Professor Neil Schmitz has been teaching Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” for the past 40 years. Recently, during the English Department reunion at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Professor Schmitz once again gave a talk on “Tender Buttons” to his students he taught 40 years ago. 

“Thank you so much, Professor Schmitz,” said a former student of Schmitz’s after the talk, now an old man with frosted grey hair, “‘Tender Buttons’ changed my life forever. It was worth coming here today.”

What, then, makes the book so appealing and how can we possibly tenderize buttons?

In her monumental work, Stein demonstrates how we can soften hard buttons by being playful with language, by melting dogmatic ideologies, and by embracing unfamiliar things. According to Stein, we should be capable of making hard, stiff objects, such as buttons, soft and tender. As the celebrated leader of the expatriate writers who belonged to what she called the Lost Generation, Stein emphasized the importance of being tender and flexible.

In English, “tender buttons” refers to a mother’s nurturing nipples that give life-sustaining milk to babies. Nipples are soft and so is milk. In fact, most foods are essentially soft and tender, not to mention water and other thirst-quenching beverages. Babies are soft and tender, too, and so is a mother’s bosom. Only dead bodies are stiff and hard, as Wallace Stevens points out in his poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”

All important things in life are soft and tender: kissing and hugging, love and affection, friendship and comradeship. Such tender things are capable of melting hard and stiff relationships. Cuddling up to a mother’s nourishing “tender buttons,” babies find comfort and relief from hunger.

Buttons connect things and hold separate objects together. Unlike air-tight zippers, however, buttons leave some space in between objects so that air can flow freely. When you button up, things become connected; when you unbutton, things are left wide open. Without buttons, objects fall apart. Yet, you can button down and still feel comfortable.

In her book, “Tender Buttons,” therefore, Stein buttons down the hard, concrete reality and transforms it into a tender, flexible fantasy. And she unbuttons the straight jacket of pure arts and finds art in mundane objects instead. In that sense, the book is a celebration of the marriage between the pure arts and our mundane life, between the concrete and the abstract, and between highbrow culture and middlebrow culture.

Appropriately, in the first chapter entitled, “Objects,” Stein attempts philosophical interrogations of the world and the universe.

She writes: “Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men.”

In the second chapter, “Food,” Stein finds exquisite art in mundane foods, and softness inside the hard shell of an egg. Like Richard Brautigan, who deliberately ends his novel, “Trout Fishing in America” with the word mayonnaise, Stein, too, values the soft nature of food that nourishes us.

Of course, when something melts and boundaries collapse, everything may seem to blur and feel uncertain. Appropriately, therefore, Stein begins her essay with an epigraph: “A carafe, that is a blind glass.” This resonates with the famous verse in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face,” as well as Alice’s looking glass. Nevertheless, Stein urges us to soften all hard objects to make them elastic and tender.

When I first read “Tender Buttons” in Professor Schmitz’s graduate seminar 33 years ago, I was stunned by Stein’s revolutionary idea. At first, I was a bit confused. “Can we really turn hard buttons into tender ones?” Soon, however, I realized we could do it and had to do it.

Ever since, I have tried to soften all of the hard, inflexible issues I have encountered in life. As a professor of literature and a literary critic, for example, I have tried to soften rigid literary studies by extending its boundaries to include the much more flexible cultural studies, embracing genre novels, popular novels and graphic novels. To make the hardened curriculum tender and elastic, I also incorporated film studies into the English Department at Seoul National University as early as 1991.

Politically, I have always hated any hardcore, extreme ideology, whether on the left or right. History tells us that both Stalin and Hitler were equally virulent, massacring millions of people for the sake of their political ideology.

Unfortunately, in South Korea, we find so many extreme leftists and rightists, who live in the hard nutshell of dogmatic ideology. Poor souls! Perhaps they have never heard of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” Or even if they have, they may have never understood its profound meaning. No sophisticated person can be an extremist. Only simpletons become extremists.

We expect buttons to be hard. But Stein tells us that sometimes, even buttons can be soft and tender. God gave us soft and tender bodies. Why, then, should our minds be stiff and inflexible?

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor of English at Seoul National University and director of the Korea Literature Translation Institute. ― Ed.