List of Illustrations Preface: The Charisma of Waste Acknowledgments Xiii Permissions

Copyrighted material 9781137402783
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Preface: The Charisma of Waste ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Permissions xv
Introduction The Poetics of Waste Management 1

1 Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 27
2 The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashberys
The Vermont Notebook 57
3 Baby, I Am the Garbage: Camp Recuperation in
James Schuyler 91
4 Kenneth Goldsmiths Queer Appropriations 123
Afterword Poetry, Waste, and the Body Politic 157
Notes 167
Bibliography 197
Index 217

THE POETICS OF WASTE

Copyright Christopher Schmidt, 2014.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
in the United States a division of St. Martins Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 9781137402783
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schmidt, Christopher, 1975
The Poetics of Waste : Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler,
and Goldsmith / by Christopher Schmidt.
pages cm.(Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
ISBN 9781137402783 (hardback :alk. paper)
1. American poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism.
2. American poetry21st centuryHistory and criticism. 3. Gays
writings, AmericanHistory and criticism. 4. Refuse and refuse
disposal in literature. 5. Waste (Economics) in literature.
6. Excess (Philosophy) 7. Poetics. I. Title.
PS325.S36 2014
811.5409dc23 2013047647
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CHAPTER 1
Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein
You are so full of a cow factory

Gertrude Stein, A Sonatina
Followed by Another (307)
T
o understand the many conflicts circulating in and around Gertrude
Steins waste management poetics, it may be useful to consider the
testimony of an outside reporter. In 1927 William Carlos Williams
visited Steins salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. Although his visit merits little
more than a mention by Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933),
Williamss own account helps us see more clearly the affiliations and disaf-
filiations that would characterize modernism and its critical reception. It
also makes legible the importance of waste for Steins writing economy and
its defining role in schisms between Stein and other modernist writers. In
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951), the writer recalls:
We looked at the paintings. Who could not have done so? It was one of
the sights of Paris. Tea was served, after or during which Miss Stein went
to the small cabinet, opened it and began to take out her manuscripts,
one at a time, telling us the titles and saying that she hoped some day
to see them printed. I cant remember the exact sequence of what fol-
lowed, but one way or another she asked me what I would do were the
unpublished books mine and I were faced with the difficulty she was
experiencing.
It must have been that I was in one of my more candid moods or that
the cynical opinion of Pound and other of my friends about Miss Steins
work was uppermost in my mind, for my reply was, If they were mine,

28 The Poetics of Waste
having so many, I should probably select what I thought were the best
and throw the rest into the fire.
The result of my remark was instantaneous. There was a shocked
silence out of which I heard Miss Stein say, No doubt. But then writing
is not, of course, your mtier.
That closed the subject and we left soon after. (254)
Bracketing his unsympathetic reaction, Williamss reportage allows us to see

some instructive things about the bewildering volume of Steins literary
output (The Work 57). Steins accumulated archive of unpublished manu-
scripts, her hope to make each and every production marketable, and her
industry in producing yet more unpublishable works highlight important
conflicts within Steins writing economy. Like the other writers I consider
in this study, Stein occupies both the poles of conserver and waster. She is a
regularly productive worker and managera proper Taylorist subject of the
technological agewhose accumulated writings nevertheless embrace and
at times occupy the status of waste. The excesses of Steins writing practice,
which Williams suggested she burn, were ones that Stein wished to market,
reflecting her investment in commodification, which many of her modern-
ist contemporaries at least pretended to disdain.
This tense encounter between Stein and Williams also exemplifies their
divergent aesthetic responses to economic pressures within the modern-
ist period. While Stein and Williams possessed much in common,1 it was
Williamss work that would more easily fit with ascendant Taylorist prin-
ciples of efficiency and waste reduction (as well as the needs of later anthol-
ogists for tidy lyric poems). Williams, like Pound, embraced a machinic
model of efficiency for his poems, and in a more charitable treatment of
Stein published elsewhere, even projects it onto her, noting that she uses
words as objects out of which you manufacture a little mechanism you call
a poem (In 69). This is not a complete mischaracterization, for Williams
captures the material, object-like quality of Steins language. Yet Steins
writing was rarely little in its mechanics, and she did not eliminate
words to achieve a state of purity and efficiency (although she did employ
a reduced vocabulary). Steins excessive, repetitive, and resolutely nonmeta-
phoric writings flout Pounds Imagist directive to include no words that
do not contribute to the presentation. The extraneous is Steins paradise.
By contrast, Williamss own poetry of the period was often quite respon-
sive to the tenets of the Efficiency Movement, as Cecelia Tichi argues in
Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1996).2
Williams himself espouses aspects of modernist reductionism in his Spring
and All (1923), arguing against excrementa and inefficiency, opining that

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 29
an essential vitality will be laid waste by the use of demoded words

and shapeseven as the books loose hybrid form, like that of Kora in
Hell (1920), undermines his polemical disdain for waste (19).3 Stein mean-
while voices what might be termed the Poundian objection to her work in
a passage from American Biography and Why Waste It (1928), composed
around the time of Williamss visit: They murmured about excess not about
excess not about exceeding their limit. They murmured about success. Be
brief (265).4 While a brief lyric might have received a more welcoming
reception on the market, the often excessive length of Steins works, replete
with repetitions and indeterminacies, make evident her stubborn, paradoxi-
cal investment in producing wastenot least the waste of language itself, in
the slippage of signifier and signified to create a remainder.5
Williams isnt the only reader to suppose a technological impulse in
Steins poetry. Tichi also suggests that critics attend to the machinic orienta-
tion of Steins writing, as it has guided discussion of Williams (284). Various
critics have addressed the influence of specific technologies on Steins work,
a list that includes Susan McCabe and Sarah Bay-Cheng on Steins use of
the cinema; Barrett Watten on the automobile; and Joan Retallack and
Steven Meyer on Steins involvement as a student at Harvard Annex with
Cultivated Motor Automatism, which would lead B. F. Skinner to dismiss
Steins writing as automatic in his Atlantic Monthly article, Has Gertrude
Stein a Secret? (1934). Stein however emphatically rebuts Skinners charge
of automatism, and the terms of her rebuttal are telling. In a letter to Ellery
Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Stein replies, No it is not so
automatic as he thinks . . . If there is anything secret it is the other way . . . I
think I achieve by xtra consciousness, excess (qtd. in Meyer 227, empha-
sis added). While Stein did indeed respond to the machinic influence of
Taylorism, she did so in a signally excessive manner, veering from the pro-
gram of reduction and efficiency that Pound and Williams absorbed from
Taylorist scientific management principles.
Instead, Steins radical response to Taylorist ideologies is to imagine the
body itself as the ground for the eras technological machinism, and to eroti-
cize that body as mechanically productive. The following passage from a
lesser known Stein work, A Sonatina Followed by Another (1921) exempli-
fies this tack:
You are so full of a cow factory. You manufacture cows by vows. The
cows produce reduce reduce they reduce the produce. Cows are necessary
after feeding. We are needing what we have after feeding. After feeding
we find cows out. How are cows multiplied. By proper treatment. Thank
you so much for being so explicit. (307)

In imagining the addressee of this passage as a cow factory, Stein conflates

organic and machinic metaphors, as she does in the tender yet machinic
buttons she presses in the poem of that name, Tender Buttons. While the
title of the latter work is often interpreted as referring to the erogenous zones
of Toklass body (les boutons tendres is slang for nipples in French), it may
simultaneously refer to the buttons of a machine, as Kathryn Kent suggests
(15051). It is illuminating to envision this machine, like the factory fig-
ured above, as Toklass body, the buttons of which Stein pushes to produce
pleasure, excrement, writing; the machine may also be the typewriter that
enabled Toklas to become the manager of Steins own writing factory. This
cow factory helps us visualize how the material conditions of Steins writ-
ing practiceher regular productivity, her installation of a kind of factory
system in her home to produce and market her work, and her annexation of
Toklass body as an extension of her ownreflect the imprint of dominant
Taylorist ideologies on her writing practice.
Tracking the development of the cow across Steins writing opens
up a window into the queer dimensions of Steins obsession with Toklass
digestive regularity, itself a remainder of the Taylorist diet regime called
Fletcherism. Although Stein herself rejected restrictive diets, her work and
life can be usefully understood through the prism of this digestive regime,
a time- and body-discipline for domestic management that was highly
prevalent in the culture of the time, as Sarah Blair argues (423). Steins cow
reflects the imprint of Tayloristand in particular, Fletcheristregimes on
household and bodily economies of waste management in 27 rue de Fleurus,
functioning both as a symbol of a queer care for Toklass regularity, and as a
psycho-sexual remainder of Steins detachment from patriarchal systems of
order and regulation, embodied in the figure of her brother, Leo, who levied
criticism and invective against Gertrudes early writing.
You Are So Full of a Cow Factory

What is a cow and why its emergence so important to Steins literary proj-
ect? There is no single answer to what Steins cow represents; such one-
to-one decoding would betray Steins multiplicative poetics of excess. But
the passage quoted above, from Steins A Sonatina Followed by Another,
provides some context for understanding this particular textual riddle, as
will later excursions into other Stein writing, including the love notes she
wrote to Toklas (often ignored by Steins most serious critics), which are full
of references to the cow.
It is not surprising that most critics have interpreted cow, which appears
with remarkable frequency not just in Steins love notes but across her

literary corpus, as a synonym for orgasm. The word often appears contigu-
ous to celebrations of the female body and is at times incanted in a frenzy
of clotted repetitionscow come out cow come outwhich poststruc-
turalist critics like Marianne DeKoven have likened to a kind of textual,
antipatriarchal jouissance.6 Dolores Klaich advances a more precise repre-
sentational interpretation of the cow, suggesting that it and Caesar, which
frequently appears in tandem with the cow, clearly . . . make the most sense
as symbols of parts of the particular parts of the body involved in the act of
cunnilingus before claiming that in A Sonatina Followed by Another the
cow would also seem to mean orgasm (206). Similar readings have been
advanced by Linda Simon, one of Stein and Toklass earliest critical biogra-
phers, and Ulla Dydo, Steins most scrupulous textual critic. Simon argues,
The cow makes sense best as the end product of their lovemaking (316).
Dydo writes, Always it is Stein, the husband, who makes love to Toklas,
the wife, which culminates in her having a cow, or orgasm (the verb to cow)
also appears (Language 28). McCabe likens the repetitive invocations of
cow come out in Emp Lace to a spasm of hyper-femininity, one that
mimics both childbirth and orgasm (92).
While Steins invocations of the cow express an erotic exuberance that
makes orgasm a plausible reading in many pieces of writing, a closer look
at the passage above reveals that many other contexts beyond the sexual
are involved in this production of cows. A striking digestive motif (After
feeding we find cows out) is intermingled with logics of production and
efficiency (You are so full of a cow factory). The passage describes a literal
incorporation of the scientific management system of Frederick Winslow
Taylor that sought to increase . . . productivity and reduce wastefulness
not just in the factory but, as Martha Banta argues, in every phase of diur-
nal experience, including domestic management (ix, 9). Steins Taylorist
interest in productivity and, in this instance, waste reduction is evident in
her suggestion that cows produce reduce reduce they reduce the produce,
a line that employs formal excess (reduce reduce they reduce) even as it
evinces, on the semantic level, a conflict between production and reduction
(reduce the produce). In this scenario, the cow is both a valued product
to be manufactured and perhaps as well a waste product to be reduced.
These tensions between excess and reduction animate Steins writing, as
does a thoroughgoing interest in feeding and digestion. But a related ques-
tion emerges about the passage above, one that demands a more immediate
response. In what context does it makes sense to equate a beloved queer body
with the logic and operations of the factory system? Despite the old-world
excesses of her own body, Stein in her writing eroticizes the lean produc-
tive body of Toklas, who was not only Steins lover, but also the domestic

