movement condensed & made explicit
in the title?
Jackson Mac Low
TENDER BUTTONS
Undergoing sight (& by 'sight' thinking
feeling looking remembering even inventing imagining certainly
tasting surely listening hearing talking) meaning potentially
all human process, as almost academic ('artschool') exercise undertaken
for the species' joy in it, less talking & listening than
looking to know that words can do it, making nomenclature consort
of nature (1911, in Spain) in the perfect understanding that that
seen makes a name, this time (accommodating strangeness of
verbiage in process of gaining exact usage), only because (mutton
flies into the sundown upwind upstream already) all time/everything
is. Artist never fell.
Sad story, now, apparently. Real im Traum, 'before the War.'
Today, a hearkening back, as longing, not the reality of the word,
not the faith that makes composition of the world, riding on that
everything, permission given. She could say anything.
Now some further difficulty of access, as the nature of human
experience slips away from the ad-men as makers of language unconvinced,
in the last resort, of any necessity.
Before I die.
Before I die.
Before I die.
Before I die.
(Robt. Creeley, Pieces)
—resolve echoes. Names repeat.
But it's the same imperative, that one might undertake now in
the absence of conviction, that anything was, that a word might
mean any-[205]thing, that she addressed
with certainty: looking at anything until something that was not
the (conventional) name of that thing but was in a way that actual
thing would come to be written." ("Poetry And Grammar")
•
"TENDER" says entire activity of the artist's portraiture
(subtitle: "Portraits of objects, food, rooms")—not
'studies' of objects etc. nor 'still lives,' but (portray:
'to draw forth, reveal'; from root, 'to drag, move') dramatic
engagements with things-given-the-sort-of-attention-that-humans-get
often in motion, 'alive,' as well—so you get a verbal-formal
offering, that stretches out to move through circles of light
(attention) in which "beginning again and again" transforms
into a "continuous present" in which words one-one-one
actively engage as single-frame sequence (". . . this our
period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production")
something all right, tendered, right in front of you. "BUTTONS"
just means everyday domestic objects (which are??) nudged—'on
the button.'
Ok, 'tender' because new-born—& all right, word-buds,
tenderly regarded.
•
What poetry does (see "Poetry And Grammar"):
realization of new nominatives—(not neologism but) whole
text, in process, "replaces" worn-out, now-merely-conventional
name offered up (in title, commonly) to be melted down in crucible
of language process attention forging other access to the ongoing
of what's what.
T.B., as early 'phenomenological investigation,' is
interpretative/as it is revelatory—the whole storm of passion,
discernment, definition, feeling//carried by language//brought
to the 'budding' of the thing—three together, through time,
make the name.
•
It's not 'snapshorts' (moves; don't copy nature), & it's
not 'the pathetic fallacy' (though it includes much of the artist's
process). And it ain't ‘abstract.'
[206] (In this context, for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
I want to say I think it's at best a 'creative misreading' of
Stein to take her work as a whole as a primary instance of 'language-oriented
writing.' Not only her somewhat less arduous later work (Autobiography
of A.B.T, Brewsie And Willie), but The Making of Americans
(a history of her family & compendium of sketches of every
possible kind of human being), Lucy Church Amiably (an
'engraving' or romantic portrait of life in the French countryside)
& her long poem "Stanzas in Meditation" (written
shortly before the Autobiography of A.B.T. &, if
anything, a prototype of confessional poetry) all are intent to
make new ways to say something—show her thinking language
not as object-in-itself, but as composition functioning in the
composition of the world. With the exception of some verbal experiment,
with Williams & Pound, Stein's basic concern as a writer was
to confront the imperative MAKE IT NEW however possible—'IT'
being, equally/simultaneously, sentience, world & language
as relation between these. T.B., specifically, exists
as such confrontation—& to take it as a variously interesting
arrangement of words, alone, is to perpetuate the initial journalist-parody
response to the work as 'nonsense.')
•
But can it be done, as a task. Was 1911, or. . . .
Even now . . . . .. It's a mild, mild day, Starbuck"
etc. . . So quiet, in America . . . . 1977 rhymes with
1911 (is it, already, 1978. . . . ) Seemingly timeless lull on
the brink, this time, of the extinction of something other than
the Pequod as American westward-expanding enterprise (or craters
in the Whiteheads' lawns). . . Beautiful fall day, clear even
to the horizon . . . though the reign of conventional names, reiteration
of terminology as fixed interpretation of that not happening,
appears to cover the globe several times over, 'ruling' air &
land & waves. . . . What a moment, nonetheless. . . . Yet
again, that chance to (two by two, alpha & beta, assess
& elephants) call the roll, look to words to show & tell
the present orders of. . . .
•
. . . Think of all that early poetry, think of Homer, think
of Chaucer, think of the Bible and you will see what I mean you
will really realize that they were drunk with nouns, to name to
know how to name earth sea and sky and all that was in them was
enough to make them live and love in names, and that is what poetry
is it is a state of knowing and [207]
feeling a name. I know that now but I have only come to that knowledge
by long writing." ("P. & G.," 1934) . . .
Robert Grenier
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