Tender Buttons
by Gertrude Stein 
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Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms from 1914 is a poetic exploration of words - clustered, juxtaposed, redefined and played off one another - to subterfuge their common meanings, which Stein felt had become watered down, and to re-infuse them with expressive force..
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Well this isn't for everyone but like some of the others here on Goodreads I have an unjustifiable love for Tender Buttons. Is it just a small selection of modernist gibberish? Maybe. Is there a great key that can be used to unlock significant meaning from Stein's famous tome of word salad? Maybe not. I don't really know. Keeping in mind her project (to paint with language like an artist... just the words, not the grammar... sort of) gives one at least some way to talk about the unusual poems here when discussing them without feeling like some kind of literary bully. Then again, that is how I'm starting to think of modernism in general.
All meaning making aside, I love this book. Honestly? I couldn't tell you why. I just like the way show more the words sound. The pleasurable catharsis of meaning always feels just out of reach so the work never provides that sort of satisfaction. Still, in a weird sort of tantric way, there is simply joy in the way Stein rolls around in language. Here's one:
A PETTICOAT
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
That's the entire poem. Frustrating if read in a certain way, beautiful if read in another. There were longer poems and certainly poems that tested my endurance and focus but all in all this is a book I'm going to dip into every once in a while because it reminds me what the best poetry can: that language doesn't only convey meaning in one way and that reading language doesn't always have to recite the same discourse. show less
All meaning making aside, I love this book. Honestly? I couldn't tell you why. I just like the way show more the words sound. The pleasurable catharsis of meaning always feels just out of reach so the work never provides that sort of satisfaction. Still, in a weird sort of tantric way, there is simply joy in the way Stein rolls around in language. Here's one:
A PETTICOAT
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
That's the entire poem. Frustrating if read in a certain way, beautiful if read in another. There were longer poems and certainly poems that tested my endurance and focus but all in all this is a book I'm going to dip into every once in a while because it reminds me what the best poetry can: that language doesn't only convey meaning in one way and that reading language doesn't always have to recite the same discourse. show less
Well this isn't for everyone but like some of the others here on Goodreads I have an unjustifiable love for Tender Buttons. Is it just a small selection of modernist gibberish? Maybe. Is there a great key that can be used to unlock significant meaning from Stein's famous tome of word salad? Maybe not. I don't really know. Keeping in mind her project (to paint with language like an artist... just the words, not the grammar... sort of) gives one at least some way to talk about the unusual poems here when discussing them without feeling like some kind of literary bully. Then again, that is how I'm starting to think of modernism in general.
All meaning making aside, I love this book. Honestly? I couldn't tell you why. I just like the way show more the words sound. The pleasurable catharsis of meaning always feels just out of reach so the work never provides that sort of satisfaction. Still, in a weird sort of tantric way, there is simply joy in the way Stein rolls around in language. Here's one:
A PETTICOAT
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
That's the entire poem. Frustrating if read in a certain way, beautiful if read in another. There were longer poems and certainly poems that tested my endurance and focus but all in all this is a book I'm going to dip into every once in a while because it reminds me what the best poetry can: that language doesn't only convey meaning in one way and that reading language doesn't always have to recite the same discourse. show less
All meaning making aside, I love this book. Honestly? I couldn't tell you why. I just like the way show more the words sound. The pleasurable catharsis of meaning always feels just out of reach so the work never provides that sort of satisfaction. Still, in a weird sort of tantric way, there is simply joy in the way Stein rolls around in language. Here's one:
A PETTICOAT
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
That's the entire poem. Frustrating if read in a certain way, beautiful if read in another. There were longer poems and certainly poems that tested my endurance and focus but all in all this is a book I'm going to dip into every once in a while because it reminds me what the best poetry can: that language doesn't only convey meaning in one way and that reading language doesn't always have to recite the same discourse. show less
Tender Buttons Again
Review of the City Lights Publishers paperback edition (2014) edited with notes by Seth Perlow with an Afterword by poet Juliana Spahr of the original Claire Marie hardcover (1914).
