OF OBJECTS AND READYMADES:GERTRUDE STEIN AND MARCEL
DUCHAMP
T H E GENESIS of a small yellow paper book with a green paper labelcalled Tender Buttons, printed in 1914 in an edition of 1,000 copies, isrecalled by Gertrude Stein herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,where, speaking in the voice of "Alice", she tells us that it was during theirtrip to Spain in 1911 that "Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed":
She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, theircharacter and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she firstfelt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world.
It was a long tormenting process, she looked, listened and described. She alwayswas, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal. Oneof the things that always worries her about painting is the difficulty the artist feelsand which sends him to painting still lifes, that after all the human being essentiallyis not paintable. [...] She experimented with everything in trying to describe. Shetried a bit inventing words but she soon gave that up. The english language washer medium and with the english language the task was to be achieved, the problemsolved. The use of fabricated words offended her, it was an escape into imitativeemotionalism.
No, she stayed with her task, although after the return to Paris she describedobjects, she described rooms and objects, which joined with her first experimentsdone in Spain, made the volume Tender Buttons.'
The shift from internal to external Stein refers to here is, of course, one ofthe central paradigm shifts of the early twentieth-century avant-garde.Stein's notion that the "human being essentially is not paintable", coupledwith her conviction that one's medium must be "the english language" asit is rather than the "fabrication] of words", a technique she took to becharacteristic of such fellow modernists as Ezra Pound and James Joyce,has a striking parallel in the visual arts. The same year that Tender Buttonswas published, Marcel Duchamp bought, at a Paris bazaar, a botde rackwhich was to become the first of his famous Readymades (Fig. 1). The wordreadymade, Duchamp was to recall in his 1967 conversations with PierreCabanne, "seemed perfect for these things that weren't works of art, thatweren't sketches, and to which no art terms applied. [...] The choice ofreadymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time,on the total absence of good or bad taste." Taste is further defined as merehabit, "the repetition of something already accepted."2
Critics have taken Duchamp at his word, even as they often assume thatGertrude Stein's rejection of the traditional representational model is arejection of meaning itself and that Tender Buttons is intentionally non-referential.3 In an influential study, Arthur C. Danto argues that Duchamp's
readymades spell the "end of art", the object no longer having "perceptibleaesthetic properties" and the artistic act thus turning away attention fromthe work to an interpretation of it. "Interpretation", writes Danto, "is ineffect the lever with which an object is lifted out of the real world and intothe art-world." Hence the much-fabled "end of art" (one of Danto's chaptertitles) with its concomitant replacement by philosophy.4
The assumption here is that a readymade is no more than a randomlychosen object taken out of its normal context, inscribed, placed in a glasscase, and exhibited in an art gallery. But suppose someone were, at thisvery moment, to hold up a randomly chosen object — a paper clip, say, ora glass of water, or perhaps an empty shoe - and call it a readymade?Would we be persuaded that the object in question is a work of art? Andif not, is it because the experiment has been tried too often and has lostits shock value as Peter Burger posits?5 Or is it that Duchamp's readymades,like Man Ray's later objels (Fig. 2) and Joseph Cornell's boxes (Fig. 3), usethe "indifferent" in a very special way?
Look at the Bottle Rack again. In 1914, the year Duchamp "found" it,the primary site of painterly innovation was generally held to be the workof Cezanne. Stein herself, after all, told Robert Bartlett Haas in her"Transatlantic Interview" of 1946 that "Everything I have done has beeninfluenced by [...] Cezanne", he being the first painter to "conceive theidea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Eachpart is as important as the whole."6 What Stein meant was that a typicalCezanne composition — for example Still Life with Peppermint Bottle of 1890-92(National Gallery of Art, Washington) - redefines the visual field as ashallow space, no longer governed by single-point perspective or chiaro-scuro. What seems to be a stable, even classically balanced structure revealsitself to be a system of irresolutions. The table top, to begin with, is largelyhidden beneath the artfully arranged blue drapery so that we cannot makeout its contours; the transparent carafe has a swollen belly, echoing theballooning blue table cloth and white cover; the objects on the table —apples, botde, glass, carafe - tilt on their axes, the white cloth reflects theblue of the draperies, whereas the blue carafe displays patches of whiteand the "background" blue planes come forward to merge with the bluedrapery. Thus "each thing is as important as every other thing" within thedensely woven structure. Yet, as Meyer Shapiro put it, still-life, even still-life as resolutely Modernist as Cezanne's, "consists of objects that, whedierartificial or natural, are subordinate to man as elements of use, manipulationand enjoyment; these objects are smaller than ourselves, within arm's reach,and owe dieir presence and place to a human action, a purpose. Theyconvey man's sense of his power over things in making or utilizing them."As such, Shapiro suggests, the still-lifes of Cezanne are, like those ofChardin, "unthinkable outside of Western bourgeois society".7
The Cubists, in any case, carried out the logical implications of theCezannian experiment. A collage like Picasso's Bottle, Glass, Violin of1912—13 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) exhibits a radically new fusion ofmass and void, between solid form and the space around it. The siphonon the left, for example, which we would expect to be transparent, is madeof the opaque newspaper, whereas the violin at the right, which we wouldexpect to be opaque, is transparent enough for us to read the newspaperright through it. And further, as Robert Rosenblum remarks,8 the laws ofgravity are inverted: the glass objects — siphon and goblet — which wouldin reality appear less weighty than the wooden violin, are made to appearmuch heavier, given their newsprint substances. And the two sound holesof the violin are not only radically different in size and shape but appearto be solids floating in a void rather than voids cut through a solid. Picassogives us an unstable structure of dismembered planes in indeterminatespatial positions (where, for instance, is the edge of the table on which theobjects are located?); his collage all but obliterates the distinction betweenfigure and ground which Cezanne's still-life still maintains. Nevertheless -and this marks the contrast between Picasso and Duchamp as well as, soI shall suggest, between Picasso and Stein - he is still using paint (or mixedmedia in the case of collage) to represent objects in the real world: siphons,wine goblets, bottles, table cloths, violins. Materials are used so as torepresent, however obliquely, something else?
