568
PARTISAN REVIEW
But what are we doing here ?We are playing hide-and-seek with
Gertrude Stein. "The author of all that, " we are told in
Rooms,
" is in
• there behind the door, and that is entering in the morning." Such
beguiling duplicities, strewn throughout
Tender Buttons,
constantly
beckon us to witness, to see through the text, through the glass, that
emergent someone behind the door, but what appears is the mysterious
glide of difference weaving through the obvious coherence of present
thinking as it supposes, declares, cites, defines, questions. "I became
more and more excited," Gertrude Stein later wrote, "about how words
which were the words that made whatever I looked at look like itself
were not the words that had in them any quality of description." At
every turn in
Tender Buttons,
then, at every question (what is) and
assertion (that is), we confront a swift narrative of telling signifiers,
"words that made whatever I looked at look like itself," but no
ascertainable signified, "not the words that had in them any quality of
description." Under
A Sound
in
Objects,
Gertrude Stein characteristi–
cally writes in this daft explicit: "Elephant beaten with candy and little
pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this. "
If
we
abandon our search for the motive, moral, and plot in
T ender Buttons,
relinquish our demand for the actual carafe in the actual room, our
desire for Gertrude Stein's face on the nickel, then the playful quality
of the writer's questioning mind exhibits itself and we may simply read
in
A Sound
the euphony of blank verse. To find in the text just what is
there, "this is this," is to read, as in a dictionary, as in an inventory, the
momentary content and knowledge of a single ex-centric conscious–
ness . In its form and structure
Tender Buttons
indeed humorously
mimics the stability of these primary forms of writing (list, lexicon ,
table), but with the analytic seriousness of a Cubist painter destabiliz–
ing a still life. Apart from the brief assertion, "I spy," under
Butter
and
the allowance of a modest "me" at the end of
A Centre in a Table,
Gertrude Stein scrupulously avoids the positing of an
I
in the text. "Act
so that there is no use in a centre." As if there were no single informing
point of view in
Tender Buttons,
no established Meaning which the
text recovers and elaborates from a place in time previous to the text.
It
is a compositional stratagem, the relative absence of this important
pronoun, and along with Gertrude Stein's consistent use of the present
tense, it reveals the control and intelligence at work in her discourse.
That is the paradox of
Tender Buttons.
It
is such a curious combina–
tion of the haphazard and the precise.
If
her sentence spills freely, it
regularly spills brisk Baconian
sententia
and forms, almost casually,
rare and compact tropes.
If
it strikes free from the burden of perspicu–
ity, proper words in the proper places in the proper forms of represen-
