OF OBJECTS AND READYMADES: GERTRUDE STEIN AND MARCEL DUCHAMP

G E N E S I S of a small yellow paper book with a green paper label called Tender Buttons, printed in 1914 in an edition of 1,000 copies, is recalled 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 their trip to Spain in 1911 that "Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed": THE

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She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world. It was a long tormenting process, she looked, listened and described. She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal. One of the things that always worries her about painting is the difficulty the artist feels and which sends him to painting still lifes, that after all the human being essentially is not paintable. [...] She experimented with everything in trying to describe. She tried a bit inventing words but she soon gave that up. The english language was her medium and with the english language the task was to be achieved, the problem solved. The use of fabricated words offended her, it was an escape into imitative emotionalism. No, she stayed with her task, although after the return to Paris she described objects, she described rooms and objects, which joined with her first experiments done in Spain, made the volume Tender Buttons.' The shift from internal to external Stein refers to here is, of course, one of the central paradigm shifts of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Stein's notion that the "human being essentially is not paintable", coupled with her conviction that one's medium must be "the english language" as it is rather than the "fabrication] of words", a technique she took to be characteristic of such fellow modernists as Ezra Pound and James Joyce, has a striking parallel in the visual arts. The same year that Tender Buttons was published, Marcel Duchamp bought, at a Paris bazaar, a botde rack which was to become the first of his famous Readymades (Fig. 1). The word readymade, Duchamp was to recall in his 1967 conversations with Pierre Cabanne, "seemed perfect for these things that weren't works of art, that weren't sketches, and to which no art terms applied. [...] The choice of readymades 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 mere habit, "the repetition of something already accepted." 2 Critics have taken Duchamp at his word, even as they often assume that Gertrude Stein's rejection of the traditional representational model is a rejection of meaning itself and that Tender Buttons is intentionally nonreferential.3 In an influential study, Arthur C. Danto argues that Duchamp's
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readymades spell the "end of art", the object no longer having "perceptible aesthetic properties" and the artistic act thus turning away attention from the work to an interpretation of it. "Interpretation", writes Danto, "is in effect the lever with which an object is lifted out of the real world and into the art-world." Hence the much-fabled "end of art" (one of Danto's chapter titles) with its concomitant replacement by philosophy.4 The assumption here is that a readymade is no more than a randomly chosen object taken out of its normal context, inscribed, placed in a glass case, and exhibited in an art gallery. But suppose someone were, at this very moment, to hold up a randomly chosen object a paper clip, say, or a 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? And if not, is it because the experiment has been tried too often and has lost its 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), use the "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 work of Cezanne. Stein herself, after all, told Robert Bartlett Haas in her "Transatlantic Interview" of 1946 that "Everything I have done has been influenced by [...] Cezanne", he being the first painter to "conceive the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole."6 What Stein meant was that a typical Cezanne composition for example Still Life with Peppermint Bottle of 1890-92 (National Gallery of Art, Washington) - redefines the visual field as a shallow space, no longer governed by single-point perspective or chiaroscuro. What seems to be a stable, even classically balanced structure reveals itself to be a system of irresolutions. The table top, to begin with, is largely hidden beneath the artfully arranged blue drapery so that we cannot make out its contours; the transparent carafe has a swollen belly, echoing the ballooning blue table cloth and white cover; the objects on the table apples, botde, glass, carafe - tilt on their axes, the white cloth reflects the blue of the draperies, whereas the blue carafe displays patches of white and the "background" blue planes come forward to merge with the blue drapery. Thus "each thing is as important as every other thing" within the densely woven structure. Yet, as Meyer Shapiro put it, still-life, even stilllife as resolutely Modernist as Cezanne's, "consists of objects that, whedier artificial or natural, are subordinate to man as elements of use, manipulation and enjoyment; these objects are smaller than ourselves, within arm's reach, and owe dieir presence and place to a human action, a purpose. They convey 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 of Chardin, "unthinkable outside of Western bourgeois society".7
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The Cubists, in any case, carried out the logical implications of the Cezannian experiment. A collage like Picasso's Bottle, Glass, Violin of 191213 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) exhibits a radically new fusion of mass and void, between solid form and the space around it. The siphon on the left, for example, which we would expect to be transparent, is made of the opaque newspaper, whereas the violin at the right, which we would expect to be opaque, is transparent enough for us to read the newspaper right through it. And further, as Robert Rosenblum remarks,8 the laws of gravity are inverted: the glass objects siphon and goblet which would in reality appear less weighty than the wooden violin, are made to appear much heavier, given their newsprint substances. And the two sound holes of the violin are not only radically different in size and shape but appear to be solids floating in a void rather than voids cut through a solid. Picasso gives us an unstable structure of dismembered planes in indeterminate spatial positions (where, for instance, is the edge of the table on which the objects are located?); his collage all but obliterates the distinction between figure and ground which Cezanne's still-life still maintains. Nevertheless and this marks the contrast between Picasso and Duchamp as well as, so I shall suggest, between Picasso and Stein - he is still using paint (or mixed media in the case of collage) to represent objects in the real world: siphons, wine goblets, bottles, table cloths, violins. Materials are used so as to represent, however obliquely, something else? Or, to take a third and rather different example, consider the case of Futurist sculpture. Boccioni's famous Development of a Bottle in Space of 1912 (Fig. 4), for example, represents an interesting transitional phase in the art making of the early avant-garde. As I argued in The Futurist Moment, the sculpture is structured to be seen frontally, like a relief. The base bears a series of bottle-shaped shells, hollowed out and fitted inside each other, resting on a concave shape with a simple, unbroken profile, as if to say that the sculpture does have a centre. But seen frontally, the hollow shells themselves seem to have been rotated slightly in relationship to one another and, especially near the top, obscure the hollow centre of the objects. It is impossible, in other words, to view the "bottle" from a single angle and "see it" whole; we have to posit different viewing positions and yet the frontal relief form and concave centre make it all but impossible to do so. Ambiguity, abstraction, distortion, multiplicity - all these epithets apply to Boccioni's "bottle construction". But neither the Futurists nor the Cubists broke the traditional visual contract with the viewer, a contract whereby the images presented, however distorted, fragmented, or abstracted they may appear (see Juan Gris' Still Life with Bottles, 1912, Rijksmuseum, KrollerMuller, Otterlo, Holland), are to be understood as retinal representations. Given this context, the iconoclasm of Duchamp's gesture is all the more remarkable: not the image of a bottle, but the rack on which bottles are placed to dry. Far from being an "indifferent" object, his thus functions

