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18yflK 821.111-3 CraMH 2.08
Natalia Bogynia
Dnipropetrovsk National University
READING GERTRUDE STEIN'S TENDER BUTTONS:
No matter how variegated and reckless the canvas of the «explosive» twentieth century art experiments is, no matter how many outstanding geniuses who have dramatically changed the course of the entire human culture evolution, it granted to the world, it is difficult to find a more controversial and ambiguous figure than Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) on it. The article is devoted to the analysis of critical readings of the innovative poetics of Tender Buttons, a prose poetry collection (1914), one of Gertrude Stein's best and most enigmatic works. The aim of this work is to outline the main trends of Anglo-American studies of Tender Buttons, thus engaging the Ukrainian readers and experts in literary criticism into interpretation of this challenging and ambiguous literary text.
The topicality of the abstract is conditioned first and foremost by the insufficient attention to the works of one of the greatest twentieth century innovative writers in soviet and post-soviet literary studies in general and Ukrainian scholarship in particular. If more «conventional» works by Gertrude Stein, such as Three Lives, The Making of Americans and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are at least mentioned in textbooks and anthologies, Tender Buttons is omitted even there. Gertrude Stein is primary known as the creator of the "lost generation" metaphor, devoted supporter of modernist artists (Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others) and the author of unreadable experimental texts1. Gertrude Stein's experimental works haven't attracted sufficient attention of Ukrainian scholars; her works are almost unknown to the general public, as up to now none of them has been translated into Ukrainian («Melanctha» from Three Lives, published in Vsesvit [2] being the only exception). As a direct consequence of this the whole picture of the American twentieth century literary process in general and modernism in particular is distorted.
The insights of American scholars into ambiguous nature of Tender Buttons have a long and rather tumultuous history. The researchers are still arguing about the nature of aesthetic originality of this work. Attempts to classify different approaches and outline central vectors of Tender
1 See, for instance the title of a recent article by a prominent Russian professor Books Not Intended for Reading [1] which exactly characterizes the direction of postSoviet Stein studies ("Stein rejection" seems to be a more proper definition).
Buttons interpretations are also relevant to modern Anglo-American Stein studies.
B. F. Skinner's paper Has Gertrude Stein a Secret? (1934) will make a good beginning of any review of Tender Buttons critical interpretations. A well-known psychologist, one of Behaviorism founders, argues here that automatic writing makes the basis of the experimental poetics of Tender Buttons, thus reducing innovate artistic searching of the writer to merely a psychological experiment. At the same time Skinner highlights memory ignoring as a very important feature of the poetics of this text: "... our hypothetical author shows no sign of a personal history or of a cultural background; Tender Buttons is the stream of consciousness of a woman without a past. The writing springs from no literary sources. In contrast with the work of Joyce, to whom a superficial resemblance may be found, the borrowed phrase is practically lacking" [13, 67]. This observation is very important, as the attempts to render human consciousness before memory mechanisms are involved is the key aspect of Gertrude Stein's "continuous present" principle, which differentiates it from "high" modernism "stream of consciousness", where memory plays a crucial part.
However, in general Skinner's interpretation demonstrates one extremity into which some researchers have fallen and are still falling from time to time: trying to approach Gertrude Stein's artistic work as a psychologically bound experimentation. I am far from claiming that trying herself as a professional psychologist in her young years and having the "school" of William James at her background, hasn't influenced Stein-the writer. Studying psychology, being well acquainted with the important discoveries made at the beginning of the XX century by William James, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and other philosophers and psychologists definitely influenced Gertrude Stein's artistic searching, defined some key aspects of her innovative writing. But to treat her works just from 'psychological' point of view is an unconstructive way, which limits and distorts the general perspective of Gertrude Stein's innovative artistic discoveries. It makes fiction writing a kind of exercise, practical course of Psychology, which is definitely not the case with Gertrude Stein. Fortunately, such approach had been repeatedly and thoroughly refuted by various researchers.
Another 'extremity' in Tender Buttons interpretation is an attempt to approach a work of fiction exclusively through the prism of fine art, particularly Cubism, and this tendency is still vibrant. See, for instance, John Malcolm Brinnin's interpretation of Tender Buttons as "... wholly a product of cubism dispensation" [3, xii] Michael Hoffman perceives Tender
Buttons almost the same way: "What she wanted to do in her emulation of the cubist painters, was to develop, exclusive of the inherent symbolic nature of words, a written art form without a mimetic relationship to the external world except through certain suggestive devices"[7, 162]. Marjorie Perloff compares still lives of Tender Buttons to cubistic ready-mades -Meret Oppenheim's Fur-Lined Cup or Duchamp's Stationary Bicycle Wheel [9].
