"William James was well within the bounds of moderation when he said that looking forward instead of backward, looking to what the world and life might become instead of to what they have been, is an alteration in the 'seat of authority.'"--John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty.

. . .

". . . the lesbian also knows that nothing can replace the lack to which in fact she has resigned herself . . .--Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love.

. . .

"No one knowing me knows me. I am II."--Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America.

[i]

Undeniably, self-authorization is one of the premier themes in the great tradition of American poetry, if not in the canons of American literature itself (see Jarraway 99-100). In the life and work of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), arguably one of the most important American Modernists this century, the struggle for self-authorization is perhaps presented to us most clearly in that well-known period from her early life marked, on the one side, by the completion of her first book, Three Lives (1906), and after several turbulent years, on the other, by the publication of Tender Buttons (1914) (Scobie 102). The texts I shall be concerned with in this essay all come near or at the end of this seven-year purgatory as it were. As such, they can be said to represent the achievement of self-authorization that, in Gertrude Stein's own particular case, is impossible to conceive in any other terms but those having to do with the very act of writing. It can hardly seem accidental, for instance, that at the time these texts were composed, Gertrude Stein finds it possible to break free at last from the pernicious and overbearing influence of her elder brother Leo, who makes a permanent departure from her life in 1912. As one of her biographers observes:

Turning to writing at this early stage appears to have been her most natural means of breaking away from Leo's paternalistic domination. Their relationship . . . was based on common pursuits and, to a degree, on shared ideas. But the intellectual initiative continued to be Leo's, and his aggressive self-assertions often silenced her and left her resentful. Somewhere along the line Gertrude apparently realized that only when she became an artist in her own right and on her own terms might she escape her brother's overzealous control." (Brinnin 54)

Fuelling Stein's struggle for self-authorization "on her own terms," additionally, was her burgeoning love for Alice B. Toklas, who came into her life in 1907, much to Leo's chagrin, just about the time this period of restiveness began. [1] But 1907 was also the year that William James, Stein's self-admitted "big influence" and "man among men" in her undergraduate years, published his lectures entitled Pragmatism (Mellow 55, 50; Brinnin 28; Diggins 115). If the achievement of self-authority, therefore, is the especial hallmark of the struggling American poet, what makes this preoccupation unique in the writing of Gertrude Stein is its complex intrication within a polyvocal discourse that is at once feminist, sapphist, and pragmatist. And unpacking the self-autonomous claims of each of these layers of discourse in her Modernist declaration of independence, as we shall see in turn, would fairly much amount to asserting the claims for all.

In this initial section of my essay, I want to deal with the pragmatist context of Stein's discourse first, particularly as it manifests itself in various texts selected from Tender Buttons (located in Selected Writings, SW hereafter), and work up gradually to the more radical claim, in my essay's final section, for her unique self-authorization as a writer of both feminist and lesbian texts that we encounter, for instance, in Geography and Plays (pub. 1922, G&P hereafter), that were composed immediately following. In working with a Jamesian Stein to start with, I perhaps may be perceived as following a popular critical response to her work advocating that "she identified herself with male roles in both her professional and personal life" much before she eventually began "to write in her own female person" (Neuman 193/n.23; also in Martin 217, 219 and DeKoven 137). After all, as Catharine Stimpson reminds us, "no one spoke of her lesbianism until after her death in 1946" (643). [2] My view, however, as I shall explain more fully in a moment, is that it was a number of the ideas associated with the philosophy of Pragmatism, particularly as Stein was exposed to them under the tutelage of William James while yet a student at Radcliffe College in the late 1890s (known then as the "Harvard Annex"), [3] which provided her with sufficient warrant, from quite early on, to begin thinking (and writing) about her own same-sex orientation in unapologetically self-authenticating and self-confirming ways. Such is the radical nature of this whole self-authorizing process, indeed, that the often oblique and tendentious manner in which it is pursued can seem as if "the unspoken censorship" necessitated by contemporaneous "social and moral taboo" to a large extent might account for Stein's purported "linguistic disguise" (Scobie 116). But once again, it is Stein who becomes the artist on her own terms. So that if we choose to postpone dealing with her anormative treatment of sexuality, or bow to the censors and handle it in code (Pondrom "Introduction" xlix), or even choose to ignore it entirely, the fault lies with our terms of reference, not hers. "To change the world," as one of the more recent commentators on the whole project of Pragmatism writes, "is to take possession of the language that describes it" (Diggins 49). If a world excluding same-sex attachments among women seemed to Gertrude Stein to be the one most worth changing, her exposure to some of the ideas of William James would appear to have been a propitious discursive beginning.

James R. Mellow has recorded the enormous debt Stein owed to this early leader of American Pragmatism, in a statement she made just before her death: "'Everything must come into your scheme,' she said of the creative life, 'otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.'"

"A great deal of this I owe to a great teacher, William James. He said, 'Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved. If you reject anything, that is the beginning of the end as an intellectual.' . . . He was a man who always said, 'complicate your life as much as you please, it has got to simplify.'" (49-50)

The "real simplicity" that Stein alludes to in this valedictory is the knowledge about life that James had always contended one "gained from direct experience" rather than the knowledge that one merely learned "about a subject" (47). Merely learning about a subject is the complacent disposition of "rationalism," as James describes it in his lecture on "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" (from Pragmatism 147, P hereafter). Passively accepting knowledge rather than actively seeking it out from direct experience presupposes that, for the rationalist, "Reality stands complete and readymade from all eternity," and that truth "adds nothing to the content of [the pragmatist's] experience" since, for the rationalist, reality "is supervenient, inert, static, a reflexion merely" (P 147).

For the pragmatist more fully in touch with life, however, truth is not "a stagnant property" inherent in an idea but rather something that "happens to an idea": "It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation" (P 133, emphases retained). This validating the process of "fictionalizing" ideas in response to life's events, therefore, leads the pragmatist away "from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins," and causes her, instead, to turn "towards facts, towards action and towards power" ("Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism," qtd. Diggins 133). With this remove, James is prompted to formulate perhaps the most revolutionary statement in his pragmatist ethos:

Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be made, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification-experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota . . . [Accordingly,] So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation--mutation towards a definite goal, it may be--but still mutation. (P 146) [4]

What a woman at the turn of the century struggling with the need for self-legitimation and self-authority would likely have heard most clearly in this last citation was the mention of the mutational aspect of reality, and by implication, the questionable need to conform to any fixed principles of experience--principles invariably established by men--in view of the fact that these were subject to the process of perdurable alteration. "The notion of a reality calling on us to 'agree' with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is 'unconditional' or 'transcendent' is one that I can make neither head nor tail of," William James would conclude (P 152). Stein, no doubt, was perplexed to the same degree, and quite possibly well before settling permanently on her vocation as a writer a decade later.

