Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

  

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

 

 

ELISAVET ARSENIOU

 

 

Decompressing Tender Buttons: Finding Stein’s Foreign Languages (notes on a ‘carafe’)

I selected the word “decompressing” for my reading of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). The idea of “decompression” offers the grounds for the three sections of this approach: depressurizing, unbending, and expanding. Depressurizing the anxiety of deconstruction, unbending the female figure and occupation(s), and expanding the text to include other realms, languages, and lines, visual and auditory.

Depressurizing the anxiety of language-centered reading

Stein’s ‘carafe’ does not only reflect a system of différance but also, in my eyes at least, constitutes an allegory of literature itself; a theoretical or critical literary ‘piece’ about the importance and magic of making and reading literature, or word art. That is one more reason why, however much the reader desires to expand the meaning of any of the book’s word or phrase by incorporating into their intention clues about its history, Tender Buttons’ language itself has already assimilated the entire history of its words, making yet another deconstructive reading of an innately deconstructive text tautological, i.e., tedious, and unnecessary.

Stein’s carafe is made of a useful material, the value of which is not intrinsic but acquired, foreign, and extrinsic. If one passes its glass off as a precious stone, they are an impostor. Yet, glass is a versatile substance; if necessary, it can replace the material of precious jewelry. As Constantine Cavafy wrote, there is “nothing humiliating or undignified in those little pieces of colored glass. On the contrary, they seem a sad protest against” (133) the unjust misfortune of the Nietzschean lost meaning of the words and symbols, of what words deserved to have. Carafe’s useful glass, which contains vulnerable meanings, has been broken and remade, just like Jean Genet's Rembrandt Torn into Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet, on the structure of which Glas is based.1 Or, rather, is it the same Grecian or well-wrought urn broken into pieces and reconstructed again?

Unbending the Female Figure and Occupation

Deconstructive readings had not allowed us to personify this very carafe, although it always did look like a woman, or a uterus, a bloody or hurt one. The carafe was a blind object that could not see but could only be seen (a reasonable beginning of a feminist reading). Yet, this disabled form of a woman opens up a new female figure, both dehumanized and rehumanized, or even posthumanized. This new form acquires unhuman qualities, like the Dadaist pot-like characters of avant-garde theater, like the metaphysical figures of Giorgio de Chirico or Marcel Duchamp’s permanently unfinished Le Grand Verre.2 Today, we can elaborate more on this very carafe’s unbending process. All the time, the same figure acquires additional qualities. It is a blind yet insightful Teiresias with his full-grown breasts.3 Being a glass container that does not include stoppers, the carafe allows the spreading of the flows. In Pablo Picasso’s still life Carafe, Jug, and Fruit Bowl (1909),4 the greatest flow is the one of vision: adjusted on its flared lip, a semantically plural eye covers its surface.

Expanding the Text to Include ‘Visions and Auditions’

Apart from being a web of signifiers, Tender Buttons, as a machine that produces results functionally and for use, contains practical objects. The carafe is itself a container without a stopper, ready to be emptied and filled again with its own flows of desire, addictions, dependencies, or paranoias, in a system of pointing lines. Each system of lines energizes a dynamic (cubist) assemblage (an arrangement, a constellation), a process that becomes interesting because of its potentials: this tendency of alteration and revision, this dehumanizing and rehumanizing procedure, is necessary for the continuation of the text. The carafe of Tender Buttons collects the glances and reflects the sight of the others thrown to herself while following the lines of flight that reach outside of its assemblage.5 Thus, she/it becomes strangely familiar, as a woman only seen placing the crockery on the table flies away from her normal form and sound and spreads out, covering the surface of the original space with her own surfaces. These lines of flight, like the rings and curls of paper thrown out by a vintage mechanical counting machine, put her in a blind spot, a nomadic mode of thought which moves and keeps itself in the margins where the human and the inhuman coexist by increasing their capacities. The ‘womanoid’ carafe is cut into many pieces by the lines of flight. These lines are drawn where the text looks and sounds like it is written in a foreign language, where the signifying process takes place through a move towards another language, where structure and grammar are lost, and words only exist on the surface, on the outside. A new mechanism has to be employed for the new language to make sense. This is why translation matters—because it works at this level of foreignness:

“All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.”
Όλο αυτό και μη κανονικό μη ακανόνιστο στο μη αρμονικό.
Tout cela n’est pas ordinaire, n’est pas désordonné dans le sens de ne pas se ressembler.
not hors d’ in ar in not un or d’ er red
 

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WORKS CITED

Apollinaire, Guillaume. Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame Surréaliste en Deux Actes et un Prologue. Éditions Sic, 1917.
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.
Cavafy, Constantine P. Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1975.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian
Massumi, Continuum, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Galilée, 1974.
Duchamp, Marcel. Le Grand Verre. 1923. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Genet, Jean. Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes. Nolay, Les éditions du Chemin de fer, 2013, pp. 1-40. ISBN 978-2-916130-54-5.
Genet, Jean. Rembrandt Le Toréador. Gallimard, 1967.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Ellen Frothingham, Roberts Brothers, 1890.
Picasso, Pablo. Carafe, Jug, and Fruit Bowl. 1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin Books Ltd, 1977.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Claire Marie, 1914.Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Claire Marie, 1914.

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