manager of 27 rue de Fleurus. This shared abode functioned not just as a

home but also as a kind of avant-garde experiment that similarly reflects the
influence of Taylorist ideology, as Sarah Blair argues. The space was a sanc-
tum sanctorum of the professional-managerial classes, laboratory for progres-
sivist theories of domestic management, display arena for the exercise of taste,
and material workplace for an expanding market of domestic laborers (423).
It was also, occasionally, a publishing house. In addition to the demands
of running a Parisian home and salon, Toklas was also Steins amanuensis,
publicist, and often her publisher, roles that demanded an efficiency and pro-
ductivity that Stein valued and encouraged in Toklas. Steins concern with
domestic management is not merely biographical speculation; it is evident
as a theme across her writing, albeit often by negative example. As Martha
Banta argues, Three Lives examines what happens to three women when
their very personal relations with the culture of management go awry (10).
If Good Anna, Melanctha, and Gentle Lena are early cautionary tales
about an inability to manage efficiently, Steins later writings are embroidered
with injunctions for Toklas to more effectively maintain domestic health and
regularitynot just of the household, but also of her own body. In works like
A Sonatina Followed By Another, A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has
a Cow a Love Story, and, most revealingly, in the posthumously published
love notes, Stein figures Toklass body as a kind of excremental machine engi-
neered for the manufacture of queer love and a number of domestic products
represented by the cow, including Steins writing.
Fletcherism and Steins Corpoautomobile

Before we look at these texts and the ways that they manage Toklass body
(and by proxy, its production of Steins writing), it may be useful to exam-
ine some of the social history that would lead Stein to imagine Toklass
body as a machine-like cow factory. Marc Seltzer has argued that in the
modernist period intimations of machine-likeness of persons and the per-
sonation of machines were rampant not just in literary and filmic texts (in
Fritz Langs Metropolis, for example) but also in the periods health rheto-
ric (32). Such human-machine intimations indeed dominate the work of
Horace Fletcher, the inventor of the diet regime Fletcherism. This extremely
popular fin de sicle diet regime sought to regularize consumption in order
to increase energy and reduce the production of offensive waste (144).
Following Taylorist principles, Fletcher suggested that adherents chew each
mouthful of food until the digestions automatic swallowing mechanism
was inducedapproximately thirty two chews, although often exceeding
this number (127). In The New Glutton or Epicure (1903), Fletcher explicitly

transposes industrial models onto the digestive system, turning the alimen-
tary canal into a scientifically monitored assembly line:
All of the functions of the body are operated by something very much
akin to electricitymental energyso that aside from the fermentation
which gluttony makes possible, the mere drag of handling of dead mate-
rial in the body, that the body cannot use, for two or three days, is a
wasteful draught on the available mental capacity.
Using an electric power-plant as analogous to the Mind Power-Plant
of the brain, and a trolley railroad as analogous to the machinery of the
bodyanalogies which are very close by consistent similaritythe load-
ing of the stomach with unprepared food, as in gluttony, is like loading
flat cars with pig iron and running them around the line of the road in
place of passenger cars, thereby using up valuable energy and wearing
out the equipment without any profit resulting from the expenditure.
(13233)
Reducing waste is a Fletcherist obsession, and accordingly, gluttony is

a drag on the system; dead weight must be avoided, for it will slow
down the Mind Power-Plant and the other machinery of the body with
undigested food. In proper Taylorist terms, wastefulness is to be avoided,
such that in Fletchers regime, profit-maximizing eating habits will mini-
mize excreta and render them inoffensive (22). In practical terms, how-
ever, Fletchers regime may have been more effective in reducing corporeal
waste than in increasing efficiency, because of the extended time required
to consume ones food. As Jennifer Fleissner jokes, imagine, if you will, a
Fletcherist lunch break! (48).
The Fletcherist ethos in Steins writing is evident not merely in a tro-
pism toward digestive themes that Stein shares with Fletcher, but also in
a shared concern about the efficiency of the bodyalthough not Steins
own. As extensive and explicit as the production line metaphor becomes for
understanding digestion in the passage above, Fletcher elsewhere advances
an even more literal machine-likeness for the healthy body, writing, We
must all be Competent Chauffeurs of our own Corpoautomobiles and our
exhausts must be inoffensive. (Schwartz 127 n31). Though Stein herself
eschewed metaphor, she similarly draws associations between the automo-
bile and the efficient body in a suggestive anecdote from the Autobiography.
Having ordered a Ford truck with the intention of using it as an ambulance
in the American Fund for French Wounded in World War I, Stein recalls,
We were waiting for our ford truck which was on its way and then we
waited for its body to be built. We waited a great deal. It was then that

Gertrude Stein wrote a great many little war poems (828). As Steins com-
ment suggests, the eras technological innovations did not always deliver the
efficiency they promised. Yet the interval between imagining the body (in
this instance, the ford) and its realization can be a productive one for writ-
ing. As we shall see, delay between the imagined body and its delivery will
typify Stein and Toklass own complicated circuit of writing, typing, and
bodily production, which is riven between productivity and constipation
within the Stein household.
After the Fords body has been built and delivered to Stein, she encoun-
ters a number of mechanical problems requiring the help of passersby, whose
interventions expose the implicit class significations of Steins old-world
body in comparison to the leanness of the new efficient body:
This faculty of Gertrude Stein of having everybody do anything for her

puzzled the other drivers of the organization. Mrs. Lathrop who used to
drive her own car said that nobody did those things for her. It was not
only soldiers, a chauffeur would get off the seat of a private car in the place
Vendme and crank Gertrude Steins old ford for her. Gertrude Stein said
that the others looked so efficient, of course nobody would think of doing
anything for them. Now as for herself she was not efficient, she was good
humoured, she was democratic, one person was as good as another, and
she knew what she wanted done. (831, emphasis added)
It is precisely because Stein does not possess the efficient body of the con-
tracted worker or other volunteers that she can convincingly assume the role
of a manager, conscripting others to perform labor for her. No doubt Steins
attitude and manner (good humoured and democratic) contributed to
her success in her eliciting the help of others. However, as she herself admits,
the main difference lies in the contrast between others efficient thin bod-
ies and her own not efficient body. (Ironically, the built machinic body
of the Ford, with its breakdowns and need for cranking and ministrations,
more resembles Steins not efficient corpoautomobile than the efficient
bodies surrounding her.) The tension between the voluptuous excesses of
Steins body and the radical modernity of her vision and writing makes her a
pivotal figure in this period, both as a popular icon and as a writer in whose
work these tensions between efficiency and inefficiency were being played
out.
Steins own sense of her bodys inefficiency reflects cultural attitudes
toward the excesses attributed to her as a corpulent Jewish lesbian.
Catharine Stimpson has ably shown how Steins somagramsfigurations
of the female body, both in depictions of Stein by journalists, and in Steins

writings about the bodyhave been used as explanatory metaphors for her
work, particularly by detractors [who] conflate her mind and body in an
attempt to neutralize the threat to a dominant ideology of a corpulent
female Jewish lesbian and her literary excesses (643). (Such phobias are
expressed by Wyndham Lewis; when reviewing Three Lives, Lewis complains
that it is all fat, without nerve, and that the weight . . . that is characteristic
of the work of Miss Steinlike the sluggish weight of her characters . . . is, to
me, of a dead order of things [61, 64]). Stimpson also suggests that critical
attacks on Steins girth functioned as a screen for critics disgust at Steins
lesbianism, which could not be named fully and publically at the time
(643). Such cautions are important to note when taking up discussions of
Stein and the body. And yet, as Stimpson later argues, Stein herself incor-
porated these representations in her own work, at first reinforcing phobic
disgust at the corpulent body and then, over the course of her writing career,
becoming freer and more flexible in these representations as she became
less monstrous to herself (646). The writing of Tender Buttons (1914) was
a pivotal moment in this resignification of the abject into the erotic; so too
was the earlier A Long Gay Book (completed in 1912), in which one literally
sees Steins style and attitudes toward the figured female body transform
midway through the composition of the book.
Class signification also informed this rewriting of gender body codes,
although not in an entirely coherent manner. Certainly broad economic and
social changes in the modern period resulted in the stigmatization of bodily
excess as inefficiency or waste. In the passage above, Stein herself gestures
toward these changes in technological development, in its impact on both
the economy and the politics of war, and finally, in the pressure that tech-
nology places on the body to become more efficient, more productive,
and more skilled so as to operate and mimic the machinery surrounding it.
Fletcherisms corresponding emphasis on productivity and the reduction of
waste shows the impress of these Taylorist principles on the health rhetoric
of the period. Like many of her peers, Stein responded to this rhetoric, and
her concern about Toklass health shows the imprint of broader ideological
process in which anxieties about the changing body politic body are discur-
sively written on the human body, particularly the bodies of women. Just as
sexual identity underwent sweeping redefinition in the wake of juridical and
medical pathologization during this period, so too were bodies shapes and
sizes subject to regimes of reform.
What new economic and historical circumstances prompted this discur-
sive rewriting of the body? Historians of the modernist period have noted
the shift in America (in particular) from an economy governed by scar-
city, in which problems of production dominated economic thought, to one

governed by abundance, in which consumption replaced production as the

main term, as Tim Armstrong notes (110). Faced with a consumer cul-
ture that was responsible for a new distribution of wealth, the bourgeoisie
found succor in counter-discourses advising against massive overconsump-
tion, which were helpful insofar as they allowed the upper-class consumer
to differentiate herself from the hungry masses. (Examples of these counter-
discourses include the domestic advice of the Wares of Autolycus column in
the Pall Mall Gazette and the Ladies Almanac, the latter of which may have
influenced the form of Steins Tender Buttons, as Kathryn Kent persuasively
argues [13942]). In other words, it is a classed response to industrialism
that led to a paradigm shift and realignment of the healthy upper-class
body, such that between the Victorian Era and World War II, the attenuated
and the ample female silhouettes exchanged positions as signifiers of poverty
and wealth. While in earlier periods, the large body could be seen as a com-
forting indicator of success and largesse, a modern celebrity figure like the
Duchess of Windsor (the ostensible subject of Steins 1941 novel Ida) would
come to exemplify a new ideal of restraint and refinement. In the twentieth
century, you can never be too rich or too thina catchphrase the reveals the
implication of bodily shape and class status.
Diets and body reform technologies became newly prevalent in this
period, with the body functioning as a medium on which cultural anxiet-
ies about ideologies of abundance and efficiency were played out. Cultural
historian Hillel Schwartz notes, Ambivalent about surplus and its waste, its
heaviness, its sprawl, Americans were finding more drama in starvation than
in gluttony. No longer was girth a sign of success: Fat bodies out of con-
trol no longer appeared powerful or confident (122). Many fad diets were
popular during this time, but the oddly machinic diet regime of Fletcherism
was particularly popular. Fletcher himself became a celebrity, and his aco-
lytes gathered for chewing parties.7 Fletchers program realigned body
shape and class signification in a couple of important ways. In eliminating
or repressing the gustatory pleasure in rich food, Fletcherism attracted jour-
nalistic comment even in its own time for reversing the typical association
between upper-class wealth and voluptuousness; by making the rich dine
like the poor, Fletcher convinced his adherents to dine sumptuously on a
menu card and a wafer biscuit as one commentator sarcastically noted (qtd.
in Fleissner 47). In a more practical sense, the extended chewing required of
Fletcherism had the effect of reducing the appetite and ultimately reduced
consumption, insuring that the Fletcherist subject would lose weight along-
side improving bodily efficiency.8
Maintaining a notoriously ample silhouette during a period in which stan-
dards of feminine form were transformed from an upholstered voluptuousness

