Stein's Use of Word Types to Emphasize Language Subversion in "Tender Buttons"

“Stein’s insight was that the reader was only aware of grammar when it was subverted.” – Jonah Lerer, “Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language” (p. 163)

 “Suppose a man a realistic expression of resolute reliability suggests pleasing itself white all white and no head does that mean soap.” – Gertrude Stein, “Objects” (p. 11)

     It’s easy to write gibberish, but it’s very difficult to write a style of gibberish that selectively breaks specific grammatical rules in such a way that it draws attention to the linguistic structure that lies beneath and holds it together. This is the difference we observe in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Lerer writes in his article on Stein’s intricately subversive style: “By flirting with absurdity, Stein forced us to acknowledge what Skinner ignored: the innate structure of language” (157). But how does one flirt with absurdity without being simply, and merely, absurd? It comes down to context.

     Lerer notes, “In her writing, [Stein] shows us that our grammar only calls for the use of certain kinds of words in certain kinds of contexts” (158). It is in isolating and utilizing these separate kinds of words and contexts that Stein most effectively communicates her point. She plays with connective phrases, cause-and-effect relationships of words, and other abstract linguistic devices. However, less subtly, she also drops incongruous words into places where expectations have been established for words of another kind. Making these moments stand out is crucial for Stein’s purpose; in order to draw attention to the way our expectations have been manipulated and subsequently subverted, she must carefully select words that contain a certain quality.

     This quality, I argue, is a sensory specificity and immediacy coupled with simplicity. The quote excerpted above serves as a good example. Here, Stein opens a sentence with one of her favorite words in Tender Buttons: “suppose.” This introduction sets up forward momentum, creating a relatively self-contained and hypothetical milieu for the words to follow. What follows here is a series of abstract ideas—words such as “realistic” and “resolute” and “reliability” and “suggests” and “pleasing” and “mean”—that blend together, creating the sense of “reading without remembering” that Lerer claims is so crucial to Stein’s work. This blending is accomplished due to the nature of the words, which carry a lot of definitional weight without much sensory aid. (Put another way, they are more mental than sensual.) Dealing with mental states and internal emotions and intentions, they cut a stark contrast to the final word in the sentence: “soap.” This word falls into the category I have identified as Stein’s secret weapon, the specific yet simple. Soap is highly visual, even a little tactile; it has the sensory quality lacked by the preceding words. It is evocative, but also blunt, obvious, and plain. It stands out like a shapeless flash of light. It calls attention to the structure of the sentence we have been blindly following. It is Stein’s way of saying, “Look what you have been reading!”

     Stein uses words of this type very frequently in Tender Buttons, usually to the same purpose. They are like signposts calling our attention to aspects of structure that Stein has flipped upside down—crucial, then, to her purpose. This category of words contains several classes: domestic imagery is one; colors is another. It is no surprise that Stein has titled her chapters “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms.” These serve as decent labels for her groups of signal words. Their common traits are their obvious sensory qualities—for example, the visual aspect of colors, the taste, smell, and sight of foods—as well as their almost mundane simplicity. Words like “hair brushing” and “eye-glasses” appear in unexpected places, and rather than conjure up strange new images or ideas, they merely assert themselves in their incongruity and fade.

     There are some outliers, naturally: a word like “sand” is not domestic, colorful, or edible—yet it has the same qualities necessary to be considered one of this kind of word, and it serves a comparable purpose as the concluding image in the opening paragraph of Stein’s “Food” chapter:

“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 steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.”

This paragraph begins characteristically (if there can be a common characteristic to Stein’s writing), with a more complex vocabulary of words that tend toward the abstract, representing mental states, emotions, and complex actions. These soon trail into the domestic images of “curtains” and “bed linen,” and the color yellow, and the simple shape of a circle. Ending on “sand” is the final punch, especially with its placement in the sentence. “This makes _____” implies an encompassing, concluding, synthesizing thought. By supplanting such a thought with “sand,” Stein not only says something about the two words that precede it, but comments on the paragraph as a whole, and, by extension, on written language in general.