I read a public domain eBook of Tender Buttons earlier this summer and reviewed it as Bastardized Buttons. That was more a reflection of the lack of editorial care that went into that edition, even if it did have bonus poems included without any source references, which I then had to research for myself.
The contrast in this corrected centennial edition is immense. The editor Seth Perlow discusses the various correction sources (these are either Stein's own manuscript or her handwritten notes on either proofs or published copies) and provides a complete appendix section of the variances from the original as published in 1914. The changes are not major but there are over 100 of them. A lot of them are punctuation. It is the care and attention that went into this edition which really makes it stand out. The bonus is the wonderful Afterword by Juliana Spahr which puts Tender Buttons into the context of its modernist times in the early 20th century saying that "Tender Buttons says something feminist, something queer, something opposed to those big modernist epics such as T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" or Ezra Pound's "The Cantos", works that were being written at the time Stein was writing hers."
See the original painting at https://imgc.allpostersimages.com/img/print/u-g-PI4J850.jpg?w=1100&h=1100&am...
The cover art for this edition is cropped from the painting La Femme au Livre (Woman with Book) by Juan Gris, oil on canvas, 1926. Image sourced from AllPosters.com.
My 5 star rating is relative to the various free or cheap public domain editions which provide no additional information or context.
Trivia and Links
Tender Buttons is in the Public Domain and can be read online at various locations such as Wikisource and Bartleby [Note: the layout at Bartleby is entirely wrong with the texts all mashed together, rather than spaced out by each subject.]. show less
Review of the City Lights Publishers paperback edition (2014) edited with notes by Seth Perlow with an Afterword by poet Juliana Spahr of the original Claire Marie hardcover (1914).
Tender Buttons is written in what one might call prose, the word that tends to get used for sentences that do not follow realist conventions and instead have poetry's associational drive but not its line breaks. While it uses fairly simple language in that there are few words that require a dictionary, it indulges in a lot of grammatical variations. It runs on... it hangs fire in fragments... it frequently indulges in a fragmented listing... at moments it even manages to run on in fragments... it seems often to have a definitional desire.show more
But it is a complicated desire. Things get defined all the time... and then Stein follows with a list of negatives... Sometimes all is grammatically set up for a definition but the words seem to have only the vaguest relation to each other. - excerpts from the Afterword by Juliana Spahr.
I read a public domain eBook of Tender Buttons earlier this summer and reviewed it as Bastardized Buttons. That was more a reflection of the lack of editorial care that went into that edition, even if it did have bonus poems included without any source references, which I then had to research for myself.
The contrast in this corrected centennial edition is immense. The editor Seth Perlow discusses the various correction sources (these are either Stein's own manuscript or her handwritten notes on either proofs or published copies) and provides a complete appendix section of the variances from the original as published in 1914. The changes are not major but there are over 100 of them. A lot of them are punctuation. It is the care and attention that went into this edition which really makes it stand out. The bonus is the wonderful Afterword by Juliana Spahr which puts Tender Buttons into the context of its modernist times in the early 20th century saying that "Tender Buttons says something feminist, something queer, something opposed to those big modernist epics such as T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" or Ezra Pound's "The Cantos", works that were being written at the time Stein was writing hers."
See the original painting at https://imgc.allpostersimages.com/img/print/u-g-PI4J850.jpg?w=1100&h=1100&am...
The cover art for this edition is cropped from the painting La Femme au Livre (Woman with Book) by Juan Gris, oil on canvas, 1926. Image sourced from AllPosters.com.
My 5 star rating is relative to the various free or cheap public domain editions which provide no additional information or context.
