‘Such the conditions of our love’

The Surreal and Ethical Lack of a Centre in Jacob’s Room and Tender Buttons

Abstract

This essay explores Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room and Gertrude Stein’s poetry collection Tender Buttons, comparing them through the notion of a lack of a centre. Jacob’s Room is concerned with this lack through its ambivalent and evasive descriptions of its protagonist and Tender Buttons through its displacement of conventional descriptive logic. I first draw on André Breton’s The First Manifesto of Surrealism and its notion of ‘elsewhere’ to link the lack of a centre to a constant movement away from a settled sense of itself. Both texts exhibit this kind of surrealist movement ‘elsewhere’, Jacob’s Room through its interest in shifting perspectives and Tender Buttons through its interest in the metaphorical nature of poetic expression. Emmanuel Levinas’ theories of radical respect towards complete otherness subsequently bring an ethical light to the question of a lack of a centre and its movement ‘elsewhere’. In Jacob’s Room the ethics of a lack of a centre are largely tied up with its conceptualisation of love and care, whereas in Tender Buttons they show the ethical importance of linguistic play and joy. The two texts therefore look at the surrealist and ethical aspects of the lack of centrality with equal importance but with different emphases on interpersonal love and linguistic joy respectively.