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A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE: KRISTEVA'S AND GERTRUDE STEIN'S

ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE

ALISON TATE

Introduction
One of the areas in which psychoanalytic theories of language have been extremely influential
is in theorizing the textual innovations of modernist writing. This is not surprising, given that literary
modernism has long been held to problematize both language and subjectivity and that
psychoanalytic theory offers a way of linking a theory of the subject to a theory of language.' The
work of Juliet Kristeva has been taken up by feminist critics of modernism, in particular, for the
ideas presented in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) offer a way to theorize not only poetry,
modernism and the subject but also to relate these to feminine subjectivity and the body.
However, I first started wondering about the limitations of Kristeva's approach to modernism
when reading DeKoven (1983) which is in many respects an excellent book on the modernist
experimental writer, Gertrude Stein, and which approaches Stein through the ideas of Kristeva.
In trying to explain the effects of Stein's idiosyncratic syntax, in one passage of exposition, DeKoven
departs from the Kristevan perspective. Instead, in order to point out that one characteristic of Stein's
writing is the production of sentences that are syntactically acceptable but which do not make sense,
she resorts, unexpectedly, to Chomsky and his concern to distinguish between grammatical and
semantic meaning in the description of 'three degrees of grammaticality' (p. 56). In other words,
at the point where DeKoven actually wants to say something concrete about the effects of
particular kinds of departures or deviance from conventional structure or style, Kristeva's model
seems to fail her. One concern of this article, therefore, is to examine the limitations of Kristeva's
approach to modernist language and why these occur. What will be argued is that Kristeva
basically draws on a structuralist model of language and the unconscious, utilizing what is
essentially a code and deviation framework, and it is this that restricts the ability of her account
to explain specific effects of modernist dislocation of language.

Kristeva's theory of language and subjectivity

I want in this section to outline Kristeva's account of subjectivity and modernist poetry but to
concentrate on the particular conception of language which emerges from it. It is Kristeva's early
work, and particularly Revolution in Poetic Language, based on her submission for her doctorat
d'ttat in 1973 (French edition: 1974; English translation in 1984) that I consider here, although
it is apparent that her emphases have changed over the years and it is not clear to me whether she

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Alison Tate, Department of Communications, University
of Humberside, Aquine House, Inglemire Avenue, Hull HU6 7LU, U.K.

329
330 ALISON TATE

would still want to claim this analysis as more than exploratory. -~But it is Revolution in Poetic
Language which, as Felski (1989, p. 33) points out: 'has undoubtedly been one of the most influential
of recent arguments on the relationship between desire and language' and which is still important
in theorizing modernism.
Revolution in Poetic Language is monumental and ambitious. It searches for a theory which
will explain the formation and operation of subjectivity in language and which will encompass
the unconscious foundations of the subject, drawing, for this, on readings of Freud and Lacan.
As part of its overarching theory it concerns itself centrally with various traditional philosophical
problems of meaning and reference, agency and volition via readings of Plato, Frege, Hegel, Husserl,
and Hjelmslev. This historical 'thetic' tradition conceives subjectivity as a unified consciousness
able to produce reason through the propositional structures embedded in syntactic order. An early
critique of Kristeva by White (1978, p. 4) points to the reverse, dark side of the tradition:
For as long as it existed, this thetic tradition of high rationalism has been mocked and haunted by alien s p i r i t s . . .
forces, desires and activities which must be censored or ostracised if the rational state is to be maintained. Plato
[in The Republic] has to exclude as dangerous the desire for sensual pleasure, laughter, the representative of death
and of madness, and those two art forms, music and literature, which may express or incite these subversive powers.
The schism has marked every major western conception of the human. The problem for any thinker who does not
merely champion one of these sides in a simple minded way is to attempt to think the relations between them, to
comprehend, in both its senses, the rational and irrational, the sentence and the song.

This is what Kristeva attempts to do, drawing on both sides of the tradition in offering a schematic
model of the 'semiotic' and the 'symbolic' aspects of the subject, presenting the realm of the semiotic
as, broadly, equivalent to the unconscious; that of the symbolic as equivalent to the conscious,
rational and social. Both aspects of subjectivity are bound up with language. The semiotic is the
site of articulation and volition, both of language and desire, the space within which language and
the subject develop; the semiotic chora is Plato's material 'receptacle of being', a bodily and
distinctively female space. It is the site of genetic and innate traits, the space of operation of sensory-
motor impulses, of primary processes such as anality and orality, the death instinct and the desire
for pleasure and of the impulses which constitute the basis for language before lexical and
syntactic organization: the production of sounds and rhythms.
The semiotic is linked to but also envelops the symbolic which is the realm of consciousness,
language, the social, rationality and law, and the necessary restrictions and repressions that
entering the social sphere entail. Kristeva traces the formation of the subject ontologically, in terms
of the development of the individual child. Through a re-reading of Lacan's reading of Freud, she
traces the child's entry into the symbolic, incorporating the theories of the mirror stage and castration,
so, for example, it is during the mirror stage that the child begins to posit his imagined ego, which
in turn leads 'to the positing of the object' (and thus world reference; propositional activity).' But
subjectivity is also continually reformed in discourse. Although language is quintessentially
symbolic, its semiotic grounding continually breaks through, representing desire, irrationality and
the body, manifested in certain forms of non-symbolic articulation closely connected to the
semiotic: to laughter, crying, rhythm and gesture. Hence signification involves both the semiotic
and the symbolic and 'linguistic changes constitute changes in the state of the subject--his
relation to the body, to others, and to objects' (1984, p. 15). Texts are practices: a way of
'transforming natural and social resistances, limitations and stagnation' (p. 17).
But some kinds of text are more effective in this respect than others. Certain practices of language
and, in particular, literature and poetry, offer potential for contract with the fundamental processes
of signification and in Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva concentrates on demonstrating this
 A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE 331

