Frost, 'Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino', Postmodern Culture v5n3
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Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette
Mullen and Leslie Scalapino
by
Elisabeth A. Frost
Department of English
Dickinson College
frost@dickinson.edu
Postmodern Culture v.5 n.3 (May, 1995)
pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Copyright (c) 1995 by Elisabeth A. Frost, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance
with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and
it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form,
provided that the editors are notified and no fee is
charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or
republication of this text on other terms, in any medium,
requires the consent of the author and the notification
of the publisher, Oxford University Press.
How can one be a 'woman' and be in the street?
That is, be out in public, be public--and still
more tellingly, do so in the mode of speech.
--Luce Irigaray[1]
[1] A 1984 anthology of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group of poets
included a section in which the writers commented on their
contemporaries--most of whom are still unfamiliar to
readers of American poetry. Rae Armantrout wrote about
Susan Howe, Barrett Watten about Ron Silliman, Charles
Bernstein about Hannah Wiener. There are 56 of these
entries. At the head of this section, announcing what
might be perceived as a principal source for the positions
on aesthetics (and politics) in the various selections that
follow, the editors chose a single text for several of the
poets to respond to. That text was Stein's _Tender
Buttons_.^2^
[2] The entries in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book's "Readings"
section--all appreciations of _Tender Buttons_ and all
written by men--bear witness to Stein's importance to this
particular "movement." Yet among what I will call feminist
avant-garde poets--writers who make use of experimental
language to distinctly feminist ends--Stein's influence is
just as potent, even inescapable. A number of recent
feminist avant-garde poets linked to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
writing owe a debt to _Tender Buttons_, and Stein's work in
general remains a subject of homage. But at the same time,
many of the changes working their way through feminist
discourse in America appear as well in feminist avant-garde
writing. In particular, recent feminist avant-garde poets
don't simply acknowledge Stein's language experiments, as
the contributors to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book did, but
contest them--and her--as well.
[3] Over the eighty years that have elapsed since Stein wrote
_Tender Buttons_, a number of experimental women poets have
reexamined the connections between the symbolic domain of
language and the subjective experience of sensuality that
Stein pioneered in her erotic, and other, poetry. Stein's
language experiments in _Tender Buttons_ serve as a
fundamental influence. But Stein's tendency to isolate
intimate, personal experience from the public sphere is
being revisited by recent feminist avant-garde writers who
perhaps have more ambivalence toward Stein's politics than
some of their male colleagues. Poets like Susan Howe
disrupt conventional language in writing that conspicuously
combines an awareness of gender with public discourse--in
her case, actual historical documents form the backdrop to
an examination of the gendering of language, history, and
nation.^3^ In recent years, feminist theorists like Luce
Irigaray and Monique Wittig have focused on the social
implications of language and sexual difference, challenging
women writers to create a distinctly feminine writing or to
eliminate the "mark of gender" altogether on female
speech.^4^ Unlike Stein herself, these theorists stress
the political implications of speech in the public sphere,
the impossibility of separating the symbolic realm of
language from the social realities language reflects, a
conviction that surfaces in writing like Howe's and in that
of feminist avant-garde artists working in a variety of
media, from Barbara Kruger to Karen Finley. While Stein is
not the only source for feminist avant-garde writing today,
her body of work, particularly _Tender Buttons_, remains a
source to be reckoned with for a range of artists who see
Stein as among their most important, and sometimes
troubling, predecessors.
[4] In what follows, I examine the influence of, and divergence
from, Steinian poetics in two writers whose feminist
avant-garde agendas lead them back to, and in contest with,
this formidable woman forebear. Both Harryette Mullen (who
has published three books of poetry, and is soon to issue a
fourth)^5^ and Leslie Scalapino (author of nine books of
poetry, prose, and criticism) use a fundamentally Steinian
language yet voice differences from Stein's politics by
engaging with questions that Stein tended to avoid in her
poetry--issues of race, class, and inequity in American
culture. In their recastings of Stein's "modern" vision,
Mullen and Scalapino merge public speech and "private"
experience--the language of the public spheres of the
street and the marketplace with the experiences of intimacy
and the erotic. In this writing no intimate experience is
ever strictly "personal"; Mullen and Scalapino blur the
border between public and private discourse that Stein
relied upon in order to reveal (and, paradoxically, *not*
reveal) her lesbian sexuality in a revolution of ordinary
domestic language. The body as public, in public--this
idea is at the core of both Mullen's and Scalapino's
growing body of work. Each one revisits and, in Adrienne
Rich's term, "re-vises" Stein's poetics to illuminate
language as a locus of the political *and* the erotic,
attacking and altering both eroticized and "public"
language as signs of a culture in need of a fundamental
awareness about the relationships between our most private
and public acts.^6^
[5] Stein attempted to make us self-conscious about
consciousness--to make us think about how we perceive the
world--by challenging the forms of written language. In
this respect both Mullen's _Trimmings_ (1991) and
Scalapino's _way_ (1988) are indebted to Stein's earlier
project. _Trimmings_ is Mullen's second book, and her
third, _S*PeRM**K*T_ (1992), employs the same distinctive
form and a similar play with the signs of American culture.
In the more recent work, her target is what she calls "the
erotics of marketing and consumption"--the supermarket that
is, in a remarkably altered form, her title.^7^
_Trimmings_, however, is more explicitly indebted to
_Tender Buttons_, borrowing elements of Stein's feminine
landscape and her oblique relation to femininity itself.
Here Mullen first combined African-American speech and
blues references with a similar sort of word-play to that
of Stein's prose poetry in _Tender Buttons_; and here, too,
she "tries on" Stein's fascination with the erotic charge
of feminine objects. Mullen's prose poems, like Stein's
pioneering language experiments, work mainly by
association, and in this they plumb the richness of the
spoken and written word.
[6] By contrast, Scalapino, a writer with ties to the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, is interested less in speech than in
perception, as experienced and recorded on the page. But
in her considerable body of work she also interrogates the
politics of the erotic, employing allusions to what she
calls "the erotica genre" in refigured forms. Sometimes
she redeems and "re-genders" erotic fantasy itself (as in
_way_, the text I will focus on), and sometimes she uses a
deliberate dead-pan to critique the mechanism of disengaged
or voyeuristic "watching" on which some pornographic images
depend. Throughout her work, she makes use of an
essentially infinite or "serial" form, with no defined
beginning, middle, or end. In _way_ this seriality is a
means of demonstrating how language and the experiences of
the body are connected. While in Mullen's work language
proffers a multiplicity of meaning that bears witness to
the subtlety and evocativeness of both the spoken and
written word, in _way_ Scalapino develops a more
visually-based poetics in which small blocks of text
represent moments of perception or feeling, even as the
language itself remains provocatively flat in its tone.^8^
But despite pronounced differences in both form and
preoccupations, both poets inherit one of Stein's most
fundamental interests and make use of it in singular ways:
exploring the relationships between language and sexuality.
[7] While Stein is certainly not the only source for either
poet's growing body of work,^9^ my own reading of
_Trimmings_ and _way_ makes it clear that Mullen and
Scalapino both take up Stein's fascination with the link
between the erotic and ordinary, everyday language. Yet
that connection doesn't mean that Mullen and Scalapino
adhere to a similar view of either world or text. In fact,
both poets challenge Stein's famous hermeticism in the
interest of bringing closer together the two poles that
Denise Levertov has called, simply enough, the "poet" and
the "world." For _Tender Buttons_ is an unabashedly closed
text. All three sections ("Objects," "Food," and "Rooms")
evoke a world not simply of ordinary domestic objects but
of private associations. In the view of scholars like
William Gass and Lisa Ruddick, Stein uses this hermetic
space to create a private language of lesbian experience,
in which particular words function as clues. As only one
example, the name "Alice," for Alice B. Toklas, and her
nickname "Ada," appear in numerous versions--"alas,"
"ail-less," and "aid her"--that exploit sound-play to
suggest Stein's own intimate, erotic life. Individual
words also function as codes for sexual experience (the
color "red" or the word "cow"), as Elizabeth Fifer and
others have documented.^10^ And, as I have argued
elsewhere, Stein's fetishization of language both exalts
language to the status of a material object and
participates in disguising the erotic "content" of _Tender
Buttons_ as a whole.^11^
[8] Such readings as my own "decode" the poem, and in the
process assume that meaning does, in fact, inhere in
Stein's apparent non-sense, that there is a profoundly
important symbolic process at work. Yet the opposite
approach has also been taken to Stein's difficult text.
Charles Bernstein, one of the most prolific theorists among
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, argues that Stein's greatest
achievement in _Tender Buttons_ is in fact that she
abandoned the signifying function of language altogether,
evoking instead the sounds, the *non*-referentiality, of
words, "the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in
language, where language is not understood as a code for
something else or a representation of somewhere else--a
kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object
status to language" (Bernstein 143). As he sees it, the
desire to decode Stein's writing merely reflects the
reader's urge to "make sense" of the poetry--an impulse
that counters the most radical aspects of Stein's project.
