Render Muttons

Non-representational art is a conundrum for me. On one hand I would like to dismiss it because I'm a philosophy major and it is my job to seek out the rational and logical purpose of a thing. However, I also like my red plaid shirt, and the cover of Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures," and I hate houndstooth jackets on women. All of these are non-representational patterns and images, there is no narrative or character or moral, they just are abstract shapes for the most part. So I cannot say that non-representational art doesn't have validity and doesn't illicit an emotional response.

And after ending my blog for the last literature class with an exploration of the death of the author, it wouldn't be intellectually honest to say that my inability to discern Stein's authorial intent with Tender Buttons means it has no value. I shouldn't even allow my grudge against her for being a fascist color my opinion of her writing since authors don't matter.

But man, I just can't get into Tender Buttons. For a split second I thought I was going to like her, when I heard the title. I thought of a mother buttoning her child's jacket on a cold day. It gave me this nice comforting feeling of maternal bonds and I thought that I might be able to get other such interesting images out of her work.

I'm reminded of the movie Donnie Darko, when Drew Barrymore's character tells her class about a linguist that said that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the english language. The point being that the aesthetic sound is pleasing despite the semantic meaning being dull or even possibly negative if you think of musky basements. That scene was always perplexing to me because I could not figure out why "cellar door" was all that pleasant a sound. I also cannot figure out why Gertrude Stein's poetry is arranged in aesthetic terms instead of semantically.

And here is the paradox because I enjoy the idea of the death of the author. Screw all your context, the text is all that matters. However, when it comes to "cellar door" and "The time to show a message is when too late..." they are meaningless to me without context. I do not give a damn about "cellar door" as a phrase in and of itself. But throw some Polish Jews in 1939, hiding in the cellar, and they can see the uniform of a Nazi through a hole in the cellar door, well now I care quite a bit about a cellar door.