One cannot deny the influence of the astonishing discoveries of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and other modernist artists on Gertrude Stein's innovative poetics and aesthetics; their rejection of presentation and superficial verisimilitude in art being vital for her too. However, such approach hides its dangers, as it also tends to deprive the writer's artistic searching and discoveries of any artistic value, reduce them to the statues of pure laboratory experimentation.
There is another obvious trend in the history of Tender Buttons interpretations. Some scholars try to «dissect» this unique artistic unite into separate parts, isolated poems or even sentences. Some of these pieces (like This is This Dress, Aider or A Carafe is a Blind Glass, etc) are being «interpreted» and given some "sense", while others are left behind and called incomprehensible and ambiguous. Even such deep Gertrude Stein scholars, as John Malcolm Brinnin and Donald Sutherland do not hesitate to use extremely negative metaphors in relation to Tender Buttons. The former calls this book a «great and resonant error» and «an eloquent mistake» [3, 137], while the latter compares the process of reading the book with lazy wandering around Luna Park or Wonderland ( «a sort of Wonderland or Luna Park for anyone who is not too busy») [15, 84]. In other words, such readings are trying to find conventional "sense" where it is not supposed to be initially, as Tender Buttons rather deals with emotions and perceptions, i.e. with images and objects of the "outside" from 'inside" without any involvement of memory. Traditional verisimilitude or "description of the reality" are exactly the principles Gertrude Stein tries to overcome to see "the earth like nobody else had seen it'.
Many Stein scholars have tried to place Tender Buttons within a framework of certain style or literary canon. These attempts, although some of them have been rather constructive, cannot be considered successful, as it is often the case with defining any canon. Tender Buttons makes an excellent proof of this thesis. The more researchers try to «include» it into any canon, its scale varying from Classicist [8] to Postmodern [14], the stronger evidence they find to prove their theory, the more new questions and interpretations appear.
Neil Schmitz was one of the first to claim that in 1914 Gertrude Stein created a work that fits well in Post-Modern Canon: "In Tender Buttons the umbilical cord that fastened Three Lives and The Making of Americans to the fiction of Flaubert and Proust is cut without remorse, the stuttering discourse of the experimental portraits refined, the radiant I of the writer assumes its commanding presence «sans ante or precedent" [14, 1204]. Marjorie Perloff also finds in Tender Buttons some parallels with the PostModern aesthetics, comparing its main principles to those discovered by Jacques Derrida: "... that final sentence, «The difference is spreading,» could be the epigraph to the whole collection of Tender Buttons ... Long before Jacques Derrida defined difference as both difference and deferral of meaning, Stein had expressed this profound recognition" [9, 153]. At the same time the researcher calls this work "Song of Myself", thus engaging Tender Buttons into Modernist discourse with its focus on autobiography or rather autography: "The elusiveness of her style, this consternating discourse which refuses to be still for the act of formal analysis, challenges both Literature and Knowledge, not with the flamboyance of Dadaist manifestoes, but with the visceral stamina of «Song of Myself» [9, 150].
Nicola Pitchford, trying to define the stylistic peculiarities of Tender Buttons in his paper titled Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism, states that the nature of Stein's work cannot be defined out of literary tendencies of her own day (i.e. modernism): "Treating Stein as a postmodernist obscures both the range of these strategies during the modernist period and the specificity of the political context in which postmodernism is written and read (a context in which anxieties about mass culture and art can no longer be addressed simply by policing the borders between the two" [10, 644]. He is one of those researchers who claim that Tender Buttons, like most works of Gertrude Stein, does not exactly fit into any existing literary canon: neither into the tradition of the literature of Nonsense, nor in Modernist, or Postmodern paradigms.
This seems to be the best possible approach to this unique text, which seems to absorb all possible canons, while surpassing any of them. Peter Quartermain was one of the first to define it at the beginning of his dexterous and deep analysis of Gertrude Stain's prose poetry: «I propose to look at a number of Stein's texts [Tender Buttons is one of them - N.B.] to see how, in the course of re-inventing literary signification, she radically redefines as pluralities both the act of reading and the role of the reader, in the process writing a veritable storehouse of technical resource. Such a linguistic / artistic enterprise, persistently and deliberately undermining certitude as it does, makes generalization of
her work a risky business indeed. What I offer is one reading of her work, and it is partial. There are many others [6, 24].
