The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents

Gertrude Stein’s early mentor William James prefaces his Principles of Psychology (1890) with an apology: “the work has grown to a length which no one can regret more than the writer himself. The man must indeed be sanguine who, in this crowded age, can hope to have many readers for fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen.”³ Stein did not share James’s hesitation about making such demands on her readers, and not just in terms of length. As she explained, in one of her 1934–35 lectures in America, of her “enormously long” Making of Americans, “I went on and on and then one day after I had written a thousand pages, this was in 1908 I just did not go on any more. I did however immediately begin again,” with the intention of writing an “even longer … even more complicated” book.⁴ Stein’s announced ambition to “describe not only every possible kind of a human being, but every possible kind” of group of human beings stemmed, she claims, from working with James, from whom she learned that “science is continuously busy with the complete description of something, with ultimately the complete description of everything.” If science could have such monumental goals, then “what else is there to do” (Selected Writings, 255) but pursue the same encyclopedic objective in her writing, which Stein describes, in her essay “Composition as Explanation,” as “using everything” (Selected Writings, 518).

James, however, pointedly admits the areas he neglects in The Principles of Psychology: in particular, he states his regret for “the exclusion of the important subjects of pleasure and pain” in human experience. But James does emphatically reject the still dominant understanding of pleasure and pain as exclusively oppositional impulses, criticizing other writers (such as Herbert Spencer and Leslie Stephen) who took this approach. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James suggests that all pleasure has a hybrid quality that frustrates the bifurcated pleasure/pain model:

Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a pianostring stops sounding when the damper falls upon it.

Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again,—at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.⁵

James’s description of pleasure as constitutionally variable, intermittent, and repetitive (“commence again;—and again and again—at intervals”) is apt for Stein’s work. The nature of Steinian pleasure—how and whether she gives delight—remains an outstanding question. Even Stein’s greatest admirers concede that much of her work is insurmountably obscure or unduly demanding—and the length is the least of the obstacles. “Stein remains more confusing and irritating than other modernists”7; “Reading Gertrude Stein at length is not unlike making one’s way through an interminable and badly printed game book”⁸; “exhilarating, but the treatment is so drastic that it kills the patient.”⁹ Stein presents not what George Steiner calls “contingent difficulty,” requiring specialized knowledge or research, but rather a more sweeping “ontological” or “tactical” difficulty.¹⁰ As Ulla E. Dydo points out, “We have learned to read Joyce, Pound, Olson, and others with the help of scholarly tools. But Stein, older than they, remains difficult because she is primitive and naïf. Her simple vocabulary requires little learning. Her refusal of the conventions of English defamiliarizes her writing and angers readers. She demands total concentration on the naked text before eye and ear. The rewards are as great as the effort is difficult” (The Language That Rises, 63).

Stein’s relationship to literary high modernism is unsettled. She is both of it and apart. In her own time, she was represented as both approachable to general audiences and “unreadable.”11 In recent years, Stein has become queerer still: not because of the critical attention to coded and not so coded lesbian sexuality in her work—which at this point seems so well established that it is the least queer thing about Stein—but because there has been a distinct turn toward interpreting Stein as a purveyor of sensuous pleasure that is secured by its hermeticism and indeterminacy. That is, the same formal features that were once deemed off-putting have increasingly been read as the source of delight and even accessibility.¹² Ann Douglas, for example, positions Stein as an opponent of modernist cultural snobbery, contending that Stein “loved the effortlessness and abundance created by the new technology of consumer-oriented mass production and saw her own art as its ally and analogue.” Contrasting Stein to Freud, who “reified productivity and hard, unrelenting work” (evidence of which is that he “never, so far as we know, went to a movie”), Douglas argues that “While Freud espoused ‘the reality principle,’ [Stein] explored ‘the pleasure principle.’”¹³ In a similar vein, Leisl Olson writes that Stein’s “incomprehensibility … actually had the effect of promoting simple sensory pleasure,” and that “the primary aim of a literary text,” for Stein, was “immediate, effortless pleasure.”¹⁴ (Wayne Koestenbaum takes this line of appraisal further, declaring that “Gertrude Stein is the most pornographic writer I know.”¹⁵) These interpretations square with Time’s 1933 cover story about Stein, in which she was described as “very democratic” and “always accessible to strangers,” but they are out of synch with the New York Times headline on the occasion of her American lecture tour, “Miss Stein Speaks to Bewildered 500,” and a large percentage of popular and academic criticism.¹⁶

Immediacy and effortlessness may describe texts such as Three Lives or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but their applicability to Stein’s more formally innovative pieces published between 1914 and the mid-1930s is a harder case to make. As Edmund Wilson remarks of Stein’s work, “If other persons say they do respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.”¹⁷ The welcoming, sensual Stein needs to be reconciled with the hermetic, opaque, and tedious Stein. The author herself was alert to this mixed reception. Although she claims, in The Making of Americans, that she writes for herself and strangers, she knows that “There are some who like it” but “there are many who never can really like it (Selected Writings, 262). Of course, readers always have the latitude of their own bliss. However, there is massive disagreement about the most basic nature of Stein’s reading effects. Cyril Connolly’s comment in Enemies of Promise (1938) that “Any estimate of Miss Stein must largely depend on the pleasure derivable from her creations” remains relevant, as that issue is still contentious.¹⁸

