Opening thoughts:
[8] Such readings as my own "decode" the Stein poem, and in the
process assume that meaning does, in fact, inhere in
Stein's apparent non-sense, that there is a profoundly
important symbolic process at work. Yet the opposite
approach has also been taken to Stein's difficult text.
Charles Bernstein, one of the most prolific theorists among
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, argues that Stein's greatest
achievement in _Tender Buttons_ is in fact that she
abandoned the signifying function of language altogether,
evoking instead the sounds, the *non*-referentiality, of
words, "the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in
language, where language is not understood as a code for
something else or a representation of somewhere else--a
kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object
status to language" (Bernstein 143). As he sees it, the
desire to decode Stein's writing merely reflects the
reader's urge to "make sense" of the poetry--an impulse
that counters the most radical aspects of Stein's project.
It is the non-referentiality in Stein, Bernstein implies,
that has become her most important legacy to the present,
especially to poets, like those of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
group, who attempt to use their texts as a means of
bringing the whole mechanism of reference to the foreground
of writing and reading.
[9] These approaches constitute the two ends of the Steinian
critical spectrum--the desire to push her text toward
sense, especially (in recent years) a feminist one, and the
urge to embrace the radical non-meaning of her experiments
with language. Clearly a private
erotic language threatens to shut that door, and, indeed,
this significant aspect of Stein's text required a host of
feminist critics, bolstered by the advent of theorists like
Julia Kristeva, to break
the code.^13^ And, on the other hand, in Bernstein's view
of the radical non-signifying of _Tender Buttons_, the
reader is kept at a deliberate, perhaps infuriating,
distance.
Elizabeth Frost, Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette
Mullen and Leslie Scalapino
So there is this: reading or filling in Stein versus the materiality of text as and for itself, the objecthood of a language, its proximity to us, a thing in our hands. Meaning versus thingness, i.e., a thing that appears to be language or communicative, but isn’t in any way propositional, but rather embraces textures, sounds, the vibratory function of language-as-sonic structure.
Meaning in Stein – what do we mean by meaning, though? What sentences refer to? Objects in the world? What we can do with words? For the two horns above to be in opposition, there is the assumption of reference outside of Stein. That meaning is tied up with reference somehow. That sentences pick out things in the world, or usually do, or do in some way that is trackable or explainable. Suppose there is no referring. What happens to meaning? What happens to these two poles of interpretation? Don’t they collapse somewhat? Or equate somehow? If there is no referring than we can do lots of things with Stein. We can read many codes or none at all. Suppose sentences do not hook up to the world, but to each other—suppose they are like tools, as Wittgenstein often said.
I want to suggest that there are two other ways of approaching Stein: assuming non-referential meaning now, the Sonic/Musical and the speech act/textual Not mutually exclusive, not completely unlike the above, but containing a slightly different emphasis and tension. I’ll take the speech act/textual approach first.
From Waldrop Intro. “Inner Speech.” What Stein referred to as “continuous presence.” Piagatian notion, culled from Freud, that we have non-predicated sentences, or non-sentences that buzz in our heads, totally egocentric. We predicate when speech turns outward, goes back from where it came, the public domain:
Examples/Exercise:
A BOX.
Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.
A PIECE OF COFFEE.
More of double.
A place in no new table.
A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. A piece of coffee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.
The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture.
The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.
A not torn rose-wood color. If it is not dangerous then a pleasure and more than any other if it is cheap is not cheaper. The amusing side is that the sooner there are no fewer the more certain is the necessity dwindled. Supposing that the case contained rose-wood and a color. Supposing that there was no reason for a distress and more likely for a number, supposing that there was no astonishment, is it not necessary to mingle astonishment.
The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating. Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not be strange in everything. May not be strange to.
Turn this into “outward speech,” i.e., predicate it, fill it in. What would this look
like?
Many possibilities. Possibility, here, is the “free play” afforded by continuous presence. Inner speech, non-predicated speech is in contemporary poetic parlance:
1) Non-clousural
2) Non-referring, non-representational
Stein lines are like this. Again, what can we do with a Stein sentence. We can do almost limitless things. This is to say we are not dealing in nonsense, but an alternative grammar, as Wittgenstein would have it. What we might call, in echo of Chomskian linguistics, associative grammar. Text on a page wide open for free play, for association, lines that are begging for a grammatical arrangement, perhaps cognitive output prior to grammatical arrangement.
The language game here allows us to decode, but to decode in a large, but finite set of ways. The erotic is one way. Reading Tender Buttons as a story about a horse with wings is a less likely way, but not provably impossible. So there are limits of acceptance, not limits imposed by logic alone.
Arun Chandra said to me in a parking lot: “Predication and modifiers reduces interpretation to a given.” Which is to say the reader is left out, or the reader’s imaginative input is stifled, the reader’s potential to construct the work is instead turned into a situation in which the reader is passively intercepted by a set of givens. He was speaking specifically of the use of adjectives in my way of talking politics. Pigeon-holing the other for reasons that lie orthogonal to describing the enemy.