Or, to take a third and rather different example, consider the case ofFuturist sculpture. Boccioni's famous Development of a Bottle in Space of 1912(Fig. 4), for example, represents an interesting transitional phase in the artmaking of the early avant-garde. As I argued in The Futurist Moment,™ thesculpture is structured to be seen frontally, like a relief. The base bears aseries of bottle-shaped shells, hollowed out and fitted inside each other,resting on a concave shape with a simple, unbroken profile, as if to saythat the sculpture does have a centre. But seen frontally, the hollow shellsthemselves seem to have been rotated slightly in relationship to one anotherand, especially near the top, obscure the hollow centre of the objects. It isimpossible, in other words, to view the "bottle" from a single angle and"see it" whole; we have to posit different viewing positions and yet thefrontal relief form and concave centre make it all but impossible to do so.
Ambiguity, abstraction, distortion, multiplicity - all these epithets applyto Boccioni's "bottle construction". But neither the Futurists nor the Cubistsbroke the traditional visual contract with the viewer, a contract wherebythe images presented, however distorted, fragmented, or abstracted theymay appear (see Juan Gris' Still Life with Bottles, 1912, Rijksmuseum, Kroller-Muller, Otterlo, Holland), are to be understood as retinal representations.Given this context, the iconoclasm of Duchamp's gesture is all the moreremarkable: not the image of a bottle, but the rack on which bottles areplaced to dry. Far from being an "indifferent" object, his thus functions
intertextually and ironically. On the one hand, it mocks the "prettiness"of Cezanne or Gris' elegant still lifes; on the other, it presents us with ashape that is a recognizable "real thing" and yet is endowed with a peculiarphallic power.
Duchamp's readymades regularly function in this way. In 1915 he boughtan ordinary snow shovel and put it in a glass case under the title In Advanceof the Broken Arm (Fig. 5). In real life, of course, we never see snow shovelsin this pristine state: either they are arranged in rows at the factory orhardware store, or they are stuck in a closet or toolshed along with otherimplements, or they are seen in use, covered with dirt or snow. But it isthe title that gives this readymade its special aura: In Advance of the BrokenArm suggests bourgeois caution — the purchase of a shiny new snow shovelto prevent sidewalk accidents that cause broken arms, the need for everyproper household to have a snow shovel, the shovel as industrialised soci-ety's replacement of the human arm, and so on. Again, the art constructis not a representation of something but the thing itself, even as that thingitself becomes part of what Gertrude Stein calls "a system of pointing".
This is especially true of Duchamp's so-called "assisted readymades".11
The most famous of them all, the so-called Fountain (1917), signed "R.Mutt" (Fig. 6), is "assisted" by turning an ordinary urinal upside down,thus upsetting the viewer's normal associations, both with fountains andwith urinals. The fountain is a standard Romantic image of natural energyand beauty, a symbol of sexual potency. But here, the urinal's originalmale function gives way to a rounded female form with a hole at its bottom— perhaps a true fountain after all. Or is this female form the receptaclefor the male artist's "fountain"? "One only has", Duchamp was to commentdecades later, "for female the public urinal and one lives by it."12 "Thetheme of the impossible encounter", observes Thierry de Duve, "of thesex act that will fail if it succeeds but that will succeed if it fails, through a"mirrorical return" that projects into a fourth dimension", is one thatrecurs again and again in Duchamp's writings of the period.13 Even diesignature "R. Mutt," a variation on J. L. Mott, the Philadelphia Iron Workswhere Duchamp purchased the urinal, becomes the occasion for extensivepunning: Duchamp himself cited the "Mutt and Jeff" comic strip,14 butthe name also recalls such German words as Mutti ("Mama"), Mut ("cour-age," "nerve"), Armut ("poverty"), or even art mutt ("art" in French +mongrel dog in American slang = mongrel art). Such sexual punning anddouble entendre is found everywhere in Duchamp's world of objects:witness the birdcage filled with sugar cubes (actually pieces of marble)called Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Selavji? (Fig. 7), or again, the well-knownBicycle Wheel (Fig. 8), with its dislocated transportation system, its equivo-cation between indoors and outdoors, stasis and movement, its metal rod'smale "penetration" of die female "seat", and its invitation to the view-er to give die wheel a spin.