Various models have been suggested to describe Steinian pleasure, including écriture feminine, preoedipal orality, and anality.19 I want to suggest a new model for approaching Stein’s work that takes into account both the appeal and the difficulties of her texts: tickling. I do not mean just the general metaphorical sense of the word—tickling as amusement or interest—but tickling in its physical incarnation, to which, structurally and experientially, Stein’s method and her literary effects are analogous. Tickling has long been understood as a form of childish physical play and a preverbal mode of communication between infants and adults.²⁰ Stein’s estranged approach to words and language and her love of repetition are regularly characterized as regressive and infantile, from Wyndham Lewis’s excoriating critique to Koestenbaum’s salute to Stein as the “Baby Queen.”²¹ Significantly, even beyond childhood, tickling fuses pleasure with irritation, intimacy, and estrangement in a way that resembles Stein’s textuality. Tickling is somatic and extraverbal, but it entails an unusual kind of coordination between reflex and social context and between self and other. James cites tickling as a primary example of states that mix pleasure and pain; at one point in Tender Buttons, Stein remarks, “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it” (462). This is a marvelously acute description of tickling as well as, I will argue, the ways Stein taxes and teases her reader. Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to James to Adam Phillips, strikingly characterizes Stein’s infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses.

Stein had many of her major aesthetic breakthroughs before World War I (notably, in Three Lives, The Making of Americans, her word portraits, and Tender Buttons) and spent much of her career afterward refining them. Before The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Tender Buttons was one of Stein’s most widely known experimental works and it remains a cornerstone of contemporary Stein criticism. It was also the main inspiration of contemporary Stein parodies. The length of Tender Buttons renders it more accessible than Making of Americans, but it is more compressed and elusive. Superficially grounded in the noun but set adrift by other linguistic elements, the still-life quality of Tender Buttons is ruptured by Stein’s wayward syntax and grammar. In the first two sections, objects and food are set forth and named and then immediately recede in a stream of apparently random, or at least highly idiosyncratic, associations.22 Images are not sustained, except as they are implied by the section titles. Stein mocks descriptive and metaphorical language: “What is the sash like. The sash is not like anything mustard it is not like a same thing that has stripes, it is not even more hurt than that, it has a little top”; “Change a single stream of denting and change it hurriedly, what does it express, it expresses nausea. Like a very strange likeness and pink, like that and not more like that than the same resemblance and not more like that than no middle space in cutting.” Seeming similes promise definition but then become occluded by negation and non sequiturs. There are cohesive, focused moments throughout Tender Buttons, but far more moments of surreal disjunction. The section called “Suppose an Eyes,” for example, offers a succession of sensuous word combinations that draw attention to the surface of words and the dance of syllables on the page.

The witty transformation of “little sales ladies” into “little saddles of mutton” is initially effected through sound. “Sales” becomes “saddles,” which is associated with mutton, a cut of aged sheep that evokes the catty phrase, “mutton dressed as lamb.” The quick, tripping quip is softened on both sides by the slower, more sonorous “rubbed purr” and the petting strokes of “beautiful, beautiful beautiful.” As this passage demonstrates, and feminist criticism of the 1970s celebrated, Stein’s work often evokes tactile sensation, both thematically and through sonic oral play. The “rubbed purr” fondles not just language but also the reader’s lips, mouth, and skin as the line is read. However, such sensations are rarely extended; they are aroused suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, and they dissipate just as quickly.

In a different tonal range, but equally abruptly, a notable paragraph of “Roastbeef” charms through a pulsing tempo and captivating imagery evoking Lewis Carroll.

My little bun is so funny.23

The other, and far more typical, extreme is when Stein falls into repetition or lengthy, convoluted passages that barrage the reader with words and sounds that seem to gain no—or only fleeting—traction in terms of meaning or pattern. “Lifting Belly,” for example, which has become a primary example of the accessible, sensual Stein, has many strikingly approachable passages but is also monotonous and meandering.²⁴ After the short preamble, from part II onward, almost all the lines are very short, with a staccato rhythm, and end-stopped. The lack of enjambment means that every line, unless it repeats an element from the line before, introduces a new idea. For example,

Lifting belly raining.

A magazine of lifting belly. Excitement sisters. (18)

In fact, Eliot gives his reader much more of a bridge between lines than Stein does; if his references are more obscure, the stepping-stones between images and words are much firmer. In “Lifting Belly,” the mixing of occasionally rhymed, emotionally evocative lines—“Lifting belly is so dear. / Lifting belly is here” (19)—and nonrhymed, more analytical lines—“Lifting belly is a rare instance. I am fond of it. I am attached to the accentuation” (18)—has the effect of constantly unsettling tempo, tone, and mood. Lines such as “Lifting belly was very fatiguing” and “Hurry up. / Hurry up with it” (15) could be commenting on sexual performance or on the prolix nature of the poem itself. “Pussy how pretty you are. / That goes very quickly unless you have been there too long” (17); “I can go on with lifting belly forever. And you do” (39). And she does.

Throughout her work, Stein’s continuous present functions as a kind of parataxis that refuses the reader a temporal or spatial orientation, a linear sense of tense or a hierarchical sense of foreground and background, and also denies “resting places,” as Richard Bridgman observes (60). Her unconventional punctuation similarly thwarts traditional linguistic signals that help the reader organize meaning around space and time. Sianne Ngai writes of the sludgelike, dense, boring, exhausting quality of Stein’s writing—the sheer demand—that is particularly evident in The Making of Americans but is also featured in less volume in the shorter works.26 That Wyndham Lewis makes a similar argument about Three Lives, but to a dismissive end, demonstrates the range of responses the same textual dynamic can solicit from different readers. What is most important about Stein’s insistence, her “sludge,” is that it is leavened—always unpredictably, seemingly haphazardly—by local moments of sprightly wordplay, brief felicity, and seeming coherence amongst the torrent. The vacillation between these effects is important: it taxes readers, challenging them to observe other features (sound, lexical structure, and shape) in place of significance and to endure estrangement and repetition in hopes of something delightful or graspable on the horizon. In most of Stein’s work, the ratio between the cryptic and repetitive passages and the moments that “bind” the reader to the text is strikingly unbalanced.