It is the non-referentiality in Stein, Bernstein implies,
that has become her most important legacy to the present,
especially to poets, like those of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
group, who attempt to use their texts as a means of
bringing the whole mechanism of reference to the foreground
of writing and reading.
[9] These approaches constitute the two ends of the Steinian
critical spectrum--the desire to push her text toward
sense, especially (in recent years) a feminist one, and the
urge to embrace the radical non-meaning of her experiments
with language. Yet both of these interpretive positions,
for very different reasons, ultimately support the view
that the "rooms" of Stein's domestic domain barely leave
the door ajar to the world outside.^12^ Clearly a private
erotic language threatens to shut that door, and, indeed,
this significant aspect of Stein's text required a host of
feminist critics, bolstered by the advent of theorists like
Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, to break
the code.^13^ And, on the other hand, in Bernstein's view
of the radical non-signifying of _Tender Buttons_, the
reader is kept at a deliberate, perhaps infuriating,
distance. Breaking the rules of syntax, denotation, and
logic, _Tender Buttons_, by either approach, surely
qualifies as what we might call a "subversive" text,
overturning linguistic conventions and forging a distinctly
new form from the seemingly intractable material of
everyday words. Yet Stein's poetic experiment remains
separate from the social and political realms that
avant-garde artists of her day addressed in their highly
polemical and disorienting art and manifestoes. One need
only compare _Tender Buttons_ to any number of Marinetti's
pronouncements, or to Apollinaire's "Merveilles de la
Guerre," or even Breton's first surrealist manifesto, to
see the extent to which Stein insisted on the privacy of
her language.
[10] In their own ways, Mullen and Scalapino have both entered
into this debate about and with Stein, each from a
distinctly feminist point of view. In embracing a feminism
that doesn't make recourse to polemics or to personal
utterance--that is more deeply interested in the kinds of
subjectivity language creates--their work is profoundly
indebted to Stein. Yet the best indication of each one's
re-vision of a Steinian poetics lies in the other
influences on that work. For Mullen, these include
Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and the writers of the
Black Arts Movement. For Scalapino, George Oppen, Robert
Creeley, and Philip Whalen are crucial influences, along
with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers of the San Francisco Bay
Area where Scalapino lives. For both Mullen and Scalapino,
the other sources that have helped form their poetics are
distinctly *more* engaged with the articulation, and
theoretical awareness, of a social/political vision, or an
engagement with history in general, than Stein ever was.
As a lesbian poet, Stein relied on the privacy of her
"codes" precisely to construct a radical language of
difference. Mullen and Scalapino have pushed her language
in the opposite direction from the one she chose--back to
an awareness of the social construction of identity, and
the complex relationships in American culture among race,
sexuality, and economic privilege. In short, the erotic
can no longer be perceived as private. The unmasking of
the politics of sexual experience is at the core of both
_Trimmings_ and _way_, and in this Stein is both the mother
of their inventions and the predecessor who needs to be
taken to task in the interests of a feminist avant-garde
that clearly cannot stand still.
[11] Obviously an understanding of both Mullen's and Scalapino's
work requires that each be seen in a broader frame than
that provided just by examining their various debts to
Stein. Yet, tracing Stein's pronounced influence on both
of these poets--the more striking because of their
stylistic divergences--sheds light on changes among a
number of recent feminist artists. If Mullen's and
Scalapino's work can be taken as any indication, one group
of feminist avant-garde artists has moved toward a
different sort of exploration of sexual politics.^14^ In
contrast to a writer like Howe, whose explorations of the
gendered nature of history and nation involve no recourse
to the erotic as subject matter, Mullen and Scalapino both
inherit from Stein a fascination with pleasure and a
reluctance to dissociate pleasure from language. In the
process, though, the burden of their poetry is precisely to
situate this pleasure in a landscape that sometimes seems
as bleak and violent as Howe's Puritan America. Adapted by
Mullen and Scalapino, Stein's innocent eroticism, and her
pleasure in parody, become more self-conscious as well as
more conscious of the social forces that eroticism is
inevitably shaped by.
[12] In _Trimmings_ (fittingly published by a small press that
is, in fact, called "Tender Buttons"), Mullen takes Stein's
1914 text as a provocative point of departure. Operating
through association rather than logic, sound-play rather
than denotation, Mullen's pun-laden prose poems take the
domestic landscape of _Tender Buttons_ and "trim" it down
to a central trope: feminine clothing. The "trimmings" of
Mullen's title suggest a re-stitching of Stein's project,
as well as a focus on the odds and ends, the scraps, of
contemporary culture. But the most prominent meaning
involves the politics of women's clothing. "Trimmings" can
be both adornments and things discarded; the word can imply
both frivolity and violence. In the poems there are belts,
earrings, stockings, hats and purses, not unlike the
petticoats, umbrellas, and shoes of Stein's poem. As Stein
does in _Tender Buttons_, Mullen uses linguistic play to
hint at the relations between the physical sensations of
the body and the experience of using language. Like Stein,
she suggests that the female body and the word need not be
divorced, as much recent theory insists. (Even Kristeva's
opposing categories of the semiotic and the symbolic imply
that soma and symbol are in constant battle, an opposition
Stein--and Mullen--expose as unfounded.)^15^ As in _Tender
Buttons_ as well, Mullen plays with words to release the
reader's own associative powers. There is, indeed, great
pleasure for the reader in the process.
[13] Among the briefest of the prose poems in _Trimmings_ is one
that consists of just two lines: "Night moon star sun down
gown. / Night moan stir sin dawn gown" (Tr 23). In this
paratactic list, vowel shifts (rather than syntax) bear the
burden of reference. There are certainly associations and
near-meanings (sundown and evening gown can be easily
teased out), and the possibility of a setting (the romantic
moon and star), yet the larger implications (for instance,
that come "dawn," the "sin" will be "done") are merely
hinted at, left to the reader's own associative powers to
piece together. The poem moves from word to word by
generating relationships among sounds and creating
localized meanings, rather than by employing linear logic.
These tactics that skew and defer meaning, even if somewhat
less disjunctive, are overtly Steinian, resurrecting
Stein's fascination with repetition and circularity, with
what she called "knowing and feeling a name" and "adoring
[and] replacing the noun" in poetry (_LIA_ 231). Like
Stein, Mullen signals the erotic without directly treating
it as subject matter. But she also critiques the erotics
of our attire. Consider the very shortest of Mullen's
poems: "Shades, cool dark lasses. Ghost of a smile" (_Tr_
62). Charged puns ("dark lasses" conjuring "glasses";
"shades" as sunglasses for the stylish and as a racist word
denoting African-Americans) render the final, simple phrase
("ghost of a smile") ambiguous: the smile might suggest a
pleasurable memory or an invitation, but it is also
inseparable from the implication that "shades"--in the
racial sense--are "ghosts," invisible presences in a
culture bent on cover-ups, on hiding behind its own, often
rose-colored, glasses.
[14] In this way Mullen uses a Steinian linguistic play to
address not just the pleasures of language and clothing,
but their larger social implications, the very issues that
Stein most frequently avoided. _Trimmings_ removes _Tender
Buttons_ from its hermetically sealed locale and, so to
speak, takes it out of the closet and into the street, by
underlining the conjunctions between racial identity and
gender in a semiotics of American culture. In choosing
Stein as intertextual companion, Mullen uses what Henry
Louis Gates identifies as a strategy frequently employed in
African-American writing: the elaboration of repetition and
difference. "Signifying," Gates says, is the playing of
various kinds of rhetorical games in black vernacular, and
it can mean "to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole,
needle, and lie," as well as "to talk around a subject,
never quite coming to the point" (Gates 54). Signifying
contrasts with the "supposed transparency of normal
speech"; it "turns upon the free play of language itself,
upon the displacement of meanings" (53). There is a
political, and not just a formal "play" here that applies
to _Trimmings_: signifying involves a "process of semantic
appropriation"; words are "decolonized," given a new
orientation that reflects a rejection of politics as usual.
According to Gates, this double-voicedness is associative,
and it employs puns and figurative substitutions to create
an indeterminacy of interpretation (49, 22).
[15] Strikingly matching Gates's theory of signifying, Mullen's
version of Steinian writing involves an assertion of
difference. Mullen encodes cultural and racial specificity
into her word games, in deliberate contrast to what I see
as Stein's *private*, largely hermetic codes. Allusions to
contemporary life are everywhere, mixed in with more
lyrical, "poetic" language. Commercials, for example, are
not shut out, precisely because such references are, all by
themselves, a commentary on American culture. Here is the
subject of clothing-become-laundry and, more specifically,
laundry detergent:
Heartsleeve's dart bleeds whiter white, softened with wear.