"To be able to live without truth and certainty," John Diggins writes in The Promise of Pragmatism, "to have the courage to face life as Melville faced the void, is the challenge of modernism" (396). A further aspect of that challenge, of course, is to learn to live without authority--authority in the sense of a controlling force or power imposed upon one from outside when "authoritative principles" like absolute knowledge or transcendent truth are thought to "regulate human affairs," in place of our openness and responsiveness to "the inexorable contingencies of experience" (248). [5] The modernism of Gertrude Stein resides in both of these challenges. And it is difficult to imagine how they might have come to settle so inescapably over the length and breadth of her very large corpus had she not first caught their fire from that teacher who "was always 'throwing off sparks'" (Mellow 47):

Characteristically, James remained convinced that modern man could live without older ideas of truth and authority if he had the will to believe in himself. Such a resolution liberated the human condition by making the subject aware that he or she could be the author of his or her own actions. Small wonder that the philosophy of pragmatism could be hailed by James as 'an alteration in the seat of authority that reminds one almost of the Protestant Reformation." (Diggins 157; see also 372, 456)

The externally imposed supervenient authority that becomes transformed into an internally induced self-authority foregrounds the punning sense in which this latter author-ity proposes to foment James's reformative "alteration": namely, the "Revolution of the Word," in Eugène Jolas's famous Modernist proclamation from 1929 (Nelson 173-75), or what William James also had in mind a generation earlier when he referred to all truth as "discursified" (P 140). Did the self-authority of American Pragmatism turn Gertrude Stein into an "author"? John Dewey who was himself especially partial to that "alteration in the seat of authority" (noted in my epigraph) could have thought so. In his own case, Dewey viewed his development, perhaps like James and Stein both, "controlled largely by a struggle between . . . the schematic and formally logical, and those incidents of personal experience that compelled [him] to take account of actual material"--a struggle which registered itself, interestingly enough, "in style of writing and manner of presentation." But it was "the concrete diversity of experienced things" which ultimately settled the conflict for this second-generation Pragmatist, and from that time forward, compelled Dewey to confess, in an even more interesting parallel to Stein, that "thinking and writing have been hard work" ("From Absolutism to Experimentalism" 5). In the Modernism of Gertrude Stein, therefore, that promises the alteration from absolute to relative truth, from fixed to mutational experience, and from permanent to processual reality, it is perhaps the authority that is made "functional rather than foundational" (Diggins 374) which counts for most. For with a functional authority, it is at last possible to begin to think how the world, for a change, might be made answerable to the individual self.

Although Stein would deny it, and understandably so given her concern for self-authority, it is quite plausible to contend that "[t]he influence of William James can be read in every example of her work up to Tender Buttons" (Brinnin 165). [6] As a prologue to taking up the issue of authorization with respect to the issue of sexual identity later, for the remainder of this section, I would like to examine the possible impact that a predisposition toward certain pragmatist modes of thinking might have had on the early Stein, in a sampling of texts from Tender Buttons. A great deal has been written about this extraordinarily baffling collection, and I don't for a moment propose to enlist any kind of ultimate interpretation or final word. Besides, in view of what we've already mentioned with respect to the relativity of truth, and the affirmation of one's own unique responsiveness to the world, a "final word" on any text by Stein would seem to be considerably beside the point. In reading her work, as Frank O'Hara, himself a voracious reader of Stein, might say, "You just go on your nerve" (110). You try to imagine what it would be like to undergo a reading experience that you have never had before, or to deal with meaning (if that word even applies) so novel and so unexpected that you hardly know where to put it--"being in being where there was no seeing," as Stein herself might say (qtd. Brinnin 202). Ideally, then, the following sampling of texts first from "Objects," then from "Food," and finally from "Rooms" ought to prove that "Every one then is an individual being. Every one then is like many other always living, there are many ways of thinking of every one . . . a whole history of each of them" (SW 262). In reading Stein, in other words, we each find our own quite personal ways of author-izing ourselves.

It has become a commonplace in commentary about Gertrude Stein to remark upon her tireless efforts to get us to see things about the world that we had not quite been aware of before (e.g., Walker 15, 17; Hawkins 120, 122; Perloff 76). The intense focus on "Objects" and "Food" in Tender Buttons might be offered as examples. But we misconstrue her project entirely if we expect to see exactly what she sees. Here, James is useful in helping us to understand that Stein's meticulous and minute observations of her surroundings are never meant to be mimetic representations of precise experience. For the pragmatist, we recall, reality can never be a "reflexion" merely. Its truth is never "given," but always "made," so that if reality is "experienceable" as James asserts, Stein's reportorial mandate is "not to reflect the world but to invent it," and like the Cubist painters offering her much inspiration from this period--Picasso, Cézanne, Braque--to "[bring] to light hidden versions of reality" (Brinnin 128, emphasis added). [7] In this (re)production of "versions" of reality, three important inferences would appear to follow. First, since no ultimate, total or final form or vision of reality exists, each attempt on the part of the artist to capture that reality must in a sense be constituted a failure, or at least, only a partial or provisional success, thus requiring the whole effort to be repeated all over again, and theoretically, for an infinite number of times thereafter, since truth is "everlastingly in the process of mutation," as noted earlier. Second, without any definitive access to ideal truth or ultimate reality--the "pretended absolutes and origins" in James's terms--the entire emphasis of artistic endeavor falls upon the openness of ongoing process rather than the closure of finalized product (see Diggins 48, 128, 133; Dubnick 20, 29-30). Hence, Marianne DeKoven, in her important study, foregrounds the "mode of writing" in Stein that is "anarchic, undifferentiated, indeterminate, multiple, open-ended," and "opposed to objectivity, order, lucidity, linearity, mastery, and coherence." In more precise terms, "It is the indeterminate, anti-patriarchal (anti-logocentric, anti-phallogocentric, presymbolic, pluridimensional) writing which deconstruction, alias Jacques Derrida, proposes as an antidote to Western culture, and which Julia Kristeva proposes as an antidote to patriarchy" (xvii; further on xiii, 5, 7, 15, 16, 20, 22-23, 24, and passim; cf. Walker 111-12).

A third and final inference that follows from the processing of endless versions of experience would be to remark the shear extravagance, the inordinate excess, the very hyperbolic nature of the artist's undertaking--what Stein brings clearly to the fore in heeding James's caution, mentioned previously, never to reject, but instead, to allow "[e]everything [to] come into your scheme." The emphasis here on the radically inclusionary aspect of the artist's project carries us, paradoxically, to the very heart of its utter impossibility. For in the end, it is an absence towards which Stein's project is ultimately aimed, and as such, would appear to defeat even the most imaginatively inspired effort to call forth "what is just entering into experience, and yet to be named," as James describes this impossible reality, "some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen":

It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked. (qtd. Wheeler 86, emphasis added).