in relation to the 'high' modernist axis within French literature (C61ine, Artaud, Mallarm6 and
Lautr6mont). Such poetry displays how semiotic features operate within the realm of the symbolic;
they represent transgression of the linguistic code which is bound up with the symbolic: the social
order of rationality, reason, law and order. Key modernist texts become instances of what Kristeva
calls 'limit texts', close to the boundaries of language, 'defined by boundaries admitting of
upheaval, dissolution and transformation' (1980, p. 25). For Kristeva 'poetic language in its most
disruptive form (unreadable for meaning, dangerous for the subject), shows the constraints of a
civilisation dominated by transcendental rationality. Consequently it is a means of overriding this
constraint' (1980, pp. 139-140). Anything which disrupts the symbolic is revolutionary; hence
such poetry gains its revolutionary power. As masculinity is traditionally equated with rationality
and law, femininity is associated with the semiotic, transgression, and revolution.
The result is a description of the construction of subjectivity through language which is part
physiological/material, part conceptual and theoretical. It is grounded in metaphors of the body,
for the chora is depicted as a maternal, female space, but the semiotic and symbolic are, at the
same time, abstract conceptions or metaphors. This is a theory that weaves across old dichotomies
in a complex manner and one which is not simply the restatement of a simple opposition between
feeling and reason or felt experience and logical order which Nye (1987), for example, seems to
assume. Nor, indeed, does Kristeva present a simple contrast between an asocial prelinguistic
unconscious and a rationality embedded in the socialization that learning language involves, a non-
thetic/thetic contrast, as White tends to suggest, for volition, Husserl's 'indication' or 'positing',
is embedded in the semiotic. 4
A structuralist model?
On the other hand, Kristeva's approach enshrines some very traditional ideas about both
language and poetry which demand critical examination. This is most evident in regard to the
treatment of language, for Kristeva is at her most unambiguous and concrete in her account in
allocating aspects of language to the semiotic or the symbolic. As Nye points out, she 'stays fully
within the philosophical tradition that supposes a radical break between language and cries, moans
and other inarticulate expressions' (1987, p. 675).
More problematic, for linguists, is that Kristeva, in fact, goes beyond this inarticulate/articulate
distinction, attributing to the semiotic: laughter, intonation, rhythm, sound patterning, pauses and
silence. Although it may be questioned if this list of items has much in common, one can see a
principle of classification: these are features traditionally regarded as non-signifying, non-
semantic, uncoded features extraneous to language. But this is folk-linguistics. These are in fact
features that in the main would be regarded within linguistics as, as 'paralanguage' or 'non-
segmental' aspects of language, features that would be widely regarded as communicative. They
are, that is, neither non-signifying, non-semantic nor uncoded, and, to an extent that Kristeva does
not acknowledge, they are part of linguistic communication?
Take, for example, the role of intonation: the combination of rhythm, pitch and stress that produces
word stress or 'sentence tunes'. Word intonation is very obviously part of the sound structure of
the vocabulary of a given language; thus part of the coded structure of language that Kristeva
identifies with the symbolic. Sentence intonation has in the past been argued to be predominantly
'emotional' in nature but many accounts have illuminated its grammatical role, for example, in
delimiting phrases and clauses within connected discourse, in marking sentence function (e.g.
statement or question), or its semantic role, for example in indicating information units, or
332 ALISON TATE

