Subjects, Objects, and the Fetishisms of Modernity in the Works of Gertrude Stein

KATE LIVETT

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW Submitted for examination August 2006 Abstract

This thesis reopens the question of subject/object relations in the works of Gertrude Stein, to argue that the fetishisms theorised by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and later Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig, and problematised by feminist critics such as Elizabeth Grosz, are central to the structure of those relations. My contribution to Stein scholarship is twofold, and is reflected in the division of my thesis into Part One and Part Two. Part One of this thesis establishes a model for reading the interconnections between subjects and objects in Stein’s work; it identifies a tension between two related yet different structures. The first is a fetishistic relation of subjects to objects, associated by Stein with materiality and nineteenth-century Europe, and the identity categories of the “genius” and the “collector”. The second is a “new” figuration of late modernity in which the processual and tacility are central. This latter is associated by Stein with America and the twentieth century, and was a structure that she, along with other modernist artists, was developing. Further, Part One shows how these competing structures of subject/object relations hinge on Stein’s problematic formulations of self, nation, and artistic production. Part Two uses the model established in Part One to examine the detailed playing- out of the tensions and dilemmas of subject/object relations within several major Stein texts. First considered is the category of the object as it is constructed in Tender Buttons, and second the category of the subject as it is represented in the nexus of those competing structures in The Making of Americans and ‘Melanctha’. The readings of Part Two engage with the major strands of Stein criticism of materiality, sexuality, and language in Tender Buttons, Stein’s famous study of objects. The critical areas engaged with in her biggest and most controversial texts respectively – The Making of Americans and ‘Melanctha’ – include typology, “genius”, and Stein’s methodologies of writing such as repetition/iteration, intersubjectivity, and “daily living”. This thesis contends that the dilemma of subject/object relations identified and examined in detail is never resolved, indeed, its ongoing reverberations are productive up until and including her final work. COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

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Date ...... Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my family and friends, Jennifer, Brian, David, Mishi, and Elizabeth, for their unconditional love and support, without which I would not have finished this thesis. For her absolutely inspiring interest in and understanding of literature, and art in general, and her specific and intense engagement with my thesis, I would like to thank my mum, Jennifer. I would specifically like to thank my brother David and my dad Brian for their complete faith in my ability to complete this thesis. Whilst “thank you” is not an adequate response to a wonderful supervisor, I want to acknowledge the fantastic efforts of my supervisor Brigitta Olubas. Her detailed readings of the final drafts were crucial, as well as her ongoing faith in me and her positive, active support in the final stages of this project. I would like to express my gratitude to Anne Brewster for reading my penultimate draft and providing productive feedback in a short turn-around time, and all at very late notice. I would also like to thank the School of English for their provision of a supportive research and working environment and conditions during my candidature. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction 1 PART ONE Chapter One: “Nation fetishism”; the problematics and productivities of pleasure 26 Nationalized-fetishized subjects 28 Taussig’s “Nation fetishism” and Stein’s “America” 39 The implications of “Nation fetishism” for Stein’s politics 57

Chapter Two: Geniuses, celebrities, and art as commodity fetish 70 Stein the Genius becomes Stein the Celebrity 72 The convergence of the Genius and the Collector 90 The ‘new’ structure of subject/object relations in modernity 100 The major structures of subject/object relations as they operate in two of Stein’s short texts 122 PART TWO Chapter Three: The pleasures and productivities of collecting 129 The inherent fetishism of the still-life 131 Fetishized objects and the status of Tender Buttons as a “collection” 143 Labour and the language/paint “surface” 158 Language, lesbian sexuality, and codification 180

Chapter Four: Making “types”; uniqueness and reproducibility, mass-production and the individual subject 198 Subjects objectified into “types” 201 The type of “woman” in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ 208 The “racial” type and the type of “woman” in ‘Melanctha’ 211 The type of the “artist-genius” in ‘Matisse’, ‘Picasso’, and ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ 217 The “national” type in Paris France 226 The “national” type, the “artist-genius” type, and the “woman” type in The Making of Americans, and Many Many Women 229 Conclusion 246 Works Cited 252 Works Consulted 265 1

Introduction

Perhaps the most basic human distinction to be challenged and “demolished” by Modernist thought was that between subject and object… (190). Gerald J. Kennedy

This thesis reopens the question of subject/object relations in the works of Gertrude Stein, her fascination with and enjoyment of all objects from the material—both ordinary and domestic (hats, bags, foodstuffs), and the rare and expensive, (gems, diamonds, artworks)—to the abstract objects that she herself constituted in their “objectness”. Stein’s abstract “objects” will be shown to encompass the words, ideas, and people she engaged with: the words that signify their material manifestations; the idea of Nations such as America and France; the subjects she knew, from friends and acquaintances to other artists, to the characters in her fiction and to, most problematically, herself. All of these objects are represented through complex, yet formal, relations. In this thesis I argue that the fetishisms of modernity theorised by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and later deployed in new formations that negotiate the interconnections of these two original theorists—namely those of Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig problematised by feminist critiques—are central to the structure of those relations.

The fundamental contribution of this thesis to Stein scholarship is the identification of different kinds of fetishism in Stein’s writing. These fetishisms are those of ‘State fetishism’, from Taussig, which forms the theoretical framework of Chapter One, Marxist commodity fetishism from Benjamin, in Chapter Two and Chapter Three, Freudian sexual fetishism and feminist engagements with it, in the latter half of Chapter Three, and the ideological functioning of commodity fetishism as a relation between subjects, as explicated by cultural theorist David Hawkes, which I deploy in Chapter Four. These different conceptualizations of fetishism are examined in turn in their own 2

terms. However, the specific gendered dynamics of Freudian sexual fetishism are considered in light of the Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist critique of those operations, and are deployed by this thesis in their modified formation, rather than in the exact terms outlined by Freud. My use of Marxist commodity fetishism is similarly not limited to the original definition as explicated by Marx. Commodity fetishism is explored in this thesis from the departure point of the ways it is made culturally manifest in specific instances, as discussed in the critical works of Benjamin. As such, both of the original theorizations of fetishism are used here in modified ways and different discourses from those of their inception.

Karl Marx’s identification and explication of commodity fetishism, from Capital: Volume One, is the major theorization of fetishism through and in relation to which the other fetishisms of modernity exist. In Volume One Marx argues:

A commodity is…a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have 3

recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities (74).

Thus, Marx argues that the “physical properties and…the material relations arising therefrom” is one aspect of the value of objects, and it bears no relation, he contends, to the relations of value between one object and another. This discrepancy in the value of the objects means that the products of labour become “endowed” with mysterious power of their own, and this, Marx argues, is similar to the endowing of religious objects with spiritual power. Religious aurification, then, is where Marx gets his name for the power attributed to objects.

Continuing a trajectory of fetishism as the name for people’s mysterious allocation of power to inanimate objects in both the religious and economic domains, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud borrows the term from Marx, and, in his 1927 paper ‘Fetishism’, uses it to explain the particular behaviour of a small number of his patients. These patients are all male, and what Freud terms their “perversion” is fetishistic, he argues, in that it involves the endowment of objects with a mysterious sexual desirability and allure. The reason for this, he claims, is that the fetish object is a substitute for the maternal phallus, the “penis” that the boy believes the mother to have. Unwilling to give up the idea that the mother has a penis, the boy partially accepts its absence, which Freud termed “acknowledgement”, and partially continues to maintain the belief that she has it, “disavowal” (351). Acknowledgement and disavowal occur simultaneously at the moment of revelation of the mother’s “lack”, and this trauma, including the simultaneous reactions of the child, are displaced onto a material object sighted by the boy in the vicinity of the mother/the mother’s genitals, such as underwear, stockings, shoes, or parts of her body such as a foot, a leg, or a breast (Baudrillard 19). This object 4

then becomes the “memorial” to the “trauma of castration”. It is only through engagement with a version of the object fetishized that the fetishist can achieve genital climax and thus sexual satisfaction (351)

Fetishism resonates throughout culture at a more ubiquitous level than that suggested by the extent of the two specific formulations of it in the works of Marx and Freud, as Emily Apter and William Pietz’s Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (1990) implies in its title, and in the range of essays within, which collectively engage with the importance of fetishism in the development of social and cultural discourses through the twentieth century. The crucial importance of Marxist and Freudian thinking to the development of culture in modernity can be seen also as a concomitant importance of fetishism. Commodity fetishism is acknowledged as a major aspect of Marxist theory, and the importance of the implications of fetishism in Freud that he himself did not follow up has been discussed by psychoanalytic theorists later in the twentieth century. Fetishism continues to be, in the context of capitalism’s ongoing dominance, a major field of engagement, as it explains the relations between the subject and the object through its different formulations according to specific discursive domains.

Fetishism has been used to explicate the relationship between the subject and the object on both the levels of socio-economic functioning and that of the individual subject’s psycho-sexual development. In deploying the formulations of fetishism within both Marxist and Freudian framework to read Stein, I am not attempting to integrate or synthesize the two, rather, this thesis uses them as productive in the multiple readings of Stein that they open up in different directions according to the different emphases of Marx and Freud. What they share is the centrality of the fetishized object to the operations of their respective contexts. These are, as has been pointed out by numerous scholars, different conceptions of the subject and the object, conceptions that are not necessarily compatible. As Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari identify, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism does involve a construction of both subject and object. In their essay ‘Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity 5

Fetishism’, they argue:

To be sure, Marxism has had a theory of the subject, the theory of commodity fetishism. To the extent that it attempts to join the analysis of commodity production and circulation with a discussion of “ideology”, commodity fetishism does discuss the peculiar subjectivity typical of capitalist social formations (188).

Amariglio and Callari conclude, however, that the subject is subordinate to the economic structure in Marx’s formulation. In Freud, however, the subject is central, and it is the economic structure that takes precedence. Fetishism is simply a condition, a perversion that can be “cured”.

The different emphases of Freud and Marx does not make them mutually exclusive, however, as is demonstrated by Robert Miklitsch’s argument in his study, From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism”(1998). Miklitsch uses fetishism as a “conceptual switch-point between the two discourses” of Marxism and psychoanalysis (25). He argues that psychoanalysis:

…enjoys, not unlike deconstruction, a unique, supplementary relation to Marxism. Indeed, according to Plotnitsky, general economy is intimately related to a “certain irreducible-structural unconscious”, so much so that there can be no question of a general economics—or, in this case, a general (political economy)—without a thoroughly radicalized “concept of the Unconscious”. Moreover, precisely because of this relation of complementarity, the concept of “commodity fetishism” offers an especially fertile discursive constellation in which to explore the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis… (25).

While Miklitsch’s focus is on the “relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis”, the interest of this thesis in its deployment of their respective fetishisms is in the ways those fetishisms explicate Stein’s texts and the inflections that Stein’s texts give to these theorizations of fetishism. Specifically, the fetishization in texts such as Tender Buttons 6

is the fetishization of the author-collector-subject in the capitalist economy of commodity fetishism. But it is often also, at the same time, the sexual fetishization of the female body absolutely connected to ideas of capitalist exchange and consumption, central also to the psychosexual functioning of the subject (the author-subject). This site of multiple economies of subject/object relations has implications for the imbrication of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the point at which they connect: the trope of fetishism.

Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism extends in another way to the individual subject in the way that commodity fetishism functions as an ideology. As David Hawkes argues, the structure of capitalism in which commodity fetishism dictates the relations between the subject and the object means that subjects ultimately “view themselves, and others, as objects” (137). I take up this point as the major impetus for my analysis in the final chapter of this thesis, in relation to Stein’s representation of subjects in her typological project that is The Making of Americans.

Walter Benjamin considers the interrelation of Freudian and Marxian fetishisms as they are manifested at the level of cultural expressions of gender and sexuality in forms such as fashion, and it is through Benjamin’s cultural criticism as a site of negotiation of these discourses that this thesis will investigate the engagements of Stein’s writing with the fetishisms of modernity. Benjamin’s particular identification of the way objects get and retain, or lose, their auras, and the functioning of this explicitly in relation to the work of art, will be demonstrated to be a particularly apposite point of departure from which to read Stein’s texts. In recent times Mark Goble (16) and Barbara Will (‘Lost in Translation’ 5) have referred to Walter Benjamin to explicate the aspects of Stein’s life and work with which they are respectively engaged. These Stein scholars offer a precedent, therefore, for further analysis of the interconnections between Stein and Benjamin, and I will pursue that trajectory in this thesis, via the numerous interests and philosophical formulations shared by Stein and Benjamin. Objects; artworks; collectors; mass-production; nineteenth-century Europe; the twentieth century; memory; time; space; the domestic; the structures and movement of history: all of these things were preoccupations of both Stein and Walter Benjamin. So, too, both were Jews living in 7

Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, though it was significant to the different trajectories of their lives that Stein was American and therefore occupied a more flexible status in Europe than Benjamin, who was European-born. Both were interested in the shift in the conceptualization of art and the relations between people and the art and people and the world from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Benjamin’s path seemed to emphasize the dying of centuries of European engagement with the aurified object, in the new forms of subjectivity and artistic production in the twentieth century, as a result of industrialization and mass-reproduction. The writer hallowed by Benjamin as the poet of the twentieth century, Baudelaire, reflects Benjamin’s tastes and the melancholic, elegiac tone that he himself expresses. Stein wrote about the same changes, but her tone is one of energy, vitality and productivity, focused on pleasure and new possibilities.

Stein’s and Benjamin’s different experiences of the Second World War reflects the broader differences in their identities and lives; their relative fates seem to somehow echo their approaches to life and their circumstances. Stein lived precariously though happily (financially secure and with the companionship of Alice) in the countryside of France during the war, and survived it (if only by a year), able to return to Paris and the house and paintings they had left behind. She documented these experiences in Wars I Have Seen, a text about her daily life during the wars as well as her philosophical contemplations upon war. Benjamin killed himself poor and alone, after being stopped at a checkpoint on the border of France and Spain, in flight from the Nazis, trying get to the New York he believed was the city of the future.

There are major differences within their respective work, however: Benjamin’s project differs, of course, from Stein’s in terms of genre (its critical/analytic trajectory; The Arcades Project’s ambitious genre-defying and fictional feel that is oddly Steinian aside), and in terms of the major difference in subjectivity between them, namely that of gender. Benjamin erases women from his discussion of the private sphere and does not include them in discussion of identities such as that of the collector or the artist (Janet Wolff 53, Susan Buck-Morss 59). Stein, however, as Barbara Will has shown, was 8

invested in claiming male subject positions for herself, and in doing so, challenged their inherent masculine gendering (The Problem of Genius 10). Gender, then, together with Stein’s implicit engagements with homosexuality in her work distinguish her trajectory from Benjamin’s.1 These similarities and differences, I will demonstrate, are productive in the ways they inform each other. It is crucially Benjamin’s use of Marxist commodity fetishism as imbricated in and connected to sexual and gender relations between subjects in social formulations theorized by Freud, figured through the objects of capitalism, that recommends this approach. This thesis will explicate the new meanings created by the interaction of Stein’s writing with Benjamin’s critical insights.

Benjamin saw commodity fetishism as both the destruction and the potential redemption of the masses in modernity. His discussion of Marx’s commodity fetishism centres around the effects of the “aura” that emanates from the fetishized object. Benjamin’s understanding of the aura is succinctly defined by Gyorgy Markus in his essay, ‘Walter Benjamin or the Commodity as Phantasmagoria’:

Aura knits together “uniqueness and permanence”…both objectively and subjectively. The aura as a characteristic pertaining to the work itself is identical with its “authenticity.” Authenticity, however, means precisely the empirical singularity of the art-object, its existence “here and now” but only insofar as this uniqueness bears witness (in opposition to forgeries) to its belonging to a tradition posited as universally valid, that is, as enduring forever. …This contradictory enmeshment of temporal singularity and permanence constitutes a basic phenomenological trait of the subjective aesthetic-auratic experience: the experience of an instantaneous gripping illumination in which time itself seems

1 This is also not to mention their respective relationships to Judaism. Benjamin carried on a lengthy intellectual correspondence with rabbi Gershem Scholem about Jewish religious thought, while Stein’s relationship to Judaism has been the site of recent deliberation by Stein scholars. Throughout the twentieth century Stein’s Jewishness was ignored by critics and seemingly by Stein herself (Damon 489), but in the last decades critics such as Maria Damon and Barbara Will have reconsidered the issue, and suggested that Stein’s Jewishness inherently influence her work. Damon argues that Stein’s writing, in its undermining of coherent identity-formations and grammatical structures, “enacted and affirmed a kind of Jewishness that eschewed fixed categories and unilinear ways of thinking…” (495). 9

to come to a standstill, the paradox of the “fulfilled present” as the unity of momentariness and eternity. Lastly, the contradictory temporal structure of the everyday experience of commodity is equally expressed in the opposed tendencies of modern artistic activity: in the compulsion to ever more radical innovation, on the one hand, and the tendency toward instantaneous “musealisation” (e.g., creation of works from the very beginning intended for exhibition in museum), on the other hand (22).

As Markus argues, the temporality of the aurified object is the temporality of a stasis: a congealment of a “moment” as the eternal. This aurified object instates a subject who is under the thrall of the object. For Benjamin, the aurified object is characterized by the “phenomenon of distance” experienced by the subject in relation to the object. That is, the subject feels that no matter how physically close “he” gets to the object, the essence of the object can never be reached, it remains inaccessible.

Although Markus argues that this temporality provokes or motivates two different trajectories of artist production in modernity—in one direction “radical innovation”, and in the other “musealisation”—both trajectories remain within the structure of commodity fetishism. This thesis will demonstrate that Stein’s radical innovation is her representation of subjects and objects that are simultaneously functioning in the relations of fetishism, as well as in the non-aurifying relations that are those of a different structure entirely. A non-aurifying innovation produces a different formulation of the subject, a formulation, in fact, which is more of a process. However, the two come together, as Benjamin identifies when he says, flippantly, as the final “Writer’s Technique” in his short-piece entitled ‘One-Way Street’: “The work is the death mask of its conception” (Reflections 81). It is this understanding of art as a negotiation of both the process of construction and the finished product that this thesis is investigating. I will show that this negotiation, arising from Marxist understandings of the relations between production and product and constitutive of artistic practice in modernity, is central to Stein’s texts about subjects and objects. 10

Where subjects are under consideration in these relations between subjects and objects, gender is an inherent point of definition of the term subject itself. While Marx’s use of the term “worker” is gendered male (in the German the masculine form of a subject descriptor is used when discussing a non-specific subject. For example, der Kaufer is the generic term “the consumer”, but der Kaufer is also gender-specific, meaning “the male consumer”. Combined with, and as a result of, the historical construction of the neutral subject as “ungendered” and therefore male), female subjects are not explicitly excluded from that construction of the subject, and therefore, if the term were being used to designate a specific individual, women could conceivably be commodity fetishists (in German there is a feminine version of each subject descriptor, i.e. die Kauferin, “the female consumer”). When Freud took the term from Marx however, and deployed it within the framework of psychoanalysis, the result was an exclusion of women from sexual fetishism, on the grounds of logical consistency with castration anxiety. Only men can be fetishists, Freud concluded, because only boys can fear castration, as women cannot have anxiety for the loss of genitals they do not have (351).

Ann McClintock reminds us, through her summary of William Pietz’s argument, that the gendering of fetishism to exclude women is a relatively recent event, occurring through Freud’s formulation in modernity. Fetishism was around before psychoanalysis, and the formulation of fetishism by Freud involved a complete reversal of emphasis from excess of female sexuality, to its predication on lack:

As Pietz shows, the earliest European discourse on fetishism concerned witchcraft and the clerical denunciation of illicit popular rites and wayward female sexuality. … At the onset, the discourse of fetishism was associated with an excess of illicit agency, unlike the Freudian inscription of fetishism as associated with female lack (5).

Freud’s conclusion about the inability of women to be fetishists has been critiqued by feminists throughout the twentieth century, many of whom have demonstrated that it is eminently feasible that women are fetishists. In contemporary feminist discourse Naomi 11

Schor’s important essay on female fetishism from 1985 focuses on the fetishization of shoes in the fiction of George Sand. Indeed, clothing and shoes are well-known fetishistic items, and Tender Buttons—whose very title continually suggests the eroticization of objects—is replete with them. More recently, other theorists have demonstrated that women are fetishists according to the logic of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which Jacques Lacan abstracted the Freudian “science” of psychoanalysis into a signifying structure in language. Marjorie Garber has argued that female fetishism has been “invisible” because it is actually the condition arrived at by women in their ‘normal’ psycho-sexual development. In Vested Interests (1992) she asks:

What if it should turn out that female fetishism is invisible, or untheorizable, because it coincides with what has been established as natural or normal—for women to fetishize the phallus on men? Lacan, in fact, says as much when he asserts that “[woman] finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love. Perhaps it should not be forgotten that the organ that assumes this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish” [“Signification”, 290] To deny female fetishism is to establish a female desire for the phallus on the male body as natural. Heterosexuality here—as so often—equals nature. Female fetishism is the norm of human sexuality. That is why it is invisible (125).

Other contemporary feminists have argued that it is not useful to claim that women can be fetishists in the same way that men are according to psychoanalysis, as doing so simply further immures women in a structure in which they will always be viewed as the gender that “lacks”. Other feminists still have argued that it may be productive to examine the particular ways in which women appear to demonstrate fetishistic behaviour, to understand how a notion of female fetishism might provide an explication of representation by women, as well as new possibilities for the construction of subjectivity. 12

Elizabeth Grosz is one such theorist, engaging with psychoanalytic fetishism as a site of potentiality for lesbian subjectivity. Grosz argues that a specifically lesbian sexual fetishism could be a productive way of understanding lesbian desire:

What relation does lesbianism have to female fetishism? In the case of the girl who has accepted her castration complex, there seems to be little or no relation. But in the case of the woman suffering from the masculinity complex, it may be possible to suggest some connection. Like the fetishist, she disavows women’s castration, but this castration is her own, not that of the phallic mother. And like the fetishist, she takes on a substitute for the phallus, an object outside her own body (153).

However, Grosz continues by admitting her own ambivalence to this formulation, reflecting a similar irresolution of this problematic that a text such as Stein’s Tender Buttons rehearses, as this thesis will show. Grosz’s contribution to the debate over female fetishism is important because it directs us to the connection between female corporeality and the world of objects in an eroticized relation, a world that has characteristics constructed as specifically lesbian, which are evident also in Stein’s writing.

Psychoanalytic fetishism’s centrality to Modernism and the development of twentieth- century thinking about the subject and its relation to the object cannot be underestimated, and therefore this thesis will engage with both Freud’s original formulation of fetishism and Grosz’s contemporary explorations. Stein’s own lack of interest in psychoanalysis is well-known, and is summarised succinctly by Jayne L. Walker:

Stein always professed a lack of interest in Surrealism. Some of the texts the surrealists produced strikingly resemble Stein’s writings in the Tender Buttons style. But the Freudian model of the unconscious that was central to their 13

theoretical premises was foreign to her own conception of human consciousness (121).

However, the trope of fetishism, including its place in psychoanalysis, is pertinent to Stein’s work for several reasons. Firstly, the specific nature of fetishism in comparison to other ‘conditions’ defined by psychoanalysis defines it as a condition unlike others in the discourse, and a condition particularly appropriate for reading Stein. It is, Freud argued, the only “perversion” that is not felt to be a pernicious condition by its “sufferer” (351). Secondly, but no less significantly, the characteristics of fetishism are the fetishist’s pleasure in the condition itself, as well as its productive nature; fetishism is a creative method of bypassing trauma to achieve sexual satisfaction. Pleasure and its creative, inherently productive, implications are central to Stein’s writing, and signal the presence of fetishism on the representational level, as I show in Chapter One of this thesis.

A third and major reason that psychoanalytic fetishism is relevant to Stein’s work is the centrality of psychoanalysis as an explication of psychosexual behaviour to art in Modernism, including the importance of fetishism in the negotiations of subject/object relations in the art movements in modernity, such as Futurism, Surrealism, and Cubism. With each discussion using a different theorization of fetishism, I hope to show that Stein’s work produces new meanings in the way it constructs the relationship between the subject and the object according to two different structures. This means, also, the points at which these theories of fetishism meet, intersect, or clash. The methodological approach of this thesis, in bringing together Stein with the different theorizations of Benjamin, Freud, Taussig, and Grosz, aims to demonstrate the multiple levels of meaning produced in Stein’s texts in the negotiations between the subject and the object.

This aim and approach is formulated in Hal Foster’s landmark account of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Surrealism in his 1993 study Compulsive Beauty. Foster establishes a model of imbricated meaning-production between the seemingly separable domains of inquiry of the artistic movement of Surrealism and of 14

the self-contained theoretical domain of psychoanalysis, specifically “the uncanny”. He argues that these two—Surrealism and the uncanny—are interconnected by virtue of their emergence/invention within the same historical period, and thus reflect and inflect each other in ways that illuminate each beyond that which each is capable of achieving internally or introspectively. He writes of his own project:

My essay is…theoretical. This does not automatically render it ahistorical, for again the concepts I bring to bear on surrealism, derived from Freud and Marx and inflected by Lacan and Benjamin, are active in its milieu. My essay is also thus textual. But I do not regard the uncanny as a mere iconography of surrealism: it cannot be seen in this object or that text; it must be read there, not imposed from above but (as it were) extracted from below, often in the face of surrealist resistance. This textual emphasis is not meant to deprecate the art (its formulaic versions are fairer game). On the contrary, it is to take surrealism as seriously as possible: not as a sundry collection of idiosyncratic visions but as a related set of complex practices, one that develops its own ambiguous conceptions of aesthetics, politics, and history through difficult involvements in desire and sexuality, the unconscious and the drives. In short, surrealism for me is less an object to be subjected to theory than a theoretical object productive of its own critical concepts (xvii-xviii).

Thus, even where the artist/s in question are resistant to the very connections being made between their works and a theoretical system that seems an appropriate one for reading through/in, these connections can still be made, legitimated by the historical contiguity of the art and the theory. Foster’s argument that a genre or art-movement can be theoretically productive in ways similar to theory itself is echoed in Kylie Valentine’s justification of her methodology in her book Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature (2003). Valentine argues that Modernist literature and psychoanalysis are historically contemporaneously-articulated discursive formulations:

Modernism and psychoanalysis are regarded as products of the same processes, 15

emerging from the same cultural quakes. Sometimes Modernism is understood as emerging from new narratives of a new world, of which psychoanalysis is one. From this perspective, Modernism is responsive to ‘the scenario of our chaos’, consequent to ‘Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”, of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud, and Darwin’.1 Sometimes cause and effect are seen as the reverse of this, such that the conjunction of early twentieth-century art and science produced psychoanalysis, which becomes ‘the point where the biological metaphors of late nineteenth-century thought met the genuinely modern demand for a science of man’. Either way, the aesthetic practices and thematic concerns critically important to Modernism – decentring of the subject, crises in narratives of the self, biological and scientific knowledges, classicism, sexuality, embodiment – are also those of psychoanalysis (31).

Thus, psychoanalysis and literature are deeply enmeshed, and are productively read in and through each other. It is, for both Foster and Valentine, the historical contemporaneity of psychoanalysis with the visual art and literature that they analyse, that creates the starting point for an exploration of the connections between them.

In this thesis I will use the seminal theorizations of fetishism, then: firstly, Freudian sexual fetishism as its symptoms are understood by Freud, but, as its narrative of formulation is seen by Grosz as the female child’s fear of her own castration, and subsequent fetishization of “an object outside her own body”, which is, potentially, the female body itself; and secondly, Marxist commodity fetishism that theorizes the relationship between labour and finished product in capitalism, the aurified object. The subsequent significant theoretical deployment of Marxian commodity fetishism by Walter Benjamin within the context of cultural criticism, as has been mentioned already, can be called a second-order fetishism that is of primary importance in the ways that it examines the overlaps between, and shared sites of, Freudian and Marxian fetishism. Michael Taussig’s use of commodity fetishism is also a second-order fetishism in that it develops Marx’s original theorization by extending and adapting it for the specific 16

context of nation/citizen relations. Taussig abstracts fetishism by likening the literal fetishism of tribes to the intellectual fetishism of the anthropologists who study “the individual” and “society”; and the operation by which, as summarized by commentator on ideology and culture David Hawkes, the subject’s fetishization of objects becomes a chronic condition in capitalism, leading to the fetishization of subjects as objects. Additionally, in the first stage of my discussion of fetishism in Stein’s work—a demonstration of the fetishism inherent in Stein’s relationship to Nation and Nationality—I will use Taussig’s reading of the fetishism that comes through the discipline of social anthropology. The original meaning of the word “fetishism” that comes from the Spanish empirical trading with tribes who held sacred spiritual/religious objects called by the Spanish “fetishes”. The sociologists and anthropologists (specifically Emile Durkheim) who studied these tribes and their fetishes were themselves, Taussig argues, held in thrall by their own fetishization of the terms “society”, “individual”, and “state”.

In each chapter the theoretical framework of fetishism is examined as it extends, differs from, or further illuminates, existing approaches to Stein’s writing. Thus, the major thematic focuses of Stein’s writing, and the critical are reconsidered in light of the fetishisms of modernity. While fetishism cannot explain the entirety of each approach, it can explain some of the essential aspects of Stein’s relation to specific recurrent issues, such as nation and national identity (Chapter One), celebrity and the production of high art in modernity (Chapter Two), collection, Cubist art, poetic language, and codified lesbian sexuality (Chapter Three), and intersubjectivity, daily habit, artistic process, typology, and grammar and poetics (Chapter Four).

Taking fetishism as a major structure of subject/object relations in modernity this thesis identifies and explores the operations of fetishism in Stein’s works. However, this thesis argues, further, that another structure of subject/object relations is functioning in Stein’s writing, both alongside (and self-containedly) as well as in dynamic tension with, the structure of fetishism. This second structure is the “new” structure of the twentieth century, one that does not perform the reification of objects. In this structure subject and 17

object are intersubjectively constructed, contingent, and exist in the moment of process, in tactile interaction. I argue that when they are brought together several methodologies, literary techniques, and thematic issues identified by Stein scholars as crucial to Stein’s investigations constitute this‘new structure of subject/object relations evident in her work as the relations of the twentieth century. Iteration as a literary device is discussed by Melanie Taylor in regards to The Making of Americans, and by Marjorie Perloff in its usage in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’. “Daily habit” as both a methodology and a thematic is examined by Liesl M. Olson and Lisi Schoenbach, and intersubjectivity is discussed by Juliana Spahr as an effect of Stein’s work and is also explored by Ulla Haselstein in ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso.’ These three devices, methodologies, and thematics render subjects and object simultaneously, in a condition of inextricability, in which the terms “subject” and “object” are not coherent entities but interimbricated. The characteristics rendered by these methodologies are tactility, closeness, and process, as opposed to the distanced, aurified stasis that are the qualities rendered by the structure of fetishism. The very nature of the difference in the two structures means that the second structure I have identified is necessarily spelled out as it occurs in Stein’s texts and in the course of the discussions in which it is relevant. Because of inextricability of this structure from process (the process of its own construction), it is in the close-reading textual analysis that the presence of this structure becomes clear; it is manifested in the appearance of these methodologies of iteration, “daily living”, and intersubjectivity, and the characteristic experiences they render, of tactility, closeness, and process.

Two major operations sit exactly at a point of shift between the two structures. Metatextuality as a literary technique discussed by numerous Stein critics in relation to many of her works occupies a position, I argue, of shifting between both structures. It operates in both structures, but to diametrically opposed effect. The linguistic issue of “one”—that functions either as an adjective or a noun—is the second major node at which both the structures of subject/object operations function. This is an issue explored in the last section of the discussion in Chapter Two in a reading of ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ and is returned to in the final discussion of Stein’s texts in 18

the body of the thesis in relation to Many Many Women. The operations of “one” as a designator of both subject and object performs and throws into relief also the shift from ontology to epistemology that was of crucial significance in Modernism and that returns the focus of fetishism to the religious and spiritual location of its original formulation. Within the economy of capitalism in which fetishism has been developed the operations of the “one” signal a shift from the unique aurified fetish object to the multiple replicas denuded of their auras in mass-(re)production, from the individual to the masses.

These two different structures of subject/object relations operating in Stein’s writing are connected to other structures of modernity that were being challenged by new structures that were assuming prominence in the shift between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: those of high art, and popular culture, the hand-made and mass- (re)production, the individual and the masses. Ellen Berry writes:

…[Stein’s]…response to mass culture differed significantly from those of other Modernist writers. Many of these writers, as I have suggested, attempted to sharply differentiate high and mass culture as a precondition for the development of a Modernist aesthetic. Stein, however, tried to express the modern in relation to them both. Far from pathologizing an “inauthentic” mass culture and fearing its intrusion into the realm of high art, she developed aspects of her aesthetic practice in dialogue with popular forms and idioms, in many cases taking her ideas for textual innovations directly from them. For her, the new forms of an emerging mass culture were not morally, psychologically, and aesthetically regressive but were tied to the very essence of the modern – “where the twentieth century was.” Unlike writers who insisted that serious art be kept pure, aligned with a mythic past, a great tradition, an autonomous realm elsewhere, Stein situated the contemporary composition – her term for the avant-garde text – within the everyday (137-38).

I will demonstrate, in this thesis, that Stein expressed these things in relation to not only both high, and popular, culture, but through both a fetishizing and a non-fetishizing 19

structure of subject/object relations.

The texts that I analyse in this thesis have been selected for their importance to Stein, their centrality to Stein scholarship, and, in the case of the short pieces, the ways that they allow me to extend and develop my analysis of the larger works. So, the conclusions I draw from my discussion of The Making of Americans (1908) in Chapter One, for example, are negotiated within the context of my reading of ‘A Patriotic Leading’ (1924). As the chronological gap between the two texts in the above example suggests, across this thesis I engage with texts written throughout Stein’s writing life, from her earliest texts such as Three Lives (1906) and The Making of Americans, to her latest, including Paris France (1940) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). The two structures of subject/object relations I establish are present (or very occasionally conspicuously absent) in all of these texts, and in examining how these structures operate in each of the texts I show how the negotiations of subject/object relations are a ubiquitous concern in Stein’s oeuvre.

My contribution to Stein scholarship in this thesis is twofold, and is reflected in the division of my thesis into Part One and Part Two. Part One of this thesis establishes a model for reading the interconnections between subjects and objects in Stein’s work, by identifying a tension between two related yet different structures. The first is a fetishistic relation of subjects to objects, associated by Stein with Europe, the nineteenth century, materiality, and the identity categories of the genius and the collector. The second is a “new” figuration of late modernity in which the processual and tactility are central and subjects and objects are constructed simultaneously and inextricably. I call this new figuration a structure because the subject/object relations that characterize it bring with them an associated set of other characteristics that belong to, or are a result of, these subject/object relations. This new structure is associated by Stein with America and the twentieth century, and was a structure that she, along with other avant-garde Modernist artists, was developing in her writing. Further, Part One shows how these competing structures of subject/object relations hinge on Stein’s problematic formulations of self, Nation, and artistic production. 20

Having established this model of reading Part Two applies this argument, examining the detailed playing-out of the tensions and dilemmas of subject/object relations within several major Stein texts. First, I examine the category of the object as it is constructed in Tender Buttons (1913) (and other shorter texts written in the same style such as ‘ADVERTISEMENTS’ and ‘IIIIIIIIIII’, both published in 1922), and second I consider the category of the subject as it is represented in the nexus of these competing structures, in The Making of Americans (1908), Three Lives (1905) and Many Many Women (1932). In particular, the readings of Part Two engage with the major strands of Stein criticism of materiality, sexuality, and language in Tender Buttons, Stein’s famous study of objects. The specific critical areas engaged with in the texts that are her biggest, most controversial, and “one of the great Stein texts” (Kostelanetz 126) respectively—The Making of Americans, Three Lives, and Many Many Women—include typology, genius, and Stein’s methodologies of writing such as repetition/iteration, intersubjectivity, and “daily island living”. This thesis contends that the dilemma of subject/object relations identified and examined in detail is never resolved, indeed, its ongoing reverberations are productive up until and including her final work.

