The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein – Flashcards

- "the lecture went off very well, the men afterwards asked a great many questions and were very enthusiastic. The women said nothing. Gertrude Stein wondered whether they were supposed not to or just did not."

- "Mrs Stein brought with her three little Matisse paintings, the first modern things to cross the Atlantic." - "All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, be was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait ca, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had." - p.85: Stein's childhood reading the literary greats. - "It is rather strange that she was not then at all interested in the work of Henry James for whom she now has a very great admiration and whom she considers quite definitely as her forerunner, he being the only nineteenth century writer who being an american felt the method of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein always speaks of america as being now the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century." - "she always says she dislikes the normal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting." - "About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it."

- "The embassy was very full of not very american looking citizens waiting their turn... The young american sighed. They are easier, he said, because they have papers, it is only the native born american who has no papers." - "But the essential thing, the treatment of the houses was essentially spanish and therefore essentially Picasso. In these pictures he first emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. - p. 78: repetition of "She was born in Alleghany, Pennsylvania." - "Gertrude Stein always says that cubism is a purely Spanish conception and only spaniards can be cubists and that the only real cubism is that of Picasso and Juan Gris." - "There was Duncan, a southern boy with such a very marked southern accent that when he was well into a story I was lost. Gertrude Stein whose people all come from Baltimore had no difficulty... The people in Nimes were as much troubled as I was ... they said not only could they not understand these americans but these americans could not understand them when they spoke english. I had to admit that it was more or less the same with me." - "She had as an instructor in painting a weird looking frenchman one who looked exactly like the pictures of Huckleberry Finn's father" (Also literature) - "a hungarian was found eating the bread for rubbing out crayon drawings that various students left on their painting boards and this evidence of extreme poverty and lack of hygiene had an awful effect upon the sensibilities of the americans. There were quite a number of americans." - "It was then that she had to take her turn in the delivering of babies and it was at that time that she noticed the negroes" - "Gertrude Stein then became very earnest and gave a long discourse on the value of the Greek to the English, aside from its being an island, and the lack of value of greek culture for the americans based upon the psychology of the americans as different from the psychology of the english. She grew very eloquent on the disembodied abstract quality of the american character and cited examples, mingling automobiles with Emerson, and all proving that they did not need greek, in a way that fussed Russell more and more and kept everybody occupied." - "If you do not realise that the fundamental sympathy of America is with France and England and could never be with a medieval country like Germany, you cannot understand America." - "It was at this time that Gertrude Stein conceived the idea of writing a history of the United States consisting of chapters wherein Iowa differs from Kansas, and wherein Kansas differs from Nebraska etcetera." - "the french soldiers were rather mistrustful of the alsatians who were too anxious to be french and yet were not french. They are not frank, the french soldiers said. And it is quite true. The french whatever else they may be are frank. - "Paul Robeson interested Gertrude Stein. He knew american values and american life as only one in it but not of it could know them. And yet as soon as any other person came into the room he became definitely a negro. Gertrude Stein did not like hearing him sing spirituals. They do not belong to you any more than anything else, so why claim them, she said." - "Gertrude Stein concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the african is not primitive, he has a very ancient but very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen."

The Angel of the House is "immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily." She says "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use al the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure."

- Perspective, distance and difference. America's conceptualisation from outside, and the effects of defamiliarisation. Cultural and geographical distance. Hemmingway - "moeveable Feast." "Away from Paris I could write about Paris." Geographical distances enable him to look back and write about a place. - Identity of being a Transnational writer: know themselves as being one, and that it gives them a privileged insight. Self-reflexive. - The inheritance of a rich tradition - John Donne "Oh my American." Motifs of cultural difference. Rhetoric of distance and alienation goes back a while.

- Ethnicity, gender, nationality - all very topical at the time. - Stein attempts to describe or codify America. Consciousness of being an American in Europe. - Removed from country - Jewish, lesbian, exPat. An outsider. - Testing limits of national identity. Stein asks what defines national character and subjectivity, particularly how this operates across different boundaries. Stein addresses specific points of intersection. - Flow across national boundaries, porous borders - people, cash, etc. The beginnings of globalisation. Global commodities. National identity more fluid and eroded. Stein is very interested in this. American not a nationality but a transnationality. - Stein is always "agonising" about what different nationalities are like. Defining and redefining Americanness. Performing Americanism. - Importance of Paris in Autobiography. Her muse. Very big attraction for Americans (Paris), as it was much more free sexually, racially etc. That reputation remains today, really. "Paris was the prize" in early 20th century. For Stein, she can live freely from family, as lesbian, free of gender essentialism. Alice as the "wife". Satirical elements involved there.