contrast or emphasis (see Halliday, 1967; Taglicht, 1984). Just as syntax is part of a language, so
are the appropriate intonational patterns for the articulation of such syntactic structures. Intonation
is socially and regionally variable as well, as a growing number of sociolinguistic studies show,
and thus convey social meanings which, again, one would expect to fall within the range of
Kristeva's symbolic (see, for example, Local, 1982; Jones-Sergent, 1983).
We find the same kind of problem with other features that Kristeva allocates to the semiotic:
they are widely recognized as culturally and socially variable in distribution and/or they have
important functions in interactive discourse. There has, for example, been much work on silence
and speech illuminating the cross-cultural variation in the extent to which silences are tolerated
or found appropriate in different situations and indicating that silence in different cultures has
different meanings (see Basso, 1970; Reisman, 1974; Bauman, 1983). Similarly, there is a long
tradition of work on the distribution and significance of pausing in conversation investigating both
the cognitive significance of pausing in relation to speech planning and the social messages that
may be conveyed by pauses (pausing as a sign of diffidence or 'powerlessness'; pauses also as
related to rhetorical delivery, emphasis and dramatic effect).
The point to be stressed, then, is not so much that many of the features which Kristeva allocates
to the unconscious are symbolic but that, symbolically coded or not, they are communicative. Some
have cognitive or grammatical functions. Many display patterned social and cultural variability;
they thus function as social indices. In the main they come within the category of discourse features
to which it is impossible to allocate single fixed meaning (that is, there is no fixed form/function
relationship) but this is not to say that such features do not have contextual meanings (see
Gumperz, 1982, 1992, on 'communicative cues'). It is worth considering here the distinction that
is often drawn between sentence and utterance meaning, for in fact many of the features that Kristeva
suggests as semiotic would be considered to have meaning not within the abstract sentence unit
(sentence meaning) but within the discourse and interaction as it actually unfolds in context
(utterance meaning). They are, very clearly, part of the social or signifying domain of language
and, perhaps most importantly, most are interactional features: the role of silence, of laughter, of
pauses and hesitations has to be considered not in relation to the individual speaking subject, but
in terms of interactional discourse or intersubjectivity.
This point illuminates a major concern about Kristeva's account. It is only from a highly structural
perspective, an account of langue as an abstract system, that the communicative (and thus
symbolic, in Kristeva's terms) role of these aspects of language cannot be recognized. ~ Kristeva
is not usually described as a structuralist because of her concentration on the sign as process and
we find that Moi (1986, p. 3), for example, argues that she was 'never a structualist at all, but rather
(if labels are to be used) a kind of post-structuralist avant la lettre'. In 'The System and the Speaking
Subject' (1986, p. 26) Kristeva claims that her own approach ('semanalysis'), studying language
as 'discourse enunciated by a speaking subject' is able to grasp 'its fundamentally heterogeneous
nature'. She contrasts this with structuralism, which 'by focusing on the static or thetic phase of
language posits it as a homogeneous structure'. The nature of her analysis of symbolic language,
however, fails to acknowledge features of language typically identified with enunciation and
heterogeneity; what is ignored is the patterned social variability and the pragmatic and discursive
functions of the features allocated to the operation of unconscious desire.
The discrete identification of features of articulation and language as either semiotic or symbolic is, then, the weakest
point of Kristeva's account, but one which is revealing about her perspective on language: founded on a notion
 A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE 333

of a narrow linguistic code. primarily syntactic/propositional in nature and unable to recognize contextual,
discursive or interactionallyconstructedmeanings.
Kristeva would argue that a concentration on the social, coded aspects of language is facile and
shallow for it does not allow recognition of the role of desire, of excess, of the role of unconscious
drives and motivations. Her problem is, however, in trying to identify particular linguistic features
with the operation of the unconscious, she fails to recognize the extent to which these have an
important role in interactive communication.
Cameron (1992, p. 216) suggests that most of the features that Kristeva claims for the semiotic
are features of spoken discourse and suggests that she is working, implicitly, with a model of langue
as written language. But this is a manifestation of the fact that is easier to regard written language
as monologic and non-interactive. Rather it would appear that Kristeva presents what is actually
a very traditional approach to language, a logical view of language as statement or predication
in which the apparently emotive or interactive features which do not appear to contribute to
predication are relegated to the subconscious. In Language, the Unknown (1989, pp. 260-261),
Kristeva criticizes the American linguistic tradition and Chomsky's work in particular for its narrow
definition of language as syntax and its lack of attention to meanings ('pure signifier without a
signified, grammar without semantics, indices instead of signs'). But her own approach, although
semantic in nature, takes a similarly idealized and abstract view of language. The question that
she herself asks of American linguistics seems to be one that might well be reversed, 'isn't
Chomsyan-Cartesian analysis too blocked theoretically by its own presuppositions, and because
of that unable to see the plurality of signifying systems recorded in other languages and discourses?
(p. 260).
This fundamentally strncturalist approach is also evident in Kristeva's wide-reaching claims
for poetic language. The association of poetry with the semiotic is founded on its connection with
particular features of articulation such as rhythm, rhyme and sound patteming. The example of
rhythm is worth considering in detail for, again, it illustrates some of the problems with Kristeva's
attempt to categorize features of language regardless of genre, discourse or their functions in
particular contexts. The long tradition of associating rhythm not only with poetry but with the body,
movement, dance and music seems to legitimate its allocation to the semiotic chora. But one wonders
what exactly is the claim being made for it seems unlikely that Kristeva is arguing that rhythm
per se acts as a vehicle for the semiotic. Rhythm in poetry in most periods has, after all, been highly
conventionalized; interestingly, in 1925, Graves and Riding, far from linking it to the unconscious,
argued that 'metre considered as a set pattern approved by convention will stand for the claims
of society as at present organised' (1927, p. 24). If the semiotic is manifested in certain features
of language, Kristeva then needs to explain why the metrical patterning in much conventional poetry
seems to have little connection with any irruption of desire. In discussing Artaud, in fact, she
distinguishes between semiotic devices that 'constitute a network of constraints that is added to
denotative signification' and the presence of 'classical poeticness (rhythm, meter, conventional
rhetorical figures)' which are not manifestations of the semiotic (1980, p. 41). The claim for the
semioticity of discrete features of language is at this point abandoned and it is difficult to see what
then links poetry to the subconscious.
Rather, Kristeva is working the formalist paradigm with a twist, characterizing poetry less in
terms of an internal typography of particular forms or features but rather in terms of a distinction
between everyday language and poetic language. The opposition is founded on the propositionality
and referentiality of the one and the sensuous and non-referential qualities of the other. No
334 ALISON TATE