What would Fish [the normative American literary scholar, theorist, etc] do with regard to interpreting Tender Buttons? “The meaning of an utterance is the speaker’s intention.” You often hear this. From Stanley Fish. From Monroe Beardsley. What is Stein’s intention? How could one possibly read that and come up with a local interpretation, or hermeneutics for Stein? One possibility: Stein is meaningless and therefore interpretation is impossible. Or maybe: Stein’s intention is to obfuscate. That is what Tender Buttons is. Obfuscation. Reading a code. Filling Stein in. All of these have a champion. Which shows the radical nature of Stein’s project in the context of the early twentieth century.
Similes do similar things. For instance, what is the difference between:
So full of life, bursting, he was like herpes
He was like herpes
He was herpes
He herpes he the life bursting full so full.
Stein, especially in Tender Buttons and poems like Tender Buttons, is seen as the “mother of post-modernism,” sure, but why? What’s post-modern about Stein? Her poems show individual excess and a relationship to genius that smack of high modernism, even Victorianism, Enlightment thinking, a staunch naturalism tending towards libertarianism and a flirtation with fascism. But there is a legacy of left post-modernism, a kind of approach to the tools Stein left us, despite her troubling political (or even apolitical) positions:
1) Praxis: reader=writer=dissolution of the individuated subject, personhood, interrogation of normative grammars.
2) Examination of the sound elements of language, i.e., English as a musical language.
Regarding Praxis, first. How did Stein get there? What was her concern and method of “making the reader finish the work.”? From “What are Master-pieces and Why There Are So Few of Them.”:
All this sounds awfully complicated but it is not complicated at all, it is just what happens. Any of you when you write you try to remember what you are about to write and you will see immediately how lifeless the writing becomes that is why expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered, that is why illustration is so dull because you remember what somebody looked like and you make your illustration look like it. The minute your memory functions while you are doing anything it may be very popular but actually it is dull. And that is what a master-piece is not, it may be unwelcome but it is never dull.
And so then why are there so few of them. There are so few of them because mostly people live in identity and memory that is when they think. They know they are they because their little dog knows them, and so they are not an entity but an identity. And being so memory is necessary to make them exist and so they cannot create master-pieces. It has been said of geniuses that they are eternally young. I once said what is the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man, the boy and the man have nothing to do with each other, except in respect to memory and identity, and if they have anything to do with each other in respect to memory and identity then they will never produce a master-piece. Do you do you understand well it really does not make much difference because after all master-pieces are what they are and the reason why is that there are very few of them. The reason why is any of you try it just not to be you are you because your little dog knows you. The second you are you because your little dog knows you you cannot make a master-piece and that is all of that.
So, for Stein, it isn’t all that interesting to write from memory about things. To write about things at all. That’s nostalgic. And nostalgia is sappy and boring, in fact tyrannical by some accounts. A way to write something sharp is to be arrested by what you yourself wrote. To do that you need to figure out tricks to forgetting—to live in a continuous presence. As Samual Becket writes in Company: “Memories are killing.” To get to the interesting shit, such that aboutness gives way to a poetics of praxis, one must kill off the traditional notion of the author, and the author’s history mistaken for history tout court.
This is how the New York LANGUAGE school poets read Stein. A radical rethinking of what poetry can be and/or ought to be doing. The first salvo: fuck Robert Frost’s miles to go before he sleeps. Stein is where it’s at. And H.D. And Zukofsky. And Oppen, sometimes. And others. Here we have a model for collaborative work, work that falls well outside of the comfort zone of the bougoise and yet is born of that context.
There’s a sociopolitical, Marxist implication here, which is as much an accident of history as something for which Stein can be said to be responsible.
This is similar, as we’ll see by week 8, to Adorno’s observation about Beckett: his work expresses the outmoded notion of personhood. In a world of catastrophic groupthink, the individual is liquidated. To write happily along without wrestling with this fact is bad faith, bad writing, writing that takes on the form of the good old days which probably never existed. To wrestle with this fact, however, is to do so as a formal biproduct of culture, not some report about what’s going on. Carol Novack, a writer and editor, said to me over the phone last night: “yeah, it’s the tyranny of realism. It’s an American thing.”
Here’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about muddy terrain and wrestling with the liquidation of human beings and all that sounds too post-apocalyptically academic. From Juliana Spahr on Stein:
In this world there might be two sorts of Stein readers: those who can hear music in the repetition and the atypical syntax and those who just hear mud.
I seem to have the dyslexia that lets me hear Stein more clearly than poets known for their following of conventions of clarity. Frequently when I go to job interviews, someone says, in voice most likely filled with concern or at times disdain or both, why are you interested in all this avant garde stuff? At moments, I want to answer with a suave simplicity that resembles what Stein herself said when asked how she felt about modern art: “I like to look at it” (Lectures 59). But I think if I really wanted to answer this question I would have to tell this story that begins like this, the town I grew up in was ugly and dirty because its only industry was a papermill with several smoke stacks and my mother owned a few books because she taught English. But because the town was dirty, whenever I read poems about the beauty of the English countryside or New England woods, which was all I knew about because the only poems we read in school were a few by Wordsworth and Robert Frost, they made little sense to me. So then I went and found this stuff by Stein in this anthology that my mother had from when she took an American lit survey course at the local community college, and because I was looking for something that didn’t seem to be telling some sort of weird optimistic story about nature, and because this stuff by Stein was so weird it didn’t seem to be trying to cover over the smoke stacks, so I clung to it.