Trivia and Links
Tender Buttons is in the Public Domain and can be read online at various locations such as Wikisource and Bartleby [Note: the layout at Bartleby is entirely wrong with the texts all mashed together, rather than spaced out by each subject.]. show less
I have to thank my friend Rebecca for recommending this one. When I told her I was reviewing the books of 1914, she immediately said she thought Tender Buttons came out that year, and she was absolutely right. I always work from the “191X in Literature” Wikipedia page, and every year I end up adding about a dozen women authors who were not included. But I don’t know anything about poetry, so the poetry section had remained all-male until Rebecca tipped me off about Gertrude Stein. (I later added Amy Lowell and just now I added Katherine Tynan.)
When my brother heard about Tender Buttons, he said, “I’ll bet no one has ever read it from front to back before,” even though he knew it was very short. When my girlfriend, whose show more head is in the gutter, heard the title Tender Buttons, she asked, “Is it about sex?” Before anyone even opens the cover, this book provokes a strong reaction.
I was excited for Tender Buttons because it is the first Modernist book I’ve encountered in this project. My only previous interaction with Stein was seeing her opera The Mother of Us All over ten years ago. (At least I think I saw it? Could there be more than one opera about Susan B. Anthony?) I began reading Tender Buttons, and I was tickled to see how the poems are in the same format as prose usually is. If I hadn’t been told it was a book of poetry, I wouldn’t have known. It was so different from all the other books of 1914 that it was like a breath of fresh air. Here’s an example:
"A Sound.
Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless rats, this is this."
I was reading along, and while I was enjoying the cadence of the words and the feeling they evoked, I didn’t understand it at all. It made no sense to me whatsoever.
"A Piano.
If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.
This is no dark custom and it is not even acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing."
I knew I needed help, so I asked Rebecca to come over and explain Tender Buttons to me. When I confessed that I was enjoying it but I couldn’t understand it, she reassured me that no one understands Tender Buttons. She said if I liked it, then I understand it. I can’t remember exactly what else Rebecca said, but this is the gist of what I retained. She said that I’m free to interact with Tender Buttons any way I want, and it's Rebecca’s favorite book of poetry. Also that Gertrude Stein was trying to create an eternal present even though this is impossible, and that she was experimenting with something that is completely plotless. This made me think of Balanchine’s ballets.
I told Rebecca I was worried because I felt I was being influenced by context and having been told that this is a ground-breaking work by an amazing writer, and I don’t know how I would have felt about it if I’d read it on the internet and been told it was flash fiction by a brand new writer. Maybe I just like it because I feel like I’m supposed to or I want to be in the cool kids club. But I do feel this book is as weird today as it was a century ago, which is something. Rebecca said she thought Gertrude Stein would say that you cannot escape from context, there is always context. She said Gertrude Stein is very permissive, except for a few things that she was very bossy about, like “This one is poetry. This one is a dialogue,” etc. Rebecca also encouraged me not to rush through Tender Buttons, which I had been doing because it was the end of December and obviously I was on a tight schedule since 1914, I mean 2014, was almost over. I decided I have the rest of my life to finish it.
I got a copy out of the library which is just the “Objects” section and it is illustrated (by Lisa Congdon.) At first I liked the whimsical illustrations, but then I started to feel like they were interfering with the working of my own imagination. Also there’s only so much weirdness that one thing can contain. I was thinking maybe I ought to try illustrating the “Food” section myself. show less
When my brother heard about Tender Buttons, he said, “I’ll bet no one has ever read it from front to back before,” even though he knew it was very short. When my girlfriend, whose show more head is in the gutter, heard the title Tender Buttons, she asked, “Is it about sex?” Before anyone even opens the cover, this book provokes a strong reaction.
I was excited for Tender Buttons because it is the first Modernist book I’ve encountered in this project. My only previous interaction with Stein was seeing her opera The Mother of Us All over ten years ago. (At least I think I saw it? Could there be more than one opera about Susan B. Anthony?) I began reading Tender Buttons, and I was tickled to see how the poems are in the same format as prose usually is. If I hadn’t been told it was a book of poetry, I wouldn’t have known. It was so different from all the other books of 1914 that it was like a breath of fresh air. Here’s an example:
"A Sound.
Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless rats, this is this."
I was reading along, and while I was enjoying the cadence of the words and the feeling they evoked, I didn’t understand it at all. It made no sense to me whatsoever.
"A Piano.
If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.
This is no dark custom and it is not even acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing."
I knew I needed help, so I asked Rebecca to come over and explain Tender Buttons to me. When I confessed that I was enjoying it but I couldn’t understand it, she reassured me that no one understands Tender Buttons. She said if I liked it, then I understand it. I can’t remember exactly what else Rebecca said, but this is the gist of what I retained. She said that I’m free to interact with Tender Buttons any way I want, and it's Rebecca’s favorite book of poetry. Also that Gertrude Stein was trying to create an eternal present even though this is impossible, and that she was experimenting with something that is completely plotless. This made me think of Balanchine’s ballets.
I told Rebecca I was worried because I felt I was being influenced by context and having been told that this is a ground-breaking work by an amazing writer, and I don’t know how I would have felt about it if I’d read it on the internet and been told it was flash fiction by a brand new writer. Maybe I just like it because I feel like I’m supposed to or I want to be in the cool kids club. But I do feel this book is as weird today as it was a century ago, which is something. Rebecca said she thought Gertrude Stein would say that you cannot escape from context, there is always context. She said Gertrude Stein is very permissive, except for a few things that she was very bossy about, like “This one is poetry. This one is a dialogue,” etc. Rebecca also encouraged me not to rush through Tender Buttons, which I had been doing because it was the end of December and obviously I was on a tight schedule since 1914, I mean 2014, was almost over. I decided I have the rest of my life to finish it.
I got a copy out of the library which is just the “Objects” section and it is illustrated (by Lisa Congdon.) At first I liked the whimsical illustrations, but then I started to feel like they were interfering with the working of my own imagination. Also there’s only so much weirdness that one thing can contain. I was thinking maybe I ought to try illustrating the “Food” section myself. show less
"Cutting shade, cool spades and little last beds, make violet, violet when." One of my very favorite books to read aloud for pleasure on sunny lazy weekend mornings over breakfast, or late into the evening with wine. The linguistic equivalent of putting on a jazz album or painting the room a new color--gratifies the senses and as Thoreau put it, "affect[s] the quality of the day" (which is "the highest of the arts"). I have a feeling Stein had a good idea of how to live well in the day to day, no matter what. And if it's any confirmation, the Alice B. Toklas cookbook seems to color everything as well.
At the risk of sounding uneducated - this book is gibberish. It reminds me of the old story of the Emperor's New Clothes. Intellectuals all say it's a masterpiece, so everyone else agrees. All the while, even the intellectuals are saying "what the heck?" when they (try to) read it. But nobody wants to admit it because then they'll sound like an idiot.
What is a tender button? Is it one too sensitive to hold your shirt closed? Is it one easily bruised when you are jostled in a crowd? Is it one you will cup in your hand and gaze at adoringly? You see the problem – and this is just the title.
Don’t try to read this as a novel or even a poem. This is a piece of experimental writing, a collection of short pieces loosely organized around the subtitles Objects, Food and Rooms. Most of the sentences observe normal syntax. Almost every one violates the rules of semantics. So there are hidden gems here. Where else would you find a line like “Sugar is not a vegetable”.
The writing has enough repetition and rhythm to suggest a mind pondering its subject, turning it this way and that to show more catch the light now from the window, now from the mirror.
Do not attempt to read this at one sitting, or to drive a motor vehicle afterwards. I found the iphone version ideal, because the constant distractions chopped the text into manageable, bite-size pieces. show less
Don’t try to read this as a novel or even a poem. This is a piece of experimental writing, a collection of short pieces loosely organized around the subtitles Objects, Food and Rooms. Most of the sentences observe normal syntax. Almost every one violates the rules of semantics. So there are hidden gems here. Where else would you find a line like “Sugar is not a vegetable”.