Steinian pleasure is irregular, sporadic, and spasmodic: too short or too long; too much or not enough. Even repetition is paradoxically erratic as sentences fold back on themselves, but rarely predictably. This sense of randomness and the switching to new tonal frequencies and rhythms every couple of lines or even within the same line, which demands the reader’s constant adjustment, are countered by Stein’s purposeful, expository—but not descriptive—tone. Throughout Tender Buttons, the voice is firm, precise, composed. The piece’s triptych organization around the headings “OBJECTS,” “FOOD,” and “ROOMS” implies a solid architectural structure, but the plan is undermined by, among other things, the free play of misclassified items. “A time to eat,” for example, appears under “OBJECTS,” and “END OF SUMMER” is included under “FOOD,” as well as phrases such as “A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday.” The loosest of the sections is “ROOMS,” which meanders, as the section announces itself, as if “there is no use in a centre” (498). Still, the piece’s organization and seemingly purposeful confusion, along with lines like “Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction” (483), indicate that there is a method at work and a will to impart it—or something: an orientation, a kind of susceptibility—to the reader.

The precise nature of Stein’s stance toward the reader is difficult to discern. On a superficial level, Tender Buttons resembles a narrated slide show (“slide one, A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS; slide two: GLAZED GLITTER”), except that the narrator’s relationship to the object displayed is cryptic and the overarching visual image is withheld. Or rather, the narrator’s relationship to the object is all that matters, but it is utterly idiosyncratic as the reader is given a seemingly concrete noun that is then loosened from its familiar anchoring points. Enigmatic address reinforces this sense of obscure purpose in Tender Buttons. Most notably, the entreaty “please” is repeated throughout, implying an interlocutor, but the addressee is not specified: “Please spice, please no name, place a whole weight, sink into a standard rising, raise a circle” (481); “Every way oakly, please prune it near. It is so found” (489); “Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces” (496); “a little piece a little piece please” (488).

“Please” is also, of course, one of the primary signifiers of diplomacy, of politeness.27 Children are told that it is “the magic word” to produce desired results. However, it is not sufficient to simply say “please”; the rules of civility require an interrogative inflection (“Pretty please?”). Please without a question mark effectively strips the statement of solicitousness, consideration, and attentiveness to the addressee. Stein was notoriously contemptuous of question marks throughout her work. As she notes in “Poetry and Grammar” (1934):

The question mark is alright when it is all alone when it is used as a brand on cattle or when it could be used in decoration but connected with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting. It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in writing. … A question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there when the question is already there in the writing. Therefore I never could bring myself to use a question mark, I always found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it.²⁸

Many critics read Stein’s whole oeuvre from the time she met Alice B. Toklas as one long address to her lover.³⁰ Others characterize Stein as writing for “everybody,” while an alternative interpretation sees her as writing for an audience of one: herself.³¹ Whatever the case may be, we can—and must—still read Stein in relation to other implied readers, at least linguistically implied. The sense that Stein’s work may be some sort of conversation or a dialogue gives the reader a tantalizing but fleeting point of orientation. Harriet Chessman argues that Stein’s primary mode is the “dialogic form, in which difference may enter without being relegated to a secondary position or subsumed under an authoritarian identity.” Emphasizing the “intimacy” of Stein’s writing, Chessman traces a variety of “forms of relatedness,” including a mother-child dyad and a lesbian relationship.³² While Stein does create moments of intimacy with her reader, they are not consistent or stable. Even when her writing has the overt structure of a dialogue, through what seems like direct address or questions, this is typically a fleeting impression, although the reader may sustain the illusion on her own.³³ The interrogative, solicitous mode is a teasing gesture in Tender Buttons, a break in the stream of associations to possibly focus on another person, a body, a listener, beyond. If this is intimacy, it is highly contingent and sporadic, a darting acknowledgment that there is an interlocutor who is just as quickly forgotten or ignored.

Some critics have argued that where Stein’s work frustrates meaning it opens up new avenues of sensual perception. Stein writes in Everybody’s Autobiography that “anybody can get tired of anything everybody can get tired of something and so they do not know it but they get tired of feeling they are understanding and so they take pleasure in having something that they feel they are not understanding.” This argument that people enjoy disorientation is reversed in a Pathé newsreel promoting her lectures: “My lectures are to be a simple way to say that if you understand a thing you enjoy it and if you enjoy a thing you understand it. Understanding and enjoying is the same thing.”34 Both statements fold back on themselves, asserting unlikely tautologies. The ease with which Stein reverses herself suggests that her central terms—“understanding,” “enjoying,” and “pleasure”—may have nothing, or everything, to do with one another.

