II
The fool rejoices in flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable; in his jokes all absolute values are ridiculed and relativised- the word and the world are made strange by their very materiality. Rigid oppositions are joyfully dismantled and confused. The womb and the tomb, the king and fool, body and mind, sense and sound, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are all turned on their heads, disrupting the contradiction of opposites. The punning of the Fool, which holds up the materiality of the word as something devious, is testament to the tricks he plays on the hierarchies of high and low. "One of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere” Bakhtin points out.[i] Thus, the corporeal core of carnival exemplifies this turning all verticals onn their head- this is why all that is “bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable, triumphant.”[ii] The comedy of the fool is where wittiness meets the libidinal- carnival humor evokes all the laughter of gross jokes.[1] It is uproarious, childlike, low-brow and in bad taste.
In the pun, the elevated meaning of a word is turned around by the emphasis on the very body of the word itself. Language of jokes takes on a polymorphous life of its own, generating excitement as it becomes a thing to be enjoyed in itself. “Low” humor and punning have been sanctified in modern poetics as literary strategies themselves. Take for example, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Stein’s poems are not descriptions of things in words, but of words as things themselves, with the same palpability as our own bodies. The aim of her poetic language is to turn the problem of this relation between body and word into an enabling passage, tracing in it the possibility of a transformative practice that opens up the speaking subject to the truths couched the stubborn corporeality of language, those moments of interruptions where we discover the pun of the Fool. Our interest is not just in the work as an example of puns, but also, since puns involve an excess of meaning or ideas, the way in which Stein takes what is low, or base, and uses it to reveal a series of ideas about the sacrificial nature of culture.
Carnival reversal implies a change from principles of stability and closure to constant possibility. The fool embodies for us the contradiction of the ideal completed, atomized being against the collective corporeality of all life. This latter grotesque collective Body is a glut of heterogeneity- always open to the world by one orifice or another. Bakhtin takes the idea of the collective body in carnival from its agricultural and Christian origins as a promise of new growth, and expands it to represent "a feast for all the world," "a feast of becoming".[iii] The cosmic banquet features the collective carnival body, constituted entirely of openings, apertures, and orifices. In images of the grotesque mouths are always open, eating and drinking, laughing, joking, shouting: they take in and commune with the outer world into which they themselves are extended. The carnival body is a grotesque body which
is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits... The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation.[iv]
It is no wonder that an entire third of Stein’s volume is devoted to food- brimming with allusions to reproduction, eating, excrement and death. However, the pieces themselves do not, as in Rabelais, merely present the image of the grotesque body. Rather, the “bodies” of the words themselves- the puns which occur through the sound of cadences and printed shape- mimic the passing of matter through the body. Her experimentation with the fragmented and openness of lexical meaning turns language inside out and reveals expression as an extension of the one’s body into the corporeal world of vegetables, animals, and inert objects. The “rooms” in which she speaks embody the kind of indeterminacy and overabundance of Bakhtin’s formulation of carnival, where language is lowered into digestive, sexual, and excretory rituals in an effort to materialize what is eternal, holy, and good.
The riddling structure of each of Stein’s short prose-poems in Tender Buttons has this same simple, idiomatic nature of proverbs and vulgar jokes in the types of the carnival speech discussed in Rabelais and His World. They are as punning and witty more than they are nonsensical, each fragment presenting itself as something that one should chew on for a bit. They involve the more base pleasures of the mouth as well as the discriminating taste of the listening ear. Through its rich sound cadences, material textures, and capacity to tolerate nonsense and discontinuity, language is couched in the corporeal. Our words are marinated in a libidinal perversity even before we reach for them.
Bakhtin pushes the point that degradation and the lowering of ideals into the belly, intestines, reproductive organs, and buttocks involves a vertical flip, but to push an object, word or idea into the lower body is not to destroy it, but to “hurl it down into the lower reproductive stratum, the zone in which…a new birth takes place…it is always conceiving”.[v] In this light, the simple and inert topics in Tender Buttons (Milk, Purse, Egg, A Hankerchief, Cream, etc.) are seen in a new light, as forms that are fertile and mobile. The bodies of carnival are never closed nor complete; the material bodily principle is always in a state of becoming, of emptying and filling itself with what is found outside of itself.