Among blowzy buxom bosomed,
give us this--blowing, blissful, open. O most immaculate
bleached blahs, bless any starched,
loosening blossom. (Tr 31)
In rich and lyrical language (especially the outburst, "O
most immaculate. . ."), Mullen bears witness to some
un-lyrical truths--that the struggle to attain the "whiter
white" (a redundant operation of either language or color)
raises questions about America's obsession not just with
cleanliness (the subject of TV ads) but with the
valorization of what is as light as possible, in shirts or
skin-tone. Here the poetic tradition of the beauty of
clothing, of feminine or other attire, has to confront the
"immaculate bleached blahs" that represent mass culture
"bleached" for a white audience.
[16] The poems insist on such meetings of the ecstatic and the
drab in women's lives (as in the title for Mullen's most
recent work in progress--"Muse and Drudge"), whether the
act in question is hanging clothes on the line or watching
TV. Whenever TV seeps into women's lives, in fact, there
is both the urgency created by commodification and the
potentially lobotomizing effect of the medium. Of nylon
stockings Mullen writes, "The color 'nude,' a flesh tone.
Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan . . . body cast
in a sit calm" (16). The issue of what color "nude"
is--the fact that the "model" for this neutral skin tone is
an Anglo one--is too often taken for granted by white
women. At the same time, any woman whose "whose flesh
unfolds barely" has become a commodity, like the many items
sold on TV, where viewers, too, are objects in front of a
screen, "body cast in a sit calm," static and passive, as
though *in* a "body cast," under an unidentified injunction
not to move. Other TV allusions, such as one to the
evening news, suggest the banality of women's lives: "Mild
frump and downward drab. Slipshod drudge with chance of
dingy morning slog" (49). Words, just barely altered from
their "originals" in a TV or radio weather report, testify
to women's representation in the mass media, the source
that may well affect whether or not they see the morning,
or themselves (the "drudges" in question), as "dingy" and
"drab." In this processed language, all of us hear a
horoscope for the day, our lives; in such representations,
we are--and this applies especially to women--caught in our
own "mild frump," as though our routines were items we
would prefer not to purchase.
[17] Yet Mullen makes it clear that, however potentially
controlling, mass media don't obliterate culturally
specific language. Mullen marks her text with both
"mainstream" speech and the black vernacular in what she
calls a "splicing together of different lexicons" that
would be hard to see in Stein's defamiliarized language in
_Tender Buttons_. In one such gesture, Mullen appropriates
cliches linked to African-American culture and forces us to
ask what "black" and "white" culture actually consist
in--where the lines are drawn:
Her red and white, white and blue banner manner. Her red and
white all over black and blue.
Hannah's bandanna flagging her down in the kitchen with Dinah,
with Jemima. Someone in
the kitchen I know. (Tr 11)
The "bandanna" and the Jemima figure suggest stereotypes
of black women. Mullen has suggested to me that even
though such images are most likely drawn from the white
minstrel tradition, they constitute nonetheless a powerful
"pseudo-black folklore" that has shaped views of blackness
in America. By refusing to exclude even these
representations from her own language, Mullen implies that
there is an important source for this language, one that
needs to be traced: such images get constructed both from
our "red, white and blue" national identity and from the
politics of violence ("all over black and blue"), also
based on color. In the "blues" alluded to here, another
kind of "folklore" is also conjured, one that may seem more
"genuine" or "authentic" than that of Hannah and Jemima.
But Mullen's text refuses to make clear distinctions among
the sources for what she calls her "recycled" language.
This word-play reclaims all and any expressions that
concern women's cultural "place" (literally, the "kitchen,"
repeated twice in this brief passage) in the service of an
explicit critique of those words that serve as designations
to divide black from white--and different women from each
other.
[18] In some of the poems, Mullen "signifies" on Stein even more
overtly. There are several instances where Mullen infuses
the very diction of _Tender Buttons_ with her own
agenda--an investigation of the ways in which racial and
gender identities are constructed in and by language.
Stein has a dialogue between "distress" and "red" which
Mullen recasts as an excursion into black vernacular
speech, with Steinian intonations:
When a dress is red, is there a happy ending. Is there murmur
and satisfaction. Silence or a
warning. It talks the talk, but who can walk the walk.
Distress is red. It sells, shouts, an urge
turned inside out. Sight for sore eyes. The better to see you.
Out for a stroll, writing wolf-
tickets. (Tr 34)
The most immediate Steinian source is the heading "THIS IS
THIS DRESS, AIDER," and the text of that "tender button"
reads:
Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider
stop the muncher, muncher, munchers.
A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a
to let. (TB 476)
One of the most frequently glossed sections in _Tender
Buttons_, this passage has often been read as punning on
"distress," as well as on the notion of "aid" and one of
Stein's nicknames for Alice, "Ada" ("Aider, why aider . .
."). The passage is crucial to readings that emphasize
that _Tender Buttons_ is really about female sexuality.
For some, this involves a critique of the "meadowed king"
who rises at the expense of "her," as Ruddick suggests;
among others, Gass sees an explicit (and joyful) sexual
scene; and, as I have detailed elsewhere, I believe that
Stein provides a typical double perspective here--that of
lesbian eroticism and a patriarchal observer's panic
*about* that eroticism.^16^ For all these readings,
sexuality provides the backdrop for Stein's polyvalent
language. In Mullen's appropriation, however, a double
perspective about sexuality and language alerts us instead
to the *social* construction of the sexual moment. There
is a different sort of doubleness at work--that of black
America itself, the experience of a division that W.E.B. Du
Bois first called "double consciousness" and which Black
Arts writers in the 1960s and 1970s converted into
experiments with a specifically black consciousness in
radical new forms.^17^
[19] Mullen's own revisionary feminist dialogue with Stein is
clear from the start. The short, uninflected questions
("Is there murmur and satisfaction," for example) are
reminiscent of _Tender Buttons_, and so is the diction--the
mixture of simple monosyllabic words ("dress," "red,"
"talk") with words describing states of consciousness
("happy," "satisfaction," "urge"). But clearly Mullen's
"talk" here is not just words exchanged between lovers but
the specific language of a whole culture: "dis" both
alludes to the sound of "this" in black English, and to the
verb "to dis," or "disrespect," someone, echoed in the
competition of "talks the talk." A similar conjunction is
that of European fairy tale (red riding hood's "better to
see you") and black English ("writing," instead of
"selling," "wolf-tickets"). But the primary question is
what happens when the seductive "red dress" is donned; is
there "satisfaction" for flirtatious partners, a desire to
shout with joy, or is there fear of violence--silence,
warning? As Mullen points out, _Trimmings_ is a
"compressed meditation on the whole idea that how a woman
dresses is responsible for how she gets treated in the
world": "is there a happy ending" for any woman's
Cinderella-like transformation "when a dress is red"--when
she puts on a piece of clothing that signifies passion and
seduction, or availability and provocativeness? How is
such a color "read" by male on-lookers? Without providing
any simple or polemical answers, Mullen links sexuality,
clothing, violence and desire, even as she forces the
literary tradition of Stein to confront the vernacular
traditions of African-American speech and writing.
[20] Mullen's dialogue with Stein in _Trimmings_ has everything
to do with the exclusion of questions of race from feminist
criticism that has recently been the subject of passionate
critique and rethinking.^18^ Mullen has described her
desire to "get a read on Stein and race," and at the time
she was writing _Trimmings_ she was reading both _Tender
Buttons_ and "Melanctha," whose overtly racist and classist
images are the subject of reappraisals by critics as
diverse as Sonia Saldivar-Hull and Charles
Bernstein.^19^ Mullen's play on Stein's famous "rosy
charm" is perhaps the most striking instance of her
recasting of _Tender Buttons_ so as to explore questions of
race that Stein didn't take on in her poetry but made all
too clear in "Melanctha":
A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, wears an air,
pale compared to shadow standing
by. To plump recliner, naked truth lies. Behind her shadow
wears her color, arms full of
flowers. A rosy charm is pink. And she is ink. The mistress
wears no petticoat or leaves.
The other in shadow, a large, pink dress. (_Tr_ 15)
Stein's text is "A PETTICOAT," and it reads, in its
entirety: "A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy
charm" (_TB_ 471). The passage is most likely about female
creation, both on the page and of the body. As Ruddick
convincingly argues, the white of a woman's undergarment is
connected to the blank page, and the stain of blood to the
writer's ink, a "rosy charm" whose power Stein asserts.^20^
Mullen has described this passage as her opening into
_Tender Buttons_--perhaps even the point of departure for
_Trimmings_ as a whole. Mullen sees Stein's text as an
allusion to Manet's provocative painting "Olympia"--the
white woman staring boldly at the viewer, in a state of
"disgraceful" sexual permissiveness, with the near-by "ink
spot" (a black servant) waiting behind her. Mullen encodes
the painting into her response to Stein, calling up the
representation of the nude white woman reclining
luxuriously on a couch, while behind her the black woman in
"a large, pink dress" holds a bunch of flowers, presumably
a love-token, in a position of attentive servitude to her
mistress.
