566
PARTISAN REVIEW
Gertrude Stein's universe." Sutherland tells us in
Gertrude Stein, A
Biography of Her Work
(1951), "and her work from the beginning was
oriented and reoriented upon that idea." The existential fluidity of
Huck's discourse , afloat on the Now, is regained in this strange book
and richly elaborated, but not as Huckspeech, not as the sign of
consciousness, of speech, brought into and painfully constrained by
the act of writing. Here are the first two entries in
Tender Buttons,
which is itself divided into three sections:
ObJects, Food, Rooms.
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single
hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and
not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is
spreading.
GLAZED GLITTER
Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.
The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has
come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that
interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime
there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very
charming is that clean and cleansing. Certain ly glittering is hand–
some and convincing.
There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be
breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color
chosen.
It
was chosen yesterday, that showed s·pitting and perhaps
washing and polishing.
It
certain ly showed no obligation and
perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.
What is before us is before Gertrude Stein in the "continuous
present" of her perception and thought. An object, a substantive, the
sign:
a carafe.
But the easy swing of definition (a carafe is a glass), this
effortless placing of the object into the known, reveals a blind spot in
the very act of its doing. One sign substitutes for the oth er, endless ly.
The glass through which we look darkly at the thing is a blind glass.
We see only
a carafe,
a sign in a system (language) that points us at
difference. We are in that Derridean supplement, in written discourse,
far from the original carafe, blind to the thing designated, blind to the
reference, but looking absolutely, directly, at the obvious thought
conceiving the carafe as it presently thinks it. A carafe, that is a blind
g lass, a kind in glass and a cousin, is, is, is. "All this," and not, not,
