2001-01-29 - 00:29:24
It's Gertrude Stein's Fault I Have No Entry Tonight
It's Gertrude Stein's Fault I Have No Entry TonightFolks, with every good intention--and some interesting new developments to relate--I am pooped out tonight. All weekend I've been speed-reading Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) for tomorrow's class, and tonight I whipped up a response paper to hand in as well. A "response paper" is not quite an essay, just a wee bit of writing to prove to my prof that I've actually read and thought about the text. So if you're here to read about the latest big dick I've ogled or sucked, sorry to disappoint eh?
ENOUGH ABOUT ME - WHAT ABOUT YOU -
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME?
Erasures and Refusals
in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas
But I am not Mademoiselle Stein, I said. He almost jumped out of his chair. What, he shouted, not Mademoiselle Stein. Then who are you. … Well, said I, you see Mademoiselle Stein. Where is Mademoiselle Stein, he said. She is downstairs, I said feebly, in the automobile. Well what does all this mean, he said. Well, I said, you see Mademoiselle Stein is the driver and I am the delegate and Mademoiselle Stein has no patience she will not go into offices and wait and interview people and explain, so I do it for her while she sits in the automobile. But what, said he sternly, would you have done if I had asked you to sign something. I would have told you, I said, as I am telling you now. Indeed, he said, let us go downstairs and meet this Mademoiselle Stein (Stein 167-168).
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein refracts her life story through the eyes of her lesbian lover: narrating her growth and reception as a writer, her literary and artistic friendships and her engagement--and lack thereof--with the sociopolitics of her age. Remarkably, this refracted autobiography accomplishes its enigmatic portrait of Stein as "seen" through Toklas' eyes without naming or characterizing their relationship as lesbian, nor depicting Toklas--the posited autobiographical "I"--in any sense other than as the Writer's amanuensis, the one who champions the under-appreciated, misunderstood Genius.
Moreover, Stein punctuates her text with refusals of identity based on marginalized difference. Her Jewishness goes unacknowledged; so too, does the queerness of the many artists and writers--Tchelitchev, Crevel, Barnes, Barney, Gide and Cocteau--who populate her life, depicted without reference to homosexuality in their lives or works; feminism "does not happen to be her business" (Stein 78); Paul Robeson is admonished for singing spirituals, which, Stein opines "do not belong to you more than anything else, so why claim them" (Stein 224).
Stein's autobiography also describes her worrisome agitation when required to authenticate her identity before any representative of hegemonic state power. On three occasions, much is made of Stein and Toklas producing their passports at a border; after the Madrid incident--when, following some bureaucratic fuss, they are deemed "desirable" enough to return to France--Stein anxiously delegates passport production to Toklas. I am not Gertrude Stein, I am her delegate, Toklas insists to the major at Perpignan and the customs official on the England-bound ship. Stein--who fashioned her appearance as a "mannish" lesbian, and who would soon enough be evading the concentration camps her Jewish heritage marked her for --puts the onus for her authentication onto Toklas. Insisting that Toklas stand in and vouch for her identity before the powers-that-be--propitiation by proxy--Stein endeavors to avoid the politics of identification with its risk of repressive violence, to postpone that inevitable reckoning of her sociopolitical desirability.
As autobiographer, Stein employs a similarly proximate strategy to sooth her identification anxieties: filtering her self through the diminished, appreciative "I" of Alice B. Toklas. Toklas as character is an indispensable witness and assistant to Stein's aesthetic projects; as narrator, a disembodied and asexual "I". On both levels of the text, Toklas proves crucial to Stein's elision of difference. While Toklas' "I" would dare not sign for Stein's--on the border or the title page--it not only corroborates Mademoiselle's genius but collaborates with and within her erasure.