The choice of readymades, Duchamp repeatedly insisted, "was based ona reaction of visual indifference with a total absence of good or bad taste"(HR 89). We have seen that what may well be "visually indifferent", if weapply the norms of easel painting or the making of sculpture, is by nomeans semantically indifferent, that indeed Duchamp's art can be under-stood as a reassertion of the cognitive at a time when the cult of die Image,not yet called into question by the new technologies that brought the imageindustry into every home, was dominant. In poetry, the same criteria —concreteness, immediacy, die Image as what Pound called the "radiantnode or cluster" — prevailed, Stein's early language experiments, her
"Portraits", plays, and short fictions, striking readers as at best too abstractand at worst nonsensical. James Laughlin, the noted publisher and poetwho served for a short time in the thirties as Stein's secretary, insists tothis day that hers was simply automatic writing.15 And Sherwood Andersonrecalls the early reception of Tender Buttons in this way:
My brother had been at some sort of gathering of literary people on the eveningbefore and someone had read aloud from Miss Stein's new book [Tender Buttons][...] After a few lines the reader stopped and was greeted by loud shouts oflaughter. It was generally agreed that the author had done a thing we Americanscall "putting something across" — the meaning being that she had, by a strangefreakish performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussedin the newspapers, become for a time a figure of our hurried, harried lives.16
This was the more or less standard response to Stein's experimental writingin the twenties and thirties; like Duchamp's visual indifference", which wastaken to be the very negation of art as bourgeois phenomenon, Stein'sseeming "verbal indifference" was regarded as a wilful "putting [of] some-thing across". Like Duchamp, who claimed to be entirely without artistictaste, or purpose, Stein regularly protested that "Grammar is uselessbecause there is nothing to say."17 But whereas Duchamp's readymadesare now largely accepted by the art world and even by the general public,Stein's "non-representational" writing continues to baffle commentators.18
No doubt this is the case because we expect a greater degree of referentiahtyfrom writing than we do from the visual arts. But in a critical climate thathas come to recognise that the semiotic of visual imagery is closely relatedto its verbal counterpart, perhaps an understanding of Duchamp'sreadymades can help us frame a text like Tender Buttons. That, at least iswhat I propose to do here.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas treats Duchamp as a figure of minorimportance: not only is he wholly eclipsed by Picasso, but even Picabia,Stein declares, is "a greater innovator" (SW 126). In the chapter"1907-1914", "Alice" refers to the 1913 Armory Show in New York whereNude Descending a Staircase was shown and recalls a dinner at the Picabias'at which Marcel Duchamp "looking like a young norman crusader" waspresent (SW 125). In New York, "Alice" learns, everyone adores Marcel,but the emphasis is on his personality rather than his art. Indeed, when,after the War, she and Gertrude go to Man Ray's tiny, cluttered apartmentto look at art works, they are shown "pictures of Marcel Duchamp and alot of other people" (SW 186), as if to say that the "adorable Marcel" is acult figure rather than an artist to be taken seriously. But then Stein wasalways sceptical about Dada, allying herself, as I noted above, squarelywith Cezanne and the Cubists. "Everything I have done", Stein claims,"has been influenced by Cezanne." But Stein's own version of influenceand transmission is not without its biases: it should be measured, in any
case, against her actual performance. Consider, for example, the first prosepoem in Tender Buttons:
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASSA 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, notunordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.19
Here is our familiar carafe again, but the riddling, anti-poetic prose passagethat follows the tide seems to have little in common with Cezanne's Still-Life with Peppermint Bottle or, for that matter, with a Modernist poem likeEzra Pound's "The Beautiful Toilet," in the Cathay sequence, published atabout the same time as Tender Buttons:
Blue, blue is the grass about the riverAnd the willows have overfilled the close garden.And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door,Slender, she puts forth a slender hand.20
Stein's nouns - "kind", "glass", "cousin", "spectacle", "color", "arrange-ment", "system", "difference" — are primarily abstract and conceptual asare die adjectives ("strange", "single", "hurt") and present participles("pointing, resembling, spreading"). The dominant trope, if we can call ita trope, of the passage seems to be negation: "nothing strange", "notordinary", "not unordered in not resembling."
Yet ironically — and this is where the Duchamp connection comes in —Stein's verbal dissection gives us the very essence of what we might callcarafeness, in the same way that Duchamp provides us with the "real"shovel or the "real" bicycle wheel. The carafe is first denned as a "blindglass", a glass, that is to say, through which one cannot see. Perhaps it hasred wine in it (the "single hurt color" mentioned in the second line); henceit is opaque. The carafe is "a kind in glass and a cousin" — a kind of glasscontainer, evidendy, and a cousin to such other glass containers as winebotdes, pitchers, vases, and goblets. It is "a spectacle", something to lookat as well as dirough although one can't see much through a "blind glass".This is "nothing strange": Stein is describing, after all, the most familiarof family relationships — a carafe is larger dian a cup and smaller than apitcher, and so on. In this sense, it participates in an "arrangement in asystem of pointing": it is part of a larger system which we might call theglass family. The carafe is "all this and not ordinary" — which is to saythat it is not just a bottle or glass — it is "not unordered in not resembling",a part of a complex network yet quite individual. And diat final sentence,"The difference is spreading", could be die epigraph for the whole collec-tion: to use words responsibly, Stein implies, is to become aware diat notwo words, no two morphemes or phonemes for diat matter, are everexacdy the same. And furdier: the repetition of a phoneme, of a morpheme
or word, always effects some change, however slight. Long before JacquesDerrida defined differance as both difference and deferral of meaning, Steinhad expressed this profound recognition.