The writing has enough repetition and rhythm to suggest a mind pondering its subject, turning it this way and that to show more catch the light now from the window, now from the mirror.
Do not attempt to read this at one sitting, or to drive a motor vehicle afterwards. I found the iphone version ideal, because the constant distractions chopped the text into manageable, bite-size pieces. show less
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The world of literary critical discourse is governed by one central imperative: to expound. Every point must be developed, every quote “parsed”, every nuance and inflection (whether of tone, dialect, or syntax) “unpacked” to find a maximum density of critical material. This is an industry that thrives on complexity, with the assumed premise that (usually) great works of literary art show more (though “greatness” or “privilege” are now much debated, and do not hold the currency they once did) are “complex organisms”, in need of a specialist’s expert appraisal. Whether it is a Deconstructionist or a Formalist reading, we can generally expect complex reactions and complex schematizations, and essential simplicity and simplistic reactions to be avoided like the plague.
How strange, then, to hear Paul Padgette make the following remark about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (TB) in the New York Review of Books: “You either get it or you don’t.” The breathtakingly blunt simplicity of this statement cuts right to the central critical crux that runs through the bulk of what has been written about TB; can it be criticized (as in, expounded upon) or can it not? Those that do engage in criticism of TB almost always do so within some contextual framework: Stein-as-Cubist, Stein-as-feminist, Stein-as-language manipulator. Others, like Padgette, are reduced by the extreme opacity of Stein’s text to a bare assertion that the text is too hermetic to be “parsed” in the normal way. It is interesting to note that the “dissidents” (as opposed to the “contextualists”) are often great fans of TB (as Padgette is), but evidently believe that the work either holds some “ineffable essence” or else must be read, first-hand, to be appreciated. That Stein’s fans (literary critics, no less), would lobby against critical discourse is a tribute both to the power and the singularity of her work.
The contextualists have a problem, too. Because TB is determinedly non-referential, any attempt at contextualization must also be rooted in an acknowledgment that the work is beyond a single contextual interpretation. As Christopher Knight noted in a 1991 article, “One can locate it in the long history of nonsense literature…in the French Cubist movement…in the Anglo-American tradition of literary modernism…and in that relatively new artistic order— the post-modern.” What is so baffling to literary critics is that, more often than not, one cannot “turn to the text” in order to verify these kinds of assertions. TB’s sense (or non-sense) is determined largely by who happens to be reading it; it is extreme enough to stymie but not as extreme as, say, Finnegan’s Wake, which by general consensus need only be touched by Joyce specialists. Simply put, there is enough sense in TB to make an attempt at locating it, but not enough so that any stated “location” could be feasible to large numbers of critics or readers. Thus, to this day, the pattern holds; dissidents argue against interpretation (and for first-hand experience), contextualists argue (with foreknowledge of “defeat”, in the sense that no contextual argument about TB in almost a century has seemed to “stick”) for a specialized interpretation. As Christopher Knight concludes, TB “embodies all…traditions even as it can be said never to be completely defined by any of them”.
The most influential writing about TB seeks to straddle the line between dissension and contextualization. Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein In Pieces, more frequently cited than most Stein critical tomes, adopts something of a centrist stance. Bridgman makes clear that the ineffable quality of TB is not lost to him; the book is “all but impossible to transform adequately into normal exposition”(127) and “unusually resistant to interpretation”(125). Bridgman’s use of the word “transform” in this context is very relevant. Just as Stein’s language experiments transform conventional vernacular usage, so “normal exposition” would have to transform Stein’s language back into something resembling a normal vernacular. Bridgman’s work also points out the central critical dilemma surrounding TB; it is “all but impossible” to expound upon, but the “ineffable essence” that makes it so compelling also becomes a goad to try and expound nonetheless. “Adequately” also points to the manner in which TB turns literary critics back on themselves; critics are forced to confront the limitations of their own methodologies, criticize themselves and their own competence. Stein makes critics feel “inadequate”, and it seems likely that, were she here to see the bulk of TB criticism, this would have pleased her.