Which, incidentally, gets me to the Sonic/Musical reading of Stein. A touch near performance. Think of symphonic work. Think John Cage. Imagine Four Walls live. Much has written about Stein’s relationship to impressionism in the visual arts, but there is also what we can call an early citation of musical expressionism in her work, one that, as with Arnold Schoenberg, a sound-language is presumed to have its own meaning, its own rules for interpretation, etc, a difficult language to be sure, but something which perhaps gets to the consciousness in ways other work cannot. Stein can be thought of as music, or that which falls between music and speech. Recall Zukofsky’s “A.”
Now, let’s read some Stein:
Exercise: read Stein passages first at differing tempi, then in discordant harmony, then in different parts of the room.
Notice the comparison between Stein, and Schoenberg, or even Cage, say:
1) Lack of tonal center
2) The urge to create a tonal, syntactic or thematic center (gets us back to filling in Stein)
3) The interrogation of traditional assumptions about what music can or ought to be.
What would it mean to “interpret Stein’s music?”
Compare: “what would it mean to interpret Beethoven’s Seventh?”
Perform it. Translate it. Where “it” is not a closed system, but something for which there are myriad possibilities. Not endless possibilities. But very, very many. Such that the question: “what is the correct interpretation?” is a category error.
The contemporary reaction/appropriation
Though a radical force and major influence on left-oriented, or in any case politically interested poets and fiction writers such as those from the LANGUAGE school, there is also a disquieting legacy in Stein. That of the emancipation from cultural realities and inequities, those of Stein’s time, for example: issues of class and its relation to war, colonialism, and so forth (The Unibomber Poetics). One might say, as Michael Gold and many Stein critics did, that her writing is a product of a leisure class, galavanting with daddy’s money and an abuse of that situation in the form of taking it for granted. Her rumination on the atomic bomb may be a case in point. I wouldn’t argue this point, other than to say that for us now, in a time of such urgency, the point is beside the point. This, for modern avant-garde feminists such as Spahr, Haryette Mullen, and Anne Heide, among others indebted to Stein but politically engaged, is a chance to do precisely not what The Facts of Life says to do (to take the good AND take the bad), but rather to insist that the Steinian poetic, her approach to line and form as well as language-as-music can hook up to complicated sociopolitical matters.
Again, from Elizabeth Frost:
Breaking the rules of syntax, denotation, and
logic, _Tender Buttons_, by either approach, surely
qualifies as what we might call a "subversive" text,
overturning linguistic conventions and forging a distinctly
new form from the seemingly intractable material of
everyday words. Yet Stein's poetic experiment remains
separate from the social and political realms that
avant-garde artists of her day addressed in their highly
polemical and disorienting art and manifestoes. One need
only compare _Tender Buttons_ to any number of Marinetti's
pronouncements, or even Breton's first surrealist manifesto, to
see the extent to which Stein insisted on the privacy of
her language.
——————————————
From Mullen:
Her red and white, white and blue banner manner. Her red and
white all over black and blue.
Hannah's bandanna flagging her down in the kitchen with Dinah,
with Jemima. Someone in
the kitchen I know. (Tr 11)
From Frost:
The "bandanna" and the Jemima figure suggest stereotypes
of black women. Mullen has suggested to me that even
though such images are most likely drawn from the white
minstrel tradition, they constitute nonetheless a powerful
"pseudo-black folklore" that has shaped views of blackness
in America. By refusing to exclude even these
representations from her own language, Mullen implies that
there is an important source for this language, one that
needs to be traced: such images get constructed both from
our "red, white and blue" national identity and from the
politics of violence ("all over black and blue"), also
based on color. In the "blues" alluded to here, another
kind of "folklore" is also conjured, one that may seem more
"genuine" or "authentic" than that of Hannah and Jemima.
But Mullen's text refuses to make clear distinctions among
the sources for what she calls her "recycled" language.
This word-play reclaims all and any expressions that
concern women's cultural "place" (literally, the "kitchen,"
repeated twice in this brief passage) in the service of an
explicit critique of those words that serve as designations
to divide black from white--and different women from each
other.
Which is to say that if we are poets writing in English interested in the avant-garde, poets today, we cannot help but be indebted in some way to Stein. Our challenge, if we are at all concerned with the Marxist-feminist critique of Stein’s corpus, is Mullens’s and Lisa Robertson’s, Didi Mendez’s, Juliana Spahr’s, that of incorporating the radical lessons of Steinian poetics into our own new ventures, while resisting the urge to retreat fully into mere “radicalism,” i.e., self-indulgent radicalism. But of course we can say this of any profession, any person. It is easy to single out the artists—this is a mistake of a culture that, even in its degraded state, fetishes artists while starving them. So, with this challenge comes the caution that we need not be poets to feel the obligation of militancy when militancy is so obviously called for.