Propuesta del Sistema de Control Constitucional Preventivo

Repetition was not a new writing technique. It even contained limitations in artistic value due to the ‘poverty of linguistic resource’:

It may further suggest a suppressed intensity of feeling – an imprisoned feeling, as it were, for which there is no outlet but a repeated hammering at the confining walls of language. In a way, saying the same thing over and over is a reflection on the inadequacy of language to express what you have to express ‘in one go’.285

Johanna Winant suggested that:

…while Wittgenstein argues that nonsense is ‘withdrawn from circulation’, Perloff works very hard to drag Stein’s language back into circulation. As a result, she ends up having to argue both that Stein’s language is nonsense, excluded from our language game like Wittgenstein’s examples of nonsense, and yet that it is not nonsense, because of the literary criticism she can do to reveal its meaning286

Thus, there was no boundary between sense and nonsense in Stein’s writings. In my view, sense and nonsense were removed from normal intentions and expressions of everyday life by repetition.

Repetition in Stein’s poems was not used to confirm any information but to create a flowing stream of thought and images that appeared automatically. For example, in ‘Melanctha’,287 _{the idea that Dr. Campbell thought Melanctha would} never come to any good was repeated three times in his monologue about Melanctha. Even the realistic part of his mind prevented him from accepting any information from her; the name Melanctha appeared in four whole sentences. The more he tried to refuse thinking about Melanctha, the more it became mainstream in his thought. What he did was repeat, not impact on or adjust anything. Thus,

285 _{Geoffrey Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (Harlow: Longman, 1969), p. 79.}

286 _{Johanna Winant, 'Gertrude Stein and the Contingency of Inductive Reasoning’, Journal of Modern} Literature, Volume 39, Number 3 (Spring 2016), pp. 95-113 (p. 104).

‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘take care’ or ‘ignore’ did not contain meanings which related to any evaluation. Another example is:

A TABLE

A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change. A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.288

At first, this poem could be classified as a definition (like many others in this collection). However, the chorus ‘a table means’ does not bring any sense of clarifying an object that (supposedly) was hidden. Continuously, lots of characteristics that seem to relate to a table are recounted: ‘steadiness’, ‘a looking glass’, ‘necessary places’, ‘a revision’, ‘a stand’, ‘a shake’. This makes the features of a table sink into a mixture of confusing definitions, and reshapes whatever it was thought to be. A table for Stein turns into a table coming from modern life, which is no longer unitary but polyhedral.

Repetition in Tender Buttons did not actually belong to sentence structure. If the whole of Tender Buttons was a long poem, each repetition (syllables, rhymes, words) would be considered as a sentence inside it.

In my view, the repetition of domestic objects like table, chair, plate, umbrella, orange, and potato played down the endless rhythm of what I would describe as ‘inner house life’, which could be a symbol for society and the poetic world in microcosm.

Moreover, repetition was not simply used as increasing concreteness or a unified stream in Stein’s writing. In Tender Buttons, opposing views were tied in knots to reveal irregular ideas about objects or human life, in which, the repetition of objects in the following clause was the preparation for an unexpected bend of it into a different perspective. An example can be seen in ‘Shoes’:

To be a wall with a damper a stream of pounding way and nearly enough choice makes a steady midnight. It is pus.

A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less. It shows shine. 289

The chain of ‘A shallow hole’, ‘a shallow hole in and in’ seem to lead towards exploration into the depth of the object. At last, ‘shine’ is found. The poem creates a paradox between inside and outside through the effort of trying to escape from the ‘pus’. This could be considered as a competition happening in the inner shoes; a competition of dark and light, quiet and noise, monotone and audacity, hurt and glory with the desire of analysing the word and the world of objects. This kind of contrary effect also appeared in many other poems in Tender Buttons (e.g. ‘A Petticoat’290_{, ‘A Waist’}291_{), where at least two opposite sides or characteristics were} hidden in one thing, such as purity and cloudiness (‘white’ and ‘ink spots’ in ‘A Petticoat’) or authentic and fake nature (‘crystal’ and ‘gild’ in ‘A Waist’).

Among such contradictions, ‘charm’ and ‘disgrace’ were of interest in examining Stein’s poems. On the one hand, Stein wrote about objects which were considered to be elegant and charming, while on the other, they turned out to be ‘Nothing Elegant’.292 _{In my view, Stein preferred to find the abnormal, the unspoken corners} of objects around the house, including in the dining room, the kitchen and especially the living room, which was always supposed to contain the most beautiful and sparkling things and moments in life. However, in a strange way, nothing was as tender as it used to be thought. Thus, words controlled life. When Stein wrote her famous statement, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’293_{, she still} wondered:

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.’294

She also wondered about fixed and constant entities (e.g. ‘A Red Stamp’, ‘A Red Hat’, ‘A Piano’) because they could transform to various situations and colours and finally find themselves blooming in a catalogue of images. Each fragment of an

289 _{Stein, ‘Shoes’, Tender Buttons, p. 14.}

290 _{Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Vintage}

Books, 1990), p. 471.

291 _Ibid.

