Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory

Gertrude Stein’s Granddaughters: A Reading of Surprise

69 Gertrude Stein’s Granddaughters A Reading of Surprise It’s said that Elizabeth Bishop’s pet toucan was named SAM, as an acronym for the three qualities in poems she prized most: spontaneity, accuracy, mystery. Of course, what readers perceive as spontaneity may be the product of deliberate and intense labor on the part of the writer; ultimately it does not matter how conscious the poet was at the moment of writing. So the first quality, spontaneity, is something I prefer to call “surprise,” because that puts the emphasis on the reader, and it is the process of reading poems that is my focus here. Modernist and postmodernist poetry is usually considered more surprising than its predecessors, a shift attributed to such factors as psychoanalysis, world wars, atomic power, computers, and globalization. In fact, contemporary readers expect to be surprised, and in some cases they consider surprise to be the criterion for good poetry. Robert Bly’s term “leaping poetry,” which he coined in the seventies, is a case in point: “In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.”1 But distinctions between conscious and unconscious minds are difficult for the reader of a poem to determine. Moreover, distinctions between other binary oppositions, such as those between emotion and reason, and between mind and body, are increasingly being questioned by philosophers, as well as by neurologists like Antonio Damasio.2 To the reader it doesn’t matter how surprise happens, as long as it does happen. In fact, readerresponse theory argues that a text exists in the mind of a reader: he or she must “fill in the blanks” or “make the leaps” between 70 ideas in a poem. Thus the act of reading is as creative as the act of writing. A writer considered by many scholars to be a postmodern writer—and thus surprising—is Gertrude Stein. Stein recognized—and put into practice—the sometimes arbitrary nature of signs, syntax as ideology, and the dependence of language on context. Her work is full of associative leaps, as well as puns, wordplay, and shifts in tone, diction, and syntax. Her emphasis on pronouns (as compared to the imagists’ and futurists’ emphasis on nouns) indicates her awareness of the referentiality of language and her critique of the self-sufficient image. As Marjorie Perloff points out, Stein “took the naming function of language to be its least challenging aspect.”3 Though Stein’s fabulous syntactical gymnastics have served as an inspiration to many poets, my focus here is on her surprising and playful tone. Stein can be serious without being pompous or pretentious, and her writing has a good-natured quality that never condescends to the reader. It manages to remain deeply funny while at the same time it critiques and theorizes. Her light touch is often best heard in the poems when read aloud. Consider these lines from her posthumously published love poem “Lifting Belly”: “You see what I wish. / I wish a seat and Caesar.”4 I hear the echo of seize her and I laugh. Stein’s poems never let us forget the link between the verbal and physical, the fact that the body produces sound and that both body and sound change constantly. Before we move from Gertrude Stein to other poets, it helps to think further about the element of surprise itself, and its power over us. When I study a poem, I see it as an engine firing, and only those words, in that order, can make it fire. But this happens only in retrospect, because at the moment of reading, something else can take place: surprise. Often in the poems I love, the poet thwarts my expectations: by using a word I would not expect, a strange syntactical construct, an omission, an unexpected tone, diction, or some other shift. Such moments have been studied— and prized—by a variety of thinkers since the nineteenth century , including the philosopher Immanuel Kant,5 the formalist Roman Jakobson,6 the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and, most recently, the poet and literary theorist Susan Stewart.7 Surprise 71 is part of what Octavio Paz calls the “principle of variety within unity”: Repetition is a cardinal principle in poetry. Meter and its accents, rhyme, the epithets...