Yet in Tender Buttons, Stein prefers not to be daunted by this "dumb and evanescent" present absence. Indeed, the genius of her text would appear to lie not in excluding it, but rather in turning its "ideal limit" into an extravagantly proliferating absent presence--"the absence of more," as she refers to it in the concluding "Rooms" section of Tender Buttons (SW 501), and thereby subverting "the tendency to deplore" a notion of reality that, until she comes to write these very words, "has not been authorized" (SW 501).

A short text entitled "Suppose an Eyes," from the "Objects" portion of Tender Buttons, brings nicely together all of these inferences with respect to Stein's pragmatic handling of reality:

Suppose it is within a gate which open is open at the hour of closing summer that is to say it is so.

All the seats are needing blackening. A white dress is in sign. A soldier a real soldier has a worn lace a worn lace of different sizes that is to say if he can read, if he can read he is a size to show shutting up twenty-four.

Go red go red, laugh white.

Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed pur get.

Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton.

Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful. (SW 475)

The exercise Stein sets for herself in this text, as with several others from this section, is to sustain a profusely fecundating discourse in response to a number of "objects" observed from the surrounding world--a white dress, some worn lace, sales ladies--when so many of the aspects of the medium through which the whole experience is rendered contrive against that experience's discursive continuance: the statements, for instance, all jammed in between the prefatory title at the beginning and the terminal punctuation at the end; the sentences themselves, each starting with a capital and ending with a period; and, even the individual letters arranged within each line of the page to signify only certain words (and meanings), and not others--"a white dress is in sign," for example. With so much closure, Stein seems to be saying, how is it possible to keep the reality of true-life experience open? or, to go with the terms of her opening line: to keep something which is supposed to be "open" still open--"to say it is so"--even though it finds itself "within a gate," and "at the hour of closing." Even one's reading of Stein too precisely on this conundrum presented by the "real" may be a betrayal if one becomes overly complacent about ascribing to it a final meaning. The fatality of "a real soldier," after all, lies in the fact that "he can read," and if he can read, then he, like us, "show[s] shutting up" daily ("twenty-four"): a "red" stoppage in response to "go," or "a collapse" in response to highly charged discourse like "rubbed purr" (fur?). Better to be like the "little sales ladies," whose example bears repeating. For when they meaning-lessly meld with the "little saddles of mutton" and "[l]ittle sales of leather" through nothing more than the mere force of the poet's vocalic elisions, a certain openness to discursive continuance and renewal is implied: "beautiful beautiful, beautiful, beautiful"!

Richard Rorty, following an important train of thought in John Dewey, shrewdly observes that the pragmatist's approach to statements like Stein's detailing the nature of observed objects is less likely to be "'Do they get it right?'" than "'What would it be like to believe that? What would happen if I did? What would I be committing myself to?'" For their discourse, concludes Rorty, "is the vocabulary of practise rather than of theory, of action rather than contemplation, in which one can say something useful about truth" (163, 162). I find this comment provides a rather useful insight into Stein's title, "Suppose an Eyes." Run together, the words do sound very much like an injunction to "hypothesize," to suppose or imagine what it would be like actually to see the world proactively, from the point of view of the fluid sales ladies, say, rather than merely contemplate it reactively, through the eyes of the static soldier. What would one be committing oneself to if one did likewise, and what might follow as a result?

In the next section, entitled "Food," Stein juxtaposes two meditations on the single topic "Milk" to enlarge upon these questions, once again, through an important contrast in perceptions. In the first apostrophe, there is much potential for getting beyond the passive contemplation of sense experience imaged in terms of the ordinary blandness of "[a] white egg" and the tight containment of "a colored pan and a cabbage" all showing "settlement" (SW 487). A "real pint" "in the middle" of the text is both "open and closed," and elsewhere, "a single cold" suddenly begins to make "an excuse" for adding a second: "Two are more necessary" (SW 487). Both point to a quite palpable sense of active alteration in response to the world when "cooking, cooking" becomes the central "recognition," opening up "between sudden and nearly sudden very little and large holes" in Stein's text (SW 487). But when the "seen eye holders" steer this "best of change" in the direction of "meaning," it's as if the text has suffered a mortal wound: "the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten" (SW 487). And it's "the best men, the very best men" who, predictably, carry it off at the close. Nonetheless, the element of "guessing" in the text's last line__possibly a reflection on the "holes" uncovered earlier__works against a completely pat ending, and thus becomes the prompt for a further meditation on "Milk," but a repetition with considerable difference, thus:

MILK

Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging. Hanging hanging.

Rounding back with "a guess" on the previous text's point of active egress extirpated by passive contemplation, this second text leaves us to wonder what might have emerged in that first draft of milk if settled meaning had at last given place to sudden recognition. Now, at least, the reader is past all halfway measures, for "a whole guess is hanging" (SW 487).

"Salad Dressing and an Artichoke," near the end of this second section, provides an interesting gloss on that "whole" left hanging from the previous two texts: "A whole is inside a part, a part does go away, a hole is red leaf. No choice was where there was and a second and a second" (SW 496). Stein's entire modus operandi may be seen summed up in these two single statements. For the "whole" here stands in for the pragmatist's reality, the whole that previously became reduced metonymically to merely a "part" of its potentially incalculable meaning, leaving here "a hole" with its "red leaf" (SW 496) so reminiscent of the bloody wound when the first "Milk" in fact "does go away." With this reduction of presence to absence, Stein is left with "[n]o choice" but to move on to a second "Milk," to restore absence to presence. That act of discursive repetition, however, promises to reenact itself yet again--"there was a second and a second" (SW 496)--since, as Stein observes elsewhere, "the balance of a space [is] not filled but [only] created by something moving" ("Poetry and Grammar" 225). [8] Stein's whole movement in Tender Buttons, then, from part to part and from section to section, in pursuit of that w/hole "space between" (SW 480) is perhaps the best evidence of how the "something" creates, and at the same time, is itself repeatedly created. But in order for us to keep her author-ity (and ours) fully functional, in order, in other words, to say something "useful about truth" in Rorty's term, we can only, as Stein herself states, "Read her with her for less" (SW 497). Less is, in fact, more in Gertrude Stein: "the absence of more" (SW 501).