to efficient sleekness, Stein would certainly have been aware of these diets,
even as she disdained them. An early patron and publicist of Steins, Mabel
Dodge, notes that the writer loved beef and I used to like to see her sit down
in front of five pounds of rare meat three inches thick and with strong wrists
wielding knife and fork, finish it with gusto (Malcolm 45).9 If Steins appe-
tite went largely unmodulated, she was not however unmindful of the effects
of certain comestibles on her stomach. In Everybodys Autobiography (1937),
Stein reports, I do not like to drink, I have no feeling about it but my stom-
ach does not like it and I never do like to do what my stomach does not like
to do (67). Although I have found no evidence that Stein herself practiced
Fletcherism as a solution to dietary distress (as both Leo Stein and Henry
James did), Stein was susceptible to digestive maladies, notably a debilitat-
ing attack of colitis during her trip to Spain in 1912 with Toklas, as Simon
notes (103). This was also the fateful trip during which Stein experienced
an erotic breakthrough with Toklas and, consequently, innovated a radical
new style that would carry her away from the fictional realism and flattening
repetitions of The Making of Americans (completed in 1911) toward the more
disjunctive modernist breakthroughs that would follow in Tender Buttons.
For Stein, alimentary distress thus seems proximate to erotic pleasure and
poetic innovationa constellation of concerns that bears significantly on the
meaning of the cow appearing throughout Steins corpus.
Digestion and Excreation

Consumption and digestion are not just useful explanatory metaphors for
Steins poetics but a thoroughgoing obsession. Because food is the most
material, most physically present object to cross the threshold of the body
wherein it is transformed into wasteit is fitting that it should serve as the
platform for Steins epistemological inquiries in the boundaries of the erotic
body. As Michel Delville writes, In Steins poetry, the unstable, liminal
quality of food questions the limits of the body which, in turn, tends to be
perceived as a precarious, unfinished entity, an organic factory ingesting,
processing, exuding, and excreting substances which are alternately inside
and outside (45). Food defines those boundaries, but it also undergoes mys-
teries processes inside the body that cannot be entirely perceived, described,
or, unfortunately for the troubled eater, controlled. Stein was equally inter-
ested in both portals of the digestive bodyits intake and its output.
In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein depicts the disorientations of erotic appe-
tite, culinary consumption, and an epistemological interest in crossing the
boundaries between outside and inside. Stein (through Toklas) describes
Tender Buttons as the beginning . . . of mixing the outside with the inside.

Hitherto she had been concerned with seriousness and the inside of things, in
these studies she began to describe the inside as seen from the outside (814).
This mixing of inside and outside would propel Stein into her most probing
accounts of the consuming body, in explicitly erotic works like Pink Melon
Joy (1915) and Lifting Belly (1917), which use consumption as a metaphor
for tracking this mixing, but also in Tender Buttons, which borrows from
Alice Toklass sphere of influence, the domestic in order to establish a les-
bian semiotics that queers the categories of consumption (Fifer 480).10 The
opening of the Food section of Tender Buttons, ROASTBEEF, establishes
its erotics through surprising conversions of the inside and outside of the
body and according confusions between meaning and feeling:
In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the

morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the eve-
ning there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is
mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in
feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. (327)
In contrast to the Imagist privileging of sight, Steins rejects the fixity of

the Imagist noun by substituting gerunds that privilege other senses: feeling,
tasting, smelling, and hearing, in the sound-sense of the language. In Tender
Buttons, food arranges a number of ritual intimacies around matter (often
fleshly matter) whose insides and outsides Stein reforms. When cooking roast
beef, one would expect the inside to redden, but here it is the outside that
reddens, suggesting a human body that blushes when shamed, pinched, or
excited. In ROASTBEEF, inside and outside are immediately operative
terms, ones that Stein queerly reverses from their expected usage. How sen-
sual perception coheres into meaningand whether innovative literature
can provide the reader with access to new perceptual-ideation complexesis
the subject of this passage and much of Steins writing.11
Digestion, with its constant sensual and perceptual negotiations of the
bodys boundaries and inner states, would come to function for Stein as
an important metaphor for language acquisition and the writing of litera-
ture, as she herself clarifies in her later lecture, What Is English Literature
(1934). In this lecture, Stein explains the language and poetic development
of England (its invasions and civil wars) through the metaphor of digestion
and its incorporation of outside and inside:
There was no confusion, as I say the trouble had come from the outside
and had been absorbed in the inside and in the process of absorption as
there is in any healthy digestion there was no confusion but inevitably in
concluding digestion there was separation. (204, emphasis added)

In Steins lecture on Englands literary historical development, the sepa-

ration that concludes digestionthat is, the evacuatory separation
between the inside digestive processes of the body and the excremental
outside product that resultsis deemed a value and subsequently pro-
duces an abundance of lively writing. Steins privileging of writing produc-
tivity as bodily output is also apparent in her first portrait of Picasso (1908).
While the product coming out of Picasso in this portrait is not explicitly
excremental, it is palpably material, consonant with the formless yet valuable
cow that emerges from Toklass body:
This one always had something being coming out of this one. This one
was working. This one always had been working. This one was always
having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing,
a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting
thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting
thing, a disturbing thing, a repellant thing, a very pretty thing. (Writings
19031932 28283)
At the same time that this something seems a bodily expulse, it is very
clearly some form of creative activity, as Wendy Steiner notes (76). As such,
the variety of aesthetic productions that Stein describes abovea reflec-
tion on her own stylistic diversity as welldisturbs typical evaluations; in a
mode of production modeled on excretory output, a repellent thing is not
necessarily valued below a pretty thing; the important criterion is merely
that the product comes out, in a regular output resistant to blockage, proper
to Fletcherist tenets of regularity. Formally, Steins stylistic position in the
portrait aboveextreme repetition with minor substitutionqualifies as
what Lisa Ruddick describes as Steins anal voice, a compulsive collection
and redigestion of patterned phrases (Reading 81).
For Stein, the excretory and the creative would become so thoroughly
linked that she would coin a portmanteau word combining the two in her
next major publication, Tender Buttons. In this poem Stein inaugurates
a new, more disjunctive style that she describes within the poem itself in
the imperative, only excreate, only excreate a no since (496). As Richard
Bridgman suggests, this neologism puns on the similarity of creation and
excretion (131). The poetic implication here is that a writing practice mod-
eled on excre(a)tion would successfully resist sense, the logical positivist
order that was the telos of a masculinist Enlightenment reason that positions
the intellectual above the material. Stein instead embraces what Ruddick
calls anus sense (Reading 145). Just as Stein deconstructs the tradition
boundaries between good and repellent art above, so would she decon-
struct boundaries that applied to consumption and thus, by proxy, to her

queer appetites, employing repetition to undermine the patriarchal catego-

ries that separate clean from dirty, food from shit. The rules separating dirty
from clean and, likewise, food from excrement are patriarchal in nature, as
suggested by Steins poem Patriarchal Poetry (1927), which performs the
very ordered system against which Steins queer poetics of consumption and
wasting is positioned:
Patriarchal poetry and not meat on Monday patriarchal poetry and meat
on Tuesday. Patriarchal poetry and fish on Friday Patriarchal poetry and
birds on Sunday Patriarchal poetry and chickens on Tuesday patriarchal
poetry and beef on Thursday. (259)
Steins style here is not the playful syntactic disruption of Tender Buttons
but the consciously boring repetition that Stein developed in The Making of
Americans a position to which she would return throughout her writing
career. As Peter Quartermain notes in a reading of Patriarchal Poetry, the
effect of such numbing repetition is that the hierarchies are ironed out, and
we read the language paratactically, nonpatriarchally (Quartermain 36).
Steins style parodically undermines the ostensible message of her writing;
the traditional binarism in which form is subordinated to content is here
reversed. Indeed Cary Nelson describes Patriarchal Poetry as possibly the
only fully realized and rigorous deconstructive poem in American modern-
ism (84).
While the subject of Patriarchal Poetry is literary (a patriarchal poet
might be Eliot or that village explainer, Pound), Steins deconstructive
thrust is most clearly directed against the restrictions placed on food,
restrictions levied by religious stricture and other patriarchal systems of
domination. In this prose poem, Stein parodies such rules through repeti-
tion, showing her distance from them and her awareness that such rules
are enforced for the same arbitrary reasons of purification and control as
those of ritual cleansing and hygiene. Matter is considered base by patriar-
chal culture; rituals and rules of cleanliness exist in order to keep distant the
cerebral, idealist activities of culture from the more domesticand usu-
ally femininizedactivities of translating raw matter into a more palatable
cultural product. Such activities include cooking and waste management,
subjects of Tender Buttons and many of Steins later experimental works.12
As Ruddick points out in an earlier article subsumed into her book
Reading Gertrude Stein (1991), the entire structure of Tender Buttons is pred-
icated on a movement between dirtiness and cleanliness, in which an object
imputed as dirty is fondled into its dialectical opposite.13 (This trans-
formation was in turn connected to a resignification of Stein and Toklass

dirty sexuality. Coo coo come dirty me, coo coo. I am for thee, Stein
writes in A Sonatina Followed by Another [291].) Cleaning appears with
some frequency in Tender Buttons, but it is never isolated as part of a ratio-
nalist design; rather, it is connected to the messier activities of the domestic
sphere in which base matter is sorted and arranged. Stein does not clean
language in the sense that Derrida influentially elaborates in his discussion
of Paul Celan.14 While Stein shares with her modernist peers an interest
in refreshing language dulled through overuse, unlike Pound or Williams,
Stein does so through multiplicity and semiotic excess, resisting positiv-
ist classification and purification. Program and totality are deprecated in
Steins work in favor of breakage and repair.15 For Stein, fragmentation is an
opportunity for reparation, not a crisis.
As Ruddick has suggested, the writing of The Making of Americans is
an extended grappling with and eventual rejection of deforming taxono-
mies, not least the binarism of clean/unclean, which would underwrite the
pathologization of the bodys basest processes as smelly, and sexuality, par-
ticularly queer sexuality, as dirty. All the digesting and dirtying combine
to render The Making of Americans a spectacularly anal text according to
Ruddick, who argues that Stein experiences her telling as a form of rhyth-
mic accumulation and release . . . Steins paragraphs, which fill with and then
evacuate words as if they were faeces, also play with language in a man-
ner reminiscent of the play of children during what classic psychoanalysis
refers to as the anal phase (Reading 77, 7980). This stylistic anality is in
turn thematized within the novel, as Stein wanders from her plot to obses-
sively uncover the bottom natures of her characters (81). Commenting
on her own bottom nature in the novel (such postmodern, self-reflexive, or
constructivist facets add interest to the family narrative), Stein links her
repetitive style with her anal-eroticism: Always at the bottom was loving
repeating being, that was not then there to my conscious being (302).16
One of Steins discoveries in The Making of Americans is in line with the
later structuralist recognition that while the categories of cleanliness and
uncleanliness are universal, the objects categorized as dirty or clean vary
by time and culture; and that furthermore, the purpose of the cleansing
is not necessarily for health reasons, but rather to burnish the social status
of the washer. As Stein writes, Washing is very common, almost every one
does some washing, with some it is only for cleansing, with some it is a
refreshing, with some a ceremonial thing that makes them important to
every one who knows them. Washing is not natural like eating or sleep-
ing (Making 111). Rather, cleansing is a ritual performance undertaken for
reasons of social distinction (including those of race and class). The pas-
sage makes clear Steins proto-structuralist understanding of the differential

impulse of signs, which are rarely tied to any natural essence but rather
depend on binaristic oppositions in which one term is subjugated below
another. Behind Steins sociological observation about cleaning lies a whole
matrix of associations around the unclean that adhere to Steins own sub-
ject position: female, Jewish, lesbian. Formally, the repetition-with-variation
technique that she employs in The Making of Americans (evident in the pas-
sage above) shows Stein working to combat these inherited cultural associa-
tions by flattening out hierarchies through anal repetition.
From Cow-Smelly to Meadowed King