292 _{Stein, ‘Nothing Elegant’, p. 4.} 293 _{Stein, Vechten, p. 114.} 294 _{Stein, ‘Nothing Elegant’, p. 4.}

object freely looked for its own voice, which suggested lots of directions that even writers could hardly consciously intend to reach. For instance, a red hat could have no necessity to be red, it might be suffused with numerous shades of dark grey: ‘A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey’.295

Thus it was impossible for readers to link Stein’s objects to normal life. The dictionary in Tender Buttons (if it could be named as such), in particular, was a closed inner life of a domestic woman, but in general, it involved an infinity that a human could only imagine. This is confirmed in The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality.296

Sometimes, in the extremity of repetition, Stein eliminated the meanings of nouns in which all rhetorical sense disappeared. It could be the journey from paper to stool,297 _{a letter to the fire,}298 _{which suggested the meaninglessness of any living} action, or the inevitable and predictable ending of objects (from ‘cool’ to ‘less hot’). The usage of strong verbs such as ‘sell’, ‘cut’ and ‘collapse’ showed the collapse of what used to be established with pride and elegance.299 _{The desire of reaching a} concluding definition of an object’s life made Stein reluctant to accept half-hearted descriptions such as ‘charm’ or ‘beauty’ (perhaps because they contained no exact meanings but seemed to be boring and ridiculous). She wrote in ‘A Drawing’, ‘nothing broader, anything between the half’300_{, and would rather ‘hot up and} inspire the pale look, the regularity, dress them to a kind of salad than let them be simple like an artichoke’.301 _{In this case, the artichoke could be considered as the} symbol of normal life which was neither difficult to nominate nor complex to imagine. Therefore, a salad dressing was a solution in defamiliarising existing

295 _{Stein, Vechten, ‘Red Hat’, p. 467} 296 _{Stein, Vechten, p. 199.}

297 _{Stein, ‘A Paper’, p. 10.} 298 _{Stein, ‘A Fire’, p. 12.} 299 _{Stein, ‘Red Roses’, p. 12.} 300 _{Stein, ‘A Drawing’, p. 10.}

objects, which Stein gave the privilege of experience. It might be described as another reality within the reality.

There also appeared, as repetition in Tender Buttons, some striking images (e.g. ‘umbrella’, ‘table’ and ‘yellow’). Although colours are generally regarded as auxiliary components of an object, Stein proved that colours themselves could individually become lively objects. Sometimes, they were definite colours, sometimes not. In this case, it tended to be a mixture like ‘rose-wood colour’ in ‘A piece of coffee’302_{, which was rather an image of a possible reality or a} transformation between reality and unreality. However, in Tender Buttons, even if colours were written simply as ‘blue’, ‘red’ or ‘white’, they were still far enough from components of metaphor or to be linked into groups of colour meaning. I examined ‘yellow’ as an apt example. This could be the colour of food: ‘the yellow and the tender and the better’303 _{or the colour of objects: ‘Dirty is yellow’}304_{, ‘The} resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter’,305 _{‘Enthusiastically hurting a} clouded yellow bud and saucer’.306 _{However, what made the greatest impression} was the yellow of people. Wright Morris questioned this when he recounted that: ‘They (Stein and Anderson) admitted that Hemingway was yellow’.307 _{The ‘pale} yellow’ of Melanctha was mentioned ten times along with her other positive characteristics, such as being ‘graceful’, ‘intelligent’ and ‘attractive’, as a way to remind readers about the origin and the stable nature of this black woman. ‘Pale yellow’ was also used to describe her sick mother. It was not really the health symptoms of a prolonged illness; it seemed that Melanctha, or her mother ‘Mis’ Herbert, was a different version of a common yet mysterious and confusing entity. That was why on the one hand, Melanctha revealed her drastic attitude in disclaiming and trying to ignore her childhood as well as the love of her parents, while on the other hand she could hardly fail to recognise her genetic traits from them. This also led to a systematic existence of ‘pale yellow’ like an obsession, which named a person and anticipated her fate and lonely death from tuberculosis.

302 _{Stein, ‘A Piece of Coffee’, p. 3.} 303 _{Stein, ‘Food’, p. 17.}

304 _{Stein, ‘A piece of coffee’, p. 3} 305 _{Stein, ‘A piece of coffee’, p. 3.} 306 _{Stein, ‘New cup and saucer’, p. 9.}

307 _{Gertrude Stein, ‘After the war 1919-1932’, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (Harmondsworth:}

Penguin, 1966). See Wright Morris, ‘One law for the lion’, Partisan Review, Vol. 28, 5-6 (1961), 541- 51 (p.546).