Stein's critical essay, "Composition as Explanation" (1926), is considerably outside our time-frame of 1907-14. But as a further theoretical expansion of the artistic procedures that remained with her for a lifetime, it forms a convenient bridge to the final "Rooms" section of Tender Buttons with which to conclude my essay's first part. The summative link between the essay as a whole and the previous "Objects" and "Rooms" is provided by Stein's own explanation of "composition" as, quite simply, "A continuous present and using everything and beginning again":

There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again. (SW 518)

These endlessly repeated trials of composition stretch back to "singularly nothing," in the first line of the text, which apparently sets them all going--"nothing," that is to say (synonymous with the lesser space of "reality" formerly), "that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking" (SW 513; also 519, 520). The trials of composition also extend forward, bringing Stein "to the period of the beginning of 1914" near the end of the essay, where the fateful cataclysm of war urges her to reconsider the whole notion of "romanticism" (SW 520). Because war is an aggressively violent activity, whose ultimate effect is always to induce extreme conformity within societies and institutions in order to be waged effectively--"the fatal unity of war," in Wallace Stevens' phrase (Collected Poems 236)--Stein searches for a viable term through which to resist "[e]verything being alike," and within which to shelter the precious historical differences of generations that composition itself, with its dedication to a repetitive "continuous" present, is not quite able culturally to safeguard. Thus, with the introduction of this concept into her discourse, Stein sharpens enormoulsy her thinking about the semantic operations of "composition." By the end of the essay, it becomes a "con-fusion" or dialectic of what she terms "distribution and equilibration" (SW 522), whose relation to each other is structured very much like that joining the two "Milk" texts earlier: on the one hand, an equilibration of sameness, meaning, and presence; and, through the "extrication" or revolution of romanticism, on the other hand, the distribution of difference, nonmeaning, and absence--yet all poised to return the entire discursive economy back to equilibration once again. The repetition or revolution of Stein's discursive economy here suggests something very much like the operational field of Foucault's "enunciative function," which he describes "as a unity of distribution that opens a field of possible options, and enables various mutually exclusive architectures to appear side by side or in turn" (Archaeology 106, 66; also 98-99). In the broaching of possible but as yet unstated options, then, through her conception of romanticism Stein gestures once again in the direction of reality's absent excess. What is more, her romanticism continues to sustain the integrity of the pragmatist project more generally, whose own "romanticism," according to John Diggins, evinces a like "willingness to plunge into a contingent world of possibility" (49). [9] In its deployment of distributive force, therefore, Stein's romantic composition seeks "to help get rid of the useless lumber that blocks our highways of thought . . . and open the paths that lead to the future" (Dewey "From Absolutism to Experimentalism" 13).

With the exhortation, at the opening of the "Rooms" section of Tender Buttons, to "[a]ct so that there is no use in a centre" (SW 499), Stein thus defers to the dialectical momentum of her composition just outlined, valorizing the distribution of differences over the centralization of meanings. "If the centre has the place" in her discourse, then the question becomes: "is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing"? (SW 499) If it is a question of "A whole centre" and a "hanging" (SW 498), we recall from a similar hanging earlier that "This question and this perfect denial does make the time change all the time." Then, Stein affirms, "there is distribution" (SW 499). What is so vexatious, however, about making a proper entry into this decentered economy of difference is its failure to provide us with any of the conventional signposts of discursive activity:

A silence is not indicated by any motion, less is indicated by a motion, more is not indicated it is enthralled. So sullen and so low, so much resignation, so much refusal and so much place for a lower and an upper, so much and yet more silence, why is it not sleeping a feat why is it not and when is there some discharge when. There never is. (SW 501)

In a word, Stein's composition "suggests nothing" (SW 501).

Gradually, however, as we begin to realize, following Stein's own lead, that it is we ourselves whom her writing purposes most to empower, and start to focus attention less on our own doubts about her writing and more on our own energy and resourcefulness in engaging it, the game begins to change: "The name is changed because in the little space there is a tree . . . [and] in every space there is a hint of more, all this causes decision" (SW 504-505). Stein refers to this change as one involving "current" (SW 505), and I take her to mean by this that now our own energies begin to find their outlet in the production and circulation of text. And whereas before, there seemed to be "no virtue" in "disturbing a centre," while her rooms had seemed so "vacant" (SW 506), now "there is plenty of room" to "question more and more," and sufficient comfort to feel "a room is big enough," when the "centre [is] no distractor" (SW 505, 506). With this "change in organization," therefore, it seems pointless to complain of the endlessness of this final section's "Rooms." Their more than ample space is there at the end of Tender Buttons to show "that there is not so much extension as there would be if there were more choice in everything" (SW 507). And without the "show of choice," so Stein concludes, there can be no "translat[ion]" of authority (SW 508). If this final installment of her writing, then, succeeds in making "a wide place stranger," it's only because "a wideness" itself "makes an active center" (SW 508).

[ii]

Poetry, according to Charles Bernstein, has its "outer limit" and its "inner limit" (66). Up to this point, we've mostly been concerned with the outer limit of poetry in the writing of Gertrude Stein, that is to say, with its relation to the existential content--objects, food, rooms--of the outside material world. But when James talks about reality in terms of "the merely ideal limit of our minds," dealt with earlier, there's also the sense in which reality constitutes an "inner limit"--the limit of personal, subjective psychic experience, within the rooms of the human mind. With the shift from the outer and objective to the inner and subjective, I shall continue to remain focussed on the issue of Stein's self-authority in this final part of my essay. But somehow, immersed in the entirely human element of subjective knowledge, one senses that this issue will be harder to control--a word which will begin to absorb more and more of our attention as we proceed. Stein, I'm fairly convinced, felt the same way. Throughout "Composition as Explanation," for example, she is happy to celebrate the "continuous present" of the new kind of romance-writing she is all the while promoting. But only until the year 1914 and war are mentioned. After that, the text seems to darken considerably--clearly, this innovative time-sense she senses is fraught with enormous difficulty--and remains that way until it quickly draws to a close:

This is the thing that is at present the most troubling and if there is the time that is at present the most troublesome the time-sense that is at present the most troubling is the thing that makes the present the most troubling. There is at present . . . expression and time, and in this way at present composition is time that is the reason that at present the time-sense is troubling . . . Now that is all. (SW 522-23)

Why, one might wonder, does Stein appear so perplexed by the sense of continuous time as it relates to expression here? And more importantly, what bearing might this concern have upon her newly confirmed sense of author-ity--confirmed, at least, up until the war years?

One can begin to gain a purchase on Stein's anxiety over her writing from about this time, by understanding, first of all, the reason for her attaching such importance to its intense temporality. For it is her writing's continuous time-sense, driving as it does the dialectic of distributive difference and equilibrated sameness in face of some ungraspable and yet to be named realit--it is this time-sense that holds her composition open to contingency, multiplicity, and variety, and assures her continuous sense of self-authority in the process. What is more, if we now begin to view the ungraspable as that ideal inner limit set by the interiority of psychic experience, Stein's continuous time-sense makes promise of a subjectivity whose claim can never be "self-sufficient, transparently self-conscious, and self-identical," but a subjectivity itself open potentially to infinite construction, given its constitution as the "endless repetition" of an (im)possible "absent ideal" (Butler "Lana's 'Imitation'" 12, 10). [10] The new spin that temporality puts on self-authority thus points it in the direction of authentication within the contexts of gender and sexuality. But here the risks begin to multiply for a writer like Stein.