What occurs at the level of meaning also occurs at the level of sound.The "blind glass" is connected by rhyme to "a kind in glass". "Strange"rhymes with the second syllable of "arrangement"; "ordinary" is echoedin "unordered". And further, note the alliteration of /k/ in "kind","cousin", "color", and of/s/ in "spectacle", "strange", "single", "system","spreading", the assonance of short Us in "system", "this", "difference",and the "-ing" suffix of the present participles. As the poet Jackson MacLow suggests, the three sentences before us constitute "a bound system ofsounds".21 Everything seems to relate to everything else in what is, despitethe air of "casual" prose, a very tightly woven structure. Indeed, the verylast syllable of the last word in the text, "spreading" takes us back to theopening noun, "kind", ing now replacing ind so that the "difference" reallyis spreading.
The word that stands out from the rest, both semantically and phon-emically, is hurt. Does the adjective merely refer, as I suggested above, tothe wound (i.e. red) of wine? Or does "hurt" have something to do, asMac Low posits (RK 89), with "blind glass", with the inability to see orbe seen? These are the sort of questions raised by Stein's subtle and concise"arrangement in a system for pointing". Tender Buttons provides no answers,its distinction being to establish relationships that we never knew existed.To foreground what is a highly systematic structure, Stein carefully delimitsthe radius of discourse of the sequence, aligning her properties under thesign of her tide, which is an oxymoron. Buttons are normally hard littleobjects; "tender" buttons (in French, boutons tendres means nipples as wellas buds) are at best an oddity, rather like Meret Oppenheim's Fur-LinedCup or Duchamp's stationary bicycle wheel. Stein thus sets up an immediatetension between hard and soft, dry and wet, closing and opening, blindnessand insight. Buttons are "tender", moreover, because, as some of the textswill imply, they are looking for a hole to enter.
The discourse radius, as I said above, is rigidly circumscribed: the worldof Tender Buttons is the domestic world of women, an everyday householdworld in contrast to the larger industrial landscape of Duchamp'sreadymades. Cushions, plates, umbrellas, dresses, hats, ribbons, roast pota-toes, milk, eggs, coffee, apples, cranberries — this is the object world ofStein's sequence, a world of cooking and cleaning, sewing and mending,dressing and dining, that is structured according to the three principleslaid out in "Composition as Explanation": "beginning again and again",the "continuous present", and "using everything".22 Again and again, forexample, we are presented with containers and enclosures — bottles, boxes,closets, rooms — enclosures that are subject to destruction or at least change.As the poet Lyn Hejinian, herself an important heir of Stein's, puts it:
"Cracks, holes, punctures, piercing, gaps, and breakage - and the possiblespill with which the first poem ends - recur and refer in part to Stein'sconcerns about the means and adequacy of writing - of capturing thingsin words."23
Consider, for example, how the second poem in Tender Buttons,"GLAZED GLITTER" relates to the first. The "kind in glass", the carafeitself, is viewed, not as an object, however distorted and fragmented, asCezanne or Picasso would view it, but as a word, generating, not relatedobjects but related words. Thus "GLAZED GLITTER", which follows "ACARAFE", begins with the sentence, "Nickel, what is nickel, it is originallyrid of a cover." "Nickel" is not directly related to the "spectacle" of glasscarafes, but the reference to the cover reintroduces the notion of "con-tainer" with which we are already familiar. And the next sentence reads,"The change in that is that red weakens an hour." "Red" may be the"single hurt color"; the "change" further recalls the "difference" that is"spreading". The second paragraph reads:
There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages inJapanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday,that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed noobligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.
