Tender Buttons is a kind of love story which leads us to ask, “What do we love when we love to read?” Is it a certain meaning or truth that reading can help us achieve, or is it the experience itself—the act rather than the end of reading? And if the latter, how important are meaning and truth to this activity of reading? Tender Buttons is a work of radical literary experimentation, which in its relationship to signification, representation, truth, and meaning is unlike anything we encounter on the St. John’s program (or perhaps, closer to the works we encounter in the music tutorial than to the books we read together in Seminar). This work provides us with an occasion, and a virtually unique perspective from which to investigate our relationship to reading, truth, meaning, beauty, and pleasure. At the very gateway of our introduction to philosophic reflection (Plato’s Republic), Socrates refers to “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” What is this quarrel? Is it a tension between truth and beauty, which the poet Keats insisted were one and the same? Must a book’s relationship to truth be mediated primarily through the category of meaning, or might it negotiate that relationship by means of beauty instead? Does beauty have a meaning, or is it an experience beyond meaning (perhaps more closely related to a certain kind of (aesthetic) pleasure?) How do we understand the difference between reading as a means to an end (such as truth and understanding) and reading as an end in itself (a certain kind of experience we desire for its own sake, as Aristotle says of happiness)? Using Tender Buttons as an opportunity to reflect on these questions, we will consider the importance (if not the meaning) of a literary work that stands at the beginning of an era of avant-garde aesthetic practices that led to fiction without plot, music without notes (John Cage’s 4’33”), and paintings that consist entirely of black canvases (Ad Reinhardt).

📷: "Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in Venice" (1908) | Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons