Substituting a Noun for the Actual Thing

“In Tender Buttons and then on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something.  And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name” --Gertrude Stein

Tender Buttons is a weird poem or prose piece or writing or whatever it actually is. Gertrude Stein titles each piece “Objects” “Food” and “Rooms” and then goes on to compile a list of seeming random attributes and stream of consciousness thoughts loosely grouped in these broad categories.

But, does she do that really? Perhaps, as she states in the above quote, she is instead trying to peel off our many-layered associations with various nouns until she can uncover something of their essence.

I’m only going to look at “Objects” because there is enough in there to write many blogs.

“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.” (p. 180, 1-4)
Here Stein brings to mind a carafe, defined as:
carafe |kəˈraf; -ˈräf|
noun--an open-topped glass flask typically used for serving wine or water.

Her choice of word may have been made by simply observing a carafe on a table. And then how does one go about stripping from that thing all the associations that have accumulated over years of seeing and using and perhaps washing carafes?

What does it mean to “know, really know” what a carafe is? Stein goes first to typology – kind, kind in glass and a spectacle …something to be seen, and seen through. Glass, but not a glass, a drinking glass, or looking glass, but glass to some other purpose, and how is this glass arranged such that it – this substance glass – becomes something different and unique?

Stein allows her prose to wander and to wonder, to skim around the edges and come to an ordinariness, while also wondering at order, that does not resemble other things that are ordinary.

“The difference is spreading.” Here she leads us on, the difference (in understanding? In not understanding?) is spreading to other objects.

Stein: “A PIECE OF COFFEE. 


More of double. 


A place in no new table.

A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. A piece of coffee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.

The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture.

The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.

A not torn rose-wood color. If it is not dangerous then a pleasure and more than any other if it is cheap is not cheaper. The amusing side is that the sooner there are no fewer the more certain is the necessity dwindled. Supposing that the case contained rose-wood and a color. Supposing that there was no reason for a distress and more likely for a number, supposing that there was no astonishment, is it not necessary to mingle astonishment.

The settling of stationing cleaning is one way not to shatter scatter and scattering. The one way to use custom is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating. Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not be strange in everything. May not be strange to.” (p. 180, 1-27)

This object is strangely dense and disconcerting. A piece of coffee – a bean? a grind? a cup? What exactly IS coffee?

Perhaps she is writing of the whole ceremony of coffee. What amazing and complicated things a simple word, this noun coffee, can hold. To know it, really know it, one can perhaps know only a piece of it.

Mixed in with the physical is the sound of the words themselves, and Stein uses them to mix it up … “the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder” here she almost sounds like James Joyce in “Finnegan’s Wake” where the words and the sounds tumbled over one another confusing the reader and at the same time bringing to mind the confusion language brings to life all the while it masquerades as the way we think we understand things.

I think the beauty of Stein’s writing in “Tender Buttons” is that one has to slow down, slough off one’s idea (and idealization) of reading and understanding and allow the words themselves to emerge as uniquely as possible.

It may be that Stein is articulating the current (via Eckhart Tolle) notion of “be here now” and rather than reading in a complicated, yet comfortable, way of bringing to mind an accumulated set of images instead one can stop and ponder the essence of the thing itself, which is a kind of poetry.

Stein, Gertrude. "Tender Buttons." The Norton Anthology of Contemporary and Modern Poetry. New York: Norton, 2003. 180-185. Print.