The sea change that Steins writing underwent during the period 191214
was also marked by the introduction of an erotically magnetized cow
into Steins literary imagination. In the earlier Three Lives (1909), the word
cow is invoked to group the maid Lena with rough cow-smelly people
(247). As Dominique Laporte argues in The History of Shit (1978), the sense
of smell is always haunted by the specter of excrement, which fragrance
attempts to cover. Certainly the excremental seems in play here in Steins
negative association of smelly with the excreting bovine animal. Smell is
for Stein often a tool of negative disparagement, as in her witty put-down of
Hemingway, who she claims looks like a modern and smells of the muse-
ums (Autobiography 873). Cow-smelly is also a marker of race and class
abnegation that holds oblique bearing on Steins own subject position. Like
the stolid German maid, Stein was an immigrant whose first language was
German, and it is not entirely surprising that this signifier of excrement
and animality would come to bear race, class, and sexual discrimination
(Three Lives 247).17 Jews were in this period often labeled as dirty, and queer
sexuality was associated with the decay and waste tropologies found in deca-
dent literature.18 In addition, as Retallack points out, Steins own race and
gender views were during this period greatly influenced by the sexist, racist,
homophobic homosexual Otto Weininger, whose sociological study Sex and
Character (1903) was quite popular among other intellectuals like Freud and
Wittgenstein and contained such rhetoric as, In the Jew and the woman,
good and evil are not distinct from one another (309). Although Stein was
influenced by Weiningers theories, her more radical poetries would undo
such fixed stereotypes by emphasizing the mixing, wasting, and dirtying of
such categories.
In A Long Gay Book, two important things begin to happen: first, Stein
begins molting the repetitive style of The Making of Americans for a more
disjunct, playful, and jouissant writing. The project literally changes styles
halfway through, a transformation that Dydo ascribes to Steins initiation

into sexual relations with Toklas, as Stein discovered the concrete, sensual
world in sexual fulfillment (Stein Reader 152). In the process, the cow is
fetishized and remagnetized. No longer is cow a derogatory signifier of the
abject but becomes a slippery reference to textual if not real-life erotic play, as
Stein employs it in Tender Buttons and subsequent writings. Although cow
does not make as many appearances in Tender Buttons as in A Long Gay
Book, they are nevertheless charged ones, which seem to refer both to sexual
and anal contexts, flickering between pleasure and pain. Constipation is
a stated concern in Tender Buttons looking into that place and seeing
a chair did that mean relief, it did, it certainly did not cause constipation
and yet there is a melody (351)and the poems erotic summa is a scene
of bodily traffic that, if not sadomasochistic, certainly combines pain and a
relief that includes access to a meadow (the habitat of cows) and a toilet:
THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER.

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. (326)
Ruddick suggests we read to let as a toilet, albeit within a scene of sexual

violation, in which a woman is degraded like a toilet, a debased vessel for
male desire (Reading 217). Ruddicks homophonic decryption is apt, but the
gender violence of her reading seems at odds with the overall lesbian domestic
erotics of Tender Buttons and with the similarly encrypted reference to Toklas
in the prose poems title, Aider (phonetically encoding Steins alternative
name for Toklas, Ada).19 The previous paragraph/strophe seems clearly
a scene of sexual pleasure, albeit not without protests of resistancestop
touchbut with so many countervailing indications of erotic excess
whow . . . munchersthe prose poem seems overall to square with other
indications that Stein and Toklass erotic relationship bore sadomasochistic
overtones. And what is there to suggest that a toilet should be a vessel for
male desireespecially when it is located in 27 rue de Fleurus? Where
Ruddick reads a female passive to violation, I read a prevailing sense of
permission (to let), which is precisely what makes this a fitting conclusion
to the prose poem and indeed the entire section from which it is drawn.
Cow in the Love Notes

Adapting Ruddicks own argument that an anal voice drives much of Steins
repetitive writing, I want to argue that the indeterminacy of the signifier

cow, which seems to flicker between references to sex, excretion, and tex-
tual completion, reveals that the three activities are imbricated in Steins
imagination. Teasing apart those layers is crucial in understanding the drives
that produced Steins writing, and the dynamics at play in our reading of it.
The love notes that Stein wrote to Toklas throughout their cohabitation rat-
ify the notion that a toilet could be a place of somatic relief and even bodily
pleasure. Over the course of several decades, Stein wrote short love notes to
Toklas in her carnets, the preliminary notebooks in which Stein developed
her first drafts, and interleaved love poems as separate notes in the pages of
the cahiers that contained more developed drafts she intended for Toklas to
type (Dydo, Language 2427). A rosetta stone for the literature, these notes
allow us to construe more clearly the digestive and erotic contexts to some of
Steins most oblique writings, especially those containing the incanted cow,
a word repeated in the notes with remarkable frequency.
While the notes are in many ways less erotically charged than published
texts like Lifting Belly and Tender Buttons, suppression and secrecy dog
their historyperhaps because of their referential clarity. Toklas seems to
have been particularly protective of sharing the notes with others, perhaps
because of a suspicion that they would be judged, as Dydo indeed deems
them, as embarrassingly bad (Language 27). A selection of the notes, the
entirety of which are maintained in the Stein archives at Yale Universitys
Beinecke Library, was partially published in a posthumous volume edited by
Kay Turner, entitled Baby Precious Always Shines (2000). Yet even this pub-
lication was controversial, as the notes were not written with any intention
of publication, and were almost not preserved in the archive where Steins
writings are maintained. They arrived to the archive in 1947 in a file mys-
teriously labeled autrespondence (a portmanteau word meaning perhaps
other correspondence.) The inclusion of this particular file was accidental,
as Turner reports: When [Curator Donald] Gallup apprised Toklas of her
unintended gift, she at first insisted that the stray notes be destroyed, then
relented with a demand that they not be made publicly available (7). The
notes were inaccessible to scholars until 1981, when the Beinecke made them
available for readingalthough it would not be until 1995 that they were
officially catalogued for inclusion in the Stein-Toklas archives.
The love notes are lineated like lyric poems, unlike the genre-defying
prose of Tender Buttons. Lacking the same level of sonic-textual delight as
the literature, the notes depend less on repetition and rhythmic play and
more on simple rhymes. This may be one reason that the notes have attracted
few critics besides Turner (who herself admits she approaches the notes as
a lesbian reader and folklorist [5]). Perhaps protecting Steins legacy,
Steins most careful editor and critic, Ulla Dydo, takes little notice of them,
not even to account for the way that cow may suggest different readings of

A Sonatina Followed by Another and A Book Concluding with As a Wife

Has a Cow a Love Story. Retallack meanwhile dismisses them in a foot-
note, drily noting that there is a vast difference between the literature of
love and love notes (Introduction 80, n41). Yet as Retallacks comments
suggests, the distance between the notes and the literature at least allows
us to measure Steins achievement, making clear how the literature is much
more carefully composedneither automatic nor the unconscious play
of childs verseas has been claimed by her detractors.20 Although full of
routine blandishment and a Baby Woojums childishness that Wyndham
Lewis, for one, abhorred in Stein, the love notes are not without interest
to the literary critic. As Sonja Streuber argues, the notes reveal how Steins
personal, psychological, and cultural biographies are intricately interwo-
ven, and whose . . . intimacies with Alice have, in fact, contributed much to
the literary, if not the cultural, history of the Twentieth Century (142).
Even beyond what they reveal about Stein and Toklass relationship, the
notes occupy a unique register of performative language (cow come out)
that has been largely unexamined in Steins work and which ramifies in the
formal literature as well.
Most importantly for this study, the notes provide a glimpse into mate-
rial conditions of the Steins writing practice, and reveal that Alices part
in the making of Gertrude Stein is much greater than previously assumed
(Streuber 143). While the love notes are composed using similar vocabulary
as in many poems, including a reduced vocabulary, their semiotic economy
is more stable and thus interpretable. Wifey is always Toklas. Hubby is
always Stein.21 The notes relative stability of referencethey still evince
some slippage and multivalence in the case of the cowoffers a window
onto the syncopated rhythms of Stein and Toklass work and sleeping habits,
which structured the writing of the notes. While Toklas slept, Stein worked
late into the night: Baby precious Hubby worked and / loved his wifey,
sweet sleepy wifey, / dear dainty wife, baby precious sleep / sweetly and long
is hubbys song (Turner 8). Many of the notes refer to Toklass sleep and
Steins work, often making reference to the process of writing itself, as when
Stein notes, a little spider just went over the paper while I was writing
(88). Other times Toklas becomes a page for reading, as does Stein: She is a
tender page / and every page is open to / me and every page in me / is open
to she (17). At other times, Stein subverts this masculinist trope, associating
Toklas with her writing instrument:
Baby precious
The pen seems to
be writing beautifully and not
blotting at all, I thought it was

because it was not full enough,

I think it blots when it needs filling,
and my baby needs filling with love
every second and she is she is
she is filled up full every
second, and a cow comes out
not every second but nicely every
day, and no pains everywhere (98)
This note reveals how closely related are love, writing, and the cow, which
provides relief and at times delivery from pain on a daily basis.
In the notes, cow carries fewer explicit erotic overtones, but rather
signifies as a production of Toklass body, one that causes distress rather
than pleasure, a distress that is nevertheless treated by Stein with humor
and cajoling. While the note above does not entirely obliterate an erotic
reading of the cow, elsewhere the cow seems quite plainly to refer to evacu-
ation and a related diminishment of pain. Stein describes Toklass smelly
relief (95, 94) from the pain of constipation that will emerge from Toklass
little behind (28) and will just plop nicely into the water (26). In this
privileging of digestive regularity, the notes reflect the imprint of Fletcherist
ideology, in which a production every day is crucial in avoiding the scourge
of constipation. And indeed, Stein suggests that a stiffy blockage is to be
avoided in favor of a softer flow:
All will be well with she.