These puns often come off as dirty jokes, alluding to a double meaning which is erotic or excretory- each poem encounters the material and heterogeneous excess of the body “out there” in the objects, food, and rooms of the world. As such, the pieces seem to be hiding something decidedly erotic or lewd. Take for example the poem called ‘A Brown’: “A brown which is not liquid not more so relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing”.[vi] The poem, alluding to feces, muscular relaxation, and the transformation of food to waste culminates in a double pun- “a-nus is pressing.” Yet the change to which Stein refers is linked to the very digestive aspect of carnival materialism and the inversions of the fool- where what has been traditionally elevated is not annihilated or negated but transformed or dissolved by the incorporations and appropriations of the body. Here, creation is linked with excrement, death, or defilement; what is “pressed” is also “new.”
The grotesque is an image of the eternal triumph of transformation; it expresses hope for the future, of always another chaotic beginning. This sense of time is quite different from a model which starts with an origin and moves in a procession, one which Bakhtin identifies with the "official" preoccupation with the past that renders life hierarchically pre-determined and unchangeable. For the carnival, the origin is obverted, contradicted, and doubled within itself. This beginning, though pre-symbolic and pre-egoistic, presents itself not just as a primordial past but the disruptive possibility of its return as something indestructible.[2] Thus to debase something, to eat and digest it, is to sacrifice it to the eternalpossibility of regeneration.
Images of becoming link the celebration of the body and the material world with the folk philosophical concept of time. By paying close attention to the punning relationships of objects (mouths, anuses, food, excrement), Stein and Bakhtin both reveal the relationships a hidden network of values. Extravagant feasting and excreting, either of food or words, herald the pleasures of carnival creativity, representing "the pathos of change and renewal".[vii] In a similar vein, the ontological relation between the digestive and the divine and permeates Tender Buttons, sharing with the Fool a predilection for punning, a play with the flexibility of the value of "becoming," and its double sense of excretion and Creation:
Pain soup, suppose it is a question, suppose it is butter, real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since.
A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since. [viii]
To “excreate a no since” is to undo the meaningless of nonsense (no-since), perhaps to uncover innocence (a-no-since). The piece is named Orange In, a pun of a title with multiple internal discordances. Orange In is also perhaps origin or arrange in. When the musical otherness of this “no since” becomes vocalized, it begins to sound “no sense,” or the Fool’s “nuisance.” The collection of sounds in a “a no, a no since” seems to metamorphose into material excess- infantile babbling or the musical cadence of a lover’s moans. Stein here seems to be playing with a reversal of the axis of a pre-symbolic beginning– “a no since when.” The carnival tricks of the fool concretize the past in the body by means of this “ex-creation.”
Debasing something to the lower body is central to the fools trickery in the “ex-creation” pun, a word which disintegrates the words “create” and “excrete” from their normal lexicon. To create something new through destruction is to ex-create, but it is also to excrete, to reformulate food into something fertile for the soil. The resemblance of excrement to the creativity of the carnival can be found again the question about the “since when,” the very first bit of matter. Degrading the idealism of the vertically ‘high’ face and mind to the bowels, belly and reproductive organs is not to eradicate it as the extreme limit or horizon. Pushing the good, the pure, or the divine to its lowest parts of the body dutifully preserves its potential to be materially felt and regenerated. The Fool’s excreatory wordplay uses language for “high” means- thinking and philosophizing, but also for the immediate bodily gratification in saying something that feels good in the mouth, by tearing words from their contexts and subjecting them to digestive change.