It is futile, I think, to attempt paraphrase of such a passage, to find a fixedreferent for "glazed glitter" or to allegorise Stein's words and phrases.There is, as she insists, "no programme". There is not even a "colorchosen", even though red has been mentioned. Yet there is nothing randomor merely "playful" about the passage in question. Note, for example, theelaborate network of references to liquids in containers: "medicine" flasks,tea cups ("breakages in Japanese"), the "spitting", "washing" and "pol-ishing" of "nickel" so as to restore its "glazed glitter". In this sense, as inDuchamp, what you see is what you see, although, again as in a Duchampreadymade, the indeterminacy of form allows for double entendre andsexual punning. Inside the "cover", there is "red" and "handsome" "glit-tering". Although there is "no obligation", "there is some use in giving".Such references are not fully sexual, at least not this early in Tender Buttons,but like die holes in Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, they graduallyaccumulate momentum. Thus, the container of the diird prose poem, "ASUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION", is neither a carafe nor an object madeof nickel but somediing soft and malleable: a cushion, again widi a coverand mysterious insides.24 And here is the fourm piece, called simply "ABOX":
Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question,out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then theorder is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is itdisappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine sub-
stance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.(TB, I I )
Stein's "BOX", let us remember, is exactly contemporaneous withanother Duchamp work, the Box of 1914, which was the artist's first forayin the production of a portable "museum", a case containing miniaturereplicas of his earlier works as well as facsimile collections of his notes. The1914 Box was produced in conjunction with Duchamp's magnum opus, theLarge Glass, otherwise known as The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even,on which he worked from 1912 to 1923; the box, made of green cardboard,contains a collection of scraps of paper containing notes and drawings.The first item in the box is called Three Standard Stoppages, made, Duchamptells us, according to identical systems of chance operation:
- If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meteronto a horizontal plane distorting itself as it pleases and creates a new shape of themeasure of length...
The 3 standard stoppages are the meter diminished.25
Duchamp later explained that this "invention" of measuring devices in theform of wooden templates, duplicating the subtle twists and curves of theirchance configurations, was meant to be "a joke about the meter, thestandard unit of measurement adopted by Europeans".26 Other items inthe Box include erotic puns, absurd definitions (e.g. "Deferment. Againstcompulsory military service: a 'deferment' of each limb, of the heart and theother anatomical parts; each soldier being already unable to put his uniformon again, his heart feeding telephonically, a deferred arm, etc."), and finallya set of instructions:
Make a mirrored wardrobe.Make this mirrored wardrobe for the silvering.Make a painting of frequency. (SS. 25)
Duchamp's Dada suggestions — how can one paint frequency? — oddly echoStein's imagery; the "mirrored wardrobe" could take its place beside the"spectacle", the "blind glass", the "glazed glitter", and the "closet [that]does not connect under the bed". Like Duchamp, Stein is interested in theprocess of "silvering", of shining and polishing or, as she cryptically callsit in one of her titles, "WATER RAINING" ("Water astonishing anddifficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke"). But beyond such verbalparallels, it is Stein's conception of the box that recalls the absurdity ofDuchamp's inventories.
Hers is, to begin with, a box that can't be visualised. Is it small or large,made of wood or enamel, lined with cardboard or velvet? We cannot sayany more than we can determine whether this is a jewellery box or sewingbox, a large carton in which to keep papers or a small pill box. Yet boxnessis established by the fourfold repetition of the words "out of". Qualities
are defined as emerging out o/~something, the items related by sound ratherthan overt meaning:
Out of kindness comes rednessout of rudeness comes rapid same questionout of an eye comes research
Here repetition of syntax as well as sound give the passage a childlikeinsistence: the proverbial tone of "out of X comes Y" recalls a second-grade reader or speller. But like the "mirrored wardrobe" inside Duchamp'sportable museum, Stein's "BOX" presents a challenge to the viewer. "Outof kindness comes redness": the two nouns have the same formation, butthe former is abstract, the latter concrete. Out of the giver's kindness,perhaps, comes the "redness" of the gift — a valentine, maybe, or someother token of love. Whereas "out of rudeness" comes "rapid same ques-tion", the interruption that is unnecessary because the question has beenasked before. "Out of an eye comes research": the beauty of the phrase isthat a specific physical organ, the eye, is now set over against thoseabstractions, kindness and rudeness. Perhaps, Stein implies, we better leavesuch abstractions aside and trust the "research" that "comes" from theeye, and the "selection" or discrimination that characterises art even if theprocess involves "painful cattle".
But what is the principle of selection, of producing "order"? In thesecond half of the prose poem, the repeated "out of" is replaced by thecopula: "the order is", "a white way of being round is", "it is not", "it isso rudimentary", "it is so earnest", these assertions balanced by the question"is it disappointing". The box, it seems, is a kind of mental box of tools:a "white way of being round" that suggests a pin, a "fine substance""see[n]... strangely," a "green point not to red" (with a pun on "read")"but to point again." Notice that, as in "A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLINDGLASS", the focus is on "an arrangement in a system of pointing". "Is itdisappointing", Stein asks, knowing it can't be since "pointing" is stillthere, but now buried in a larger word with a different meaning. Hence,"it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analyzed."
"A BOX" is thus best understood as a photo-conceptual art work, thecreation, not of a Cubist surface of dismembered planes, but of an obliquestatement of poetics. "Out of rudeness" (perhaps Stein was thinking ofEzra Pound, of whom she said with some asperity that "he was a villageexplainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not")27 therecan come nothing useful, only the "rapid same question". Whereas thetrue poet knows that "a white way of being round" can suggest a pin, diata "green point" cannot be equated to a red one, and so on. A few pageslater, Stein introduces her second longer version of "A BOX," which begins:
A large box is handily made of what is necessary to replace any substance. Supposean example is necessary, the plainer it is made the more reason there is for someoutward recognition that there is a result.
A box is made sometimes and them to see to see it neatly and have the holesstopped up makes it necessary to use paper.
A custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that a large partof the time there are three which have different connections. The one is on thetable. The two are on the table. The three are on the table. The one, one is thesame length as is shown by the cover being longer. The other is different there ismore cover that shows it. The other is different and that makes the corners havethe same shade the eight are in singular arrangement to make four necessary.
Here the "box" explicitly functions as a replacement for a "substance"that is presumably out of date. "To see it neatly and to have the holesstopped up makes it necessary to use paper": to have a sense of themateriality of the object is the first step in putting pen to paper, to write.And now Stein engages in the sort of mock-mathematical exercise forwhich Duchamp is famous. In a 1912 note in The Green Box, for example,we read:
The machine with 5 hearts, the pure child, of nickel and platinum, must dominatethe Jura-Paris road.
On the one hand, the chief of the 5 nudes will be ahead of the 4 other nudestowards this Jura-Paris road. On die other hand, the headlight child will be dieinstrument conquering this Jura-Paris road. (SS, 26)
The "Jura-Paris road" refers to a trip taken by Duchamp, GuillaumeApollinaire, and Francis Picabia and his wife Gabrielle Buffet to Mme.Picabia's family home at Etival in the Jura. It was during this trip that thedecision was made to publish Apollinaire's The Cubist Painters. Duchamp'sway of mocking this "Jura-Paris" or Cubist road, is to turn the whole thinginto an absurd number game, concluding with a group of "algebraiccomparisons" designed to generate the "fourth dimension" (SS, 29). Steinsimilarly resorts to arithmetical reductionism: "The one is one the table.The two are on the table. The three are on the table [...] the eight are insingular arrangement to make the four necessary."
But Stein's pragmatism (eight folds to make four corners of the tableclodijust as, for Duchamp, the snow shovel is what comes "in advance of thebroken arm") is never mere empiricism. On the contrary, the everyday,the ordinary, the common-sensical becomes the basis for witty, eroticdouble-entendre. This is especially true of the poems in the Food section,for example "MILK", whose Dadasque analogy between pint bottles andthe "best men" I have talked of elsewhere.28 But it is also true of the longfinal section of Tender Buttons called "Rooms", which begins:
Act so diat there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparationis given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet.There was an occupation. (TB, 63)
The first sentence above anticipates the postmodern turn toward decentringand dispersal, but for Stein, decentring is not, as many critics have posited,synonymous with improvisation and/or free play. "A wide action is not awidth." For Stein, the issue is always one of discrimination: "What is thedifference between a thing seen and what do you mean", as she put it."They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation."Real sustenance must avoid the trappings of the table, the "silver" and"sweet" and take the "occupation" of writing seriously.
"Rooms" are of course another instance of containers, of enclosure. Butthe room of Tender Buttons is depicted as wide open, a place of sexual loveas well as poetic production:
A curving example makes righteous finger-nails. This is the only object in secretionand speech.
Or again:
Dance a clean dream and an extravagant turn up, secure the steady rights andtranslate more than translate the authority, show the choice and make no moremistakes than yesterday.
And:
The sight of no pussy cat is so different that a tobacco zone is white and cream.
"Rooms" concludes with a long paragraph in which the drive towardlyricism is treated to delicate parody:
A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision.The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music,not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstandingthe celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstand-ing Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephantand a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning,not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with morelikeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and aspecial resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which therain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with whichthere is a chair and plenty of breadiing. The care with which there is incrediblejustice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.(TB, 78)
As in such well-known Romantic poems as Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes"and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight", the moonlit night is the scene ofimagination and erotic longing. But Stein playfully inverts the Romantictopos, giving in to a "sensible decision", a decision that involves a long-winded argument that "notwithstanding" any number of eventualities (theword "notwithstanding" is used five times, followed by "not even with-standing" [once] and "not even" [four times]), "all this" (all what?) "makesa magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain."
The "notwithstandings" in the passage are worth tracking. To beginwith, "declarations" and "music", the trappings of romantic love, arediscarded. Next, we read "notwithstanding the choice and a torch and acollection", three nouns that seem not to be parallel but which makeperfect sense when we stop to consider that traditional romantic love storiesinvariably involve choices, that they take place {pace Shakespeare and themock-heroic Byron) by torchlight or perhaps in church when someone istaking up the collection. Notwithstanding, furthermore, "the celebratinghat and a vacation" — trappings, this time, of romance as it is rendered inImpressionist painting as well, for that matter, as in Cezanne's Provencallandscapes and Picasso's portraits of Fernande wearing a large hat. TheBig Picture — Europe, Asia, the world of elephants, of "the ocean beingencircling" and tales of drowning — is not for Stein. "Not even with terrificsacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely tobe pleasing." What is rejected here is the literary drive to say somethingImportant, to make manifestos, and, finally, to write so as to please ademanding public.