matter how much Kristeva intended to evade the philosophic tradition she criticizes in Revolution
in Poetic Language, she ends up retracing its distinctions, firstly within individual subjectivity,
secondly in identifying the difference between poetry and other forms of language. The same kind
of binary oppositions are used to argue to claim a revolutionary role for poetic modernism.
Various critics have queried Kristeva's equation between literary and social rebellion, so that White,
for example, comments that 'the step which Kristeva makes from this achieved poetic destruction
of masculine rationality to political practice and feminism, seems to me a deft slight of pen, a merely
sophistical l i n k a g e . . , a negative politics, an evanescent disruption, incapable of identifying its
own political agent, masculine or feminine' (1978, p. 16).

What should be noticed, though, is that the argument for the link between social and poetic
revolution works through the establishment of equations, of which the fundamental one is the
homology between text and identity, so that for the reader of Artaud, 'all identities are unstable:
the identity of linguistic signs, the identity of meaning, and as a result the identity of the speaker'
(Kristeva, 1980, p. 19). A series of binary oppositions are then established: between, for example,
semiotic/symbolic; poetic/non-poetic, and female/male, and homologies between the elements of
these equations are assumed. There is a conceptual slippage between linguistic dislocation and
other kinds of deviation, so that the former can be taken as an index or metaphor for the latter.

It is the shuffling of terms between equations that allows Kristeva to claim that the writers she
discusses in the second and third parts of the French edition of Revolution in Poetic Language,
although male, write from a female position. The broken text of modernist writing stands as a figure
for the position of women in patriarchal society, for 'woman' is 'that which cannot be represented,
that which is not spoken, that which remains outside naming and ideologies' (1980, p. 21). It is
a similar shift of terms that allows 'woman' to be equated with other marginalized or disruptive
social forces, as Kristeva makes clear: 'call it "woman" or "oppressed classes of society", it is
the same struggle and never the one without the other' (p. 24). So, linguistic disruption equates
to the disruption of the self or rationality and to the symbolic position of women and to a
challenge to the social order.

This structuralist bifurcation and slippage of terms, I would suggest, limits Kristeva's analysis
of modernist language. The analysis is couched in terms of oppositions, codes and breaking codes:
all that can be said about ungrammaticality in such a case is that it is ungrammatical or
transgressive. Any textual effects of such code-breaking is then assumed by a metaphorical
transposition of terms in various equations: if ungrammaticality disrupts the linguistic code, the
semiotic disrupts the symbolic; femininity disrupts masculinity; irrationality disrupts rationality;
revolution disrupts the social order. But this is only to say that deviance is deviance, in whatsoever
form it is couched, for whatever effect is gained, it results from the breaking of the code, not in
the way that this is done.

My critique, then, is that Kristeva's underlying model of language is narrowly propositionally

and logically based, and that this does not allow her to explore linguistic signification adequately.
A more adequate model, I suggest, would take into account variable contextual and interactive
meanings, and draw on work in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. In the rest
of this paper I want to show that such an approach at least offers another perspective on the practice
of modernist writing. The alternative involves adopting a more socially and discursively aware
model of language which, although it does not admit (or necessitate) the unconscious, at least in
 A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE 335

