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. . . why is the surface outrageous, why is it beautiful why is it not
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Feel it to see
Gertrude Stein, "A Command Poem"
Burnt, callous, churned, coagulated, crackling, crumbling, woolen; dipped, gilded, glazed, varnished; moist, wet, soaking, sodden; hard or soft; rigid or pliable; shiny or dusty; thin or thick-to encounter the "Objects," experience the "Food," and move through the "Rooms" that make up Gertrude Stein's 1914 book of prose poems, Tender Buttons, is to take part in an overwhelmingly rich and varied tactile experience.1 Each surface in Stein's domestic miseen-scene presents a texture to touch, feel, hold, press, gather, handle, dust, mend, polish, shine, cut, grind, hammer, hurt, jerk, pierce, cuddle, squeeze, pet, pinch, or rub.2 Meanwhile, Stein's style itself-comprising linguistic objects with their own palpable surfaces-also presents such textures. If poetic texture is understood as those textual elements independent of a poem's argument or logic, resisting paraphrase,3 then the notoriously intractable Tender Buttons is almost nothing but texture, and our engagement with it by necessity tactile. Indeed, in her lecture on "Poetry and Grammar," Stein claims that "Poetry"-and to Stein's mind, "Tender Buttons was very good poetry"-"is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns" (330, 327, emphasis mine).
Stein's earliest critics, responding to her claim that she took "individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete" ("Transatlantic" 18), largely faulted her for treating words like objects, "as if they were unencumbered plastic entities of such and such texture, weight and resilience" (Brinnin 142). Yet in the post-structuralist climate that Stein's work has often been seen as anticipating, the materiality of the signifier morphed from her writing's principal blunder into its principal insight. In retrospect, Stein's idiosyncratic project in some ways even seems to exemplify the impulse of her era. As Bill Brown observes, the effort to "imagine the work of art as a different mode of mimesis-not one that serves to represent a thing, but one that seeks to attain the status of a thing-is a fundamental strain of modernism" (Sense 3). Nonetheless, despite the multifaceted fascination in modernist studies with the question of the object, and despite broad...