EATING WORDS: “BREAKFAST” WITH GERTRUDE STEIN By Sam Panken

EATING WORDS:“BREAKFAST” WITH GERTRUDE STEIN By Sam Panken

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is a fruitful meeting place for
the grocery list and a burgeoning 20th-century queer consciousness.
Stein’s selection of “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”—with members
of each initially appearing to be familiar—ultimately melts into a
Modernist concoction of language and sexuality. There is a pleasure
in the mental exercise that is reading Tender Buttons. But first, there
are the expectations that each reader brings to the text.
To engage Stein’s running-away-with breakfast, one must gather and
then discard those images and concepts customarily brought to the
proverbial breakfast nook. The invocation of the morning meal
conjures images that are both visually rich and implicitly hierarchical.
The accoutrements of breakfast in the home evoke the pinnacle of
freshness and self-determination: a still warm-from-the-iron, red and
white gingham tablecloth matches the tops of the many Bonne
Maman jars spread along the countertops in a gesture of choice. The
mother, doling out portions to everyone present, dons an apron to
keep those abject butter smears and coffee stains at bay. The location
of breakfast in this feminine sphere of care is inevitably a “nook,” an
enclosure of warmth and scent whose signifying word conjures
imagery of the corners where body parts meet—like a better-smelling crotch or armpit. Stein’s breakfast wanders curiously towards a crotch.
Unprompted by the manicured suburbanite feeding and
dressing her children in gingham aplenty, expectations of the
breakfast might instead begin on a most basic level of the content of
the meal. Perhaps bacon, eggs, and toast split the plate in your mind
into neat thirds. The culinary achievement of the omelette is a venue
for a woman’s most purposeful fold, one that begets well-fed
generations. The cup of coffee is the omnipresent symbol of rising,
and indeed, breakfast enough for many. Yet, breakfast with Stein is
devoid of what a Western audience might consider a proper menu,
some staples of which she mentions, but later comes to reject. No
object or food, when dissected and reformulated in the Steinian
dialect, is fit to sit properly upon the table—a platform that, says
Stein, “means a whole steadiness” (44). Such volatile other objects
whose nomenclature can be so easily circumvented are not granted
such steadiness. Preceding the “Food” section containing “BREAKFAST,” Stein sets an expectation of steadiness in a two-sentence poem entitled “A TIME TO EAT”:“A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and
educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy”
(Stein 42).
It is thus established that the mealtime is the observable center
of (likely patriarchal) force exerted upon marginalized parties, albeit a
center shrouded in the pleasantries and pleasures of eating. The
commensal convention of eating and the necessity of never being “tardy” reinforce the power structures undergirding that “whole
steadiness,” the table we might slide off were we to transgress. As
Stein makes her foray into “Food,” breakfast is served as an
example—or a discipline.
Stein delivers her first meal of the day, and every meal to
follow, through a heady peppering of Modernist nuance. Nicola
Pitchford proposes that Tender Buttons, as “one of Stein’s least
accessible texts was misread at the time because of the same critical
conflation of femininity with mass-cultural consumption” (Pitchford
644). Indeed, Stein presents a laundry list of recognizable household
objects and foods, but there is nothing commonplace about their
arrangement. Tender Buttons finds a canonical home in the Modernist
movement by way of its conscious linguistic undoing. Referring again
to Pitchford’s analysis of Tender Buttons, we can see that “Stein’s
compositions…exhibit a high degree of linguistic compression,
follow no regular rhythmic pattern, and, it can be argued, seek to
evoke objects directly without the mediation of conventional naming
or description” (Pitchford 645). These characteristics make space for
the technical application of the Modernist label (a disciplinary act in
and of itself), but also account for the imaginative joy of reading
Tender Buttons. Stein beckons come-hither toward an escape from
proper English, and toward a more complicated place that sputters and
trips over itself with purpose.