Of those brave enough to “jump into the ring” with Stein, none does so with more panache than Marjorie Perloff. Perloff’s attack on the “locked semantic gates” of TB is multi-tiered and determinedly contextual. In “Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp”, Perloff posits a space for Stein’s experiment alongside Dada-ists Duchamp and Jean Arp, while also granting its unique nature and inscrutable texture. Though this texture seems interpretation-proof, when Stein, for instance, talks about a carafe (“A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange…”(3)), Perloff claims that “Stein’s verbal dissection(s) give us the very essence of what we might call carafe-ness.” For Perloff, Stein is not talking “around” objects, but using language to “dissect” them, in much the same way that Picasso and Braque dissected objects, using Cubist techniques to put them back together. Or, in the same manner Arp and Duchamp “dissected” the nature of works of art by presenting “readymades”.
It would seem that Perloff’s use of the word “dissection” would make a Cubist analogy more apropos than a Dada one. TB, however, is so much like a Rorschach blot that almost anything can be made to “fit”, and the more perceptive contextualiats, like Bridgman, realize this and foreground their assertions with a central disavowal. Perloff goes on to say, “to use words responsibly, Stein implies, is to become aware that no two words, no two morphemes or phonemes for that matter, are ever exactly the same.” It could be stated, without too much hyperbole, that a discussion of literary “responsibility”, as regards TB, is an extreme stretch. This leads to the major problem contextualists have in dealing with TB; no two of them seem able to agree about even the most general framework. Thus, reading contextual criticism about TB is like looking at snowflakes; no two contextual critics say the same thing, which makes “grouping” a problem and talking of a “majority” an impossibility.
Perloff saves her most provocative card for last; she says, “long before Derrida defined difference as both difference and deferral of meaning, Stein had expressed this profound recognition.” This is a plausible interpretation, and it would seem likely that others might come to similar conclusions. However, this is not the case. Virgil Thomson takes the more centrist tack that “if (Stein’s) simplifications occasionally approached incomprehensibility, this aim was less urgent…than opening up reality…for getting an inside view.” Between Thomson and Perloff, we get opposite ends of the contextualist stance, as presented in criticism. From Perloff, we get definite, authoritatively presented analogies (Duchamp, Arp, Derrida) that seek to situate Stein and her work in a specific literary and aesthetic context. In fact, Perloff’s approach is both more definite and more authoritative than the vast majority of approaches that have been made to TB. From Thomson, we get a very anti-authoritative sentiment, which leans towards an abject-seeming generality; Thomson talks of getting an “inside view” of reality, but he cannot commit to a single or singular definition of what this reality is. He does not join in with the dissidents who argue against critical interpretation and/or the ineffable quality of this text, and in fact somewhat boldly claims to surmise Stein’s “aim”; yet, though the “why” is accounted for in his interpretation, the “what” is lightly brushed aside in a platitude. Considering that Thomson is writing, like Paul Padgette, in the prestigious New York Review of Books, it is remarkable that a platitudinous statement in this context seems par for the course. Few knew what to do with Stein and her work during her lifetime; it appears that little has changed.
WORKS CITED
Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing.
Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Dubnick, Randa. The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Gygax, Franziska. Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein. London: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Knight, Christopher. “Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, and the Premises of
Classicalism.” Modern Language Studies, 21-3 (1991): 35-47.
Mitrone, Mena. “Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein’s Tender
Buttons.” Modern Language Studies, 28-2 (1994): 87-102.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp.”
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 23-2 (1996): 137-154.
Padgette, Paul. “Tender Buttons.” New York Review of Books, 16-12 (1971).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10510.