     Virtually any sentence or paragraph in Tender Buttons can be analyzed this way. I have explored only a tiny element of Stein’s masterful subversion of language. Her separation of words into functional classes is fascinating to observe, and it raises questions about how we might define boundaries for such classes, or whether even the act of separating words into classes might be itself subverted. These would be complex questions indeed.

Life Without Our Lens: Animism in Poetry

“[E]ven apparently ordinary animism conceals deeper social motivations.” – Vermeule, “The Cognitive Dimension (p. 27)

 “After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn” – John Berryman, “Dream Song 14” (lines 2-3)

     For a poem about the boredom of life, John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14” is astonishingly rich in detail and nuance. One’s immediate reaction to such a poem must be, if life, literature, and art are so boring, why is the author writing this poem in the first place? Perhaps out of boredom—it is the product of a bored mind, unrolling language onto the page with an intricate skill that, however, it seems to deem useless. Alternatively, the author may be making a comment on human expectations of life and the world, and how our tendency to project ourselves onto our environment produces a false sense of our surroundings—a sense that the poem deftly deconstructs.

     Whatever his intention, Berryman begins by breaking rules. “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so,” proclaims the first line. From here, the author proceeds to do exactly what one apparently must not do, which is to say that life is boring. Berryman’s rule breaking permeates every stanza of the poem, from his oscillation between the word “and” and the ampersand, to his improper use of word forms. A mother speaks “repeatingly” instead of “repeatedly.” “Peoples” bore the author. The phrase “which bores me” in line 13 ambiguously refers to either “people” and “art,” or just “art.” The last line contains a dissolved, broken sentence: “me, wag,” all that remains of what was once a dog and a man and some kind of unknown connection between them.

     This connection holds important significance. Throughout the poem, Berryman makes comments on the human penchants for animism and assigning agency. In lines 2 and 3 cited above, he writes a sort of explanatory sentence that implies a relationship between the flashing of the sky and yearning of the sea, and the flashing and yearning of ourselves. The coupling of a dehumanized verb in “flash” and a humanized very in “yearn” to illustrate the human process of anthropomorphism emphasizes an inherent instability. As Vermeule says, citing Guthrie, “We anthropomorphize because guessing that the world is humanlike is a good bet” (22). It is an adaptive trait. And, according to Berryman, it leaves one with false expectations of a decidedly non-humanlike world. The unfinished sentence in lines 2 and 3, which, by its initiation with the expression “After all,” ostensibly serves to justify the preceding line: “We must not say [that life is boring’.” But what justification does Berryman provide in pointing out the human tendency to anthropomorphize? On the surface, it would seem that animating the environment makes it less boring. However, the rest of the poem proves this to be a clearly insufficient explanation, and indeed, Berryman does not even end the sentence, moving into line 4 with: “and moreover…” The unresolved sentence structure hints at the unresolved point that has been made.

     The poem continues to unravel in a similar way. The enjambment ending the first stanza results in a gaping pause before the phrase “Inner Resources,” which, while emphasized by both this prioritized placement and dual capital letters, is soon demoted by its lack in the author and a decapitalization in the next line. These inner resources may refer to the conceptual primitives that Vermeule discusses—our cognitive toolkit that allows us to view the world through a human lens. Without these devices, the author observes a dreadfully boring world, one in which literature and heroes have no value.

     The final stanza completes the themes introduced in the first. Berryman writes, “somehow a dog / has taken itself & its tail considerably away,” attributing agency to a beast whose intentions can never be fully understood if they exist at all. Here, the dog joins the “mountains or sea or sky,” recalling the entities animated earlier. With all of these “taken away,” in effect symbolizing the removal of the humanizing lens and conceptual primitives, the author is left behind with a crippled fragment of language: “me, wag.” This ending may be interpreted at least two ways. By illustrating what life can be reduced to—mere selfhood and a meaningless verb—Berryman may be affirming his conception of the life’s essential boredom. When we strip away our human tendencies to animate and anthropomorphize, we are left with practically nothing. Alternatively, Berryman may be asserting the absolute necessity of viewing life through this lens, for the very same reason: without it, we have nothing to relate to, nothing to create meaning. The poem, like many of its sentences, leaves itself hanging. Its interpretation remains open for us to insert ourselves in whatever way we choose.