***

What follows is a close reading of Stein’s “BREAKFAST,”
reproduced and examined below. While I acknowledge that this
method of parsing line-by-line interrupts the ticklish flow of one
declaration to another, I find it useful in exploring the several worlds
and critiques convening at Stein’s breakfast. There are junctures of
which I cannot make something precise, another attractive frustration
in the multitudinous process of investigating Tender Buttons. I will
examine many moments, but some will remain untouched and
nebulous as no interpretation can properly crack open every one of
“BREAKFAST’s” nooks. There are several threads that I will follow
and give a friendly tug, principally: the female body, sexuality, and
critiques of capitalism and the workday.

“BREAKFAST.”
The word itself, “break-fast,” simultaneously ushers in an end of
restraint and a beginning of digestion. Peeling back layers of
association as any reader of Tender Buttons is seemingly contractually
obligated to do when reading the book, “break-fast” morphs into a
universe of possibility. What is breaking, and can it be stopped?
Stein’s historical moment is at the brink of significant events, being at
the threshold of World War I at the time of Tender Buttons’
publication and a new Modernist consciousness. Stein takes this
moment and makes it hers, retreating into what is read easily (and
often, to an incorrect conclusion, superficially) as the “feminine”
sphere, “breaking” indeed from the steadfast.

“A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority
for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.”
Perhaps Stein starts at the very beginning, the incarnation of breakfast
itself. “A final change” might indicate a societal pivot towards
agriculture, one that brings about reliance on potatoes and the notion
of breakfast before work. The abuse of cheese, while initially
conjuring images of post-breakup emotional eating, might gesture
towards a notion of stealing from the feminine. The female cow lives
life as a resource for her capitalist counterparts, much like the mother
feeding those at the breakfast table before work or school. Language
can instruct any man to lead this life, and any old fellow can learn to
farm. Production and profit welcome all to pick up a tool and join the
ranks of the capitalists. Stein could also be posing a question: “what
language can instruct any fellow?” Though Stein tirelessly whittles
language down throughout Tender Buttons, she suggests here that it
was already ultimately useless in instructing us in the name of
fulfilling our most basic need: feeding ourselves.

“A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice,
nothing, nothing at all.”
The gingham image, an empty one, must be free of dispute in order to
radiate the pristine life it ought to preach. That is also what makes it
empty.

“A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.”

Here the slice is called into question. The “sudden slice” can be read
as an action of slicing, as a knife through a sunnyside yolk that runs
and colors the whole plate yellow. The slice might be an object, as a
slice of toast or bacon that changes the plate by taking up space. To
extend to the sexual realm where Stein’s words play throughout
Tender Buttons, a sudden slice of the hymen changes everything—
loss of virginity leads to becoming the wife who fixes the breakfast.
The next line brings the logical succession of child rearing:
“An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.”
Here, perhaps the children arrive at the breakfast nook to be fed. To
succeed is both a patrilineal and capitalist imperative. To be
succeeded, one must accrue capital. To succeed, one must be
succeeded. The cycle bears down, publicly on the man, quietly on the
woman.

“Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a
cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of
clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the centre.”
The “anything,” though referencing an object on its surface, could
also be referring to a woman figure. Decent, present, calm, and
cooking, she provides the shelter for the family, and the structure to
the society at large. She is most in need of clamor (and perhaps
Stein’s linguistic mashing of the feminine sphere is that delightful and
occasionally ominous clamor that is so needed). “What is the custom”
destabilizes the very custom of breakfast within which this woman
functions; if it can be questioned in this manner, it cannot assert itself as finite and immutable. Stein pokes again at the “centre,” one she has
already demanded be done away with: “act so that there is no use in a
centre” (Stein 71). If there is no use in a centre, there is no use in a
custom. If there is no use in a custom, there is either no use for woman, or perhaps, more optimistically, new (and, specifically, self-
determined) use for woman.