Chapter Three examines Cubism in relation to Tender Buttons—an oft-considered relation—through the unique perspective of the fetishism that is inherent to them both. The validity of focusing upon the connections between Nation and nationality, Cubism, language, art objects, still-lifes, paint, and the written word, and the status of all of these in regards to fetishism, is suggested early on in Stein criticism in a paragraph in Janet Hobhouse’s Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein, published in 1975. Hobhouse argues:

As an expatriate and as a natural listener, Gertrude had learned to analyse and reify language. She held back and analysed description as the painters Cezanne and Picasso held back and analysed objects. In both cases the whole was composed of various views of itself (73). 21

In this thesis I take up, and consider the implications of, Hobhouse’s word-choice here, asking the question: Why and how does Stein reify language, and is that reification in operation more generally in her works in the representation of subject/object relations? The trajectory I identify of the fetishism in the visual still-life, and the effect that the inherent fetishism of still-life has on Cubism, given the centrality of still-life to Cubism, is one that implicitly concurs with the validity of readings of Tender Buttons through the framework of the Cubism that Picasso, Braque and Gris were developing at the same time that Stein was writing her poem suite. Since Tender Buttons was published it has been read in comparison to Cubism by many commentators, from John Malcolm Brinnin in 1959, to Michael J. Hoffman in 1966, and L. T. Fritz in 1973. In her intelligent work from 1984 Jayne L. Walker extends the standard readings of Tender Buttons through Cubism as a coherent movement, to read The Making of Americans through “Analytic Cubism” and Tender Buttons through “Synthetic Cubism” (212).

In recent decades, however, concomitant with the shift in criticism to an explicitly language-focused readings of the poetics of Tender Buttons, the validity of reading the text through the framework of cubism has been challenged by Stein commentators such as Marianne DeKoven. In her 1981 article ‘Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism’ she argues that: “Useful as these [past] analyses of Stein’s writing as literary cubism have been in helping us approach her work, we should not overrate their reliability in accounting for its specific linguistic shapes” (82). In the subsequent decades of the 1980s and 1990s numerous Stein critics, including DeKoven, contributed sophisticated deconstructive and semiotics-based readings of Tender Buttons, which focused on the linguistic operations of the text and the highly experimental nature of its meaning-production. DeKoven’s sensible warning against judging Stein’s writing comparative to painterly experimentation and aesthetics was a timely intervention. However, at this point, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, after the preceding decades of post-structuralist analysis of Stein’s work, this thesis will make the move of returning to Cubism. Heeding DeKoven’s advice, my use of Cubism is not comparative at the level of the specific techniques used by the painters and by Stein. Rather, I demonstrate that the centrality of questions of the relations between the subject and the 22

object, and the capitalist fetishism inherent in the answering of those questions by both Cubist painters and Stein in Tender Buttons, is a point at which they are engaged in a similar fluctuation between the process and the end product, the tactile non-reified, and the fetishized object.

Given that, as DeKoven argues in her critique of Cubist readings of Stein, when reading Tender Buttons through Cubism, the issue of different media arises, and the shift between paint and words becomes essential. Three years after DeKoven’s critique Jayne L. Walker and Randa Dubnick both published monographs directly on the relations between Stein and Cubism (1984). Both critics explicitly address the difference in medium between Tender Buttons and Cubist painting, thereby demonstrating that it is both possible and useful to return to a site of cross-medium analytical comparison, when that reading-through can continue to be productive.

While there is a significant body of critical work on the relation between Stein and Cubism, with the implicit focus of that material on the object, there has also been a parallel stream of Stein analysis engaged with the other term of the binary, the subject. Questions about subjectivity have been the central consideration of Stein scholars throughout the twentieth century, and one of the main areas of tension around the issue of the subject has been that of gender. How does gender affect/effect subjectivity? If subjectivity is inherently gendered masculine, how can female subjectivity be understood? The model of fetishism that this thesis identifies and explicates in Chapters One, Two, and Three, as operating in Stein’s oeuvre highlights the capitalist tension of subject and object that permeates Modernism and Modernist art such as Stein’s writing. Further, this model raises the specific question regarding subjectivity: Are women objects, or are they subjects? Chapter Four attempts to answer this question through a detailed analysis of Stein’s texts ‘Matisse’, ‘Picasso’, ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, The Making of Americans, ‘Melanctha’, and Many Many Women. The framework of fetishism from within which this question is generated recontextualizes and problematizes the considerations that have motivated the work of feminist Stein critics over the last half-century. These considerations include Perloff and 23

DeKoven’s curiosity about the gendered subject in Stein’s language, and her gendered use of language in the context of Modernist experimentation, as well as Lisa Ruddick, Judith P. Saunders, Barbara Will, and Wanda Van Dusen’s investigations into the racialized female subjects in Stein’s texts. Parallel to these examinations have been Ulla Haselstein, Robert Lubar, and Phoebe Stein Davis’ querying (and often queer-ing) of the female subject and Stein’s role in relation to it in Modernist visual art such as Cubism and the artistic and literary cultures of modernity. The identity of the artist/genius that is so central to all of these issues has been explicitly considered by Will extensively, as well as Kirk Curnutt, and Mark Goble, among others, all of whom have considered the question: “Are women objects, or are they subjects?” This question touches upon all of Stein’s concerns regarding her own status as an artist, a genius, and a woman. The role of gender in subjectivity is necessarily implicated in the broader generic conundrum that is: in art (as in capitalism), are people—both male and female—subjects or objects? Both reflecting and arising from the tension in capitalist subject/object relations that is the preoccupation of this thesis, this question in relation to Stein’s texts is the focus of this last chapter.

Taking up the significant conclusions of Chapter Three—that there is a model of tension between aurification and non-aurification/de-aurification operating in Stein’s texts about objects—I will examine in Chapter Four the specificities of the texts that focus on subjects. Chapter Four finishes what Chapter Three begins: an examination of the individual terms of what operates as a dichotomy in the capitalist unconscious, of ‘subject’ and ‘object.’ Where, as Jayne L.Walker says, the objects in Tender Buttons become subjects, this chapter will claim that the subjects of Stein’s most well-known texts about subjectivity function as objects. In the texts that will be explicitly focused on in this chapter—The Making of Americans and ‘Melanctha’, as well the portraits ‘Picasso’, ‘Matisse’, and ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’—Stein remains, as she was in Tender Buttons, attracted to the coherent “aurified” object that is the collector’s passion and which can be made into “new” arrangements that break the otherwise static nature of the object. This chapter will demonstrate how, in the texts about subjectivity, it is subjects who perform the function of these attractive objects. 24

Again, as with the objects in Tender Buttons, the writerly process of describing the object as it appears in its intersubjective handling by the subject, both subject and object are simultaneously demonstrated as being rendered through labour, rather than existing miraculously in a reified coherence, as objects. The tension between these two points is the tension that characterises Tender Buttons but which, in the emphatically subject- focused texts of The Making of Americans and Three Lives, operates to different effect. This chapter will identify and set out the methodologies specific to Stein’s texts about subjectivity—methodologies that render, both stylistically and in terms of content, the labour required to produce the fetishized objects.

While my thesis’ contribution to Stein scholarship lies in my identification of fetishism (in its multiple formations) across Stein’s oeuvre, within each chapter there is some consideration of the reasons for Stein’s consistent deployment of fetishism. In Chapter One I argue that her nation-fetishism of America and France is the result of her simultaneous acknowledgement and denial of the reality of citizenship; Stein can never fully occupy the American national identity. Her nation-fetishism is additionally explained, I argue, by her positioning of America as a ‘muse’, an object of artistic contemplation, a move that invokes the aura of the fetishized object. In Chapter Two I consider the pleasure of authority and power (through celebrity), as the explanation of Stein’s fetishism. In Chapter Three I identify the pleasures of collection evident in Tender Buttons—the power derived through authorial selection and arrangement—as the why of this fetishism, and in Chapter Four I extend this issue of the pleasure of collection to argue that the pleasure of typological organization is the underlying motivation for Stein’s fetishization in The Making of Americans. I also show, in Chapter Four, that Stein’s use of fetishism is directly related to her attempts to represent subjectivities that were in a socio-historical moment of crisis. Thus, in each chapter of the thesis I consider the issue of why Stein deploys the particular fetishization that I have identified and analysed. The cumulative evidence suggests that it is pleasure that is the overriding propulsion in Stein’s consistent use of the tropes of fetishism in modernity. 25

PART ONE 26

Chapter One “Nation fetishism”; the problematics and productivities of pleasure

This chapter makes the claim that a fetishizing structure of subject/object relations characterizes and dominates Stein’s representations of Nation and nationality across her oeuvre. This is an appropriate starting point for a discussion of Stein and fetishism, of aurified objects and collection, because of the active contemplations of Stein on herself as an object of scrutiny, evidenced by her most famous work The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. My argument responds to the importance of the dilemma as to where, how or even if, life and art separate. This is an issue frequently contemplated by numerous Modernist artists and taken up by critical commentators, but seen in particularly complex and insistent engagements in Stein’s case. Through the interplay of her life with Alice B. Toklas, in which their home was a social meeting point for Modernist artists, and her writing (a famous component of which was the recording of her life in the “autobiographies”), Stein wove art, life, and self into a seemingly inextricable material. One of the major points of Stein’s cross-imbricated construction of herself in life and art was her relationship to Nation as a concept and as a lived reality, that is to say specifically, to America and France. I argue that across her oeuvre Stein fetishizes America, making it an objectified “idea” whose aura obscures the narrative labour that was required to construct it. Stein’s own position in this fetishizing economy is as a subject held in the thrall of the aura. My understanding of Stein’s relation to Nation and nationality, then, is fundamental in two ways, firstly it is central to Stein’s understanding of her “self” and her work, and secondly, it is fundamentally about the relationship between subjects and objects. Given the importance of this fetishizing structure that I have identified, I argue that this structure can explain texts from across her oeuvre, whether or not they discuss Nation and nationality, so long as they are interested in questions of the subject and/or the object.

Having identified this fetishizing structure I argue, further, that there are nevertheless an infrequent number of commentaries and texts by Stein about Nation and nationality in 27

which fetishism is either not operating at all, or is explicitly critiqued. This absence and/or critique is as crucial as the examples of fetishism, I contend, as it demonstrates a profound contradiction in Stein’s constructions of subject/object relations. I argue that this contradiction is the result of a second structure of subject/object relations also in operation in Stein’s work. This second structure and the points at which it is in tension with the first is further explicated in Chapter Two, the second section of Part One. Thus, my argument moves from my identification of the structures operating in Stein’s self- representations in her “autobiographical texts”—her own reflections upon her “self” and her art—which are, significantly, backward-looking in their assessments of time that has passed, to a forward-looking trajectory. This trajectory is one of application and development: I deploy the framework that I have established, of the two structures of subject/object relations, to read Stein’s texts across her body of work including examples of her earliest texts as well as her latest.

In order to make my argument that Stein fetishizes America, France, and the citizen- subjects of those Nations I first examine Stein’s construction of several of her friends and acquaintances in terms of their national identities, in The Autobiography. I demonstrate that the text fetishizes both men and women metonymically in terms of nationalized body parts, clothing, and surrounding domestic objects, although the specific operations in each case function differently according to gender. Having established that The Autobiography effects a conflation of nationalization and fetishization, I show how it is pleasure that is the central underlying motivation for this textual process. Extending the discussion from the level of Stein—the author- subject’s—pleasure to the broader level of the Nation, I argue that Michael Taussig’s formulation of “state fetishism” explicates a fetishism that is abundantly clear in Stein’s constructions of ‘America’ as an entity. This operation is evident in the case of Stein’s early epic text The Making of Americans, which functions, I contend, as an aurified object of Nation. I demonstrate that the experience of distance central to the subject’s fetishization of the Nation, as in Stein’s relation to the idea of “America”, is also in operation in the short fictional piece ‘Wherein Iowa Differs From Kansas and Indiana’, which was written twenty years after The Making of Americans, demonstrating the 28

ubiquity of this fetishizing operation across the span of Stein’s body of writing. This claim is further supported by my analysis of the Nation-fetishism in several short pieces and excerpts from other “autobiographical” texts, Paris France, Wars I Have Seen, Everybody’s Autobiography, and ‘Why Do Americans Live In Europe?’ I then discuss why what I have shown recasts and challenges the argument of Wanda Van Dusen, who identifies fetishism in one specific Stein text, the ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’. At this point, having supported my claims that a fetishizing structure of Nation is operating in these texts across Stein’s oeuvre, I turn to the pieces ‘Off We All Went to See Germany’ (an autobiographical piece), as well as the “purely” fictional piece, ‘A Patriotic Leading’, from similar years as the texts in which fetishism operates, and demonstrate that in these two instances there is either no aurifying, fetishizing function, or the fetishism of Nation is explicitly critiqued. Thus, my analysis in this section concludes that although Stein’s texts frequently fetishize America and France and the citizen-subjects of those Nations, occasionally a perverse resistance to this fetishization occurs—a situation that will be further considered and explicated in the second section of Part One of this thesis.

Nationalized-fetishized subjects The description of Fernande Picasso in The Autobiograpy is founded on the fetishization of “woman” as object, and the pleasure this construction provides is the pleasure of the viewer, the narrating subject, “Alice”/”Stein”. This operates at the level of the woman as fetishized entity, which is an implication of the fetishism of clothing, as cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard elucidates in his article ‘The System of Collecting’ (1994):

…sexual perversion consists in the inability to grasp the partner, the supposed object of desire, as that singular totality we call a person. Instead, it is only able to operate discontinuously, reducing the partner to an abstract set made up of the various erotic parts of its anatomy, and then exercising a projective fixation on a single item. Whereupon a given woman stops being a woman and becomes no more than a vagina, a couple of breasts, a belly, a pair of thighs, a voice, a face – according to preference (19). 29

What Baudrillard describes here is the result of the “castration trauma” theorised by Freud. As discussed in the Introduction to this thesis, Freud’s 1927 paper on fetishism argues that the fetish object is a substitute for the maternal phallus, the penis that the boy believes the mother to have. Unwilling to give up the idea that the mother has a penis, the boy partially accepts its absence, which Freud termed “acknowledgement”, and partially continues to maintain the belief that she has it, “disavowal” (351). Acknowledgement and disavowal occur simultaneously at the moment of revelation of the mother’s “lack”, and this trauma, including the simultaneous reactions of the child, are displaced onto a material object sighted by the boy in the vicinity of the mother/the mother’s genitals, such as underwear, stockings, shoes, etc. This object then becomes a “memorial” to the “trauma of castration”. As an extension of this process, individual parts of the female body such as feet, hands, neck, and breasts can also become fetish objects, as Baudrillard notes. As such, these fetishized parts operate as metonymic of the fetishized woman—a solidified object of the narrative of trauma of recognition and disavowal that the mother is not a phallic “whole”. This operation is evident in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, when the narrator (“Alice”/ “Stein”) describes Picasso’s wife, Fernande, as

…a big woman but not too big because she was indolent and she had the small round arms that give the characteristic beauty to all french women (28).

Here Fernande is fetishized, as women are in the understanding of the fetishized body as Freud argued it operated in a “normative” heterosexual male’s displacement of desire onto the female body (351). Fernande’s arms are a synecdochic fetish object: the part that represents the whole. They are also fetish objects in themselves, the object onto which the castration trauma is displaced. Fernande has no distinct personality in Stein’s description, her whole identity is displaced onto the fetishized arms, which are national arms, french arms. Hence the fetishized body parts stand for the fetishized woman in toto, and this overdetermination of fetishization obscures any sense of the individuality of Fernande. She is French, she is a woman, she is a frenchwoman. She is contained, a 30

wholly present blank, a mute, national object. The metonymic effect of the fetishized part of the woman’s body that stands in for the absent maternal phallus and represents the “wholeness” of the phallic mother is evident in the way that the narrator “Alice” continues the description of Fernande in the next sentence, now discussing her legs:

It was rather a pity that short skirts ever came in because until then one never imagined the sturdy french legs of the average french woman, one thought only of the beauty of the small rounded arms (28).

The text is constructing here a fetishistic separation of limbs—arms and legs—into distinct objects that constitute an overall fetishized woman. The legs are operating as distinctly fetishized parts, like the arms. These “french legs” seem to possess their own nationality, distinct/apart from the nationality of the whole woman. However, the “whole” picture that the arms and legs build up—of a coherent figure of a woman, arms and legs relationally positioned as limbs—is disappointing: it is “a pity” that the legs can be seen; the fetishized part of the woman is preferable as it is an aurified displacement. The subsitute part—the arms—represents an idealized whole that is the phallic mother whose “penis” is intact. Any movement towards a whole “real” woman disperses the intensity of the displacement, and is therefore inherently disappointing. The imbrication of nationality in the process of fetishization means that Fernande is rendered an object of nationality, a nationalized, fetishized object. This objectification creates stasis in the subject. When the narrator says: “She was a big woman but not too big because she was indolent” the narrator blocks the movement or causal action of Fernande: even her “indolence” does not seem to affect anything, but in a disjunctive/ incorrect grammatical structure, makes her “not too big”—her indolence only affects the object that is herself, in a self-reflexive movement. The objectification of Fernande through the metonymic fetishization of her limbs renders her static, then, in the aura that plays out at the grammatical and linguistic level to reflexively disallow Fernande’s interaction with the world as a subject. Fernande’s objectification is concomitant with a loss of subjectivity and a petrification into the containment of stasis. However, this fetishization through nationality functions to produce pleasure, a pleasure located in the viewing subject, 31

“Alice”/ “Stein”, which in turn creates vicarious pleasure for the reader, whose necessary faith in the narrator’s judgement implicates her in the construction.

Freud identified pleasure as the result of sexual fetishism, in psychoanalytic terms, and this understanding of the outcome of fetishism is helpful in explaining Stein’s deployment of fetishism to describe and constitute national subjects. Freud noted that the fetishist is the least likely subject to experience “his” “perversion” as a problem, and indeed, Freud argues, “Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life” (351). The importance, then, of the pleasure that fetishism affords is central to its functioning. In Freud this “pleasure” is genital climax. If this role that pleasure plays in sexual fetishism (as well as a general interest/affect of the subject in relation to “his”, or the experience of his, condition) is extended to the fetishism that is occuring as a meta-psychological structure in the author-subject’s/ “Stein’s” representational impulse, then pleasure can be understood to be an explicit outcome of the representation of subjects as objects in literature. In other words, the operation of the trope of fetishism on the level of the relation between the text and the authorial subject, provides pleasure. Thus, the pleasure that the fetishized Fernande gives the authorial “Alice”/ “Stein” is clear, and functions in descriptions of other subjects in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Pleasure is absolutely integral to Stein’s use of fetishism in her representations of subject/object relations, then, an argument that I will return to and develop throughout this thesis, in relation to her texts.

The gendered nature of the objectification of Fernande and its accordant attribution of/experience of agency, control and pleasure, is thrown into relief by the different way in which this operation functions in the fetishization of Wyndham Lewis, a male, also according to nationality. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, there are slippages in the categorization of the subject according to nationality as Phoebe Stein Davis identifies (34). According to Stein Davis, these slips prove that “nationality is an aesthetic that can be adopted”, and that ultimately “nationality is an effect of narrative” (39). Taking up the slippages that Stein Davis identifies and explicating them through the fetishism that they demonstrate shows that these slippages of nationality can be seen 32

to be explicitly located in the negotiations between, or constructions of, subjects through their relation to objects. Stein Davis takes an example from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas about the British writer Wyndham Lewis:

[Wyndham Lewis] looked rather like a young frenchman on the rise, perhaps because his feet were very french, or at least his shoes (122).

By owning the shoes Lewis can look “like a young frenchman on the rise” which, Stein Davis argues, joins several other examples in the text that prove the “mutability of national identity” (30). What Stein Davis does not discuss in this example is the specificity of the item possessed—the shoes that articulate nationality. Shoes are, of course, a typical fetish object. In the 1927 paper Freud argued that the foot and the shoe are frequently the objects onto which the fetishist displaces the acknowledgement/disavowal trauma. Freud argued that: “…the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish – or a part of it – to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up…” (354). The shoe is a fetish not only in Freudian terms, but also within the parameters of its precursor discourse, Marxist commodity fetishism (Schor 3). In Stein’s example it is by a “nationalized” fetish object that you can identify a Frenchman, as his subjectivity is displaced onto a fetish object. However, the possessor of the shoes is Wyndham Lewis, who is British. What I would like to emphasize here is not the fact that national identity shifts (Stein Davis makes that point) but that this shift is made possible here by Lewis’ literally acquiring the objects of a different nationality. In this case, then, of central importance in the subject’s ability to shift identities is the possession of the shoe, the fetish object itself. The example of Lewis also shows a gendered difference in the fetish: whereas Fernande’s body is a fetish of Nation—men’s “selves” are not fetishized, only their clothes—men can change their nationality by changing their shoes. This is emphasized by the qualification that the narrator makes: “his feet were very French, or at least his shoes”. The difference between foot and shoe is significant in its enunciation of the gendered fetishization here: a foot cannot be “changed”, but a shoe can. Lewis’ shoes that the narrator settles on as the point of national fetishization (as fetish objects of 33

nationality), are not literal parts of the bodily subject and as such are not “essential” to the biological subject. 2 Fernande is over-determinedly French because her arms and legs are very “french” and this effects, as was argued, a stasis—a stasis which can also be seen as an inability to move across national boundaries. Fernande is “characteristically” “french”, according to the narrator. For the male subject Lewis, however, although he is being described in a similarly perfunctory and patronising way, possession of a fetish object does not create stasis but in fact allows movement across categories of nationality, from British to French. The stasis of the shoes does not circumscribe or render immobile the entire subject.

Mildred Aldrich provides a case in which the female gender does not create stasis or prevent movement through complete objectification in the same way it does for Fernande, but (even though Aldrich is fetishized through a combination of clothing and body-parts) allows for deviant shifts in nationalised identity through the very fetishization that constructs that nationalised identity, through the centrality of pleasure—the authorial subject’s pleasure. Mildred Aldrich was an American living in France contemporaneously with Stein and Toklas, with whom she was good friends. In the representation of Aldrich in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas the complexity of the shifting national subject and the importance of the object in that shift (attested to by Wyndham Lewis’ shoes) extends to the gender of the subject and the intersection between the axes of gendered, and national, identity categories. Aldrich is depicted as able to shift/claim nationality and gender, variously (and simultaneously) through both clothes and body. Stein describes Aldrich as completely an American:

…then in her early fifties, a stout vigorous woman with a George Washington

2 Fetishism and its relation to gender and biology in the writings of Wyndham Lewis can be illuminated by Jessica Burstein’s article ‘Waspish Segments: Lewis, Prosthesis, Fascism’ in Modernism/Modernity 4.2 (1997) 139-164. Burstein argues that: “The fascist body is a forgery. That is, it is wholly constructed, meant for circulation, and stands in for a previous incarnation, the volkish body, that of the people. The fascist body is fabricated, renovated, reconstructed, consisting of extensions and projections. It is frequently said that all bodies are constructs, but there’s an original sort of forgery at work in the fascist body, because it’s a forgery of a forgery, a stand-in for a prototype that never existed, the double of a fake” (139). The connections between prosthesis and fetishism have been discussed by numerous critics, but are not central to the argument of this thesis. 34

face, white hair and admirably clean fresh clothes and gloves. A very striking figure and a very satisfying one in the crowd of mixed Nationalities. She was indeed one of whom Picasso could say and did say, c’est elle qui fera la gloire de l’Amerique. She made one very satisfied with one’s country, which had produced her (129).

National subjects are “produced” by their country, the “striking” and “satisfying” aura of such a subject redounds back onto the country, and the “gloire” of Aldrich is transferred to that Nation. She is—in a literal translation of the French—“the one who makes the glory of America”, just as it is America which “had produced her”. “Woman” is “produced” , then, like a commodity fetish is produced in capitalism: by the technologies of the culture. In the case of Aldrich, the technologies are those of nationalizing ideology. This paragraph signals both the production of subjects by the Nation and the contribution that these aurified subjects make to the aura of the Nation. Pleasure, again, is the motivating—and resultant—experience “produced” in the authorial subject who is “producing” the fetishized national subject here, as in the description of Fernande: Aldrich is “very satisfying” and “made one very satisfied”. This repetition of a verb denoting pleasure hints at the sexual pleasure/satisfaction conferred to the fetishist by the fetish object, as Freud theorised it. This is not to claim this as an explicit function here, rather, the repetition of “satisfied”/ “satisfying” betrays exactly the inherent “satisfaction” that the fetishized object facilitates in the fetishizer. The pleasure that Aldrich produces as an over-determined fetish object here—a female-object-Nation- object wearing fetish objects of gloves and a fetishized face of a leader, the fetishized “face” of the Nation (Nation-object)—is received by Stein, the “producer” of the object.

It is not only the conventional fetish-objects of clothes that allow this slippage of Aldrich’s identity between nationalities, but, as the description of her testifies, body parts, specifically the fetishized face, allows slippage between genders. As a female Aldrich is liable to be frozen into the textual stasis that characterizes the description of Fernande Picasso, by the metonymic fetishizing of woman through the fetishization of parts of the woman, as was described by Baudrillard. However, the particular form that 35

this takes in the example of Mildred Aldrich creates a different effect. The displacement of George Washington onto Mildred Aldrich gives her that possibility of moving across to the individualized, self-determining male subject position, by acquiring his face. The male leader is an aurified identity, his face particularly: images of leaders’ faces play a major role in the maintenance of the power of political regimes in the twentieth century, from Hitler to Mao to George Bush (Rainey 125). In a similar operation to that achieved by Wyndham Lewis’ wearing of French shoes, Mildred Aldrich is constructed as typically American not only because she wears “fresh clothes and gloves” like a particular kind of American woman, but also because she possesses a “George Washington” face.

This shifting across gender boundaries identities causes a concomitant destabilisation of national boundaries, which become, through both the fetishization of clothes and body parts, crossable. Despite being firmly located initially as an American Aldrich is then almost immediately and somewhat curiously constructed as slipping into the subjectivity of a French peasant, through her relation to the other nationalized objects—French objects. As Stein Davis says:

…in the case of Mildred Aldrich, these boundaries between inside and outside, American and un-American, do not always remain firmly in place. Alice explains that she and Stein “teased her and told her she was beginning to look like a french peasant and she did, in a funny kind of way, born and bred new englander that she was” (160). While Aldrich can “look” like a French peasant despite her “breeding,” it is the nationality that is “bred” into her that makes her house, French in every other way, look American: “it was always astonishing that the inside of her little french peasant house with french furniture, french paint and a french servant and even a french poodle, looked completely american” (160). Although what amazes Stein and Toklas is the resilience of Aldrich’s American identity, Stein allows for a fluctuation between national identities here that her repeated essentializing would seem to belie – something French can look “completely american,” and someone “born and bred” in 36

America can “look like a french peasant” (30).

Here Stein Davis argues that the complexities of Stein’s construction of two separate national subjectivities which can be moved between, which appear together and define each other. However, Stein Davis does not identify why this is the case. It can be argued that it is explicitly the fetishized objects of nationality that allow, in this construction of Mildred Aldrich’s subjectivity, the other fetishized categories of “woman” and “leader” to be thrown into relief. That one axis can be crossed—that of nationality, due to the amount of French furniture Aldrich owns—allows another axis to be crossed also—that of gender, which, in turn, destabilises another domain in which identity is categorised, that of class.3 George Washington and Mildred-Aldrich-the-American are upper-class, whereas Mildred-Aldrich-the-french-peasant is working-class.

It is the possessions, fetishized according to nationality, the exhange of which allows shifts in identity that allow the subject agency; the agency is precisely in the mysteriousness or secretiveness of the slippage. Mobility is enabled, containment and congealed stasis in one Nation-object is avoided by multiple fetishism—a proliferation of fetishizations of and around the subject, so that the she/he that is “Mildred Aldrich” is not contained by the author-subject “Stein”. Aldrich retains some agency in this formulation: she is a subject who “possesses” a George Washington face just as she possesses French furniture. She is not the passive, objectified woman that Fernande is, but the active owner. Nationality cannot contain Mildred Aldrich, as neither can gender. She is not being passively objectified here—her relation is one of active “ownership.” Thus the role of the subject is central in the economy of its own objectification. An excess of fetishization actually allows for slippage: the fetishization along one axis, that of nationality, throws into relief the fetishization along another, that of gender, and creates an opportunity for the obscuring functions of those to be undermined. The extent

3 This effect of one crossing destabilising other binaries and creating the potential for multiple-crossings is theorised by Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Through her considerations of the homosexual/heterosexual binary, Sedgwick demonstrates that the multiple binary terms within culture are tied for their secure boundaries to the operations of each other. Undermining one binary creates a flow-on effect of destabilisation (34). 37

to which there is slippage between physical body and clothing/furniture creates a concomitant slippage between American and French, male and female, working-class and upper-class. These slips are about varying degrees of subject/object balance. In the case of Fernande, the fetishism of her limbs according to nationality is concurrent with a fetishization of her as “a woman”, but these operations serve to maintain the objectification of her as woman, whereas in the case of Mildred Aldrich the fetishized status of nationality and gender undermine the simple objectification of her as woman.

To return to Baudrillard’s description of the fetishist and “his” taking of the body parts of the woman as fetishized objects, Baudrillard’s argument about the implications of this for the subject can explain the relation of “Stein” as the author-subject to the subjects she fetishizes. Baudrillard argues that in the fetishization of women:

…[the female subject] is reduced to a set whose separate signifying elements are one by one ticked off by desire, and whose true signified is no longer the beloved, but the subject himself. For it is the subject, the epitome of narcissistic self-engrossment, who collects and eroticises his own being, evading the amorous embrace to create a closed dialogue with himself (19).

As I suggested earlier, the fetishization of Aldrich involves complex negotiations between self and other for Stein, who identified with Aldrich. If “Stein” fetishizes Aldrich in the description of her in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but Aldrich bears some resemblance to Stein’s own conception of herself as an American military “General” and yet as a peasant wandering the hills of Spain4, it becomes perhaps an imperative to avoid the kind of stasis that results from the fetishization of female subjects, as seen in the case of Fernande. Thus, it is Stein’s own meta-textual presence—her own prior and subsequent references to and constructions of herself

4 In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘Alice’ says: “Gertrude Stein was very fond of Assissi for two reasons, because of Saint Francis…and because the old women used to lead instead of a goat a little pig up and down the hills of Assissi. The little black pig was always decorated with a red ribbon. Gertrude Stein had always liked little pigs and she always said that in her old age she expected to wander up and down the hills of Assisi with a little black pig” (99-100). 38

across her oeuvre—that echo in this description of Aldrich, and inform the avid Stein reader’s understanding of its operations. In depicting Aldrich here Stein is depicting “herself”, and so she cannot afford to fetishize Aldrich to the extent that she is rendered a static object.

Having established that the fetishization of clothes, shoes, and subjects occurs concomitantly with the fetishization of nationality on the level of individuals, and that this is deeply complicated in terms of the relation of “Stein” as author-subject to the subjects she is depicting, it can be further seen that the formulation of “state fetishism” theorised by Michael Taussig (in relation to Emile Durkheim and Jean Genet) can help explain Stein’s relation to the broader structure of Nation. Given that the pleasure of fetishism functions centrally in between the author-subject and the represented subject, is it pleasure that impels the relation between “Stein” as an author-subject and America as an object of contemplation? “Nation” is a concept, I will demonstrate, that functions for Stein as a fetishized object—her awe at the America she gazes at from across the ocean is evident when she tells The New York Herald Tribune in 1935: “I am married to America, it is so beautiful” (Goble 141-42). This statement “[plays] off Stein’s own teasing approach to Toklas’s de facto married status”, as Stein critic Mark Goble argues (11), but it also demonstrates internally the link between individuals fetishized and nationalized in the same operation and the relation of the individual to the Nation. The relations constructed in this phrase are gendered; Stein is the “husband”, a masculine subject, the owner of the gaze and creator of the value-judgement “beautiful”, while America/Alice B. Toklas is (as the reader already knows from the first pages of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas5) the “wife”, the object of both the gaze, and of the valuation. Reading Stein through Taussig’s argument that the citizen is held in thrall by the aura of the State demonstrates that it is precisely distance that is essential to effect the relation of subject to object evident in the fetishizing operations in her writing. For Stein then, this relation reflects the pleasure in the description of Mildred Aldrich, but it

5 Early on in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ‘Alice’ writes: “Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. …I have sat with real wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses” (22). 39

will also be shown that on a broader level of Nation and nationality this relation reflects the functioning of America as an aurified “idea-object”. This is the pleasure of description: Stein’s pleasure and the artistic productivity which that pleasure facilitates. However, similarly to the case of Aldrich, Stein’s own “self” as a subject and the ways that Stein’s need for the agency of the subject to remain intact is a negotiation that continues in her constructions of herself in relation to America.

Taussig’s “Nation fetishism” and Stein’s “America” In his study of the social anthropology of Emile Durkheim regarding the religious fetish in tribal society and the fictional text The Thief’s Journal, by Jean Genet, Taussig argues that the subject’s awe of the State is an effect of the aurified status of the State as an idea. Departing from the literal fetish objects discussed by anthropologists and sociologists such as Durkheim, Taussig takes the operation of fetishization and abstracts it, using it as a trope that operates conceptually to aurify metaphorical “objects” that belong to the community in question. Thus, modern citizens fetishize the idea of the State with the same fervour as tribal groups fetishize material religious objects (227). In ‘Maleficium: State Fetishism’, Taussig theorises the idea of society, or the State, as an idea “beyond” which it has traditionally been difficult for anthropologists to extend their analysis, despite the fact that these ideas of “society” and the “individual” are the central points of their disciplinary study. Durkheim, Taussig argues, is a theorist who enacts in his work the awe of the citizen beholding the idea of the State. Taussig critiques the critique by Lukes, a theorist who argued that Durkheim’s “reification” of the idea of “society” and “the individual” prevented Durkheim from getting at some kind of “real meaning” of these concepts. Taussig identifies the “intoxication” of Durkheim as evidence that he was in awe of the concept as if it were a fetish object (227). Their “reified” status, as Taussig argues, obscures the processes of their constitution. For Taussig, then, the State is fetishized thus:

By State fetishism I mean a certain aura of might as figured by the Leviathan or, in a quite different mode, by Hegel’s intricately argued vision of the State as not 40

merely the embodiment of reason, of the Idea, but also as an impressively organic unity, something much greater than the sum of its parts (228).

At any one stage the State is an objectified idea of something whose coherence only occurs through and in discursive constructions of the State, the narratives that delineate its boundaries, discuss the history of its formation, and project its future aspirations. Hence, the State is a fetishized object: the production of the idea of the State through discursive labour is obscured by the fetish object’s aura.