Moments of Empathy in Persuasion

“When cultural representations push our mind-reading adaptations to what feels like their limits…, we might find ourselves in rather emotionally suggestive moods. …[A] momentary cognitive vertigo induced by the multiple mind-embedment may render us increasingly ready either to laugh or to quake with apprehension.” – Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (p. 31)

 “Anne sighed and blushed and smiled, in pity and disdain, either at her friend or herself.—The part which provoked her most, was that in all this waste of foresight and caution, she should have lost the right moment for seeing whether he saw them.” – Jane Austen, Persuasion (p. 169)

     There are numerous instances in Persuasion in which Anne is rendered emotionally drained by forces exerted on her mind. Many of these are the result of surprises and revelations, which elicit an automatic reaction that tends to leave her momentarily incapacitated. One such moment occurs in the passage excerpted above. Anne has spotted Captain Wentworth on the other side of the road, and she notices Lady Russell’s eyes directed in that general area. The narrator observes:

“She could thoroughly comprehend the sort of fascination he must possess over Lady Russel’s mind, the difficulty it must be for her to withdraw her eyes, the astonishment she must be feeling that eight or nine years should have passed over him, and in foreign climes and in active service too, without robbing him of one personal grace!” (169)

Immediately after this, Lady Russell makes a comment that reveals she has been examining the other side of the road in search of a certain style of curtains. Anne then experiences the rush of emotion excerpted above. She has been engaged intently in the process of mind-reading, thinking that she has accurately understood Lady Russell’s inner thoughts and impressions. The revelation of her mistake prompts the sigh, blush, and smile—which we, as readers, ourselves read to indicate the emotions running through Anne. This example illustrates Zunshine’s assertion from Why We Read Fiction. Engaging in the process of mind-reading may induce a certain emotional susceptibility.

     Austen seems to link these moments of emotion with important plot events. Almost every time something important comes to the surface, Anne experiences a mental rush. This likely derives from the plot itself, which boils down to a series of misunderstandings and concealed intentions that conspire to keep Anne and Captain Wentworth apart. Each instance of revelation, therefore, lifts the curtain a little higher on this web of connections between mental states. The scene with Mrs. Smith, in which the circumstances of Mr. Elliot’s past are laid bare, is a prime example of this (Chapter 21). By unveiling these mental connections in discrete moments, Austen allows her readers to participate in Anne’s narrative: we are learning the information at the same time as she is. Her reactions on the page, described with such physical detail, prompt the reader’s empathy. We read her mind while she is reading others’.

     Zunshine explores how dense a web of mental connections can become before it begins to dissolve. According to cited studies, “people have marked difficulties processing stories that involve mind-reading above the fourth level” (29). The connections between characters in Persuasion certainly go beyond four degrees of separation, and, as discussed above, this confusion of intention and meaning contributes to the powerful moments that Austen inserts into the text.

     A distinction worth noting that Zunshine makes is that this four-level limit applies only to mental states. People can follow rather easily simple successions of events. In the pivotal scene near the end of the novel, for example, Mrs. Smith outlines a path of information from Mr. Elliot to Anne: “Mr. Elliot talks unreservedly to Colonel Wallis of his views on you—which said Colonel Wallis I imagine to be in himself a sensible, careful, discerning sort of character; but Colonel Wallis has a very pretty silly wife, to whom he tells things which he had better not, and he repeats it all to her nurse; and the nurse, knowing my acquaintance with you, very naturally brings it all to me” (192). The information moves through five people on its way to Anne, but this revelation does not prompt any sort of emotional reaction. It is only when Anne comes to understand the relationship between Mr. Elliot’s intentions and his actions, and how he has deceived her family by various means, that she feels the chill of realization.

     Because the novel operates so closely on the often blurred relationship between intention and action, moments of revelation coupled with narrative empathy work well to drive the plot and steer the story toward its conclusion. Austen’s use of this device may go beyond marking the progress of the plot, however. It serves also to develop Anne as a character and encourage empathy through the use of emotionally loaded physical descriptions. When we see Anne’s body making gestures of distress, we engage in automatic mind-reading. Because we are actually experiencing many of the same emotions due to the perspective Austen has given us in the story—that of following Anne’s mind as she discovers information—this technique proves especially effective.