[21] Mullen's take on "Olympia," and on "A PETTICOAT," concerns
the supposed "disgrace" of sexuality in conjunction with
her awareness about the difference of blackness in a
culture in which femininity is equated with the naivete of
"pink" and the skin color "white." This motif of color
pervades the book. Mullen writes that in _Trimmings_
The words pink and white kept appearing as I explored
the ways that the English language
conventionally represents femininity. As a black woman
writing in this language, I suppose
I already had an ironic relationship to this pink and
white femininity. (_Tr_ "Off the Top")
Throughout Mullen's work, evocations of the blues
tradition and African-American speech confront the
deficiencies of conventional language in representing
blackness. Yet in her "rewriting" of the painting
"Olympia," the very ownership of sexuality is at stake:
the transgressive eroticism--of the sort Stein championed
and Manet supposedly celebrated--is, in Manet's depiction,
available only to the "light white" woman, not to her
"shadow standing by." While clearly a feminist reading of
Olympia" might suggest that Manet "owns" (or names) the
white woman's sexuality as well, Mullen's own attention is
drawn to the dynamics between black and white: there is
implicitly a problem not just for the black woman depicted
here, but for the African-American woman writer as well.
The "ink" of blackness is literally "in shadow" (the word
is repeated three times), as the white woman, clothed in
what Mina Loy called "ideological pink"--in this case
nothing more than her own pink skin--"wears an air."^21^
In another section of _Trimmings_, girlhood and the color
pink are also associated ("Girl, pinked, beribboned.
Alternate virgin at first blush" [_Tr_ 35]). This passage
uses the same technique of multiple meanings and the
connotation of innocence conjured by the color pink to
point out the disturbing "naked truth": "pink" is "a rosy
charm" in the white world only when it's worn by someone
"pale," "white," and "sugary." The one whose skin is "ink"
remains in shadow. She is, literally, incomplete: the
word "pink" minus the "p" gives us "ink." And yet, she
still has the power to signify--after all, writing is
produced with "ink." It is this most important
"signifying" on Stein's text about the "rosy charm" of
female sexuality, a celebration of the erotic that
nonetheless reveals considerable limitations to any black
women reader, that produces the revisionist poetry of
_Trimmings_.
[22] Far from innocuous, the "pale," "sugary" femininity that
Mullen unveils is also part of a culture that, in addition
to privileging whiteness, condones violence against women
in covert, as well as overt, forms. Mullen uses Steinian
disruptive language to expose this violence, which lurks
just beneath accepted standards of femininity. Even
seemingly harmless items, like the feminine attire of the
pocketbook, are emblematic of theft, assault, rape:
Lips, clasped together. Old leather fastened with a little
snap. Strapped, broke. Quick
snatch, in a clutch, chased the lady with the alligator
purse. Green thief, off relief, got into
her pocketbook by hook or crook. (_Tr_ 8)
The purse is metonymic for female genitalia; on one level,
getting "into her pocketbook" is the male game of conquest.
Yet the puns on currency ("strapped," "broke," "green,"
"relief") show the close ties between money and desire (as
in some men's ability to purchase female companionship) and
allude to the ways women are frequently economically
exploited--simply put, ripped off. There is double-meaning
as well in the word "snatch," and the covert violence of
"snap," "strapped," "clutch," and even "chased"
(traditionally, women are sought after, or "chased," if
pure--"chaste"). The word-play and subject rhymes, in
familiar idioms and rhythms, convey the very real violence
women are often subject to, whether by the "thief"
(purse-snatcher) or the man intent on sexual assault.^22^
[23] This violence is, then, insidious even in its less obvious
forms--jewelry, to take another example. Of earrings,
Mullen writes: "Clip, screw, or pierce. Take your pick.
Friend or doctor, needle or gun" (_Tr_ 40). Earrings carry
a weight beyond their immediate function; these small items
refer to more profound mutilations of the female--and
male--body. There are choices among modes of violation
here ("clip, screw, or pierce"), yet the "pick" is merely
between "friend or doctor," figures of betrayal, whether
personal or institutional. And, most significantly, the
intrusion into the black body is metaphoric of social
exploitation and the prevalence of the "needle or
gun"--drug-use and other violence. Here a simple female
"adornment" can no longer be seen, or written about, as
innocent. Mullen evokes a semiotics of clothing, the
language that is revealed in those items women decorate
their bodies with ("such wounds, such ornaments," as Mullen
concludes in this "trimming"). This language reveals,
however subtly and covertly, what Mullen calls ironically a
"naked truth"--that black women and men are, still,
psychologically and otherwise, subject to violence and
mutilation, symbolized by the very objects women use to
make themselves seem different, to meet our culture's
standards of beauty.
[24] Mullen has written that "Gender is a set of signs which we
tend to forget are arbitrary. In these prose poems I
thought about language as clothing and clothing as
language" (_Tr_ 68). In the final poem of _Trimmings_,
Mullen links her interest in literary signification with
the importance of a poetic utterance that remains conscious
of how the signifier functions in the public sphere:
Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing
or language a body of thought
which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is
veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable
body makes an available space. (_Tr_ 66)
Placed at the end of the book, this "trimming" serves as
Mullen's %ars poetica%, the explanation for her use of the
trope of clothing. That which is "veiled" shows through
language--the "unavailable" or often invisible "body" of
the black woman "makes" its own space. Moving away from
simply being "veiled in silence" is precisely _Trimmings_'s
project. It is a goal that diverges from Stein's "play,"
which, however radical an expression of its time,^23^ is
nonetheless kept safely indoors. Stein tended to abstract
the objects she wrote about from their specific contexts,
to see them in formal terms, which is one reason her work
is often associated with Cubism. She wrote of the process
of *looking* at objects as the inception of the poetry of
_Tender Buttons_; she focused intently on an object in
order to name it without using its name. While Mullen also
uses words to "re-name" objects, her interest lies not just
in form but in a semiotics of American culture. Each
gesture, each belt or buckle, reveals the society that
created it. Less arbitrary than the "signs" of language,
the semiotics of clothing reflects women's position in the
culture at large. Signifying on Stein, as well as playing
by some of her rules, Mullen makes it clear that she cannot
simply "use" Stein's poetic language uncritically. In
fact, by simultaneously inhabiting and altering Stein's
non-traditional language, Mullen encodes in Stein's own
hermetic diction the divergent perspective provided by an
African-American woman. Stein's codes must, indeed, be
broken; to have social significance, linguistic "play" has
to evoke aspects of a shared, social identity, and not
simply constitute an idiosyncratic, private language. In
part, _Trimmings_ is indeed homage to Stein, a writer whose
poetry attempts to change consciousness, and even our own
relation to our bodies, through a changed language. Yet
for Mullen, the experiment now appears too circumscribed.
Her "signifying" on _Tender Buttons_ lays down a challenge:
women's dress (their "distress") constitutes a social
semiotics, the "language" of a culture whose racial and
sexual politics we would do well to change.
[25] In contrast to Mullen's dialogue with Stein, Scalapino's is
less exclusively linked to _Tender Buttons_. Instead, it
is as closely tied to Stein's philosophical writings--most
of which (with the exception of "Composition as
Explanation") appear in _Lectures in America_--as it is to
Stein's erotic codes. Yet Scalapino focuses just as
sharply as Mullen does on developing a Steinian poetics in
which the erotic is inseparable from what I might broadly
call the public sphere. Scalapino draws from the
Objectivist tradition that includes (in addition to Stein)
Oppen, Robert Duncan, Creeley, and, more recently, many
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers.^24^ These poets agree on a
central issue: they dispute the primacy granted to the
ego--the experiential, the psychological--in more
Romantic-derived American poetry, seeking instead to
reflect a greater scope than the self in meditation that
Marjorie Perloff (for one) associates with Stevensian
Romanticism.^25^
[26] Yet, as I see it, Scalapino also owes a particular debt to
Stein--to a poetics that first made repetition the stuff of
poetic knowledge. Scalapino's writing consists of diverse
fragments organized in what Joseph Conte describes as
serial form--in Scalapino's case, discrete units, often
with involved repetitions and permutations, that are
potentially infinite in number rather than structured by
either generic constraints or the more basic linearity of a
definable beginning, middle, and end. This is the same
sort of form Stein associated with "the natural way to
count"; that is, "One and one and one and one and one" (not
needing to make two). This sort of counting, according to
Stein, "has a lot to do with poetry" (_LIA_ 227),
particularly the poetics of repetition, as in "A rose is a
rose is a rose."^26^ Through an epigraph to her book
_way_, Scalapino likens this infinite serial form to the
principles of theoretical physics, quoting physicist David
Bohm. Bohm describes "the qualitative infinity of nature"
and asserts that because there is "no limit to the number
of kinds of transformations, both qualitative and
quantitative, that can occur," it follows that "no . . .
thing can even remain identical with itself as time
passes." Stein's studies with William James and her later
work in medical school reflect a similar orientation toward
both science and epistemology. Yet, while Stein applied
her musings about numbers, grammar, and the passage of time
mainly to the realms of literature and the imagination,^27^
Scalapino elicits in her serial poems--poems about both
"the qualitative infinity of nature" and about private
sexual experiences--the pressing question of how individual
desire is situated within existing social categories.