Taussig’s “state fetishism”, drawing as it does from the structure of tribal fetishism, reflects the fact that all types of fetishism, in whatever discourse the trope appears, are inherently about distance. This is the distance of the subject from the object, explicitly identified by Walter Benjamin in relation to Marxist commodity fetishism, and essential also to Freudian sexual fetishism. Walter Benjamin argues that the quality of the aura is “the unique phenomenon of distance however close [the actual object] may be” (‘The Work of Art’ 222). In Taussig’s formulation of state fetishism, the distance is a metaphorical one, it is the distance between the subject (citizen) and the State to which the citizen belongs—an idea at which the citizen “peers”, as at an object. The State is not a real object but an idea whose aura obscures the narratives that actually define, contest, and redefine the complexity of ideas that involve the running of institutions, organizations, governing bodies, and the individuals who are regulated by these. The subject cannot ever “reach” the State, partly because of its abstract nature, and partly because the citizen’s experience of the State as a fetishized object is always defined by the “phenomenon of distance”, due to its aura. This is one of two points of significance in Taussig’s argument for the Modernist writings of Stein.

The second major point in Taussig’s theorisation of “state fetishism” that I will use to read Stein’s relation to Nation is that the aura of the fetishized object obscures the labour required to produce it. Thus, in the Marxian terms from which Taussig’s argument stems, the arbitrary (high) value that is placed on the object contributes to this aura, which in turn further obscures the “real” value that is the value of the labour required to 41

produce the object. In the abstraction of this into an understanding of State as an aurified idea, Taussig’s argument implies that the aura of the idea of State obscures the labour that goes into, and produces, the idea of State as a fetish-object. In the Marxist context of class and financial economy this “labour” is the physical labour of the working classes in capitalism. However, in Taussig’s “state fetishism” this labour is the “labour” of the narratives—both personal and public, individual and communal, that are authorised (and “aurified”), and repeated through the media and in discourses such as history, myth, and government/politics—required to constitute the idea of Nation as a coherent object. As Lloyd Kramer says of the construction of nationality after Benedict Anderson6: “The origins of most Nations are shrouded in obscurity or symbolized by semi-mythical figures, but both the obscurity and the myths offer nationalists the means to portray the Nation as an object of reverence” (532). Kramer’s words here bespeak the origins of fetishism in religious objects “revered” by the members of the tribe.

This elision of the labour of narrative by the aura of the object, and the “experience of distance” that characterizes the relationship of the citizen to the State can be used for a productive reading of Stein’s biggest work, The Making of Americans. Having identified the centrality of these two points to Taussig’s argument I want to suggest that they explicate the obscurity of Stein’s text: its largeness at nine-hundred and twenty-five pages, and its repetitive, non-realist, experimental language, is offset by its absolute self- reflexive aurification as an “object” of American writing. Stein insists on a relationship between herself and America that is in inverse intensity to the physical distance between them.

For this discussion of The Making of Americans and other Stein texts about America, it is necessary to determine the exact parameters of the term State as Taussig understands it, and consequently how, or whether, State differs from Nation. Taussig uses his formulation of state fetishism to read Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal as the story of a

6 Anderson is widely regarded as the key theorist of Nation-formation and discourses of Nation, in the twentieth century. Contemporary theories of national formation are indebted to the Anderson’s work, whose book Imagined Communities was, post-colonial critic Partha Chatterjee claims, “…without doubt, one of the most influential books of the late twentieth century” (128). 42

character fascinated by and expelled from the aurified state of France. The character moves across state boundaries and into the shadows of the margins, or “outside”, as an illegal, itinerant thief and homosexual (Genet 58, 69). While there are resonances between Taussig’s reading of Genet and Stein’s fictional self-representations in terms of illicit sexuality and particularly her presence within the Vichy regime’s France as a Jew, Stein was nevertheless not as marginal as Genet’s character in social terms: she was upper-middle-class. As a bourgeois, Stein’s relation is more to the idea of the Nation than to the regulations of the state. Is America operating as a State? Is Nation fetishized in the same way that State is? The symbolic objects of Nation discussed by Anderson and referred to by Marc Redfield are quantatively similar to those that Taussig discusses in terms of the state. Redfield argues that “the Nation as “imagined community” is always fundamentally irreducible to the state…” (66). However Taussig’s understanding of the aurified State would seem to require at least in some part the same act of imagination that is necessary for the formation of a national community, and therefore would seem to be susceptible to the same fetishizing operations. The similarities can be seen in the respective fetish objects that symbolize the Nation, and those that symbolize the State. Redfield argues that the “flag, anthem, building, cultural monument” are “sensuous tokens of lack, mechanically produced substitutes for what Benjamin calls Erfahrung”, and that “these signs are in a quite precise sense the fetishes of an imagined Nation” (66)7. Taussig identifies the fetish objects of the state as the badges that police officers—the officers of the state—wear. The “fetishes of an imagined Nation” are physical manifestations of, as well as synecdochic of, the greater fetish object that cannot be touched: the idea of the Nation.

The Making of Americans performs an impenetrability, or reflexively throws an aura around itself (creates an “experience of distance”)—is, in fact, a fetish object of the highest order. This operation is a result of, or indeed an effect of, its endlessly repetitive prose, lack of internal orientation for the reader, and metafictional obsession with the

7 This value has not diminished in postmodernity: at a recent New York auction, two early American flags (one dating from the War of Independence) sold for a combined US$20million. To use Redfield’s words, this demonstrates “in a quite precise sense” the literal arbitrary market-value that aurifies the object of Nation in capitalism. 43

practice of writing creating a kind of shiny surface of text, demonstrated in any page of the text. For example:

There are many that I know and they know it, they are all of them repeating and I hear it, sometimes I tell it, mostly I tell it, there are many that I know, they are all of them repeating and I hear it, sometimes I see a whole being in it, sometime, always, I see the whole being in it. There are many that I know and they know it, sometimes they soon know it. Sometimes I soon tell it, sometimes I wait a long time to tell it, sometimes I slowly tell it. There are many that I know and mostly always sometime they know it (314).

The text is the “work of art” that Benjamin posits as the object aurified to the extreme, the quintessence of the “phenomenon of distance”. It is high-art par excellence. The reader/owner of The Making of Americans is left largely with a sense of the epic nature of the novel, an image of the physical and metaphorical largeness of the book itself, its solidity and impenetrability as an object, a closed book, radiating “value” and producing awe. This is precisely the same operation that Durkheim encounters when, as Lukes says in his critique, the sociologist cannot get beyond the idea of “society”: The Making of Americans performs its own aurifying function, reflexively circumscribing itself, creating an opaque surface that cannot be seen into or beyond. Its endlessly repetitive and indistinct nature prevents the reader from engaging with the trajectory of its narrative, or from understanding the text as specific, evidenced in the seemingly arbitrary nature of the sections into which the text is divided: “[The Dehnings and the Herslands]” (editor’s square brackets) is thirty pages long, “[The Hersland Parents]” (editor’s square brackets) is one hundred and seventeen pages long, “Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning” is two hundred and fifty six pages long. While the sections get progressively longer their content does not substantially differ. In between these titled sections are page-breaks that are not titled—an omission that undermines the helpfulness of the titled sections. Given this internal lack of cohesion, then, the title of the whole work, The Making of Americans, stands as a monument: that is what the novel is, the object that is “the making of Americans”, because the content is not graspable on the 44

usual terms of the novel, in which readerly expectation is satisfied by character description within the conventions of realism through which the novel form was defined, as well as grammatical clarity and narrative development. As Jayne L. Walker identifies (in her book The Making of a Modernist: From Three Lives to Tender Buttons), The Making of Americans “systematically violates the reader’s expectation that the structure of a novel should roughly correspond to the succession of events in the story it narrates” (49). My purpose in identifying this operation is simply to argue that, in the context of this examination of Stein’s relation to nationality and constructions of nationhood, this book as her self-proclaimed piece de resistance operates as a fetishized object of Nation. She was always insistent on its importance to American literature, and the title reminds us of that. As a novel whose status is that of a great work of the twentieth century it is often quoted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which contributes to its aurification. Stein positions herself always as a celebrity, a status she validates through the shared domains of the celebrity and the genius (which will be developed further later in this chapter), authorised by her production of “the first American work of art that was of the twentieth century”: The Making of Americans.

As a perhaps unconscious reflection of the over-determinedly objectified/objectifying nature of The Making of Americans, in 1999—the last year of the twentieth century and seventy-three years after it was first printed—the Dalkey archive issued a second imprint of The Making of Americans. At this moment now, in 2006, the first decade of the twenty-first century, this far from Benjamin’s prediction that the “aura” of the commodity fetish would dissolve in the age of mass-production (‘The Work of Art’ 222), and from our position of knowledge that the commodity fetish and the aura have in many ways only gained in their potency, the presentation of this 1999 printing of The Making of Americans wears its capitalism not just on its sleeve but all over its jacket. Issues of mass-production and repetition, objectification, female subjectivity, and Nation, are crystallized, literalised, in the cover of this most recent edition of the novel. As an object of mass-production Stein’s book is nevertheless a commodity fetish, and its rarity and her high-art fame contribute to its aura. The cover consists of a repeated/tiled photo of two women in 1930s-style hats wrapped together in the American flag. The 45

“wearing” of the flag is the combination of nationality and fetishism that characterizes the description of Fernande Picasso in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The photo appears in Warhol-like repetition, as if it were wallpaper, or computer-generated wallpaper, or a word printed over and over again. This cover ironically suggests woman as fetish object, woman and Nation, fetishized idea of Nation, the fetishization of repetition as popular culture that has become high-art. What the The Making of Americans really functions as, then, is as a physical manifestation, an object of national “history”, given by Stein to the people of the Nation and to herself as an authorizing proof of her status as an important person from, and in relation to, the Nation of America.

Stein’s location in relation to Anderson’s theorisation of “imagined communities” is significant here. As Julie Abraham identifies in her article on Nation in Stein’s novella Brewsie and Willie, Anderson actually discusses Stein in Imagined Communities to exemplify his point about Nation as a product of combined imagination. Anderson uses Stein’s comment: “What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there”, to argue that: “Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is ‘no there there’” (509). In terms of Anderson’s theorisation of the “imagined community”, the absence of an actual “there” “there” is precisely the absence of an actual entity that is “Oakland”. While Anderson does not consider The Making of Americans his emphasis on the role of the novel in Nation- formation is useful in understanding Stein’s epic novel as a text. Jonathan Culler argues that Anderson’s argument that the novel is one of the technologies of the “imagined community” rests on the form of the novel, rather than nationalist content, and that critical analyses that focus on content are less helpful:

Anderson’s work can lead us to realize that what is distinctive about the novel, about its formal adumbration of the space of a community, is its open invitation to readers of different conditions to become insiders, even while the novel raises as a possibility the distinction between insider and outsider, friend and foe, that 46

becomes the basis of political developments. This gives the novel a richer role as condition of possibility of the Nation than it is likely to retain if we shift, as readers of Anderson seem inclined to do, from the form of the novel as condition of possibility of imagining the Nation to the content of novels as representations of the Nation (38).

Culler argues that the form of the novel is more productive in analysing the ways “imagined communities” are constructed than the representational content of novels concerned with issues of Nation. However, in making this argument Culler is making also the assumption that Anderson’s work involves a quantative analysis of Nation- effects in the “imagined community”, rather than what is surely equally as valid, that is to say the representation of these effects at work in the fictional worlds presented, which are, in fact, representations of that outside world. In a sense, Culler is maintaining/insisting upon, a distinction between “outside” world of “reality” and “inside” world of the language of the novel. However, in the case of The Making of Americans, the content of the novel affects/effects the degree to which its form is a “condition of possibility of imagining the Nation”. The internal content of Stein’s texts in relation to Nation is analysed in this chapter, but in terms of Culler’s argument the importance of form is demonstrated by the significance of The Making of Americans to Stein’s claims to be the “writer of the twentieth century” and of America. The epic size of the novel authorised her claim to represent, and write for, the Nation through its reference to the “imagined community” of America. From as early as 1908, then, with her self-announced “great work”, Stein had designated her relation to the Nation of America as that of (as the characters in The Making of Americans themselves are constructed) a citizen in a relationship of fetishization of Nation.

Both her own relation to this, and her construction of characters in this way, gave Stein pleasure, and in doing so validated her right to write about a country that she had no recent experience of and had, if proximity and normativity were the conditions of artistic representation of the Nation, forfeited her authority to write about. This is evident in Abraham’s discussion of Stein’s sense of national identity. Discussing Stein’s life-long 47

self-imposed exile from America, and the fact that it was in part an “escape” from family and relations who would have been “disapproving” or “condescending” about both her sexual and artistic practices, Stein critic Julie Abraham argues that it is not easy to account for “the vehemence of her identification with the Nation [Stein] was leaving…” (3). Having noted this, Abraham goes on to do an analysis of Brewsie and Willie—a “dialogue” text written in 1945, in which several un-educated G.I.s in Europe discuss their involvement in the war and what it is to be American—and the critical responses to this text which saw Stein as a manipulator of her young male subjects. Abraham concludes, however, that:

Brewsie and Willie rests on Stein’s compassion for the G.I.s and her passion for a Nation and a narrative that would include her, a woman in her seventies whose grandmothers and grandfathers were “lousy foreigners” and whose sexual behaviour was, she knew, not of a kind to gain her entry to everyone’s America (11).

In this 1995 reading of Brewsie and Willie Julie Abraham’s summary of the text exhibits and performs, somewhat confusingly, the contrary claims of different Stein critics regarding Stein’s relationship with America and her own nationality, as well as the contradictory nature of Stein’s own representations of herself in terms of Nation.

This is where the second significant point of Taussig’s “state fetishism” and its implications for “labour” explicates even further the fetishism I have identified as operating in (and around) the text The Making of Americans, showing that the “labour” required to produce national identities and Nation as an object is obscured by the aura. Internally within the text the labour required to produce the subjects of a Nation is the central thematic investigation of the novel. Against Culler, it is extremely useful to examine the content of The Making of Americans inasmuch as it is, broadly, the narrative of a large number of characters who are Americans, national subjects, and this narrative in toto has an effect on, and is effected/affected by, the form. While the title announces that “Americans” are in the process of being created—that national 48

subjectivity is, like other categories of subjectivity, “under construction”—the text itself, as has been demonstrated, performs “objectness”, the coherence and aurified stasis of a commodity fetish. The status of The Making of Americans as an object of Nation renders an authorial subject who is the one engaged in the processes of labour, the one gazing at the object of Nation, the one held in thrall by its aura.

As I have shown, the “phenomenon of distance” and the work of the object’s aura to obscure the labour required to make it are the major operations that signal the fetishization of Nation. That this fetishization is apparent as a trajectory across Stein’s oeuvre is demonstrated further and clarified by another piece from the middle of her life in which the same operation is abundantly clear, in a more concise form than that of The Making of Americans. The “phenomenon of distance” as well as the elision of the “labour” of narrative are the specific textual effects of Stein’s short fictional piece from 1924, ‘Wherein Iowa Differs from Kansas and Indiana’, which rehearses an inability to move beyond the aurified idea of the State. In this piece Taussig’s fetishized State is literalised in the multiple States of America, as Stein focuses on the division of America into its discreet sections, the individual States that comprise the United States of America. The fetishization of the different American States as objects seen from a distance, able to be textually arranged by the writer, is clearly evident. The States are considered in relation to each other, through their relational positioning, which relies on a scale that makes the idea of each of the fifty American states (forty-eight in Stein’s time) graspable as a coherent, aurified entity:

Otherwise seen and otherwise see and otherwise seen to see, to see otherwise. Otherwise seen. The difference to be seen the difference and otherwise seen, the difference and otherwise seen the difference seen otherwise. In Iowa, in there, in Iowa and in there in there and in Iowa it is noticeable the difference in there the difference in Iowa and in there. …… And in Iowa held it. 49

And in Kansas hold it so as to hold it for it. In Indiana held it to hold it, hold it to hold it. In Iowa held it, in Kansas hold it, in Indiana to hold it. …… The next question has an answer. Iowa and the next question has an answer. Indiana has the next question and has the next answer. Kansas question and answer. …… The next question. Iowa and the next question. Indiana and the next question. Iowa and the next question. Indiana and the next question. Iowa and the next question or the next question or Iowa. Indiana and the next question or the next question or Iowa. Indiana and the next question and the next question Indiana and the next question, the next question left the next question Kansas and the next question, Indiana Iowa Kansas and the next question” (224-27).

That this piece is structured around a “question” is salient for the discussion in several ways. Firstly, if we take it that the “question” here is the one implicit in the title: “How does Iowa differ from Kansas and Indiana?”, the text cannot get past the surface of the word-objects, the proper nouns, “Iowa”, “Kansas” and “Indiana.” They are aurified objects, that are to be “held”. The aura is that which obscures their make-up, their narrative constitution, the plurality of people and experiences that make Iowa differ from Kansas and Indiana. This is demonstrated further by the emphasis on “seeing”; Benjamin argues that the optical perspective is the perspective of the subject on the object in the subject/object structure of capitalism, in which the gaze of the subject is “held in thrall” to the fetishized object (‘The Work of Art’ 222). This optical perspective is the one adopted by the narrator of ‘Wherein…’. Sentences such as: “Otherwise seen. The difference to be seen the difference and otherwise seen, the difference and otherwise seen…” construct, as in The Making of Americans, an authorial subject who is the one 50

doing the labour of creation, but whose gaze becomes held in thrall by the aura. However, where in the epic novel the subject’s gaze is held in thrall by the finished product and the representation of that finished product, in ‘Wherein…’, the inability to see beyond the aurified object is strongly evident at the level of the internal text.

The idea of the word as a unit of sense, as theorised in Structuralism, is evident here. Structuralism’s historical development in the first decades of the twentieth century joins the experimental artistic and literary movements of the time in a broad critical examination in European culture of the relationship between words, meaning, and materiality. Stein’s work has been examined in the light of the conclusion of Structuralism regarding the mechanics of language.8 Ferdinande de Saussure identified the visual and phonetic difference between words as the primary carrier of linguistic meaning. As in Saussure’s argument that words are understood, and make meaning, through their difference from words, meaning is created in Stein’s piece by the “difference seen” between the proper nouns “Iowa”, “Kansas”, and “Indiana”.

In this formulation, however, all that can be “seen” is the nouns. No narrative labour can be recounted then, movement ceases and there is stasis apart from the repetition, the constant restating of the names of the “objects”. Their presence as entities is the only “answer” to the “question”. A question should be specific enough to denote its relation to what it is asking, and an answer is generally delivered in the form of a narrative or description/explanation. Here there is no question except the implicit one (“What is the difference between Iowa, Indiana, and Kansas?”), to which the “answer” is always one proper noun. These proper nouns, then, each function as a fetishized “idea” of one of the internal States of America, an idea beyond which the text cannot move, precisely as—Taussig identified—Durkheim could not move beyond the idea of State in his analysis. When Stein’s text says:

The next question has an answer.

8 Jayne L. Walker has used Roman Jakobson to read Tender Buttons (149), whilst Randa Dubnick uses structuralist principles in his reading of that text (86). 51

Iowa and the next question has an answer.

“Iowa” is the “answer” to “the next question.” If we keep reading, “Indiana…” is the answer to “Iowa and the next question has an answer.” We are given neither the question nor the answer, both are elided in the displacement onto the fetishized objects of “Iowa”, “Kansas” and “Indiana”. Ironically, however, if we take this operation to its logical conclusion, though at the same time we are given in a sense both the question and the answer, which is that the object is for Stein enough—the pleasure of repeatedly writing and apprehending the objects of “Iowa”, “Indiana” and “Kansas” is a complete pleasure.

The ubiquity of fetishism as a structure of subject/object relations that determine subjects and the Nation is demonstrated by yet another example of Nation fetishism twenty-one years later. The same formation at the other end of Stein’s life and in the very different genre from either that of the epic Modernist novel of The Making of Americans or that of the fictional, experimental poetry/prose piece of ‘Wherein…’, is seen in the 1945 text Wars I Have Seen—a political-opinion/reality work with a similar, (though less joyous) tone to that of Everybody’s Autobiography. In this text the significance of distance to the aurified object and the subject’s response is seen in “Stein’s” and the American G.I.s’ mutual love of (their pleasure in) saying and hearing the names of American states that they are separated from by a great geographical distance, but also by the un-traversable space between the citizen and the Nation-object that they adore. In Wars I Have Seen Stein and the American G.I.s talk about lots of things, but the emphasis is not (as might be expected) on the narratives of home that they share, what we get is Stein’s and Toklas’ greatest pleasure, which is Stein says, in literally hearing them ‘recite’ the names of American States:

What we always wanted to know was the state they came from and what they did before they came over here. One said that he was born on a race track and worked in a night club. Another was the golf champion of Mississippi, but what we wanted most was to hear them say the name of the state in which they were born and the names of the other states where they had lived. After every war, 52

there have only been two like that but I do not think that just to say after the other war makes it feel as it does, no I do mean after every war, it feels like that, after every war when I talk and listen to all our army, it feels like that too, the thing I like most are the names of all the states of the United States. They make music and they are poetry, you do not have to recite them all but you just say one one two three four or five of them and you will see they make music and they make poetry (41-42).

“Stein” is interested in the specific details of the lives of each unique individual soldier as an American person living in America, but she passes over their stories quickly, without narratives and using only simple assertions (“One said that he was born on a race track and worked in a night club”), to get to what gives her real pleasure: the group chant of the “imagined community” of America—herself and the GIs united in the idea of America constituted in the speech act of naming the states, using the proper nouns that give definition to the boundaries of and within the Nation. This is clear in the relish with which Stein writes: “The thing I like most are the names of all the states of the United States.” The repetition of “states” with the enhanced “United States” in the second assertion creates a trajectory from smaller units to the one large entity that is literally and metaphorically the unified Nation. The individual narratives of the individual American subjects, who together constitute the population of the Nation of America, is elided here by the force of the fetishized Nation-object. The assertion that this litany of names makes poetry and music, both of which are “art”, further emphasizes this operation; reciting the names of American States constitutes, in this construction, “art”, which is imbricated as a result in the economy of the “work of art” as a commodity fetish in capitalism. The implication of the assertion that “they make music and they are poetry” is that the names of the States are literally “works of art”, thereby connecting the fetishized Nation-object to the fetishized “work of art”.

This operation is not limited to America as the only Nation of Stein’s contemplation: France, the other Nation with which she was engaged during her life and across her writing, is also constructed in terms of distance and aurification. Stein fetishizes the two 53

countries of her life as objects of space, displacing the crisis of acknowledgment/disavowal onto the objectified country; France becomes a space of daily inhabitation and existence and America becomes the place that Stein writes about. In Paris France (1940) Stein uses metonymic objects, fetishized by herself, to depict the aurified feeling of France that she always had from a small child. France itself occupies a fetishized space in Stein’s memory: it is the rare, “interesting” quality of France as an exotic “Other” that Stein remembers about France:

In San Francisco it was easy that it should be France. Of course it might have been Spain or China, but really in San Francisco as a child one really knew too much about Spain and China, and France was interesting while Spain and China were familiar, and daily. France was not daily it just came up again and again. It came up first in such different books, Jules Verne and Alfred de Vigny and it came up in my mother’s clothes and the gloves and the sealskin caps and muffs and the boxes they came in. There was the smell of Paris in that (3).

Here it is decidedly not the quotidian, daily aspect of France that features, but the aurified objects that represent a fetishized France. Spain and China, traditionally represented as more “other” and exotic than France, are here “familiar, and daily” because of the strong presence of these communities as migrants in San Francisco. The “phenomenon of distance” is represented here, in the way that Spain and China are seen as “close” to Stein’s daily life in San Francisco, whereas France seems far away. This distance is manifested in the mysteriousness of objects at hand, objects whose secret narratives are elided by their auras. Along with the pleasure of fetish objects of Stein’s “mother’s clothes and the gloves and the sealskin caps and muffs and the boxes they came in.” Gerald J. Kennedy, in his book Imagining Paris, which examines notions of exile and home for non-French writers significantly engaged with Paris, argues that even when she is engaged in the genre of writing about place, in Paris France, Stein’s “…Paris emerges as a ville manquée, an absent city; through the feints, shifts, and asides which comprise the narrative, Stein seems perpetually to defer a portrait of the capital” 54

(49). Within the terms of this thesis a “portrait of the capital” is perpetually deferred precisely because it cannot be represented except as a static image, because it is, like America, a fetishized idea—the “object” of “Paris France” that is the title.

Where France and America are different in Stein’s thinking (the fuller implications of which will be considered later in this chapter) lies in the temporalities she organises for them—the centuries to which Stein respectively associates them. This is an arrangement which feeds into the particular subjectivity she is constructing for herself as an American and as a writer of the twentieth century, with the inextricable qualities of “twentieth- centuryness” and Americanness. This arrangement foregrounds America and her own relation to it as a citizen of the Nation of the twentieth century. Stein’s own understanding of her relation to America is firmly tied to her understanding of America’s development along a temporal trajectory. In ‘Why Do Americans Live In Europe?’, published in Transition (1928), she writes:

[America] is the mother of modern civilization and one wants to have been born in the country that has attained and live in the countries that are attaining or going to be attaining. …A country that is the oldest and therefore the most important country in the world quite naturally produces the creators, and so naturally it is I an American who was and is thinking in writing was born in America and lives in Paris (Gertrude Stein’s America 67).

Here Stein constructs the mutuality of her pleasure at being “an American” and her place at the forefront of literature in the twentieth century, and reconciles this with the seemingly contradictory fact that she does not seem able to live there, is not really allowed to inhabit that literal space, because of the irreconcilability of her own subjectivity—which she insists is American—and the American subjects alongside whom she cannot live. This is depicted in the very terms of capitalism, the economy in which fetishism exists, the terms of material possession, of commodification and capitalism: “…one wants to have been born in the country that has attained…”. Stein needs to have distance from the fetish object. The physical distance of France from 55

America becomes, for Stein, a necessary playing-out of the metaphorical distance inherent between the subject and the fetish object, the distance between the concept of Nation and the daily reality of existence in a geographical place.

Stein’s fetishization of America as an object of Nation is inextricable from her notion of America as the country of the twentieth century. The inherent opposition against which America is contrasted is Europe, the country in which Stein is “standing”, “looking” at the shining light of America across the water. The construction also posits a temporal difference: Stein is “standing” in the nineteenth century, “looking” at the twentieth. This creates a model of time and distance as imbricated, and related to object and subject. This model will be further established and explicated in the second half of this chapter, focusing on the ideas of the subject that Stein associated with the divisions between America and Europe, and the status of the artist in both places, and across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that they represent.

Given the ubiquity of Stein’s fetishization of Nation it is no surprise that when Stein eventually returned to America twenty three years after leaving it her comments on what she saw from the plane reiterate the aspects of fetishism that appear across her representations of Nation: the “phenomenon of distance” alongside an elision of narrative, or “labour”, which combine together to create the fetishized Nation that brings “pleasure” to the fetishist, the textual “Stein”. In Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), she writes about returning to America for her lecture tour in 1934 by plane, her first time in the air and her first experience of the perspective of great height. Just as she had considered the discrete objects of the States in ‘Wherein Iowa differs from Kansas and Indiana’, she could now consider them from their discrete shapes in the literal cartographical arrangement of America. She says:

I have always wanted to write about how one state differs from another. It is so strange that the lines are ruled lines on paper, I never can stop having pleasure in the way the ruled lines separate one state from another. Ohio from Indiana Kansas from Nebraska Tennessee from Alabama, it always gives me a shock of 56

pleasure the American map and its straight lines and compare it to any other with the way they go all over nothing neat and clean like the maps of America. Well that is the way the earth looked to me the pilots and the stewardesses and then I went into the pilot place and talked to them and I sat down in one of their chairs and made the wheel move a little and it was all a pleasant matter but most of all the looking down and finding it a real America. Straight lines and quarter sections, and the mountain lines in Pennsylvania very straight lines, it made it right that I had always been with cubism and everything that followed after (53).

As argued in the discussion of ‘Wherein…’, the “difference between the States” is only the difference between one object and another—object to object, State to State, proper noun to proper noun, a “difference” that serves to reinforce the coherence of each individual object. The relative value and meaning of each proper noun is evident in the grammatical structure of: “Ohio from Indiana Kansas from Nebraska Tennessee from Alabama”, in which the difference in nouns is the difference in States. The focus is on the boundaries between objects that define the objects themselves. This makes it “a real America”; it is “real” because it is the sense of a coherent Nation, an “object” that is “America”. The narratives that are what actually create the idea of a coherent State such as Indiana or Iowa are absent, obscured by the aura, in the insistence on the object of the State itself. The narrative labour required to create “Indiana” or “Iowa” is obscured by the aura of the State. This arrangement of States, says Stein, “gives me a shock of pleasure”, but this is also a repeated and consistent pleasure: “I can never stop having pleasure in the way the ruled lines separate one state from another”. The pleasure here is a fetishistic one similar to the pleasure shown to be central to Stein’s depiction of National subjects in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; each State is a coherent object, unique in its name. Stein takes pleasure from the segregation of America, as if it represents the capitalism that would define America in the twentieth century. Whereas the literal fetish objects of Stein’s “mother’s clothes and the gloves and the sealskin caps and muffs and the boxes they came in” (Paris France 3) both represent, and are metonymic of, a fetishized Paris seen from a distance in Stein’s childhood, the separated States seen from above represent and are metonymic of, the fetishized Nation of 57

America in Stein’s adulthood.

The distance of the subject from the fetishized object demonstrated by Stein in relation to The Making of Americans and ‘Wherein…’ is in operation in this section of Everybody’s Autobiography also, in this case demonstrating the strength of the requirement of distance, as Stein is literally on the point of descending into the geographical space of the Nation of America. These are put forth as her first comments on seeing America for the first time in twenty-three years, and they position the relation between herself as the subject of Nation, and the Nation itself, as a still-distant perspective. The same metaphorical distance played out in ‘Wherein…’ is in literal operation here; from the great distance of a plane above America, the aura of the distant Nation-object is now powerfully in evidence. In a sense, Stein is trying to delay for as long as possible the moment when she will be in/within the Nation, amongst the labouring of subjects and their daily narratives that are constantly creating “America”. The perspective of distance testifies to Stein’s fetishization of America, then, and demonstrates her resistance to “getting closer” to her fetishized America even as she was flying down into it.

The implications of “Nation fetishism” for Stein’s politics The ubiquity of Stein’s broad fetishization of Nation demonstrated here as an object of thought across the entire temporal line of her life and writing, as well as across genres, demonstrated here, can account for the appearance of fetishism in works about political/historical reality in which the fetishization of central figures—such as Maréchal Pétain, leader of the fascist Vichy regime in France—has disturbing implications. The fetishization of Pétain identified by Wanda Van Dusen, occurs, it can be seen, because of the ubiquity of fetishism across Stein’s considerations of Nation and nationality. The discussion so far has demonstrated that in texts from 1908 (The Making of Americans), 1924 (‘Wherein…’), 1933 (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), and 1940 (Paris France), Stein consistently presents Nation as a fetish object, and citizens of Nation as fetishized national objects. How easy and likely, then, for Stein’s representations of Pétain in 1940 to deploy the same structure of representing a subject of Nation, a leader, 58

as a fetishized object? While understanding this representation as part of a larger representational structure favoured (either consciously or unconsciously) by Stein does not excuse the implicit valorisation of fascism by the ‘Introduction…’, it nevertheless contextualizes that piece within the broader frame of Stein’s relationship to Nation. Van Dusen cites Taussig’s “state fetishism” in her article about Stein’s relation to the Vichy government considering her translations of speeches by Vichy leader Pétain, and her ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’. Discussing both the ‘Introduction…’ and ‘The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France’ (1940), Van Dusen identifies the figure of the Maréchal on a white horse—seen in both pieces—as a fetishistic image. As such, Van Dusen argues:

In both pieces this figure operates as the fetish image of a benevolent, patriarchal state behind which is masked a reactionary, racist regime, the hidden maleficium of fascism. Stein’s portrait of Pétain obscures her vulnerability as a Jewish American lesbian in a hostile cultural and political environment. If a by-product of fetishization is “intoxication” (“M,” 228), then the intoxicating aura of Pétain as a political savior radically obscures the Vichy policies that made it an enemy of the United States, a persecutor of Jews, and certainly no protector of sexual minorities… (4).

Van Dusen argues that Stein’s engagement with the Vichy regime, whether or not it was motivated by self-preservation, is manifested in texts that glorify Pétain, and that the aura of Pétain as a fetishized “leader-object” obscures the fascist philosophies and policies he espoused.

It has been demonstrated that Stein’s first epic novel from 1908, The Making of Americans, operates through the fetishization of Nation. Further, I have argued that in the fictional piece from 1924 this same operation is occurring, and similarly that in her 1933 “autobiography” Stein constructs individual subjects as fetishized/nationalized objects. Thus, the fetishization of Maréchal Pétain is not a single instance. Within the context of the ubiquitous fetishizing in Stein’s work that this thesis identifies, however, 59

the fetishism of Pétain takes on a different meaning, one that does not deny or elide the specifically disturbing meaning of aurifying a fascist leader, but which draws attention to the seeming-compulsion or readiness of Stein to construct people through the operations of fetishism, particularly in relation to Nation. While Van Dusen’s account of ‘Introduction…’ identifies the ramifications of the fetishism in the text as the construction of “Stein” as a fascist self, the broader account presented here of fetishism in Stein’s texts about Nation across her oeuvre complicates Van Dusen’s conclusion. Within this broader context it is possible to separate the political fascism of the fetishism in ‘Introduction…’ from Stein’s use of fetishism per se. This is not to disavow Van Dusen’s claims through a fetishistic displacement of analytical argument, but to complicate it.

Such a move, though not within the terms of fetishism as an operation, is the province of Barbara Will’s response to Van Dusen entitled: ‘Lost in Translation: Stein’s Vichy Collaboration’ (2004). Will shows that Stein’s actual translations of Pétain’s speeches are complex, in their subtle rendering of resistance to the ideas expressed by Pétain in the french language. Will argues that: “…the literalism of the Pétain translations seems to emerge out of…a collaboration undertaken under coercion, such as that practiced by an occupied country during war” (660). In an earlier response to Van Dusen, Phoebe Stein Davis argues that Van Dusen’s argument does not account for the deep imbrications of politics and aesthetics. Stein Davis contends that: “…while Van Dusen’s work exemplifies the current reexamination of the complicated relationship between modernist aesthetic and politics in Stein’s work, it maintains an opposition between aesthetic concerns and the treatment of political events and issues” (‘History, Narrative, and “Daily Living”’ 569-70). My analysis will similarly complicate Van Dusen’s account by examining fetishism specifically, outside the parameters of Van Dusen’s argument.

Having established that Nation functions according to the operations of Taussig’s “state fetishism” in The Making of Americans, in Paris France, and in ‘Wherein Iowa…’, to render an aurified Nation-object gazed at from a distance by the authorial subject, it will 60

now be demonstrated that at other points there is an absence of fetishism in some instances in which Stein represents Nation and Nationality. Further, some of these pieces are explicit critiques of “state fetishism”, despite her own constant deployment of it. These factors of the absence or direct critique of fetishism suggests a different structure of subject/object relations than the one this discussion has so far identified and pursued through Stein’s representations of Nation. The alternative representations construct a different subject/object relation, depending on the specifics of the genre and the degree of the political/historical seriousness of the situation being represented. While Stein’s relation to the Vichy regime is, as Van Dusen has demonstrated, problematic in texts such as ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’, Stein demonstrates at other points, such as in an excerpt from ‘Off We All Went to See Germany’ in Gertrude Stein’s America (published first in Life magazine in August 1945), an understanding of the war and relations between the countries which condemns the operations of fetishism that determines the citizen-subject’s conceptualization of Nation. As numerous scholars have identified, Modernism and fascism have complexly interrelated histories. “Stein” writes:

That evening I went over to talk to the [American] soldiers, and to hear what they had to say, we all got very excited, Sergeant Santiani who had asked me to come complained that I confused the minds of his men but why shouldn’t their minds be confused, gracious goodness, are we going to be like the Germans, only believe in the Aryans that is our own race, a mixed race if you like but all having the same point of view. I got very angry with them, they admitted they like the Germans better than the other Europeans. Of course you do, I said, they flatter you and they obey you, when the other countries don’t like you and say so and personally you have not been awfully ready to meet them half way, well naturally if they don’t like you they show it, the Germans don’t like you but they flatter you, doggone it, I said I bet you Fourth of July they will all be putting up our flag and all you big babies will just be flattered to death, literally to death, I said bitterly, because you will have to fight again. Well said one of them after all we are on top. Yes I said and is there any spot on earth more dangerous than on 61

top. You don’t like the Latins, or the Arabs or the Wops, or the British, well don’t you forget a country can’t live without friends, I want you all to get to understand other countries so that you can be friends, make a little effort, try to find out what it is all about. We got very excited, they passed me cognac, but I don’t drink so they found me some grapefruit juice, and they patted me and sat me down, and there it all was (43).