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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 a shape that is a recognizable "real thing" and yet is endowed with a peculiar phallic power. Duchamp's readymades regularly function in this way. In 1915 he bought an ordinary snow shovel and put it in a glass case under the title In Advance of the Broken Arm (Fig. 5). In real life, of course, we never see snow shovels in this pristine state: either they are arranged in rows at the factory or hardware store, or they are stuck in a closet or toolshed along with other implements, or they are seen in use, covered with dirt or snow. But it is the title that gives this readymade its special aura: In Advance of the Broken Arm suggests bourgeois caution the purchase of a shiny new snow shovel to prevent sidewalk accidents that cause broken arms, the need for every proper household to have a snow shovel, the shovel as industrialised society's replacement of the human arm, and so on. Again, the art construct is not a representation of something but the thing itself, even as that thing itself 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 and with urinals. The fountain is a standard Romantic image of natural energy and beauty, a symbol of sexual potency. But here, the urinal's original male 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 receptacle for the male artist's "fountain"? "One only has", Duchamp was to comment decades later, "for female the public urinal and one lives by it."12 "The theme of the impossible encounter", observes Thierry de Duve, "of the sex 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 that recurs again and again in Duchamp's writings of the period.13 Even die signature "R. Mutt," a variation on J. L. Mott, the Philadelphia Iron Works where Duchamp purchased the urinal, becomes the occasion for extensive punning: Duchamp himself cited the "Mutt and Jeff" comic strip,14 but the name also recalls such German words as Mutti ("Mama"), Mut ("courage," "nerve"), Armut ("poverty"), or even art mutt ("art" in French + mongrel dog in American slang = mongrel art). Such sexual punning and double 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-known Bicycle Wheel (Fig. 8), with its dislocated transportation system, its equivocation between indoors and outdoors, stasis and movement, its metal rod's male "penetration" of die female "seat", and its invitation to the viewer to give die wheel a spin.

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Fig. 2

Fig. 1

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Fig. 7

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The choice of readymades, Duchamp repeatedly insisted, "was based on a 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 we apply the norms of easel painting or the making of sculpture, is by no means semantically indifferent, that indeed Duchamp's art can be understood 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 image industry into every home, was dominant. In poetry, the same criteria concreteness, immediacy, die Image as what Pound called the "radiant node or cluster" prevailed, Stein's early language experiments, her

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"Portraits", plays, and short fictions, striking readers as at best too abstract and at worst nonsensical. James Laughlin, the noted publisher and poet who served for a short time in the thirties as Stein's secretary, insists to this day that hers was simply automatic writing. 15 And Sherwood Anderson recalls the early reception of Tender Buttons in this way: My brother had been at some sort of gathering of literary people on the evening before 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 of laughter. It was generally agreed that the author had done a thing we Americans call "putting something across" the meaning being that she had, by a strange freakish performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussed in 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 writing in the twenties and thirties; like Duchamp's visual indifference", which was taken to be the very negation of art as bourgeois phenomenon, Stein's seeming "verbal indifference" was regarded as a wilful "putting [of] something across". Like Duchamp, who claimed to be entirely without artistic taste, or purpose, Stein regularly protested that "Grammar is useless because there is nothing to say."17 But whereas Duchamp's readymades are 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 referentiahty from writing than we do from the visual arts. But in a critical climate that has come to recognise that the semiotic of visual imagery is closely related to its verbal counterpart, perhaps an understanding of Duchamp's readymades can help us frame a text like Tender Buttons. That, at least is what I propose to do here. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas treats Duchamp as a figure of minor importance: 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 where Nude Descending a Staircase was shown and recalls a dinner at the Picabias' at which Marcel Duchamp "looking like a young norman crusader" was present (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 apartment to look at art works, they are shown "pictures of Marcel Duchamp and a lot of other people" (SW 186), as if to say that the "adorable Marcel" is a cult figure rather than an artist to be taken seriously. But then Stein was always sceptical about Dada, allying herself, as I noted above, squarely with Cezanne and the Cubists. "Everything I have done", Stein claims, "has been influenced by Cezanne." But Stein's own version of influence and transmission is not without its biases: it should be measured, in any

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case, against her actual performance. Consider, for example, the first prose poem in Tender Buttons: A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS A 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, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.19 Here is our familiar carafe again, but the riddling, anti-poetic prose passage that follows the tide seems to have little in common with Cezanne's StillLife with Peppermint Bottle or, for that matter, with a Modernist poem like Ezra Pound's "The Beautiful Toilet," in the Cathay sequence, published at about the same time as Tender Buttons: Blue, blue is the grass about the river And 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", "arrangement", "system", "difference" are primarily abstract and conceptual as are die adjectives ("strange", "single", "hurt") and present participles ("pointing, resembling, spreading"). The dominant trope, if we can call it a trope, of the passage seems to be negation: "nothing strange", "not ordinary", "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 call carafeness, in the same way that Duchamp provides us with the "real" shovel or the "real" bicycle wheel. The carafe is first denned as a "blind glass", a glass, that is to say, through which one cannot see. Perhaps it has red wine in it (the "single hurt color" mentioned in the second line); hence it is opaque. The carafe is "a kind in glass and a cousin" a kind of glass container, evidendy, and a cousin to such other glass containers as wine botdes, pitchers, vases, and goblets. It is "a spectacle", something to look at 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 familiar of family relationships a carafe is larger dian a cup and smaller than a pitcher, and so on. In this sense, it participates in an "arrangement in a system of pointing": it is part of a larger system which we might call the glass family. The carafe is "all this and not ordinary" which is to say that 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 collection: to use words responsibly, Stein implies, is to become aware diat no two words, no two morphemes or phonemes for diat matter, are ever exacdy the same. And furdier: the repetition of a phoneme, of a morpheme

