Gertrude Stein and the value of meaning

There is no better writer than Stein for stating at the outset the tentativeness of one's critical assertions. In Tender Buttons, she is obscure. She leaves playfully up-ended any definite notions of meaning one may have had before coming to her work. The question is not whether it's nonsense, but what type of nonsense it is and whether it can tell us anything. There's not going to be any sense at the narrative level; one can only look for which meanings might be subverted by the unexpected, and which meanings are created through those subversions. I can only hope to read small pieces of brokenness to look for what might be offered in return.

Nothing Elegant
"A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest."

The first sentence employs a form found repeatedly in Tender Buttons: a word followed, without punctuation, by a modification of that word. Instead of being placed in front, like an adjective or adverb, the modification calls attention to itself by trailing the word it modifies in an uncomfortable join. Often the modification swallows the word itself.

In this first sentence, the charm is emphasized as a single charm: a real, identifiable, graspable, countable charm...but it is "doubtful." It is negated, though uncertainly. The attempt to isolate and instantiate a single charm is found doubtful. The reader's desire for meaning is ultimately unsatisfied. This is even clearer "if inside is let in and there places change." "Inside" is not, of its essence, inside. Stein suggests it must be "let in." If objects do not contain their inside essences, then they are given meaning. And if it can be given, it can be taken away, which seems to be Stein's project here.

But she has an interesting notion of taking away, as exemplified in another instance of this familiar locution: "this means a loss a great loss a restitution." In subverting the desire for meaning, Stein offers at least some recompense: we gain a greater understanding of language when we understand the necessary dissolution of meaning.

But for me, this is the insight offered over and over again by so much postmodern literary criticism: yes, meaning is unachievable, thank you very much. What I value about (some) postmodern literary texts is missing in Stein's modernist one: a closer examination of the human wreckage of lost meaning. Meaningful or not meaningful, language is a medium of human communication and emotion. Tender Buttons is entirely devoid of people, probably because the blessed rage for order (if I may borrow the phrase), the human yearning for meaning, is too complicated to fit into the task of pointing out language's failure.