Stein argues here that the “flattery” of the Americans by the Germans consists of Germans strategically buying into the “imagined” America, its belief and pride in its own might. She further sees that by partaking in America’s imagination of itself the Germans will obtain a right over America, an allegiance formed in a shared act of imagination, that will lead directly to the deaths of Americans; not for the “imagined community” of Germany but for the “imagined community” of America. As Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, this shared imagining is the reason why millions of citizens are prepared to not only kill, but die, for their country (7). Stein is self-ironising here when she tells of them all becoming “excited”, offering her an alcoholic drink, and then having to find her juice because she does not drink, like a child. Then, like a child or an old lady, they “pat” her and, perhaps less cutely and more significantly, sit her down out of harm’s way, so that they can ignore her.

Stein, here, is vehemently and personally opposed to the rhetorical and discursive acts of Andersonian “imagination” that bind citizens together as subjects of one Nation, as enemies of others. In this example she is exposing the labour behind the idea of Nation that is obscured by the aura when Nation is fetishized as an object. There is no evidence of the “phenomenon of distance” here. and it is precisely the labour of narrative that is being revealed and exposed—the repeated actions of flattery and obsequious respect for the literal fetish objects of Nation, such as the American flag, that is creating the “imagined community” of America between the Americans and the Germans. Stein exhorts the soldiers to go and “make a little effort”, referring directly to the labour required to construct and create National identity. The specific circumstances of this occasion are significant: Stein has been invited to talk to the G.I.s by army Generals. 62

They are present, and it is a formal occasion in which Stein is being “overseen” by the higher levels of the military hierarchy, but there remains the safety of being on the same side as these people—it is the army of “her” country. In this sense then, her expression of her opinion is serious and deliberate, and depicts her rather as a steadfast opponent of fascism, three years after ‘Introduction…’ was written. Stein’s fetishization of Petain, then, must be considered within the context of Stein’s expressions of disapproval of the fetishization of Nation.

The “imagined communities” aurified into fetish objects through the obscuring of labour are represented with this operation, but critiqued as well, in explicitly fictional texts by Stein. The difference in genre means that abstract Nations can be discussed, as opposed to the “real” Nations of America and France, and political reality, such as the fascism of the Vichy regime, is not a fundamental referent of the text. This is the case in the heavily ironic ‘A Patriotic Leading’ from 1928’s Useful Knowledge. Published four years after ‘Wherein Iowa differs from Kansas and Indiana’, but seventeen years before Wars I Have Seen, ‘A Patriotic Leading’ uses irony to call into question the aurified nature of national discourse and patriotic sentiment: precisely the operations that appear as problematically “straight-forward” in other of her pieces such as the ‘Introduction…’ and even Everybody’s Autobiography.9

A patriotic leading

9 Naomi Schor theorises the homologous operations of fetishism and irony in her article ‘Irony and Fetishism’, in relation to Flaubert’s Memoirs of a Madman. Given the acknowledged irony of Stein’s tone throughout much of her work, Schor’s identification of the similarity of the operations of irony and fetishism could provide an interesting further explication of Stein’s oeuvre, but would need too-detailed a consideration of Steinian poetics for the purview of this thesis. Just as acknowledgement and disavowal lead to displacement onto a fetishized object and thereby allow the reassertion of control and pleasure, irony both acknowledges and disavows the trauma of realising that one discourse (the discourse being ironised) is not ‘the truth’. As with fetishism, irony sets up a memorial to itself, in the sense that it deploys the discourse that it is undermining. Schor argues that: “…just as the fetish enables the fetishist simultaneously to recognize and to deny woman’s castration, irony allows the ironist both to reject and to reappropriate the discourse of reference, Romanticism in the case of Flaubert” (98). In ‘A Patriotic leading’, as my argument suggests, the language-objects of the cliché and the phrase reassert control and pleasure. 63

VERSE I Indeed indeed. Can you see. The stars. And regularly the precious treasure. What do we love without measure. We know.

VERSE II We suspect the second man.

VERSE III We are worthy of everything that happens. You mean weddings. Naturally I mean weddings.

VERSE IV And then we are. Hail to the Nation.

VERSE V Do you think we believe it.

VERSE VI It is that or bust.

VERSE VII We cannot bust.

VERSE VIII Thank you. 64

VERSE IX Thank you so much (68-69).

In this poem Stein effects a “leading” of the reader through both a kind of literal and a subversive speech of nationalism. The complex use of cliches from nationalist, patriotic discourses is both serious and ironic; “Hail to the Nation” is a direct nationalistic sentiment, and “love without measure” alludes to the ‘love for one’s country’ that is total—the love that, in Andersonian terms, allows one to die for one’s country (7). These clichés are joined by specific, direct quotations from the American national anthem—the words “Can you see?” constitute half of the lines: “Oh say can you see, by the Dawn’s early light…”, and “the stars” alludes to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. These phrases are fetishized into “a precious treasure”.

The discourses of nationalism and patriotism that these phrases are doing the work of constructing are obscured by their over-familiarity. The phrases of the national anthem are so well-known that they are divorced from immediate meaning-production. They have become objects, distanced and reified, ironically, by their very familiarity. The aurified quality of each cliché is felt in the way its sense seems to convey a natural power and truth to the reader, such as in: “Hail to the Nation.” The use of cliches, even in a modified form, circumscribes every other short line with the aura of these fetishized phrases. Even such a simple non-sentence as the first lines of: “Indeed indeed” is imbued with the inherent resonance of automatic agreement between the speaker and the audience (other citizens of the Nation, invoked in the poem by the use of “we”, the millions of American subjects who constitute the Nation) of an unexamined, unthinking patriotism. “Indeed indeed” is a preliminary agreement, a preordained acceptance of the conventional patriotic pieties which follow. The patriotic sentiments to come are the both the expressions of adoration of the “precious treasure” that is “America”, and, reflexively illuminated by the glow of the “precious treasure” they are describing, they become aurified “reverence-objects” themselves. Context is essential here for meaning- production, but it is the fetishized nature of everything in the poem, reigned over, as it is, 65

by its title and the markers of its structure (“a patriotic leading”, and the “VERSE ..” form, suggesting a kind of National anthem) that allows the undermining phrases to do their work.

The irony means that while the fetishization deploys the terms seriously, as they are deployed by the State, Stein’s tone undermines the veiling that the fetishism creates. This is evident from the first words “Indeed indeed”, which not only invoke the pact of patriotism, but expose it, precisely in its position alone, without either prior, or subsequent, assertions to refer to. This is an absence signified in terms of subsequent lines by the full-stop after “Indeed indeed”. Standing alone the phrase is rendered meaningless. ‘A Patriotic Leading’ is the American national anthem broken up, objectified by phrase-units, and reconfigured in a Modernist pastiche, in a Cubist arrangement that draws attention to its own components and to a certain degree to its own processes.

The complex rendering of the relation of subject to Nation through irony evident in ‘A Patriotic Leading’ is reminiscent of a poem written four years earlier (1924) by another major American Modernist, who unlike Stein lived his life in America: ‘[next to of course god America i]’ by e.e. cummings.

‘next to of course god america I love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh say can you see by the dawn’s early my country’tis of centuries come and go and are no more what of it we should worry in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gory by jingo by gee by gosh by gum why talk of beauty what could be more beaut- iful than these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter 66

they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voice of liberty be mute?’

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water (Seven Centuries of Poetry in English 5). cummings’ text is straight-forwardly ironic to the point of caustic disgust; this is reflected also in the direct condemnation of the effects of nationalism—the deaths of a Nation’s citizens in war, where Stein’s text keeps an oblique distance from the literal results of nationalism. Nevertheless, both poems share a use of the cliché, and in the ironic tone of the nationalist phrases “land of the pilgrims”, “say can you see by the dawn’s early”, and “thy sons acclaim your glorious name”, cummings, like Stein, exposes the ‘reality’, or labour, behind the aura through a direct recasting of patriotic phrases in discourses of labour: “these heroic happy dead/who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter” become those who “did not stop to think they died instead”. The aura created by the metaphors of glory obscures the reality that the metaphors signify: the actual dying that “rush[ing]…to the roaring slaughter” means. The opening line “next to of course god america I” establishes a geometry of self/Nation-subject, Nation, and God, that is similarly heard in Stein’s “And then we are/Hail to the Nation”, and which will be discussed in its negotiation of shifts between ontological and epistemological subject/object relations later in this thesis.

Both Stein’s and cummings’ poems construct a speaker and an audience, thus emphasizing the “community” aspect of “imagined communities”. Stein’s “VERSE VIII/Thank you” , and “VERSE IX/Thank you so much” (68-69), imply a speaker making a speech, as does cumming’s ironically bathetic line about the ubiquitous glass of water provided at public-speaking occasions, at the end of the main rhetorical accumulation: “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water” (5). These texts subtly suggest, then, the writer her/himself called to deliver a public address for and to the Nation. In modernity part of the artist’s function becomes the representation of the Nation, seen in the development of the role of poet laureate. Stein’s avowed sense of 67

being a writer of and for America, is literalised in the speaker/audience dynamic of ‘A Patriotic Leading’.

In terms of both of these poems, and Stein’s relation to Nation more generally, it must be remembered that World Wars I and II threw ideas of nationality, patriotism, and Nation-formation into crisis, and Modernist writing reflects the deeply traumatic effect of the wars on notions of the subject in general and specifically in relation to the State and the Nation. Modernist writers from Britain, America and Europe depicted the fragmentation of the humanist subject through war and its technologies. Septimus Warren Smith, the returned war-veteran and shell-shock victim in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (written in 1925, three years before ‘A Patriotic Leading’), epitomises the fractured subject who has no proper place in the Nation for whose continuing maintenance he sacrificed his ability to maintain a coherent ‘self’. The horrific possibilities of Nationalism were demonstrated in World War I, and yet it was again Nationalist sentiment and its extreme of xenophobia that led to World War II. In this context the fetishization of Nation was a very dangerous undertaking for an artist and a thinker. Stein and Toklas were in Europe during World War I, for the American Fund for French Wounded they drove an ambulance that Alice Toklas had asked her father to pay for, and helped the injured. Stein also had close friends afflicted by the war, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, a writer and great friend of Stein’s. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas “Alice” calls Apollinaire “very wonderful” (66), and describes how the head injuries he sustained in the war were so severe he eventually died of them (67).

In this context then, Stein’s insistent fetishization of Nation and national subjects seems deliberately provocative, and certainly did lead to controversial texts such as ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’. Stein’s pleasure in her own fetishization of Nation, as well as her contradictory approach to Nation in different pieces across her oeuvre, can be further illuminated by Anne McClintock’s persuasive argument that fetishism is a trope that functions at locuses of discursive difficulty. 68

McClintock argues that fetishism is an operation that appears precisely at moments of incoherence in social discourses:

Far from being a purely phallic icon, the fetish stands at the crossroads of a crisis in social meaning. The fetish is the embodiment of social contradictions, which the individual cannot resolve at a personal level, precisely because they are social contradictions, however intensely they are lived by the individual. The contradiction is displaced onto, and embodied in a fetish object, which is thus destined to recur with compulsive repetition. Hence the apparent power of the fetish to enchant the fetishist. By displacing power onto the fetish, then manipulating the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities. For this reason, the fetish can be called an impassioned object. Fetishes may take a myriad guises and erupt from a variety of social contradictions. They do not resolve conflicts in value, but rather embody in one object the failure of resolution. Fetishes are thus haunted by both personal and historical memory, and may be seen to be structured by recurring, though not necessarily universal, features: contradiction, displacement, embodiment, repetition, and emotional investment. As composite symbolic objects, fetishes embody the traumatic coincidence, not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction. The fetish is thus a radically historical phenomenon. While beginnings are never absolute, reading the fetish as both an historical as well as an impassioned object upsets the Lacanian assumption of phallic universality (6).

The terrible consequences of nationalism—the death, destruction, poverty, and displacement—that were being experienced by people across Europe, could not be reconciled with the adoration of the Nation that Americans, feeling themselves “newly- defined” subjects in the twentieth century, were expressing. This dilemma, then, is encapsulated by Stein’s fetishism that, in terms of psychoanalytic discourse, both “acknowledges” and “disavows” the trauma of Nation and nationality as a failed “wholeness”; the Nation-mother, in a sense, that lacks a phallus. In ways that have been 69

demonstrated America shows this very displacement and subsequent manipulation of the fetish that McClintock argues allows “the individual [to gain] symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities” (6).

It has been established that fetishism is in operation across Stein’s oeuvre, as a central trope in her constructions of Nationality and Nation. In these instances, the pleasure that fetishism provides allows Stein the space to write about America, to which she has a complex relation. This very complexity is demonstrated by the further argument made in this chapter: that in other Stein texts—both ‘political/reality’ and fictional poetry—this kind of fetishization of Nation is questioned. At moments where she resists fetishism the effects of political regulation can be seen to be at stake. This suggests that Stein is aware of the potentially destructive aspects of fetishism in formations that justify political action in historical moments when political actions are intensely destructive for millions of people. The next chapter will take up these critiques and the issue of Stein’s perverse resistance to the fetishism she herself deploys. I will show that this resistance is manifested in the use of an oppositional structure of subject/object relations operating simultaneously with the fetishistic structure. How do the operations of the subject and object function in texts not explicitly connected with Nation? If they continue to function fetishistically, what are the implications for the subject, that is, “Stein” as author-subject, in this structure? These questions will propel the discussion in the next chapter. 70

Chapter Two Geniuses, celebrities, and art as commodity fetishism

This chapter elaborates upon the argument of Chapter One that Stein fetishizes Nation and national subjects except in a small number of instances in which fetishism is conspicuously absent or explicitly critiqued. The work of this chapter is two-fold; firstly, this analysis continues and intensifies my engagement with Stein’s writings about herself, the “autobiographical” texts. Where the previous chapter unpacked the fetishizing structure in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Paris France, and selected war-writings, this chapter moves chronologically forward to examine Everybody’s Autobiography, a focus that refines my reading of Stein’s self-construction as an author- subject in relation to an object: this time it is not the Nation-object, but the “work of art”. In the first section of this exposition I show how the fetishizing structure of subject/object relations operates as the structure for Stein’s negotiation of herself as an artist-subject in relation to the work of art. The artist-subject means for Stein, I argue, a composite of different yet related identity-categories: the genius; the celebrity; and the collector. It is the diverging positions of the subject and the object in relation to each other within the fetishizing economy—the degrees of the subject’s fixation on the aurified object, the status of the audience in the circuit of the artist-subject’s contemplation of the fetishized object of the work of art—that, I show, determines Stein’s attitude towards each category. This attitude includes her self-imbrication in, or resistance to, each category in each specific textual instance. Ultimately, in Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein deflects the persistence of what she finds the troubling economy of her celebrity status in America by asserting her preference for the fetishizing structure, which she associates with the nineteenth century and Europe. I argue that this retrospective construction of her own “self” by Stein is a deflection from what, in her other fictional and more experimental texts than the “autobiographies”, was her steely- eyed refusal to accept the false comfort of the traditional. Further, this self-construction as conservative belies the multiple techniques, methodologies, and thematic considerations through which so much of her work challenges, explores, or enhances the 71

possibilities of, the fetishizing structure of subject/object relations, and experiments with a non-aurifying structure.

It is this other structure of subject/object relations that I take up and unpack as the second part of my discussion. I argue that, when brought together, major experimental techniques of representation constitute a new structure of subject/object relations that opposes the fetishizing structure. These new areas of experimentation include the refiguration of visual art conventions in which Stein was interested, specifically, a focus on the materials of composition and a shift in representational “planes” discussed by Leo Steinberg as central to twentieth-century visual art development. Two specific methodologies are also used to represent the other structure of subject/object relations: intersubjectivity, which I demonstrate through comparing the conditions of its construction to that of the Modernist subject as summarised by Georg Lukács, and ‘filmic’ technique suggested by technology that was new in the twentieth century and which is explicitly a methodology connected to Stein by her own comments and by the critical arguments of Michael Hofmann, Bonnie Marranac, and Susan McCabe. Additionally, this other structure involves the ubiquitous thematic considerations in Stein’s work of issues such as how to represent phenomenological reality, the experience of “tactile appropriation” that Walter Benjamin defines, and the “daily living” explicated in Stein’s work by Liesl M. Olson and Lisi Schoenbach. Through all of these modes and topics of representation this new structure of subject and object emerges, in which subject and object are constituted simultaneously in the present moment of process, a moment in which labour is the focus and no aura can accrue to the object. Finally, I contend that both of these structures are, despite Stein’s alleged preference for the “old- world” structure in Everybody’s Autobiography, operating in a range of complex degrees in works from across her oeuvre, a claim that I substantiate in an initial applied reading of two of her fictional texts, ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’, and ‘Galeries Lafayette’. 72

Stein the Genius becomes Stein the Celebrity The final section of the discussion in Chapter One showed how Stein’s position as a genius is constructed through her fetishization of Nation and the imbrication of herself as a subject in relation to the fetish object of Nation. A closer consideration of the figure of the genius and the explicit functioning of that category in this chapter will show that the implicit functioning of “Stein” as an object-subject of Nation—a citizen “subject to” the same objectification through national identity that she herself uses to depict Fernande Picasso, Wyndham Lewis, and Mildred Aldrich—is problematic when it operates alongside Stein’s self-representation as a subject constructed through the identity categories of the genius and the collector. One of the many ironies of The Autobiography is that Stein’s retrospective construction in that text of herself, Picasso, and the artists of the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s, as “geniuses” made her instantly famous—not according to that category of identity, however, but in another related but not identical category that was new in the twentieth century: the celebrity. Stein claimed to be a genius but to the public she was officially a celebrity. This problematic negotiation between genius and celebrity is highly significant in the way it preoccupied and troubled Stein and in the centrality of subject/object relations to this anxiety- producing slippage. In order to examine the implications of these negotiations I will consider the subject/object relations of each subject category separately, beginning with genius.

Stein’s insistent refrain that she was a genius is well known to Stein critics, but the text in which she most insistently refers to this is in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, whose narratorial persona problematizes Stein’s claims about the “self” that is “Gertrude Stein”. The narrator, “Alice B. Toklas”, writes:

Within a year I also had gone and I had come to Paris. There I went to see Mrs. Stein who had in the meantime returned to Paris, and there at her house I met Gertrude Stein. I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and by her voice. I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was 73

before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life began (11).

“Gertrude Stein” is the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Stein the author takes herself as “Stein” an object of narrative, and affirms her own genius through the fictionalized gaze of “Alice”, her lover. Barbara Will’s insightful examination of Stein’s relationship to ideas of genius is a seminal work on the subject. In Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000) Will argues that in her constant claims to possession of/inclusion in the category of genius Stein threw into relief the inherently gendered nature of the category and undermined its essentialized solidity (20). As Will’s discussion makes evident, Stein’s construction of her own genius is as complex as her work; Stein is confident of her genius but hints at her doubts as to the validity of the category. Such challenges to the hegemony if the genius is evident in the title of Everybody’s Autobiography, which conflates the genius, who is traditionally the only subject valuable enough to warrant autobiography, with ordinary subjects, the masses, “everybody”. You could be as I am, Stein’s title suggests, destabilising the boundaries between artist-genius and ordinary citizen that she elsewhere insists upon.

If genius is understood, then, as a complex relation to the “work of art” and to the people who are not geniuses but who receive the work, the category can be explicated through its substantial enmeshment in capitalist structures of artistic production and exchange. In these terms genius is a relation of the artist to the work that is one of the fetishist to the fetishized, of a subject to an aurified object. The genius “himself” performs the obscuring work that hides the labour required to create the work by perpetuating or even explicitly insisting upon the unique and divinely-bestowed quality of the work. While the labour of the genius is a central preoccupation in most discourses of genius, the focus is on the genius as a subject labouring, not the work coming into existence through 74

that labour. There is an absence, a deliberate eliding (the work of the aura), that prevents the object from being seen in the condition of labour. No matter with what intensity the viewer gazes at an image of the genius scratching away at his desk or tinkling at the piano, until the nineteenth century the sight remains a static image. This is due to the economy of subject relations in which such an image is produced and read, it is thus a fetishization.

The genius subject is positioned like the citizen in relation to the Nation-object but in the genius’ case it is at a distance from the artwork rather than the Nation. The same necessity for distance that is inherent in Stein’s fetishization of America from her standpoint in Europe is evident in the fetishistic operations of genius; Stein needs the category of genius because it allows for distance from the self. However, this fixation of the subject on the object is ambiguous: is it a relationship of stasis, of the subject held in thrall to the fetish, or is it productive in that it allows forward movement through the completion of a circuit of trauma and displacement through climactic satisfaction? This is a question that this chapter will consider. Genius and artwork, then, are like the citizen and the Nation, manifested in a relation of distance between subject and object.

While at one level the genius is a subject in relation to the object that is “his” work of art, on another level he is himself a fetishized identity, a subject-object. The genius is an inherently fetishized category, a man whose intellect/talent/vision are extra-ordinary, at a great distance from the same qualities in the masses, a “rare” (unique) subject, whose genius has no originary story but is divine, somehow born whole and complete, veiling the labour that is required by anyone, whether genius or not, to produce master-pieces (Orrin N. C. and Wang 30). Even the great geniuses of Romanticism—in which spontaneous apprehension of God in nature, the sublime, was supposed to flow out into equally as spontaneous works of art—recorded the process of making drafts. But the genius is envisaged as a separate entity, protected by an aura, a fetishized object. So when Stein says: “A genius is someone who doesn’t have to remember the two hundred years that everyone else has to remember” (Lectures in America 103) she is referring directly to the notion that arises as an implication of the fetish object’s aura, namely, that 75

the genius does not labour, does not have a narrative past that constitutes the self and its position in society. The genius, according to Stein, has not had to learn over time the narratives of the culture that everyone else has had to in order to be productive. The genius is “ready made” to produce masterpieces.

The development of art as a consumer item created a problem for many “high-art” Modernists once the consumer market became that of twentieth-century industrial modernity, and together with the interimplications of the genius as a fetishized object these nexes created deeply destablised conditions for artists’ self-conceptions. This is overwhelmingly evident in Stein’s contemplations on and constructions of her “self” as an artist genius and the ways in which it challenged the power and control of the artist over the work of art. The problems posed by celebrity in modernity and in Stein’s specific case are those of control in terms of production, subject/object relations, and the capitalist market.

In his highly influential essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin defines the original relation of the “work of art” of the genius to culture, as a pre-twentieth-century phenomenon (Illuminations 45). In this initial economy of the subject and the object it is the rarity, the “uniqueness”, of the work of art that operates to reify and fetishize it, making it desirable. In the age of mass reproduction however, the work of art struggles to maintain its status in competition with the mass-produced, which is accessible to everyone. This is why the work of art becomes conflated in modernity with the term “high-art”, thus emphasizing its status as unobtainable, metaphorically unreachable, through the operation of a spatial designator. The “work of art” can only retain that desirability by insisting upon its scarcity. Hence, as commentator on Modernism Aaron Jaffe argues, capitalism in modernity promoted scarcity and aesthetic uniqueness as desirable in themselves in order to maintain any market at all for the “originals” of works of art that could be mass produced (113), an opration mirrored by the idea of the rarity of geniuses themselves and their respective fetishized status. 76

This economy between subjects and objects was explicitly depicted in works by Marcel Duchamp, whose “fountain” challenges the entire category of art through its reframing of an ordinary object into the context of display and exhibition, and therefore of “art”. This is not to forget the collage of Picasso, Braque, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst, in which mass-produced objects such as bus-tickets and newspaper clippings were incorporated into more conventional mediums such as paint, simply by being used by the artist and exhibited as “art”. This defamiliarisation of ordinary objects and attribution of them with the status of an “art work” challenged the conventions of skill and technique as necessary components of works of art, and posed the question that would reverberate throughout the twentieth century: “What is ‘art’?”

The mass-production with which America became synonymous (both symbolic and constructive of the representation of America as the country of the twentieth century) is part of Modernism as a discourse and is entwined in a complex negotiation with the rarity of the work of art, a negotiation that Stein felt keenly. Certainly Modernist artistic production was imbued in the general economy of commodification, as Aaron Jaffe argues, beginning with the commodification of Modernist artists. The response of high art to mass-(re)production was, Jaffe argues, to take advantage of the commodity fetishism that operates in capitalism as a result of mass-production. This meant emphasizing the rarity of Modernist art to raise its value relative to the market in the same way that the rarity of paintings and the “uniqueness” of artworks in earlier centuries was, as Benjamin identifies, the source of their aura, as their immense expense arose from their scarcity. The “literary economics of “highbrow Modernist criticism””, Jaffe argues, “cultivates taste for a rarified commodity”, which is, as he argues further, “nothing if not a decidedly capitalist response to the proliferation of cultural material” (113). Individual Modernist art works were frequently commodity fetishes, then. Discussing the mention of Joyce’s Ulysses amongst an up-ended library in a scene from Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, a work of mass-produced popular fiction from 1924, Jaffe identifies the different values of the mass-produced novel and the high-art Modernist novel: 77

The Modernist’s name works as a signifier because of, not despite, a degree of inaccessibility--not despite [Arlen’s character] Storm’s indifference to Joyce among the wrecks of an exploded library but because of Joyce’s naming in Arlen’s much more widely disseminated work. ... The very rationale of the limited edition as a business model, the middle term in what Rainey calls Modernism’s “tripartite production program--journal, limited edition and public or commercial edition,” starts from this assumption. Signed, illustrated, finely papered and wrapped, gold-edged, printed in off-set colors, these luxury commodities were designed to be scarce, to be more heard of than come across, and to redound their excess aura to the authorial name (13).

The high Modernist artist/genius then, a position that Stein claimed for herself at least partially, was deeply involved in the negotiation between “high-art” as aurified commodity, the place of the artwork in the market, and the aurification of the subject as a celebrity-commodity. As Jaffe suggests here, there is a circuit of aurification between producer and product, writer and book, in which the “excess aura” of the limited-edition or luxury-bound book bolsters the aura of the writer in a transfer of auratic radiance.

Stein understood this relation of scarcity to value as well as this circuit of reflected aura that covers both artist and work in a sacred glow, a relation between the subject and object that she had always worked with, and which facilitated her writing. Stein, Modernist critic Mark Goble argues, was acutely aware that rarity and uniqueness generate value. He argues that:

…by the time of Everybody’s Autobiography Stein has learned that publicity is governed by a different genius, and so she tells Charlie Chaplin, of all people, that “having a small audience not a big one” is what has produced, perversely, her amazing popularity in America (18). 78

What appears as a perversity—to engage with Goble’s word-choice—is the perversity of fetishism, the allure of the aura. The rarer, more distant the object, the more “popular” it becomes, because the more desired it is, without being available to possession/access.

This is where the circuit of aurification tends towards commodification in its most blatant sense: the aura of the work that reflects onto the producer also functions as an objectifying operation, turning the genius or celebrity into a commodity. The two are related, as Goble summarises. He argues that celebrities are analogous to the genius in terms of the role of the work of art in the culture.

The same way Modernists and Modernism’s literary economists fetishize authorship, celebrities and their publicists fetishize the production of self. The rhetoric of both insists on alleged indifference to consumption, studied insensitivity to existing tastes of consumers, readers, audiences, and publics. Yet both presume a notion of production that cannot be confined to a single productive source but that instead measures production in terms of both the circulation and the relative valuation of its commodities (25).

While, as Goble argues, author-geniuses and celebrities are both fetishized categories, there is a difference between subject-object relations in the cases of the genius and the celebrity, centred in the dynamics within the subject. The celebrity is aurified as an object in themselves. It is not their work that is fetishized but their “self”. While the genius is a subject producing objects, the celebrity is the object of the audience’s gaze. This distinction becomes blurred, however, when the genius has to “perform” for an audience in the same way that a celebrity does (effecting a conflation of genius with celebrity) and in doing so ends up looking at the self as an object, as the audience does, rather than maintaining their gaze on the object of their own creation.

It is precisely this issue of the direction in which the subject’s gaze is turned that concerns Stein in her depiction of herself. This “Stein” is not a simple biographical subject, nor is she a psychological subject, but is rather a “self”-producing subject, an 79

author-subject self-consciously producing a “Stein” across her oeuvre. While celebrity was initially attractive to “Stein” it did not, unlike genius, suit her, as—I will demonstrate—she constructs celebrity as denuding her of the sense of control over her “self” in the contemplative, constructive, and productive circuit between the genius and the work of art, by disputing her sense of value at the level of individual words. This was caused by the destabilisation of value that the commodity fetishization of the genius as a celebrity effects. Celebrity operates according to the same fetishized subject/object relations as genius, but with a different emphasis, and that shift in emphasis from the rarified, prohibitive value of the genius to the purchasable mass-produced value of the celebrity,had a serious effect on Stein’s ability to function as an artist. In Everybody’s Autobiography in a section entitled “What Was the Effect Upon Me of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”Stein herself relates the panic she experienced because of the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to the effect of the economic commodification of her work:

Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care. And then it happens sometimes sooner and sometimes later that it has a money value I had mine very much later and it is upsetting because when nothing had any commercial value everything was important and when something began having a commercial value it was upsetting, I imagine this is true of any one. Before anything you wrote had commercial value you could not change anything that you had written but once it had commercial value well then changing or not changing was not so important (27).

For Stein the arbitrary value of commodification creates a situation in which, when art is aurified (in part precisely because of the increased valuation of the artist/genius by the public in the market economy), it does not matter what the content is, nor even what the stylistics or genre are: “once it had commercial value well then changing or not 80

changing was not so important”. The aura, the fetishized nature of the art, is what becomes important in an economy in which the commercial value of her output was already decided, relative to the rest of the output of others. This is a problem of mass- production and celebrity in which the name gives value to the work, the anxiety of which is evident when Stein writes: “I always was worried that Americans were more interested in me than in my work” (Everybody’s Autobiography 73). This statement demonstrates Stein’s concern that the aura of herself as commodity would overshadow her work—would, in the terms of fetishism, obscure her actual literary output. This is for Stein a negative effect of the shift between genius and celebrity. As a genius artistic production is central and operates in a circuit of perpetuation; the subject’s status as a genius is constantly supported by the existence of the artwork, and the artwork is aurified by its association with the genius. It is importantly a balanced relationship. Although, as Stein identifies, it is necessary that the celebrity have done or produced something, as that is what has accorded her the status of celebrity. Once the genius is a celebrity, however, the work of art recedes and it becomes the celebrity-object that assumes the greatest importance, because of the centrality of audience to the equation. It is audience and its purchasing power that matters. Ironically, the bigger the aura of the celebrity the bigger the value of the work. This suggests, then, a trajectory of celebrity as more important than product, where product was of primary importance in the genius/artwork circuit. This is opposed to the pre-modern genius, whose works could not financially support them as the works were not easily copied or accessible or sold in large numbers. Stein was still in this pre-modern position to some degree, with her private income that meant she did not ‘write for money’. Stein’s protection of her “self” from objectification is a gendered issue. While male artists might feel the restrictive containment of the fetishizing gaze of the audience, at another level they will always remain “subjects”. Women, on the other hand, are not inherently included in the understanding of subjectivity, and therefore the objectification of female artists (already a long-bow within the terms of culture), threatens to completely stultify women into stasis and loss of agency. As the petrification of Fernande Picasso in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas would suggest, this operation was more than possible in relation to female celebrities in the world, and explains Stein’s own insistence on her similarity to 81

Pablo, not Fernande, in the first pages of that text—the male genius rather than the “wife”.

The commodification of her work as a result of her celebrity did not simply disturb or annoy Stein but profoundly disrupted her conception of self—its fetishization of the genius subject as an object for the gaze of an audience. We can see the difficulty with the entrance of celebrity into Stein’s conception of self, as Kirk Curnutt discusses:

As she insists, fame intrudes upon the writer’s sense of self, for whereas her personality had “always been completely included in myself... as any personality naturally is,” her celebrity status tempted her to see herself through her audience’s eyes. Suddenly--in a line that prefigures Geographical History--she felt that “I was not just I because so many people did know me.” The result was a double blow. Fame not only prompted an identity crisis (“I lost my personality”) but halted the prolific writing schedule which she had maintained for decades: “For the first time since I had begun to write I could not write and what was worse...I began to think about how my writing would sound to others, how could I make them understand, I who had always lived within myself and my writing” (4).

Curnutt here discusses Stein’s allusion to her own famous refrain “I am I because my little dog knows me”, from Geographical History. Stein’s redeployment of this phrase, and the issues of identity it negotiates now that celebrity has intruded into her conception of herself, marks an acknowledgement of the disruption that audience can cause for the artist. What happens, as Stein describes, is that fame makes her lose her “personality” and as a result creates her first ever writer’s-block. As both the result of and the reason behind the block the audience intrudes into Stein’s mind, between herself as thinking and as writing, and the writing being produced. In the terms of the fetishizing structure, identified by this thesis as operating in Stein’s texts on Nation, this writer’s block can be understood within the fetishizing economy of the artist and the work in which distance is central, as with its functioning in Stein’s “Nation-fetishism”. 82

The writer’s block caused by Stein’s fame then, is the trauma created when the objectified subject (objectified from without) starts to see itself as an object, as others do, a fetishized object. It is an exceeding of the borders of the self, a fragmentation, but also a solidification, a fetishization. This then creates a situation in which the subject is afflicted by stasis, because to continue to write would be to create change in the self through the production of new work. This change would jeopardise the stability of the aura, the stability of the celebrity’s “self” as it has been objectified by the gaze of the audience.10 Stein is aware of this when she says:

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important (94-95).

The audience creates their own fetishized object, they are the subjects, and the celebrity is their object.

Both Barbara Will and Kirk Curnutt have identified that Stein constructs an artist/author subject who is “fixated” by the subjects and objects that she is gazing at, and this can, I contend, be further explicated by reading this “fixation” within the terms of fetishism as the subject held in “thrall” by the aura of the fetishized object, as Benjamin explains it. The similarity of these arguments suggests the aptness of the analytical framework of fetishism, whose power to “fix” the gaze of the subject is legendary. Where they diverge is that Curnutt frames this phenomenon within the problematics of Modernist artists’ relation to the commodity market, while Will examines the issue as a difficulty of/at the

10 Curnutt identifies, however, that the ‘identity crisis’ became an established event in celebrity discourse. He says: “The star who publicly announced that “my body [or image] is not me; not accept the ‘real me’” was not necessarily pronouncing the image false, however. He or she was insisting instead that the public reputation did not accommodate the many facets of the inner self. … By the mid-1930s, such pronouncements were so pervasive that the celebrity identity crisis became a rhetorical staple of popular culture” (2). Stein’s insistence on the seriousness of her writer’s block can be seen, I would suggest, by her dropping of her usual ironic tone. I therefore pursue her comments as providing insight into the subject/object relations of the artist to the artwork and to the audience. 83

level of individual subjectivity. However, within the terms of fetishism I would argue that these two “fixations” can be explained across both axes—that of the capitalist market of modernity, and the individual’s subjectivity as it relates to (is formed by) and interacts with, that market.

Both of these critics regard Stein’s “fixation” as a result of the negotiation between “inside” and “outside” and as a direct consequence of issues of celebrity. Will argues that while the celebrity originates with the audience, the “outside” is in a sense created by the audience; the conditions of celebrity existence endow the role with the powers of the genius:

However self-alienating celebrity may have been for Stein in a creative sense, it also seemed to convince her of the power of her authorial voice within the context of a public. … It is everybody who “makes” a celebrity—bringing “the outside inside and the inside outside”—but once made, it is the celebrity who, like the genius, guides, instructs, and in turn “saves” everybody (662).

As this quote suggests, Stein’s relation to celebrity was complex. It had both a detrimental and a productive effect on her, depending on its context. Will goes on to discuss celebrity and genius in relation to Stein’s take on the Vichy regime, which is where the issues become fraught because of the suggestion of fascism.

A reading of Curnutt’s and Will’s arguments through the terms of fetishism—the “fixation” of the subject held in thrall to the fetishized object—can explain why the problematics of Stein’s relation to fascism and to celebrity operate so similarly. It is because they are both negotiations of the subject/object relations of fetishism. What happens here, I would argue, is that the audience interferes in the subject’s relation to the object of their production—which is the relation of the subject to its own object, with which it has different points of fetishization/fludity/crossing. In fetishizing the work of art as well as the artist themselves the audience stands in front of the art object, blocking the artist’s view of it and entering into a circuit of subject/object themselves (the 84

audience), which redefines the object to the artist subject who created it. The “audience” is not a consideration for a genius because the “audience” for the genius is, in modernity, still conceived of in comparison to pre-modern terms, the passive recipients who are allowed to gaze in awe at the work of art but not to turn the intensity of that gaze onto the artist to objectify him, which is what does occur between the audience/public and the celebrity. When the work of art is mass-produced and purchasable by the “audience” that audience has an investment in the “value” of the product. Curnutt hints at this when he argues:

By focusing attention on “the thing in its essence being completed” (Narration, p.42), audiences approach writing not as a communicative exchange initiated by a speaker but as an objet d’art wholly self-contained. Just as artists shelter their writing through the fixity of their inward gaze, audiences must refrain from contaminating it by projecting extrinsic assumptions about the author’s identity upon it (8).

Again, prefiguring Will’s argument here, there is the idea of the “gaze”. Curnutt calls it the “fixity of [the artist’s] inward gaze” while Will views Stein’s gaze at Petain as making her a “fixated subject”. There are several operations at work here though: the artist’s gaze at the object of contemplation (“his” “work of art”); the audience’s gaze at the artist; the audience’s gaze at the artist’s work-object. The artist and the work are both objects that become subjected to the audience-subject’s gaze and the creation of their own relations between the two objects. When Stein is giving public lectures, there is a self-reflexive, self-consciousness of being a fetishized object to herself that disrupts the trajectory, or circuit, between subject direct to object of contemplation—writer to page and words, or mental image—that is necessary for writing. If the two could be kept separate lecturing would not be so problematic but, as Stein intimates, the one affects the other; her public speaking affects what she tries to tell as the “truth” about writing and we know that it enters into her private contact with the page because of the lengthy writer’s block that she suffered. As she frequently insisted in her essays (‘Portraits and Repetition’) it is Stein herself who needs to be “talking and listening” at the same time, 85

to herself, not to an audience, or talking to an audience and listening to herself talking which, as she says about orating, prevents the writer from “hearing herself” (Everybody’s Autobiography 217).11

This is problematic for Stein, however, when she herself is the subject objectified. In Everybody’s Autobiography Stein is several times disturbed by the status of her own name:

So then we went on and people said how do you do nicely and we said how do you do to them and we thought how pleasantly New York was like Bilignin where in the country everybody says how do you do in passing the way they do in any country place in the country and then we saw a fruit store and we went in. How do you do Miss Stein said the man, how do you do I said, and how do you like it, he said, very much I said, he said it must be pleasant coming back after thirty years and I said it certainly was. He was so natural about knowing my name that is was not surprising and yet we had not expected anything like that to happen. If anything is natural enough it is not surprising and then we went out again on an avenue and the elevated railroad looked just like it had ever so long ago and then we saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein has come and that was upsetting. Anybody saying how do you to you and knowing your name may be upsetting but on the whole it is natural enough but to suddenly see your name is always upsetting. Of course it has happened to me pretty often and I like it to happen just as often but always it does give me a little shock of recognition and non-recognition. It is one of the things most worrying in the subject of identity (149-50).

11 “Talking and listening” is extremely complicated as outlined by Stein in her essays, and its importance to her work in ways other than in terms of oratory (as discussed here) has been taken up by numerous Stein critics. Specifically, what Stein refers to as “talking and listening” has been considered extensively by commentators who consider the influence of William James’ teaching on Stein and her writing. The relevance of “talking and listening” to the subject/object relations in Stein will be explicitly addressed in the final chapter of this thesis. 86

What is upsetting to Stein in being recognized as a celebrity is the sudden confrontation of the self with the “self” as an object, a name. It is the shock of displacement encountered whilst “being” a person, experiencing life from moment to moment as a subject, and then suddenly being reminded that in other economies, specifically capitalism and the discourse of advertising, she is not a subject but an object, and the proper noun that is her unique name functions to signify a commodity, a static thing, divested of movement or change by its aura. Her name functions, as Jaffe says, as an “elite currency” (113). The suddenness is essential to the shock and the disturbing effect the encounter with her own name has on Stein, as the unexpected is the most extreme form of loss of control or lack of agency.

If the fixation of the genius upon the work of art is productive while the celebrity’s enforced fixation upon the “self” is paralysing, it is the location of pleasure—of the subject in relation to the fetishized object—that is the difference between the two, and it is agency that reassures Stein and gives her pleasure, even when it is found in celebrity. This pleasure is derived, then, from being the subject—however “fixated” or in thrall—gazing at the object, rather than being made the object itself. This is a similar centrality of pleasure to, I argued in Chapter One, that which is evident in Stein’s fetishization of Nation. We can see the further complexity of this when it becomes a more general issue in the many instances in Everybody’s Autobiography in which she takes on, in a more heart-felt tone, the commodification of her “self” as a celebrity. Her enjoyment of celebrity is in the moments where celebrity imitates or has inherited the conditions of genius, the power that the genius possesses as a subject over objects. It is also firmly linked to her control of that identity in instances where the balance is on the side of the celebrity’s control of the object:

It is very nice being a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them. I never imagined that would happen to me to be a celebrity like that but it did and when it did I liked it but all that will come much later (xxi). 87

This is a question of Stein’s construction of her own agency then, the power that can be the result of being “a real celebrity”. Mark Goble also discusses this section of Everybody’s Autobiography, arguing that “Stein wants for “celebrity” to name an experience of sovereign social power, a new order of agency in the public world” (8). Stein’s comment here is in direct contradiction to her recounting of the “shock” and “worrying” nature of seeing her name on a sign. In being able to make them “come or not come as you want them” Stein is the one calling people’s names, confronting them with the objectification of their subjectivity. The balance of subject/object relations is the important thing, then, in the distinction between genius and celebrity—the degree to which the subject is circumscribed by the fetishized object. A genius is more emphatically a subject and his work an object revered by those in the know (other elites), whereas a celebrity is more the object itself, objectified by the gaze of the modern mass-audience—the products the celebrity produces are essentially less important than the reified status of themselves.

Highlighting the fetishizing structure of subject/object relations in which it is formed, celebrity is seen to come at a “cost” for Stein, both financially in terms of money and in terms of needing to reassert her agency against the audience that provides the money, which were manifested respectively in the financial success of The Autobiography, and her simultaneous writer’s block and artistic crisis. Stein goes on to reveal in Everybody’s Autobiography that she dealt with this commodification of her work by inserting herself as an active subject back into the subject/object economy of the commodity fetish, and in doing so regained control of herself and of her own “assets”—the money she received from her commodified work:

Well anyway it was a beautiful autumn in Bilignin and in six weeks I wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and it was published and it became a best seller and first it was printed by the Atlantic Monthly and there is a nice story about that but first I bought myself a new eight cylinder Ford car, and the most expensive coat made to order by Hermes and fitted by the man who makes coats 88

for race horses for Basket and two collars studded for Basket. I had never made any money before in my life and I was most excited (28).

Here, Stein uses the proceeds from her “best seller” to “first” buy herself a new car and “the most expensive coat made to order by Hermes”: two clichés of luxury items, commodity fetishes. Coming hot on the heels of her declaration that commercial value was interfering with the inherent “value” of her words is Stein’s professed excitement at making money, but the process through which this money is accepted as valid is the insertion of herself back into that literal economy as a subject, in a deliberate reassertion of her own subject agency and its control over the purchasing of objects. The commodification of her own work is given her implicit approval—in this instance—because it has allowed her to buy the commodities she wants; an exchange of high art to luxury fetish items has been effected. Stein’s negotiation with the commodity value of her work, then, centres on her relation as a subject to that which has been objectified, and her struggle between celebrity and genius.

The most extreme exertion of the genius’ agency and control is evident in the example of the genius’ fetishization of other subjects, “his” aurification of them as objects, as was demonstrated in Stein’s pleasure at the power of celebrity when the celebrity can retain agency, her enjoyment at making people “come or…not come as you want them” (Everybody’s Autobiography xxi). Stein’s relation to the other geniuses and the “wives of Geniuses” (discussed earlier in this chapter as a relation Stein deploys to position herself as a masculine subject and Toklas as a “wife”, and which she then uses in an extended meaning as a metaphor for her relationship to America) demonstrates the agency of the genius, who is allowed to objectify and fetishize other subjects. Given that Stein’s model here is the genius/object model for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and her understanding of what it was to be a celebrity was her proximity to other celebrities, and finally that she claimed to be a genius and therefore a kind of celebrity, we can see her love of listing the celebrities from within this position of the genius- collector. Stein’s listing of celebrities is part of both her fetishization of people as objects and her collection-making of the salon. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 89

there are repeated paragraphs about the “wives of geniuses” Alice B. Toklas “sat with”, including this one:

The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me. How they unroll, an endless vista through the years. I began with Fernande and then there were Madame Matisse and Marcelle Braque and Josette Gris and Eve Picasso and Bridget Gibb and Marjory Gibb and Hadley and Pauline Hemingway and Mrs. Sherwood Anderson and Mrs. Bravig Imbs and the Mrs. Ford Madox Ford and endless other, geniuses, near geniuses and might be geniuses, all having wives, and I have sat and talked with them all all the wives and later on, well later on too, I have sat and talked with all (97).

Goble reads Stein’s listing of endless cameo appearances through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorisation of the individual living entirely in a public dimension, surrounded by people, a “ ‘surface’”, a “human medium” that is intimate, utopian, without “loneliness”, and granting a “unity” (4). In Goble’s view Stein existed in this kind of “human medium”, but without the three-dimensionality of this public existence that is part of Bakhtin’s model:

…for Stein, the “human medium” figures as an interminable series of cameo appearances—a public in two dimensions only, if you will.” … Braudy describes the historical world of fame as one in which “names inundate us,” and this is certainly true of Stein’s world in Paris. In the ten pages surrounding Toklas’s elegy for the less significant masses of friends and strangers at 27 rue de Fleurus, the reader is treated to a cacophony of proper nouns… (4).

Goble argues that this “baroque” listing is “weirdly without a message” (4). He argues that “Stein seems intent on exploiting a phenomenon of social poetics, and what comes to matter about all these names is not their singularity as references to specific people but their slow accretion within a certain time and space” (4). I would argue that the importance of names to Stein is a point at which celebrity meets—or returns to—the 90

genius, in an identity category that has not yet been discussed: the collector. The names themselves are important as objects, as pleasurable aesthetic words, accretions of the kind that characterize the baroque form, to take up Goble’s simile, with the aura of the fetishized proper noun considered by the genius on the level of the aura of the word, and by the collector in terms of their possibilities of collection and arrangement. The name “Mildred Aldrich” evokes a person, but the name contains that person, the name has the power of a fetish. The name is used to invoke an aura that obscures the ongoing, reiterative narrative labour required to construct a coherent “self” that is invoked but not explained when the name is used. Stein is interested in other celebrities and these signs of their celebrity status: their fetishized names. This then extends to the names of ordinary people as well, whose names are not fetishized by the public but are fetishized by the language-loving Stein. This, then, is an operation of collection.

The convergence of the Genius and the Collector Stein collects people as she collects art, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and she uses words—proper nouns that she has “collected” in her fiction—in constructions that demonstrate the connections between celebrity, genius, and collector, all of which are identities imbricated in Stein’s fetishizing subject/object relations. She “collects”, as friends or acquaintances, the painters of the artworks she has literally collected, bought, or in other ways amassed and hung on her walls. In a scene from The Autobiography she invites the painters to dinner and sits them opposite their own painting, with the smug delight of the collector in “his” arrangement of “his” objects:

…Gertrude Stein and her brother gave a lunch for all the painters whose pictures were on the wall. Of course it did not include the dead or the old. It was at this lunch that as I have already said Gertrude Stein made them all happy and made the lunch a success by seating each painter facing his own picture. No one of them noticed it, they were just naturally pleased, until just as they were all leaving Matisse, standing up with his back to the door and looking into the room suddenly realised what had been done (73). 91

The subjects here—the painters—are just as much “objects” as the literal objects of the paintings. This gives Stein pleasure, and part of that pleasure is secret control over the social event, as an arranging subject with the power of possession over all the objects in her house, both painters and paintings.

This understanding of people as objects is evident across Stein’s oeuvre, at the level of language and the word; Stein always had a great love of the proper noun, particularly people’s names. From How to Write to numerous other pieces, Stein loved to simply state people’s names, turning them from the subjects signified by their names into fetishized signifiers. Stein says in Paris France, in relation to the “very wonderful name…Mademoiselle Pierette Davignon”, that “Names are always interesting…” (72). In How to Write proper nouns are used in sentences as the possessors of general nouns, as a demonstration of the basic sentence. However, the pleasure of listing and the pleasure of names is evident here, as these short, compact sentences are like pleasing little objects:

George Maratier in America. The Sexual Life of Genia Berman. A book of George Hugnet. The choice of Eric Haulville. The wealth of Henri d’Ursel. The relief of Harry Horwood. The mention of Walter Winterberg. The renown of Bernard Fay. The pleasure of prophecy concerning Rene Crevel. Titles are made of sentences without interruption (25).

This demonstrates the objectification of subjects through their names; the word that denotes them takes on the aura of the “unique” in the same way that the work of art is unique according to Benjamin. The word “pleasure” is even used here, and is appropriate for the secretive or elliptical tenor of these sentences. All of the sentences, in stating a basic condition, do not reveal any further details and thus contain a kind of 92

mystery. Each sentence invokes an implicit question: What is the significance of George Maratier in America? What acts and with whom constitute the Sexual Life of Genia Berman (note the capitals, as if the “Sexual Life” were itself a personified, objectified entity, rather than a diverse and fragmented number of thoughts, events, or acts)? Which book belongs to George Hugnet? What choice did Eric Haulville make? How great is Henri d’Ursel’s wealth? Why is Harry Horwood relieved? The inherent mystery of each sentence gives it an aura, because the narrative “behind” the statement is obscured by the “uniqueness” of the name. A sense of distance between the reader and the sentence is created, each becomes a fetish object. The metonymy that is frequently associated with the fetish is evident here: a kernel or essence of dense subjectivity that each individual possesses is rendered an aurified object that seems to represent, or present, the mystery of the whole—the subject whose proper noun objectifies “him”.

Stein’s “collection” of people attests to her absolute fascination with collecting of all kinds—an activity that solidified in the nineteenth century into the recognisable identity category of the collector. The genius is closely associated with this prominent figure of the nineteenth century, evident in the plethora of collector characters in the works of authors such as Henry James.12 In light of this connection, Stein’s listing of the geniuses Alice B. Toklas “sat with” becomes a kind of exhibition catalogue, a record of the collection of people Stein had gathered together.

Many of Stein’s pieces demonstrate her obsession with collections and collecting and arranging her collection, all of which are centred around the fetishized objects that constitute the collection. Benjamin investigates the preoccupation of the collector with the object and emulates it in the structure of his own meditative collection, The Arcades Project, which is essentially a collection of cultural fragments and descriptions of

12 For example, in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The central characters of each text are literal collectors of expensive objects, as well as of people. Modernist literary critic Guy Davidson argues in his forthcoming article ‘Ornamental Identity: Commodity Fetishism, Masculinity, and Sexuality in The Golden Bowl’, that Amerigo, the central character of James’ 1904 novel, is “a consumed and displayed precious object”, and that Amerigo’s marriage to Maggie is inverted into an exchange in which Amerigo is “purchased” by his new step-father, Adam, in “ a sort of eroticized imperialist appropriation”. 93

aspects of culture that interested Benjamin. Integral to his formulation of the relations between objects, rooms, space more generally, and subjectivity, is the presupposition of a gendered subjectivity. Benjamin devotes several sections of The Arcades Project to themes of space and rooms, and the nineteenth century’s obsession with reversing interior/exterior room/universe (176-85, 290-98). He identifies this obsession as deeply imbedded in nineteenth century culture and society, and specifies that preoccupation as residing within the epoch’s aesthetic of the masculine. Despite the traditions of association between women and the interior, in which domestic space is seen as feminized space, Benjamin’s ‘collector’ is male. As Janet Wolff argues, Benjamin casts both exterior and interior as masculine domains:

Is the collector (another Konvolut category) an example of a dialectical image? If so, it can be shown that this is similarly gendered. Schor, in her article on postcards of Paris in 1900, has argued that the collector, or rather the basis for the desire to collect, may be primarily male. Clearly for Benjamin the interior is a central image, and one, we might think, that balances the masculine focus on the street on which the image of the flaneur depends. However, like Adorno in his discussion of the bourgeois interior in the study of Kierkegaard, Benjamin has nothing to say about the gender dimensions of the interior space. Rather, the bourgeois woman is rendered invisible in his discussion of the interior as the counterpart of the office and as the habitat of the collector, who moulds the traces of his living in the interior. And where the micrological focus is on a woman, as in the case of the prostitute, as Buck-Morss has pointed out, the whore is reduced to a sign (53).

As Wolff says, Schor identifies that collection is a masculine impulse, allied to the masculine subject. This is certainly the presumption by Benjamin in his comment on the collector in The Arcades Project. He notes: “Animals (birds, ants), children, and old men as collectors” (156), thereby granting the capacity to engage deliberately within a relation to the commodity fetish to subjectivities of different ages and species, but not genders: women are the obvious exclusion. Their omission is because, perhaps, in 94

Benjamin’s formulation, women were a commodity fetish in themselves; woman is the prostitute or the lady of fashion, both of whom walk the streets, displayed in the public and exterior realm (88). The gendered nature of the collector is something Stein negotiates in her self-representations.

Stein constructs herself as a collector from the first pages of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in a way that depicts collecting as imbricated with artistic genius, in the relations between the artist-subject and the objects of artistic contemplation. The text’s narrator “Alice” describes with reverence her initial encounter with Gertrude Stein at a visit to Stein’s salon, already notorious by 1907 for being covered floor to ceiling with paintings. In her confusion at the multitude of paintings Alice turns her reverential description onto the objects on a table:

…in one corner of the room was a large table on which were horseshoe nails and pebbles and little pipe cigarette holders which one looked at curiously but did not touch, but which turned out later to be accumulations from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein. But to return to the pictures. The pictures were so strange that one quite instinctively looked at anything rather than at them just at first (18).

These “accumulations from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein” are the kind of objects that form the subject matter of Cubism, the pipes and the nails that appear in Picasso’s paintings of this period. The shared possession of these objects equally between the owner of the salon and its star attractions—“from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein”—aligns Stein with Picasso in the possession of the masculine subjectivity of genius, and attributes her with over-determined masculine subject positions of the collector of art just as she is a collector of objects and a possessor of pockets, which must be inherently masculine, in their metonymic connection to trousers. These important first pages of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas set up the construction of Stein as a genius. It is a theme repeated, developed, and emphasised throughout the book, but this initial formulation of it in the salon scene highlights the 95

centrality of object/subject relations in Stein’s construction of herself and in her works themselves.

Stein’s ultimate response to the problem of the new economies of celebrity that she describes herself as becoming embroiled in, in Everybody’s Autobiography, and which she associates with her return to America for the lecture tour, is a renewed insistence upon what would traditionally be understood as a pre-twentienth-century economy. The discussion starts as a fetishistic displacement or elision of a topic that is obviously creating anxiety for Stein—a quarrel with her “agent” Bradley—over the relation between celebrity, self-commodification, and wealth, in Bradley’s insistence that Stein go to America to sell herself on a lecture tour to make more money:

I had quarrelled with Bradley and said I would not go to America, he said but I wanted to get rich certainly I said I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich. Just at present my passion is avarice. To be avaricious I think the greatest value in the world and I say so and I do want to be so. For instance the house we have has always been in the hands of the family the most completely miserly in the country hereabouts. .... Avarice is a good thing, it would be a wonderful thing to be really avaricious and so occupying. It is true though the Americanisation of everything has driven avarice out of every one and I do not like it. I am hoping a good many will commence to be avaricious again and I want to be the first one (108-109).

Stein argues that the “Americanisation of everything has driven avarice out of every one…”. Americans do not want to greedily “possess”, and “hoard”, though, as I will show, this does not necessarily mean they are not captivated by money. Avarice though, is the ‘good’ side of hoarding and is related by Stein, two pages on, not to money but to objects:

El Greco meant a great deal to me once and now I would not go anywhere to look at them. And so I do not have to talk to myself about them but I do. It is 96

like nutting. You go over the same ground ten or a dozen times and each time you see nuts that you had not taken. The pleasure is in the eye seeing them but if you did not take them there would be no pleasure in the eye seeing them and that is why avarice is so occupying… I have just found another pocketful of them and that is a pleasure. (111-12)

The specific objects referred to here are nuts, in fact, linking the behaviour of the collector/hoarder to the squirrel and therefore to the animal (who is essentially different to the human, in Stein’s formulation, because it does not have money and cannot count). Nuts are the simile for the pursuit, collection, and possession of high-art, El-Grecos. As when one is collecting nuts, there is no point if there are none left—as El Grecos have all been purchased, following the simile, there is no point going “anywhere to look at them”. What this qualification of “avarice” here effects is an understanding that when Stein has said earlier that Americans are not avaricious she means that they are concerned with the economy, with the market, with the relative relations of money and objects, but not with the material objects or even artworks for which money stands, or the ‘truth’ of the money itself as a physical object to be possessed. This is indicated in the short pieces explicitly about money (‘Money’, ‘More on Money’, ‘My Last on Money). Stein’s sense of weariness/wariness with the topic—a sense that she has to or should write on money but does not really want to—is suggested by their un-ironic, slightly anxious tone, and the relatively uninteresting titles, particularly ‘My Last on Money’, as if she herself, as well as the reader, are happy to have come to the end of her thoughts on money. She herself likes “avarice” and possession, specifically, of objects, the things that lend “reality” to the abstract signifying system of money: “I have just found another pocketful of them and that is a pleasure”; it is the pleasure of possession. Importantly, the subject here is doing the collecting and possessing and is not subject to her own role within an economy of nuts, as it were, except as the one proscribing it. A shift occurs then, from the celebrity who is a commodity in a market of commodity fetishes and their relative value, to a humanist conception of the subject as collector, in control of the market. The definition of “market” shifts also, from the too-compromising market of money and its abstract significations to the “market” of what money can buy, 97

the object (though it is figured here as objects that are not “for sale”, rather, they are the bounty of nature provided ‘free’ for the collector who would find them, whether that collector be a squirrel or a genius).

Stein also links this “avarice” to genius, and back to herself as a specific genius, shifting away from the discussion of celebrity and simultaneously constructing the shift from the relative values of “money” to “avarice” and the collection of the object, as a concommitant shift from celebrity to genius:

Any way my aunt Fanny did always count by one and one and she still does and she still can manage to have everything come out the way it should by the simple process of counting one and one. I saw her when I was in Baltimore and she had again won by counting one one one. So then there was the Keysers counting money and the Steins counting money and they all like to spend money, unless you can really have the pleasure of being a miser there is no pleasure like the spending of money, and it is hard to be a miser, a real miser they are as rare as geniuses it takes the same kind of thing to make one, that is time must not exist for them. There must be a reality that has nothing to do with the passage of time and it is very hard for any one to have that in them, not hard almost impossible, but there is no way of having it unless you have it, I have it and so had Hetty Green. Oh yes (131-32).

This is a retrogressive shift, as signalled by the lauding of a family member a generation older than Stein—her Aunt Fanny—and demonstrated also in her associations of avarice with the ‘old world’ of Europe and the nineteenth century. Counting, hoarding (the miser) as “genius” is related here to stereotypical Jewishness, the suggestion that Jews hoard money as if it were an object. Aunty Fanny ‘wins’ because she counts each individual object as “one”, thereby as a ‘unique’, fetishized object. The accumulation of these is a collection. This “hoarding” is linked to both pleasure and a hint of perversion: “…I have it and so had Hetty Green.” What Stein also “has” is lesbianism (or, at the very least, in terms of the unspecified nature of this comment, Stein has deviance). In the 98

greedy delight, the pleasure of hoarding money as an object, is a perversion that is smoothly connected to the perversion of fetishistic collecting. I would argue that the fact that the ‘Keysers’ and the ‘Steins’ are American does not contradict my claim that America is identified by Stein with the ‘new’ kind of capitalism of money and celebrity, and France as the more dignified place of objects and ‘real’ value of possession. In its effects of to casting Stein as in this instance descended from Jewish, European, old- world ancestors, (Aunt Fanny as older than Stein, possessing this innate desire to “hoard”). Stein the heir to these traditions does not compromise her Americanness, but constructs her as, paradoxically, both American and old-world simultaneously. She is both naturalized as a subject of the old-world economy, the economy of France in which she lives, and at the same time she is incontrovertibly an American, because she grew up in America and all her relatives are there (she comes to France from America). Thus Stein positions herself as the locus of what she has established as different structures of object-relations.

This model is inextricably linked to Europe, the ‘Old world’, but as a valid, surviving, parallel system, part of the cultural understanding (essence) of the French, as Stein demonstrates in an argument showing why the French prefer the objects that money buys to the possession of money itself. She says in Paris France:

Of course money has done a lot of changing but there is always the hope that it will stay put sometime. Anyway the French people never take money very seriously, they save it certainly and they horde [sic] it very carefully but they know really that is has no very great permanence. That is the reason they all want a place in the country. Lots of people we know have tried to buy a house in this neighbourhood and they are always surprised that nobody wants to sell, neither the peasants or the small people or the bigger people. But as they all say if we sell our home what will we have it for, money, and what is the use of that money, money goes and after it is gone then where are we, beside we have all we want, what can we do with money except lose it, money to spend is not very welcome, if you have it and you try to spend it, well spending money is an 99

anxiety, saving money is a comfort and a pleasure, economy is not a duty it is a comfort, avarice is an excitement, but spending money is nothing, money spent is money non-existent, money saved is money realised, even as it did the other day in the village it got burned up (103-4).

For Stein, here, the French value possession over money and the object over its arbitrary market value, and this is inherently connected in Stein’s construction with their status as an old-world, nineteenth-century Nation. This goes for the items of commodity fetishism, luxury goods: “French people do not like to spend money it worries them, they take luxuries naturally, if you have them they are not luxuries and if you do not have them they still are not luxuries” (105). This is seen as “logical” in Steinian terms, the counting of unique collection as opposed to masses of the ‘same’ “ones”. Industrialisation then, is part of a de-aurification (which will be further explicated later), and the shift from the covetous avarice and love of the object, to the desire for masses of money in abstract “possession”, but not manifested or embodied as physical object.

The genius, the celebrity, and the collector, then, are intrinsically involved in counting in terms of avarice and European material accumulation, and function according to fetishistic relations between subject and object. Even though celebrity seems different to genius it still operates as the relations of subject and object associated by Stein with the nineteenth century, which are are those of fetishism and its pleasures. Opposed to this structure is another structure that, I argue, is associated by Stein with twentieth- century dynamics of subject/object relations. The anxieties of the monetary and celebrity operations of twentieth-century capitalism and its imbrication of her “self” in ways that abrogated her control and that she resisted, results in her retrospective privileging, in Everybody’s Autobiography, of nineteenth-century subject/object relations (the structure of fetishism). However, what Stein might seem to be rejecting in her resistance here is the associated ‘new’ relations between subject and object that can actually be seen to operate in Stein’s own texts. I will now unpack what I contend are the defining characteristics of that structure in order to establish the premise for two short but paradigmatic readings (pursued throughout the rest of this thesis) in which I demonstrate 100

how these conflicting, unresolvable structures function simultaneously or at divergent points in a given text, and indeed are one of the central nodes of resonance in many of Stein’s works.

The ‘new’ structure of subject/object relations in modernity As was discussed in the Introduction to this thesis, numerous scholars have identified the changing nature of subject/object relations in modernity, and the general breakdown in the coherence of these terms during the (particularly late) Modernist period. Gerald Kennedy argues that “…the most basic human distinction to be challenged and “demolished” by Modernist thought was that between subject and object…” (190). The way that Stein was investigating this breakdown of categories of subject and object was in the other structure of subject/object relations operating in tension with the fetishistic one, in her work. Opposed to this structure of fetishism is a structure associated by Stein with the twentieth century, a ‘new’ structure of subject/object relations in which no fetishism takes place, in which, in fact, the boundaries between subject and object are made indistinct through literary techniques inspired by new modes of technology such as cinema, that provided new ways of representing subjects and objects, and through new methodologies such as an emphasis on process, labour, and tactility. This chapter will now outline the specific modes through and in which a twentieth-century structure of subject/object relations is constructed in Stein’s texts.

As this chapter has argued, the subject category of celebrity is firmly connected to the traditional category of genius but evinces ‘new’ shifts in the emphasis of fetishized object in relation to subject. The first aspect that is more completely ‘new’ in modernity, and that changes the relation of subject to object, is mass-production: the series composed of large quantities of the ‘same’ object, as opposed to the unique work of art. Mass-production, Benjamin argued, differs in fundamental structure from fetishism. He argues that in a comparison of the original and an object of mass-reproduction time and aura are inextricable and the relationship between them changes inversely—the more “unique” an object the more permanent its aura: 101

Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction (223).

Thus, mass-(re)production destroys the uniqueness of the object.

The second aspect that Stein engages with as potentially highly productive, but with concomitant difficulties, is the new emphasis on process rather than product—the moments of writing, like the moments of “existing”, rather than the book as an entity or the person’s coherent identity—which institutes a major new structure of conceptualising subject/object relations in the twentieth century, which both results from and inflects the creation of art in the twentieth century.

Process is a mode that requires proximity between subject who is involved in the process and the thing that is being created. As discussed in the previous chapter, central to the shift in subject/object relations between nineteenth- and twentieth-century formulations of those relations is a difference in spatial relations: the “phenomenon of distance”, as Benjamin called it. This is replaced by an experience of proximity, again, in Benjamin’s words, “tactility”. Distance is the “phenomenon” associated with the work of art, the aurified fetish object of pre-mass-production culture (as demonstrated in Chapter One in relation to Stein’s far distant aurified America-object and elucidated in regards to the “phenomenon of distance” that the reader/consumer of The Making of Americans experiences due to the text’s status as a fetish object of Nation). Opposed to this in the twentieth century it is closeness which is the condition that defines the new subject-object relations. Benjamin argues that the “decay of the aura” in modernity occurs primarily because of: 102

…the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction (223).

Because of this “coming closer” of the subject to the object identified by Benjamin the visual perspective of the twentieth century shifts also. This is summarised by the visual art critic Leo Steinberg who, writing in the 1970s, theorised the shift in relations between subject and object, artist and representation, in the course of the twentieth century. Steinberg argues that there was a shift between the vertical and the horizontal picture planes within the first half of the twentieth century, as a fuller move by late Modernism (and into Postmodernism) away from the “Renaissance world-space concept” of ‘realist’ representation that had persisted even in seemingly radical avant- garde art of the early twentieth century, such as cubism. Steinberg writes:

The top of the picture corresponds to where we hold our heads aloft; while its lower edge gravitates to where we place our feet. Even in Picasso’s cubist collages, where the Renaissance worldspace concept almost breaks down, there is still a harking back to implied acts of vision, to something that was once actually seen. A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data which are experienced in the normal erect posture. …[However works by Rauschenberg and Dubuffet] no longer simulate vertical fields but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed – whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last 15-20 years insist on a radically new orientation in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes (84). 103

These distinctions as they play out in representations of visual experience will be discussed in relation to Stein’s Tender Buttons later in this thesis. I show that Tender Buttons shifts between the “vertical fields” of cubist collage and the “opaque flatbed horizontals” which are engaged in recording these “operational processes”. Brigitta Olubas argues, in her discussion of Stein’s writing in relation to visual art, that the shift Steinberg identifies is one that marks a major divide within twentieth-century modernity. Olubas argues that what Steinberg identifies in the works of Dubuffet and Rauschenberg

…is a radically new perspective on the material world, a perspective bound up with the materiality of technology and the modernity of labour; a realisation of the conceptual leaps of early Modernist visual art (8).

In her own integral engagement with early twentieth-century cubism and her further development of it in language, Stein’s construction of subject/object relations is poised between the “Renaissance worldspace concept” and this “radically new perspective” seen in visual art. This new mode is closely related to the object as commodity fetish, not just in the subject’s new “closeness” to an object whose aura has been destroyed, but in the subject’s relation to labour. It is precisely the process of the experience of creation that is recorded in this aesthetic. As Steinberg identifies, Cubist experimentation did not completely make this shift into twentieth-century subject/object relations and perspective, but it was what the Cubists were working towards. Similarly, Stein was engaged in the negotiation between the subject/objects relations of these two centuries, and her work reflects that. This will be discussed in detail through a close reading of Tender Buttons in the next chapter.

This shift is occurring at the same time in literature through a number of different methodologies and representational modes that were developed in order to capture—but also served to simultaneously create—this different structure of subject to object. These techniques and issues in and about writing that Stein was deeply immersed in and producing are “intersubjectivity”, “daily living”, iteration/repetition, metatexuality that emphasizes process and the labour that is going into producing the text ‘now’ at each 104

moment that it is being written and read. This new structure and these features that characterize it will be discussed in relation to Stein’s ‘portraits’, as well as The Making of Americans and Three Lives, in Chapter Four.

If, as established in Chapter One of this thesis, the “aura” is closely related to the “distance” between subject and object, then the aura is destroyed partly because of the subject’s desire to get closer to the object. The relation between the subject and the object in the twentieth century shifts from the perspective of distance to the experiential closeness of tactile appropriation. This is an issue of new technologies, indicated by Benjamin’s positing of painting as the representative artistic mode of the nineteenth century, where film is the new mode of the twentieth. He identifies the subject’s shifting experience between regarding a painting and viewing a film as the shift from an optical perspective to a tactile one:

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. …The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change (231).

Thus the spectator is engaged in a relentless, active, moving procedure when viewing film, in opposition to the static optical perspective of regarding a painting. Michael Hofmann’s assessment of Stein’s literary style in her epic novel, The Making of Americans, demonstrates the aptness of a reading of Stein through this argument of 105

Benjamin’s. Hofmann describes Stein’s style in terms of cinema, which he explicitly identifies as an “anticipatory” move by Stein:

Stylistically, Stein anticipates the full-scale development of a new form which she will define in her “portraits” and which I call the “cinema technique”. She proceeds, as in a moving picture, to repeat almost exactly the same image in each frame; but, in the cinema, each frame has a subtle variation so that, when the film is passed quickly through the projector, the viewer perceives on the screen the sensation of movement. And such is the intent of Stein’s “cinema technique” (49).