“What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is
when tears many tears are necessary. The tongue and the salmon,
there is not salmon when brown is a color, there is salmon when
there is no meaning to an early morning being pleasanter.”
The new use for woman arrives in the form of sex when “a loving
tongue” evokes cunnilingus. The fish, perhaps the vagina, takes the
place of tears cried or hymens torn in the previously occupied
heterosexual sphere (note the possibility “tears” pronounced as
“tares”). The new happy union of “tongue” and “salmon” is
interrupted by the color brown, perhaps an indicator of menstruation.
There can be “salmon,” or maybe, the enjoyable and likely queer
encounter, when the customary pleasantries of breakfast are not
dictating the morning schedule.

“There is no salmon, there are no tea-cups, there are the same
kind of mushes as are used as stomachers by the eating hopes that
makes eggs delicious. Drink is likely to stir a certain respect for
an egg cup and more water melon than was ever eaten yesterday.
Beer is neglected and cocoanut is famous.”

Never treading too close to pronounced specificity of a sexual
orientation, Stein turns back to those pleasantries of breakfast:
without the salmon, or the indulged queer impulse, there can be no
truly nice things, no teacups and only identifiable mush. Breakfast is
indeed the time for eating hopes as it is positioned at the beginning of
the money-making day, the child-teaching day, the house-cleaning
day. Eating eggs becomes eating hopes of offspring, and the
possibility of doing so, from the untouchably dominant position of
man, is what makes them delicious. This is why the custom of
breakfast serves him best.
“Coffee all coffee and a sample of soup all soup these are the
choice of a baker. A white cup means a wedding. A wet cup means
a vacation. A strong cup means an especial regulation. A single
cup means a capital arrangement between the drawer and the
place that is open.”
There is no more prevalent symbol of rising to the workday than the
solitary cup of coffee. “The drawer” might be that of a cash register,
found at the “place that is open” for daily business. The cash register
requires the human to function, and the human requires the coffee to
function. The coffee, by and by, requires the capitalist structure to be
produced and distributed and consumed as product and gospel of
productivity. For the man, the “place that is open” exists beyond the
9-5 hours; the doting woman becomes the place that opens in the
marital bed. The other cups—white and then wet—evoke purity and
then fullness, or a virgin bride whisked to a honeymoon vacation. The
accrual of such cups parallels an image also produced in 1914, Juan

Gris’ identically titled Breakfast. Stein and Gris each apply a Cubist logic to the cup and saucer, fragmenting them into porcelain half-
shards and hints of newspapers nearby on the table.

“Price a price is not in language, it is not in custom, it is not in
praise.
A colored loss, why is there no leisure. If the persecution is so
outrageous that nothing is solemn is there any occasion for
persuasion.”
Price, or exchange of currency, comes later in the day, outside of the
realm of custom and breakfasting. Communication is not useful to the
male counterpart who at this point is to exit the table and take up his
role as breadwinner. The color might drain from a woman’s face,
knowing there is no time for leisure, only housework. She will never
persuade the man that her position is indeed subordinate.

“A grey turn to a top and bottom, a silent pocketful of much
heating, all the pliable succession of surrendering makes an
ingenious joy.
A breeze in a jar and even then silence, a special anticipation in a
rack, a gurgle a whole gurgle and more cheese than almost
anything, is this an astonishment, does this incline more than the
original division between a tray and a talking arrangement and
even then a calling into another room gently with some chicken in
any way.”

A brief moment of queer fantasy comes into focus at the beginning of
this passage, ushered in by what are likely bodies, top and bottom, the
heated pocketful once again the genitalia. Surrendering to this fantasy,
or a pliable life outside of a structure, makes an ingenious joy indeed.
Perhaps a gurgle comes as the remains of the meal served are poured
down the sink, a dream discarded. The opposition of “a tray and a
talking arrangement” places the woman once again in a role of
servitude. She is doomed to prepare chicken that she will place before
her male counterpart, as she has placed his breakfast earlier in the
day.