[27] Scalapino's primary debt to Stein has to do with the very
notion that there might be an epistemology of
composition.^28^ In an essay entitled "Pattern--and the
'Simulacral,'" Scalapino writes about the poet Michael
McClure, in whose work the "self" becomes a simulacrum
identified with an infinite universe: "the author or the
sense of self and the investigation of its desire is the
pattern, which is neither present time nor past time. It
is potentially infinite in form and number" (_Phenomena_
28-9). I believe the notion here is that subjectivity, its
pattern, assumes an infinite form, which the text mimics.
Scalapino culls this epistemology of form in part from
Stein, whose essay "Composition as Explanation" is the
starting point for Scalapino's observations. Stein asserts
a radical subjectivity: "The composition is the thing seen
by every one living in the living they are doing, they are
the composing of the composition"; consequently, "The time
when and the time of and the time in that composition is
the natural phenomena of the composition" (qtd. in _Ph_
27). Scalapino explains that she is drawn to the notion of
the "continuous present" Stein posits, a kind of
composition that leads to individual acts of perception
that need not be connected in linear fashion--in other
words, an infinite series, with attendant combinations and
permutations of elements. She summarizes her position
elsewhere: "I am concerned in my work with the sense that
phenomena appear to unfold. (What is it or) how is it that
the viewer sees the impression of history created, created
by oneself though it's occurring outside?" (_Ph_ 119). The
central notion is how perception, informed by the internal
narratives of subjective experience, creates the history we
attribute to what occurs "outside."^29^
[28] This Steinian epistemology is experienced through the text
itself, often in writing that adapts the forms of pop
culture.^30^ Particularly in her trilogy (_The Return of
Painting_, _The Pearl_, and _Orion_), Scalapino explores
"writing which uses the genre of comic books" (_Ph_ 22).
In Scalapino's work--in contrast to Andy Warhol's or Roy
Lichtenstein's silk screens and paintings--the "frames"
consist solely of language. They take the form of small
windows of text that Scalapino finds congenial to exploring
our experiences of the present moment, its individual,
disparate acts of perception, as though in cartoon-sized
boxes. In the trilogy, Scalapino plays with the images of
film noir (one character is "a sort of tight sweater
version of Lana Turner" [63]) in conjunction with more
conceptual reflections, reminiscent of Stein's writing in
_Lectures in America_: "To not do rhetoric--so that it is
not jammed in on itself." Or: "To have a convention--not
the way it is spoken, but the way it is heard" (54).
Scalapino has said of Stein:
I took her writing as having to do with wanting
to be able to write the essence of something,
of an emotion or a person [or] an object, and
that's impossible; she's fully aware that it's
impossible, so she's in a mode of conjecture
about things, a curiosity and experimentation.
In both her trilogy and in _way_, Scalapino embarks on
similar projects--inviting a "mode of conjecture" about
poetic language and perception itself.
[29] Yet however linked Scalapino's serial form is to theories
of perception, Scalapino also inherits Stein's fascination
with erotic codes, which Stein articulated through the
"continuous present" and the "infinite form" that Scalapino
finds so intriguing.^31^ For Scalapino, seriality is, in
fact, inherently erotic. While some might find the
pre-determined structure of a romance novel--or a
sonnet--both comfortingly accessible and erotically
charged, Scalapino associates closure (literary or
otherwise) with entrapment. Without what she sees as the
enforced structure of pre-determined forms, "you can feel
comfortable and relaxed in something"; whether in pop
culture incarnations like soap opera or in poetry like her
own, Scalapino finds that serial form "has to do with just
pleasure, the notion that we generate certain things that
are pleasurable."^32^ Differing from Pound's serial yet
epic _Cantos_ (Pound's definition of epic being--very much
like his _Cantos_--a "poem including history"),^33^
Scalapino's serial form, like that of _Tender Buttons_,
emerges from pleasure--the pleasure of not ending.^34^
[30] "The floating series" is one of several "infinite series"
that make up _way_. The most erotic of its sections, "The
floating series" consists of brief, thin poems--visually,
the inverse of Mullen's "_Trimmings_." Small lines of type
meander down the page and abruptly end, with dashes or no
punctuation, to continue on the facing page. These various
comic-book-like "frames" of words and perceptions are
overtly erotic in their subject matter, as I will show.
Yet the form is minimalist in the extreme, and the language
stylized in a _way_ that hearkens back to _Tender Buttons_.
Like Stein, Scalapino suggests both the eroticization of
ordinary objects, culled from daily experience, and a
playful means of using poetry to allude to the female body.
Like Stein's codes for Alice, or her use of words like
"milk" or "cow" to signal sexual experience, some of
Scalapino's individual words--used repeatedly--take on
sexual connotations, particularly the motifs of the "lily
pad" and "bud":
the
women -- not in
the immediate
setting
-- putting the
lily pads or
bud of it
in
themselves
a man entering
after
having
come on her -- that
and
the memory of putting
in
the lily pad or the
bud of it first,
made her come (_way_ 65, 66)
The figures of the bud and lily pad recall icons of sexual
organs (reminiscent as well of the Buddhist "way" used in
Scalapino's title): in Taoism, jadestalk, swelling
mushroom, and dragon pillar represent the male; while jade
gate, open peony, and golden lotus denote the female. It
is possible to praise God through a celebration of these
sexual parts, both playful and pleasurable.^35^ Scalapino
explains that her purpose in using the recurring words
"lily pad" and "bud" was to "imply things about the female
body that are pleasurable" through terms that are both
sensual and deliberately not anatomical. As Stein does in
_Tender Buttons_, Scalapino eroticizes language; she
employs an iconography of her own in a clearly sexual
context, from the woman's point of view and, in the very
notion of a "floating" form, she alludes to the potentially
amniotic experience linked to the female body. The lack of
syntactical markings here and the isolation of particular
words defamiliarize their meanings, even down to the
articles and prepositions which Stein found so
fetching.^36^ In this passage (like many others in the
permutations of "The floating series"), the attention to a
stylized but explicitly sexual physical experience makes
the female body the subject of meditation. Yet this
detailing of what resides "in" or "on" the female body in
the moment of orgasm is also accompanied by an analogous
attention to language as physical presence: the deliberate
highlighting of prepositions and conjunctions ("in," "and,"
"after") on single lines permits us to pay heed to the
connectives of language, to focus on words as words, and to
think of language, too, as a material, immanent force. In
this way Scalapino makes language material, employs it for
the pleasures of its textures and sounds--and this is very
like Stein.
[31] Yet the nature of this sort of erotic--and
linguistic--experience in Scalapino is problematic. There
is an apparent lack of affect in this and other passages, a
flattened tone, and a deliberate vagueness in phrases like
"immediate setting" and "in that situation." Marjorie
Perloff points out that Scalapino's seemingly ordinary,
transparent language typically breaks down and turns into
deliberate artifice that highlights the surface of language
rather than its referent (_Radical Artifice_ 50-1). In the
passage I quoted, the "he" and "she" are engaged in an
anonymous act of intercourse (which is repeated, with
changes, later on), yet it is one that also defamiliarizes
the "act" and focuses as much on memory and language as on
sensual experience. Scalapino's comments on the work of
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman illuminate her own
practice: "A series or list of simple sentences creates
simple states of being, requiring that consciousness exist
only in the moment of each sentence, i.e., in an infinite
series of succeeding moments" (_Ph_ 30). Clearly it is not
just the sexual coupling of these bodies that concerns
Scalapino, but also the very nature of perception and
repetition, the concerns Stein elaborates in "Portraits and
Repetition" and in her poetry. Hence the stylistic
spareness, the minimalism that emphasizes small
permutations, the use of repetition and difference. How
should we reconcile these philosophical and formal
preoccupations with the specifically sexual motifs of "The
floating series"?