Indirectness in Jane Austen's Persuasion

“No sooner had such an end been reached, than Anne, who had been a most attentive listener to the whole, left the room, to seek the comfort of cool air for her flushed cheeks; and as she walked along a favourite grove, said, with a gentle sigh, ‘a few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here.” – Jane Austen, Persuasion (p. 25)

 “The plot owes much of its tension, in fact, to the ongoing threat that feelings which can be read only haphazardly, through momentary glimpses, or indirectly, through their bodily manifestations, can always be misread.” – Alan Richardson, “Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion” (p. 152)

     Jane Austen and her characters do a lot of hinting in Persuasion. Austen foreshadows the dramatic event of Louisa Musgrove’s head injury with a similar incident in Chapter 7, when one of the children suffers a bad fall: “they suspected great injury, but knew not where” (51). For the boy, the damage turns out to be physical only; his mental capacities appear undiminished, and he recovers with Anne’s aid. The effects of Miss Musgrove’s fall are thus set in contrast: “Louisa’s limbs had escaped. There was no injury but to the head.” The earlier event lays the way for a more serious one later on.

     Beyond the devices of plot, Austen employs a distinct prose style that utilizes indirectness to create hints which contribute to both a sense of pervasive uncertainty and a degree of suspense, as Alan Richardson maintains in his article “Of Heartache and Head Injury.” Austen frequently writes a form of indirect dialogue, in which passages are contained within quotation marks and yet read like third-person narration. For example, in Chapter 15, a collective quote describes the buzz of conversation that occurs among members of the household in Bath after a knock sounds at the door. By altering her structure to accommodate a sort of blend of narration and dialogue, Austen avoids directness and instead fosters a sense of disconnected suspense. Because the words remain unattributed, they convey more realistically the atmosphere of the moment and create a more distinct impression.

     Austen also makes use of italics to hint at underlying emotions. When Anne is pondering which of the Miss Musgroves may capture Captain Wentworth’s fancy, Austen writes: “she knew not now, whether the more gentle or the more lively character were more likely to attract him” (69). Such emphasis implies that one character will indeed win out over the other. This functions less to illuminate anything about the merits of the Miss Musgroves, than to set up the more concrete seduction of Captain Wentworth and foreshadow his further emotional distance from Anne.

     Anne herself is shown to make several hints, even through the third-person narration that inhabits, at some level, her conscious mind. When describing Mr. Elliot, Austen’s narrator says, “His manners were so exactly what they ought to be, so polished, so easy, so particularly agreeable, that she could compare them in excellence to only one person’s manners” (134). In a later moment with Mr. Elliot, Austen writes: “He gave her to understand that he had looked at her with some earnestness. She knew it well; and she remembered another person’s look also” (139). These allusions to Captain Wentworth serve to emphasize Anne’s tentative manner of thinking. Even through the extension of consciousness embodied in the narrative’s free indirect discourse; Anne represses her feelings for him so scrupulously that at times she cannot even mention Captain Wentworth by name.

     Richardson argues that Anne’s moments of unconsciousness function in the novel as a means to reveal her truer inner thoughts and impressions. He adds, “Her periods of dislocation mark the collision of conscious awareness with unconscious thoughts and feelings and the intense physiological sensations that accompany them” (149). She frequently pauses to recover from a surge of feeling that leaves her physically depleted. Austen makes her heroine’s nature clear: “Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not” (46). When she loses herself in emotion, she lets go of the repressed thoughts that churn inside of her, and these thoughts come to the surface by various narrative means. Austen’s use of hints and indirectness stands out as a method of revealing what lies hidden in her character’s heart of hearts. One must wonder, of course, whether the thoughts that sneak out in moments of emotion are really our true thoughts—whether our conscious or unconscious mind is the true representation of ourselves. By blending them in her prose, Austen implies that the distinction is more than a little blurred.