Tummy soft and cow come out,
No stiffy in my baby stout,
No stiffy in her arms and hands
Only kisses where it softly lands (99)
If the notion of kisses meeting the landing place of bodily excretion seems
strange, it is not the most unusual transformation Stein uses to express her
love for Toklas in the notestransformations that involve the mixing of
inner and outer states, as Stein would describe her literary project. Stein
transforms herself into ink that fills up Toklas, but also into smoke that
will stimulate Toklas into moving her bowels: my baby will smoke / me
instead of cigarettes and that / will do baby precious just as much / good
(100). Stein wishes to be not only the remedy of Toklass constipation, but
the food that Toklas will ingest as well: I wish I was always good just as /
I am my babys daily food (91). In addition to cigarettes, another remedy

Tolkas employed to ameliorate her constipation was the consumption of

fiber-containing apples: I love my love bless / her and the two little apples
inside her / bless her, and the cow that comes out (63). In the published lit-
erature, apples and cows also appear together, in a phrase of Steins, repeated
frequently in A Sonatina Followed by Another, of Calville cow: Lovely
sweet. / Calville cow. / And that it is (33).22 In English, Calville cow is
witty word play, with calville commenting redundantly on the already
diminutive relation of calf to cow. In French, however, Calville is a
type of apple, one often used in tarte tatins. If, as Turner notes, cigarettes
and apples were two practical remedies to Toklass constipation, then a
Calville cow denotes a successful elimination caused by the ingestion of
a fibrous Calville pomme: in Fletcherist terms, apple feces. The implication
that food and waste are integrally related, and that the type of food eaten
will engender a more amenable variety of wastea cow that is sweet smelly
and complete (67) and which comes out gently / primly and completely
(71)is in line with Fletchers Taylorist beliefs that the right kind of input
will fuel the corpoautomobile more efficiently, reducing disproportion-
ately excessive waste and producing instead a more ash-like waste (88).
Another Stein word, Caesar, often appears in tandem with the cows and
provides more clues about the dimensions of this excretory/erotic scenario.
Richard Bridgman wrote astutely of the Caesars in his pioneering study
Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970) that they appear repeatedly as custodians
and masters of ceremonies for the cow, and thus may indicate Stein herself
(who in middle age wore her hair in a Caesar style), or an instrument that
helps to produce the cow, whether Steins encouraging words, or an actual
object (152). For just as cow has several meanings, so too does Caesar
seem also to refer to a material instrument that attends this theater: perhaps
a bedpan, an enema, or a hot water bottle: Caesars are round a little longer
than wide but not oval (Two Poems, qtd. in Bridgman 152).23 Cow, Caesar,
orgasm, excrement, enema, custodian, master, ceremony, dildo?there is
indeed what Williams would call a bewildering volume of possibilities
hovering around the edges of this textual ceremony. Practically, we might
speculate that for Stein and Toklas, the act of evacuation took on erotic
overtones and may have been coextensive or interchangeable with sexual
intercourse (which may too have involved instruments). But while the love
notes may bear this specific performative injunction for Stein to have a
cow, the words itself, as is typical of Steins multiplicative poetics of excess,
may refer to any number of processes and products centering on the south-
ern zone of Toklass body: sexual congress, colonic cleansing, dildo, enema,
orgasm, excrement.

Cows and Textual Performance

An aspect of Steins poetics that emerges strongly in the love notes but has
not been elsewhere much described is the performative quality of Steins
writing. This performativity is related to the phrase cow now that appears
across the love notes. While the preponderance of now owes no doubt
to the easily availability of the word as a rhyme for cow, the invocation
of temporal presence reflects Steins acute sense of the purpose and read-
erly reception of her writing. This circuit is made particularly salient in the
notes, which imply that as Stein slept, Toklas would read the note penned
the night before and, as a result of Steins words, have a cow. Stein envi-
sioned the notes themselves as instrumental, a suppository of words with a
singular purpose: to stimulate Toklas to peristalsis in the now of reading.
(As Stein writes in one of the notes, I speak to little stomach / I counsel
mister to be good [84].) The notes are mostly untitled but one bears the
title Command Poems, suggesting that Stein in the notes was exercising
the imperative power of How To Do Things with Words, as philosopher J. L.
Austin titled his seminal series of lectures elaborating a theory of performa-
tive language. This performativity is distinct from the notion of oral perfor-
mance that Retallack uses to describe Steins language games: oral-musical
properties of [Steins] texts come most alive in spoken or sung performance
(Introduction 13). It is also distinct from de Manian performativity that
describes nonreferential slippage, in which a writers intention and the texts
performance are divorced (as the dancer is separate from the dance in de
Mans reading of Yeatsan antireferentiality that Stein herself employs to
an unprecedented degree [1112]). But the love notes make legible a distinct
brand of performativity, which is Steins belief that her words can perform
an action in the world, in this case, the relief of Toklass cow when she
reads the notes.24
The love notes thus establish a literary interval between the writing
and the reading that is crucial to Steins poetics and the phenomenon of
reading Stein. In the notes, two poles mark the interval between composi-
tion and reception: Steins writing of the note and Toklass reading of it,
which activates its performative potential, that is, baby has a cow now
(emphasis added), when the note is read. In the literature Stein maintains
this awareness of the texts performance, but the reception is no longer that
of a single reading and a single performance of an action (cow now) but an
infinity of possible subsequent readings, such that the text becomes a ambi-
ence of now or a continuous present, as Steins describes her method in
Composition as Explanation. She writes, The time of the composition
is a natural thing and the time in the composition is a natural thing it is

a natural thing and it is a contemporary thing. The time of the composi-

tion is the time of the composition (502). Steins poetics at its most radical
and successful does not engage description or narrativethat is, prior or
imagined real-world events archived in the writing. Rather, Steins writing
is activated as a contemporary thing because the text is primarily about
its own composition and the always contemporary experience of reading
it, a present that is continuous in being always available for reactivation. We
might thus judge Stein to be using the cow to play with and confuse time
in the composition and time of the composition in this passage from A
Book Concluding with as a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story:
Have it as having having it as happening, happening to have it as having,

having to have it as happening. Happening and have it as happening and
having it happen as happening and having to have it happen as happen-
ing, and my wife has a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife
having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and hav-
ing a cow now, my wife has a cow and now. My wife has a cow. (462)
While the passage may qualify as description of a real-world eventSteins

wife having an orgasm or evacuationit seems equally a reflection on
this process of textual performativity. When does happening occur, and
what kind of possession or having results from this happening? Stein is
exploring the gap between action in the presenthaving a cow nowand
the continuous present of subsequent possession: My wife has a cow (i.e.,
possesses a cow). The implication is that the cow is both a performative pro-
cess (Cow come out cow come out cow come out, as Stein writes in Emp
Lace [239]) and the result of that process: the stool, the relief, the typescript
that Toklas produces by reactivating the time of the composition on the
keys of her typewriter. Dydo writes of this prose piece, As making love
concludes with a cow, so writing concludes with a book (451). While I
question Dydos exclusion of the erotic-excremental valences of the cow,
I follow her in seeing the product of Toklass cow factory to be Steins
own texts. The cow is the product of Steins composition, and as well, the
product of reading it.
In support of this interpretation, consider that these notes were often
interleaved in the manuscripts Stein would write at night for Toklas to type
in the morning upon rising. Thus Toklass bodily output and her production
of Steins writing were implicated, sometimes explicitly, as in the following
note: As surely as Life publishes / me and we get material / and baby has a
cow so / surely will the allies / win (Turner 83). The material production of

the cow is here equated with (magazine) publication and a general program
of efficient success, as Toklas was indeed crucial to the successful outing
of Steins often unruly writing into the world: typing it, arranging for its
publication, and generally tending to its promotion and circulation. What
Stein would dirty, Toklas would clean.
Considering the cow as the product of Stein and Toklass factory
helps us theorize the psychological dimensions of Stein and Toklass rela-
tionship, as well as Steins writing process. It also speaks more broadly to the
pressures exacted when Taylorist principles are imported into the domestic
space. In A Sonatina Followed by Another, Stein declares, We are won-
derfully productive, a privileging of Taylorist productivity, implicating both
Toklass household management and Steins writing practice (291). There is
perhaps as well a more psychologically complex side to this partnership to be
acknowledged and explored in Steins appropriation of Toklass body. Steins
attention to Toklass waste may have been a way of elevating Toklass own
productions to the level of Steins, thus granting her parity in the relation-
ship. The notes are a testament to the procreative power of Alices pen, not
only in fostering Steins literary career, but also in her responses to the notes.
(In addition to the ten folders of notes from Stein in the Beinecke archives
is a single folder of notes from Toklas, some of which Turner reproduces in
Baby Precious.) Or, on the other hand, was Toklass blockage an unconscious
resistance to the hierarchical circuits of labor, power, and efficiency to which
she was subjecta protest against Steins implicit injunction to produce her
writings with Taylorist efficiency? Constipation and writers block are often
linked, indicating a resistance to the pressures of the marketcertainly a
factor faced by Stein and Toklas in their search to attract publishers for
Steins experimental writing. Discussing the use of digestive tropes in avant-
garde writing, Michel Delville notes that the subjects vulnerability to con-
stipation also underlines the potential dangers of a dysfunctional exchange
between self and world (57). Whether a fantasmatic projection of Stein or
a real complaint of Toklas, the constipation imputed to Toklas in the notes
and the literature seems a sign of dysfunction in the smooth management
of the households consumption-production economy, and evidence of dys-
functional exchange written on the body.
Leos Criticism and Outing the Cow

Domestic dysfunction did not begin with Steins relationship to Toklas,
but rather originated in Steins conflict with her brother Leo. In this final
section, I speculate that Gertrudes difficult relationship with her brother,
and her split from him, haunted Steins obsession with Toklass digestion

and informed her fetishization of the cow. Before the arrival of Toklas
into Steins life, Gertrude and Leo lived together in 27 rue de Fleurus
and were remarkably close, to the degree that some, like the art collector
Isabella Stewart Gardner, suggested an incestuous bond (Wineapple 302).
It was not only in terms of intimacy and intensity that Leos compan-
ionship prepared Gertrude for her partnership with Alice, but in making
alimentary complaint an aspect of that intimacy, for Leo made a career
of pursuing solutions to his stomach problems (alas, at the expense of his
writing career).25 Furthermore, if the imagined blockage in Steins writing
circuit was in complicated ways responding to anticipated resistance to her
output, Leo was the original and most stinging critic to voice that resis-
tance. While Leo initially mentored Gertrude in aesthetic temperament,
inviting her to Paris after she abandoned her medical studies and, more
importantly, introducing her to the radical artists whose work they would
collect before their split, he eventually grew critical of Steins writing and
many of the artists they had formerly admired. He complained, Both
[Picasso] and Gertrude are using their intellects, which they aint got, to
do what would need the finest critical tact, which they aint got neither,
and they are in my belief turning out the most Godalmighty rubbish that
is to be found (Mellow 2023). According to Ruddick, Stein in turn
overcame Leos overweening criticism through the writing of The Making
of Americans, a work of patricide, in which we see Stein murdering the
various fathers who seemed to stand in the way of all her sexual and
artistic powers, including Leo and the bourgeois patriarchs she had left
behind in America (5).
But it was not just in Steins fiction where Gertrude and Leos split was
enacted. It is also in criticism and through criticism that Gertrude performs
this patricide of Leo, which led to his departure from 27 rue du Fleurus
in 1914. When Gertrude was asked if she had ever thought of becoming a
critic, since she spoke so intelligently about writing. Stein replied, Its
funny that you should say that. As a matter of fact, I did, long ago, but I
found that analysis is not in my line. Ill leave that to Leohe loves to chew
the cud. I want to do something more vital than write about the writings of
others (Mellow 1617). Stein, while possessing a magnificent and domi-
nant gift for talk, was aware of the dangers of allowing speech to supersede
writing. In her lecture, What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So
Few of Them, Stein notes:
Talking essentially has nothing to with creation. I talk a lot I like to talk
and I talk even more than that I may say I talk most of the time and I
listen a fair amount too and as I have said the essence of being a genius is