As she explains in "Composition as Explanation," writers "creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical" (SW 514). The regrettable implication of Stein's observation is that the true modernist can write nothing of importance in life, her reputation as a writer of "romantic" (as opposed to "classical") composition residing entirely in her status as an "outlaw" throughout all of that time (SW 514). "Acceptance," if it comes at all, is earned when "the thing created becomes a classic"--a thing whose "characteristic quality . . . is that it is beautiful" (SW 515). If there is to be any surviving death in this life for the writer, one senses the tremendous pressure being brought to bear on the modern artist to surrender her authority to the discourse of classicism. Thus, at the outer limit of her project, the removal of the continuous time-sense from the representation of reality is likely to presence it in some form of "realism" (Walker 16-17), and even Gertrude Stein herself was famously known to go that route with the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), a book that brought her instant fame and a great deal of money besides (Souhami 190-96). At the inner limit of reality, however, the removal of the rhetoric of temporality in yielding to the clamor for "acceptance" could mean only one thing: the surrender of alternative forms of gendered subjectivity to the pathology of abjection, in exchange for the authority of a heteronormative lie. Both outer and inner limits of discourse, if handled just this way, come together in George Steiner's remark that "heterosexuality is the very essence of . . . classic realism," which prompts him further to note that "homosexuality could be construed as a creative rejection of the philosophic and conventional realism, of the mundanity and extroversion of classic and nineteenth century feeling" (qtd. Dollimore 307). Sue-Ellen Case makes the similar observation that "Oscar Wilde brought [his] artifice, wit, irony, and the distancing of straight reality and its conventions to the stage," following the suggestion of Michael Bronski, closer to our own day, that "Wit and irony provide the only reasonable modus operandi in the American Literalist Terror of Straight Reality" (298). Now Stein is able to maintain some sense of control over the terror of realism threatening her authority as a lesbian writer by indulging the continuous time-sense of her modern composition: in the passage previously cited from "Composition as Explanation," for instance, "trouble" is repeated five times in as many lines. But as a control maintained in face of, if not precisely founded upon, a perpetual lack of acceptance for queer authorship now, and in the future, what could it matter?

What must have made the struggle for self-authority through temporality even more troublesome for Stein was the toll it exacted in terms of the loss of sibling support and fraternal love. From a very early age, she and her brother Leo formed a deeply affectional alliance in response to a distant and invalid mother and an overbearing and tyrannical father, the latter in particular sparking a resentment so intense in both that it was eventually "to include all fathers" (Brinnin 16-17, 10). As time wore on, however, it was Leo, ironically, who more and more would assume the role of patriarchal authority, mounting his claim for control and mastery of his sister, not unexpectedly, on the basis of a demand for greater realism in her work:

A writer, he felt, should aim only at fitting meaning to purpose with the exquisite precision of a jeweler . . . As early as 1907, Leo had made a series of drawings of an abstract nature, but he was dissatisfied with the results and may very likely have extended his impatience with abstractionist art to include Gertrude's experiments . . . [for] it became apparent that she had found in [abstractionist] writing the one means by which she could gain ascendance over Leo and that she would no longer allow her progress to be curbed. (Brinnin 80; cf. Souhami 113)

The introduction of Alice B. Toklas into Gertrude's life shared with her brother in Paris in the years leading up to the war succeeded only in heightening even further the crisis taking shape around the struggle for self-authority. For what Gertrude and Alice both began producing together now "was beyond realism, or 'things remembered,' or 'reconstruction from memory.' They were dismantling the components of reality and reconstructing them in their own highly individual ways [and Gertrude] felt that this subjective expression put them into the vanguard of the twentieth century" (Souhami 101; further on 113, and Brinnin 198). Having all the while contended that "[Gertrude's] basically stupid and I'm basically intelligent" (qtd. Brinnin 311), Leo eventually dissolved the relationship with his sister for good in 1913 (Chessman 228/n.11). Despite a couple of half-hearted attempts by Leo to reconcile the differences with his sister (Souhami 140, 253), for the remainder of her lifetime, for her part, "Gertrude apparently welcomed the estrangement and made no serious effort to repair the break" (Mellow 296).

Gertrude may have welcomed the break with Leo. Nonetheless, I think it's fairly safe to assume that their highly pitched battle over the right to assert what was really true in life--a battle essentially for authoritative control over how their world ought ideally to be represented--left Gertrude deeply troubled. In "A Portrait of F. B" (1913) composed the year Leo left 27, Rue de Fleurus for good, we find a great deal of Gertrude's frustration spilling over into the text in the form of bitter sarcasm:

Praise the lion and the rat, see the morsels fairly, show the swimming of the rat show the rabbit winning. Bestow the light and chase it there, see the hall is dimmer, see the lightening everywhere see the lightening dimmer . . . Make no dinner in the morning, make it in the evening, see the same and see it there, see it in the morning . . . say no more and undertake what is so ridiculous that there is no time to say that and any how what is the abuse of an intention, why should there be etiquette, why is there every lightening, why if the season is the same is there summer, when is there more night than in winter. (G&P 176)

If Leo might be thought to be the lion in this passage (and perhaps also the rat, and the rabbit who always wins the race), Gertrude imagines herself in the somewhat petulant position of insisting on merely doing the opposite to him. If dietary protocol demands that dinner be made in the evening rather than the morning, then she, "undertak[ing] what is so ridiculous," prefers to "see it in the morning": "why should there be etiquette"? If Leo prefers "lightening everywhere," then she will see dark everywhere--"more night than in winter." In a battle for authority, one either controls, or is oneself controlled. And to a large extent, this generally represents Leo and Gertrude's epistemological standoff. In Leo's championing the position of realism, he represents the "traditional quest for foundations and first principles . . . searching to get at the truth of things by thinking thoughts that are true to the way things are and consistent with other thoughts." Gertrude, to the contrary, assumes "the nature of things to be a succession of events in which nothing is fixed and everything is in change and transition":

No longer could the reality of things be a matter of photographic representation, copied in the mind like a "kodak fixation," as Dewey put it . . . With pragmatism, [] ideas are tested in experience in view of their observable outcomes, as opposed to being measured against some standard that is atemporal and external to experience. [Accordingly,] the rational meaning of ideas would lay in the future since only the future, and not the past, could be subject to alteration and control. (Diggins 39, emphasis added; further on 19, 24, 38, 154, and 471)

As this passage indicates, then, whether one found oneself nourished by ideas in the past, or ideas in the future, the positions could hardly be distinguishable one from the other if it was a fixation on authoritative control which ultimately served as their overriding purpose and governing rationale. "A turn of the table does not mean that cups are there," as Stein's "Portrait" goes on to reveal, "it means that there is no loneliness" (i.e., unique distinction or separation). In sum: "It does not mean any little thing" (G&P 177).

