“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.
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