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or word, always effects some change, however slight. Long before Jacques Derrida defined differance as both difference and deferral of meaning, Stein had 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 echoed in "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 Mac Low suggests, the three sentences before us constitute "a bound system of sounds".21 Everything seems to relate to everything else in what is, despite the air of "casual" prose, a very tightly woven structure. Indeed, the very last syllable of the last word in the text, "spreading" takes us back to the opening noun, "kind", ing now replacing ind so that the "difference" really is spreading. The word that stands out from the rest, both semantically and phonemically, is hurt. Does the adjective merely refer, as I suggested above, to the wound (i.e. red) of wine? Or does "hurt" have something to do, as Mac Low posits (RK 89), with "blind glass", with the inability to see or be 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 delimits the radius of discourse of the sequence, aligning her properties under the sign of her tide, which is an oxymoron. Buttons are normally hard little objects; "tender" buttons (in French, boutons tendres means nipples as well as buds) are at best an oddity, rather like Meret Oppenheim's Fur-Lined Cup or Duchamp's stationary bicycle wheel. Stein thus sets up an immediate tension between hard and soft, dry and wet, closing and opening, blindness and insight. Buttons are "tender", moreover, because, as some of the texts will imply, they are looking for a hole to enter. The discourse radius, as I said above, is rigidly circumscribed: the world of Tender Buttons is the domestic world of women, an everyday household world in contrast to the larger industrial landscape of Duchamp's readymades. Cushions, plates, umbrellas, dresses, hats, ribbons, roast potatoes, milk, eggs, coffee, apples, cranberries this is the object world of Stein's sequence, a world of cooking and cleaning, sewing and mending, dressing and dining, that is structured according to the three principles laid out in "Composition as Explanation": "beginning again and again", the "continuous present", and "using everything".22 Again and again, for example, 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:

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"Cracks, holes, punctures, piercing, gaps, and breakage - and the possible spill with which the first poem ends - recur and refer in part to Stein's concerns about the means and adequacy of writing - of capturing things in words." 23 Consider, for example, how the second poem in Tender Buttons, "GLAZED GLITTER" relates to the first. The "kind in glass", the carafe itself, is viewed, not as an object, however distorted and fragmented, as Cezanne or Picasso would view it, but as a word, generating, not related objects but related words. Thus "GLAZED GLITTER", which follows "A CARAFE", begins with the sentence, "Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover." "Nickel" is not directly related to the "spectacle" of glass carafes, but the reference to the cover reintroduces the notion of "container" 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 in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation 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 fixed referent for "glazed glitter" or to allegorise Stein's words and phrases. There is, as she insists, "no programme". There is not even a "color chosen", even though red has been mentioned. Yet there is nothing random or merely "playful" about the passage in question. Note, for example, the elaborate network of references to liquids in containers: "medicine" flasks, tea cups ("breakages in Japanese"), the "spitting", "washing" and "polishing" of "nickel" so as to restore its "glazed glitter". In this sense, as in Duchamp, what you see is what you see, although, again as in a Duchamp readymade, the indeterminacy of form allows for double entendre and sexual punning. Inside the "cover", there is "red" and "handsome" "glittering". 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 gradually accumulate momentum. Thus, the container of the diird prose poem, "A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION", is neither a carafe nor an object made of nickel but somediing soft and malleable: a cushion, again widi a cover and mysterious insides.24 And here is the fourm piece, called simply "A BOX": 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 the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine sub-