Stein's favorite reading (in addition to detective stories and Clarissa Harlowe) was William Shakespeare. With the eve of war serving as backdrop, one can't help thinking that she must very much have been minded of another brother, eager to colonize his sister's independence of mind and singularity of spirit, in the author from whose work she would read a play "every few days" (Brinnin 61, 374). "The canker gall[ing] the infants of the spring," as Ophelia's importuning elder brother Laertes remarks, "too oft before their buttons be disclos'd" (Hamlet, I.iii), in one sense, depicts a predatory situation that seems to fit both sisters precisely. And the line quite possibly suggested to Gertrude the title for her Tender Buttons, completed the previous year (Pondrom 424). But in another sense, Stein could hardly have thought Ophelia's plight at all matched her own, if she felt the key to her pursuit for self-authorization might lie in fashioning herself into a mirror-image of her brother's own controlling identity. Yet this appears to be the very troubling impasse--"the abuse of an intention" in the previous citation, perhaps--that the continuous present of her composition had brought her by 1913:

A clatter registered has a calming center. That is the outlasting of a sight of all. If it is possible that there is the result then certainly no one would think so. Every one does. There is no sense in such a history. There is no sense at all. Not a bit of broom has the window open, not a bit. (G&P 177)

Ensconcing herself at the "calming center" of her Paris apartment for all the important painters and poets and writers of the day to see, in prospect of such closure--not even "the window open"--Stein seems to sense that her whole project as a modernist lesbian writer has been betrayed if, as in the earlier passage, she can "say no more": "There is no sense in such a history. There is no sense at all."

Judith Butler has recently argued the case for uncontrollability in feminist and gay politics, and one is prone to speculate whether or not a similar notion might have suggested itself to Stein as just the insight needed to work through the troublesomeness that her quest for a distinct sense of authorship had incurred when revolved from an overly controlling and exclusionary sense of identity. Writes Butler:

The singular and authoritative homophobic figuration . . . cannot be opposed by remaining within the terms of that binary fight, but by displacing the binary itself through producing again and again precisely the discursive uncontrollability of the terms that are suppressed by regulatory violence . . . The task is not to resolve or restrain the tension, the crisis, the phantasmatic excess induced . . . but to affirm identity categories as a site of inevitable rifting, in which the phantasmatic fails to preempt the linguistic prerogative of the real. It is this incommensurability of the phantasmatic and the real that requires . . . to be safeguarded . . . to make that rift, that insistent rifting, into the persistently ungrounded ground from which [] discourse emerges. [11] ("Force of Fantasy" 120-21)

If Stein proposed to move her composition forward, she perhaps realized she was not likely to succeed by turning the tables on Leo, and prolonging the "binary fight" by arrogating his authority to her self. Instead, her sense of self-authorization would be achieved by displacing that authority onto a continuous presencing of selfhood "as a site of rifting" precisely through an enlargement of composition's repeated troublesomeness rather than its curtailment. [12] By locating her authority in non-authority, so to speak, she gestures toward that "ungrounded ground" that places identity beyond the control of all categories and classes, and joins the outer to the inner limit of her poetry in revealing "that there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life" (Rose 91).

In so doing, Stein thus ushers queer authorship, finally, into a future of potential acceptance based on nothing more--"say no more," "the absence of more"--than the fluid distribution of an excess of subjective space, what she perhaps calls, in this final passage of "Portrait," "the practice of Nileing":

Bake a table, the rest is empty, see the plate first, the first is distributed, see the arrangement the arrangement is in the curling Christmas.
Bet more than sugar, copy no more principally, restrict more decoration, repeat the needle. There is made.
So to see and so to go and so to turn the list around, so to go and so there is the practice of Nileing. Plainer sheets have simple stripes. (G&P 177)

The an(nihil)ation here of controlling authoritative categories--"copy no more"--suggests a possible "arrangement" that gives a Christmas-like new birth to the subject in a repeated turning, curling, or nileing around an empty "rest"--an incommensurable reality that Teresa de Lauretis (in my second epigraph) designates as the "lack" to which Stein becomes resigned, and elsewhere refers to as "the symbolic space of excess and contradiction . . . or imaginary space in which [the difference between characters and roles] configures a lesbian subject-position" (227, 110; also 224-25, and Schmitz 129). [13] In the end, Stein's "turn[ing] the list around"--presumably, the list of subject positions--argues for "the speculative character of identity," so that "[w]hat survives the ravages of time," in her discourse, "is not an identity but a question of identity" (Cope 201, 197). [14] The question of identity, in this optional rather than problematic sense, would lead her much later to the paradoxical formulation in my last epigraph from the Geographical History of America (1936): "No one knowing me knows me. I am II" (77). But undoubtedly, it's the "nileing" of subjectivity in this redoubled i-dentity--"the terrible fluidity of self-revelation," according to Henry James ("Preface" to The Ambassadors, qtd. in Nadel 88)--in a text like "A Portrait of F. B.," that can eventually transport her there. For "There is the rate," as its final stanza declares, "that makes no more" (G&P 177).

The notion of a fluid subjectivity through which to maintain her composition's radical sense of both temporality and authority is perhaps a final debt Stein owed to William James. For its was his concept of a "stream of consciousness," one of the critical hallmarks of Modernism, that construed consciousness not as an essentialized state of being, but whose "liquid metaphor impl[ied] a Whitmanesque continuous becoming" (Diggins 127). "Sacred Emily" (1913), a poem composed the same year as the previous "Portrait," and with which we might conclude, veritably overflows with the continuous alteration of states of feeling and thought unbounded through time:

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters,
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Pages ages page ages page ages.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Able able able
A go to green and a letter spoke a go to green or praise or
Worships worships worships.
Door.
Do or. (G&P 187)

I would like to think that the "door" opened up in this last citation tropes a kind of portal through which Stein's pragmatism flows seamlessly into her feminism and sapphism, hence melding the two parts of my own argument together. Thus, when we stand back from this passage, we perhaps see how Stein's sapphism repeats (does over=do'er=door) her pragmatism, in the way that "sexuality remains fluid and everchanging," like James's stream of consciousness, "evolving through adult life in response to internal and external vicissitudes: flexible, anarchic, ambiguous, layered with multiple meanings, offering doors that open to unexpected experience . . . [in] the search for pleasure and expansiveness that motivates visions of political change and human connection" (Vance 22, emphasis added). Accordingly, James's opposition to rationalism for its exclusionary logic's resistance to such expansiveness is Gertrude Stein's as well: "Reason purses. / Reason purses to relay to relay carpets . . . Cunning saxon symbol / Symbol of beauty. / Thimble of everything. / Cunning clover thimble. / Cunning of everything. / Cunning of thimble. / Cunning cunning" (G&P 186). [15] Her queer self-authorization, therefore, locates itself in a position quite outside mainstream culture's narrow logocentric "thimbology," a discursive site from which she can then resist patriarchy's "official symbol systems" by deploying them "to both reveal and mock dominant culture" (Vance 15; also DeKoven xvii): "rose is a rose is a rose . . ."