To turn one's back on these conventions, Stein implies, is to enter whatis best described as a room of one's own. But she goes much further thanVirginia Woolf in making a clean sweep of the old rooms. "The rain iswrong and the white is wrong": once the pretty Romantic imagery hasbeen discarded, even rhyme becomes a new possibility: "the care withwhich there is a chair and plenty of breathing." In the end, Tender Buttonsoffers its readers "incredible justice and likeness" in the form of "a magnifi-cent asparagus, and also a fountain". "Asparagus" is the tide of one of thepoems in the Food section — "Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. Thismakes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet" — where the imageis one of long hot stalks, juicy and tender. But how is "asparagus" relatedto "fountain"? Not logically or spatially, surely; we would not find the twotogether in a still-life by Gris or Braque. But Stein's focus on the wetdimension of the vegetable allows her to make a fanciful leap to her finalword "fountain". The composition of Tender Buttons antecedes Duchamp'sreadymade by a few years but I find it apposite that Rooms ends with afountain curiously akin to R. Mutt's upside-down urinal, that ordinarydomestic object chosen for its "aesthetic indifference" and yet a fountainafter all, a fountain "notwithstanding" all the retinal cliches that precludedits acceptance for such a long time.
"Sentences", observes Stein in How to Write, "are not emotional whileparagraphs are."29 Like many of her aphorisms, this one sounds absurd tillone stops to think it through. Usually, Stein's individual sentences - "Dirtand not copper makes a color darker" (TB 13), "A charm a single charmis doubtful" (13), "A widow in a wise veil and more garments shows thatshadows are even" (18) - demand the network of the larger paragraph,
her syntax depending upon the most delicate adjustments between word-groups and phrases.
On the other hand, just as Duchamp painted an ordinary French window,removed a single phoneme from "window" and came up with the titleFresh Widow for one of his best known readymades, so some of Stein's finestmini-sentences, many of them having achieved the status of aphorisms andproverbs, depend upon a single function word. Here is "Roast Potatoes"(TB, 51):
Roast potatoes for.
"The incorrectness of the dangling preposition [for]", says Lyn Hejinian,"attracts one's attention" (LH 138). Roast potatoes for dinner? For me?"For" as a pun for "four", or perhaps a pun on the French word for oven,which gives us pommes de terres aufour? Is "roast" a noun or an adjective? Ifa noun, we must supply a comma following it, "Roast, [and] potatoes for[dinner]." Or suppose "roast" is a verb in the imperative? The first andthird words keep shifting whereas "potatoes" is the staple of life, the stableelement in an otherwise variable language game.
Three words, of which only one is anchored. "Roast" (we recall "Roastedsusie is my icecream" in "Preciosilla") and "for" cannot be pinned down.But hasn't Stein made this point all along? "ROAST POTATOES" is thethird potato poem in Tender Buttons, the first containing the four words"Roast potatoes cut in between". Between, that is to say, "Roast" and"for". It is a Dada joke Duchamp would have appreciated. "Successionsof words", as Gertrude Stein remarks in How to Write, "are so agreeable."
MARJORIE PERLOFFStanford University,Department of English,Stanford,California 94303-2087,U.SA.
NOTES
1 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed.Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 111-12. This collection is subsequently cited inthe text as SW.
2 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1967; New York: Viking Press, 1971)1 P- 4&Subsequently cited in the text as PC.
3 Marianne De Koven, for example, writes: "There is no reason to struggle to interpret or unifyeither the whole of Tender Buttons or any part of it, not only because there is no consistent patternof meaning, but because we violate the spirit of the work in trying to find one. [...] Tender Buttonsfunctions anti-patriarchally: as presymbohc jouissance and as irreducibly multiple, fragmented, open-ended articulation of lexical meaning. [...] Stein is playing, and playing entirely in the realm oflanguage, without interest in representation of the material world." M. De Koven, A DifferentLanguage: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983),pp. 74-6.
G E R T R U D E STEIN AND MARCEL D U C H A M P 153
The trouble with this argument — and it has been echoed by other critics — is that it avoids thecentral issue: when is free play, nonsense, non-referentiality effective and when do we consider itmere gibberish? To say that Stein is deconstructing "the world of patriarchal hierarchy, sense,and coherence" (De Koven, p. 77) is only half the story.
4 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranckisement of Art (New York: 1986), pp. 107—11.5 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans, from the German by Michael Shaw (1974;
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 49—53 and passim.6 Gertrude Stein, "Transatlantic Interview 1946", in Robert Hass (ed.), A Primer for the Gradual
Understanding of Gertrude Stein (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976), p. 13.7 Meyer Shapiro, "The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-Life", in Shapiro,
Modem Art: lgth & 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), pp . 19, 21 .8 Rober t Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Har ry N. Abrams, 1978), p . 69.9 T h e case for Stein's Cubism and the parallel between her work and Picasso's has been made
frequently: see R a n d a Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbanaand Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp . 2 9 - 4 5 ; J ayne Walker, The Making of a Modernist:Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst: T h e University of Massachusetts Press,1984), pp. 129—33. I myself discuss Stein's "Cubis t " writing in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaudto Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Chapte r 3 passim. But, as I want to suggestin this essay, important as the Cubist connection obviously is, the analogy, made repeatedly byStein herself, no longer strikes me as accurate.
10 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp . 5 4 - 6 .
11 "Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my cravingfor alliterations, would be called ready-made aided.