What does “understanding” mean in the context of Stein’s work? And what quality of pleasure (or “excitement”) does her work offer? The case is often made that Stein’s sensuous approach to language is based on a “caressing” of nouns. She comments, in “Poetry and Grammar,”

But Stein dictates a range of relationships to language: “Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun... Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns” (“On Poetry and Grammar,” 327). The false simplicity of the definition (“doing nothing but”) is a familiar Stein tactic to mask a complex idea. Many of the gerunds here—“abusing,” “losing,” “denying,” “avoiding,” “refusing,” and “betraying”—are, as Marianne DeKoven observes, “predominantly anxious and violent verbs”³⁶ that conflict with the last one, “caressing.” Stein’s work can be embracing and sensuous, but not all of her tactile effects are so affectionate. Yes, there is “rubbed purr,” but Stein also rubs words—and readers—the wrong way, with her exasperating repetition or bafflingly arbitrary word choices, which can be more abrasive than tender.

Instead of caressing, which implies benevolent, gentle seduction, Stein’s model of relatedness suggests the more rough action of tickling. Stein’s seeming estrangement from language, her attention to its material and sensual properties, its sounds and patterns, rhythms and textures, has been likened to a kind of primal or preoedipal performance, a toying with the building blocks of linguistics. Lisa Ruddick describes Stein’s work around the time of Tender Buttons as wordplay that operates according to its own rules, producing “childish pleasures … childlike jabs at the rules of grammar and diction.”37 When we enter a Stein text, language operates erratically: this is a game that does not disclose its rules, or a code that does not permit us to decipher it entirely. But tickling is not just a game, and its pleasures are not simple; it has a very particular effect and neuropsychological structure that correspond to the vicissitudes of Stein’s writing.

Stein jokes about tickling. She likes the word for its onomatopoeic properties. In A Long Gay Book, for example, when Stein writes about the creative process, tickling is a minuet of the mouth. “All the conscience which tells that little tongue to tickle is the one that does not refer to teeth.”³⁸ She often pairs “tickle” with “little,” producing “little tickles,” flickerings of the tongue. In Saints and Singing, Stein makes a literary pun with “tickle” and “canticle” (“[c]an tickle can tickle”; “Can tickle/He can make her purr.”³⁹ In The Making of Americans, she points out the somatic and cerebral dimensions of tickling: “waiting is to me very interesting for always something is coming or else nothing is coming and there is eating, sleeping, laughing, living, talking and a little tickling in the body and the mind then that is very pleasant to any one.”⁴⁰ The homology between somatic and linguistic or mental tickling is hardly new. Darwin, for example, explored the metaphor—“The imagination is sometimes said to be tickled by a ludicrous idea; and this so-called tickling of the mind is curiously analogous with that of the body.”⁴¹ However, by this account, any creative work that strikes our fancy could be said to “tickle” us. I want to suggest that Stein’s writing substantially and structurally operates like tickling.

Both ancient philosophers and modern scientists consider tickling to be an enigmatic and singular form of stimulation.42 In his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Havelock Ellis proposes that ticklishness is “one form of touch sensation … which is of so special and peculiar a nature that it has sometimes been put aside in a class apart from all other touch sensations.”⁴³ Earlier philosophers did indeed try to classify it as a distinctively ambiguous phenomenon. In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates assigns tickling to the category of states that are “a combination of pains with pleasures, the balance tilting now this way now that.” Although tickling is correlated with laughter, Plato specifies that “In the class in which the pains predominate over the pleasures you must count those pleasures of itching … and of tickling.”⁴⁴ This opinion has held sway over centuries. Tickling can produce pleasurable sensation signaled by laughter, but it is laughter on the edge of discomfort, which at some point demands cessation. Anyone who has a young child will recognize this pattern: “Tickle me, tickle me … stop!” (There is a wonderful description of this in Carl Sandburg’s review of a 1920 screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Floorwalker, in which he observes “a healthy rollicking kid” in the audience emitting “a steady stream of laughter—a sort of tickle-me-don’t tickle-me laughter.”⁴⁵)

Some scientists, looking for an evolutionary purpose for tickling to account for its aggressive dimension, have speculated that it may be a mock form of fighting.⁴⁶ Havelock Ellis addresses cases of tickling used as torture.⁴⁷ Writing for The New York Times, John Chamberlain likened Stein’s writing to “Chinese water torture; it never stops and it is always the same.”⁴⁸ Stein’s own publishers described “the effect produced on the first reading” of Tender Buttons as “something like terror.”⁴⁹ However, we do not have to go so far as torture or terror to grasp the volatile and compound nature of tickling. Adam Phillips points out in his brief essay “On Tickling” that “the tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.” Tickling is “a paradigm of the perverse contract” that highlights “the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration.”⁵⁰ “Frustration” is an important concept for Stein; she frustrates conventional systems of signification and linguistics, but for many Stein admirers this is explicitly a source of pleasure.

Tickling folds together affection and hostility as well as infantile and erotic impulses. It can also persist into adulthood, between adults, as erotic play. Ellis devotes a section of The Psychology of Sex to this. (Molly Bloom, for example, recalls of an old flame, “I tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the motel rrrssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning” [Ulysses, 18:812].) Ellis suggests that ticklishness decreases “with age and sexual activity,” but is related to arousal and, in extreme forms, a fetishistic fixation (11). Infantile tickling is healthy, but adult-on-adult tickling is a perverse regression. Stein criticism is notably divided between readings of her language as infantile (or preoedipal) and interpretations of it as expressing a mature female eroticism.