[32] However much Scalapino's interest in Stein has to do with
epistemologies of composition, as I see it Scalapino's
invocation of charged erotic material also involves her in
a further dialogue with Stein's erotic writings. One of
Scalapino's goals is clearly to provide a contemporary
alternative to the long-standing literary conventions used
to portray sex, much as _Tender Buttons_ succeeded in
doing. And in creating her own poetic grammar and using it
to elaborate a sexual motif, Scalapino also destabilizes
masculine and feminine positions. Her permutations enact a
textual version of the "gender trouble" or indeterminacy
that Judith Butler endorses as perhaps the most threatening
of all social/sexual gestures to an established
heterosexual culture.^37^ The lily bud, which initially
suggests the penis, eventually suggests as well the
clitoris--or, in more general terms, the sexual exchange
itself, as though neither party had to be defined in terms
of difference:
having
swallowed the
water
lily bud -- so having
it in
him -- when he'd
come on some
time with her (_way_ 85)
The indeterminate "water / lily bud" represents the
*process* of sexual exchange, more than a bodily part.
Scalapino has even suggested that the "bud" represents a
way of imagining pregnancy as though from a child's point
of view--as a growth within the body. This shifting of
symbols within the text is appropriate, given Scalapino's
views of her work as a particular kind of feminist
enterprise--the sort that strives to conceive of gender
itself as ideally "not being in existence--the idea that
there is no man and no woman, that that's a social
creation." For Scalapino, contemplating gender perceptions
entails "a process of unravelling the hypothesis and the
conclusion" of supposed gender difference. Clearly, then,
Scalapino's phenomenology of composition is not simply a
philosophical game. To the contrary, it has everything to
do with a reconceptualization of gender itself, a process
that can be compared to Stein's exploration of lesbian
sexuality in _Tender Buttons_ and "Lifting Belly."
[33] For Scalapino, however, even indeterminacy needs to be
placed in context, and that contextualization is part of
Scalapino's project to situate sexuality within a broader
socio-economic picture. Most significantly, Scalapino uses
a Steinian elusive language not to cover over the sexuality
that is her subject (as in Stein's private codes) but to
expose its relation to prevalent social conventions between
men and women, reflected as well in literary forms. In "A
sequence," a serial poem in Scalapino's earlier book _that
they were at the beach_, men and women are, in flattened
diction, identified as having leopard parts, and in this
way the body appears as objectified in moments of arousal
("The parts of their bodies which had been covered by
clothes were those of leopards" [57]). Here, Scalapino
says, she tried to be "completely dead-pan, flat," and in
fact to create something "not palatable erotically." Her
intention in this disorienting series is to reveal the
workings of domination in erotic representations, whether
in the photographs in mass market magazines or in the
involved plots of historical romances.
[34] In _way_, however, the erotic is *not* flattened out; as in
Stein's text, it is pleasure itself that emerges. But in
contrast to Stein's eroticism in poems like _Tender
Buttons_ and "Lifting Belly," this pleasure is not disjunct
from, but part of, a broader context, which includes daily
interactions in the public sphere. In fact, the
"convention" Scalapino explores in both _way_ and _that
they were at the beach_ is not simply literary or
formal--and here is one of the points at which she parts
company with Stein. For Scalapino, as I will show,
rethinking literary conventions about everything from
syntax to portrayals of sexual experience necessarily
entails engaging as well with the particulars of economics
and class in the public world as they exist *outside* the
confines of the erotic exchange. But for Scalapino this
broader context is already connected to the erotic--through
the very notion of convention. For what Scalapino calls,
in general terms, "social convention" is also embedded in
literary forms, including those devoted to what she calls
"the erotica genre." In _Tender Buttons_, Stein left her
erotic clues in a mesh of seemingly non-referential words,
focusing on language and thwarting literary convention at
every turn, but leaving the broader sweep of public
experience largely out of the equation. Scalapino, taking
a different tack, allows us to see the interdependence of
various aspects of our social selves and that most
"private" aspect of our lives--our sexual acts.In _way_ and
other texts (from the early _Considering how exaggerated
music is_ to the more recent _Crowd and not evening or
light_), Scalapino uses a Steinian method--to a distinctly
non-Steinian end.
[35] The method involves fragmentation, juxtaposition, and
repetition. The goal is to inscribe in her text the
socially-defined nature of private, erotic experience.^38^
The first clue precedes a reading of the poem, yet typifies
Scalapino's technique. The cover of _way_ shows two
photographs by Andrew Savulich, who placed them together on
a postcard which, Scalapino told me, she saw and later
decided to use for the cover of the book. One is labeled
"couple dancing in bar," the other, "men fighting on
sidewalk." The poses are remarkably similar--the
possibilities of homoeroticism in fighting, and of violence
in sexuality, emerge through the juxtaposition, which
succeeds in linking two acts that we are sometimes invested
in perceiving as culturally dissimilar, yet which in fact
are intricately linked. The use of juxtaposition as
technique subverts the possibly "erotic" content of the one
photograph while eroticizing the other--thus using form
itself to expose a romantic mythology that would have us
separate erotic and overtly violent struggle.^39^
[36] This is the device that emerges, in linguistic terms, in
"The floating series" in _way_. As the poem continues, any
doubt we might have had about its function as "just" erotic
writing, an eroticism disjunct from a larger context,
quickly dissolves. While the first several sections
concern the repetition of a sexual encounter, at the very
point when the form starts to seem familiar, we move
outside the parameters of the "genre" Scalapino has taken
care to establish: we move outside the bedroom, beyond the
couple; as in _Trimmings_, we leave Stein's flat at 14, rue
du Fleurus far behind. The first such instance is jarring
but vague:
people who're
there
already -- though
the other
people aren't
aware of that (_way_ 68)
The writing is open-ended: *what* people? People other
than the "he" and "she" of the couple? And who are the
"other people" whose awareness is lacking? The secrecy of
the sexual encounter seems to be challenged--one thinks of
a primal scene, a child walking in on parents in a
compromising position, or a couple unaware that they are
being observed in a restaurant or car--a position on the
fringe of the "outside" world. Yet there is a political
implication to the "people who're / there / already"
underlined in the next fragment: "not / being able to /
see the / other people." The possibility of colonization
is made more likely in that people don't "see" others
because they are in various ways culturally invisible,
whether because of race, class or other hierarchical
systems that delineate privilege. The trope of
invisibility and difference has, of course, long been a
presence in African-American literature and theory, from
W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson to Ralph Ellison
and, more recently, Michele Wallace.^40^ In white America,
there is seeing and not seeing, awareness and its lack,
depending on one's position as subject or object of the
gaze. A few sections later, we come across a reference to
"the city," with more "people having / been / there," and
"others not / aware of them" (_way_ 70). Without a doubt,
we have moved from the conjoining of two--seemingly without
specific context, focused instead on the "convention" of
erotica--to a larger public context (in this case, an urban
scene), an increasingly imposing structure far from the
private relation that recurs, as well, throughout the
series.
[37] Scalapino continues to juxtapose these two sorts of scenes
in the rest of the series--the woman and the man, using
erotic language, and the anonymous "people" of the unnamed
city. The juxtaposition inevitably comes down to money and
politics. New elements enter into the play of Scalapino's
permutations, including the words "livelihood," "jobs,"
"high rents," "public figure," "small store," "race,"
"means," and "not enough." Such linguistic allusions to
economics and to public enterprises and interactions
alternate with the motifs from the first few passages--the
symbolic lily pad and bud, the woman and the man. One
passage suggests the very real presence of class barriers:
having the
high rents
with
an attitude that
they
shouldn't live in
this
place -- who're poor (_way_ 76)
Suddenly the man and woman engaged in their own *private*
experience are seen in context, as only one element in a
larger, socio-economic picture. In isolation, this passage
has nothing to do with sexuality, but its juxtaposition
with the other passages about the man and the woman
underlines a central point: that our sexual exchanges need
to be contextualized, however resistant we are to that
notion, as the two within the couple might well be. The
space of the poem, then, has moved from indoors to out,
from the private to the public sphere. Scalapino suggests
that there is in fact a corollary to the phenomenology of
composition, which concerns the space we inhabit, and the
"conventions" (social and linguistic) that we impose on it.
Scalapino makes a direct analogy between space, political
structure, and poetic form: "As (spatially) infinity is
all around one, it creates a perspective that is socially
democratic, individual (in the sense of specific) and
limitless" (_Ph_ 119). "Style is cultural abstraction"
(_Ph_ 28), Scalapino writes, meaning, I believe, that style
"speaks" for its culture, just as, for Mullen, clothes
"speak" women's lives, and, in Scalapino's hands, a
disorienting style can also be a means of critiquing the
very culture it emerges from.^41^
[38] The minimalist writing in _way_ addresses the conventions
of language and sexuality as *social* conventions. There
are two phrases Scalapino links in her essay: "[T]he
process of creating convention--the description of
ourselves as a culture" (_Ph_ 32). The link here
demonstrates the reason for this poetry of repetition and
juxtaposition. While Stein's interest in composition as
explanation takes her into the realms of epistemology,
linguistics and sexuality, Scalapino forces all these
fields to confront the businesses opened, the rents unpaid,
the unnamed "people" we encounter in the public space of
the street or marketplace. In this respect, Scalapino
opens Stein's erotic discourse in poems like _Tender
Buttons_ to the public sphere, one that women have
frequently been excluded from, and that women poets, in
efforts to combat the lack of value placed on affect and
the "personal," have sometimes deliberately shunned. Just
as Stein rejects referentiality, Scalapino rejects the
"confessional" or personal tradition of women's writing,
even when that writing is politically engaged--and she
rejects this mode as dramatically as any poet today.^42^
Scalapino has defended the erotic, attacked by some as
"quintessentially subjective and egoistic" and by others as
"inherently sexist." For Scalapino, separation of the
erotic from socially engaged writing is neither efficacious
nor desirable in any way: "If eroticism is eliminated,
that leaves only that social context, which has 'seen' it
as sexist; there is no area existing for apprehension or
change. We are split from ourselves" (_Talisman_ 47). For
Scalapino, then, the erotic is related to "social context"
in a way Stein never felt the need to explore.