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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 with another Duchamp work, the Box of 1914, which was the artist's first foray in the production of a portable "museum", a case containing miniature replicas of his earlier works as well as facsimile collections of his notes. The 1914 Box was produced in conjunction with Duchamp's magnum opus, the
Large 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, Duchamp tells us, according to identical systems of chance operation: - If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane distorting itself as it pleases and creates a new shape of the measure of length... The 3 standard stoppages are the meter diminished.25 Duchamp later explained that this "invention" of measuring devices in the form of wooden templates, duplicating the subtle twists and curves of their chance configurations, was meant to be "a joke about the meter, the standard unit of measurement adopted by Europeans". 26 Other items in the Box include erotic puns, absurd definitions (e.g. "Deferment. Against compulsory military service: a 'deferment' of each limb, of the heart and the other anatomical parts; each soldier being already unable to put his uniform on again, his heart feeding telephonically, a deferred arm, etc."), and finally a set of instructions: Make a mirrored wardrobe. Make this mirrored wardrobe for the silvering. Make a painting offrequency.(SS. 25) Duchamp's Dada suggestions how can one paint frequency? oddly echo Stein'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 the process of "silvering", of shining and polishing or, as she cryptically calls it in one of her titles, "WATER RAINING" ("Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke"). But beyond such verbal parallels, it is Stein's conception of the box that recalls the absurdity of Duchamp'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 say any more than we can determine whether this is a jewellery box or sewing box, a large carton in which to keep papers or a small pill box. Yet boxness is established by the fourfold repetition of the words "out of". Qualities

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are defined as emerging out o/~something, the items related by sound rather than overt meaning: Out of kindness comes redness out of rudeness comes rapid same question out of an eye comes research Here repetition of syntax as well as sound give the passage a childlike insistence: the proverbial tone of "out of X comes Y" recalls a secondgrade reader or speller. But like the "mirrored wardrobe" inside Duchamp's portable museum, Stein's "BOX" presents a challenge to the viewer. "Out of kindness comes redness": the two nouns have the same formation, but the former is abstract, the latter concrete. Out of the giver's kindness, perhaps, comes the "redness" of the gift a valentine, maybe, or some other token of love. Whereas "out of rudeness" comes "rapid same question", the interruption that is unnecessary because the question has been asked before. "Out of an eye comes research": the beauty of the phrase is that a specific physical organ, the eye, is now set over against those abstractions, kindness and rudeness. Perhaps, Stein implies, we better leave such abstractions aside and trust the "research" that "comes" from the eye, and the "selection" or discrimination that characterises art even if the process involves "painful cattle". But what is the principle of selection, of producing "order"? In the second half of the prose poem, the repeated "out of" is replaced by the copula: "the order is", "a white way of being round is", "it is not", "it is so 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 BLIND GLASS", the focus is on "an arrangement in a system of pointing". "Is it disappointing", Stein asks, knowing it can't be since "pointing" is still there, 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, the creation, not of a Cubist surface of dismembered planes, but of an oblique statement of poetics. "Out of rudeness" (perhaps Stein was thinking of Ezra Pound, of whom she said with some asperity that "he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not")27 there can come nothing useful, only the "rapid same question". Whereas the true poet knows that "a white way of being round" can suggest a pin, diat a "green point" cannot be equated to a red one, and so on. A few pages later, 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. Suppose an example is necessary, the plainer it is made the more reason there is for some outward recognition that there is a result.

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A box is made sometimes and them to see to see it neatly and have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper. A custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that a large part of the time there are three which have different connections. The one is on the table. The two are on the table. The three are on the table. The one, one is the same length as is shown by the cover being longer. The other is different there is more cover that shows it. The other is different and that makes the corners have the same shade the eight are in singular arrangement to make four necessary.
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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 holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper": to have a sense of the materiality 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 for which 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 dominate the Jura-Paris road. On the one hand, the chief of the 5 nudes will be ahead of the 4 other nudes towards this Jura-Paris road. On die other hand, the headlight child will be die instrument conquering this Jura-Paris road. (SS, 26) The "Jura-Paris road" refers to a trip taken by Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, 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 the decision was made to publish Apollinaire's The Cubist Painters. Duchamp's way of mocking this "Jura-Paris" or Cubist road, is to turn the whole thing into an absurd number game, concluding with a group of "algebraic comparisons" designed to generate the "fourth dimension" (SS, 29). Stein similarly 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 in singular arrangement to make the four necessary." But Stein's pragmatism (eight folds to make four corners of the tableclodi just as, for Duchamp, the snow shovel is what comes "in advance of the broken arm") is never mere empiricism. On the contrary, the everyday, the ordinary, the common-sensical becomes the basis for witty, erotic double-entendre. This is especially true of the poems in the Food section, for example "MILK", whose Dadasque analogy between pint bottles and the "best men" I have talked of elsewhere.28 But it is also true of the long final 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 preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation. (TB, 63)

