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Epilogue: Returning to Stein
- University of Iowa Press
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G ertrude Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry,” published in the 1927 collection Bee Time Vine, bears all the hallmarks of her most hermetic and difficult poetry. The nearconstant repetition, always with “a little changing,” of specific words and phrases is not, however, as some readers may believe, a paean to nothing. Virgil Thomson writes in his preface to Bee Time Vine that “I have not the slightest idea what it means” (vi). Even Marianne DeKoven admits defeat , writing in A Different Language that “most of ‘Patriarchal Poetry’ not only defies interpretation, it defies reading” (138), later suggesting that the poem is simply a way of pointing out the “amusingly pretentious and slightly absurd” sound of “Patriarchal Poetry” as a phrase (168). However, as numerous other critics have demonstrated, the poem offers more than simple wordplay and nonsense.1 Rather, it is Stein’s way of striking at the heart of patriarchal tradition and culture, dependent as it is on order and rigidity. As she writes, “Patriarchal poetry needs rectification. . . . /Come to a distance and it still bears their name” (116). But what, exactly, requires “rectification,” and how might such change be effected? In the poem, Stein begins by uncovering the ways patriarchal poetry works to support what Krzystztof Ziarek identifies as the key elements of its discourse: “objectification, definition, possession through cognition, erasure of difference, linear progression, propositional forms of epilogue Returning to Stein Reject rejoice rejuvenate rejuvenate rejoice reject rejoice rejuvenate reject rejuvenate reject rejoice. Not as if it was tried. How kindly they receive the the then there this at all. In change. Might it be while it is not as it is undid undone to be theirs awhile yet. Not in their mistake which is why it is not after or not further in at all to their cause. Patriarchal poetry partly. In an as much to be in exactly their measure. Patriarchal poetry partly.—Gertrude Stein, “Patriarchal Poetry” 160 . . . Epilogue language” (127). Put another way, Stein’s way, it insists on “[t]heir origin and their history patriarchal poetry their origin and their history patriarchal poetry their origin and their history” (115). Like the “arrangement in a system to pointing” of the “Carafe That Is a Blind Glass” inTender Buttons, “[p]atriarchal poetry is named patriarchal poetry,” pointing only back to itself as the point of origin, as the site of meaning (145). But Stein challenges the primacy of patriarchal conventions throughout her long career. The poem begins with a call to “fasten it back to a place where after all he would be carried away, he would be carried away as long as it took” (106). Harriet Scott Chessman argues that this “place where after all he would be carried away” is the moment “‘before’ words became ordered by the Word” (128), the period Julia Kristeva has identified as the presymbolic. Stein goes on in the next paragraph of the poem to invoke some kind of “before,” in a formulation that seems simultaneously to evoke and deconstruct the Word of God: “For before let it before to be before spell to be before to be before to have to be to be for before to be tell to be having held to be to be for before” (106). The passage continues at some length, but even the material quoted here suggests Stein’s strategy: to repeat words and phrases in order to defamiliarize them, to both cast a spell and to spell them in new ways.2 At some point in this passage, “before” and “be for” collapse into one another , and the reader is left to wonder whom “before” is for. Is it a function of patriarchal poetry itself to fetishize origins, the moment at which God spoke the world into being? Is it the site of authority, through which Adam is given the power to name?3 Or is it a moment before all these forces have come into power, before patriarchal authority settles into place? Perhaps, the poem suggests, it’s all of these possibilities. As Stein writes a few lines later, “There never was a mistake in addition” (106). Throughout the poem, Stein calls our attention to the processes of careless replication of tradition. For instance, a long passage early in the poem evokes the phrase one might teach a parrot, “Such a pretty bird,” eventually repeating it ad nauseam, the way the bird itself might in a bid for attention (109–110). In representing this parroting, this habit of repeating something...