World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  The spatial organization of this paragraph is revealing, and shows what I meant by sentences turning on the spindle of Being:

  Having lost our innocence and put on knowledge with our leaf, we had to earn our keep, labor, sleep, and learn to wash. Like Alcibiades to the cloak of Socrates, cleanliness crept next to Godliness and made itself beloved by health and hospitals equally. Coverings grew grand and hid our weaknesses. We covered sculpture’s plaster glands, legs of pianos, tables too, and all our thoughts with discretions. These poems are themselves excessively discreet.

  To red up is to rid oneself of whatever is extraneous and out of place (a small change, ‘e’ for ‘i’), and the uppermost meaning here is how the work of tidying tires out both time and ourselves. Still we cannot forget that red is the past tense of reading, the color of blood and wine, of Jezebels, the suit of Satan, and the cent it takes five to make a nickel of. And any reader who observes Stein’s sly small small-change in this passage (to mention but one of so many), must begin to be of different mind about her alleged subconscious methods of composition.

  We hope of course that one day we shall be able to take it easy, draw an idle breath, purify ourselves the way we polish hardware and pots, clear tables, or better yet, cure sin, and cook without dirtying a dish. Cleaning, like confession, is a rite, and the spells it casts are effective, because a tidy house does seem for a time to be invulnerable.

  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.

  The medical theme (one thread: hurt-spreading-rid-red-weakens - hope - interpretation (diagnosis) - breath - cure - clean and cleansing) is joined by the sacramental (another thread: “wine”-“Satan”-“the Fall”-hope-interpretation(hermeneutics)-breath-sinecure-cleansing) to become momentarily dominant. We do not receive mercy from God because He is grateful to us, nor does the physician feel he is discharging a debt.

  “The change has come.” If the change has come (unlike the coming of the Kingdom, to be sure, but love has been made with Alice for some time, and Leo has been replaced), it has come without our fumbling for it (reds, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves). One may borrow a nickel (after all, what is a nickel?) without any obligation to repay. Actually one rarely asks for the loan of such a small sum, and indeed a nickel is easy to give away. Later one learns how these little daily things add up, for a dollar contains ten dimes the way loving is made of lots of light caresses.

  GLAZED GLITTER is a “poem” with a subject: roughly, the price of change and restoration, repairs and healing, the charm of coming clean.

  A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION

  The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable.

  Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume.

  I have quoted only two of this important section’s ten paragraphs, yet these, and the two poems already so cursorily examined, make the fundamental moral and metaphysical issues apparent: the contrast between surface and depth, for example, the relation between quantity and quality, permanence and change, innocence and knowledge, giving and receiving, art and life, in and out.

  Sugar cane, of course, is a vegetable, a grass, but the process of refining it transforms the juice of the stalk. Sugar is often a surface addition, as on cereal; it sweetens our coffee, for which we may be grateful; it enhances, but it does not nourish.

  Again: if we multiply dust until it becomes earth, it is no longer dirt, and so long as Gertrude lived with her brother there was no suspicion, but when Alice moved in to form, in effect, a ménage à trois, or after Leo left, the whispering began. One must become hardened.

  So sometimes work, sometimes writing, sometimes love, are uppermost; sometimes one metaphorical carrier (cooking, cleaning) rises above another; key words are obsessively repeated, not only in particular paragraphs, but throughout; sometimes the sentences look over their shoulders at where they’ve been, and we are not always prepared for the shifts.

  Although the text is, I think, overclued, the language plain, and the syntax so Spartan as to be peculiar, naked as a Dukhobor whose cause we cannot yet comprehend; nevertheless, the “total altogether of it” remains cryptic, and we are likely to feel that our interpretations are forced unless they are confirmed by readings from another direction. Some knowledge of Gertrude Stein’s daily life and obsessive concerns is essential, as well as familiarity with the usual associations she makes among words, and the in-common subjects of her works. Then, not only must we fasten ourselves to Webster, as Empson chained himself to the OED, and avail ourselves of slang dictionaries too, we must go to Skeat or Partridge as eagerly as a cat for cover on a cool day.

  Thus this is certainly not an airtight text. It leaks. But where? and why should we care? It will not tell us what day the bridge is to be bombed, the safe rifled, or buck passed. We must set to work without reward or hope of any, and submit ourselves to the boredom of an etymological narrative.8

  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 substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

  A box protects and conceals. It is frequently wrapped and tied. It is usually of wood or paper. Ribbons are found on it. A box contains surprises. Gifts. Pandora had one. Although a box is something one can get caught in, it is also something one can get out of. A jack is often in a box. A word is a box out of which we can draw other words. A woman has a box into which penises are put and from which babies are taken. To have such a box in our world, certainly in Stein’s, is to be in a box (hemmed in). And so the passage assumes the structure of a series of Biblical begettings. Or are we listening to a recital of the pedigrees of prize stock? Etymology affirms everything at once, for the root of ‘box’ is tree (the boxwood). A FAMILY TREE. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