Aristotle pointed out that man “cannot … tickle himself,” a phenomenon that subsequent scientists have interpreted as indicating a complex interface between the self and other. Darwin, writing about tickling in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, speculates that “it seems that the precise point to be touched must not be known” by oneself, and that therefore the purpose of tickling may be to establish social bonds between people, particularly children and parents.51 In the section on “Infantile Sexuality” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud compares tickling to thumb sucking. In both, he writes, “A rhythmic character must play a part”; “the stimuli which produce the pleasure are governed by special conditions, though we do not know what those are” (49). In fact, thumb sucking and tickling are quite different. Thumb sucking, characterized by a regular rhythm, is a form of self-soothing. By contrast, the key to ticklish pleasure is its unpredictability and discontinuity, and it has to be produced by another person.

The tickle response is epidermal, but it also has a powerful social dimension. One must be susceptible—one must be ticklish—in order for it to register as pleasurable. An unwanted tickle is an annoyance. In “What Does She See When She Closes Her Eyes” (1936) Stein explores relationships of tactile receptivity and refusal, as well as the erotic connection between caressing and tickling: “Henry Maximilian Arthur could be tickled by grasses as they grow and he could not caress but he could be caressed by Theresa as well as be tickled by grasses as they grow.”⁵² Tickling, like caressing, is a pleasure that requires receptivity. This, as we will see, is an important factor in readers’ responses to Stein. Wyndham Lewis, who was hostile to her, makes a nevertheless relevant observation about this feature of tickling. In Time and Western Man (1927), he links Stein and Charlie Chaplin as “revolutionary simpleton[s]” who cultivate a repulsive “infant-cult.” In his preface to Tarr, Lewis reflects on the related phenomenon of the “worship of the ridiculous,” of which Chaplin is a key idol. “The worship (or craze, we call it) of Charlie Chaplin is a mad substitution of a chaotic tickling for all the other more organically important ticklings of life.”⁵³ To Lewis, “chaotic” tickling is annoying as well as trite. Actually, all tickling is necessarily “chaotic”: jagged and intermittent. What he calls “more organically important” tickling has gravity and is supposedly mature or adult: something like arch humor or irony. Tickling is somatic and erratic, whereas irony is cerebral and calculated: traits associated with modernist stylistics. Clearly, as tickling goes, “There are some who like it” and “there are many who can never really like it.”

A former student of William James, G. Stanley Hall, with whose work Stein was familiar, contributed a major publication in the modern science of tickling.54 In 1897, Hall copublished, along with Arthur Allin, a paper on “The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing and the Comic” that identified two categories of tickling: knismesis and gargalesis. The former is a light stimulation (for example, “contact with the finest hair, wool, or cobweb,” which “evokes sensations that are not only exceedingly intense, but also very widely irradiated, and also provokes reflex movements that may be convulsive in their intensity”), and the second is a “harder” touch that produces laughter but can also cross over into discomfort.⁵⁵ Hall and Allin relate this to children picking scabs, pulling off their hangnails, and so on, “often removed with great pain.” Studies of gargalesis in humans and primates alike specify that there is a pronounced note of aggression in this kind of tickling. Hall and Allin make two important points: that pleasure and displeasure are closely related in tickling, and that one of the essential questions about tickling concerns whether it is an automatic response or dependent upon social context.

The jury was still out on this last question when Stein was writing, and it remains so. In 1999, two University of California scientists took up the conundrum. Christine Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld summarize the debate: “The interpersonal explanation suggests that tickling is fundamentally interpersonal and thus requires another person as the source of the touch. The reflex explanation suggests that tickle simply requires an element of unpredictability or uncontrollability and is more like a reflex or some other stereotyped motor pattern.”56 In order to test the rival hypotheses, Harris and Christenfeld built a fake “tickle machine.” This contraption was “designed to look and sound like a robotic hand … attached by a long flexible hose to an impressive array of equipment that could plausibly control its motion. This equipment, when turned on, produced a vibrating sound that could be that of a genuine robotic apparatus” (505). Subjects were blindfolded and told that they would be tickled on their feet by, alternatingly, the machine and a human being, and were then asked to identify who or what had administered the tickling. A human experimenter did all the tickling. The subjects were not able to distinguish accurately between what they had been told was a machine and a human tickle; they had the same ticklish response to both. “The tickle-machine works,” Harris and Christenfeld concluded, “because it, like another human being but unlike oneself, can produce stimulation that is unpredictable and/or not canceled by command or afferent signals. … The present results are generally favorable to the view that the tickle response is some form of innate stereotyped motor behavior, perhaps akin to a reflex.”

Now, stereotyped motor behavior and reflex—as well as robotic hands—were of intense interest to Stein. Her earliest single-author publication was her 1898 article, “Cultivated Motor Automatism; A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” building on a 1896 coauthored article on “Normal Motor Automatism,” in which Stein tested her own ability to become distracted or detached from conscious movement and produce “automatic writing.”⁵⁷ “Habits of attention,” she wrote, “are reflexes of the complete character of the individual, and again on habits of attention are dependent the different forms and degrees of automatic writing.” When the famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner reviewed Stein’s later writing for Atlantic Monthly in 1934, he claimed that the 1898 article was the key to her baffling method. He maintained that her rambling, “unintelligible” prose was simply automatic writing, a flow of unorganized words.⁵⁸ Stein resisted this interpretation; as Barbara Will points out, her claim was not that she achieved automatism but rather, even more impressively, that she could “be simultaneously engaged in the performance of automatism and outside of it,” to achieve “attentive inattentiveness” and to produce unpredictable patterns, surprising herself.⁵⁹ Tim Armstrong describes this as more of a “distracted” writing than one produced by a “second self.”⁶⁰