the form Kristeva models it, does concern itself with the linguistic construction of subjectivity.
At this point, then, I follow DeKoven back to the work of Gertrude Stein.
Stein and subjectivity
A few words initially about Stein and the problems that she presents to the critic. Her work has
been rediscovered largely through the work of feminist literary criticism; for many years her writings
were regarded with some derision and for a time they were largely out of print. 7 In many ways
she represents an interesting feminist case study. An American of German extraction, she initially
studied under William James at Harvard but later, settling in Paris, devoted herself to writing. She
was that rare thing in the early decades of the twentieth century: a woman of independent means,
not only a writer but a salonist and patron in her own right. She was lesbian but not feminist and
her conservative affiliations led her to favour the Petain regime in France. Whether promoting
herself as a 'character' or as a writer, she always insisted on her own seminal modernist role,
comparing her status with that of her close friend, Picasso.
Stein's work is particularly susceptible to being re-framed in various critical paradigms (see,
for example, Steiner, 1978; Schmitz, 1974, 1988; DeKoven, 1983). What is clear, though, is that,
just as much as Kristeva, she is concerned with issues of reference, representation, mimesis and
subjectivity. Perloff (1981 ) explores Stein's writing as an example of 'referential indeterminacy';
she has been argued to translate 'cubist' models into writing (see, for example, Dodge, 1913;
Dubnick, 1984). Caramello (1988) suggests that her major concern was with rendering subjective
experience with fidelity, yet this is associated with a concern for accurate and objective
representation of reality to the extent that Stein appears to represent the point at which an extreme
subjectivism merges into objectivism. Her experimental writings are often regarded as a further
development of 'stream of consciousness' techniques which can be seen as teasing at the
conventions of realism in an attempt to produce a greater realism (Bridgman, 1970). Her own
comments on her work in How Writing is Written (1974) support such an interpretation, stressing
'exactitude' and fidelity to experience.
Her concern with the issue of identity in writing emerges in her early narrative experiments in
conveying a 'progressive present'. It figures later in The Making of Americans, at the heart of which,
she says, was 'the question of resemblances' which were 'the element of memory', and which
she found to shackle the initial concern of 'immediacy' (1975, pp. 155-157). The recurring reference
in her writing of the thirties is to the Mother Goose rhyme of the old woman who returns home
disorientated and 'only knows that she is she' because her little dog recognizes her: 'I became
worried about identity and remembered the mother goose I am because my little dog knows me
and I was not sure but that that only proved the dog was he and not that I was I (1985, p. 259).
Her desired creative state of 'entity' is to be achieved by the effacement of authorial identity and
this is bound up with both memory and a notion of the Other, conceptualized as 'audience':
At any m o m e n t when y o u are y o u y o u are y o u without the m e m o r y of y o u r s e l f because if y o u r e m e m b e r yourself
while y o u are y o u y o u are not for purposes o f creating you. This is so important because it has so m u c h to do with
the question o f a writer to his audience ( 1967, p. 147).

Lively w o r d s
Stein's work displays markedly different styles in different periods; however, in terms of the
features of poetic language discussed above, of most interest is the stylistic period that DeKoven
christens 'Lively Words'. This is marked by 'colorful, concrete adjectives and nouns, in place of
the privileged gerunds and participles, and simple present or past tense in place of the ubiquitous
progressives'. Works in this style are 'dense with multiple, open-ended connections of lexical
336 ALISON TATE

meaning (image, association, connotation, resonance)'. At the same time, 'they function powerfully
at the level of the signifier, through sound and rhythm' (DeKoven, 1983, p. 68). Tender Buttons
seems an interesting test to examine in this respect for, according to Lodge (1977, pp. 151-152),
it marks a transition in Stein's writing 'from length to brevity, from verbs to nouns, from prose
to poetry and (in our terms) from metonymic to metaphoric experient'.
Tender Buttons itself appears to be a domestic catalogue, highly object-orientated. It consists
of descriptive sections broken down into sequences by subheadings: 'Objects', for example, begins
with ' A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass', followed by 'Glazed Glitter', 'A Substance in a Cushion',
'A Box', 'A Piece of Coffee'; the list of titles is, in fact, too extensive to quote. The opening sequence
of Tender Buttons illustrates some of the problems the reader encounters with this text:
A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system
to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading (Stein, 1914,
p. 9).
One might consider two different commentaries on this passage. The first is by one of Stein's
biographers, Robert Bridgman, who chooses to take it as an example of portraiture, commenting
that Stein is here defending and illustrating her new method of representation:
It is a conservativelesson,reasonablyavailable.The carafe is made of a glass tintedgrey-greenor purple, the color
of a bruise, a 'hurt' color. The carafe is a 'kind' of glass container,one not so familiaras a pitcher, which is part
of the immediatefamilyof containers,but "a cousin'. It is at once somethingto see and somethingthrough which
to see, a 'spectacle'. Its arrangementis part of a larger system which is not without order itself, even though it
does not represent things in an ordinaryway. The difference representedby this openingstill life is 'spreading',
spreading in the book itself and into the world at large (Bridgman, 1970,pp. 127-128).
A rather different interpretation is offered by Schmitz (1974, p. 1205):
'The differenceis spreading' not only foreshadows deconstructivethought; it recognises that between one term
(a carafe) and a possible substitute(a blindglass) exists a barrier, not an equals sign,and it is this differencewhich
supports all signification.Steininterrogatesthis barrierin order to breakopenthe imperialSignand leave 'a system
to pointing', a languagethat no longerneeds to containthe world in order to live in it.
Bridgman regards the passage as conveying a hyper-rich associative reality; Schmitz perceives
it as demonstrating the play of linguistic difference. Bridgman demonstrates that the lexical
polysemy of the text can reveal a logical chain of reasoning; Schmitz reads it symbolically as a
demonstration of the self-referentiality of language. Both interpretations illustrate DeKoven's point
about the 'irreducibly multiple connections' evident in Stein's writing (1983, p. 10).
But where, in fact, does the dissonance of the passage lie? Two features are worth notice. Firstly,
the syntax itself is not particularly deviant; the sequence of verbless noun phrases is a familiar
stylistic variant, the punctuation is only mildly idiosyncratic. Secondly, within the passage there
is an indeterminacy, not so much of reference, but of co-reference. For example, one might consider
the juxtaposed noun phrases of the first sentence. It appears that Bridgman reads these as
accumulating glosses on the title and thus as a series of metaphorical redefinitions: it is the 'carafe'
that is a 'blind glass', 'a kind in glass', 'a cousin' and 'an arrangement in a system of pointing'.
This, however, is not the only possibility: the series could be read as a list, or even as three adjacent
paired units, and there seems no obvious way of deciding which of these alternatives is to be
preferred. Certainly there are semantic connections to be traced between the noun phrases, as
Bridgman demonstrates, but this does not clarify whether co-referential links are intended or not.
A major area of uncertainty is deciding if noun phrases enter into appositional relationships or
are metonymic in representing discrete items.
 A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE 337