Thus the connection between Benjamin’s deployment of the cinema as a tactile medium and Stein’s “cinematic” style demonstrates the similarity of their perspectives on the conceptual shifts from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in art. Another Stein critic, Bonnie Marranac, discusses the relation between Stein’s writing process, the medium of film, and the conceptual mode of the optical. In her discussion of Stein’s plays Marranac says:

She instinctively knew that modernity had to do with looking. Likewise, Stein was impressed by the cinema’s ability to generate rapidly changing images that made it difficult to remember previous ones, and she liked to play with the idea of photographs as frames and suggestive sights that also confounded the past and present lives of images (xi).

Marranac also suggests that it is part of the conceptual explorations of modernity to examine the optical. The reference to images in the quotation from Marranac is pertinent to both Benjamin’s theorisation of modernity, and is also evident in the writing of another female Modernist, Dorothy Richardson, whose major work, Pilgrimage, has been compared to film. Richardson biographer Michael Rosenberg argues that: 106

Pilgrimage is literally a ‘motion picture’, in its view of the ceaseless fluctuation of people’s lives, minds and hearts, and in its prismatic analysis of perceptions into their elements. But its author was searching as well for something constant and essential underlying the continual movement in beings or objects. ‘There was something in matter that had not yet been found out.’ The search for reality, in this new writing, was also an attempt to rediscover meanings and truths that the twentieth-century mind could no longer take on trust. This is the search that gives the novel its title Pilgrimage and its central theme (162).

However, as with the above examples of Woolf and Joyce, most complex Modernist texts engage with or deploy or demonstrate examples of both competing aesthetics of temporality. Stein’s work certainly does so. Susan McCabe argues that: “Stein, as I have said, devises an aesthetic indebted to film's capacity to track and splinter the shock of a “continuous present”” (434).

The temporality created by the development of cinema in modernity is a temporality of “movement and speed”. In ‘Portraits and Repetition’ Stein herself discusses the cinema as an influence on her work, particularly in its relation to time and the construction of the subject. She argues that the temporality of the cinema is the “solution” to the problem of how to represent a subject in one ‘moment’, without using ideas of memory and the past:

In other words the making of a portrait of any one is as they are existing and as they are existing has nothing to do with remembering any one or anything. Do you see my point, but of course yes you do. You do see that there are two things and not one and if one wants to make one portrait of some one and not two you can see that one can be bothered completely bothered by this thing. As I say it is something that has always bothered any one. Funnily enough the cinema has offered a solution of this thing. By a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing, it is in a 107

way if you like one portrait of anything not a number of them. There again you do see what I mean (175-76).

Susan McCabe argues that Stein’s portrait piece ‘Mrs. Emerson’ is a demonstration of a “time” of cinema, new in modernity, that constructs a subject through a continuous present, the splicing of frame-by-frame repetition that is nevertheless cut-and-paste and which presents a similarly dislocated body for the subject (430). This subject is the “comic/hysteric” evident in Chaplin's physical body on the screen and in the visuals in Man Ray’s Emak Bakir, McCabe argues:

Stein and her generation were, therefore, not only “bound by the period of cinema and series production,” but by the fluctuating body of a continuous present. Stein consciously perceived herself as writing a form of divagatory cinema with the body as comic/hysteric “repeating mechanism,” her crisis of embodiment bridging the experimental aesthetics of Man Ray with the popular icon of Chaplin's dislocated body. Film's spasmodic dance away from causal plot thus reverberates in Stein, unhinged from destination, a gestural body of malleable mechanics that interrogates its volition and processes of attention (448).

As McCabe’s discussion of the “continuous present” and its relation to Stein’s work suggests, the ‘cinematic’ technique in writing is necessarily engaged with issues of time. As has been extensively explored by scholars of Modernism and Modernist art, one of the central issues of Modernism and a problem that was “resolved” in different ways by different Modernist artists, was that of time and the relation of representation to time. Coming after nineteenth-century realism, Modernist art was concerned with the breakdown of conventional modes of representation that dealt with time and the production of art along trajectories that were not integrated. As Ann Banfield argues in her discussion of the future in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: 108

There are two competing aesthetics of temporality in Modernism, one “spatialized,” its model of time marked by breaks and often attacked as “static”; the other a celebration of movement and speed. Their points of reference are competing conceptions of time (145).

The second of these two aesthetics of temporality is evident in Modernist texts such as Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, in which the speed and movement of modernity is literalised/symbolized in the mass-produced modern object of the motor-car and its effects on the subject, the modern people for whom time in modernity is a constant ‘now’. Technology creates the ‘violent clash’ that creates the future, as the futurists argued (Schoenbach 245). The first temporality that Banfield summarises—the “spatialized” and “static”—is demonstrated in texts such as James Joyce’s canonical Ulysses, which narrates the events of a day over the course of nine hundred pages and in the stream-of-consciousness style that he made iconic, a style that in and of itself attempts to render the passing of time in the human consciousness from moment to moment, in language. Proust’s A La Recherche du temps perdu also has this same construction of time. Narrative theorist Gerard Genette argues that:

In each of these cases, a singular scene has arbitrarily, and without any but grammatical change, been converted into an iterative scene, thus clearly revealing the trend of the Proustian narrative toward a kind of inflation of the iterative. It would be tempting to interpret this tendency as symptomatic of a dominant psychological trait: Proust's highly developed sense of habit and repetition, his feeling for the analogy between different moments in life (288).

However, in 1913—much earlier than Joyce—Dorothy Richardson is generally known to have “invented” stream-of-consciousness, and in the thirteen volumes of her Pilgrimage she explored the passing of time in the context of the daily living of the main character, the narrator, Miriam Henderson. John Rosenberg’s 1973 biography of Richardson identifies May Sinclair’s 1918 article on Richardson’s work as “the first application of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ to a novel” (90). Rosenberg notes 109

that it was William James—Stein's mentor and supervisor in her experiments in 'automatic writing' at Radclyffe university—who “invented” the phrase in his 1890 treatise The Principles of Psychology (90). Virginia Woolf did the same in Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, in which she focused on the quotidian time that women experience in the domestic sphere. In Woolf’s Orlando the passing of time across four centuries is the almost humorous conceit that constructs shifts in subjectivity over one individual’s lifetime experience.

Stein regarded time as one of the most insistent, incontrovertible aspects of artistic production, and shared the Modernist preoccupation with time as central to the construction of subjectivity, identity, history, and art. Stein pondered time extensively and thoroughly in her explications of her own work practices and on art in general, in the essays and lectures she gave. She saw herself as essential to this group of Modernist writers, positioning herself, in ‘Portraits and Repetition’, in a trinity with Proust and Joyce:

A thing you all know is that in the three novels written in this generation that are the important things written in this generation, there is, in none of them a story. There is none in Proust in The Making of Americans or in Ulysses. And this is what you are now to begin to realize in this description I am giving you of making portraits (110).

Stein connects, then, her production of the portraits with the same concerns as she explored in her epic novel, The Making of Americans. She sees the relations between herself, Proust, and Joyce as centred in the absence of “a story”. One could argue that in all three there is a proclaimed “story” or “reason” for the narrative: in Proust it is the memories of one individual’s life; in The Making of Americans it is a genealogical narrative about immigrants; and in Ulysses it is the history and present experience of a man seen in one day of his life. But it is the spreading-thin of these “stories” in the explorations of time—the literal spreading across too much narrative time and physical word-length and space—that is what supplants the conventional “story” in each text. It 110

is these three texts’ preoccupations with time that gives them their similarity. All demonstrate an epic stretching of time to its most extreme, excessive limits, and the new subjects, different from their pre-Modernist counterparts, that emerge and are constructed in and through that experimentation with time.

An irony of Stein’s comparison here—and an example of the closeness in experimental style and motivations—between herself, Proust, and Joyce, is that Dorothy Richardson was, in several major instances, compared to Proust and Joyce. In his The March of Literature Ford Maddox Ford categorised her as an English “realist”, comparing her to Proust and arguing that Richardson’s work is “less willfully elaborate and much more verbally beautiful...” than Proust’s (148). The focus of Stein's The Making of Americans can be regarded as “stream-of-consciousness” of the author, of the narrating consciouness. This differs from Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in which the stream- of-consciousness style is used to represent the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the central character, who is an autobiographical foil for Richardson herself but is nevertheless a character. The author-consciousness so central to The Making of Americans is also a fictional entity, but in its “author” category it seeks to represent the authorial function in a narrative.

When the subject draws closer to the object and the aura of the object is dissolved, as Benjamin argued, the labour required to produce it is exposed. Labour then becomes a focus of artistic production, as Steinberg identifies when he discusses the shift from the vertical to the horizontal plane. This causes a concomitant shift in emphasis in time/space negotiations. The time of the commodity fetish, which is Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’—the presentation of the ‘novelty’ in the form of the ‘always-the-same’, a time of memory—is replaced by the time of the present moment whose qualities include: ongoing; focused on the tactile; and without memory. Contemporary cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, a commentator on Modernist and Postmodernist aesthetics, has argued that time and space, while ineluctably related, are each privileged in different historical periods. He argues that time was the preoccupation of Modernism whereas space is the preoccupation of Postmodernism: 111

The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high Modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and memory (something to be understood fully as much as a category of literary criticism associated with high Modernism as with the works themselves). We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high Modernism (16).

Although Jameson argues that this privileging of one domain over another is partly due to the critical frameworks deployed in the reading of texts, nevertheless, his formulation is useful for the reading of what might be called a ‘bordering’ or ‘crossing’ text like Tender Buttons, which is deeply immersed in considerations of both time and space but also exposes other negotiations between Modernism and Postmodernism.13

No discussion of the methodologies of Stein’s writing that investigate and reflect the time of labour is complete without consideration of Steinian critical material on “automatic-writing”. Stein’s distinctive contribution to aesthetic experiments in writing is echoed in her exploration of this relation to the time of labour through process in her early scientific studies into what she called “consciousness without memory”, or “automatic writing”. This experiment is clarified retrospectively by Jameson’s formulation of the shift between the respective privilegings of time and space in Modernism and Postmodernism. Stein herself was interested in the negotiations between

13 While Stein critics such as Ellen Berry, in her book Curved Thought and Textual Wandering, argue that Stein’s work demonstrates Postmodern characteristics (54), others argue that her work is definitively Modernist. Peter Nicholls takes this line in his essay on the relations between the “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets” and Stein, in ‘Difference Spreading…’ Another way that Stein’s work crosses from Modernism to Postmodernism is in its depiction of subject/object relations which, when read through the framework of fetishism, demonstrates relations that continue from the very origins of capitalism into Postmodernity, in changing formulations. 112

process and product. Stein’s undergraduate degree in science was spent under the tutelage of William James, who supervised Stein’s experiments into “automatic- writing”. Susan McCabe says about the motor automatism articles that: “While the article is written collaboratively, “Motor Automatism” is prescient of Stein's writing processes, particularly her penchant for repetition and its somatic impetus” (439). However, I would argue that “automatic-writing” is closer to the idea of the content of stream-of-consciousness in its mode of representing the character’s internal thought- processes and internal “existing”, than in its relation to the author-subject. The author’s approach to writing, in all cases of Modernist literature, is highly deliberate. “Automatic-writing” refers specifically to an experimental process undertaken by the writing subject. It cannot be, in other words, easily translated into a technique of production for a Modernist writer. Stein critics have noted that in the article itself Stein herself rejects the success of “automatic-writing” as an experiment, and certainly does so in relation to her own writing, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Susan McCabe notes this critical response but insists on the usefulness of “automatic-writing” for reading Stein’s text ‘Mrs.Emerson’:

Linda Wagner-Martin describes them as an early discounting of “automatic writing,” a point corroborated by Stein's disavowal in The Autobiography: “Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions, nor was she a successful subject for automatic writing.” However, while “Motor Automatism” examines the “limits of normal automatism” and the acts of so-called normal people as opposed to those of hysterical subjects, the article determines that automatism permeates the everyday activities of the nonhysterical subject (43).

Barbara Will, too, sees “automatic-writing” as useful for reading Stein. She argues that Stein’s experiments led her to conclude that:

…there exists within the field of automatic motion a certain form of consciousness irreducible to automatism: what she would refer to as “consciousness without memory,” since it describes a state of conscious 113

awareness that is immediate and cannot be extended from one moment to the next. Crucially, “consciousness without memory” is unrelated to conscious intention or will, or to self-consciousness, both of which mask automatic or habitual behaviour and provide what Stein calls the “feeling of a personality.” Rather, “consciousness without memory” lies outside the persona, as an “extra personal” residuum that emerges through the process of automatic motion (22).

“Consciousness without memory” is the claim to be able to remain conscious without that consciousness interfering in or directing ‘automatic’ action such as writing. The complication of this, according to Will, is that:

It is not the automatism achieved in the experiment which is the ultimate “secret” of Stein’s aesthetic, but what goes “the other way”: the “xtra” consciousness or “excess” that cannot be reduced to automatism yet remains inextricable from it. To elicit this form of consciousness, one must be simultaneously engaged in the performance of automatism and outside of it, both proprietorial of the self and outside the circuits of automaticity and habit. “Experience is remoulding us every minute,” William James has written; this is the process of self-making and unmaking to which the “consciousness without memory” bears witness (27).

Will argues that Stein’s use of automatism, “automatic-writing”, was part of Stein’s self- construction as a genius. However, what Stein called “consciousness without memory” can be read as a formulation of the changing ideas of time and space, optical and tactile, and as a process and philosophy of time and aesthetics which informs texts such as The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. What Will identifies in these two passages is Stein’s negotiation of conflicting modes, the shifting between awareness and automatism, self-consciousness and “consciousness without memory”—like the process of writing in the moment and then seeing or remembering what one has written. Tender Buttons demonstrates the complex precariousness of “consciousness without memory” and the tendency of the subject to constantly become aware of the process. Stein commented once that although the experience of writing for the author was a process of 114

creation in the continual present, once the words were out and the sentence finished “something had died” (46). This connects, I would argue, to Benjamin’s comment about process and product that the “finished work is the death-mask of its conception”, which he made in relation to the Modernist work of art (‘One-Way Street’ 97). Thus, the dilemmas of “automatic-writing” can be read as its tendency to shift between structures of subject/object relations. I will explore the methodologies connected to it but which remain deliberate strategies of writing and representation: those of iteration and “daily habit”.

Iteration in speech and then in writing is reflected in a kind of iteration of living, for Stein, and is a technique that, I will demonstrate, is central to the construction of subject/object relations according to a structure in which they are simultaneous and exist in process. Phoebe Stein Davis, Lisi Schoenbach, and Liesl M. Olson refer to the thematic content of the iteration of living in Stein’s oeuvre as “daily habit”, taking up the term from Stein’s own usage of it. Stein Davis examines “daily living” in Stein’s World War II writings, arguing that in the novel Mrs. Reynolds and the autobiographical memoir Wars I Have Seen Stein “rewrites traditional conceptions of “history” by introducing the aesthetics of American warfare that reveals the integral relationship between everyday life on the home front and the history lived on the front lines” (‘History, Narrative, and “Daily Living”’ 600). Schoenbach examines “daily living” in a different aspect of Stein’s writing, arguing that “daily living” can be understood in texts such as Tender Buttons in relation to American pragmatism. Schoenbach contends that Stein’s texts evince an understanding of the repetition of daily life as an iterative space in which change can gradually occur—a view similar to that of the American pragmatist understanding of change. Stein’s “Pragmatic Modernism,” as Schoenbach terms it, is in opposition, she argues, to the surrealist, futurist, avant-garde notions of change as occurring radically, as the result of a sudden shock to the habitual repetition of normative daily life. Schoenbach argues that: “…Stein applies a dialectical understanding of habit as both stultifying and enabling of original thought and action…gradualism, accretion, continuity, and recontextualization define Stein’s work…” (1). Robinson Crusoe, the text that Stein uses to explicate her interests in “daily 115

habit” interests Stein, Schoenbach argues, because it represents the construction—in a new environment such as America—of a set of daily practices and habits that are appropriate for the new place. Schoenbach says:

This evocation of Crusoe, who had to recreate life anew on his island, to forge new habits taken from the past but shaped and molded to the new context in which he found himself, is at once a powerful tribute to habits of the past (including those represented by British literary history), and a celebration of those who are willing to create new habits and thus new ways of living in the present. Writing to Stein in 1936, Thornton Wilder offered the following enthusiastic adoption of Stein’s most recent principals: Oh, dear Gertrude, how right you are. Without tears I say it human nature is not interesting only Robinson Crusoe is interesting. “Human nature” here can be taken to mean mindless, habitual behaviours. Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, can be taken to represent a commitment to creating new habits better suited to a new world. It is thus the reinvention—and not the rejection—of “daily island living” that enables Stein to claim a position from which she can create the literature of the twentieth century (8).

Ultimately, Schoenbach concludes, “daily living” provides a methodology of slow accumulation that creates gradual change, in contrast to the method of shock and destruction of a single instant favoured by other artistic movements of modernity such as the Surrealists and the Futurists. Schoenbach sees Steinian “daily living” as “reinvention”, and as what Stein and Toklas were doing in their daily living:

If the “daily island life” indicates a world in which “everything was shut in there with them,” it is not much of a leap to imagine the lesbian menage of Toklas and Stein as one possibility for a newly responsive and modern recreation of “daily island living” with a difference—a new set of habits, created in Dewey’s words to be “more intelligent, more sensitively percipient, more informed with 116

foresight, more aware of what they are about, more direct and sincere, more flexibly responsive than those now current” (8).

Also, I would argue, the fact that it is made into an “artwork” is fundamentally significant. As Wilder says, “human nature is not interesting” because it is a generalisation, a field of ordinary individuals whose specificities are not yet fashioned into art. “…only Robinson Crusoe is interesting” because Robinson Crusoe is both an individual and a textual person in a work of art. His “daily living” is aurified by its fictional nature, by its reality which is representational, rather than real. It is the “death- mask” of the processes in which Robinson Crusoe is seen to perform the “daily living” that constitutes human experience.

Liesl M. Olson also discusses Stein’s use of Robinson Crusoe and “daily island living”, and deploys it to analyse Stein’s construction of the lives of people during the wars. Olson’s account engages therefore with the very specific historical situation, conditions, and implications of “daily island life” as a concept and a literary technique. Unlike Schoenbach, and in an implicit critique of Stein Davis’ conclusion, Olson concludes that habit is used conservatively in Stein as well as transgressively or experimentally:

Stein’s World War II writings implicate her Modernism in a paralysing and troubling preoccupation with the daily. Habit, in both Mrs. Reynolds and Wars I Have Seen, creates “an existence suspended in time,” as she described her method in “A Transatlantic Interview,” conducted in the last year of her life (103). While Stein’s use of habit works against a movement forward or backward in time, challenging a sense of linear temporality, her reliance on habit also sheds light on a surprising conservative tendency in her work. Her desire to suspend time illuminates a refusal, on some level, to accept “momentous” change (357).

As Olson argues, war is the problematic here; it is war that has caused a crisis in social discourse about habit, and it was shown in the previous chapter to do so in relation to nationalism. War challenges the coherence of categories of subject and by extension 117

object, to a profound degree. Iteration and “daily island life” are two major techniques and thematic concerns in Stein’s literary conscious, then.

The other major methodological technique and representational issue that Stein’s texts deploy, and that demonstrate the labour required to produce the aurified objects that they are investigating, is intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity, in its relationality, its dependence on others, and its suggestion of compromise, is akin to traditional, nineteenth-century ideas of female subjectivity, and is in direct opposition to discourses of the artist genius that stem from Romanticism and continue today and which (as has been suggested previously in this thesis) were central to Modernist conceptions of the artist.

The subject in modernity is a male subject, defined through his alienation and isolation from the surrounding environment and other subjects. Basic ideas of the subject in Modernism formed the foundations of what is being experimented with, questioned, subverted, and maintained in different instances of Modernist works. Numerous Modernist artists were exploring the fragmentation of the coherent subject explicitly resulting from the trauma of the wars and their challenges to stable identity and self. Famous examples of such incoherent and fractured selves are Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, the subjects in the war poetry of Randall Marshall, and the absolute dissolution of meaning and useless attempts to perform coherent identity seen in the works of Samuel Beckett, such as Watt, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Waiting For Godot. The fragmentation of these subjects is a disintegration from within, a trajectory quite different from that of a subject who is not coherent unto “himself” because his identity is negotiated intersubjectively with the identities of others. Georg Lukács gives one summary of the subject as it was conceived of by Modernist writers, arguing that, in the abstract, philosophical formulation of their ideas of the subject, Modernists viewed “man” as an ontologically static, coherent being, whose “ontological solitariness” makes him inherently unable to “establish relationships with things or persons outside himself…” (Literature in the Modern World, 160). Lukács argues that: 118

Man, thus conceived, is an ahistorical being… This negation of history takes two different forms in Modernist literature. First, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience. There is not for him—and apparently not for his creator—any pre-existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon him or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the hero himself is without personal history. He is ‘thrown-into-the-world: meaninglessly, unfathomably. He does not develop through contact with the world; he neither forms nor is formed by it. The only ‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition. Man is now what he has always been and always will be. The narrator, the examining subject, is in motion; the examined reality is static. Of course, dogmas of this kind are only really viable in philosophical abstraction, and then only with a measure of sophistry. A gifted writer, however extreme his theoretical Modernism, will in practice have to compromise with the demands of historicity and of social environment. Joyce uses Dublin, Kafka and Musil the Hapsburg Monarchy, as the locus of their masterpieces. But the locus they lovingly depict is little more than a backcloth; it is not basic to their artistic intention (160-61).

Lukács cites only male Modernists here; however, female Modernists such as Woolf and Stein were actively negotiating the problem of female subjectivity which challenged the conception of the inherently masculine, yet universal, subjectivity that Lukács is summarising. Lukács points to an awareness of this potential for variations or shifts in the representation of the subject by acknowledging the gap between the philosophical abstraction and the ‘reality’ of the written subjects mediated by their textual worlds. In one sense, however, this is a contradiction in the basic terms of that subject—he is not supposed to be mediated by the outside world. This is a tension that is expressed in the complexities of gender in Stein’s work.

Robinson Crusoe and Stein’s relation to Defoe’s text illuminate the gendered possibilities of the relations between subject and object. Crusoe is at once completely unconnected to the surrounding environment, replicating the conditions of the society he 119

was born in despite being alone, but in doing so being forced into a type of interaction with the environment that is about the time of labour. The narrative is his enforced interaction with the environment and an enforced “daily island living”, an iterative tactile existence engaging with the environment in the space of the domestic. However, as cultural critic and fiction writer Lesley Stern identifies, Crusoe’s task is also to maintain the coherence of his “self” as an object like the other objects he collects and builds. She argues:

On “his” island Crusoe constructs a building with rooms to hold all his worldly goods, going to elaborate lengths to safeguard them against the weather, theft, and fire, while he himself continues to sleep in a cave. … Through a characteristically Puritan mode of elision, the body is conflated with worldly goods. Through this procedure, the body is in fact objectified, distanced. It can only be kept safe if detached. It is put in a safe place—that is, not the sleeping place, not the bedroom. By this maneuver, the mind is protected from clutter—mind and body, separated out, are actually coerced into a negatively metaphrastic liaison (198).

As has been argued, the text itself performs these thematic concerns: it is a record of labour, but is nevertheless an aurified work of canonical literature, of “high-art”. Stein’s interest in Robinson Crusoe as an artwork, and her life with Alice Toklas as the “island living” that Schoenbach sets out, testify to both structures of subject/object relations.

This is where intersubjective construction arises as a second structure of subject/objects relations in Stein’s texts, between the authorial subject and the object of the text. In her book, Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), Juliana Spahr argues that Stein’s work is deeply intersubjective in the relations it constructs between text and reader. This is often achieved, Spahr shows, through the utilisation of non-normative English that connects at many different potential points with a multiple readership constituted of subjects with a range of language-knowledge: 120

The ephemeral tendencies of second-language speakers—which include unusually inclusive and complex sentences, phrases or incomplete sentences, non-standard qualifier and verb usage, duplicate words and/or a restricted vocabulary, and word confusion (such as spelling inconsistencies and homonym confusion)—show up in various forms throughout Stein’s work (26-27).

Intersubjectivity, along with iteration and daily habit, functions as the time of process and labour that de-fetishizes by exposing the work required to construct the object (the literary “work of art”), thereby preventing the assignment of arbitrary value to the object that is what gives it an aura. A significant amount of Stein’s work reflects the new subject/object relations of the twentieth century in its engagement with ideas of process and memory in which the subject and the object are simultaneously always in the process of being constructed, as opposed to the static already-solidified nature of the reified object of the fetish in the nineteenth century, and the subject who is enraptured by it.

All of these “new” techniques and modalities of representing subject/object relations, however, are potentially re-claimed by the petrifying forces of aurification. The stream of consciousness in Joyce’s Ulysses becomes the “death-mask” of its conception, through the aurification of the text as a “high-art” object (as shown in Michael Arlen’s representation of Ulysses in his popular fiction novel The Green Hat, discussed in my usage of Aaron Jaffe’s article earlier in this chapter). As I argued in Chapter One, Stein’s The Making of Americans is a text that absolutely functions as “the death-mask of its conception” (‘One-Way Street’). In broader terms than that of individual works, this recouping by the operations of fetishism is a common occurrence in Modernism because of the economies of capitalism that require art to be commodified for exchange. Thus, even on the widest level of an entire medium whose representational mode is one of process, such as the cinema, the labour of that process is recouped by the fetishizing structure.

This tension between the two structures, simply stated as the tension between process 121

and product, is evident in the complex explanation that Stein gives of her literary portraits. In ‘Portraits and Repetition’ she argues:

You see then what I was doing in my beginning portrait writing and you also understand what I mean when I say there was no repetition. In a cinema picture no two pictures are exactly alike each one is just that much different from the one before, and so in those early portraits there was as I am sure you will realize as I read them to you also as there was in The Making of Americans no repetition. Each time that I said the somebody whose portrait I was writing was something that something was just that much different from what I had just said that somebody was and little by little in this way a whole portrait came into being, a portrait that was not description and that was made by each time, and I did a great many times, say it, that somebody was something, each time there was a difference just a difference enough so that it could go on and be a present something. Oh yes you all do understand. You understand this. You see that in order to do this there must be no remembering, remembering is repetition, remembering is also confusion (106).

As Stein says here, cinema is made up of thousands of almost the same shots that are always slightly different from the one that came before. While in one sense this constructs a different time from one perspective—that of the person involved in the process, the audience viewing the film, the author writing the work—Stein herself identifies in another sense time in this operation continues to function in the twentieth- century as it did in the nineteenth: “a whole portrait came into being”, it is a “whole” entity, an object. A portrait is an objectified object, and in Modernity there arises a tension between its mode of construction—this new kind of time, the time of labour and process—and the finished product that exists in the time of the commodity fetish in a capitalist system. The film is an object, a marketable story that is a soundbite. This is emphasized nowadays with the trailer that summarises the entire narrative of a film into an “object” of genre, tone, and so on, identifiable to the consuming public. The trouble with this idea of the representation of the subject as it exists from moment to moment is 122

that in making this representation at all, in rendering that subject as “recorded” in a particular medium, the finished product then draws each of the moments in that series or across the time of their production back into a whole that immediately presents itself as coherent—as an object. Hence a Cubist painting that breaks down a supposedly coherent object into simultaneously-apprehended angles, once declared finished, becomes an object of art, an art-work, that immediately becomes a commodified object of exchange within the economic market. This operation with regard to individual works of art, and the conceptual structure it replicates at the level of the individual work of art, is an operation that saturates Modernism and an operation that Stein explores across her oeuvre. This recouping function is evident in Stein’s short piece, ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ (1922), that I will now examine as a demonstration of the theoretical structures I have discussed.

The major structures of subject/object relations as they operate in two of Stein’s short texts Written fifteen years earlier than Everybody’s Autobiography, ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ can be read through the competing structures of subject/object relations implied by Stein in that former, “autobiographical”, text. An analysis of the 1922 text shows how the modalities and techniques of the new structure I have identified operate in tension with the characteristic of the structure of fetishism. Bringing to bear my argument in Chapter One, that Stein fetishizes Nation and the subjects of the Nation, ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ displays the fetishization of the subject as Nation object—leaders as objects of Nation—as well as the dissolution of the aura of the unique individual effected by mass-production, but at the same time demonstrates another fetishizing function in the ways it reflects the uniqueness treasured in collection. In all these ways, then, ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ demonstrates the internal tensions of nineteenth-century fetishism with the twentieth- century, non-aurified subject/object relations that I have explicated in these first chapters of my thesis. The “hundred men” are listed from number one to hundred and a little is said about each one. However, none of the hundred has a name or is easily identifiable: 123

The third one alternates betweens mountains and mountaineering. ... The ninth one is vague. … The tenth one the tenth one feels traces of terror. … The seventeenth is a century older is older than a century older than the sixteenth. … The eighteenth one wishes to annex the Philippines. … The twenty-eighth is perceptibly loving. He has invented perfumes and portraits and he has also reconciled stamina with countenance. … The forty-sixth prominent man is the one who connected them to their country. My country all the same they have their place there. And why do you tell their names. I tell their names because in this way I know that one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one make a hundred. It is very difficult to count in a foreign language (35-40).

Remembering the “question” of how Iowa, Kansas and Indiana differ from one another in ‘Wherein Iowa Differs From Kansas and Indiana’, it is never explained how a hundred prominent men are the instant answer to anything, as their auras obscure the question. Roughly in the middle of the text the hundred are counted out in a list of “one”s (“one” by “one”), as if laid out on a visual grid. They are mass-produced objects, suggested by their generic, numerical status, but they are rendered unique by their specificities. They are both individualised but then restated as a collection of “ones”. They are instated in and by the process of naming and of being counted, as “one” and “one”. They are both unique, but also the same, aurified, and mass-produced. They 124

function according to both structures of subject/object relations in exclusive containment, as well as recording the tension and struggle between the two structures in struggle with each other. One” is a unique designation, and Stein’s Aunt Fanny in Everybody’s Autobiography counts “one and one”, giving each object its due consideration. They are collected here, and their “uniqueness”, evident in each “one’s” different description, is countered by the sameness and lack of uniqueness when they are referred to as “one”s. Thus, while the aura of each “prominent man” is destroyed by the visual appearance and verbal invocation of the series, the grid of one hundred “and one”s, at the same time each “one” is precisely a “one”: a coherent, aurified entity. “One” is a word that signifies unity and coherence. In that absolute coherence is the divorcing of the object, the coherent “one”, from the labour required to produce it. Thus, it accrues an aura of uniqueness. Both structures, then, are in operation separately in ‘An Instant Answer and a Hundred Prominent Men’, depending on which section of the text is being read, but they are also in operation simultaneously in the use of “one” as a repetitive grid.

Stein’s rendering of subjects as objects of collection in this text in their status as “one”s, can be seen as explicitly linked to the consumer market of the European arcade. The Parisian arcades referred to in the title of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project are located by him in that work as the literal and symbolic site of nineteenth-century capitalism, in which each object is still “unique” and has not lost its aura through mass-production. This connection with the Arcades is evident in Stein’s ‘Galeries Lafayette’ (1915). The relation of France to the commodity fetishism of the nineteenth century and the material objects that are the subjects of Benjamin’s contemplation in The Arcades Project, (“The arcades as temples of commodity capital” (37)), with the concerns of Stein is evident in the fictional piece ‘Galeries Lafayette’. Counting, the object, and the subject come together in the site of the Galeries, the famous French shopping-mall that was so important in the nineteenth century. In his reading of the piece Gerald J. Kennedy identifies the word “one” as a signifier for the individual subject and, therefore, in its only slightly varied repetition, he sees a depiction of the subsuming of the individual in the mass of the crowd, a theme common to the post-industrial period. He says: 125

With the opening declaration – “one, one, one, one, there are many of them” – Stein seems to allude to the hordes of shoppers in the department store. Each is “one,” an individual being, and at the same time part of the crowd, the “many.” Each person presumably possesses qualities which form a pattern of identity, and each shopper is “accustomed to being that one.” But amid this mass of human forms individual differences blur, and Stein sees only sameness. Hence her monotonous repetition – “each one is one” – acknowledges the gulf between subject, between the observing writer and those individuals striving to be “the especial one that one is being.” (51).

However, firmly located by its title in the galleries that Benjamin theorised, I would argue that “each one is one” is an affirmation, a reassuring statement of fact in which the fetishization of the commodity is also the fetishistic repetition of the word “one”—the repeated pleasure of encounting the “one” as an object. While as Kennedy suggests “one, one, one, one” invokes the mass-production of the period through its sameness (its reproducibility), I would argue that the implicit meaning of “one” as unique invokes simultaneously the fetish object whose aura is derived from its uniqueness. It is reasonable to suggest that within the context of the ‘Galeries Lafayette’ of the title, a place of capitalist sales, that in terms of what is around in the environment to be signified by the “one” there is not only the subject but a proliferation of objects, consumer items, that could also be indicated by the “one”. In this case, where no meaning is specifically attributed to the word, it lends itself to over-determination and a proliferation of meanings. In this contex, then, the repetition constructs the inextricability of subject and object for sale, of subject and commodity. The “one” doing the observing is the genius, still a subject, not “one” of the “ones”, but the reader cannot be sure that this is a distinction between subject and object maintained through the piece. “One”, therefore, functions to designate either a subject or an object or both simultaneously. In being both it is an intersubjective, iterative structure of relations, but in being a singular, unique “one” it is also a unique object, fetishized, and completely mysterious, its aura erasing any narrative of its constitution. 126

Thus, both subjects and objects are simultaneously operating according to the two structures of subject/object relations, that of the non-aurification that mass-production creates in the twentieth century and that of the fetishized unique object from the nineteenth century. ‘Galeries Lafayette’, therefore, produces meaning through its repetition of subjects and objects at the point of transition between two structures with different trajectories. ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ can be read through the multiple functioning of “one” established in ‘Galeries Lafayette’. These pieces bring together all of the issues discussed in this chapter, of the complex relations between mass-reproduction and commodity fetishism. Stein critic Ellen Berry argues that:

…[Stein’s]…response to mass culture differed significantly from those of other Modernist writers. Many of these writers, as I have suggested, attempted to sharply differentiate high and mass culture as a precondition for the development of a Modernist aesthetic. Stein, however, tried to express the modern in relation to them both. Far from pathologizing an “inauthentic” mass culture and fearing its intrusion into the realm of high art, she developed aspects of her aesthetic practice in dialogue with popular forms and idioms, in many cases taking her ideas for textual innovations directly from them. For her, the new forms of an emerging mass culture were not morally, psychologically, and aesthetically regressive but were tied to the very essence of the modern – “where the twentieth century was.” Unlike writers who insisted that serious art be kept pure, aligned with a mythic past, a great tradition, an autonomous realm elsewhere, Stein situated the contemporary composition – her term for the avant-garde text – within the everyday (137-38).