But that discursive remove, as we know, was also the site of Emily Dickinson's unique authority, displaced through "play, parody, duplicity, evasion, illogic, silence, role-playing, and renunciation" (Bennett 107). Gertrude Stein can honor Dickinson's poetry in the title of her text, therefore, because a symbolic absence underwrites her sacred identity as a writer--"Gold space gold space of toes. / Twos, twos. / Pinned to the letter." (G&P 183)--rather than essentializing orders of meaning and truth "Begging to state begging to state begging to state alright / Begging to state begging to state begging to state alright" (G&P 182). "Sacred Emily" thus becomes a tribute to a writer whose work, like Stein's favorite Shakespeare, is sutured over an engima--"So great so great Emily. Sew grate sew grate Emily" (G&P 182)--a tribute to an author-ity that, like Hamlet's skewed custom, is perhaps "More honour'd in the breach than the observance" (Hamlet, I.iv). [16] And the miracle is that the custom has survived, in the repetition of the writer, Gertrude Stein, herself:

Put something down.
Put something down some day.
Put something down some day in.
Put something down some day in my.
In my hand.
In my hand right.
In my hand writing.
Put something down some day in my hand writing. (G&P 185)

The excess of repetitions from this passage midway through the text are brought to a halt with, appropriately, a quadruple iteration of the phrase "Never the less" (G&P 185). As a further inaugural, accordingly, to the "absence of more" that promises to follow, Stein ultimately channels her lines' unstoppable flow, near the end of the poem, through her own enigmatic identity as "hubbie," the lesbian lover of "pussy," i.e., Alice B. Toklas (Souhami 111): "Excessively illigitimate. / Pussy pussy what what." (G&P 187). The inscrutable double-what capping this excess is intended to show only "Mercy for a dog," which Stein positions dumbly immediately following (G&P 187). "I am I," she was once reported to have declared, "because my little dog knows me," then added, "That does not prove anything about you it only proves something about the dog" (Brinnin 327). For the readers of this doubly emphatic dumb cadence, therefore, the two "what's" present a final portal through which Stein's struggle for self-authorization can perhaps pass out of her life, and begin to take hold of our own, through the prodigal variety and alterity of a queer love that the future has yet to legitimate:

A go to green and a letter spoke a go to green or praise or
Worships worships worships
Door.
Do or. (G&P 187)

David Jarraway is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and the author of Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1993.

Copyright David Jarraway 1998

Comments to jarraway@uottawa.ca

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Notes

[1] "Alice met Gertrude on September 8, 1907," as Harriet Chessman sums up their courtship, and "[t]heir relationship may have been consummated in the spring of 1908," with "Stein's marriage proposal to Toklas [coming] the following summer, as they vacationed in Fiesole, Italy" (228/n.9). For brother Leo's resentment over the introduction of this new source of emotional attachment into Gertrude's life at 27, rue de Fleurus, see Souhami 101-102.

[2] Ironically, it was Alice B. Toklas herself who endeavoured most to background the issue of Stein's lesbianism, if not efface it entirely, particularly among her biographers. To Julian Sawyer, for instance, an American academic who wanted to deal frankly with this issue in Stein's work, Toklas was provoked to respond: "You will understand I hope my objection to your repeated references to the subject of sexuality as an approach to the understanding of Gertrude's work. She would have emphatically denied it--she considered it the least characteristic of all expressions of character--her actual references to sexuality are so rare . . . " (qtd. Souhami 258).

[3] Brinnin also notes the possible influence of other Pragmatists while Stein was at Harvard: "a course under George Santayana in philosophy and a course in metaphysics under Josiah Royce" (26). The influence of William James on Stein mainly in terms of his deregulation of traditional epistemology is dealt with most thoroughly by Dubnick (for the convergences, esp. 90-92), by Chessman (for the departures, esp. 157-60), and by Walker (for Stein's "conscious rebellion against some of [James's] precepts," 159/n.6, 104-105), and is dealt with more or less in passing by Caramello (5), Sayre (24), Dydo (45), Hawkins (119), and Martin (210). More socially and culturally resonant treatments of James in relation to Stein and other American Modernists broadly speaking can be found in Poirier and Lentricchia.

[4] To the constructed and processual character of truth offered here, James would have us imagine the rationalist taking the most strenuous exception: "'Truth is not made,' he will say; 'it absolutely obtains being a unique relation that does not wait upon any process, but shoots straight over the head of experience, and hits its reality every time . . . The bare quality of standing in that transcendent relation is what makes any thought true that possesses it, whether or not there be verification'" (P 143). For a much fuller development of the view "that knowledge is produced rather than discovered" through the several generations of important American pragmatist thinkers, see Diggins 39, 111, 127, 132, 136, 224, 233, 412, 416, 424, and 426.

[5] "Ultimately what pragmatism offers us," this passage from Diggins goes on to conclude, "as Santayana noted, is the benign message that it is better to pursue truth than to possess it, and better to regard as knowledge only those ideas that enable us to change things according to our desires, rather than to regard knowledge as a criterion of judgment that stands over and against our drives and desires" (248). Kant's own examples (in Foucault's extrapolation) of such a criterion of judgment, if we "accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas where the use of [our own] reason is called for," occur "when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be," etc. ("What Is Enlightenment?" 34). For a quite different take on the whole notion of Modernism than the pragmatist version offered here, see Hutcheon 179-82.

[6] In her own defense, Stein's biographer records her riposte to this contention from 1914: "It does not follow that the strongest impression is produced by the strongest mind. It just happened by accident or circumstance that I came under the influence of William James, but I have not yet found the expression of that influence or impression" (165). B. F. Skinner, the famous behavioral psychologist, in an inflammatory article in The Atlantic Monthly from 1934 ("Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?"), likewise contended that Stein's "eccentric writing style, in Tender Buttons and other works, was simply a continuation of the practice she had begun with William James," but in a sharply worded letter to the magazine's editor, again she denied it (Mellow 484; see also Schmitz 127, 137). As John Brinnin sums up the case, "Gertrude still peferred to think of James as an influence on her personality, rather than as a source of her writing career. However, since she was shy about admitting to the slightest literary influence from any quarter, she seems to have suffered, in this instance, from a temporary case of myopia" (165).

[7] In commenting on Stein's "Cubist" connection, Diana Souhami writes that what Stein and Picasso thought "they were producing was beyond realism . . . They were dismantling the components of reality and reconstructing them in their own highly individual ways . . . working at a time when 'belief in reality of science commenced to diminish'" (101).