Such problems continue in the subsequent sentences. 'All this', in line 2, appears to refer back
to the first sentence so that 'not ordinary' and 'not ordered' seem to have their referent in the initial
sequence, however this has been understood. In the third sentence one can note ambiguity over
whether 'difference' is to be taken as lexically related to the 'not resembling' of the sentence
preceding it. Both of the commentators quoted above appear to interpret the difference as one already
implied or stated, although they equally assume it refers to a more symbolic difference as well.
The obscurity of this extract, it seems, relates less to obscurity of reference than co-reference.
The phrases and sentences appear to be connected; this is signalled by the conjunction 'and' and
by what appear to be cross-sentential referential ties. But, in fact, the connections are ambiguous
and are not clarified as the text develops. Yet it is apparent that the text is susceptible to
interpretation: one might, in fact, suspect that its openness to interpretation is a direct result of
its ambiguity. What is perhaps most striking about this short extract from Tender Buttons is the
multiplicity of textual connections that appear to exist, producing a web of potential relationships
rather than clear threads of identity. The concept of textual coherence provides a major clue to
the indeterminacy of Stein's writing, for, if there is a constant feature to be traced across her markedly
different styles, it is what might be called a 'semblance of sense'.
If we'look at some of Stein's other experimental writing this may become more evident. In 'Poetry
and Grammar' (1967, p. 133), Stein produces a list of sentences that she identifies as particularly
'successful'. Considering this list, it appears to be the logic of syntax that is implicitly held up
to ridicule. For instance, the resources of the language for producing grammatical but absurd or
illogical statements is demonstrated in the examples: 'A dog which you never had before has sighed'
and 'He looks like a young man grown old'. Other sentences illustrate the capacity of language
to form tautologous or paradoxical statements as in: 'A bay and hills are surrounded by having
their distance very near'. Again, 'If a sound is made which grows louder and then stops how many
times may it be repeated' and 'It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident' exploit
the apparent logicality that connectives can impose on a sentence. The indeterminancy of deictic
reference is evident in the sentence: 'Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to
close.'
This is a revealing collection of examples, for most of the 'logical' problems exemplified have
been the subject of philosophical or linguistic debate at some time or other. The ability of
sentences to presuppose conditions at odds with the main assertion, for example, is a classic
philosophical problem raised by Frege and explored by Russell (1905) (see also Levinson, 1983,
pp. 167-225; Pecheux, 1982). The tautology of definitions is sometimes distinguished as 'alethic'
or 'apodeictic' modality (see Lyons, 1977, p. 791). The problems raised by conjunction are
explored variously in, for example, Lakoff (1971), Martin (1983) and Halliday (1985); for some
of the problems that deixis raises for philosophy, see Lyons (1977, pp. 636-724) and Levinson
(1983, pp. 54-96).
Other evidence of Stein's fascination with the paradoxes of syntax can be identified; for
example, her concern to probe the meaning relations inherent not just within a sentence but also
in sequences of sentences. She often appears to take a particular structure and use it as a sentence
frame or matrix in order to generate a sequence of sentences. For example:
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 evening there is feeling (Stein, 1967, p. 171).
338 ALISON TATE