“A bent way that is a way to declare that the best is all together, a
bent way shows no result, it shows a slight restraint, it shows a
necessity for retraction.
Suspect a single buttered flower, suspect it certainly, suspect it
and then glide, does that not alter a counting.”
Suspicion of a “single buttered flower” again recalls vaginal imagery
and may point to suspicion of a woman’s lesbian alignment. Reaching
back into the realm of currency, “does that not alter a counting” might
be read aloud as “does that not alter accounting.” Stein sonically

inquires as to whether queer relationships undermine the capital-
centric dynamic embedded in heteronormative life.

“A hurt mended stick, a hurt mended cup, a hurt mended article
of exceptional relaxation and annoyance, a hurt mended, hurt and
mended is so necessary that no mistake is intended.”

This is another moment when reading aloud becomes essential to
dancing with Tender Buttons: “a hurt mended” dissolves into “a hurt
men did,” an outcry against patriarchal injustice. The language of
patriarchy, the only one with which Stein can communicate, must be
undone and re-done to convey the embodied truth she wishes to
speak. The “stick” immediately emerges as a phallic symbol, perhaps
with the “cup” as its yonic counterpart. Beyond the sheer physical
imposition of the phallus, Stein alludes to the systematic
reinforcement of patriarchal norms. “Hurt and mended is so necessary
that no mistake is intended” can be understood to say that the pain
caused by men, though positioned as some sort of “that’s just the way
things are” byproduct of norms, is an essential tenet and intentional
element of perpetuating patriarchal society.

“What is more likely than a roast, nothing really and yet it is
never disappointed singularly.
A steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any
steady cake has a mounting reason and more than that it has
singular crusts. A season of more is a season that is instead. A
season of many is not more a season than most.
Take no remedy lightly, take no urging intently, take no
separation leniently, beware of no lake and no larder.”
Steadiness returns from the table in this passage, but the quality takes
the form of a cake. Cake for/at breakfast raises several questions. Is
this a wedding cake? A birthday cake? What makes its crusts
singular? This cake might well be a person, indeed, even the woman or wife—another queer re-embodiment of a patriarchal signifier. After
the cake, we are regaled with commands: be healed carefully, do not
listen to anyone who tries to convince you of something, indulge in
lakes and cupboards.

“Burden the cracked wet soaking sack heavily, burden it so that it
is an institution in fright and in climate and in the best plan that
there can be.
An ordinary color, a color is that strange mixture which makes,
which does make which does not make a ripe juice, which does
not make a mat.”
“Which does make which does not make” would be an apt descriptor
of the world Stein constructs in Tender Buttons. In making and not
making meaning, Stein finds space for an un-making and re-making
essential to emergent queer consciousness.

“A work which is a winding a real winding of the cloaking of a
relaxing rescue. This which is so cool is not dusting, it is not
dirtying in smelling, it could use white water, it could use more
extraordinarily and in no solitude altogether. This which is so not
winsome and not widened and really not so dipped as dainty and
really dainty, very dainty, ordinarily, dainty, a dainty, not in that
dainty and dainty. If the time is determined, if it is determined
and there is reunion there is reunion with that then outline, then
there is in that a piercing shutter, all of a piercing shouter, all of a quite weather, all of a withered exterior, all of that in most violent
likely.”
A clear dichotomy is set in this passage between what is perceived as
the comically dainty sphere of the female and the screaming and
piercing power of the male. Stein rejects housework, but
acknowledges the violence of man’s return to the home that the
woman controlled in his absence throughout the workday.

“An excuse is not dreariness, a single plate is not butter, a single
weight is not excitement, a solitary crumbling is not only
martial.”
There is always something to be desired when a single plate cannot
encompass all. A single weight, possibly that of the husband upon the
wife in a conjugal interaction that arrives at the very end of the day, is
not excitement. Falling apart on one’s own is not only a war—is Stein
suggesting there is room for growth in this process? Perhaps this is a
suggestion of moving towards an active queer consciousness, one that
deconstructs or un-makes the proposed breakfast table and its
accompanying structures.