[8] Although working with a completely different text from Tender Buttons, Chessman, similarly, is compelled to conclude that "Otherness ('difference') is now celebrated; the hole or lacuna, which in a Freudian 'system' 'points' to such difference can now be sensed to be, not a locus of absence at all, but a rich and indefinable presence" (93). cf. also Scobie 116 and Dubnick 22.

[9] Richard Brodhead is not minded of such pragmatist thinking, but his own conception of romance is remarkably similar: "a literary form that aims not to be like reality__by which we mean in part, not to organize meaning as it is coded in the systems of understanding we call the real. Instead romance aims to produce its own, frankly literary world: not the one we know already but a new one, the yield of the work's own representational act . . . Returning us to a primal state of undifferentiated possibility, this genre allows us to participate in the making of moral signification--in the heady and risky act of giving such possibility determinate shape . . .--that primal definition or reduction of possibility by which meaning is brought to an actual form" (193). Diggens, in the reference cited, follows closely the suggestion of Louis Hartz in The Necessity of Choice (1990): "When revolutionary norms move into the realm of reality they become romantic. The implementation of ideals requires a departure from rationalism. By his own route the revolutionary adopts precisely that romantic mood of indeterminacy and complexity that gets defended in reactionary thought. In the world of action the Revolution and the Reaction meet" (qtd. 49). Or, in the world of "romance," the "very essence" of which, according to Oscar Wilde's famous comment in The Importance of Being Earnest, "is uncertainty."

[10] Butler's formulations for subjectivity are most apt here, forming a vital intersection with James's pragmatism whose own "ideal limit," at the impossible interface between repeated representation and evanescent reality--"mother nature," he calls it (62)--exactly parallels "the primary prohibition against an original experience of maternal presence" in "Lacanian discourse," thereby providing "an occasion to generate a limitless series of phantasms which effectively multiply the aims and directionalaities of desire . . . [yielding] "a multiplication and diversification of imaginary strategies" (13), or as Stein reamarks, "a center confused with lists [and] series" ("Composition" 519). In grasping "always some substitute" for reality, but never the thing itself (qtd. Wheeler 86), James would further agree with Lacan's suggestion "that the 'real' is obliquely contained in the repetitive act . . . which establishes substitutability as the indeterminate site of the real" (Butler "Lana's 'Imitation'" 14). Hence, Stein's "Act so that there is no use in a centre," in Tender Buttons (498), since, in her famous tag from Lectures in America, "there is no there, there" (218). Teresa de Lauretis, working with the psychoanalysis of Jean Laplanche and the Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, contrives to construct a parallel argument to the foregoing, viz., "Both the sexual object constructed in fantasy and the immediate object constructed in semiosis are contiguous but displaced in relation to the real; and hence the homology of fantasy (in sexuality) and semiosis with regard to the subject's relation to the object of representation" (305).

[11] The figure, noted previously, of Stein centered in her Paris salon's enclosed room, forms a strong intersection with Elizabeth Bishop's well-known "In the Waiting Room," and a similar troubling cry which can be heard emanating from it. As in Stein's predicament, "It is a cry," writes Lee Edelman, paralleling Butler's thoughts on control, "that cries out against any attempt to clarify its confusions . . . that recognizes the attempts to clarify it as attempts to put it in its place . . . [Hence,] a cry of displacement--a cry of the female refusal of position in favor of dis-position. As a figural subversion, it wages war against the reduction of woman to the status of a literal figure, an oxymoronic entity constrained to be interpreted within the patriarchal text" (106-107). As a further elaboration on "identity categories" that Butler perceives as "a site of rifting," John Champagne observes: "What Foucault terms 'the reality of discourse' is a necessarily inadequate attempt to name the rift between unthinkable heterogeneity and the sign, a rift that humanism attempts to fill with recourse to concepts such as experience" (198/n.15).

[12] cf. Butler Gender Trouble 66-72. Domestic trouble should also be included here, as Martin notes: "Stein wants to create a continuous present not only of language but also of self, an eternally renewing and transforming identity that cannot be confined to the permanent past of marriage . . . [since] [t]he desire of marriage to freeze the other in a past time brings it inevitably into conflict with the need of the individual to change" (216). cf. also Walker 48 and 56.

[13] Ed Cohen explains, similarly, how "Foucault repeatedly assesses the significance of gay experience as a space of possibility, of creativity, and not just as a 'sexual' identity but as a 'way of life,'" and finds further corroboration in De Lauretis's notion (in Alice Doesn't [1984]) of subjectivity as "an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival" (91, 100/n.15). In the reference cited here, De Lauretis's formulation is based on a film-text, but a poem can be like a film, as the passage from Stein shows, "by disallowing a univocal spectatorial identification with any one character or role or object-choice, and foregrounding instead the relations of desire to fantasy and its mobility within the fantasy scenario" (122)--safeguarding, in other words, the "incommensurability of the phantasmatic and real," as Butler earlier observes, and refers to elsewhere (following Lacan, again) as "a fêlure of or in the subject, the division that multiplies into the dissimulating trajectory that 'is' the subject" ("Lana's 'Imitation'" 14). Scobie (following Terry Eagleton) develops this last idea in relation to the notion of a metonymic "desire" in Lacan that he finds applicable to Stein (116).

[14] Echoing de Lauretis's invocation of symbolic "lack" just mentioned, John Champagne also observes that "such positionings will always necessarily be contingent, provisional, subject to slippage--that is, subject to deconstruction . . . so that it becomes impossible to speak of something like 'the homosexual' except as a determined and vacant place in a discourse, a place that, by definition, cannot be filled once and for all" (65, emphasis added).

[15] "[T]he opposition between rational analysis and emotional immediacy was one of Stein's central preoccupations during the early years of her career," Jayne Walker writes, and explains it further in the context of sibling rivalry already referred to: "Identifying her brother Leo's failures with his excess of rational control and redefining her own intellectual stance in opposition to his, she began to regard all analytic thought as a barrier to the unmediated experience that nurtures creativity" (37, 104; also 161/n.17). Walker's argument elsewhere that Stein "declar[es] her rejection of James's philosophical pragmatism," may thus be more rightly perceived as a rejection of brother Leo's "version" of the philosophy (104), which Mellow implies Leo completely misunderstood in any case (54), although Walker is careful to note that Stein "never abandoned her early commitment to James's teachings" (104-105).

[16] "'Suture,'" as Joan Copjec writes (following Jacques-Alain Miller), 'names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse.' It is an account of the subject's, of meaning's coming into being . . . [that] says that there are no fully constructed subjects or objects outside discourse which must then be integrated into a social structure. Nor is there any unified subject or object outside discourse that governs it. The subject is, instead, simultaneously constituted and dislocated by speech" (47, 58).

WORKS CITED

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