[39] Whether those relationships involve the "city" (its mass of
individuals) or the "man and woman" in their most "private"
lives, Scalapino's poetry is fundamentally about things in
relation. The Buddhist influence in _way_--the notion of
"the middle path, meaning something that's totally in the
center and has no point of vantage," what Scalapino calls
"the motions of experience"--converges with the physicist
David Bohm's theory of the transformation of time and
matter, which I quoted earlier, concerning the nature of
identity. For Scalapino, both take on a political charge,
since neither one is disjunct from economic and other
social marks of difference, like the "high rents" and
invisible "other people" who inhabit _way_. The "span" of
perception Scalapino includes in her text differs from
Mullen's explorations of the way language constructs
individual identity and social categories--the way that the
clothing that is language creates both what we are and how
we are perceived. Yet to make vivid the relationship
between identity and language, Scalapino, like Mullen,
evokes the connections between eroticism and violence,
along with the very real pleasure that words afford.
However different stylistically, these texts share a
central goal: to forge a disjunctive language that will
direct our attention to both sexuality and the public
sphere--to illuminate, in a feminist avant-garde poetics,
the inevitable link between our public selves and our most
private acts.
[40] Neither of these writers' recent works would be possible
without Stein's ventures into the relationships among
language, consciousness, and sensuality. It is precisely
this series of relationships which is constantly changing,
as culture and speech continually shift, and as new voices
take on new forms of various experimental "traditions."
For writers concerned with feminine subjectivity, with race
and cultural politics, and with opening up the boundaries
of language, Stein's linguistic experiments remain a
source, yet one that needs revision, that cannot go
unchallenged. Such rewriting is a testament to both
continuity and change in feminist avant-garde writing by
American women. For Mullen and Scalapino, the task is to
bring Stein's often insular discourse to the language of
the world outside. That two poets as different as Mullen
and Scalapino both turn to Stein--to contribute to an
existing poetic discourse and to alter its
orientation--bears witness to the strength of women's
commitment to experimentation with language and
consciousness and to a feminist avant-garde poetics they
hope will alter the landscape of American culture.
NOTES:
^1^ Luce Irigaray, _This Sex Which Is Not One_ 144.
^2^ See _The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book_ 195-207, a reprint
of entries from the journal _L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E_ 1-3. The
writers in the section on Stein were Michael Davidson,
Larry Eigner, Bob Perelman, Steve McCaffery, Peter Seaton,
Jackson Mac Low, and Robert Grenier. See also _In the
American Tree_ for what is perhaps the most comprehensive
collection of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writings, both poetry and
theory.
^3^ This is particularly true if Howe's _Articulation
of Sound Forms in Time_, republished in the collection
_Singularities._ But Howe has made use of historical
documents throughout her poetic texts, from the early
_Defenestration of Prague_ through the more recent (and
highly scholarly) "Melville's Marginalia," in _The
Nonconformist's Memorial_.
^4^ The "mark of gender" is Wittig's phrase, borrowed,
of course, from linguistics. Her emphasis on *eliminating*
the difference encoded in language (even more pronounced in
French than in English)--and her Marxist orientation--is in
marked contrast to a theory like Irigaray's, which assumes
that Western culture has in fact never truly acknowledged
feminine difference in the first place, relying instead on
a logic of "the same," whether in Plato, Freud, or other
thinkers. She is also critical of Marxist rhetoric. See
Irigaray's _Speculum_ for her elaborate critique of the
entire Western tradition. Criticisms of Marxism appear in
_This Sex Which Is Not One_, particularly 32 and 81.
^5^ Like _S*PeRM**K*T_, the new book, _Muse and Drudge_,
will be published by Singing Horse Press.
^6^ I am indebted to the notion of "writing as re-vision,"
in the path-breaking 1971 essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing
as Re-Vision" by Adrienne Rich.
^7^ Interview, March 26, 1993. Where not noted otherwise,
citations from both Mullen and Scalapino are culled from
unpublished interviews with the authors.
^8^ Concerning _that they were at the beach_ , Scalapino
describes the attempt to arrive at a sort of "neutral
tone," a dead-pan, that would elicit responses from the
reader precisely because it's flat: "It doesn't have
depth, and because it doesn't have depth you have a
reaction to that" (interview).
^9^ This essay is an adaptation of the final chapter of a
book devoted to feminist avant-garde poets from Stein to the
present. As the book begins with _Tender Buttons_, I use
this final chapter to focus on Stein's continuing influence
on recent feminist avant-garde poets. While I would hardly
minimize the other important sources for both of the poets
discussed here (such as Brooks's considerable influence on
Mullen), that broader look at each poet's creative sources
awaits a slightly different study.
^10^ See Fifer's "Is Flesh Advisable," as well as Gass's
book and Stimpson's "The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein," among
a wealth of other such criticism.
^11^ See my "Fetishism and Parody in Stein's _Tender
Buttons_."
^12^ Michael Davidson, in the "Readings" section of _The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book_ (196-8), makes a similar point. For
him the breakdown is between the idea that "her writing is
all play" and the view that "Stein is a kind of hermetic
Symbolist who encodes sexual and biographical information
in complex verbal machines." For Davidson, the commonality
between these two is not that they are both fundamentally
"private" but that they both "operate on either side of a
referential paradigm." What we need to do is "learn to
read %writing%, not read %meanings%." In this, he
re-instates the formal, closed, nature of _Tender Buttons_
itself.
^13^ Marianne DeKoven, in _A Different Language_, is
particularly influenced by Kristeva, as is Ruddick. Most
significant among other critics who also have explored
Stein's erotic codes are Stimpson and Gass. See my
"Fetishism and Parody" for a detailed account of this
approach to _Tender Buttons_.
^14^ In terms of moving the discourse of the "private" or
erotic into the public sphere, in often dramatic ways,
performance artists Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle come to
mind as offering new versions of feminist avant-gardism, ones
that make the body a site of public display in overtly
polemical fashion. Both merge polemical texts with enactments
involving their bodies, naked or outrageously dressed up.
See _Re/Search: Angry Women_ for more examples of feminist
performance art. A good deal of earlier feminist
theory--and poetry followed (or perhaps preceded) this
tendency--focused primarily on valuing the private sphere,
including personal or "confessional" discourse. This
tendency shifted value from public "event" to affect and
qualities labeled "feminine," as evident in those
Anglo-American theorists who emphasize difference, among
them Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow. A divergence from
this philosophy of difference, toward a critique of gender
dualism itself, is evident in the work of several feminist
conceptual artists in recent years (many influenced by
French psychoanalytic theory, particularly Jacques Lacan),
including, most notably, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger.
Teresa De Lauretis, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler are
among those more recent theorists who call for gender
ambiguity and critique feminine difference as a basis for
gender theory.
^15^ In _Revolution and Poetic Language_, Kristeva outlines
this opposition in detail. While the semiotic can, for all
speaking subjects, only be experienced *through* language
and never (after the pre-Oedipal stage) in its "pure" form,
it is nonetheless at continual odds with the symbolic
functioning of language, threatening to break down its
rational, semantic relationships. Poetry pushes language
toward the semiotic, thus proffering both pleasures and
dangers readers rarely experienced--except in madness--in
other types of language.
^16^ Ruddick's most important argument along these lines is
in her "A Rosy Charm." For my argument on female fetishism,
see my "Fetishism and Parody."
^17^ See Du Bois' now-famous passage from _The Souls of
Black Folk_: "It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of looking at one's self
through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his
two-ness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark
body" (5). Gayle's _The Black Aesthetic_, among a number
of anthologies from the early 1970s, provides some of the
most important theoretical writings of the Black Arts
Movement and the revolutionary impulse to change both the
political and psychic realities of African-Americans.