At another time, wanting to expose the basic ant inomy between art and ' readymades ' I imagineda recipocral ready-made: use a Rembrand t as an ironing boa rd?" Marcel Duchamp , "Ready-Mades , "in Hans Richter, DADA: Art and Anti-Art (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978),p. 89. Subsequendy cited in the text as H R .
12 Marcel Duchamp, " T h e 1914 Box", Salt Seller, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed.Michel Sanouillet & Elmer Peterson (New York: T h a m e s and Hudson, 1975), p . 23. Subsequendycited in the text as SS.
13 Thier ry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymaae,trans. Dana Polan (1984; Minneapolis and Oxford: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 31.
14 See William A. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp Fountain (Houston: The Menil Collection, 1989),pp. 22-3.
15James Laughlin, in conversation with the author, October 1991.16 Sherwood Anderson, "The Work of Gertrude Stein", Preface to Stein Geography and Plays
(1922), in Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Jefferson, N.C.and London: McFarland & Co., 1990), p. 1. Subsequently cited in the text as RK.
17 Gertrude Stein, "Arthur a Grammar", How to Write, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York:Dover, 1975), p. 62.
18 Even when critics like Marianne DeKoven have acknowledged the importance of TenderButtons, they rarely engage in actual analysis of the texts in question. Or again, allegorical readingsare imposed. In The Public is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), for example, Harr ie t Scott Chessman, imposing aparticular feminist grid on the work, posits that die phrase " T h e difference is spreading" (in theprose poem "A CARAFE") "may be femaleness itself; perhaps this moment of 'spreading' is oneof parturi t ion, a new birth of the female" (p . 93).
19 Ger t rude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914; Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990), p . 9. All furtherreferences are to this edition, designated as T B .
20 Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound(1926; New York: New Directions,
1990). P- >32-21 Jackson Mac Low, "Read ing 'Objects ' from Tender Buttons", in R K , p. 89.22 Ger t rude Stein, "Composi t ion as Explanat ion" (1926), in SW, pp. 5 1 3 - 2 3 .23 Lyn Hej inian, " T w o Stein Ta lks" , Temblor, 3 (1986) p . 133. T h e two talks, " L a n g u a g e a n d
Real ism" and " G r a m m a r and Landscape" (pp . 128-39), subsequently cited in the text as L H ,constitute one of the most important analyses to date of Stein's style and grammar .
24 O n this prose p o e m , see m y Poetics of Indeterminacy, p p . 1 0 2 - 0 8 .
25 See SS, 22. The entire contents of the 1914 Box are reproduced in this book: see SS, pp. 22-5.26 See Francis M. Naumann, "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites," in Marcel
Duchamp Artist of the Century, R. Kuenzli and F. M. Naumann (ed.) (Cambridge and London: MITPress, 1989), p. 30.
27 G e r t r u d e Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B . Toklas, in S W , p . 189.28 M a r j o r i e Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition ( C a m b r i d g e :
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 190-92.29 Gertrude Stein How to Write, with a new Preface and Introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz
(1931; New York: Dover, 1975), p. 39.
FIGURES
1. Marcel Duchamp, BOTTLERACK (BOTTLE DRYER), 1914. Original lost; 2nd version: theartist, Paris c. 1921 (inscribed "Antique"), collection Robert Lebel, Paris; 3rd version: Man Ray,Paris, 1961. 4th Version: Galleria Schwarz, Milan, edition of 8 signed and numbered copies, 1964.Readymade: galvanised iron bottle dryer.2. Man Ray, INDESTRUCTIBLE OBJECT (or OBJECT TO BE DESTROYED), 1964, replicaof 1923 original. Metronome and photograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York. James ThrallSoby Fund.3. Joseph Cornell, UNTITLED (HOTEL BEAU-SEJOUR, c. 1954. Construction, 17JX 12^x4!in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.4. Umberto Boccioni, DEVELOPMENT OF A BOTTLE IN SPACE, 1912-13. Silvered bronze(cast 1931), 15 x 12^ x 23 J in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Aristide Maillol Fund.5. Marcel Duchamp, IN ADVANCE OF THE BROKEN ARM, 1915 (New York). Original lost;2nd version obtained by Duchamp for Katherine S. Dreier, 1945; 3rd version Ulf Linde, Stockholm,1963; 4th version Galleria Schwarz, Milan.Readymade: wood and galvanised iron snow shovel, 473 in. h. (121.3 cm). Collection Katherine5. Dreier, West Redding, Connecticut, acquired in 1945.6. Marcel Duchamp, FOUNTAIN, 1917, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. Readymade, Urinal,18 X 15 x 12 in. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.7. Marcel Duchamp, WHY NOT SNEEZE, ROSE SELAVY? 1964 (Replica of 1921 original).Painted metal birdcage containing 151 white marble blocks, thermometer, and piece of cuttlebone;cage 4$ x 8J X 6$ in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Galleria Schwarz, Milan.8. Marcel Duchamp, BICYCLE WHEEL, 1951 (Third version after lost original of 1913).Assemblage: Metal wheel, 25^ in. diameter, mounted on painted wood stool, 23J in. high; overall50J in. high. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, gift to the Museum of Modern Art,New York.