Thus, as I have demonstrated through the framework established in these two chapters, culminating in this reading of ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ and ‘Galeries Lafayette’, Stein’s texts evince two structures of subject/object relations: the first is a fetishizing structure in which subjects and objects are coherent and solidified 127

and objects are aurified, the subject held in thrall by that aura, and the second is a structure in which iteration, intersubjectivity, and “daily living” are methodologies for recording and thematically emphasizing the relations between subject and object that are non-fetishizing and recorded in the time of the moment. This supports Berry’s assertion that Stein “tried to express the modern in relation to” both high art and mass culture, in that the two structures I have identified are associated with the petrification of the “high- art” work of art and the “tactile appropriation” of the mass-reproduced object. I have extended upon Berry’s claim by demonstrating that Stein expresses the modern in relation to high art and mass culture internally within individual works as well as simultaneously at certain textual moments.

The specific ways in which the tension between the two models of subject/object relations that this thesis has identified as operating in Stein’s works play out in particular pieces from across Stein’s oeuvre will be the work of Chapters Three and Four, that constitute Part Two of this thesis. 128

PART TWO 129

Chapter Three The pleasures and productivities of collecting

There it is the oil painting in its frame, a thing in itself. There it is and it has to look like people or objects or landscapes. Besides that it must not completely only exist in its frame. It must have its own life. And yet it may not move nor imitate movement, not really, nor must it stay still. It must not only be in its frame but it must not, only, be in its frame. This whole question of a picture being in its frame returning to its frame or not returning to its frame is the question that has latterly bothered me the most. Modern pictures have made the very definite effort to leave their frame. But do they stay out, do they go back and if they do is that where they belong and has anybody been deceived. I think about that a great deal these days (Lectures in America 87).

Here, in this 1938 essay, Stein details her own approach to understanding and using visual art—a complex relation to the processes of literature and visual art—and the significance of framing and containment to creative experimentation in modernity. It is in a sense an epochal lecture Stein delivers in America; on the brink of World War II she was looking back at a piece she wrote at the dawn of World War I and asserting the ongoing relevance of the issues involved. I want to engage with Stein’s urge to consider the interconnections of literature and visual art, and in doing so I hope to take the commonly-known exploration of Stein through Cubism in a new direction. This chapter will show that Tender Buttons, like the “modern paintings” which “made the very definite effort to leave their frame”, rehearses the fluctuation between the two extremes of containment and movement, and I will show also that these fluctuations are located in the relations between the subject and object. I will extend the body of work that connects Stein’s poetics with the contemporary visual-art culture of Cubism by explicating the centrality and the contradictions of the still-life genre as practiced by Cubist visual artists and by Stein in Tender Buttons. The focus of this analysis takes up and extends to the context of Cubist practice Hal Foster’s important reading of Modernism’s 130

indebtedness to seventeenth-century Dutch still-life. The ready connections between Stein, Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris have been for the most part examined by Stein critics, notably L.T. Fitz, Randa Dubnick, and Jayne L. Walker, in relation to aesthetics of the surface and multiple perspectives on the object. My analysis will contribute to this comparative study by exposing a shared economy of “looking”, the gaze lost in the aura of the fetish object. I will argue further that the recognition of this shared economy of the fetishized object brings into view the underlying premises of still-life, which are selection and arrangement, and the imbrication of these in collection. Specifically, the discussion will engage with Benjamin’s understanding of the object and its role in the collection as definitive of modern experience and his formulation of the artist as one possible collector-subject, an idea that is taken up here as an illuminating way of reading Tender Buttons.

Having established this broad thematic focus on the relations between people and things in the world, the discussion will then critique the inherent presumptions of this thematic focus on materiality, a critique that the works themselves invite. This extension of the analysis will focus on another aspect of the relation between Cubism and Tender Buttons, namely the shared engagement with the materials of composition—paint or language respectively—and the secondary function of those materials in signifying ‘real world’ materiality. The meticulously reimagined relations between language and the world achieved by Tender Buttons provide a basis from which to reenter the world of embodiment. Accordingly, the third and final aspect of this analysis will take up the capacity of language to signify multiple material ‘realities’, the implicit operation of Stein’s encoding, and critics’ decoding, of lesbian sexual practices. This deviant sexual subtext, I will contend, is figured through the text’s use of objects whose fetishization transgresses the boundaries between commodity fetishism and sexual fetishism. The trajectory created by these three aspects of my argument, then, is one in which the fetishism of objects plays out across the points of critical analysis of Tender Buttons and across the types of fetishism in modernity, from the commodity fetishism of the collector to the sexual fetishism of psychoanalysis. The generic categories of the artist, 131

the collector, art, language and the material world, are shown to be complicated through the negotiations of subject and object evident in Tender Buttons.

The inherent fetishism of the still-life In his article ‘Still-life and the Art of Fetishism’ Hal Foster argues that Dutch seventeenth-century still-lifes are inherently fetishistic. For Foster, this tradition of the still-life remains central to painting even in Modernist art movements such as Surrealism. According to the logic of Foster’s reading, Cubism itself is invested with and ultimately negotiates the fetishism inherent in still-life. Stein’s Tender Buttons is explicitly based on both the painterly still-life and the investigations of Cubism. Thus, Tender Buttons can be productively read through the fetishism of the still-life that is inherent in Cubism’s methodological and thematic conception.

Stein’s own construction of her approach and explicit engagement in Tender Buttons argues the difficulty of subject-object relations in different structures and implicitly sets up Tender Buttons as a text that, in working out subject-object relations, tends towards the fetishizing operations of the gaze, in its relationship to the painterly still-life. Stein constructs Tender Buttons as a text explicitly concerned with the same issues, and in the same ways, as painters and their preoccupations when creating still-lifes. In ‘Portraits and Repetition’ she says:

I began to make portraits of things and enclosures that is rooms and places because I needed to completely face the difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening and at first if I were to include a complicated listening and talking it would be too difficult to do. That is why painters paint still-lifes. You do see why they do. So I began to do this thing, I tried to include color and movement and what I did is what you have all either read or heard of, a volume called Tender Buttons. I for a time did not make portraits because as I was trying to live in looking, and looking was not to mix itself up with remembering I wished to reduce to its minimum listening and talking. In Tender Buttons, I 132

described anything, and I will read you a few things to show you what I did then (Look At Me Now and Here I Am 113).

These words and many others from this essay are often quoted by Stein critics, particularly in the analysis of Tender Buttons. In the above paragraphs Stein explains that things, rooms, and places are the subject matter of still-lifes, and the reason that painters paint still-lifes is that they want to focus entirely on “looking”. Portraits—without the qualifier “of things”, that is, portraits of people—Stein implies here, require the negotiation of “remembering”, which she equates with “listening and talking”. “Listening and talking” are posited as antithetical to “looking” in the reasoning within this one sentence: “I for a time did not make portraits because as I was trying to live in looking, and looking was not to mix itself up with remembering I wished to reduce to its minimum listening and talking”. Because Stein had to “reduce” “listening and talking” (which are involved in remembering) when trying to “live in looking”, “looking” becomes defined as precisely not about “remembering”. In the initial paragraphs here Stein separates out “looking” as the particular preoccupation of still- lifes, specifically because they do not “include a complicated listening and talking”. Stein then says that she herself “began to do this thing”, namely, create literary still-lifes, which she calls “portraits of things and enclosures that is rooms and places”.

Stein’s distinction between these methodological approaches to artistic production (“looking” as opposed to “listening and talking”) and their fundamental correspondence to different genres (“looking” to still-lifes and “talking and listening” to the portraiture of people) resonates with understood distinctions between the more generic categories of subject and object. The still life and “looking” are the provenance of the object, and “talking and listening” are related to the subject. Thus, in Stein’s own formulation of the relationship between the portraits of people and Tender Buttons, the latter is, in terms of methodology, genre, and subject matter, about representing objects, and privileges the object over the subject. It is about the nature of the object, which, in turn, defines the subject—a distinction at the heart of this thesis. 133

Given the explicit and acknowledged nature, then, of the influence of the painterly still- life on Stein in Tender Buttons, and the centrality of the still-life to figurations of subject-object relations in Modernist art, it is important for this discussion to examine just how the visual still-life operates in Modernist art. It can be seen that still-life is a subject-object relation functioning according to the structure of fetishism, in terms opened up by Foster. Still life is about objects and, in terms of its historical situation, can be seen as a genre locked in an inherent negotiation with commodity fetishism.

Hal Foster claims that commodity fetishism is the cultural fascination that propels seventeenth-century Dutch still-life, and he argues further that the use of objects in Modernist visual arts movements occupies a similar negotiation with the cultural conditions that create and maintain the aura of objects so that they become separate, and distant, from the subjects who labour to produce them. He argues that seventeenth- century Dutch still life painting was located at an historical juncture in which trade between the Dutch empire and the “primitive” races the Dutch had encountered in their explorations meant that the Dutch were preoccupied with issues concerning the object. Of particular importance to the Dutch painters were the relations between the subject and the object in their own culture, as thrown into relief by the relations between those terms in other cultures the Nation traded with (‘The Art of Fetishism’ 252). The original meaning and origin of “fetishism”, as William Pietz has extensively discussed, comes from the trading of Spanish and Portugese sailors with “natives” who endowed objects with religious auras (40). Foster argues that while the Dutch scorned the religious fetishism of the races they traded with, the still-lifes produced in the same period by Dutch artists demonstrate an aurification of the object that is clearly the fetishized object of the capitalism that the Dutch were embracing. They claimed to be more “civilized” than the races they encountered, because they endowed objects with no arbitrary spiritual faith, but they were nevertheless equally in thrall to the fetish, one central to the economic market, in which arbitrary value equals market value (‘The Art of Fetishism’ 252). 134

Foster’s examination of Dutch still-lifes is located within the context of his prodigious and highly-respected work as a Modernist scholar; it is in this context that Foster draws a trajectory between Dutch still-lifes and Modernist uses of the object in art works, and it is this connection or even continuum that makes Foster’s theorisation of still-lifes productive for a reading of Stein’s texts. In the opening paragraph of his article Foster identifies the ways in which Modernist art movements were engaged with the object in precarious relations that explicitly negotiated different conceptual structures of knowing and understanding the object:

I am fascinated by Modernist works that involve an encounter between different cultures or, more precisely, different economies of the object. These works emerge in an interstice between, say, the ritual order of tribal artefacts and the exhibitional status of modern art, as in primitivism; between the mundane realm of commodities and the hermetic realm of autonomous art, as in the ready-made; between the sexual register of part objects and the social field of objets trouvés, as in the surrealist object. Such practices are posed in these interstices ambivalently—as if to make us ambivalent, as if to turn the psychic conflict and social contradiction that underlie them into a critical provocation. No given model can grasp Modernist art as such a symbolic figuration of conflict and contradiction—except, perhaps, one based on an expanded concept of fetishism (‘The Art of Fetishism’ 251).

Foster here references the ready-made as used by Duchamp and the artistic practices of movements like surrealism, and genres such as primitivism. While Cubism was invented by artists who had explored, particularly in Picasso’s case, the use of “primitive” representation in his art, as well as the frequent use of “found objects” (objets trouvés) in late Cubist collages, Cubism is not explicitly mentioned by Foster in his summary of Modernist art movements engaged with the ambivalent status of the object in their contemporary moment. However, I would argue that Cubism, like these other visual art movements in modernity, was similarly placed in what Foster calls an “interstice” of different conceptions of the (value of) the object. I want to claim that, for 135

Cubism, that interstice was the ambivalent relation between the nineteenth-century European understanding of the object as commodity fetish (as well as, as Foster says of primitivism, “the exhibitional status of modern art”) and the emerging twentieth- century—European still, but significantly also American—understanding of the tactile relation of the subject to the object, of the labour and process that constructs the subject and object together. I want to claim this position for Cubism because I want to take up Foster’s suggestion that only a model “based on an expanded concept of fetishism” can explain the operations of “conflict and contradiction”, incited by the relationship between the subject and the object in some Modernist art, namely, in Stein's writings.

In the centrality of still-life to its experimentation Cubism demonstrates the structure of subject-object relations that works by fetishizing the object, I contend. However, I will show further that in its experimentation Cubism invokes and deploys a second structure of subject/object relations also, a structure new in the twentieth century and characterized by tactility, non-aurification, and an absence of distance between the subject and the object. Stein’s Tender Buttons and other pieces written in the same style demonstrate the representation of subjects and objects in the relations of this second structure to a greater degree than Cubism achieves, due to the inherently more extensive signifying possibilities of language.

While Cubist paintings deploy still-life and are circumscribed by the fetishism that characterizes them, at the same time the Cubist project was an explicit attempt to break down conventional aspects of realism upon which still-lifes are based. They are, therefore, like Dutch still-lifes, “poised in an interstice between competing conceptions of the object”. At one level they deconstruct the idea of realist representation that masks its own processes of artistic production and as a consequence attracts an arbitrary value that gives it possession of a force or aura and renders it a commodity fetish. The deconstruction of this conventional realist form of representation is effected in cubism by the lines, forms, and colours used to emphasize the two-dimensional, representative nature of objects, rather than pretend to the conventional illusion inherent in the three- dimensional, mimetic representation of realism (Dubnick 56). However, despite this 136

internal deconstructive impulse, Cubist paintings nevertheless maintain the head-to-toe picture plane that is the underlying premise of realism (Steinberg 84). As a mimetic experience of the vertical experience of “seeing” (Stein's “looking”) that privileges the distanced perspective of the gaze, this perspective keeps the subject and the object separate and the aura in place. Thus, the picture-plane corresponds to the vertical representational field of the canvas, where the bottom of the canvas is the bottom of “reality” and the top is the head, which is a figurative conceptualisation (Steinberg 84). Cubist portraits and still-lifes have a top and bottom that correspond to this representational realism. Thus Cubism both acknowledges and disavows the operations, and possibility, of realism.

This shift enacts Stein’s own integral engagement with early twentieth-century cubism, and her further development of its principles in language. This new mode is closely related to the object as commodity fetish, not just in the subject’s new closeness to an object whose aura has been destroyed but in the subject’s relation to labour. It is precisely the process of the experience of creation that is recorded in this aesthetic. Peter Schwenger discusses still-life in relation to the “snare-pictures” (“tableaux-piège”) made from 1960 by the artist Daniel Spoerri. These snare-pictures are tables with the plates, food, and accessories that were in the process of being used (often by Spoerri and his friends) when Spoerri removed them and glued them—in the condition in which they had been abandoned—to a board and then hung them on the wall (Schwenger 144). The evidence of labour in such a snare-picture exists as a literal “capturing” of a section of “reality” that is made into a work of art simply by being shifted from the flat plane of experience to the vertical plane of exhibitional art. Schwenger argues:

When Spoerri began his Anecdoted Topography of Chance, he was already known for his “snare-pictures,” which he explains as follows: “Objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are 137

fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed, and the table hung on the wall” (144).

This is a mid-twentieth-century development of the experimentation of Cubist collages constructed of found objects and materials. However, in collage and montage works the artists changed those shapes and materials to suit an idea of the piece as an artwork: they were selected and arranged. Given an understanding of the selection and arrangement of the artist’s composition, Spoerri did not “change” anything, rather, he shifted an already- existant bit of “reality” from its horizontal plane to a vertical plane. In doing so he transformed it into art, thereby fundamentally questioning the criteria of art through a presentation of the illusion of the “absence” of labour in art that the aura produces. By presenting the selection and labour required to turn a slice of reality into art, Spoerri exposes the operations of the aura. Spoerri’s work, like the work of Dubuffet and Rauschenberg discussed by Leo Steinberg, is contextualised within the historical continuum of Modernist artistic development. These painters extended the breakdown of the “Renaissance worldspace concept” that Cubism began in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Despite its early date, Stein’s literary work Tender Buttons, from 1914, is spread across this continuum of the breakdown of realist representation that spans early twentieth-century Modernism to late Modernism. At times this text seems to jettison representation altogether, but numerous aspects of the text contain the reference- points of vertical representation fundamental to the “Renaissance worldspace concept”.

Cubism deploys the object in deliberate still-life arrangements that are nevertheless still re-presented as a painting on a canvas, unlike the use of the object in other avant-garde deployments of the object in which objects from life are called art. Duchamp’s ‘objets trouvés’ present ordinary objects as art through the use of contextual display, i.e. once exhibited an ordinary object becomes art. In his book on the avant-garde (1999) Richard Murphy argues that:

The apparent “meaninglessness” of art-objects such as Duchamp’s “fountain” is linked to the similarly enigmatic quality of the montage (which also frequently 138

lacks any obvious “intention” or explicit unifying meaning as a mode of joining its individual components). Clearly the goal of such meaninglessness is to negate specific expectations and so reveal the presence of the institution of art as its hidden context and as the pre-condition for its unsettling effect. These avant- garde forms are consequently revealed to be entirely meaningful at another level, namely at the meta-aesthetic level, where art practices self-criticism and reflects upon the conditions of its own possibility (24-25).

Thus, Duchamp’s work in pieces such as “fountain” investigate the relation between the artist, the consumer, the ordinary object, the commodity fetish, and the work of art, as well as the operations of value (market and labour value) in these relations. Labour in the traditional sense of the artist’s craft is located differently in a work such as “fountain” according to Peter Bürger, theorist of Modernism and the avant-garde. Summarising Bürger’s argument Murphy says: “Bürger suggests that with the objet trouvé and other “meaningless” works, it is the act of provocation itself which takes the place of the “work”” (25), identifying that the difference in praxis causes or reflects a shift in meaning.

Despite the historical gap between the works of the Cubists and Duchamp, and Spoerri, in all of the examples of work discussed the critique of the aurified object becomes ultimately recouped as an artwork: Cubist paintings “maintain the head-to-toe picture- plane”; Duchamp’s “fountain” relies on being exhibited in a museum-context, that is, to be displayed within the context of conventional art, to ensure its provocative effect; and Spoerri’s snare-pictures are still created through a process of selection. Spoerri’s process of decision is reflected in the temporality invoked by a viewing of a snare-picture, the sense that one moment has been caught, ensnared, and pinned, like a butterfly in a collection, stasized. It has been hung on the vertical plane, as a work of art. Therefore, while there is a trajectory of greater extremes of explicit critique of art itself, of metatextual emphasis, in the line between cubism, Duchamp, and Spoerri, these are all nevertheless degrees of the same process of aurification. They are all instances of engagement with the work of art from within an economy in which the work of art is 139

always aurified no matter what its content. This process will be shown to be in operation in Stein’s Tender Buttons, but, where in the visual art-market this produces another fetishized object of exchange, in the literary work Tender Buttons this will be shown to operate in the medium of the text itself, in its language.

In a piece that seems to demonstrate Spoerri’s table-art in the literary medium, Stein’s ‘Objects Lie on a Table: A Play’ published in 1932 (eighteen years after Tender Buttons, but still twenty-eight years before Spoerri’s snare-pictures), is nevertheless circumscribed by the aurification implicit in the still-life genre, as well as by the relation of the still-life to collection:

The objects on the table have been equal to the occasion. We can decorate walls with pots and pans and flowers. I question the flowers. And bananas. Card board colored as bananas are colored. And cabbages. Cabbages are green and if one should not happen to be there what would happen, the green would unhappily unhappily result in hardness and we could only regret that the result was unfortunate and so we astonish no one nor did we regret riches. Riches are not begun. They have a welcome in oceans. Oceans can not spread to the shore. They began description and so we relish seas. Over seas objects are on the table that is a wooden table and has not a marble top necessarily. So thank every one and let us begin faintly. As to houses certainly houses have not the same restfulness as objects on the table which mean to us an arrangement. You do not arrange houses nor do you fancy them very much. I have a fancy for a house (315).

The life on the horizontal plane is “caught” here by Stein in the piece’s experimental recording of the authorial subject’s associations and thought-interactions with the objects on the table in space. The musing of the narrator is initially located in the materiality of what is “on the table”, in assertions like: “I question the flowers. And Bananas.” Flowers and fruit are typical of both the conventional decoration of a “table”, as well as of the deliberate arrangements of still-life paintings. These lines, then, signify 140

both reality and lived experience of the kind that Spoerri documents, and the artistic selection and arrangement of reality that occurs in conventional artistic representation, before that reality is recorded. After the invocation of bananas and fruit, the section quoted from ‘Objects Lie on a Table: A Play’ shifts into strings that no longer relate to objects that might be found on a table, except through mental association. The shift that is occurring here is from representation to association. In statements such as: “Riches are not begun. They have a welcome in oceans” there is no obvious, direct relationship to “objects on a table”. But the language then returns to referentiality, smoothly shifting back within the sentence: “Over seas objects are on the table that is a wooden table and has not a marble top necessarily”. The difference between artistic selection and arrangement, and the experience of life as a random interaction with objects in space, is implicit in the last paragraph of the section quoted here. The narrator directly compares the all-encompassing experientiality of life within the space of a house with the pleasure of controlled selection and arrangement, when she writes: “As to houses certainly houses have not the same restfulness as objects on the table which mean to us an arrangement.” As the narrator says, “you do not arrange houses” because the largeness of the space within a house means that events and interactions between subjects and objects within it cannot ever be completely contained and controlled. The narrator, however, has “a fancy for a house”, suggesting that the narrator is attracted to this experientiality despite the obvious pleasure the narrator receives by representing the still-life arrangement of “objects on the table”. In this piece, then, there is the evident enjoyment of and interest in experimenting with both fetishized collection and lived experientiality. ‘Objects Lie on a Table: A Play’ demonstrates the same tension between two structures of subject/object relations—the fetishizing and the experiential—seen in Tender Buttons eighteen years earlier. Before examining the playing out of these structures within that latter text I will show more fully how collection fetishizes the objects within its limits.

In order to show that the objects in Tender Buttons are both unique and aurifed in the manner of objects in a collection it is necessary to clarify that, according to Benjamin, all kinds of objects can be commodity fetishes in capitalism. Conventional fetish items of psychoanalytic fetishism, such as shoes, underwear, stockings etc (Stoller 79), and 141

Marxist commodity fetishism, such as clothing, shoes, accessories (Miklitsch 3) are joined by ordinary domestic objects in Benjamin’s definition of the commodity fetish. None of the domestic objects that are the subject matter of Tender Buttons—‘A BOX,’ ‘A CLOTH,’ ‘A PLATE,’ ‘A CHAIR’, ‘A SELTZER BOTTLE’—are the kind of luxury items associated with the “luxury” end of commodity fetishism, a situation which is ironized in the self-descriptive title of the poem ‘NOTHING ELEGANT’ (6-9). However, even these ordinary objects can be understood to be fetishized according to Benjamin's description of the aurified object. Benjamin argues that even the “natural” or non-man-made object has an aura:

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be (‘The Work of Art’ 222).

As was discussed in relation to Stein’s construction of the Nation of America as an object at a distance, where the object is a material one the “phenomenon of distance” is similarly central.

It is the aura that creates this “phenomenon of distance”, and the aura itself is instated by a discrepancy in the different values of the object. Benjamin scholar Gyorgy Markus gives a useful definition of Benjamin’s idea of the aura as created by the discrepancy in different exchange values, a situation that makes objects into commodity fetishes:

A product of labor is a commodity if its actual utility, its use-value, constitutes only the external shell of its generic essence: universal exchangeability, exchange value. To live in a world which appears as the enormous collection of (real or potential) commodities means to endow objects with significations that have nothing to do with their useful properties. Such a world confers meanings that, while no longer transcendent but inner-worldly and in fact fabricated (through display, fashion, and advertisement), again become reified. 142

Commodities actually repress their own making, their origin in human labor and construction. This endows the things of everyday with an illusory glitter, an aureole: a weak remnant of the sacred. The world of commodity is not so much that of an impoverished rationality, but rather a world of re-enchantment which overlays everything with a spell promising profane enjoyment, but what it offers for enjoyment is the alienation of the individual from his/her own product and from other individuals, a contemplative empathy with the aesthetic luster of exchange value (16).

Stein’s Tender Buttons could certainly be called “a world of re-enchantment which overlays everything with a spell promising profane enjoyment”, as the author-subject’s pleasure in all objects as rare and precious permeates the text in lines such as: “any steady cake is perfect” (27); “Cold coffee with a corn a corn yellow and green mass is a gem” (31); “A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness” (13); and “Lovely snipe and tender turn, excellent vapor and slender butter, all the splinter and the trunk, all the poisonous darkening drunk, all the joy in weak success, all the joyful tenderness, all the section and the tea, all the stouter symmetry” (22). But somehow the text also does not seem to entirely follow with what Markus argues is the corollary—the “alienation of the individual from” what he/she produces and “from other individuals”, the things and people of the world. This is because, as this chapter will later show, there is also a non-aurifying structure at work in the text. Before I demonstrate this, however, I will explicate the ways in which fetishism is evident in Tender Buttons.

The aura is connected to the arbitrary value that the object has been assigned, relative to other commodity items produced. This arbitrary value is a monetary value related to the object’s perceived desirability and power, rather than to a value directly related to the labour value of its production. This is a standard operation in the capitalist system, Marx argues in Capital Volume One, and leads to the workers’ alienation from the objects produced by their labour because “the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between 143

themselves, but between the products of their labour” (74).

Fetishized objects and the status of Tender Buttons as a “collection” This operation between subject and object on the level of the entire economy determines the operations on the level of interaction between individual subjects and the objects with which they are engaged. The context of a collection is one of the major ways in which “the unique phenomenon of a distance” is instated by/in “natural” objects, on the level of the individual in culture. Ordinary objects become unique when collected, such as butterflies, shells, flowers, because they are placed into the context of an inherently high valuation. The importance of collection to still-lifes is that they are essentially collections—objects selected and arranged according to a schema of value—turned into art. They are not Spoerri’s snare-pictures moved from the horizontal plane to the vertical to achieve the status of artwork, but are deliberate arrangements, selected and arranged by the artist. Picasso and Stein, as was discussed in the previous chapter, were both geniuses and collectors. In the first pages of The Autobiography Stein constructs herself and Picasso as unique geniuses, contributing to which is the strangeness/uniqueness of their collecting of odds and ends in their pockets—the same kind of objects Picasso pasted into his paintings and Stein represents in Tender Buttons. These objects are aurified by the context of their having been collected by geniuses.

The status of Tender Buttons as a collection, and its concomitant aurifying circumscription of the objects contained within its parameters, is effected on the level of content. Practically every poem in Tender Buttons contains some form of listing or reference to collections or arrangements. Explicit content includes paragraphs such as this from the ‘OBJECTS’ section in ‘A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION’: “A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit” (4). Numerous other poems contain lists of objects, often entirely incongruous ones, collected together. ‘SUGAR’ contains lines of listed objects throughout: “A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet. … A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday. … A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog” (28-29). In ‘A WAIST’: “A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness” (13). Collection is even given in 144

terms of arrangement and “use” (in ‘MORE’): “An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil” (11). And finally, in ‘ROOMS’, the third and final section that can be read as commenting on the structure and operations of the whole text, the curatorial nature of Tender Buttons is made explicit: “There was a whole collection made. A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made” (46). These lines inform the reader that Tender Buttons is a text of collection. The claim is made in ‘ROOMS’, also, that: “The whole arrangement is established” (44). Thus, all the grammatical possibilities of the world, in terms of the relations between subjects and objects, are re-fashioned into lists in Tender Buttons.

The list is the verbal and written arrangement that corresponds to the visual grid (explored by other major Modernist writers such as Mallarmé) presented by the list, evident in Tender Buttons at the beginning of the ‘FOOD’ section. This list emphasizes the “objectness” of the food referred to, through the visual solidity and coherence of each word presented through the capitalization. It is certainly not a list considered by Stein as necessary, demonstrated by the absence of a similar list at the beginning of the ‘OBJECTS’ section, and it is not even correct, omitting several of the ‘ORANGES’ poems that appear in the body of the section, emphasizing the visual nature of the grid:

ROASTBEEF; MUTTON; BREAKFAST; SUGAR; CRANBERRIES; MILK; EGGS; APPLE; TAILS; LUNCH; CUPS; RHUBARB; SINGLE; FISH; CAKE; CUSTARD; POTATOES; ASPARAGUS; BUTTER; END OF SUMMER; SAUSAGES; CELERY; VEAL; VEGETABLE; COOKING; CHICKEN; PASTRY; CREAM; CUCUMBER; DINNER; DINING; EATING; SALAD; SAUCE; SALMON; ORANGE; COCOA; AND CLEAR SOUP AND ORANGES AND OATMEAL; SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE; A CENTRE IN A TABLE (20).

This list is an arrangement of nouns and the objects they signify, selected and positioned within the context of an overall collection to which they belong. 145

The layout and structure of Tender Buttons also constructs the text as a collection, inviting the reader to take the object that is (in) the title as the subject of the poem. The “uniqueness” of the ordinary domestic objects of Tender Buttons is emphasized by the singularity that each poem’s title gives to the object it is discussing. Many poems are designated by the indefinite article: ‘A PETTICOAT’; ‘A PURSE’; ‘A PLATE’; ‘A FEATHER’; and ‘A HANDKERCHIEF’. Prior to even beginning a detailed reading of the text, then, the reader has been made aware that each poem (each object signified by the title) has been particularly selected for inclusion in this collection, and arranged, in a deliberate order according to a set of values developed or adopted, and prioritized, by the author.

The arrangement of objects in Tender Buttons by the author-subject as collector creates a dilemma of value in terms of the collector(author)-subject’s relation to objects as commodity fetishes. Alongside listing as evidence that Tender Buttons functions according to the negotiations of collection, a further way in which the fetishized nature of the objects within the parameters of the meta-value of a collection in Tender Buttons is apparent is in the text’s construction of objects in terms of their relationship to “value”, either “connoisseur value” or “use value”. As a text Tender Buttons has the domestic object as its central fascination, and those domestic objects are fetishized, as implied but not explicitly taken up by Jayne L. Walker in her summary of the text. Walker argues that:

Although a few exotic items, including an elephant and a “white hunter,” make momentary appearances, the iconography of domestic life dominates the text. Concrete nouns and adjectives name a wealth of homely particulars. But in its artful rearrangement of these details, the text models a world in which objects, foods, and rooms are liberated from their normal subordination to human routines and purposes (127).

Walker’s claim that the “world” of Tender Buttons is one “in which objects, foods, and 146

rooms are liberated from their normal subordination to human routines and purposes” echoes Benjamin’s argument that the collector liberates even ordinary objects from “the drudgery of being useful”. In one of the fragments in The Arcades Project he says:

The interior is the asylum of art. The collector is the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one—one in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful (9).

But the capacity to liberate objects “from the drudgery of being useful” is only a dream, it is the condition of the object in the collector's desired world. In reality it is a “Sisyphean task” to “[divest] things of their commodity character by taking possession of them”. When the collector takes possession of objects “he” only changes their “use value” into “connoisseur value”, thereby failing to “divest things of their commodity character”, as they remain commodity fetishes. Thus, the particular formulation of the subject—that of the collector—determines the potentialities of the object. In his examination of Benjamin’s “collector” figure Abbas Ackbar identifies this when he argues: “…the collector saves objects only by turning them into Art. In the process, however, art turns into mere objects of contemplation; hence the uneasy relation between art and commodity fetishism” (220).

The central point on which this dilemma turns is the value of the object. In capitalist society there is a tension between the “use-value” and the arbitrary market-value, as the worker is alienated from the product of “his” labour by the arbitrary monetary value attributed to that product, a value often so high (in the case of “unskilled workers”) that he is denied access to that product. Neither is the ideal, in Benjamin’s formulation. On one hand Benjamin accepts Marx’s explicit critique of the commodity fetishism he 147

identified (the aurified market-value) as leading to the alienation of workers from the objects they produce. The collector, whose concern is “the transfiguration of things” does so, Benjamin maintains, by “taking possession” of them, by stepping forward and touching, entering into a tactile relationship with these objects. The collector’s task gives objects a “connoisseur value” but not a “use value”. “Use value” divests objects entirely of their aura, denuding them of the pleasure that they give in their fetishized form. The contradiction inherent in this issue is clear when Benjamin calls the collector's dream-world in which objects “are freed from the drudgery of being useful” as “a better [world]”. Whilst he agrees with Marx in part, then, on the other hand Benjamin appreciates the pleasure of the fetishized object, the commodity fetish. Completely evacuating the object of its aura to uncover its use value leads to “drudgery”, in his view.

As Ackbar notes, Benjamin’s construction of “connoisseur value” and its relation to “use value” means that personal interaction of subject with object does not necessarily lead to the breakdown of the aura; uniqueness can be established/accrued by the subject’s “taking possession” of the object, because the collector's possession is inherently one that takes pleasure in the object’s aura (220). The collector's experience is a positive experience, then—the assignment of the object with an arbitrary and personal value is a specific pleasure. However, the engagement of the subject with the object in tactile relations does not diminish the aura of the object nor does it mean that the “phenomenon of distance” that the fetish creates is broken down or dissolved. In Benjamin’s terms the collector’s arrangements of “his” objects do not necessarily mean the distance between subject and object that fetishism creates/perpetuates is traversed in the literal physical coming-closer; arrangements can actually serve to aurify objects that are otherwise not fetishized, replacing their use-value with arbitrary commodity fetish value. A standardized “use-value” that the mass-produced object accrues in modernity is its prison of “drudgery”.

The aurified nature of the ordinary object once arranged in still-life is ironically reflected in Stein’s description in The Autobiography of Matisse’s anxiety over the expense of 148

fruit to be used in his painting. The fruit is extremely expensive: “It had strained the resources of the Matisse family to buy this fruit, fruit was horribly dear in Paris in those days, even ordinary fruit, imagine how much dearer was this very extraordinary fruit and it had to keep until the picture was completed and the picture was going to take a long time. In order to keep it as long as possible they kept the room as cold as possible…” (47). In this instance the fruit is already a luxury commodity because of its relative unavailability (which drives the market-value up). The fruit’s arbitrary value gives it an aura that, ironically, ensures its stasis, its uniqueness and its permanence, because the Matisses have to keep the fruit preserved all winter as they cannot afford to buy more.

Tender Buttons is a collection in which the collector—“Stein” as narrator—changes objects from “use value” to “connoisseur value” by the authorial “taking possession of” them. The text is actively involved in the fetishization of ordinary, domestic objects, through according them the status of objects in a collection; Tender Buttons attributes each object with uniqueness, a move which “frees” them from the “drudgery of use- value”. While this can be identified throughout the text, one example from the ‘FOOD’ section is in ‘ROASTBEEF’: “There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual” (22). Through an absence of use here aurification is signalled here by the “mutual respect” given between the authorial subject and the object/word that is an appreciation unrelated to “use value”. In constructing this “taking possession of” (as opposed to “tactile appropriation” of) Stein constructs her author-subject as that of the collector, coherent and separate from the object she gazes at, creating a relation of “mutual respect” between object and subject.

The above example from ‘ROASTBEEF’ aside, the ‘FOOD’ and ‘ROOMS’ sections of Tender Buttons have only one or two instances of the word “use”, rather, it is the ‘OBJECTS’ section that repeatedly examines the implications of objects and “use”. This is evident in ‘MORE.’: “An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil” (11). The “elegant” suggests an aesthetically-pleasing arrangement, which is certainly a case of the author-collector turning the standard use-value of ordinary 149

objects such as “foliage” and “a little piece of white cloth” and “oil” into the connoisseur value of their fetishized status in that arrangement or positioning with one another. The word “use” appears in its imbrication with cost and monetary markets of exchange in ‘A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION’:

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. … It shows what use there is in a whole piece if one uses it and it is extreme and very likely the little things could be dearer but in any case there is a bargain and if there is the best thing to do is to take it away and wear it and then be reckless be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude (4).

The “use” of a “whole piece” is demonstrated in the practice of its use (“if one uses it”), and this is connected to a consideration of value (“things could be dearer but in any case there is a bargain”). In other words “use” is associated with a unified and coherent object (a “whole piece”), and this coherent object is then immediately considered in terms of its ‘dearness’, the resultant pun suggesting both a high monetary value and an intense affective relation. This “use” , then, is not the “use value” of the banal object utilised for the “drudgery” of everyday life by the consumer, rather, it is the “use value” of the connoisseur or the collector—Benjamin’s “connoisseur value”. In this context the “bargain” describes the collector or connoisseur’s pleasure at acquiring a coveted object for less than the standard relative value of that object on the market.

