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20Th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars

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20Th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2016 The Color of Grammar and the Surface of Language: 20th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars Sarah E. Kruse University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Kruse, Sarah E., "The Color of Grammar and the Surface of Language: 20th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars" (2016). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 449. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/449 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE COLOR OF GRAMMAR AND THE SURFACE OF LANGUAGE: 20TH CENTURY AVANT-GARDE POETICS IN GERTRUDE STEIN, MINA LOY, AND BLAISE CENDRARS BY SARAH E. KRUSE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2016 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF SARAH E. KRUSE APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor Mary Cappello Peter Covino Galen Johnson Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2016 ABSTRACT The study here arises from a long held interest in the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a preoccupation with the role and function of ordinary language. Examining the late work of Wittgenstein, and focusing on his last work, Remarks on Color, I connect the place of color within language and its fundamental role in our visual perception with an earlier idea of Wittgensteinian grammar. Grammar for Wittgenstein is not sets of rules or even descriptive rules as in linguistics, but a certain use and function of language that is as varied and multiple as humans are themselves. For Wittgenstein, there is a disconnect in our systems of thinking about language and our actual use. The difficulties that arise in language come from a limited way of talking about these things because we are already enmeshed in language itself. What is possible, I argue in light of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, is a kind of visibility of grammar that is realized through operative examples rather than through statements of fact. Color for Wittgenstein, I argue, is that example. Color, then, is no longer an emotive aspect nor a scientific method nor a psychological condition, but an example that reveals a grammar of language not ordinarily seen. Taking up the work of early 20th century avant-garde poetry and poetics, specifically the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Blaise Cendrars, Sonia Delaunay, and Mina Loy, I examine how these authors’ works with their unusual use of color that runs contrary to ordinary description demonstrates a different “grammar,” what I call the color of grammar, that reveals the framework of how language itself functions. The color of grammar in the avant-garde, I argue, carries with it a unique sense in language that cannot be easily categorized as simply nonsense or experimentation. In rereading what earlier scholars often categorize as nonsense, I illuminate a facet of language that is not the way things are in language, but the way in which a reader comes to think things are. The ways a reader may come to recognize alternative ways of reading and the affect that has on understanding everyday and ordinary language in the world is exemplified by avant-garde poetics. The combination of philosophy and poetry, I believe, makes operative alternative methods of understanding. What I call “the color of grammar” functions slightly in the margin of what we think of as the ordinary “sense” of things. The goal of this work combines disciplines to open a “between space” in language, making other facets of language and our thought “visible.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I do not believe that we ever really know what we think until we have come to it through the process of writing. Writing itself is a topic worthy of a dissertation and the affects it has on an individual. In this transformative process, I would like to thank my outside dissertation committee members, Cheryl Foster and Jean Walton, for their careful attention and support. And to my core committee, Galen Johnson for his clarifying insight and afternoon discussions of philosophy; to my second reader Peter Covino for his love of the avant-garde and poetry and his understandings of all the interworkings of poetry from sound texture, to print production, to aesthetics of the page; and my Major Professor, Mary Cappello for her brilliant insights, enlightening innovations in bending genre, and her careful and meticulous reading of my work. I would also like to thank all of those outside of my committee who have provided invaluable discussions and true intellectual community, Diane, Ly, Thomas, Stephen, Shannon, Shawna, Rose, and Holly. And to my parents, Maryanna and Dennis Kruse who have endured no one knows how many conversations regarding this entire process. Also a special thanks to Michelle Caraccia for all her administrative help and making paperwork make sense. And in memory of Kara Lewis whose words, “You can spin nonsense into gold,” will be remembered, and in loving memory to my grandmother, Friedel Kruse, who wanted nothing more in the world than to see me graduate with my doctorate as the first woman in our family to ever do so. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ...................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................iv Table of Contents ....................................................................................................v Introduction ............................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Simultaneous Language and the Color of Grammar: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color and the Avant-garde ...........................44 Chapter Two: The Balance of Color, Collapsing, Folding, and Not Confusing: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons ..............................................................88 Chapter Three: The Geography of Color and Simultaneity Revisited: Blaise Cendrars’ La Prose du Transsibérian ....................................................126 Chapter Four: Surface Color and Transformative Lighting: Mina Loy’s 1923 Lunar Baedecker ....................................................................................178 Appendix ............................................................................................................214 Bibliography.......................................................................................................220 v 1 INTRODUCTION I lean against the streetcar’s glass window mesmerized by the reflection of red taillights mirrored against rain. On first seeing Kandinsky’s Panels for Edwin R. Campbell (1914) at MoMA, I feel like I could fall into the movement of his color. Walking at twilight, I watch the sky on certain days and in particular weather turn the most magnificent, luminescent blue before fading to black. The four o’clock sun lights up a brick building, giving way to an image of knocking over the cardboard universe of a theater set. In a vintage shop, I purchase a dress because I cannot quite describe the color and how the fabric reflects light. None of these examples are a definition of color. None of these examples illustrates anything about the uniformity of color; instead, they are something else beyond a certain limit of reflection, surface, light, and lighting. There is no stasis here, but a moment of something imperceptible made visible if only ever so briefly. Color is not a set object, it is not one emotional response, one cultural association, but something that overwhelms my senses, an instant in my perception that moves me beyond the ordinary routine of experience. Color is that which is fundamental to my world and something that transcends my ordinary world in the moments when it is most transient. The brightness of a neon sign in the rain, the blur of colored lights through a fogged window is an effect that I cannot quite touch or place permanent parameters around. Color is an experience that resists event. When we think of color, we think of color as primary attribute of perception. Color is also a kind of surface because what we see is really only a reflection of light 2 on a surface. I propose that language too is a kind of surface, but one through which the surface figuration creates what we come to think of as depth and meaning. This is not to say that surface is oppositional to depth, but that surface is integral to our idea of depth. What may manifest in language as inconsistencies, contradiction, and nonsense in our ordinary grammar, perhaps better illustrates the visibility of this particular surface because it highlights the constructedness of our language. Theorizing surface and color, and grammar and visibility, I investigate the use of color in early 20th century avant-garde poetics as a space between the color I perceive and conceptualize and color as it exists in the world. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his late work, Remarks on Color (1951), tells us nothing about color theory per se, but rather illustrate the fissures in our thinking about color concepts. I examine
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