NEIL SCHMITZ
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doggedly shows us how Tom does it, who infallibly wrongs the pomp
and control of Tom's writing. The
agon
that essentially determines
nineteenth-century American humor reaches here its rarest, most
complicated statement. Speech is no longer out there to be sketched, to
be shown poorly dressed in print, often freakish, but in here, in the
writer's questioning of his role as interlocutor, the one who transposes
unleltered speech into the lettered text. And yet, as Richard Bridgman
argues in
The Colloquial Style in America
(1966), few idiomatic
writers subsequently understood the ontological tension that creates
Huck's position and those who imitated the textual novelty of Huck–
speech missed the allention Mark Twain had given to the rhythm and
repetition of colloquial utterance. What is the
natur
of speech in the
nature
of writing? Only writers fully aware of themselves as writers,
aware of the forms and linearity of writing, its motive, moral, and plot,
ask this question. What is the
natur
of speech in the
nature
of writing?
If
one replaces the
e
the humorist dropped, the question becomes
Gertrude Stein's question. How does the written text picture the silent
speech of thought? Does it?
Apart from William Burroughs, whose eccentric humor deserves
separate attention, no one in the modern period has understood the
structure and activity of American humor better than Gertrude Stein,
in whose work the humorous style realizes itself as a bonafide (wrong)
philosophy of presence. Between
Huckleberry Finn
and
Portnoy's
Complaint,
those two eminent prodigies in American humor,
Tender
Buttons
(1914) exists as an unseen, rarely read middle term, exists
possibly as a resolution. The final ecstatic third of
Tender Buttons
appropriately celebrates the beauty of wronged writing, the truth upon
which it opens. "The care," the text closes, "with which the rain is
wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with
which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which
there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent
asparagus, and also a fountain." Just so
Tender Buttons
is carefully
wrong, decentered, phunnily phonological, perhaps the wrongest text
in modern literature. For all the dazzle of Gertrude Stein 's artistic and
intellectual environment, the sensibility immanent in
Tender Buttons
is as homespun and humorous as Huck's. All the text asks of the reader,
Donald Sutherland wryly observes, "is a grade-school education and a
decent liking for the marvelous." Indeed
Tender Buttons
is a seductive
invitation to play with puns and things, with pronouns and sibilance,
but the text also asks the reader, or player, to look, and look again. The
idea of "present thinking" as the final reality "was the axis or pole of