Ruddick, Lisa. Reading Gertrude Stein. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. New York: Dover Publications, 1997.
Thomson, Virgil. “A Very Difficult Author.” New York Review of Books, 16-6 (1971).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10510. show less
How strange, then, to hear Paul Padgette make the following remark about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (TB) in the New York Review of Books: “You either get it or you don’t.” The breathtakingly blunt simplicity of this statement cuts right to the central critical crux that runs through the bulk of what has been written about TB; can it be criticized (as in, expounded upon) or can it not? Those that do engage in criticism of TB almost always do so within some contextual framework: Stein-as-Cubist, Stein-as-feminist, Stein-as-language manipulator. Others, like Padgette, are reduced by the extreme opacity of Stein’s text to a bare assertion that the text is too hermetic to be “parsed” in the normal way. It is interesting to note that the “dissidents” (as opposed to the “contextualists”) are often great fans of TB (as Padgette is), but evidently believe that the work either holds some “ineffable essence” or else must be read, first-hand, to be appreciated. That Stein’s fans (literary critics, no less), would lobby against critical discourse is a tribute both to the power and the singularity of her work.
The contextualists have a problem, too. Because TB is determinedly non-referential, any attempt at contextualization must also be rooted in an acknowledgment that the work is beyond a single contextual interpretation. As Christopher Knight noted in a 1991 article, “One can locate it in the long history of nonsense literature…in the French Cubist movement…in the Anglo-American tradition of literary modernism…and in that relatively new artistic order— the post-modern.” What is so baffling to literary critics is that, more often than not, one cannot “turn to the text” in order to verify these kinds of assertions. TB’s sense (or non-sense) is determined largely by who happens to be reading it; it is extreme enough to stymie but not as extreme as, say, Finnegan’s Wake, which by general consensus need only be touched by Joyce specialists. Simply put, there is enough sense in TB to make an attempt at locating it, but not enough so that any stated “location” could be feasible to large numbers of critics or readers. Thus, to this day, the pattern holds; dissidents argue against interpretation (and for first-hand experience), contextualists argue (with foreknowledge of “defeat”, in the sense that no contextual argument about TB in almost a century has seemed to “stick”) for a specialized interpretation. As Christopher Knight concludes, TB “embodies all…traditions even as it can be said never to be completely defined by any of them”.
The most influential writing about TB seeks to straddle the line between dissension and contextualization. Richard Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein In Pieces, more frequently cited than most Stein critical tomes, adopts something of a centrist stance. Bridgman makes clear that the ineffable quality of TB is not lost to him; the book is “all but impossible to transform adequately into normal exposition”(127) and “unusually resistant to interpretation”(125). Bridgman’s use of the word “transform” in this context is very relevant. Just as Stein’s language experiments transform conventional vernacular usage, so “normal exposition” would have to transform Stein’s language back into something resembling a normal vernacular. Bridgman’s work also points out the central critical dilemma surrounding TB; it is “all but impossible” to expound upon, but the “ineffable essence” that makes it so compelling also becomes a goad to try and expound nonetheless. “Adequately” also points to the manner in which TB turns literary critics back on themselves; critics are forced to confront the limitations of their own methodologies, criticize themselves and their own competence. Stein makes critics feel “inadequate”, and it seems likely that, were she here to see the bulk of TB criticism, this would have pleased her.
Of those brave enough to “jump into the ring” with Stein, none does so with more panache than Marjorie Perloff. Perloff’s attack on the “locked semantic gates” of TB is multi-tiered and determinedly contextual. In “Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp”, Perloff posits a space for Stein’s experiment alongside Dada-ists Duchamp and Jean Arp, while also granting its unique nature and inscrutable texture. Though this texture seems interpretation-proof, when Stein, for instance, talks about a carafe (“A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange…”(3)), Perloff claims that “Stein’s verbal dissection(s) give us the very essence of what we might call carafe-ness.” For Perloff, Stein is not talking “around” objects, but using language to “dissect” them, in much the same way that Picasso and Braque dissected objects, using Cubist techniques to put them back together. Or, in the same manner Arp and Duchamp “dissected” the nature of works of art by presenting “readymades”.
