Gertude Stein’s radical Tender Buttons (1914) marks one of literary modernism's most radical breaks with the poetic tradition. Organized in three sections titled “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” Tender Buttons is a loving map of the geography of her intimate everyday life at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where she and Alice B. Toklas entertained the leading young poets and painters of the day, and later at night, where she sat reflecting and writing.
More specifically, the poems would seem to take place "in there, behind the door" of Stein's well-photographed study which was full of what would become the most famous artworks of the 20th century, whose position on the walls frequently shifted as her private collection grew and shrank, and where her friends like Man Ray, Matisse, Dora Maar, and Picasso would gather for conversations about art, literature, philosophy, and the adjacent rooms where she and Alice B. Toklas lived their private lives, cooked food, and wrote (Stein, TB, 64). Read this way, Tender Buttons depicts an intellectual and cultural crossroads. It is a text that renders other texts.
The poems bring before our eyes a magic lantern show of an array of ordinary items, though she later called them "still lives" that "include[d] color and movement" ("Lectures in America "189.) There are eyeglasses, chairs, cups and saucers, and carafes; petticoats, a hat, and a handkerchief; butter, mutton, and roast beef. On occasion, the poem's logical template morphs, and the slideshow turns from objects to affects ("A FRIGHTFUL RELIEF"); cognitive processes ("SUPPOSE AN EYES"); and occasionally, to non-sense ("IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK"; "A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE.") Her depictions of everydayliness are, in other words, made "strange (77) and even "stranger" (77), with the goal of unleashing what Stein describes as “a violent kind of delightfulness” (10). It is in this process of making strange that the LLM-generated uncanny deformances pick up and amplify.
There are many ways to approach Stein's poetics in this work. Scholars have contextualized Tender Buttons in relation to cubism, dadaism, surrealism, pragmatism, feminism, and lesbianism. However, Stein's poetics frequently invite a more active, and more disruptive engagement. Joining other projects that have taken up Stein's spirit of experimentation and drive to "keep a strange, estrange on it" (TB 52), In There Behind the Door deforms and performs her syntax, lexicon, and logical structures by operationalizing them in order to lay bare her philosophical concepts, a history of media, and the history of art.
The idea of deformance was first formulated in 1999, when Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann proposed an approach to literature that countered traditional methods of interpretation. Reading "backward" (26), against the work's "original grain" (28), through what they describe as "fields of experiment" (28), they asked "not 'what does the poem mean?' but 'how do we release or expose the poem's possibilities of meaning'" (28). Their own examples of deformance are highly bookish. They cite Dante and Emily Dickinson as models for their approach. It is noteworthy that they turned to electronic and computational metaphors to explain what a deformance does to the source text.
I've now exhibited several deformances projects using large language models to inquire into Stein's poetics.
My first work was a video that interpreted the opening poem of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein:
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing
strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a
system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not
unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
I used a series of large language models -- still image and video generators -- as well as a voice clone to reimagine the poems
Here's how you can make bold and italic text.
"Hard-To-Let-Go-of-Grammar" by pATCHES:
“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
XoMEoX, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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