“A mixed protection, very mixed with the same actual intentional
unstrangeness and riding, a single action caused necessarily is not
more a sign than a minister.”
There is both certainty and denial that comes with the normative life
performed through the rituals of breakfast and the workday and the marriage. “Intentional unstrangeness,” the un-queer life, is actually
quite strange, as it turns out.

“Seat a knife near a cage and very near a decision and more
nearly a timely working cat and scissors. Do this temporarily and
make no more mistake in standing. Spread it all and arrange the
white place, does this show in the house, does it not show in the
green that is not necessary for that color, does it not even show in
the explanation and singularly not at all stationary.”
The knife is a tool but undoubtedly a phallic symbol, guarding to keep
the woman in the cage. The decision to exit (or to even imagine the
possibility of escape) is almost within reach but not quite, just near.
Even within my analysis, a “woman” is caged, utilized as a collateral
symbol necessary in order to build Stein’s meal out into a chewable
narrative.
I wish to conclude my contention with Stein’s
“BREAKFAST” by shifting the discussion into my personal present
and the necessity of re-examining the Steinian conception of
breakfast. Above my bed in my small college apartment hovers the
oddity of an oval-shaped postcard, a glossy print of a plate bearing a
sloppy English breakfast. The printed breakfast is missing beans, but
the sausage, tomato, bacon, and egg glisten nonetheless. It is a strange
halo to my body, an image that reinforces custom and centre and
“eating hopes” the way Stein cautions against. I bought the card on a
trip to London, amused by its self-contained representation of a
culture, a tradition. On the same trip I bought a small print of Sarah Lucas’ Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, another forebear swathed in
reproductive membranes fried into nourishment. Lucas’ 1990-1998
series of self-portraits is the embodiment of Tender Buttons. She steps
into the role of the Steinian (pre-)selfie subject as she slouches with a
silvery fish slung over her turtlenecked shoulder in one image, a skull
between her bent legs in another. In other photographs in the series,
she holds a dead bird, smokes a cigarette, eats a banana (need I say
more), and hides her body with the tank of a toilet. But mostly, in my
mind, she covers her breasts with fried eggs, doing away with the
steady table and making one of her unsteady body itself.
Stein’s “Objects” are queered by way of being shaken in a
drawer or knocked off the dining surface. They vibrate in and out of
focus as they are stripped of their names and deposited in new corners
of a household, far from their expected places. The buck and sway of
these objects serves to unsettle the conventions they occupy in
“Food,” putting the ritual off balance for the better. Through one meal
with Stein, a reader can glimpse one quietly developing queer
approach to operating within and without the sinister underbelly of
the heteropatriarchal, capitalist schedule. More than a century later,
eggs remain. So does the custom, so does the steady table, and so do
the husband and wife.

Works Cited

“Juan Gris. Breakfast. (1914).” The Museum of Modern Art,
www.moma.org/collection/works/35572. Accessed 9 Mar.
2018.
Pitchford, Nicola. “Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism:
Stein’s Tender Buttons.” American Literary History, vol. 11,
no. 4, 1999, pp. 642–667. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/490273.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Edited by Leonard Diepeveen,
Broadview Editions, 2018.

Sam Panken, while functionally an Art History major and a Queer
Studies correlate in the class of 2019, is, more authentically, a Virgo
who listened to Joni Mitchell for 128 hours last year. Sam’s hobbies
include grocery shopping, addressing flora and fauna as though they
understand human conversation, and bending anyone’s ear about
working towards a world without prisons. Sam takes eggs over easy
and recommends R.W. Knudsen’s Morning Blend juice as a part of
any complete breakfast.

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