The invitation to construe meaningful text, in this instance, is a function, firstly, of the 'in t h e . . .
there is' sentence frame and, secondly, of the syntactic and sound repetition which invites
semantic parallels to be drawn between phrases and sentences. There are other instances in
which Stein's sequences of sentences resemble the pattern of verbal conjugations:
I will not look at them again.
They will not look for them again.
They have not seen them here again.
They are in there and we hear them again.
(Stein, 1967, p. 141)

These examples are reminiscent of the kind of drills used in language teaching in which sentence
patterns take precedence over meaning; here, the formal patterning element of sentence structure
is being used to generate a sequence of text just as, in other circumstances, an underlying metrical
sequence can generate text. But Stein could also be held to be experimenting with the way in which
syntactic form gives structure to experience. What she is aware of is the way that, in the balance
and the relationship between clauses, sentences can be seen to impose certain hierarchies of cause
and effect, or relations of subordination and independence, which are linguistic in nature, not derived
from the world. Reviewing Stein's practice, one realizes that she treats a range of other linguistic
features in a similar way: that is, they are used to impose a semblance of meaning on an otherwise
suspect discourse or, alternatively, varied in order to disrupt a coherent text. In either case the result
is to pose problems about the relationship between the formal features of language and meaning.
What seems to be most important in maintaining a 'semblance of sense', then, is the use of the
kind of formal markers of cohesion which are held, in various accounts, to create the 'texture'
of the text (see, for example, Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Significantly, Stein herself points out
that she found it 'impossible to put [words] together without sense. I made innumerable efforts
to make words write without sense and found it impossible. Any human being putting down words
had to make sense out of them' (1975, p. 15). Evident in all Stein's various stylistic experiments
is her concern with the formal features of textuality, markers of connectivity and the mechanisms
of text generation and organization more generally.
Although Stein's subversion of the laws and conventions of grammar has been commented on
many times, what has not been sufficiently emphasized is the apparently systematic manner in
which in different ways, over the range of her work, she explores the interaction of syntax and
semantics. This is not a random dislocation of language: Stein appears to manipulate precisely
those aspects of language which function to impose linguistic order and discursive meaning on
reality. This constant probing at the way texts construct coherence and meaning can be demonstrated
in relation to many aspects of her work. In her early novelistic experiments it is time, aspect and
modality which are explored. In her 'Lively Words' period, rhyme, rhythm and lexis are exploited
for their formal status and cohesive significance. The play on the formal and conventional
linguistic correlates of meaning is too deliberate and sustained to be ignored. Stein appears to engage
in a systematic exploration or revolt against linguistic constraints, both syntactic and textual, and
it is probable that much of her experimental writing centres, quite deliberately, on probing the ways
in which language serves to identify, frame, organize and impose its own 'sense' in the rendering
of experience.
Should one therefore accept Stein as predominantly a linguistic explorer, as a creative writer
producing a pathology of textuality which foreshadows the linguistic interest in the generation
of text that was to emerge half a century later? It is, of course, possible. However, her concern
 A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE 339

with personality, with identity and with exploring and rendering surface consciousness is well
attested and cannot be ignored and it seems more likely that both explanations of her work
converge in her notion of impersonality in writing. For Stein, the notion of impersonality was bound
up with her concern to achieve 'entity' but avoid 'identity' in writing, and thus with the attempt
to evade the considerations of audience. In 'Portraits and Repetitions' (1967, p. 170), she refers
to the state of 'entity' as the perfect state of writing, 'at the same time talking and listening'. In
What are Masterpieces, she envisages the presence of the audience as preventing the achievement
of entity:
It is very interesting that letter writing has the same difficulty, the letter writes what the other person is to hear
and so entity does not exist there are two present instead of one and so once again creation breaks down. I once
wrote in writing The Making of Americans I write for myself and strangers but that was merely a literary
formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then
identity would take the place of entity (Stein, 1940, pp. 147-148).

At this point, I would suggest, Stein's interest in linguistic representation and linguistic subjectivity
merge. Many features of discourse are interactive, relating to the way the text is framed by the
writer for the reader and, as already suggested, these are the features that constitute a key area of
interest in relation to the construction of subjectivity in language; something which Kristeva's
account of subjectivity does not recognize. It is not surprising that Stein's concern to evade identity
and audience recognition should lead her to focus on and manipulate some of the parameters of
discourse that she identifies as embodying 'audience' or, more broadly, conventional, social and
linguistic restrictions. And one might suggest that, for Stein, the 'givenness' of language resides
not only in an inherited syntax but in every aspect of discursive organization and cohesion from
punctuation to paragraphs.