to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening
but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing
to do with creation. (355)
While Stein may talk most of the time, this talk has nothing to do with
creation, a more vaunted realm than mere criticism, which, in Steins
view, amounts to little more than the cows twice-chewed cud. The animus
Gertrude musters against the recycled talk of criticism may be directed
as much toward Leos vocal criticism of her writing as toward the genre
itself. (Indeed, Steins own literary criticism would first emerge as publicly
performed lecturesi.e., as talk.) In characterizing Leos critical faculty as
chew[ing] the cud, Stein diminishes Leos criticism of her own work, while
simultaneously highlighting Leos inability to convert his talk into some-
thing more substantial and productive. Like cudthe cows domaintalk
begins and ends in the mouth and never meets the page. Not incidentally,
this linking of criticism and cow in the Stein intertext was not limited to
criticism from Leo. During the infamous Armory Show of 1913, in which
Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase was first exhibited, Mabel Dodge
circulated a word portrait of Steins that prompted one journalist to mock
both the art and Stein in pointedly bovine terms:
I called the canvas Cow with Cud

And hung it on the line,
Altho to me twas vague as mud,
Twas clear to Gertrude Stein (Mellow 171)
Cow with Cud is decipherable to Stein but remains opaque or vague to

the general audience, much as the word cow would function in Steins
writings. (Is the journalist also implying that Stein herself is cow-like in her
ability to recognize the cow?) If criticism of Gertrude associated her with the
cow, Gertrude would in turn associate the cow with criticism.
With the phrase chews the cud, Stein may also be caricaturing Leos
adherence to Fletcherism, whose primary methodological control was exces-
sive, methodical chewing, such that Fletcher himself was termed the Great
Masticator (Engs 127). The well-disciplined Fletcherist was encouraged to
chew slowly and thoroughly, as a cow might ruminate its meal of grass,
in order to improve digestion, reduce weight, and alleviate constipation
and other maladies. And while many members of the Stein family suffered
from digestive problems, Leos distress was especially acute (owing perhaps
to his fathers verbal abuse; at the dinner table Daniel Stein would force
his adolescent son to eat boiled vegetables, knowing that they made him

ill [Wineapple 26]). Although digestive problems obsessed the adult Leo,
distracting him from his writing, for at least a two-year period during Leo
and Gertrudes cohabitation at 27 rue de Fleurus, Leo found some relief
in Fletcherism, as recounted in a letter to Mabel Weeks, dated July 1910:
Fletcherism, which I took up two and a half year ago, at once put an end to
all the acute bowel troubles that I used constantly to have and also it cured
me once and for all of the colds which used to be chronic. It also cured me
in the main of the broken sleep which had come to be chronic and also of
the tired feeling ( Journey 33). Leo was not alone in this adherence; various
members of Steinss milieu, witnessing Leos devotion, often attempted the
treatment.26 Mary Berenson, wife of art critic Bernard Berenson, notes in
her diary that Leo spared us no detail of the effect on stomach & intestines
of his Fletcherist adventures (Wineapple 282). Even if Stein did not person-
ally subscribe to the remedy of Fletcherism, she would have been acutely
aware of Leos dedication to the diet, and the tenets if not the practice of
Fletcherism clearly informed her concern with Toklass regularity and,
accordingly, Steins productive economy of writing. But could it also have
influenced the poetics of the page as well?27
In addition to Leo, another important adherent to Fletcherism was Henry
James, the one writer contemporary with Stein whom she openly and con-
sistently admired.28 Fletcherism seemed to have provided James relief from
constipation, but it may also have influenced his writing. Tim Armstrong
argues that Jamess regurgitated style and in-depth revisions of his New
York Edition are influenced by Fletchers program of chewing and rechew-
ing each morsel before ingesting it, such that the revision process becomes
a chewing-over and purification of Jamess corpus (103). In its influence
on Jamess writing, Fletcherism thus allows us to see writing as rumina-
tion, Armstrong argues (106). In his letters, Henry confided the secrets of
his constipation and diet measures to his brother William James, who was
Steins teacher at Harvard Annex. Is it possible that Jamess adherence to
Fletcherism was known to Gertrude, perhaps via communication through
Henrys brother William, who visited Gertrude in Paris while she lived with
Leo? While Stein herself rarely revised, Steins sentences foreground repeti-
tion and regurgitation much more apparently than Jamess impacted sen-
tences do. In her most repetitive works, it is as if Stein were chewing over a
word or phrasea single chewed-over morseluntil it liquefies, as Fletcher
recommended. Consumption was for Stein not merely an erotic vehicle to
explore the bodys inner and outer realities, it was also on the practical level
an available model for understanding the rhythms and structure of her own
writing. In her Autobiography, Stein notes of her dog Basket that listen-
ing to the rhythm of his water drinking made her recognise the difference

between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and that
sentences are not (Autobiography 907). The dogs rhythmic lappingnot
unlike the Fletcherists rhythmic chewingsparks Steins understanding
that her own sentences are automatic, machinic, much like the Fletcherists
rhythmic, repetitive intake of food or like the dogs lapping.
Indeed, what figure could function as a better emblem of writing as
rumination than the cow? Despite Steins rejection of Fletcherism, it
seems to have edged into her unconscious and to have influenced her habits,
her writing, and her relationships with Leo and Toklas. Yet the question
remains: If Stein was increasingly estranged from Leo and resistant to fol-
lowing Fletcherist principles herself, what psychological factors would com-
pel her to pull Toklas into following a Fletcherist cult of regularity associated
with her brother? In answering what is at once a biographical and a textual
riddle, I want to venture a hypothesis that Stein is not only projecting her
concern with poetic productivity onto Toklass cows, but that the cow,
as a product of Fletcherist concern for waste, is a remainder of Leos pres-
ence, haunting the circuits of alimentary concern and productivity within
the walls of 27 rue de Fleurus. According to biographers and accounts of
acquaintances, Gertrudes break with Leo was largely unacknowledged;
thus it is a reasonable speculation to suppose that Leos departure went in
a literal sense unmourned by Gertrude, developing into what Freud diag-
noses as melancholia, in which the unmourned object is incorporated into
the psyche and then subject to recrimination. In The Ego and the Id, Freud
writes that melancholia does not depend on death or a departure to become
arousedalthough that too was the case in the departure of Leobut can
even be caused by a sense of injustice:
In melancholia, the occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the
most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those
situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can import
feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an already
existing ambivalence. (251)
Gertrude was certainly slighted by Leos criticism, and her relationship to

the cow is accordingly marked by ambivalence and a sense of recrimina-
tion: the cow is both nursed and cajoled out of Toklass body and thus out
of 27 rue de Fleurus.29
One of the most innovative and epochal readings of Freuds theory of
melancholia occurs in the work of Judith Butler, who cannily deploys mel-
ancholia to theorize gender imitation and performativity. Butler argues
that a reified heterosexuality and its phobic rejection of its binaristic other,

homosexuality, results from a melancholic refusal of an original homosexual

desire that is then incorporated melancholically as gender. In her engage-
ment of Freud, Butler asks where such melancholic identification would be
located, since Freud himself does not resolve this question. Butler finally
argues that the melancholic identification is incorporated on the surface of
the body. In Gender Trouble, Butler explicates this melancholic performance
by taking up Lacans figure of the mask. While my own argument differs
from Butlers in that I locate Steins melancholic identification not in her
own skin, but in Toklas and her bodily refuse, Butlers discussion of the
dynamics underlying this incorporationdynamics of simultaneous refusal
and preservationdo seem to animate Steins and Toklass Fletcherist per-
formances of Leo. Butler explains:
If every refusal is, finally, a loyalty to some other bond in the present or
past, refusal is simultaneously preservation as well. The mask thus con-
ceals the loss, but preserves (and negates) this loss through its conceal-
ment. The mask is taken on through the process of incorporation which
is a way of inscribing and then wearing a melancholic identification in
and on the body; in effect, it is the signification of the body in the mold
of the Other who has [been] refused. Dominated through appropriation,
every refusal fails, and the refuser becomes part of the psychic refuse of
the refused. (4950)
The notion of psychic refuse in Butlers formulation goes some distance in

illuminating how Steins obsession with Toklass bodily refuse on one hand
reanimates Leo through a performative citing of his Fletcherism and, on the
other hand, expels him through the ritual act of elimination. Cow come
out Stein writes to Toklas, a textual peformative directed as much to Leo
(the psychic refuse of the refused) as to Toklass cow: to come out of the
body, where Leo has been melancholically inscribed, and also out of the 27
rue de Fleurus, from which Stein physically banished him, but where his
specter lingered. Steins citation of the unwanted element (the cow, Leo) is
haunted by the very object it refuses; if Toklas was both the substitute body
of Steins writings, and the machine that distributed them to the world, the
specter of Leo animated their productions, both in Steins melancholic reen-
actment of his Fletcherism, and in her success in overwhelming his criticism
in a blanketing expanse of writing.
Earlier in the chapter I sketched various usages of performativity, and
two of these lineages Stein seems to yoke together in her various deploy-
ments of the word cow. The de Manian use of performativity is often
associated with the divorce of signifier and signified. That this phrase should

emerge in obverse relation to Austins dependence on the marriage vow I

do as the exemplary speech-act performative is suggestive in its irony. It is
also, I argue, the crux of Steins performative poetics. For when Stein writes,
You manufacture cow by vows, in A Sonatina Followed by Another, she
describes the performativity of her own writing, a performativity that effects
a reality in Toklass body through language. Yet when Stein describes cow
as a vow in A Sonatina Followed by Another, I also hear Austins norma-
tive marriage vow I do being torqued, queered, sullied, and remade.30 If
Stein and Toklass union was made possible by the departure of Leo from 27
rue de Fleurus, it is an evacuation that is consecrated anew every time the
cow is performatively outed. Cow come out may be Stein and Toklass
version of I do, a kind of queer vow consecrated daily through poetic anal
rites. Love has indeed pitched her mansion in the place of excrement, but it
is Stein and Toklass genius to queer that pitch and make of it a poetics.