Ulla Dido also does not try to "bind" Gertrude Stein to any particular literary trend or movement. In her profound monograph The Language that Rises (2003), she mentions Tender Buttons analyzing the basic principle of Gertrude Stein's poetics - "continuous present", which, according to the researcher, is realized twofold in her works: "using everything" and "beginning again and again". "Both "beginning again"and "using everything"involve similarity and difference. Repetition, never twice the same, creates difference and newness, not mere likeness. She associates her growing interest in difference with description, with the exercises in minute observation of Tender Buttons and with natural phenomena" [6, 95].
There are some other important discourses in Tender Buttons analysis, I cannot omit in this introduction. These are feminist reading, lesbian studies and psychoanalytical theory. Among numerous works concentrating (and often much exaggerating) the lesbian code of Tender Buttons, I would mention Elizabeth Fifer work "Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theatre of Gertrude Stein" as the most profound and interesting interpretation of this kind. Lisa Ridduck's chapter on Tender Buttons called Woman and Gnosis can be considered the most profound feminist and at the same time psychoanalytical deconstruction of this text. The researcher begins her interpretation of Tender Buttons claiming the initial novelty of the work. She sees some contributors in previous Gertrude Stein's development (William James, Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso are among them), but with Tender Buttons "...Stein was moving to the territory so radically new that no one quite ushered her there. Her revisionary spirituality was the effect of her own brilliant «guess»" [12, 192]. Analyzing different poems from Tender Buttons, Lisa Ruddick outlines different codes of Stein's prose poetry. The most important of them are: cutting and crucifixion (implying sacrifice); moon-sun (personifying male-female natures); female body and its devaluation.
Feminist and psychoanalytical deconstructions of Stein's text can sometimes lead to interesting discoveries, and it's especially the case with Lisa Ruddick's book. Moreover, it is emerging feminist criticism that can be said to "rediscover" Gertrude Stein in 1970 - 1980 and place her within the contemporary modernist discourse, attracting new wave of critical attention and new estimation of the writer's innovation, those discussions being held up to present day. On the other hand, dealing with the literary text only as a kind of psychoanalytical writing, through which the author works with her child complexes and deep psychological
problems, realizing them, transferring them from subconsciousness into consciousness, inevitably limits the scale of artistic innovation, once again reducing it to mere psychoanalytical therapy.
While critically analyzing Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, the whole complex of the above mentioned modes of interpretations and approaches should be taken into consideration. The writer who surpassed any literary canon, got inspiration from her psychology teachers and painter friends rather than fellow writers, she clearly saw that the conventional method of "description" had broken down both in painting and in writing. Stein was desperately trying to find new ways, followed different directions, and her innovative works (Tender Buttons being one of the best) challenge diverse approaches and avoid any general definitions.
LITERATURE
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2. Стайн Г. Меланкта: кожнш свое / Пер. Н. Богиня // Всесвт -№ 7-8. - 2007. - С. 3 - 78
3. Brinnin J. M. Introduction // Stein Gertrude Selected Operas and Plays. - University of Pittsburgh Press. - 1970. - p. I - xxviii
4. Brinnin J. M. The Third Rose. Gertrude Stein and Her World. -Boston, Toronto: An Atlantic Monthly Press. - 1959. - 452 p.
5. Dydo U. Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises. 1923 - 1934.
- Evanston: Northwest UP. - 2003. - 686 p.
6. Fifer E. Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theatre of Gertrude Stein.
- Signs, # 4, 1979. - P. 472 - 483
7. Hoffman M.J. The Development of the Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein. - Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. - 1965. - 229 p.
8. Knight, Ch. J. Gertrude Stein, «Tender Buttons,» and the Premises of Classicalism // Modern Language Studies, Vol. 21. - No. 3.
- 1991. - P. 35-47
9. Perloff M. Of Objects and Readymades: Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duchamp// Forum of Modern Language Studies - 1996. - P. 137
- 154.
10. Pitchford N. Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein's Tender Buttons. - American Literary History. - Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 642-667
11. Quartermain P. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. - Cambridge UP. - 1992. - 230 p.
12. Ruddick, Lisa. Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis. -
Ithaca and London: Cornell U Press. - 1990. - 270 p.
13. Skinner B. F. Has Gertrude Stein a Secret // Atlantic Monthly, # 153. - January 1934. - P. 50-57
14. Schmitz, N. Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons// Journal of Modern Literature. - # 3. - 1974. - P. 1203-18
15. Sutherland D. Gertrude Stein. A Biography of Her Work. - New Haven: Yale University Press. - 1951. - 218 p.
