NEIL SCHMITZ
569
tation, it only moves from one disciplined way of thinking the world to
another disciplined way of thinking the world, not from sense to
nonsense. The text, after all, is a veritable commotion of inquiry.
The sentence in
Tender Buttons
does all that: presses through a
studied impersonality a fulsome subjectivity, audaciously quizzes the
real, and yields above all the purity of an individual voice. In
The
Colloquial Style in America
Bridgman cogently argues that Gertrude
Stein is the first writer in American literature after Mark Twain to
master the style, and indeed the talk in
Three Lives
(1906) is very good,
but in the experimental portraiture of the later period, specifically in
Tender Buttons,
a text Bridgman treats summarily, she exhibits a
transformation of the colloquial style. In this work it is no longer a
ques tion of diction and syntax, of how one stylistically approximates
the idiomatic eccentricity of speech in wr iting, but instead a question
of how the systems and rules of traditional writing extrude the volatile
nature of the individual voice. No busy interlocutor is at hand to
elucidate motive, moral, and plot. No supervening
I
writes
down
the
course of thinking. Yet the writer who is present in his writing as a
continuous voice speaking is intensely self-conscious and constantly
rev ises. It is " beginning again" or "insistence" for Gertrude Stein,
revision that is brought into the text, incorporated. The whole process
of rewriting i always right before us, written, as contradiction, as
repetition, as the same phrase or word turned over and over, rum–
maged, so that no part of her thought is absent, no part of her speech
left unsaid. Nothing, of course, could be wronger in writing. "We write
frankly and fearlessly," Mark Twain observes in
Life on the Mis–
sissippi,
"but then we 'modify ' before we print. " Gertrude Stein takes
that process back a single important step: we think frankly and
fearlessly, but then we "modify"
as
we write, rejecting along with the
scandalous idea the errant, the interstitial, the constant shove of the
inappropriate into otherwise coherent lines of thought. Speech , which
the humorists conventionally exhibited as freakish, as "funny" in the
text, serenely goes its un bracketed way in
Tender Buttons.
So Gertrude Stein's sentence, which begins with a
carafe,
sinu–
ously widens, improvising, improvising, until at length it reaches its
final word , a
fountain.
The text goes round from one symbol of
consciousness
to
another, from small, separate containment to immedi–
ate, continuous, overflowing abundance, and implicitly describes
therein the writer 's dream of writing: the exhilaration of eloquence, a
ready flow of apt words moving across the page, pauseless seamless
writing woven from the very corpuscular stuff of consciousness, et