Index
Abish, Walter, 129 The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,

Abramovi, Marina, 136, 192n19 57, 174n20
Acconci, Vito, 1889n1 The Instruction Manual, 63
Acker, Kathy, 136 The Minstrel Boy, 78
Adorno, Theodor, xi, 12, 106, 138, 162 Pyrography, 667, 70
Aestheticist writing, 68, 123, 168n10 Reported Sightings, 177n6, 180n23
Agamben, Giorgio, 15962, 195n12 Rutabagas and Farm Implements in
Allen, Donald, 17 a Landscape, 14
Altieri, Charles, 82 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 3,
Ammons, A. R., 17, 16970n19 58, 79, 177n25
anality, 213, 3943, 11722, 14856, Some Trees, 7981, 86
176n28, 187n24, 188n267, Street Musicians, 8990, 183n38
194n30 The Tennis Court Oath, 58,
Andrews, Bruce, 136, 143, 153 6970, 79
Arendt, Hannah, 13 The Thinnest Shadow, 81
Arman, 103, 180n23 Three Poems, 58, 734, 77
Armstrong, Tim, 36, 53, 172n8, 175n26 Turandot, 78
Ash, John, 82, 182n32 Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a
Ashbery, John, 3, 4, 14, 15, 16, 19, Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
201, 23, 24, 5790, 91, 1056, 182n36
118, 159, 174n20, 17683, The Vermont Notebook, 19, 24,
186n17, 1867n20, 192n16 5890, 159, 17683
Business Personals, 74 White, 78
Chinatown, 78 Auden, W. H., 778, 99100, 11820,
Chinese Whispers, 80 178n11, 181n28, 188n25
Europe, 69 Austin, J. L., 4850, 56, 121, 175n24
The Fairies Song, 61, 849, avant-garde. See mass culture and the
179n20 avant-garde
Flow Chart, 21, 61, 79
Girls on the Run, 789 Banta, Marta, 11, 31, 32
Haibun, 182 Barthes, Roland, 133, 155, 172n6

218 Index
Bataille, Georges, 1921, 1701n21, camp, 24, 823, 91122, 135,

171n23, 181n27, 192n18 185n1317, 1856n17,
Baudelaire, Charles, x, 17, 100, 184n9 187n22, 193n27
Bauman, Zygmunt, 170n20 Carmody, Teresa, 1889n1
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 10, 29 Chaplin, Charlie, 11
Beckett, Samuel, 17, 118, 148, 150 Cixous, Hlne, 172n6
Benjamin, Walter, x, 17, 104, 12930, Cohen, William, 18
189n2 conceptual writing, 18895, 1889n1,
Berenson, Bernard and Mary, 53 190n59, 192n16. See also
Bergvall, Caroline, 137, 141, 152, Bergvall, Caroline; Dworkin,
1889n1, 190n6 Craig; Fitterman,
Berlin, Peter, 185n15 Rob; Goldsmith, Kenneth;
Bernstein, Charles, 20, 136, 143, 190n9 Place, Vanessa
Berrigan, Ted, 186n17 containment policy and homosexuality,
Berryman, John, 94 1115, 24, 65, 802, 162. See also
Bersani, Leo, 185n1314 Lavender Scare
Bishop, Elizabeth, 66, 101, 167n4, Cornell, Joseph, 103, 180n23
188n25 Costello, Bonnie, 62
Blair, Sarah, 30 Coultas, Brenda, 17
Bloom, Harold, 789, 183n38 Craft, Christopher, 182n31
Bockris, Victor, 193n29 Crane, Hart, 183n38
Bois, Yves-Alain, 167n2, 181n27 Crase, Douglas, 65
Bk, Christian, 123, 126, 136, 138, Creeley, Robert, 66
1889n1, 190n6, 190n7, 192n19 Cronon, William, 61
Bolter, Jay David, 12930 Cunningham, Merce, 139, 141, 192n20
Boon, Marcus, 130
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 1323 Darger, Henry, 789
Brainard, Joe, 58, 62, 76, 82, 847, 99, Davidson, Michael, 8, 9, 1315, 138,
1014, 177n3, 182n34, 184n10, 154, 168n11, 172n5, 177n5, 183n3
1856n17 de Certeau, Michel, 133
Bridgman, Richard, 39, 47 de Kooning, Willem, 147
Bromwich, David, 70 de Man, Paul, 48, 556
Brown, Bill, 127 Debord, Guy, 133
Brown, Nicholas, 167n3 DeKoven, Marianne, 19, 31, 172n5,
Brown, Norman O., 22, 166 172n6
Browne, Laynie, 1889n1 Delany, Samuel R., 17
Brummel, Beau, 109 DeLillo, Don, 17
Burroughs, William, 141, 14950, Delville, Michel, 37, 50
192n17, 193n29 DEmilio, John, 6, 83
Butler, Judith, 546, 60, 108, 178n8, Derrida, Jacques, 20, 41, 173n14
183n4 dtournement, 1313, 141, 147, 149
Dick, Philip K., 190n7
Cage, John, 5, 25, 125, 126, 136, Dickens, Charles, 113
13842, 1435, 147, 1889n1, digital culture, 4, 25, 12434, 1506,
192n201, 193n23 190n67, 1901n9, 191n15

Index 219
Divine, 115, 187n22 Fleissner, Jennifer, 33, 172n8

Doctorow, E. L., 17 Fletcher, Angus, 62, 178n12
Dodge, Mabel, 37, 172n9 Fletcher, Horace, 323, 36, 523,
Donegan, Cheryl, 143, 1489 175n27. See also Fletcherism
Douglas, Mary, 17, 18 Fletcherism, 1011, 24, 2837, 506,
Drucker, Johanna, 126, 130, 137, 172n78, 175n26, 175n27,
190n7, 191n10 176n30
Dubois, Andrew, 58, 63, 7980, 84, Ford, Mark, 58
88, 177n4 formalist criticism, 23, 25, 12355,
Duchamp, Marcel, 52, 62, 126, 127, 13642, 159
141, 193n28 Forster, E. M., 83, 88
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 6, 8, 138, Foster, Hal, 167n2
140, 154 Foucault, Michel, 56, 133
Duran, Carolus, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 16, 213, 545,
Dworkin, Craig, 1234, 127, 129, 11617, 149, 181n27, 188n26
130, 131, 135, 1368, 142, 143, Frost, Robert, 179n18
1889n1, 190n6, 195n31 Fussell, Paul, 187n21
Dydo, Ulla, 31, 42, 44, 175n27, 176n1
Gaard, Greta, 178n10
ecocriticism, 612, 629, 8290, Gallup, Donald, 44
124, 15766, 178n912. Gangel, Sue, 58, 64
See also queer theory Genet, Jean, 150
Edelman, Lee, 23 Ginsberg, Allen, 13842, 1445
Efficiency Movement, 1011, 2834, 124 Giorno, John, 147, 193n28
and body image, 357 Girard, Ren, 105, 154
See also Fletcherism; Taylorism Goffman, Erving and spoiled
Eliot, T.S., 3, 68, 12, 13, 16, 40, 69, identity, 5, 14, 88
123, 169n14, 1889n1 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 3, 4, 5, 21, 23,
Elmslie, Kenward, 84, 186n17 25, 12359, 18895
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 74 Against Expression, 130, 131, 1889n1
Epstein, Andrew, 734, 84, 86, 8990, Day, 126, 128, 1313
99, 106, 182n36, 185n12, 188n28 Fidget, 141, 1505
I ll Be Your Mirror, 1467
Felski, Rita, 168n11, 172n5 No. 111 2.7.9610.20.96, 129
feminist criticism, 811, 1314, Seven American Deaths and Disasters,
17, 1819, 357, 108, 1235, 126
13642, 14850, 1525, 178n10 Soliloquy, 128, 1418, 1556, 190n8
Fielding, Henry, 106 Sports, 126
Fifer, Elizabeth, 38 Traffic, 126
Firbank, Ronald, 106, 175n25 Uncreative Writing, 124, 126,
Fish, Stanley, ix 127, 129, 130, 134, 144, 154,
Fitterman, Rob, 123, 130, 137, 1923n22, 193n26
1889n1 The Weather, 126
Flarf, 128, 1889n1, 189n4, 191n12 Gordon, Nada, 137
Flatley, Jonathan, 141 Grangaud, Michelle, 137

220 Index
Gray, Timothy, 121, 1867n20 Kashevaroff, Xenia Andreyevna, 139

Greenberg, Clement, 13, 106 Katz, Alex, 182n33
Grusin, Richard, 12930 Kelly, Robert, 64
Guest, Barbara, 186n17 Kennan, George F. 14
Gysin, Brion, 134, 192n17 Kent, Kathryn, 810, 30, 36, 175n27
Kidd, Benjamin, 169n13
Halperin, David, 183n4 Kinnell, Galway, 64
Halpern, Rob, 15966 Kittler, Friedrich, 130
Haralson, Eric, 174n18 Klaich, Dolores, 31
Hartley, Hal, 170n20 Koch, Kenneth, 17, 91, 169n18,
Hawkins, Gay, 17 181n28, 186n1718
Hejinian, Lyn, 135 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 105, 116
Hemingway, Ernest, 42, 1712n4, Kostelanetz, Richard, 21
174n18, 174n22 Kotz, Liz, 143, 1456, 153, 1923n20,
Herring, Terrell Scott, 94 193n26
Hines, Thomas S., 193n23 Krauss, Rosalind, 167n2, 181n27
Hoarders (television show), 170n20 Kristeva, Julia, xii, 18, 172n6
Hocquenghem, Guy, 149, 194n30 Kubota, Shigeko, 192n19
Holly, Carol, 175n26
homosociality, 83, 90, 101, 105, Lacan, Jacques, 151, 194n30
1378, 1424, 148, 1535. Lamos, Colleen, 154
See also queer theory Language poetry, 4, 201, 79, 1356,
Horkheimer, Max, 162 143, 1534, 168n8
Housman, A. E., 7, 182n30 Laporte, Dominique, 42
Howard, Richard, 190n8 Lavender Scare, 12, 1415, 801, 162
Howe, Susan, 136 Leddy, Michael, 78
Hoy, Dan, 189n4 Lehman, David, 81, 110, 186n18
Huebler, Douglas, 127 Lessig, Lawrence, 191n15, 192n18
Huysman, J. K., 7, 109, 174n18 Levin, Kim, 167n2
Huyssen, Andreas, 9, 168n12, 172n5 Levy, Ellen, 72, 177n34, 182n29
Lewis, Wyndham, 4, 35, 45, 123
James, Henry, 37, 53, 175n26, Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 58
176n28, 188n25 Lippard, Lucy, 127
James, William, 53, 1723n11 Locke, John, 183n2
Jameson, Fredric, 4, 989, 107, Lolordo, Nick, 79
1334, 142, 192n16 Longenbach, James, 2
Jarry, Alfred, 17, 156 Loos, Adolf, 123, 168n10
Johnson, Ryan, 18 Lowell, Amy, 123
Jones, Ernest, 22 Lowell, Robert, 925, 101, 167n4,
Jordan, Bob, 117 183n5, 1834n6
Joyce, James, 150
Junkerman, Charles, 193n23 Mac Low, Jackson, 136
Macdonald, Dwight, 13, 106, 169n15
Kallman, Chester, 108 MacFarquhar, Larissa, 77
Kant, Immanuel, 110 Madonna, 147

Index 221
Malanga, Gerard, 179n14, 183n1 Brainard, Joe; Guest, Barbara;

