286
NEIL SCHMITZ
me be I no not really because after all being I I am I has really
nothing to do with the little dog knowing me, he is my audience,
but an audience never does prove to you that you are you.
Simply put, what the little dog knows--the objective human
nature of its mistress--is the same behavioral object his mistress knows.
What he cannot know is the self-conscious thought that realizes what he
knows. To decipher the intention of the historical Gertrude Stein in the
text is thus to present only her human nature, to know her as a pet
would know her, as an ensemble of gestures, and this knowledge, she
declares, is at best "occupying," never "interesting."
It
belongs to the
lower orders of fiction: history and biography. "What then is the reality
to which
I
or
you
refers?" Emile Benveniste asks in
Problems in General
Linguistics.
"It is solely a 'reality of discourse,' and this is a very strange
thing.
I
cannot be defined except in terms of 'locution,' not in terms of
objects as a nominal sign is." Gertrude Stein stresses this point
repeatedly in the
Geographical History:
no self that can be situated
underlies the declaration of "I am
I."
The existence of the Mind is purely
verbal; it is a linguistic entity
here
in the moment of utterance and
absolutely separated from the
thereness
of the body in time, the
realia
of
nature. Therefore writing ought to attend to the exercises of the mind,
she argues, and relinquish the futile task of describing nature, renounce
"because and become," the origin and end of things. The writer's subject
can only be language and the particularity of his own discourse, a subject
she found rich with possibility if one were willing to improvise, to enter
the domain of syntax, the parts of speech, grammar, the sign itself, as a
child restlessly imposing an individuality on these inert forms. "Articles
please," she tells us in
Poetry and Grammar,
"a and an and the please as
the name that follows cannot please. They the names that is the nouns
cannot please, because after all you know well after all that is what
Shakespeare meant when he talked about a rose by any other name." In
Tender Buttons
she writes:
Pain soup, suppose it is question, suppose it is butter, real is, real
is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since.
A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no
since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when
since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since.
The originality of Gertrude Stein's "literary thinking," and the
wondrous prose it released, stems from this fundamental relocation of