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The first sentence above anticipates the postmodern turn toward decentring and dispersal, but for Stein, decentring is not, as many critics have posited, synonymous with improvisation and/or free play. "A wide action is not a width." For Stein, the issue is always one of discrimination: "What is the difference 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. But the room of Tender Buttons is depicted as wide open, a place of sexual love as well as poetic production: A curving example makes righteousfinger-nails.This is the only object in secretion and speech. Or again: Dance a clean dream and an extravagant turn up, secure the steady rights and translate more than translate the authority, show the choice and make no more mistakes 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 toward lyricism 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, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breadiing. The care with which there is incredible justice 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 of imagination and erotic longing. But Stein playfully inverts the Romantic topos, giving in to a "sensible decision", a decision that involves a longwinded argument that "notwithstanding" any number of eventualities (the word "notwithstanding" is used five times, followed by "not even withstanding" [once] and "not even" [four times]), "all this" (all what?) "makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain."

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The "notwithstandings" in the passage are worth tracking. To begin with, "declarations" and "music", the trappings of romantic love, are discarded. Next, we read "notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection", three nouns that seem not to be parallel but which make perfect sense when we stop to consider that traditional romantic love stories invariably involve choices, that they take place {pace Shakespeare and the mock-heroic Byron) by torchlight or perhaps in church when someone is taking up the collection. Notwithstanding, furthermore, "the celebrating hat and a vacation" trappings, this time, of romance as it is rendered in Impressionist painting as well, for that matter, as in Cezanne's Provencal landscapes and Picasso's portraits of Fernande wearing a large hat. The Big Picture Europe, Asia, the world of elephants, of "the ocean being encircling" and tales of drowning is not for Stein. "Not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing." What is rejected here is the literary drive to say something Important, to make manifestos, and, finally, to write so as to please a demanding public. To turn one's back on these conventions, Stein implies, is to enter what is best described as a room of one's own. But she goes much further than Virginia Woolf in making a clean sweep of the old rooms. "The rain is wrong and the white is wrong": once the pretty Romantic imagery has been discarded, even rhyme becomes a new possibility: "the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing." In the end, Tender Buttons offers its readers "incredible justice and likeness" in the form of "a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain". "Asparagus" is the tide of one of the poems in the Food section "Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet" where the image is one of long hot stalks, juicy and tender. But how is "asparagus" related to "fountain"? Not logically or spatially, surely; we would not find the two together in a still-life by Gris or Braque. But Stein's focus on the wet dimension of the vegetable allows her to make a fanciful leap to her final word "fountain". The composition of Tender Buttons antecedes Duchamp's readymade by a few years but I find it apposite that Rooms ends with a fountain curiously akin to R. Mutt's upside-down urinal, that ordinary domestic object chosen for its "aesthetic indifference" and yet a fountain after all, a fountain "notwithstanding" all the retinal cliches that precluded its acceptance for such a long time. "Sentences", observes Stein in How to Write, "are not emotional while paragraphs are."29 Like many of her aphorisms, this one sounds absurd till one stops to think it through. Usually, Stein's individual sentences - "Dirt and not copper makes a color darker" (TB 13), "A charm a single charm is doubtful" (13), "A widow in a wise veil and more garments shows that shadows are even" (18) - demand the network of the larger paragraph,

