Notes on Tender Buttons

Patrick Mooney
English 235
12 October 2011

Like Tom, I've spent a good portion of the week trying to build a Wittgensteinian poetics as a scaffold for reading Gertrude Stein, but I've found Perloff less helpful than he has in doing so. The comments in chapter two on the Philosophical Investigations are useful, but the reading of Stein, I think, is less successful. While the close readings of the poems are helpful, I think that she's forcing her argument in certain places. More specifically, I think that she fails to draw the full implications of some of her theorizing on Wittgenstein, and that she waffles back and forth in places on method.

For instance: her readings sometimes seem to focus on hermeneutic methods for extracting coded meaning: she says towards the end of her discussion that Stein stages the subject's self-exposure (105). Is this what Wittgensteinian language-games do? The presumption seems to be that the poem communicates a meaning in a coded sense, and this seems hard to reconcile with statements like if a lion could talk, we would not understand him (PI #223, which Perloff cites on page 74 of her text). Perloff herself says that Wittgenstein [emphasizes] the solipsism central to human life (77). Or she discusses gender coding in Stein briefly several times (e.g., 86) as if (part of) our interpretive task is to uncover the coded references to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures, as Foucault puts it in the last few pages of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (p. 152 in my cheap British edition) -- but this seems incongruous for the writer who has quoted Wittgenstein (on p. 72) as saying, philosophical observation does not give us any new facts.

Perloff's selection method seems to need more justification (why select just those particular mentions of sugar, but not others?). If Language is a labyrinth of paths (PI 203, qtd. on Perloff 80), are we then to take the choice of interpretive details as one that we can undertake with indifference? Do not some paths, after all, pass closer to the center of the thicket? -- or reach a destination more quickly? -- or just have a nicer view? Speaking more broadly, the shifting interpretive frames invoked by applying close reading, biographical allusion, language games, Shklovsky's defamiliarization, and various other interpretive lenses seems to leave surprisingly little room for paying attention to what the language itself is actually doing and to focus on finding essentialist references embedded in a text.

Or: Perloff cites PI #500 (When a sentence is called senseless […] a combination of words is being excluded from the language) on p. 84, then begins a close reading by speculating about which words have been withdrawn from circulating in the sentence Roast potatoes for. But a clearer reading of PI 500, given the context of the previous passage from PI (which Perloff also quotes), seems to indicate that Wittgenstein is gesturing toward a more generalized drawing of linguistic boundary lines by examining practical domains that specify legitimate and illegitimate word usages. (Each tool in the toolbox is traditionally used in certain ways.) Questioning which words have been withdrawn from the phrase Roast potatoes for, though provocative and in some ways insightful, seems to start out by making a basic interpretive misstep, because it misses one of the basic points of its theoretical text.

More generally: What does Perloff's extended discussion of Stein actually get her (and us)? There is a pair of claims that more or less bracket the essay: She writes near the beginning that what has not been sufficiently recognized is that, in Stein's particular case, issues of gender are closely linked to those of exile (86) near the beginning of her discussion of Stein, after language has been problematized. And Perloff says near the end that the traditional feminist readings of Stein as antipatriarchal, antiauthoritarian, nonlinear, and oblique lesbian miss the point because in Stein's case, such specific gender construction is never the whole story. (111) Are we to take this as a basic thesis advanced by the text? If so, how much does the rest of the chapter actually advance this idea?

There are other bracketing pairs that could be suggested, but I think that similar objections could be made about all of them. This is related, I think, to the way that Perloff's close readings are nuanced but often seem to lead nowhere. The counting of phonemes and tracking of their rearrangements in the potato poems, for instance, leads only to the rather disappointing conclusion that in this 'poetry game,' the locution makes rather good sense (85). Despite the close analysis, we're not told in what way the locution makes sense, what makes it a good move in the language game of poetry. There are occasional other problems that suggest that some of the implications of Perloff's own ideas have not been fully thought out, such as problems with phrasing. (Was Virginia Woolf best described as a homosexual writer (92), even if all that we're trying to specify with the description is her career path and sexual orientation?)

Perhaps the way through some of these problems is to read the linguistic strangeness, what Perloff calls Stein's fabled obscurity, as a function of what we might call her hyperrealism (104-5). This ties in with Inez's comments about cubism, and this hyperrealism can then be seen as an analogue to cubism, a way of representing sense impressions rather than the mental concepts that result from processing them -- which may or may not imply that Tender Buttons can (or should) be read as a stream-of-consciousness work. But doesn't Perloff's metaphor of obscurity imply again that what is needed is clarification, a hermeneutic effort? What happened to the notion of language as something that might allow us to build bridges, but which doesn't break our essential solipsism?

Alternately, perhaps we should see Perloff's text as a language-game whose aim is to work out Stein's language-games, and this is perhaps the fairer reading of Perloff. But, if this is the case, then how are we to take Perloff's constant attempts to ground her readings of Stein in terms of Stein's biography? It seems that the question of reading always seems to return to the facts of biography and finding ways to disencode the text so as to uncover them. In this case, the question of what is actually gained seems to have a somewhat better answer -- a better understanding of Stein's language-games -- but are we really being shown the way outside the bottle in this case?

Formal Characteristics of Stein's Writing

Perloff makes a number of useful observations about the formal features of Stein's writing:

• Formal attention to grammar, rooted in alienation from both the mother and adopted tongues. (87)
  • This is later referred to as a destruction of syntax (101).
• An act of distancing from dependence on nouns and adjectives, with a preference for verbs, pronouns, and connecting particles (89-91).
  • A preference for abstract rather than concrete nouns, when nouns are used. (100)
• It is characterized by an extreme form of literalism (92), later called hyperrealism (105). This hyperrealism is claimed to be the motive force for Stein's fabled obscurity (105).
• An avoidance of infinitive verb forms. (100)

It is my hope that grounding a discussion in these formal characteristics might help to do a better job of digging into how we're to read Stein's text than Perloff has done. Like Meaghan, I'd like to spend some time with at least some of Rooms. In the spirit of discussing family resemblances and beginning again and again, I think we might also focus on the Food poems with similar or repeated titles: the four CHICKEN. poems (p. 35 in my edition, the bookstore-stocked Dover Thrift, ISBN 0-486-29897-3), the four consecutive poems whose titles are ORANGE. or variations on it (p. 38), and the two SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE. poems (38-9).

References and Selected Related Works