Stein would have no doubt been amused at Harris and Christenfeld’s experiment, with their fantastic fake machine. Tickling is simultaneously reflexive, a motor response, and highly context specific, involving a complex relationship between self and other. Stein’s writing and tickling both depend on erratic stopping and starting. There is no predicting her next move, even when she seems to be repeating herself:

Stein preferred the term “insistence” to repetition (“there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and … insistence … can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive” [288; 290]), arguing that “repetition” has a mechanical quality while “insistence” is more organic and animate, yet she explored “mechanistic” human response such as motor automatism. The ticklish parts of Stein are evident everywhere, but they necessarily appear at unpredictable intervals. Even her “insistence” or repetition is a function of intermittency. Stein locates “a little tickling in the mind and the body” as an interruption of the flow of waiting and the habitual. Likewise, when we read Stein, we wait for that little tickle amid a field of seeming random wordplay arranged, as Marjorie Perloff points out, “precisely to manifest the arbitrariness of discourse, the impossibility of arriving at ‘the meaning’ even as countless possible meanings present themselves to our attention.”⁶²

The important texture of Stein’s work, then, is the contrast between tedium or disorientation and moments of intensity or excitement. In “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein emphasizes the “excitement” of her word portraits: “they were exciting to me and they were exciting to others who read them” (301). She points to her writing’s palpable effects: its somatic or sensual but not necessarily pleasurable properties. Along with “excitement,” another word Stein employs often to describe the effect of her work is “irritating,” as do many of her readers: Edith Sitwell, for example, described the writing in Geography and Plays as “an irritating ceaseless rattle like that of American sightseers talking in a boarding-house (this being, I imagine, a deliberate effect).”63 In “Composition as Explanation,” when Stein contrasts “classic” to new or “outlaw” art (Selected Writings, 514), she argues that before art becomes “a classic” it “is still a thing irritating annoying stimulating.” Its “beauty” is not recognized. However, “beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic” (Selected, 515). For Stein, repetition plays a central role in this irritating and stimulating quality. In The Making of Americans, she explains that she sees “All living” as “repeating” and that she loves this (A Stein Reader, 61). Like Freud, Stein recognizes that “Loving repeating is always in children” (62), but for Freud, this feeling is lost in adulthood. Like tickling, a love of repetition is thought to be normal in children, but abnormal or neurotic in adults. While Stein concedes that “repeating is very irritating,” it is also a source of enjoyment, of primal pulsating pleasure. “Always more and more I love repeating” (56).⁶⁴

The most obvious sense of irritation here is emotional annoyance or aggravation, but the term also has a somatic connotation, as in a local inflammation of a body part, particularly the skin. Excitement too is an affect that suggests sensual as well as mental agitation. Both connote a strongly embodied connection with and response from the reader. While many writers evoke sensual registers (oral, sonic) in their work, Stein draws particular attention to them in her shift away from language as a conventional system of signification. Catharine Stimpson proposes that “in Stein’s more abstract writing, the body disappears into language utterly, or becomes an example of a linguistic category.”65 If the body disappears in a thematic sense, it returns through the somatically evocative nature of Stein’s language. Along with sound, Stein highlights the tactility, volume, grain, and materiality of language in a way that necessarily involves the audience. As Rebecca Scherr puts it, Stein’s readers’ bodies are “implicated in this textual exchange.”⁶⁶ Stein’s tactile effects are often playful—“All the tickling is tender,” she remarks in Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein⁶⁷—but not entirely. The visceral qualities of her texts can also be frustrating, belligerent, and antagonistic to the reader. These effects are not beyond Stein’s control. No matter how improvisatory her writing was, she made continuous choices. She cultivated and inscribed effects of irritation and annoyance, as well as excitement, into her work. In Stein’s rhetorical (non)question, “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it,” the double double negatives (“no pleasure,” “not getting tired”) and contorted syntax reinforce the oscillation between seemingly contradictory violence and delightfulness. “Not getting tired of it” indicates the sheer stamina that is required to read Stein’s work: stamina that can just as easily collapse into exhaustion or boredom. Adam Phillips defines tickling as a “delightful game” that highlights “the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration” (11). Stein creates the effect of ticklish intermittency that can so easily—indeed, must—tip over into irritation and annoyance. Tickling, as Stein knew, is exciting because it is also annoying and irritating, and because it involves the subject in a simultaneously affable and antagonistic dynamic.

This suggests that Stein is the tickler and her reader is ticklish. But the picture is more complicated. Chessman’s conception of Stein’s work as a “dialogue” implies mutual, reciprocal pleasure, as does the interpretation of the reader and Stein collaborating. Likewise, Scherr argues that Stein’s tactile aesthetic erodes the boundary between self and other: “In the bodily experience of touch, we can never locate the exact place where we end” and the other “begins. … Stein’s tactile eroticism allows us to hover in uncertainty, in the threshold space between subject and object. … By prioritizing tactility and sound, meaning is created in close contact and dialogue with the reader” (204). Clearly, not all readers have a sensation of participation and collaboration with Stein; at the very least, dialogue is only one way of understanding her work.