Thus, yellow in Stein’s prose and poetry lived a real individual life and told its individual story rather than being an auxiliary for any subject. That might be the reason why we can hardly find the link between ‘curtain’ and ‘yellow’ and ‘roastbeef’,308 _{or ‘shining yellow – hope – nothing’,}309 _{where ‘yellow’ is written as a} random factor or an untold potential in the inner core of objects. Along with ‘yellow’ is ‘Chinese’, which could be considered as an object appearing many times in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: ‘Chinese chair’, ‘Chinese gown’, ‘translations of Chinese poems’. Those could be seen as examples of defamiliarisation in Stein’s writings, when she did not want to draw attention to any common objects. However, the repetition of ‘yellow’ and ‘Chinese’ could evoke the prejudice of racialism since the words have close relations to yellow-skinned people and patriarchy. Sometimes, with metaphors like ‘Japanese’, ‘broken pieces’ and ‘single piece’310_{, the poem also raises questions about the existence of a} minority. There might also have been reference to the The Yellow Wallpaper311 _by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with its ‘smouldering, unclean yellow’, ‘deadly fascination’ and ‘a yellow smell’ where the female protagonist found freedom in suicide through madness. That was the only way to reject, to strangle the woman behind the yellow wallpaper who day by day by day by day tied her with a rope. Therefore, ‘yellow’ turned out to be the environment, a jailer as well as a victim, a companion, which promoted the feminist ideology and required a change of the gender relationship.

Along with this, sexuality is considered to be one of the repeated inner subjects in Tender Buttons. In sexual politics, writers tried to avoid theories of male domination by looking at women’s experience in culture and forming a coherent understanding of women’s writings. However, because gender was considered to be the product of a discourse in which the participants were divided into a muted and a dominant group, the only way that one could find the speciality of women’s writing was by translating their language into the language of the dominant group.

308 _{Stein, ‘Roastbeef’, p. 17.}

309 _{Stein, ‘A little bit of a tumble’, p. 11.} 310 _{Stein, ‘Careless water’,p. 10.}

311 _{Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Golden Catherine J., Charlotte Perkins Gilman's the Yellow Wall-paper: a} sourcebook and critical edition (London: Routledge, 2004).

This could be examined more specifically in A Room of One’s Own312 _{by Virginia} Woolf, in which a problem was presented: men and women had the same qualities, but under the cultural and historical conditions of a traditional society, women were not allowed to become like Shakespeare. They could not develop genius. Thus, they would be forever buried into two dungeons, one imposed by society, the other created by women to avoid the influence of partisan prejudices which had evolved over thousands of years. Female writers only had one way to be themselves, to escape the frame of social knowledge, the discourse of their era. It was through madness and death. If not, they would turn into witches or wizards and live the life of a different, peripheral person. To solve this, there were only two ways they could become abnormal: to be inferior, or to stand higher than the society. The female writer took the second way and she was alone in the sense that she was both the pioneer and, possibly, the last. Thus, while on one hand, Woolf desired to enter through the closed library door, on the other hand she was afraid of boredom when trapped inside. The imprisonment of women was the biggest hurdle; it was a challenge for them to come to literature as a way of release and live their own lives. It also raised the question of what benefits it would bring to society. Virginia Woolf pointed out that the innovation of women’s roles was committed to the innovation of literature. To achieve such innovations, she cited the basic concepts of women expressed by Samuel Butler and La Bruyere, and concluded that looking at women through the eyes of men led only to confusion and chaos. This was because a woman in men's writings existed in a two-fold way: personality and impersonality. To explain this, Woolf pointed out that women in poetry only existed as shadows, beloved objects and major sources of inspiration for literary works. However, in real life, women were slaves in their own homes. As a consequence, Woolf drew a portrait of professor von X - an ugly and unbalanced picture, and she temporarily imagined a reason that would have made him have a bad view of women. It could have been anger when his wife committed adultery, which reduced the man’s confidence. She realised that anger made the views of both genders become biased. She also felt that the bad characteristics women had to assume were due to the nonsense and craziness of men. Women were victims of anger. This might be the reason why Woolf, in later arguments, was not against male viewpoints. She also realised that female writers who wrote based on the

response of their gender, found difficulty in expressing all their literary capacity. The more they reacted to society, the more they were influenced by it. Prejudice, therefore, was always in their minds and forced them to think about it before making art. It was the invisible regulator for female writers. They were locking themselves into a social cage, self-questioning about views that attacked women, despite opening their souls to freedom in the world of writing. Thus, Woolf rejected the argument that genius just needed to focus on personal thinking and capacity. No-one seemed to be outside of prejudice and social institutions. That was the reason why women used to write as a man to avoid the appearance of abnormality, and considered writing as a way to relieve the self-destructive tendency. However, it was inevitable in a society where professors could disparage women and men legally established politics, law, education, economy and culture. It was a society where women could only appear in the miscellaneous pieces of news, and as figures of minor entertainment. All of these existed in the dominant male discourse. However, Woolf deeply indicated that underestimating women manifested the lack of confidence of males, and the reason for expressing the power of men was because they were actually weak. They needed women to create a rival. Without women, the balance of life would be changed and there would be nothing called nobleness and inferiority, victory and defeat. Women’s humility was proportional to the pride and power achieved by men. Men live by that illusion.

Therefore, the creation of a new balance could be found in Stein’s writings, in the participation of both genders like the division of two entities in one object. From a biographical perspective, this could be seen as the result of the lesbian life