It would seem that Perloff’s use of the word “dissection” would make a Cubist analogy more apropos than a Dada one. TB, however, is so much like a Rorschach blot that almost anything can be made to “fit”, and the more perceptive contextualiats, like Bridgman, realize this and foreground their assertions with a central disavowal. Perloff goes on to say, “to use words responsibly, Stein implies, is to become aware that no two words, no two morphemes or phonemes for that matter, are ever exactly the same.” It could be stated, without too much hyperbole, that a discussion of literary “responsibility”, as regards TB, is an extreme stretch. This leads to the major problem contextualists have in dealing with TB; no two of them seem able to agree about even the most general framework. Thus, reading contextual criticism about TB is like looking at snowflakes; no two contextual critics say the same thing, which makes “grouping” a problem and talking of a “majority” an impossibility.
Perloff saves her most provocative card for last; she says, “long before Derrida defined difference as both difference and deferral of meaning, Stein had expressed this profound recognition.” This is a plausible interpretation, and it would seem likely that others might come to similar conclusions. However, this is not the case. Virgil Thomson takes the more centrist tack that “if (Stein’s) simplifications occasionally approached incomprehensibility, this aim was less urgent…than opening up reality…for getting an inside view.” Between Thomson and Perloff, we get opposite ends of the contextualist stance, as presented in criticism. From Perloff, we get definite, authoritatively presented analogies (Duchamp, Arp, Derrida) that seek to situate Stein and her work in a specific literary and aesthetic context. In fact, Perloff’s approach is both more definite and more authoritative than the vast majority of approaches that have been made to TB. From Thomson, we get a very anti-authoritative sentiment, which leans towards an abject-seeming generality; Thomson talks of getting an “inside view” of reality, but he cannot commit to a single or singular definition of what this reality is. He does not join in with the dissidents who argue against critical interpretation and/or the ineffable quality of this text, and in fact somewhat boldly claims to surmise Stein’s “aim”; yet, though the “why” is accounted for in his interpretation, the “what” is lightly brushed aside in a platitude. Considering that Thomson is writing, like Paul Padgette, in the prestigious New York Review of Books, it is remarkable that a platitudinous statement in this context seems par for the course. Few knew what to do with Stein and her work during her lifetime; it appears that little has changed.
WORKS CITED
Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing.
Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Dubnick, Randa. The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Gygax, Franziska. Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein. London: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Knight, Christopher. “Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, and the Premises of
Classicalism.” Modern Language Studies, 21-3 (1991): 35-47.
Mitrone, Mena. “Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein’s Tender
Buttons.” Modern Language Studies, 28-2 (1994): 87-102.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp.”
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 23-2 (1996): 137-154.
Padgette, Paul. “Tender Buttons.” New York Review of Books, 16-12 (1971).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10510.
Ruddick, Lisa. Reading Gertrude Stein. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. New York: Dover Publications, 1997.
Thomson, Virgil. “A Very Difficult Author.” New York Review of Books, 16-6 (1971).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10510. show less
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First published in 1915
87 works; 11 members
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Author Information
183+ Works 13,669 Members
Famous writer Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, PA and was educated at Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins medical school. Stein wrote Three Lives, The Making of Americans, and Tender Buttons, all of which were considered difficult for the average reader. She is most famous for her opera Four Saints in Three Acts and The show more Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was actually an autobiography of Stein herself. With her companion Alice B. Toklas, Stein received the French government's Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise for theory work with the American fund for French Wounded in World War I. Gertrude Stein died in Neuilly-ser-Seine, France on July 27, 1946. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Tender Buttons
- Original title
- Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms
- Original publication date
- 1914
- First words
- A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.
- Original language*
- Engels
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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