- Written in a period of immense social and intellectual change. Ideas about morality, authority etc. Socially and politically, cities grew, rural life dwindled. Immigrants, farmers, city-dwellers together. Impact of the revolutionary movements. Communism, facism, Hitler. Women Suffrage. 1920 amendment in America. Legacy of civil war and racism. Scientific advances. Einstein, Marie Curie. Freud. Cinemas, "talkies". Leisure changes, private and public. Technological changes. All this shapes cultural mood. Essentially, the basic foundations of culture are massively shaken. - So there's a tension between old and new. Artists must think of new ways of engaging with that. The result is modernism. So Stein, Faulkner, Pound, Hemmingway come to Europe and reflect on this moment of great change. In Britain, James Joyce, Conrad (Polish), W.C Williams, Auden. They show the "prevailing sense of dislocation of the past and place and commitment to active remaking of art." For some, 20th century basically represents The End. WWI, waste and uncertainty. Opportunity for change, innovation, difference. - Modernism is truly transatlantic, international. - Rise of avant-garde art - Picasso and Matisse. - Europeans the first to change in artistic practice. (America is the newfound land, so) - Modernisms - multiple. Movement gave women, Jews etc. chance to speak traditional writing didn't. - Stein's style is very in tune with new painters and artists. Which was seen as completely incomprehensible at the time. - Move for realism: New modes of writing hostile to ready-made values of realism. Virginia Woolf abandons "holding a mirror up to reality." - away from Victorian "propriety". - Internal impressions. - ecriture feminine. - Joyce's Ulysses embraces all kinds of bodily functions. (It was censored). Goes starkly against traditional ideals. - Destabilising boundaries. - Ending and linearity. Joyce's work always clearly has something more after the end.

- Very long sentences, "express the rhythm of the visible world." - Seeming errors deliberately left in the text. Real patters of speech. Also "nothing new under the sun"? - Certainty and uncertainty. - Stein as bridge to the future. Death of the Author. Commas, gaps, "motion-sickness". Etc. - Both write against romantic author (Creative spirit, writing as a gift.") - Writing as sexual. French feminism. Ecriture feminine. - Meaning as something to be suspicious or wary of. - Nationalism: Blanket statements about nationality which are unsettled. Staged scenes? - Stein's Jewish identity - the original diaspora. Problems of essentialism. Jewish people obviously very negatively protrayed. - Feels like you can plunge in to the narrative at any moment and feel like it's the beginning. - The name itself plays around with identity. - Regional diversity. Chicago versus California etc. - Nationality and aestheticism, different art-forms and practice. - Space and gendered spaces. [uni talk - no women ask questions] - Challenges of her style. [Only when she reads herself from the outside (like nations), is she comprehensible. - Ideas of national identity, constructed and fixed. - Refusal of plot-structure and linear narrative. - Intricacy versus chatty, confiding tone. Overpopulated, almost. - Validity of different perspectives.

Stein doesn't confront issues head-on, but feminism is present, in a sense. - Autobiography, biography - male genre. Male self-reflexity. "I" - plural and shared. A woman writing herself into a very masculine history. - Alice as wife of the "genius". - Traditional portrait subject - but subverted. Not exploited, like Undine. Object, but active agent. Alice and reciprocity.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is much clearer than Stein's other stuff. First comprehensible text of hers. Stein's essentialist view invoked and destabilised. All about destabilising identity. Unusually for her, we have an identifiable genre. One that is traditionally male. "Anticipates post-modern notions of subjectivity." Autobiographic genre - identity is not coherent, linear etc. Formed by outside world and inside interaction. SO narrative is unstable, not chronological etc. Except for national identity: "a category that Stein both essentialises and destabilises." Laurencin's sense of split national identity. "the blanks that permeate this text." "to obtain an essentialised American identity one is, necesssarily, aware of one's self as an incoherent self." Anderson and nationality narratives. Imagined construction. "the ways in which this text both characterizes national identity as an inherent, essential aspect of one's identity and at the same time allows national identity to fluctuate, to be adopted and performed." "national labels often replace names" and essentializing statements abound. p. 28 - forced attempt to make Stein sound like she's destabilising national identity. Because identities (national) can be swapped etc. "One can adapt the national identity of a foreign country." Risk of destabilising national identity high at time. National Identity determined by what is absent, not present. Marriage, N.I and the 1924 Immigration act - limited immigrants allowed in America. Feminism - "In the Autobiography, masculine identities are often associated with strict, stable national identities while more feminised figures are more flexible concerning their national identities." Landscape and aesthetic very important to Stein's thinking. In the midst of an actual warfront, ability to distinguish nationality is lost. p. 187 - but then not. "nations engender a specific aesthetic." Adopts different aesthetic for Autobiography and so switches national identity.

- "In many ways the autobiographical act is one at odds with, even a betrayal of, Gertrude Stein's aesthetic principles" (901) - For her, too, identity is "an artificial construction based on the perception of certain fixed traits...stresses repetition, which is, according to Stein, antithetical to creativity" (902) She's all about an "ongoing present", and autobiography presents a linear sequence of time. "The reader is not certain who it is he is listening to; nor is he meant to be" (904) "Stein, Toklas tells us, sought in her writing to give "the inside as seen from the outside"" (905) Avoiding psychological speculation, focusing on surface detail to give the real self. "But in this first representation of Stein ... the external perspective of Toklas, sticking to the observable surface, suggests the inside while leaving it mysterious." (908) "the book frustrates any attempt to fix Stein in a simple identity" (909) "The Autobiography continually points up the disparity between actuality and its representation" (911) "In the original edition this final page of the text was followed by a photograph of the first page of the manuscript" (912) Conclusion: "Gertrude Stein at once accepted, denied and created autobiography" (913) → "constant excursions backward and forward in time" (Slaughterhouse 5) (911) → A question the book raises: "How can we deal with the tension between historical truthfulness and aesthetic design in autobiography? Or with the splitting of the author into character and writer?" (Slaughterhouse 5) (913)