What is also of interest is that, in her different stylistic periods, Stein explores the textuality
of different genres. In fact, her writing can be shown to contain a wide ranging examination of
genre to the extent that it is possible to argue that genre is the central focus of her analysis. At
the end of the lecture, 'What is English Literature' (1967, p. 56), she provides a final summation
of her theme of 'God and Mammon' that could be read as a programme for the interrogation of
genre:
And now about serving god and mammon. The writer is to serve god or mammon by writing the way it has been
written or by writing the way it is being written that is to say the way the writing is writing. That is for writing
the difference between serving god and mammon. If you write the way it has already been written the way writing
has already been written then you are serving mammon because you are living by something someone has
already been earning or has earned.

Genre seems the key element in producing texts for Mammon: 'the way writing has already been
written'. And the notion of 'genre' provides an economical way of describing the diversity of Stein's
experimental writing, for a marked feature of her output is the range of genres that she utilizes:
works ostentatiously presented as narratives, poems, lyrics, plays, operas, autobiographies or
detective stories. She also borrows genres such as portraits and landscapes from the other arts.
In itself, this range is not remarkable for an experimental modernist writer; it could be argued that
the challenging of generic conventions, literary forms and aesthetic framing is a characteristic feature
of modernism. But Stein does show an obsessive concern with genre. Her titles are often
suggestive; few are without generic resonance: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; A Novel
of Thank You; Ida a Novel; Everybody's Autobiography; Wars I have Seen; Stanzas in Meditation;
How Writing is Written; The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature
to the Human Mind; The Making of Americans; Blood on the Dining Room Floor.
340 ALISON TATE

The uncertain relationship between the titles and the works so entitled points to the fact that
Stein is concerned to probe and subvert generic conventions. This discontinuity has been noted
before and has been considered a major flaw in her work; Bridgman (1970, p. 201), for example,
complains:
•., as is the rule with Gertrude Stein, the lbrm she chose to a p p r o x i m a t e . . , slowly began to fray, then deteriorate
•.. Because she could not or would not sustain her original form, she rarely carried her work through to a predictable
end.

Bridgman assumes that such effects results from Stein's inability to utilize generic conventions;
however, one suspects that her 'failures' are too consistent to be credible. Rather, I would suggest
that many of Stein's linguistic dislocations can be associated with the exploration of the way
particular discourses within language function to organize and construct subjectivity and reality.
It seems that her work functions to explore key aspects of the generic construction of reality,
concentrating on key formal features of genre related to discourse organization, formal linguistic
markers and markers of connectivity--her own analysis of the features of language which frame
reality and experience.
Conclusion
The analysis offered above does not attempt to offer a Kristevan reading of Stein's work. This
may be possible although I do not see what it would look like. DeKoven's solution to the problem
of how to use Kristeva's work to illuminate Stein necessitated her gesture towards Chomsky. This
move, while not rewarding in itself, does represent an insight into Stein's own concerns with the
signifying qualities of linguistic structure, including not only syntax and lexis but a whole range
of other, associated textual cues. It also illuminates some odd continuities between Stein and Kristeva
who share a fascination with the propositional, referential aspects of language and in subverting
them. What is different, however, is that it is Stein who seems much more conscious of the
meaningfulness of the textual, discursive, interactional features of different discourses and Stein
who, rather than accepting the inherited ('written') force of formal features of language within
particular genres and discourses, seems to tease and play with them, testing out the extent to which
their presence can guarantee the effects that are traditionally promised.

NOTES
' Explanations of the disintegration of subjectivity in modernism have long been sought in terms of 'alternative logics':
e.g. 'analysis by controlled unreason' (Kenner, 1968, p. 234), "the music of ideas' (Richards, 1968, p. 53).
In comparison, in Kristeva's later Lxlnguage. the Unknown (1989), psychoanalysis is treated as a form of discourse. The
section on poetics takes a firmly Jakobsonian perspective although it extends his description of the poetic function of language
to argue that, in certain cases, the search for the autonomy of the signifier is taken so far that the poetic text constitutes
a new language, 'less obedient to the rules of a grammar than to the universal laws (common to all languages) of the
unconscious' (p. 290).
The English translations of Kristeva systematically employ the convention of the universal 'he' for the singular subjects
of non-specific gender, presumably with Kristeva's permission. The conlusions that may thus ensue in discussions of gendered
subjectivity are interesting to contemplate.
4 Payne (1993) convincingly demonstrates that Kristeva locates the act of 'positing', the thetic, in the semiotic (in
Husserl's terms: indicative but not expressive, i.e. propositional).
Also often included in psychological treatments of non-vocal communication, which entails the same communicative
claim.
" A n d similarly, it is notable that Language, the Unknown has no sections on pragmatics or sociolinguistics; the section
on gesture deals mainly with a highly structural form of 'kinesics', presented as 'an autonomous stratum in the
communication network'.
: See Steiner's introduction to the Virago edition of Lectures in America (1988) which points to an earlier 'small flurry"
of publications on Stein in the 50s and early 70s but attributes the interest in her work in the 80s to feminist critics. Neuman
and Nadel (1988) date the resurgence of interest in Stein's work to the 1970s.
 A SEMBLANCE OF SENSE 341

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