Excreation, if understood in its double sense, involves a sacrifice, an act that debases and dissolves for the sake of resurrection. Where mystics find holiness in taste of Christ’s body, the punning brilliance of the carnival fool - so fantastically preserved in the language play of Tender Buttons - seems to excreate innocence, or excrete a new kind of rapture. To create and then ex-create preserves the taut and witty reversals of a riddling, punning Fool and the surprise and sensuousness of his carnival outlook on the world. The excreation of time in the carnival is itself a pun, one which crosses the vertical opposition of holy and fleshly with the horizontal affiliation of the purely spiritual with the immutably carnal, where “to the pure, all things are pure.” In this crossing, we find that “in emptying ourselves, we expose ourselves to the pressures of the surrounding universe.”[ix]
[1] The “material bodily principle” of the figure of the fool extends beyond the Western scope of the carnival. Even primitive myths about the figure of the trickster or clown reveal something indestructible about his bodily excessiveness. The American anthropologist Paul Radin published an in depth study of the myth of the trickster, considering the Winnebago story cycles in which the character ‘Trickster’ goes through a series of misadventures. In the early cycles, Trickster attempts to butcher a slain buffalo and his left and right hand begin fighting one another over the possession of the carcass. Before it is over, Trickster has injured himself. Or another in which he goes to sleep after appointing his anus to guard some roasting meat. When a group of foxes approaches, the anus attempts to drive them off by flatulating, but to no avail. When Trickster awakens, he is so angry with his anus that he burns it with a brand from the fire. Then, as he walks along, he sees delicious pieces of cooked fat on the trail, which he eats. He discovers, much to his surprise, that these pieces of meat are fragments of his own burned intestines. In the next, Trickster wakes up to find a flag flying above him, but he soon discovers that the "flag" is his blanket and the pole is his phallus. He reels his penis in, carries it in a box, and attempts to have sex with a princess he encounters. No one can dislodge his enormous penis from her until an old wise woman tells them it is Trickster trying to have sex. There is another in which Trickster attempts to impersonate a woman until his fake vagina falls out and another in which he eats so many laxatives that he creates a mound of excrement into which he falls. He is so covered with excrement that he cannot see, so trees tell him where he can find water to clean himself. In these story cycles we re-discover the fundamental pattern of the Trickster: material excess, laughter, contradiction and above all the ability to disturb signs. The semiotic function of the Fool occurs where comedy is inverted, meaning collapses in its own excrement, and the borders of inside/outside are no longer sacrosanct.
[2] Julia Kristeva, a feminist theorist who drew heavily from the work of Bakhtin, claimed that laughter came from a crisis of the body with the symbolic matrix of signification. In Revolutions in Poetic Language, she refers to the site of this crisis as laughter. What concerns Kristeva is the logocentric bias which has taken hold on Western thought, compelling us to reduce psychic processes to linguistic ones and to posit the “Word” at the beginning of meaning. Kristeva opposes this tradition with the ‘extra-linguistic’ semiotic, and tries articulates a place of beginning before the Word, an originary phase dominated by the negative space of the mother's body, a “rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position.” Kristeva articulates this space of negativity and bodily drive as the semiotic chora drawing from Plato's Timaeus. Similar to stories of the Fool, the chora’s “nonexpressive totality” is by its nature almost impossible to articulate. It is the material origin from which the subject is both produced and threatened with annihilation. It is intersection of sense and non-sense, both spatially as the originary interior of the mother’s body, and temporally, as the beginning before the Beginning. So the chora is contradictorily both moment and receptacle, though “as rupture and articulations (rhythm), [it] precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality” In this sense the chora is not simply the redemption of forgotten past (whose status, Kristeva warns us, is that of a theoretical fiction), but is the force of its movement in the body that perpetually and repetitively destabilizes the subject and frustrates any effort to impose the Word as the origin of being. Of course, the Fool’s laughter erupts also from a heightened awareness of logos and rationality, not just its non-signifying intersections in the body. Nevertheless, the palpability of puns in poetic are related to this chora in the sense that they are reproductive or fertile. (Kristeva, 26-30)
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