In the introduction to Useful Knowledge, Keith Waldrop utilizes Vygotsky’s Thought & Language positing that Stein’s repetitive portraits of people and objects are what Vygotsky terms “inner speech”.

By the term “inner speech” he means “speech for oneself; external speech is for others… (Inner Speech) is neither an antecedent of external speech nor its reproduction in memory but is, in a sense, the opposite of external speech. The latter is the turning of thought into words, its materialization and objectification. With inner speech, the process is reversed: Speech turns into inward thought…” (Waldrop xxiv)

Waldrop goes on to consider the syntax of “inner speech,” which shares many Steinian qualities. “Inner speech” operates in a “continuous present,” with “a reduced vocabulary.. where fewer and fewer words carry more and more sense,” and where the “sense of words” takes precedence over their meaning (Waldrop xxivi). Each of these qualities can be seen in Orange In. in Tender Buttons.

Go lack go lack use to her./ Cocoa and clear clothes, woodling./Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal./Pain soup, suppose it is 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. (Tender Buttons 38)

There are methods one can expect to encounter in Stein’s portraiture. Emphasis through repetition; words that make more than one appearance; and within that insistence, which words fade out of the arrangement, and which shift places. One of Stein’s absolute convictions was that inanimate things can move within arrangements of other objects. A group of seemingly stagnant objects might appear differently because something else around them was moved, for instance a curtain may have been drawn or a bottle may be less full because part of the liquid within it was poured. To Stein these nuanced shifts are movements (or woodles?). The “arrangement” in the poem, Orange In, is a breakfast table with cocoa, clear soup, oranges and oatmeal. An immediate repetition of “go lack,” and then “lack” and “use” together introduce the possibilities that what “lack” is may be of use, or more likely, (with other Stein-isms in mind (addressed later)), “use” is a “lack.” Then nouns “unlinked” from understandable surroundings, force readers to see (as in the first phrasing where there is no grammatical sense to be made of “use”) these nouns become the words they are without definitive denotations. Then, they are “woodling,” so inanimate objects taking continuous (though unimaginable because what is woodling?) action. Then “cocoa” again, but “clothes” trades places with “soup” and the word that makes the title of the poem, “oranges,” makes an appearance. In the next line “clear” is traded out for “pain” making “pain soup.” Perhaps the butter is melted and appears as soup, or there is a question about what it is and it is butter, but it is all melted and that is a pain. Then a discussion of “real” appears and “real is” becomes “real is only,” which is perhaps “real is” only what is seen. So butter as “clear soup” is what butter actually is in this instance. “Excreate” is an antithesis of creation. Stein believed in creation thoroughly and contrasted “things created,” with things merely “conceived” (Picasso 42). Placing an article with the word “no” (“a no”) draws attention to its smallness and then helps attach it to the phrase that will repeat out into the end of the poem. “No since” becomes “no, because”; because the butter melted perhaps? And “no since” pulls in homophonic echoes of “nuisance,” and also “no sense.” In this continuousness the notion of Stein’s writing as an “inner speech” holds true. Her play with the materiality and surface of each word trumps any chance at realization or meaning one can paraphrase, but thoughts about possible meanings can continue and accrue ad infinitum.

   Stein liked an arrangement. She did not like associations and their inevitable relationships to interpretation and memory. In Two Stein Talks Lynn Hejinian explains this as the difference between synchronous and diachronous words. Diachronous words arrive dragging a tail of associations behind them. More often than not diachronous words are nouns (Hejinian 116). Stein liked synchronous words, words that were relational: verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and articles because, according to her, they “all do something” and because they can, “be so mistaken” (Poetry & Grammar 290-92). …

   Thinking of Stein’s writing as “inner speech” is an applicable way to approach much of her oeuvre, but similarly to those on the hunt for cryptograms in Stein, this thinking does not account for Stein’s highly developed relationship to the act of writing. When Stein’s work resembles “inner speech” it is a highly trained version of “inner speech.” It is as if, armed with theories and convictions about her beliefs concerning writing, she knew how to access the space in her mind where “inner speech” exists that many adults lose admittance to. Stein’s writing was a practice, a daily practice as meditation can be. In an interview when The Geographical History of America, one of her later books, was published Stein remarked:

I cannot afford to be clear because if I was I would risk destroying my own thought. Most people destroy their thought before they create it. That is why I often repeat a word again and again –because I am fighting to hold the thought. (Mellow 420)

If we take the liberty of equating “thought” with “inner speech” Stein did manage to hold on to something that many adults “destroy before they create.” As described, Stein often fought to hold on to her thinking as she wrote. On a literal level, considering her writing with this in mind provides another way to pull meanings from her strings of insistence. In Preciosilla, for instance, perhaps the eleven repetitions of “go” leading up to “Toasted Susie is my ice-cream” are active waiting, the continuousness that is necessary for Stein to access the next part of her thinking. In an essay about Stein’s Four in America Thorton Wilder wrote,

It is being written before our eyes; she does not, as other writers do, suppress and erase the hesitations, the recapitulations, the connectives, in order to give us the completed fine result of her meditations. She gives us the process…we hear her groping toward the next idea; we hear her cry of joy when she has found it; sometimes, …we hear her reiterating the already achieved idea and, as it were, pumping it in order to force out the next development that lies hidden within it. (Bloom 33)

Accepting Stein’s writing process as a meditation can help us discover her aims which were her meanings. Wilder was correct that part of the power in Stein’s work is that the making is as much a part of the final product as what appears on the page. In Poetry & Grammar Stein wrote, “I remember in writing An Acquaintance With Description looking at anything until something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way that actual thing would come to be written,” (305). Her process involved waiting as much as writing, and this waiting became meditative. Her choice of words was exacting here too –the “actual thing would come to be written,” is very different than her saying, “I came to write.” In this statement and in her comments about fighting for the next thought Stein depicts herself more as a medium or transmitter that writing comes through than as an active agent writing.