Stein’s lectures are particularly illustrative of her relational dynamic with her audience and her ticklish effects. Much of Stein’s interwar writing was ostensibly given to elucidating herself in works such as “Composition as Explanation” (1926), How to Write (1931), Lectures in America (1934), and Narration (1935). Although Joyce, for example, talked privately about keys to his work, he did not publish them or perform them on the stage as Stein did. The modernist impulse to teach readers, to inculcate, comes across strongly in these expository pieces. (Stein’s early work too was preoccupied with education—Q.E.D., Fernhurst, “The Value of College Education for Women”—and after World War Two, she wrote several books for children that also assumed a pedagogical stance.) Her line in “Sacred Emily,” “Tickle tickle tickle you for education,” brings to mind Darwin’s and other scientists’ speculations that tickling has a pedagogical purpose in mimicking self-defense or attacks, or that an “edifying tickle” is a means of imparting information through humor, just as humorous banter and “word play teach about relationships of words, language and concepts.”68 In Stein’s creative prose/poetry and her expository writing such as her lectures there is a constant friction between her management of and her seeming disregard for or implicit aggression toward her reader. We see the same tension between free play and restriction, between address to an implied audience and disregard or disrespect. Both kinds of writing display the same strategies of intermittency and repetition, obfuscation and justification, solicitation and irritation, that characterize Stein’s ticklish pleasure.

A lecture is in many ways the opposite of a dialogue or collaboration. In contrast to Socratic teaching, which does take the form of a dialogue, a lecture—from the Latin root for “reading”—traditionally presents an authoritative speaker holding forth to a passive, silent audience that is perhaps allowed to ask questions at the conclusion. Stein’s lectures conform to this unidirectional rhetorical model, even as she continually addresses her audience. While some critics have described her lectures as so accessible that they resemble cozy fireside chats, their structure and formal elements illustrate the push and pull of indeterminacy and the withholding of meaning that happens throughout all of her work. “Composition as Explanation,” Stein’s 1926 lecture written for Cambridge and Oxford audiences that was subsequently published by the Hogarth Press, opens with a promising declarative—“There is singularly nothing”—followed by a phrase that raises more questions than it answers: “that make a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking.” Stein seems to clarify the statement with “By this I mean so simply,” but what she means is hardly simple, any more than “singularly” is singular: “that anybody knows it that composition in the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it” (Selected Works, 513). What exactly does Stein mean by “explanation,” here or in her title? Who or what is “all of them”? And what is it that everybody knows and says? The lecture has the structure of the titular “explanation,” but both terms of the title remain puzzling throughout. Stein includes many gestures appearing to simplify matters—“Now that is all” (523)—when the opposite seems true.

The legend of Stein’s American lectures in the mid-1930s has reinforced the narrative of her as populist and accessible: “Stein for everybody.” The lectures are not exact transcripts; apparently, Stein improvised a great deal and sometimes ignored her notes. However, the final edited versions reveal a dramatic, performative mode of communication that is consistent in many ways with her poetry and creative prose work. There are moments of great clarity: for example, Stein’s discussion of her developing method in “Portraits and Repetition” and her comments on crime novels and the Old Testament (“permanently good reading,” Narration, 19). There are also notes of surrealism. For example, following a discussion of newspapers versus fiction, Stein suddenly blurts out, “I love my love with a b because she is peculiar” (39). Bridgman refers to this “abrupt, bizarre interruption” as an extension of a child’s game in which letters are substituted for names (259). There is an example of the game in chapter 22 of David Copperfield: “I love my love with an E, because she’s enticing; I hate her with an E, because she’s engaged.”69 In typical fashion, Stein departs from the rules of the game and invents her own: the letter (“b”) does not match the adjective (“peculiar”) except only approximately in sound. It’s a game Stein plays often, including in How to Write (“I love my love with a b because she is precious,” 105), Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (poem 29)⁷⁰ and Reread Another (“I love my love with a z because she is exact,” Stein Reader, 354). In the lecture, this phrase is in part a tease—a flirtatious gesture to pique her audience’s interest, a coy suggestion of exposure—but it is mostly Stein’s self-amusement, her game with herself. It is, above all, self-referential. While Stein’s delivery and performance were by all accounts winning, her words on the page suggest that the strength of her connection with the audience was probably more by force of her charismatic delivery and physical presence than by her actual words, which are intensely engaged with herself and her work and only cursorily engaged with the audience.

Thornton Wilder’s preface to Stein’s Narration lectures framed the talks as friendly collaborations with the audience. For example, he explains one idiosyncrasy as a gesture of good will on Stein’s part: “Miss Stein pays her listeners the high compliment of dispensing for the most part with that apparatus of illustrative simile and anecdote that is so often employed to recommend ideas.”71 Wilder reads this feature as Stein’s faith in the audience’s intelligence, but it can just as easily be read as Stein’s indifference to having to substantiate her theories. In both Lectures in America and the four talks published as Narration, her direct address to the audience is deceptive. The solicitation is undermined by her imperative tone: “You will see what I mean”; “You do understand if you think about it.” As with “please” throughout Tender Buttons, what seems like an appeal to the listener is actually a command to see things the way Stein does. She does not ask, “Do you see what I mean?” but rather tells it: “Do you see what I mean. It is very interesting. And it has an awful lot to do with everything” (Narration, 39). Likewise, in “Portraits and Repetition”:

Does it really make a difference to Stein if her audience understands? Her grammar suggests otherwise. Although the lectures are full of what seem like interrogative constructions, Stein does not pose them as such. These gestures in which Stein feigns interest in her audience constitute a kind of game, for those inclined to play and to follow the erratic twists and turns of her mind, encouraged by the occasional apostrophe. (Koestenbaum provocatively proposes that “Stein’s ideal audience is a dog, mute and loyal” [Cleavage, 327].) The conclusions of the second and final lectures in Narration show Stein shifting back and forth, reversing direction, just when one would expect her to be most summative: “Perhaps narrative and poetry and prose have all come where they do not have to be considered as being there. … Perhaps yes, perhaps no, no and yes are still nice words, yes I guess I still will believe that I will. You will perhaps say no and yes perhaps yes” (29); “That is what makes anything everything that it has been done and so perhaps history will not repeat itself and it will come to be done. Perhaps no perhaps yes anyway this is all I know just at present about how writing is written how an audience is existing how any one telling anything is telling that thing” (62). These oscillations, like Stein’s beloved “b,” raise expectations and reverse them just as rapidly, bringing the listener along and then casually undermining the promise of an answer or at least a statement. Is this really a dialogue? Is Stein trying to communicate to anyone but herself? Perhaps yes, perhaps no.

The last talk in Narration is significantly concerned with “what is it to be an audience.” Stein declares that “the audience is the thing. It helps a lot to know anything about this thing if you think are always really always thinking about the narrating of anything of narrative being existing. So then what did I know about myself as an audience (49). Meditating on herself as the audience, she then concludes by crediting her listeners with the same knowledge: “This you all of you know. Then after all what is the use as you all of you know this” (50). What exactly is known is not clear, but when Stein reframes the question, her purpose comes into focus:

Here we come back to the charge that Stein has a reckless disregard for her audience. Koestenbaum, a bona fide Stein fan, states, “Above all one must remember this about Stein: she did not care” (Cleavage, 326). Stein makes no attempt to disguise this. “I was not interested in what other people would think when they read this poetry,” she explained of Tender Buttons. “They might have another conception which would be their affair.”72 She makes clear, in “Portraits and Repetition,” for example, that although she is glad for others’ excitement about her work, her real investment is the excitement in herself. How does this jibe with tickling, a pleasure that requires “the enacted recognition of the other” (Phillips, 9)? One has the sense, reading Stein at length, that the author, practiced in the art of automatic writing, cultivated reflex, and split subjectivity—talking and listening at the same time, she always claimed⁷³—is watching herself amuse herself. Tickling for Stein is intrapersonal, and if interpersonal, that is a secondary goal. Unlike high modernists such as Joyce, Pound, or Eliot, whose referentiality is external—“contingent difficulty”—Stein’s referentiality is internal. Her methods are internal to her own language; her stylistic innovations, including her repetitions and idiosyncratic construction, are inward-looking and insular. She produces textual effects that are impossible in physical terms: self-tickling. And yet, we might think of Stein as a kind of tickling machine, with her somatic, acoustic language and her erratic and rhythmic cadences collaterally involving the susceptible reader in her circuit of pleasure.

“Stein pleases herself,” Kostenbaum notes, but she also, by example, “leads the willing reader to imagine a regime of self-pleasure” (324). But not all readers. This is where Stein is running a far more daring experiment than Harris and Christenfeld’s. In their project with the tickle machine, all their subjects were prepared to be tickled, by man or motor. Stein’s textual effects are wildly contingent. Her texts can be a pleasure machine or a torture machine or both, depending on the reader. In Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein, she remarks that “Many many tickle what is not ticklish and many tickle the rest when that is not the only way to say that every bad one and every good one is the kind of a one to go away.”⁷⁴ Some readers are more susceptible to Stein’s tickle than others. Some are pleased, some are exasperated, some decode. Most probably, the more one reads Stein, the more ticklish one becomes.

“The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful,” Stein writes in Tender Buttons, and so is her tickling (486). The purpose of tickling is multifold: intimate, playful, erotic, regressive, reflexive, aggressive, and pedagogical. Recent research suggests that tickling may not, in fact, actually be pleasurable in a straightforward sense. Harris and Christenfeld conducted another experiment in which people were exposed to humorous television and then tickled. The results indicated that the laughter or giggles that result from tickling are not necessarily experienced as enjoyable; rather, the “elicitation of laughter by tickle results from its association with humour through Pavlovian conditioning. … Tickle [may share] an internal state with other emotions such as social anxiety and that ticklish laughter might be similar to nervous rather than mirthful laughter.”75 Conditioning: perhaps the more we are told that Stein is a difficult or a sensuous writer, the more we experience her that way. But also, anxiety: the ubiquitous parodies of Stein’s writing in the teens and twenties suggest the conversion of anxious bafflement into mastery: if you can copy Stein, you must understand her. One critic in the 1920s suggested that “Reading [Stein] aloud … to almost any gathering is to experience an electric charging of the room; none is able to sit quiet, none is able to keep silent. Everyone shouts at once. They become more and more angry, more and more exhilarated, more and more tickled … until they guffaw.”⁷⁶ Harris and Christenfeld’s interpretation of tickling returns to Plato’s original formulation of a pleasure that is also—and perhaps primarily—a discomfort, and enfolds the psychoanalytic suggestion that tickling, as a narrative with no climax, demonstrates “the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration” (Phillips, 11). If Harris and Christenfeld’s findings are true, Stein’s is a triumph of modernist hedonic—and anhedonic—conditioning, turning frustration and anger into laughter and, sometimes, pleasure. In her own time, Stein taught many readers to experience her style of textual difficulty as enjoyable. Her work continues to be, at least for some, a singularly difficult delight, and a testament to modernism’s radical redefinition of pleasure.