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her syntax depending upon the most delicate adjustments between wordgroups 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 title Fresh Widow for one of his best known readymades, so some of Stein's finest mini-sentences, many of them having achieved the status of aphorisms and proverbs, 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? If a noun, we must supply a comma following it, "Roast, [and] potatoes for [dinner]." Or suppose "roast" is a verb in the imperative? The first and third words keep shifting whereas "potatoes" is the staple of life, the stable element in an otherwise variable language game. Three words, of which only one is anchored. "Roast" (we recall "Roasted susie is my icecream" in "Preciosilla") and "for" cannot be pinned down. But hasn't Stein made this point all along? "ROAST POTATOES" is the third 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. "Successions of words", as Gertrude Stein remarks in How to Write, "are so agreeable."
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Stanford 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 in the 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 unify either the whole of Tender Buttons or any part of it, not only because there is no consistent pattern of meaning, but because we violate the spirit of the work in trying to find one. [...] Tender Buttons functions anti-patriarchally: as presymbohc jouissance and as irreducibly multiple, fragmented, openended articulation of lexical meaning. [...] Stein is playing, and playing entirely in the realm of language, without interest in representation of the material world." M. De Koven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 74-6.

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The trouble with this argument and it has been echoed by other critics is that it avoids the central issue: when is free play, nonsense, non-referentiality effective and when do we consider it mere 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. 10711. 5 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans, from the German by Michael Shaw (1974; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 4953 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), p p . 19, 2 1 . 8 Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978), p . 69. 9 T h e case for Stein's Cubism a n d the parallel between her work and Picasso's has been m a d e frequently: see R a n d a Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p p . 2 9 - 4 5 ; J a y n e Walker, The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst: T h e University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 12933. I myself discuss Stein's "Cubist" writing in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Chapter 3 passim. But, as I want to suggest in this essay, important as the Cubist connection obviously is, the analogy, made repeatedly by Stein herself, n o longer strikes m e as accurate. 10 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p p . 5 4 - 6 . 11 "Sometimes I would a d d a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called ready-made aided. At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and 'readymades' I imagined a recipocral ready-made: use a Rembrandt as an ironing b o a r d ? " Marcel D u c h a m p , " R e a d y - M a d e s , " in Hans Richter, DADA: Art and Anti-Art (New York a n d 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 a n d Hudson, 1975), p . 23. Subsequendy cited in the text as SS. 13 Thierry 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. 15 James 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 Tender Buttons, they rarely engage in actual analysis of the texts in question. Or again, allegorical readings are imposed. In The Public is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), for example, Harriet Scott Chessman, imposing a particular feminist grid on the work, posits that die phrase " T h e difference is spreading" (in the prose poem "A C A R A F E " ) " m a y be femaleness itself; perhaps this moment of 'spreading' is one of parturition, a new birth of the female" (p. 93). 19 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914; Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990), p . 9. All further references 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- >3 2 21 Jackson M a c Low, "Reading 'Objects' from Tender Buttons", in R K , p. 89. 22 Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation" (1926), in SW, pp. 5 1 3 - 2 3 . 23 Lyn Hejinian, " T w o Stein Talks", Temblor, 3 (1986) p . 133. T h e two talks, " L a n g u a g e a n d Realism" a n d " G r a m m a r a n d Landscape" ( p p . 128-39), subsequently cited in the text as L H , constitute o n e of the most important analyses to date of Stein's style a n d grammar. 24 O n this prose p o e m , see m y Poetics of Indeterminacy, p p . 1 0 2 - 0 8 .

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See SS, 22. The entire contents of the 1914 Box are reproduced in this book: see SS, pp. 22-5. 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: MIT Press, 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 Marjorie 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: the artist, 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 T O BE DESTROYED), 1964, replica of 1923 original. Metronome and photograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York. James Thrall Soby Fund. 3. Joseph Cornell, UNTITLED (HOTEL BEAU-SEJOUR, c. 1954. Construction, 17JX 1 2 ^ x 4 ! 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 Katherine 5. 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; overall 50J in. high. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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