  The manifest text invokes two covert, or, in Stein’s terms, covered, colored, or red, texts: a main one, the Old Testament tale of Adam and Eve, which establishes the linear order of ideas in advance of any other expression which may be placed on top of it, and whose verbal character is relatively fixed; and a second, subordinate one—the story of Pandora and the box of Prometheus—which is not fastened to any single formulation, and so floats. The alignment of the two covert texts is parallel, and the relationship between them is one of structural identity, thus the function of the secondary tale is to interpret and heighten and universalize the first. God makes Adam out of clay, for instance. Zeus shapes Pandora out of the same substance. Both are seen as vessels into which the breath of life is blown, and thereafter they hold that life like a liquid: wine or water. Clearly the two texts are accompanied by sets of traditional interpretations. For example, it is often supposed that Adam took a carnal interest in Eve only after the Fall. Both tales are anti-feminist tracts. Both involve disobedience to the chief. Both are about revenge. Both explain why mankind must live in sorrow and die in delusion. And both invoke male saviors.

  The principal covert text manifests itself immediately in two ways: through a key word or phrase—in this case, ‘box’—and by means of a mirrored rhetorical form, the Biblical be-gats. The key in the latter case, of course, is the phrase ‘out of.’ Even more darkly mirrored, with a parallel alignment and the same key, is the form of the livestock pedigree. Eventually the proportion: as men are to the Lord, so are women to men, and cattle to their owners, will con
trol our understanding of the argument. Both forms, because of their associations, contribute substantially to the meaning of the passage. They are, that is, significant forms.

  The manifest text contains a coded commentary on the covert texts. Each word must be regarded as standing for many others, the title A BOX referring to a blow as well as a container. Not only is Tender Buttons a polytype text, it is frequently polytokenal too (see the formation of ‘kindred’ in the first line). There is evidently a metatextual metaphor operating here. The paragraph before us is a box containing words which are also regarded as boxes. In short, the passage does not describe some object which the title designates as much as the title describes the passage. Tender Buttons, itself, is a metatextual metaphor.

  The meanings we discover when we open these boxes are, like the covert texts, both floating and fixed; that is, certain associations are general: with the ‘red’ which comes out of ‘kindness’ we may connect a blush of pleasure, but we are not confined to exactly these words, as we shall not be to ‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ later. However, when we extract roots, such as ‘recircle’ from ‘research,’ we are. These meanings have no serial order. They are clustered like grapes, and the way they are eventually fitted together depends not upon the order of words in the manifest text, but upon the way each illuminates various aspects of the covert text. At first we may want to think of ‘kindness’ as kindness, but it is difficult to continue in that vein. Digging down we find a few roots. We might favor ‘inborn’ first, but ‘kind’ seen as ‘nature’ snaps into ‘-ness’ understood as ‘state,’ with a satisfying certitude. We must not abandon ‘kindness’ as kindness, though, because it is in fact the complaisance of the woman which leads to sin and kinning; but the incorporation of this surface sense into the total interpretation of the passage has to come later, after most of the ground floor has been built. Thus there is no preestablished order. We must wait until a place to fasten the meaning to the emerging sense can be found.

  Except for the fact that the manifest text hides Adam and Eve like a leaf, the text is not layered. Certain themes or threads can be continuously followed, but sometimes one will be more obvious or dominant than another, so it is more accurate to describe the text as woven. Since the text often looks at itself, it is reflexive, and since meanings which emerge rather late in the manifest text must often be sent back to the beginning like unlucky players, the presentation of meaning is spatial, not temporal the way, for example, ‘John hit Jack’ is temporal. It is temporal, that is, until we decide that ‘John’ is Jack and ‘Jack’ John. Then the sentence spatializes, swinging back and forth.

  This swing can be corralled, as Gertrude does in the case of her overly famous tag:

  These chaplets retain the plainest syntax, but beneath the simple grammar of these Buttons lie meanings which have nearly lost their syntactical value, becoming astonishingly plastic. Let’s take a look at some of the etymological clusters.

  The entire passage is held together by underlying meanings which are greatly akin and often simply repeat one another—a familiar characteristic of Stein’s manifest texts—and the passage is pushed forward as much by the progressive disclosure of these deep meanings as by ordinary linear onset. There is a cluster around what might be called the idea of an early state; there’s one around gestation, blood, and pain, as well as punishment and judgment; there’s still another around resistance, repetition, and property. There is finally a solution expressed in the dimmest imagery of all: the target with its black bull’s-eye.

  I recall particularly that Zeus, desiring to punish Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man, fashioned a beautiful woman out of clay, clothing her like a queen and, with the help of the Four Winds, breathing life into her according to the customary recipe. This done, he sent his glittering clay creature to the brother of Prometheus as a gift, but Epimetheus, warned not to accept any favors from Zeus (as though to “beware of gods bearing gifts”), politely refused her until Zeus frightened him by chaining his disobedient brother to a pillar high in the mountains where a vulture ate by day the liver which grew heedlessly back by night (just as waking life was to be ruinous for us ever afterward). Pandora, of course, capricious and willful and curious, opened the box in which Prometheus had bottled all the evils which might beset man, among them delusive hope whose sting keeps us from suicide and still alive to suffer the bites of the others.

