"Rose is a Rose": Gertrude Stein and the Critique of Indeterminacy

The foremost example of a contemporary American avant-garde poetry—at least as far as American academics seem to be concerned—is the body of writing that, since the brief run of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has come to be identified with that name. Aside from its prominence as an object of academic attention—or perhaps in part because of it—L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing has been particularly marked by its practitioners' efforts to construct a genealogy for their aesthetic principles. This effort has meant dislodging from their comparatively marginalized positions in literary history a number of key modernist figures—Louis Zukofsky, Laura (Riding) Jackson, George Oppen, and Mina Loy, to name a few—and redefining those figures as postmodernists avant la lettre. The figure who looms largest by far in this reordering of the pantheon is Gertrude Stein. And the particular spirit of innovation she has come to represent in this postmodernist poetic tradition is likewise attributable in part to the cross-pollination among poets and academics associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing: a commitment to linguistic indeterminacy as an aesthetic value and principle of composition. ¹

Take, for example, the lines "So great so great Emily. / Sew grate sew grate Emily" or "A go to green and a letter spoke a go to green or praise or / Worships worships worships" from Stein's 1913 poem "Sacred Emily," where her famous line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" first appears. ² In lines like these meaning becomes indeterminate, the postmodernist argument runs, because we can't make out whether a word like "go" is being used as a noun or an infinitive or an imperative verb, or because we are confronted with the fact that the same sounds, like the instances of "so grat," can refer to different words with completely different meanings. For readers in search of Stein's postmodernism, ambiguities like these appear to be underscored by Stein's own remarks about the literary aims of her ruptured syntax, interchanged parts of speech, and homophonic puns. When, for instance, in her lecture "Poetry and Grammar" (1934) she extols the virtues of verbs, pronouns, and articles, she simultaneously repudiates nouns, insisting that the former are "varied and lively," able to "make mistakes" and "be mistaken," while the latter, being merely "the name of anything" do "not go on doing anything . . . and so why write in nouns." ³ Not surprisingly, Stein's criteria for hierarchizing the parts of speech—the degree to which those elements can yield variations and "mistakes"—have appeared to readers familiar with poststructuralist theory to constitute irrefutable evidence of her prescient commitment to linguistic indeterminacy in particular and the values of postmodernism in general.

The proper name, with its long philosophical standing as the one category of sign that, as Stein puts it, "never can make mistakes can never be mistaken" has been understood as the sign whose structure of meaning is the very paradigm of determinacy ("PG," 315). In deconstructive accounts of language (most prominently in the work of Jacques Derrida) however, proper names become the very paradigm of indeterminacy. Indeed, according to the Derridean theory of language that underwrites the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement's aesthetic, not only is the name intrinsically indeterminate, but insofar as it is imagined to represent the underlying structure of all meaning, it is also what defines the indeterminacy of the entire linguistic system. Stein's own account of names, which is most thoroughly elaborated in "Poetry and Grammar" and in her counterfactual history Four in America (1934), does correspond to the Derridean one to the extent that the name becomes a paradigm for what all words do. Stein's theory, however, holds the name to be rigidly determinate. Moreover, far from...