Malcolm, Janet, 37, 172n9, 175n25 Koch, Kenneth; OHara, Frank;
Mallarm, Stphane, 127, 1601 Schuyler, James
Manovich, Lev, 129 Newton, Esther, 113
Martin, John, 176n2, 177n4, 182n33 Ngai, Sianne, 1314, 723, 148, 167n5
Marx, Karl, 133, 187n23, 191n14. See Nims, John Frederick, 94
also materialist criticism Noland, Carrie, 128
mass culture and the avant-garde, Notley, Alice, 17
1214, 91, 123, 1579. See also
materialist criticism O Fantasma (film), 170n20
materialist criticism, 36, 811, 17, OHara, Frank, 5, 17, 70, 74, 889,
245, 701, 958, 102, 1314, 91, 94, 1046, 1678n6,
1423, 159, 1636, 168n8, 169n18, 180n22, 181n28, 182n30,
187n223. See also Jameson, 1834n6, 184n7, 186n17, 188n25
Fredric; queer theory Olson, Charles, 138, 187n21
The Matrix (film), 190n7 Ondine, 147, 149
McCabe, Susan, 10, 29, 31 Ortner, Sherry, 18, 173n12
McCaffery, Steve, 201, 171n22 Oulipo, 128, 1368, 1889n1
McCarthy, Mary, 193n29
McLuhan, Marshall, 131, 190n7 Pater, Walter, 67
Melville, Herman, 168n9 Pegler, Westbrook, 15
Meyer, Steven, 29 Perelman, Bob, 192n16
Mikics, David, 98 Perloff, Marjorie, 3, 20, 64, 92, 93, 95,
Mikkelsen, Ann Marie, 65, 171n1 126, 135, 1434, 179n14, 184n7,
Miller, Arthur (politician), 169n16 189n2, 193n23
Mohammad, K. Silem, 1889n1, Piero, W. S., 97, 110
189n4, 190n5 Piper, Adrian, 136
Moon, Michael, 11316, 187n22 Place, Vanessa, 123, 130, 1889n1,
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, 191n11, 193n24
178n10 Plato, 98
Morton, Timothy, 612, 178n9 Pollock, Jackson, 13, 147
Mullen, Harryette, 1367 Ponge, Francis, 17, 167n4
Murphy, Cullen, 17, 181n26 Pope, Alexander, 109
Myles, Eileen, 153 Porter, Fairfield, 99, 113, 117
Pound, Ezra, 1, 69, 11, 23, 27, 289,
Nadel, Alan, 14. See also containment 40, 41, 123, 132, 167n1, 168n10,
policy and homosexuality 171n1, 189n2
Nealon, Christopher, 4, 107, 135, Presley, Elvis, 147
168n8, 178n11, 180n22 Proust, Marcel, 7, 63, 71, 190n8
Nelson, Cary, 40
Nelson, Maggie, 105, 185n14 Quartermain, Peter, 40
The New York School, 17, 62, 70, 89, queer theory, 410, 17, 245, 546,
90, 914, 1056, 110, 121, 125, 5962, 8290, 969, 1058,
135, 185n14, 186n17, 188n28, 1202, 1235, 13842, 14455,
189n3. See also Ashbery, John; 15766, 178n710

222 Index
queer theoryContinued The Cenotaph, 99

and ecocriticism, 612, 8290, 157, The Crystal Lithium, 1004
1626, 178n910 Diary, 967, 118
and materialism, 46, 245, 969, Dining Out with Doug and Frank,
1056, 1202, 1579, 1636 96, 116
See also containment policy and A Few Days, 92, 1078, 11011,
homosexuality 11417, 120, 159, 185n13
Hymn to Life, 118
Rabelais, Franois, 150 Just the Thing, 91, 101, 117, 119, 121
Raitt, Suzanne, 8, 169n13 The Morning of the Poem, 11517,
Rathje, William, 17, 181n26 1201, 178n13
Rauschenberg, Robert, 95, 99, The Trash Book, 100, 1025
103, 184n8 Used Handkerchiefs 5, 1002,
Reed, Ishmael, 17 103, 184n10
Retallack, Joan, 29, 45, 48, 137, Wystan Auden, 100, 118
158, 176n1 Schwartz, Hillel, 36, 172n8
Revill, David, 144 Schwitters, Kurt, 99, 103
Ricoeur, Paul, 125 Sedgwick, Ellery, 29
Rimbaud, Arthur, 3, 171n1, 181n28 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5, 7, 60,
Rosenbaum, Susan, 62, 177n4, 1057, 109, 11316, 154, 168n9,
181n24, 182n35 176n28, 178n7, 187n22
Rosenquist, James, 64 Seldes, Gilbert, 173n14
Ross, Andrew, 24, 59, 95, 102, Seltzer, Mark, 32
178n13, 179n14 Shaw, Lytle, 106
Rossetti, Christina, 2 Shelley, Mary and Frankenstein, 190n7
Roth, Dieter, 103 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 245, 989, 115
Rothenberg, Jerome, 64 Shoptaw, John, 61, 69, 812, 86, 90,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 667 179n20, 181n24
Roussel, Raymond, 129 Silliman, Ron, 17, 135, 191n12
Rubin, Gayle, 6, 82 Silverberg, Mark, 98
Ruddick, Lisa, 19, 39, 401, 43, Simon, Linda, 31, 37
173n13, 174n19 Situationist International, 133, 191n13
Skinner, B. F., 29
Sargent, John Singer, 84 Smithson, Robert, 1801n23
Scanlan, John, 17 Sontag, Susan, 97, 1089, 183n4,
Schneemann, Carolee, 136, 192n19 185n16
Schuyler, James, 24, 23, 66, 91122, Spahr, Juliana, 1369, 143, 149,
139, 159, 1678n6, 178n13, 1523, 192n19
179n14, 181n25, 181n28 Stefans, Brian Kim, 190n7
Advertisements by Jimmy Schuyler, Stein, Gertrude, 3, 4, 910, 11, 20, 21,
1856n17 234, 2756, 578, 723, 81,
After Joe Was at the Island, 111, 123, 126, 141, 150, 158, 161,
1001, 184n10 169n14, 1716, 177n6
and John Ashbery, 66, 119, 188n28 and 27 rue de Fleurus, 278, 32,
art writings, 95, 184n10 506, 176n28

Index 223
American Biography and Why Stimpson, Catherine, 345

Waste It, 29 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 188n30
and anality, 3943 Strasser, Susan, 17
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Streuber, Sonja, 45
3, 27, 334, 423, 534, 169n14, Swift, Jonathan, 22, 109, 150
171n4, 172n8, 173n14 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 7, 123
Baby Precious Always Shines (love
notes), 302, 4350, 158 Tapper, Gordon, 143
and body image, 347 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 1011
Bon March Weather, 9 Taylorism, 4, 1011, 234, 2834, 50,
A Book Concluding with As a Wife 168n10, 177n6. See also Efficiency
Has a Cow a Love Story, 32, 45 Movement; Fletcherism
Composition as Explanation, 489 Thompson, Michael, 17, 100
and corpoautomobile, 324 Tichi, Cecelia, 289
and cow, 2932, 37, 4256, Tinkcom, Matthew, 1067, 109
176n30 Tom of Finland, 185n15
and digestion, 3740 Toy Story 3 (film), 19, 170n20
Everybodys Autobiography, 37 Tranter, John, 77
Four in America, 176n28 Trinidad, David, 167n6
A Long Gay Book, 35, 42 Turner, Kay, 44, 174n21
The Making of Americans, 37, 402,
723, 1712n4 Vaneigem, Raoul, 133
Patriarchal Poetry, 40 Varda, Agns, 18
Picasso, 39 Veblen, Thorstein, 11
Poetry and Grammar, 176n30 Vendler, Helen, 59, 73, 78, 97, 99, 110,
A Sonatina Followed by Another, 186n19
27, 29, 30, 32, 45, 56, 174n22 Vincent, John Emil, 59, 61, 86
Stanzas in Meditation, 578, Vreeland, Diana, 110
176n1, 177n5
and technology, 10, 2930, 334 Waldman, Anne, 66
Tender Buttons, 910, 30, 35, 36, Waldrop, Rosmarie, 201, 171n23,
3741, 43, 44, 72, 169n14, 192n18
173n1516, 175n27 Wall-E (film), ixxii, 16, 17, 1578
Three Lives, 11, 32, 42, 173n17 Warhol, Andy, 5, 25, 64, 97, 125, 126,
and Toklas, Alice B., 3, 223, 127, 131, 136, 1402, 1458, 149,
2932, 357, 3841, 4350, 153, 179n14, 17980n21,
172n10, 172n12, 174n223 180n23, 193n289
What Are Master-Pieces and Why Waste Land (film), 19, 170n20
Are There So Few of Them, 51 Waste Studies, 1623, 170n20
What Is English Literature, 389, Waters, John, 111, 115, 187n22
176n28 Watten, Barrett, 10, 29, 193n25
Stein, Leo, 37, 506, 175n25 Weeks, Mabel, 53
Steiner, Wendy, 39 Weininger, Otto, 42, 123
Stevens, Wallace, 23, 17, 59, 73, Wershler-Henry, Darren, 137
168n7, 181n25 Whitman, Walt, 2, 62, 163

224 Index
Whorton, James C., 172n8 Wolff, Janet, 168n11, 172n5

Wilbur, Richard, 93 Wright, James, 64
Wilde, Oscar, 67, 66, 84, 86, 109,
168n9, 182n31 Yaeger, Patricia, 18, 68
Wilkinson, John, 1645 Yankelevich, Matvei, 128
Williams, Raymond, 65 Young, Stephanie, 1369, 143, 149,
Williams, William Carlos, 23, 279, 41, 1523, 192n19
123, 171n1, 172n5, 182n34, 188n25
Wolf, Reva, 147 Zukofsky, Louis, 161

List of Illustrations Preface: The Charisma of Waste Acknowledgments Xiii Permissions

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

List of Illustrations Preface: The Charisma of Waste Acknowledgments Xiii Permissions

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

List of Illustrations Preface: The Charisma of Waste Acknowledgments Xiii Permissions

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction The Poetics of Waste Management 1

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

THE POETICS OF WASTE

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein

You are so full of a cow factory

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

28 The Poetics of Waste

Bracketing his unsympathetic reaction, Williamss reportage allows us to see

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 29

an essential vitality will be laid waste by the use of demoded words

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

30 The Poetics of Waste

In imagining the addressee of this passage as a cow factory, Stein conflates

You Are So Full of a Cow Factory

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 31

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

32 The Poetics of Waste

manager of 27 rue de Fleurus. This shared abode functioned not just as a

Fletcherism and Steins Corpoautomobile

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 33

Reducing waste is a Fletcherist obsession, and accordingly, gluttony is

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

34 The Poetics of Waste

This faculty of Gertrude Stein of having everybody do anything for her

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 35

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

36 The Poetics of Waste

governed by abundance, in which consumption replaced production as the

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 37

Digestion and Excreation

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

38 The Poetics of Waste

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the

In contrast to the Imagist privileging of sight, Steins rejects the fixity of

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 39

In Steins lecture on Englands literary historical development, the sepa-

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

40 The Poetics of Waste

queer appetites, employing repetition to undermine the patriarchal catego-

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 41

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

42 The Poetics of Waste

From Cow-Smelly to Meadowed King

Copyrighted material 9781137402783

Industry and Excess in Gertrude Stein 43

THIS IS THIS DRESS, AIDER.

Ruddick suggests we read to let as a toilet, albeit within a scene of sexual

Cow in the Love Notes