  Similarly, Satan (‘red’), speaking through a serpent and by tradition from a tree (‘box’), tempts Eve in Paradise (‘kindness’) to pick (‘selection’) and eat the apple (‘box,’ ‘red’). A whole set of derivations indicates that we should interpret this act as a case of praiseworthy resistance. (No time is wasted on Adam.) Kindness is thus reduced to rudeness. God soon (‘rapid’) seeks out (‘research’) the impure pair (‘rudeness’) and holds an official investigation (‘question’). He finds that their eyes (‘eye’) are now open; they see (‘research’) that they are naked, and are consequently full of shame (‘red’). His judgment (‘question’) is that Eve shall belong to her husband like a chattel and bear her children (‘kindred’) henceforward in pain and labor (‘painful cattle’). At the point of the first full stop, there is a definite break in the text. In order to go on, we must go back.

  And who are “we” at this point? Not even Gertrude would have read this far.

  Without the myths of Eve and Pandora I should have no sounding board, no principle of selection, nothing to paste my conjectures to, however remarkably I imagined them. So far what have I been made to do? I have been required to put roots and shoots and little stems and tendrils together much as their author did, to wander discouraged and confused as Hansel and Gretel through a dark wood of witches, to strike the hot right way suddenly, but just as suddenly to mire, to drag, to speed, to shout Urreek! to fall asleep, to submit to revelations, certainly to curl a lip, to doubt, unnose a disdainful snort, snick a superior snicker, curse, and then at some point not very pleasantly to realize that the game I’m playing is the game of creation itself, because Tender Buttons is above all a book of kits like those from which harpsicords or paper planes or model bottle boats are fashioned, with intricacy no objection, patience a demand, unreadable plans a pleasure. So I am pulling a poem out of this BOX. The words on the page do not contain it, but their conundrum does.

  Adam and Eve now beget children who, though innocent infants for a time (‘rudeness’) have the same in-born impulses (‘kindness’), so that shortly (‘rapid’) they manifest the same lusts and suffer the same punishment as their parents (‘rapid same question’). The cycle (‘research’) of generation (‘kindness’) is viciously continuous (‘redness’), and soon (‘rapid’) women are being picked (‘selection’) as Eve once was (‘eye’), and bred (‘rapid’) like cattle.

  So God’s command (‘order’) is that the common way (‘round,’ ‘way’) is a repetition (‘round’) of that first fornication and painful multiplication (‘something suggesting a pin’). There is, in effect, a second break in the argument here, so with a little help from the final lines I shall loop back over these still unclear combinations. The Virgin Mother was spared both sin and pain, shame and copulation. Her child was engendered by the prick of light from a star (see the section, A WAIST). While gloomily researching ‘point’ (whose ‘disappoint’ deprives the ‘pin’ of its pain), I come upon the phrase ‘de pointe en blanc’ (from a point in the white of a target), and everything rattles into place like iron gates. But will it rattle for you unless you labor? Something fired point blank is fired from the outer white toward the bull’s-eye; that is, from a point so close that an arrow needs no compensatory arc in its travel to the target. Its path (‘way’) is straight (as a pin). So the chaste way of becoming pregnant is through that gleaming straight arrow of light from a star, while the common way requires mating with a bull.

  The consequences of our investigation of this basic and traditional myth, reducing it to small rubblelike b
its (‘rudimentary’), the paragraph goes on to say, is not disappointing because it shows how the penis may be removed (‘disappointing’), and how the woman’s struggle (‘substance,’ ‘earnest,’ and so on) to escape male domination (‘analysis’) can be won (‘fine’). She (‘a green’) must turn not to her complementary, the male (‘red’), but to his opposite, her own sex (‘to the point again’).

  In sum, A BOX is an ironic argument (the jest in ‘suggesting’) for lesbianism on the ground that such sexual practices preserve virginity, avoid God’s punishment, and do not perpetuate original sin.

  Now that A BOX has been broken down, we can look back at that CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS, with eyes from which the scales have fallen. Fitzgerald’s Omar, among others, testifies to the commonness of the metaphor which, on Old Testament authority, pictures man as a clay vessel containing a gaseous spirit or liquidy soul.

  XLIV

  Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,

  And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,

  Wer’t not a Shame—wer’t not a Shame for him

  In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

  Mankind, before eating from the tree, was a blind glass, a carafe (an object and a word of Spanish and Arabic origin). Women were also a “kind,” in-born, cousin to man, taken out of his side by caesarean; thus neither sex was a stranger to the other, and both were designed from the first for copulation. Nevertheless, as time passes and people disperse and multiply, the differences between men and women aggravate and widen.

  The techniques at work here do more than allow Gertrude Stein to disguise her drift. They permit a simply astonishing condensation. The word ‘difference’ alone contains to carry apart, delay, disperse, to bear (as fruit). And this inner economy facilitates the interweaving of contradictory strands of meaning within a single sentence.