^18^ The work of Barbara Smith, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh
Minh-ha, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldua come to mind as
just a few of the theorists and critics who have reshaped
the feminist thinking that first emerged in the 1970s with
attention to issues of postcoloniality, racial difference,
and the neglect of women of color among earlier feminist
writings. Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" (in
_But Some of Us Are Brave_, mentioned below) is now a
classic of the many pioneering works that critiqued early
feminist criticism and voiced the need for a black feminist
criticism. See also Spivak's _In Other Worlds_, Minh-ha's
_Woman, Native, Other_, and hooks's _Feminist Theory_ for
particularly influential and important explorations of
feminism and race in the U.S. and in an international
frame. Anthologies that emerged in the 1980s have been
crucial in collecting and disseminating revisionist
feminist work by women of color. See especially _This
Bridge Called my Back_, edited by Anzaldua and
Cherrie Moraga; and _All the Women Are White, All
the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave_, edited by
Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith; as
well as the more recent _Coming to Terms_, edited by
Elizabeth Weed, and _In Other Words_, edited by Roberta
Fernandez.
^19^ Saldivar-Hull argues that the racism in _Melanctha_
has been either excused or ignored altogether by
critics--even feminist critics--in their commitment to
championing Stein's radical experimental style. See
Saldivar-Hull and Bernstein, "Professing Stein/Stein
Professing." See also Milton Cohen for a reassessment of
Stein's racial politics.
^20^ See Ruddick's "A Rosy Charm" for her fine reading of
this passage.
^21^ The phrase is from Loy's mythological and
autobiographical epic, "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" in _The
Last Lunar Baedeker_ 124. See my "Mina Loy's 'Mongrel' Poetics"
in the forthcoming book _Mina Loy: Woman and Poet_ for a
treatment of Loy's racial and gender politics.
^22^ Teresa De Lauretis addresses this issue in her essay
"The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and
Gender," in _Technologies of Gender_.
^23^ See Bernstein's "Professing Stein" for a discussion of
_Tender Buttons_ as a radical expression of its time.
^24^ In _How Phenomena Appear to Unfold_, and in other
uncollected articles, Scalapino has written about Ron
Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, and Hannah
Wiener, as well as about Duncan, Creeley, H.D., and Stein.
^25^ See Perloff's "Pound/Stevens: whose era?" for one
account of the divide between a Poundian object-oriented,
historical poetics, and the more meditative, essentially
Romantic, Stevensian mode. Taken on its own terms, the
distinction holds true. The dichotomy implies, however, a
false dualism. In this particular piece, Perloff seems to
hold either that these two "modes" were in fact the only
ones present in the early part of the century, or that
writers with other concerns--Harlem Renaissance poets were
at work at the same time, as were avant-gardists with
preoccupations sometimes quite divergent from
Pound's--somehow fit neatly into this one central divide.
^26^ See Conte's _Unending Design_ for a detailed account
of serial form in writers including Creeley, Duncan, Jack
Spicer, and others.
^27^ See, in particular, "What Is English Literature"
(_LIA_ 11-55) for Stein's personal version of English and
American literary history.
^28^ See Robert Grenier's identification of Stein's
"phenomenological" preoccupation in _The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Book_: "_T.B._, as early 'phenomenological investigation,'
is interpretative/as it is revelatory--the whole storm of
passion, discernment, definition, feeling//carried by
language" (205).
^29^ For comparison, note Stein's statements about her
understanding of English literature in "What Is English
Literature." Stein invokes the same sort of dialectic
between subjective and objective experience, as a dance of
mysterious origins, one that itself becomes the subject of
inquiry: "There are two _way_s of thinking about
literature as the history of English literature, the
literature as it is a history of it and the literature as
it is a history of you" (_LIA_ 12). And later: "And so
my business is how English literature was made inside me
and how English literature was made inside itself" (_LIA_
14).
^30^ Wendy Steiner's fine introduction to _Lectures in
America_ likens Stein's experiments with repetition to those
of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein two generations later, in
the Pop Art movement. Steiner argues convincingly that both
Stein and the later visual artists revel in their own
culture's versions of mechanism and structural repetition,
adapting them to new art forms in defiant, and celebratory,
ways. See _LIA_ xiii-xv.
^31^ The serial writing of Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, and other male writers was in fact preceded by
Stein's, and in her hands, such seriality emerged with a
distinctly erotic--and feminine--perspective, especially in
_Tender Buttons_, "Lifting Belly," and her other erotic
poetry. For historical comparison, one might note that the
first three of the _Cantos_ were published in June, 1917, in
_Poetry_ 10.
^32^ Scalapino discussed in our interview the serial forms
of pop culture and mass media, including TV news and soap
operas. While she acknowledged the possible appeal of the
sit-com or soap opera as serial form, she herself can't
stand either one: "There is something interesting about
the serial form almost as if it were soap opera. Except I
hate soap operas and I never look at them, they're terribly
boring and irritating. But it's the idea that something
could go on and then start again and keep going, and it
would always reproduce some of the information that's core
information so that you could come into it at any point.
It implies that there's no end to this and also that people
are attending to very intricate but essentially delicate
small things that they're doing. There's something about
that that's satisfying, but definitely not at all
satisfying in soap operas."
^33^ Ezra Pound, _Literary Essays of Ezra Pound_ 86.
^34^ Scalapino briefly mentioned in our interview her
feelings about the possibility of writing in closed forms,
one that indicates the depth of her discomfort with being
boxed in: "Writing a form that implies closure in
conventional works that I've heard or read--I find that
completely stifling. You feel that you're trapped and dead.
I have a reaction of total claustrophobia."
^35^ See Avis for a brief and general account of these
symbols in Taoism.
^36^ See "Poetry and Grammar" (_LIA_ 212-14) on the
"interesting" role of articles, pronouns, and
conjunctions--particularly articles, which have the power
to "please as the name that follows cannot please" (212).
^37^ In particular, Scalapino seems to attribute the "bud"
to both the man and the woman as the poem progresses, so that
its phallic association is either "lent" to the woman or
redefined as a female quality.
^38^ The last series in _way_, "hoofer," works to very
similar ends. That series begins with a scene on a bus and
moves to a sexual motif, though in markedly non-erotic language:
the first appearance of a sexual phrase is: ". . . women /
in their being licked / between their legs" (139). The
imagery that likens the sexual to the animal hearkens back
to _that they were at the beach_ , but the over-all
form--juxtaposing the social "scene" with a sexual
moment--coincides with the same structure in "The floating
series."
^39^ Scalapino may even be responding to the prevalent soft
porn poses explored by Annette Kuhn. The most frequent poses
avoid any disorientation of the spectator's direct
experience of the "object" photographed, most often through
the use of realistic poses, as though the viewer had just
happened upon a scene in which the woman is, usually,
unconscious of the viewer's gaze. Scalapino implies that,
as a formal strategy that disrupts the way we would
otherwise receive each image, juxtaposition of two or more
images (or pieces of text) can indeed destroy the "realism"
of the medium and thereby challenge us to see things
differently. See Kuhn for a detailed analysis of poses and
the position of the gazer in different types of
pornographic representations.
^40^ I am thinking, in particular, of Johnson's _The
Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man_, an important
precursor to Ellison's _Invisible Man_, in which the
narrator's race is "invisible" insofar as he can "pass" for
white--with the price of a blurring, even denial, of
identity, that makes him both tortured and, ironically,
unsympathetic. In other more recent treatments of the idea
of invisibility, Toni Morrison in _Playing in the Dark_
raises the issue of the construction of "whiteness," as
well as blackness, in American culture, most often
dependent on an unacknowledged black "other." Wallace, in
_Invisibility Blues_, a collection of her essays, argues
that frequent visual representations of African-American
women (and other women of color) in fashion photos is
accompanied by the conspicuous absence of their voices in
the influential spheres of public discourse, both political
and academic. See her introduction for a full account of
the issue of "visibility" and language for African-American
women.
^41^ See Stein's important recapitulation of her arguments
in "Composition as Explanation" at the opening of "Portraits
and Repetition": "In Composition as Explanation I said
nothing changes from generation to generation except the
composition in which we live and the composition in which
we live makes the art which we see and hear" (_LIA_ 165).
Scalapino's insistence on the relationship between a
culture and its "style" is clearly an articulation of a
similar position. Yet, significantly, Scalapino takes the
extra step (one typical of avant-gardist attitudes toward
language) of using a disorienting or disruptive style of
her own precisely to alter the entrenched traditions that
artistic conventions reflect. See Burger's _Theory of the
Avant-Garde_ for the most complete treatment of the issue
of stylistic and cultural revolutions.
^42^ In particular, the privileging of personal experience
and language in the writing of such poets as Anne Sexton and
Sharon Olds comes to mind, in contrast to the more
outward-looking and "historical" poetry of other feminist
writers, such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Yet,
despite a similar orientation toward social and political
issues, Scalapino rejects the mode of this sort of
politically engaged poetry because it, too, has most often
been voiced in relatively traditional forms.
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