Several more poems from the ‘OBJECTS’ section, in particular ‘A MOUNTED UMBRELLA’, demonstrate the “taking possession of” objects by the collector, the omniscient narrator of Tender Buttons, who “liberates objects from the “drudgery of their use-value”. The “connoisseur value” assigned to ordinary objects fetishizes them by giving them an aura that obscures both the labour required to make them and the labour for which the consumer uses them.

A MOUNTED UMBRELLA. 150

What was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it. The lesson is to learn that it does show it, that it shows it and that nothing, that there is nothing, that there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange (10).

This specific poem can be read as a question about the difference between “use-value” in terms of the non-collector subject or consumer “taking possession of” the ordinary object for the banality of everyday usage, and the collector or connoisseur subject “taking possession of” the ordinary object and in doing so conferring it with an aura through recognizing its “connoisseur-value”. The curatorial impulse of the poem’s narrator is established in the title: ‘A MOUNTED UMBRELLA’. There is no “use” to the narrator of “not leaving it there”, or of “using” it for its banal “use-value”. For the omniscient narrator-collector there is no “use” except its “connoisseur value”, which is the appreciation of how the umbrella looks hanging up: “What was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it”. This particular “taking possession of” confers “connoisseur value” so strongly that the final line argues that the trajectory of the contemplation in this poem must lead to the possibilities that exist for this fetishized object on the exchange market, because of its aurified status: “…there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange”.

Gyorgy Markus’ definition of aura, discussed earlier, argues that there is an “enchantment” of objects. I suggested that that enchantment does not, however, overwhelm Tender Buttons, and that this is due to the operations of the other structure that functions in the text alongside the fetishizing structure. At other points in Tender Buttons objects are constructed in the terms of another structure of subject/object relations also negotiated, in Benjamin’s formulation, in a relationship to “use”. Somewhat confusingly in relation to his assertion that objects “taken possession of” by 151

the collector acquire connoisseur value (and the concomitant aura), elsewhere Benjamin argues that the contemporary period (early to mid-twentieth century) is the period in which “taking possession of” objects leads to a dissolution of the aura. In ‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Benjamin argues that the “decay of the aura” in modernity occurs primarily because of:

…the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction (‘The Work of Art’ 223).

As discussed in Chapter Two, Benjamin argues that in a comparison of the original and an object of mass-reproduction, time and aura are inextricable, and the relationship between them changes inversely—the more unique the object the more permanent its aura. Benjamin’s claim on this point was quoted in Chapter Two but is worth re-quoting here for its particular use of the imagery of the shell. Benjamin writes:

Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction (‘The Work of Art’ 223).

The particular image Benjamin deploys here encapsulates both the highly-valued and the ordinary object, and one that resonates peculiarly with the range of objects explored in Tender Buttons, from the literal beach shell to the object metaphorically pried from its shell “Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom” (13). Throughout her text Stein repeatedly establishes the beauty and attraction of the fetishized (yet in most instances ordinary) object with its aura, only to “pry [the] object from its shell” and thereby effect the destruction of that aura. In doing so she demonstrates the labour required to produce the aura, as well as the tactile relationship between subject and object that occurs in that labour. This is, again, about value; the 152

subject’s sense of the “universal equality of things” means that “he” attributes as much value to an artwork as to a button, or a motorcar to a glove, which is certainly evident in Tender Buttons in poems such as ‘LUNCH’. In this poem from the ‘FOOD’ section,“Cold coffee with a corn a corn yellow and green mass” has the equal value of “a gem” (31). The banal, everyday objects, foodstuffs for consumption, are depicted in aesthetic terms through colour (“yellow and green mass”) and renamed “a gem”, which is a luxury object, a commodity fetish of the highest order—rare, expensive, and beautiful. Further, this results in a shift to a new structure of subject/object relations, occurring on the “horizontal plane” in Steinberg’s definition of the picture plane.

This movement is achieved by Stein’s shifts in perspective, a closing-in of distance that draws subject and object into interactive experience, and time into the experience of the moment. The closing in of distance, or the experience of the tactile interaction of subject and object in which the terms do not remain cohesively separate, is evident in numerous poems. Tactile interaction is the mode through which subjects and objects enter into new relations. Benjamin argues that:

For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation (‘The Work of Art’ 240).

“Tactile appropriation” is a focus of representation throughout Tender Buttons. In ‘APPLE’, two clauses of nouns described using adjectives and verbs constitute the experience of tactile interaction between subject and object:

A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use (30). 153

The “little piece” of apple is experienced in its “use” through the actions of the nouns and verbs of the second sentence. That this is the phenomenological experience of ingestion, of eating, is implied by the title and the poem’s position in the ‘FOOD’ section. However, the construction implies consumption in all its meanings, in the generic nature of the statements that precede and succeed the middle sentence that records the process of experience. The statements: “A little piece please” and “This is use” resonate with desire and consumption outside of the discourse of food. “A little piece” alludes to idioms from consumer culture about an individual’s desire to purchase a little piece of paradise/heaven/the future/immortality. The trajectory from the desire for possession (“A little piece please”) to the “tactile appropriation” that is consumption (“this is use”) denotes a structure in which “use” is not “connoisseur value” but a mode of subject/object relations in which the two terms are not coherent and separate. Thus, the differences between ‘ROASTBEEF’ and ‘APPLE’ signal the capacity for “use” to function in the text according to two different structures of subject/object relations whose trajectories lead in opposing directions.

Consumption, then, is a central mode of literal tactile appropriation. The subject is defined simultaneously with the object of consumption in the processual experience of eating. The tension between competing structures of subject/object relations is rehearsed in the ways in which critics such as William H. Gass have described the text, but which can be made explicit and recast through the argument of my thesis that the structure of fetishism and a non-fetishizing structure are competing in Stein’s texts. The tension between tactile relations between the subject and object, and the obscuring of labour through the assigning of arbitrary value—that distances the subject and creates the aura and the fetishized object—is played out in William H. Gass’ idiosyncratic yet influential 1975 analysis of Tender Buttons. Gass describes Tender Buttons metaphorically as a cafeteria tray:

Like a cafeteria tray, Tender Buttons has three sorting sections (Objects, Food, Rooms), but it is also built with three floors, so that its true shape is a cube. Objects are things external to us, which we perceive, manipulate, and confront. 154

Next are the things which nourish us, which we take into ourselves: information, feeling, food. Finally, there are things which enclose us as our body does our consciousness, like a lover’s arms, or as people are embraced by rooms (The Geographical History of America, 78).

By attributing dimension and physical form to the text Gass creates an object out of Tender Buttons itself. Gass identifies the sections of Tender Buttons as components in the negotiation between self and external world. These components are described in the way that they occur in actions—objects that we “perceive, manipulate, and confront”, the “information, feeling, food” “which we take into ourselves”, and also the “lover’s arms” and “rooms” which embrace and enclose us. All these are tactile negotiations, expressed as process. However, the overriding metaphor that these actions serve is one of the fetishised object. Gass’s “cube” is three-dimensional—the text of Tender Buttons made an object in itself—and creates an object out of the processes of experience and the tactile modalities of eating. Thus, the tactile interaction of subject and object are re- aurified, by the inclusivity and solid image that the metaphor deploys, into a commodity fetish, the object that is a cafeteria tray. Gass’s metaphor renders Tender Buttons and the reading of it, then, at once a process of labour like the labour of eating, and at the same time an object, whose aura partakes in the commodity fetish and the work of art. 14 Thus there is a shift between the aesthetic of the commodity fetish and of a de-aurified object in contact with the subject in tactile experience, the process of consuming the food in the “tray”. This shifting between optical and tactile perspectives in Gass’s metaphor re- enacts in critical terms what is happening on the textual level of Tender Buttons itself. The objects in Tender Buttons are both fetishized, unique, and special, and—often

14This operation echoes the operations of Spoerri’s “snare-paintings”: the “slice” of “life” shifted from the horizontal plane where it was “reality”, to the vertical, where it becomes art, a fetishized commodity, with an aura that distances it from the viewing subject, an aura that it did not possess whilst part of the horizontal plane. Gass’ metaphor connects Stein’s text to Spoerri’s “snare-pictures”, suggesting Tender Buttons is a “captured” phenomenological experience of the “reality” of eating, and interacting with objects in space. However, like Stein’s text, it is written in language and therefore remains within the realm of representation. Also, Stein’s text is almost in opposition to Spoerri’s work on the level of deliberatio; Stein’s words are carefully considered fabrications—like the shapes, colours, and forms of Cubist paintings—rather than selected bits of reality gathered up in their entirety and simply shifted to a different plane. 155

simultaneously—useful, put to use, in the process of being “used”, constructed in terms of the tactile relations between subject and object, the competing structures of subject/object relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Stein’s text and Gass’s critical theorisation of the work it does are constructed through metaphor. Thus, metaphor is both an aesthetic mode as well as a mode of “use”, in the ways that it brings into proximity and appropriates objects in words.

On the larger scale of the collection as a whole in itself, this “tactile appropriation” on the level of the individual subject in relation to a single object through modalities of eating and consumption can also be understood as an issue of “transmissibility”—an issue which further explicates the role of language, specifically of metaphor, in “use”. Benjamin commentator Abbas Ackbar argues that there are three characteristics that explain “the rather puzzling matter of how Benjamin sees the collector’s relation to objects”, a relation that can be compared to that of the “writer’s relation to the image”.

Both, Ackbar argues, feature this idea of “transmissibility”. The first behaviour that Ackbar argues is characteristic of the collector is that of “tactical instinct”:

In the essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin says that “for a collector…ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects”. It is as if under certain conditions, the experience of possession could be transformed into the possession of experience. … For Benjamin, such a transformation is achieved by rethinking the nature of ownership. Like the literary image, ownership has its subtler aspects. For example, analysing how books come into the collector’s possession, Benjamin speaks about the collector’s “tactical instinct”. The tactics for acquisition include borrowing books and not returning them; or systematically failing to read them; or inheriting them. Even the most obvious means of acquiring books, buying them, has its tactics, which differ when one buys at bookstores, or from catalogues, or at auctions. But “the most praiseworthy method” of acquiring books is “writing them oneself”. 156

Beneath the whimsicality, then, possession becomes a matter not of contingency but of strategy (230).

This is the first characteristic of the collector’s relation to objects that is, Ackbar argues, the basis of comparison between writer and collector. Despite, then, the inherently fetishistic nature of collection in the aurified objects that propel the activity of collecting, the true collector demonstrates an engagement with processual experience through “his” own creation of possessions. Stein is an exemplar of this relation between the collector and the object; she both collected and wrote her own books. In this context Tender Buttons is just such an example of a acquiring a book through “writing [it] oneself”. Thus processual experience—the writing of a text in order to possess it—enters into this context of otherwise aurified objects.

Ackbar then identifies “personal ownership” as definitive of the collector’s relation to the object. This is not an emphasis on the necessity of the individual to meaning- creation, rather, it is a sense that it is only the individual who can resurrect or introduce, through “personal” collections, things that are not currently authorised or accessible in the mainstream culture. Ackbar argues:

A second aspect of ownership that Benjamin stresses is the importance of the “personal owner”: “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. This is not, however, an ideology of the private self that Benjamin is elaborating here. He makes the same point in an essay on Fuchs, and there he adds an explanation: “The collector’s passion is his divining rod and turns him into a finder of new sources.” It led Fuchs to study “scorned and apocryphal matters” such as caricature, pornography, and the problematics of “mass art”. These two aspects of ownership can now be compared to the writer’s use of the image. Ownership is first a question of strategy, of allowing a process to unfold; and second, it is an interruption—not in the sense that the private 157

owner takes objects out of circulation, but in the sense that he takes objects that are out of circulation and confronts cultural history with them (230-31).

The points Ackbar enumerates here relate to Stein’s collecting in general and, specifically, the collection that is Tender Buttons. The difference that gender makes can be seen in the dynamic between mainstream and marginalized or invisible; Stein “confronts cultural history with” “objects” that, rather than being “out of circulation”, have never been in circulation, such as the “objects” that fetishistically stand in for the female body and that are “in use” in lesbian sexuality.

Finally, Ackbar notes “the question of the transmissibility or communicability of experience” (232), a point that is, I would argue, akin to the processual and tactile experientiality of the new structure of subject/object relations in the twentieth century, as they play out in the process of literary creation:

As the collector is concerned not to reify the art object, so the storyteller is concerned not to reify the story. Storytelling does not aim “to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”—and, we might add, the way marks of the collector cling to the object. Storytelling is a medium in both senses of the word, as is collecting (232).

Both “storytelling” and the exhibition of collections is a shift from the closed circuit of a private collection to the display of that collection for an audience or public. This is, in a sense, the necessary endpoint (and beginning) of the collection, as with the resurrection of “scorned and apocryphal matters”, which aptly describes the implicit representations of lesbian sexuality in Tender Buttons, which will be further examined later in this chapter. 158

Labour and the language/paint “surface” I have argued that Cubism fetishizes objects through the use of still-life and the inherent aurification of collected objects arranged by geniuses. Further, it has been shown that another subject/object structure, with a trajectory oppositional to that of fetishism, is operating also in Tender Buttons, a structure in which process and tactility are central. Now it will be shown that these same fluctuations between structures are evident in operations on the mirror level of the language of the text. The analysis of Cubism in Stein’s work can be further used as a node of interchange between word and referent, language and materiality. Building upon the strand of still-life and Cubist analysis of Tender Buttons, this chapter will now extend this further into a consideration of the metatextual and non-referential aspects of Stein’s text that can also be seen in Cubism. As numerous critics have demonstrated, Cubist art is about the insistence upon the surface that is creating the representing, and I recast this to contend that Cubism is thus interested in the labour required to produce the work of art.

Stein’s Tender Buttons, as the title suggests, is based on a premise of the visual still-life but is further engaged with the complexities of subject-object relations. On the level of language the text mirrors the tension between competing structures of subject-object relations evident on the level of the materiality that the words signify. In his article on the relation between Stein and the “L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E” poets Peter Nicholls argues that:

…Tender Buttons, like the Cubist painting to which it is often compared, tends to situate itself midway between representation and abstraction… Stein’s idiom may seem coy at times, but her reference to ‘excitement’ is more than whimsical hyperbole: for the fact that nondescriptive terms suggest themselves to her produces pleasure in precisely the degree that it frees the mind from the obligations of reference and conventional repetition. This particular freedom is the objective of a form of Modernism which is quite different from the one we associate with Eliot… (152). 159

Again, Stein’s text is one in which pleasure is central, as Nicholls identifies. The pleasure of listing is a fetishistic pleasure in the satisfaction derived from apprehending each object in the list. Jayne L. Walker argues that Stein’s literary techniques parallel the painterly techniques of Cubism:

The concern with vision and visual description…continues throughout the text. Names of colors and adjectives describing the qualities of light are abundant in Stein’s “portraits of things.” Lines and outlines, surfaces, centers, lengths, widths, and measurements evoke the compositional resources and structures of painting (137-38).

As Walker identifies here, the perspective of the author-subject and the reader is an optical one—the perspective of “looking” and the gaze. This is the fetishistic perspective of the subject fascinated by the object, at a distance from it, within the terms of this thesis. However, it can be argued further that when the emphasis is on the experience of measurements and spatiality, through tactile interaction and the use of these things, these same words can construct a relation between subject and object that is defined by its tactility and closeness. This is evident in ‘A SELTZER BOTTLE’:

Supposing a certain time selected is assured, suppose it is even necessary, suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is needed, suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle and even if it could be any black border, supposing all this altogether made a dress and suppose it was actual, suppose the mean way to state it was occasional, …suppose this and an elegant settlement a very elegant settlement is more than of consequence, it is not final and sufficient and substituted. This which was so kindly a present was constant (8).

Here, there is both the experience of measurements and spatial actions that construct realist representation (“a certain time selected”, “any black border”), but these elements are considered in terms of the ways they are used (“suppose the rest of the message is 160

mixed with a very long slender needle”). The tactility creates an object “all this together made a dress”, but this is not a final process as this “elegant settlement…is not final and sufficient and substituted”. It is not the fetish object “substituted” for acknowledgement and disavowal of labour. The “present” moment is “constant”, constituted in each moment of tactile engagement between subject and object. However, the word “present” means also a gift, synonymous with a precious object, a commodity fetish. Thus, in this example of Stein’s language both structures of subject/object relations can and do operate at the same time. Walker claims:

While its concrete objects are animated with human qualities, Tender Buttons presents human beings simply as physical objects, equal to all the others named and arranged in these “still lifes”: “and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining” (473). Here, as in “A Feather” and many other pieces, spatial contiguity is the ordering principle of this “perfectly unprecedented arrangement,” but “mild colds” and “real seasons” mingle with the “curves and outlines” of purely spatial configurations (138).

The internal content of each poem provides, in varying degrees according to the individual piece, demonstrations of the subject/object relations in a twentieth-century structure. That the description of processes and labour required to produce the object is proportionately damaging to the aura of the object is evident in the proximity of sentences and paragraphs that describe process to re-iterations of the experience of distance, and the experience of the visual evidence of the aura such as its “shine”, the quality of reflectiveness that prevents the subject from experiencing the object as “close”.

The relation between Stein’s text and Modernist ideas of language demonstrates the persistence of the referent of a material world that exists outside of language. Randa Dubnick’s 1984 discussion of Stein’s writing and its relation to Cubism, Structures of 161

Obscurity, is a thorough analysis of what Dubnick argues are Stein’s two main styles. Dubnick uses the deconstructive tools of structuralism, particularly ideas of selection, combination, contiguity etc. on horizontal and vertical planes (hypertaxis and parataxis), to read Tender Buttons. He argues that these tools are the literary equivalent of the painters’ selections and, further, that they particularly correspond, as does Stein’s methodology for Tender Buttons as a whole text, to the second phase of Cubism, termed ‘synthetic’ Cubism. The first phase of Cubism, Analytic Cubism, was characterised by the artist’s intellectual deconstruction of the subject matter that was seen—the “real” object in the world—and reconstruction of it using the fragments into which it had been broken down. Synthetic Cubism, on the other hand, followed a trajectory that built up the object that the painter (or writer in Stein’s case) was representing through accretion, from the selections and combinations made in the artist’s head.15 However, as Dubnick’s analysis suggests, neither type of cubism completely departed from the idea of whatever was being represented as an originary thing. In fact, Dubnick echoes the Steinbergian analysis of the picture plane, in relation to Cubism:

All Cubist art implies a tension between the two-dimensional picture plane and the three-dimensionality of space represented. But, whereas analytic cubism with its spatially complex faceted surface seems to place more emphasis on a shallow three-dimensionality, synthetic cubism emphasizes the surface of the picture plane, sometimes in a very witty reminder to the reader that the depth in a painting is an illusion (as in Braque’s famous trompe l’oeil nails painted on the surface of the painting). The emphasis on the painting’s flat surface, first produced in collage by pasting flat pieces of paper on the picture plane, suppresses relationships of spatial syntax by de-emphasizing depth (40).

The “tension” between the representational picture plane and the experience of reality can be understood through the emphasis on subject/object relations, in terms of fetishism, as the tension between the labour and the finished product, manifested in

15Walker argues further to this that analytic Cubism is a methodology evident in the 925-page novel, The Making of Americans, written six years earlier than Tender Buttons. 162

terms of space, as distance and closeness. Dubnick discusses Picasso’s ‘Guitar and Wine Glass’ in terms of the importance cubism placed on the “art object in its own right as an opaque surface”, a finished product, a work of art, existing as a material object in space:

Lines do not clarify spatial relationships by providing perspective. Depth becomes ambiguous as relationships of in front of, behind, forward, and back become impossible to read. In Guitar and Wine Glass, it is hard to tell if one is looking through the guitar at a wall or if the wall is part of the guitar. Actually, all such questions are no longer relevant. We are looking at an opaque surface, not through a window on the world. Stein’s second obscure style and synthetic cubism both force attention on the signifying element as a thing in itself and on the art object in its own right as an opaque surface—of paint and pasted paper or of words—to be looked at rather than through (41).

The importance of materiality is central to Dubnick’s subsequent reading of Tender Buttons as a language “surface”. Dubnick argues that Tender Buttons:

…marked a change from mimesis of external reality to mimesis of the intersection of the present moment of consciousness with an object. It also marked the emergence of her “literature” as a piece of independent reality, as a thing in itself with no need to represent any other objective reality to justify its existence (28).

Here, in his formulation of the operations of the text, Dubnick himself rehearses the text’s struggle between art as capable of immersing the reader in “the present moment of consciousness with an object”, the tactile experience, but at the same time as a work of art, a finished product, it becomes “a thing in itself,” a coherent object that does not “need…any other objective reality to justify its existence”. This is the point at which, on several levels, mimesis recedes to irrelevance and the object becomes the text, and language, itself. However, there are two problematic conclusions here. Firstly, Dubnick 163

implies that the two experiences of the text, as both “tactile experience”, and “a thing in itself”, are congruent. The relations between the subject and the object that Dubnick summarises are, as he argues, fundamentally related to Cubism and they therefore, as I have demonstrated, function according to the logic of the still-life and its inherently fetishizing operations. However, as I have also argued, there is a second and different structure of subject/objects relations operating in the text. Secondly, where Dubnick sees the “opaque surface” of a Cubist work of art as the literal material composition of it (the “paint and pasted paper” of it) he sees Stein’s text as a textual reality, a mass of words that has “no need to represent any other objective reality to justify its existence”. This is not the same operation across mediums, because the book is a mass-produced object. Literature in its mass-produced physicality (the reproducibility of inexpensive editions of a book after the invention of the printing press and industrialization) can only ever have a metaphorical surface.

The physical object of a book has a value (often a high one as discussed in relation to Modernist high-art limited editions in Chapter Two), but it is the words inside that are the “surface”, and while each individual copy can become “used” by its owner and accrue its own uniqueness, it will nonetheless always be the unique, original painting that possesses the biggest aura of the two, because of market value. My point here is that there is a different abstract conception of “surface” between visual art and literature. Walker summarizes this when she says:

This freedom to put into play such different kinds of signs is, of course, impossible in writing. Language is a closed system of arbitrary signs; it cannot present a literal piece of an object. Nouns and adjectives are the most “concrete” resources of language, but they are the names of things and attributes and not the things themselves. Still, language brings things to mind by calling their names, and sounds and syntax can create relationships among them that are as complex and multiple as the ones in Cubist collage (133). 164

Thus, literature can only ever have a metaphorical “surface”. This can be seen in an analysis of the points at which this occurs in the text, as in ‘APPLE’:

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use (30).

All of this “surface” is created by the “use” of the words in homonymical/synonymical rhymes and suited sounds. “Calm seen” is a rearrangement of almost all the letters of “seed clam”, and “calm seen, cold cream” is a rhyme. “Potato, potato and no no” is a sound-repetition, and “a green seen” is both an internal-rhyme and a visual iteration. The “surface” is visual to some extent, but it is also an aural and semantic one, in which the difference between words syntagmatically and paradigmatically creates meaning, as theorised by Saussure. Harriet Scott Chessman has argued that the first sentence of ‘APPLE’ constitutes a “word heap”. The very term Chessman uses reflects Nicholls’ claim that Stein’s text is “positioned part way between representation and abstraction”. “Word heap” invokes both the language focus of the poem and the sense of material creation.

This is what Charles Altieri is suggesting when he argues, in Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (1989), that:

…we must speak of her making material, not the words as sensual elements, but the semantic weight of the words as composing their own site. That site, in turn, can be understood only in something like physical terms, because meanings appear to lock together, like facets turning in a four-dimensional space (241). 165

There is a constant fluctuation between signified materiality and the materiality of the words used to describe reality—the language surface that is constructed. In a sense Altieri joins Gass in the call to render Tender Buttons both a materiality and a deconstruction of materiality. As the above examination of cubism in Tender Buttons demonstrates, the analytical, experimental and critical concept/project of the Cubists to break down representation quickly leads to a shift in consideration from a focus on subject matter to an emphasis on medium and the techniques of artistic production. Thus, where the use of colour, line, and form become central (draw attention to themselves) in Cubist painting, the deliberate use of different forms of words and language is a meta-textual commentary that similarly re-focuses the reader from the subject-matter of objects to the metatextual process of writing. This fluctuation between signified material reality and the materiality of the words used to describe reality is evident in sections such as this one from ‘ROASTBEEF’:

All the time that there is use there is use and any time there is a surface there is a surface, and every time there is an exception there is an exception and every time there is a division there is a dividing. Any time there is a surface there is a surface and every time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence and every time that is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always, not particular, tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the succor and the white and the same and the better and the red and the same and the centre and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether (21).

Each word or phrase is repeated in a construction that emphasizes the “thereness” of it as a word or phrase: “Any time there is a surface there is a surface”. This repetition puts the focus on the construction of materiality that language effects, at the same time as showing that “there is”, in a sense, no real material object behind or as a result of the assertion that “there is a surface”. All “there is” is the four words “there” “is” “a” “surface”. This movement, or fluctuation (as it is easily reversible), from subject matter 166

to medium and technique, creates a reverberation throughout Tender Buttons, and in other of Stein’s similar works. One way this occurs is through the use of the titles that are made list-like, and the general pleasure of the list, the stating of the noun that is the displacement of the narrative about that object. The list is a collection that raises the question: Is the pleasure of listing located in the material objects signified by the words, or in the look and sound of the words themselves? This is the question that the text constantly presents. In Tender Buttons each poem breaks down the coherence of the object that it is about, but what remains is the pleasure of the smug, full word that encompasses the narrative of itself.

Collection remains an issue when it is language rather than materiality that is under consideration. There is even a collection of actions/verbs in ‘ROASTBEEF’:

To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and to settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satisfy a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer (24).

The collection here is of verbs, and the repetitive structure of each clause emphasizes the first two words that constitute the infinitive: “To bury…to raise…to surround…to bake…to suggest…to settle…to surrender…”.

The meta-textuality evident in Tender Buttons is of central significance as it is one of the points at which the two structures of the subject/object relations show themselves to be operating simultaneously. As Jane Palatini Bowers clearly states, Tender Buttons is a metatext: “...like many of Stein's works...[it is] a text that is self-reflexively focused on the materials and methods of its own composition” (100). The meta-textual commentary in Tender Buttons is central to the deconstructive work of the text, but in terms of 167

relations between the subject and the object it functions to both record/rehearse the process of labour and tactile engagement with the object that leads, in Benjamin’s formulation, to a dissolution of the aura. However, simultaneously and in contradiction, metatextuality serves to reinstate the authorial subject, the artist-genius whose “mind directs an apple”, as Walker suggests (89), and who is in charge of the whole collection and arrangement and is quite determinedly attempting to create a work of art. In the metatextual commentary, I am contending, the authorial subject draws closer to the objects of the text, the accumulation of word-objects, thereby disintegrating the aura of the fetishized commodity and achieving a temporality in which the authorial subject and object are constructed simultaneously in the time of the labour and process. This is evident in ‘BREAKFAST’:

Seat a knife near a cage and very near a decision and more nearly a timely working cat and scissors. Do this temporarily and make no more mistake in standing. Spread it all and arrange the white place, does this show in the house, does it not show in the green that is not necessary for that color, does it not even show in the explanation and singularly not at all stationary (28).

There is an author-subject, the writer-collector, here, who is seating “a knife near a cage”, both the words in language and the material objects that the words signify. The writer-collector is “very near a decision”, a report on the status of the self-as-subject- creating-object that further emphasizes the subject and artistic production. “Do this temporarily and make no more mistake in standing. Spread it all and arrange the white place” are lines that describe simultaneous writing process and authorial selection and arrangement. The labour of production is being recorded but the subject who presides over that labour also coheres, becomes itself in the act of giving directions. Movement is the final indicator of the structures according to which all these metatextual self- directions are operating. The stasis that is a condition or quality of the fetishized object is not present here, rather, the movement that is a quality of the twentieth-century subject/object relations is in evidence. 168

However, because Stein’s authority and genius status are threatened by the exposing of the work of art as simply a result of labour over time, without the aura that obscures labour in the high-art piece, in order to maintain the authority of a subject position Stein as the authorial subject must continue to emphasize her own subjectivity as a genius, writing the work. Thus, within the text, the meta-textual commentary highlights the process of creation that is obscured by the arbitrary value assigned to the work of art once it is finished, but as a record of the subject and what the subject has created it cannot but re-confirm the status of the artist within the high-art Modernist economy, as established in relation to Everybody’s Autobiography earlier in this thesis. This operation occurs in the first page of ‘ROOMS’, when the present tense of process and experience in the moment slides into the past tense and process turns to product, the congealed, the finished:

To begin the placing there is no wagon. There is no change lighter. It was done. And then the spreading, that was not, that was not accomplishing that needed standing and yet the time was not so difficult as they were not all in place. They had no change. They were not respected. They were that, they did it so much in the matter and this showed that that settlement was not condensed. It was spread there. Any change was in the ends of the centre. A heap was heavy. There was no change (43).

The shift in tenses from present to past is the shift from writing process to contemplation of a finished object. The first two sentences are about process in the present moment, evident in the present tense, which is followed by the phrase “It was done”. The “it” of labour, or the object that is the task, is finished, “done”. This is a solidification of process then, into finishedness and stasis, which is seen to follow completion in the lines: “They had no change. …A heap was heavy. There was no change”. The congealing of labour into a static object, a “heap” that makes its solidity felt (it is “heavy”) is evident here; the process of transformation has ceased (“There was no change”). 169

It is through the meta-textual commentary, then, that the authorial subject Stein fluctuates between the tactile and the distanced, both “taking possession” of the objects in an attempt to “dissolve their auras” but also and ultimately re-aurifying them as artworks by attributing them with “connoisseur value”. The writer-collector stands back from the work, re-engages with the optical perspective on what has been written, viewing it as, and simultaneously rendering it as, an image, a work of art at a distance whose labour is obscured by the arbitrary value of it as a unique work of art, a commodity fetish.

That the description of the processes and labour required to produce the object is proportionately damaging to the aura of the object is evident in the proximity of sentences and paragraphs that describe process to re-iterations of the experience of distance and the experience of the visual evidence of the aura such as its “shine”, the quality of reflectiveness that prevents the subject from experiencing the object as “close”. These re-iterations of distance are a defensiveness against the non-aurified, a re- assertion of the fetish. However, Stein’s strategy of aesthetic pleasure in the fetishized object—the collector's pleasure—her desire to enjoy the aurified object transfigured not into use value but connoisseur value and still disconnected from the processes of its labour, is an urge encouraged into the inevitable by the inherent pull of the objects in capitalism towards this aurification. Stein, after having demonstrated the labour of production and de-aurified the objects of her poems, allows their auras of uniqueness and the fetishizing circuit of the work of art itself once it enters the market, to reclaim and repossess the objects in Tender Buttons. This is evident in the number of poems in which sentences about labour in which multiple actions are recorded in their subsequent moments of happening are recouped into a final product of this labour. In the ‘OBJECTS’ section these include ‘DIRT AND NOT COPPER’ (all emphases in the following selections are mine):

Dirt and not copper makes a color darker. It makes the shape so heavy and makes no melody harder (5). 170

In ‘A METHOD OF A CLOAK’:

A single climb to a line, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate adventure and courage and a clock, all this which is a system, which has feeling, which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver (6).

The entirety of ‘A PAPER’:

A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool (12).

And of ‘COLD CLIMATE’:

A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places (12).

In the ‘FOOD’ section, in ‘ROASTBEEF’:

Sincerely gracious one morning, sincerely graciously trembling, sincere in gracious eloping, all this makes a furnace and a blanket. All this shows quantity (23).

In ‘MUTTON’:

Does it dirty a ceiling. It does not. Is it dainty, it is if prices are sweet. Is it lamentable, it is not if there is no undertaker. Is it curious, it is not when there is youth. All this makes a line, it even makes makes no more. All this makes cherries (26).

In ‘BREAKFAST’: 171

A grey turn to a top and bottom, a silent pocketful of much heating, all the pliable succession of surrendering makes an ingenious joy (27).

In ‘ROOMS’ section:

A package and a filter and even a funnel, all this together makes a scene… (46).

In all these poems a group of objects, or an experience, or an action, or several of these in a combination of sub-clauses, is refered back to as “all this”. The mass that is “all this” “makes” a new object, or couple of objects, or a new experience. One arrangement, then, creates a different and new arrangement that is the sum of its parts but unique. Words become new language-objects. Walker points out that:

…in “Food,” as in the rest of Tender Buttons, concrete nouns and adjectives mingle in…astonishing ways. “A cake, a real salve made of mutton and liquor, a specially retained rinsing and an established cork and blazing” transforms an ordinary dinner into an astonishingly unpalatable menu (483). Although the individual foods named are rather bland, the bill of fare includes such exotic items as a “buttered flower” and a “carpet steak”—delightful combinations that can exist only in the realm of language” (139).

Further to the language-combinations discussed here, however, I am contending that on the structural level ‘ROOMS’ internally recoups its own process (and the rhetorical processes of the first two sections) and states what has been “shown”:

There was a whole collection made. A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made. This shows the disorder, it does, it shows more likeness than anything else, it shows the single mind that directs an apple (46). 172

Within the context of the entire text as a collection, the statement:“There was a whole collection made” circumscribes the whole of Tender Buttons so far and, as all of the words in the next sentence have been used at least once already in the text, the sentence itself forms a kind of microcosmic or representative collection of the overall collection that the author has made. Then “this”—the whole collection—“shows the disorder”, “it shows” the similarities between objects and between words) and “it shows” the authorial control in the phrase “the single mind that directs an apple”, as Walker identifies. This “showing” continues in ‘ROOMS’:

A can containing a curtain is a solid sentimental usage. The trouble in both eyes does not come from the same symmetrical carpet, it comes from there being no more disturbance than in little paper. This does show the teeth, it shows color (46). The concern with vision and visual description that is evident in the pieces I have been discussing continues throughout the text. Names of colors and adjectives describing the qualities of light are abundant in Stein’s “portraits of things”. Lines and outlines, surfaces, centers, lengths, widths, and measurements evoke the compositional resources and structures of painting. But the chosisme of Tender Buttons is as far from Robbe-Grillet’s “littérature objective” of the 1950s as it is from Ponge’s meditations on the meanings of concrete objects. Robbe- Grillet’s early novels use the language of geometrical description to “register the distance” between the object and the self. Tender Buttons systematically collapses this distance, as the title itself indicates. Buttons are “tender,” a glass is “blind”, a color is “hurt”, food is “kind.” An interpenetration of mind and matter animates the portrayal of concrete objects… (137-38).

Walker’s statement is true of Tender Buttons, but by understanding this distance between subject and object as a function of fetishism—the “phenomenon of distance” theorized by Benjamin as the subject’s relation to the object—I have shown that there are two different structures of subject/object relations functioning in the text. Through the operations of the fetishizing structure the distance between subject and object that has been “collapsed” is constantly reasserted. 173

This perpetual collapse and reconsolidation on the level of language occurs through a similar rhetorical move to the repeated use of the phrase “all this makes”, discussed earlier, as a recouping on the level of the materiality signified by language. The phrases “all this shows”, “it shows”, and “this shows” refer to the preceeding metatextual directions, and reclaim them as coherent entities (all emphases in the following selections are my own):

A tribune, a tribune does not mean paper, it means nothing more than cake, it means more sugar, it shows the state of lengthening any nose. The last spice is that which shows the whole evening spent in that sleep, it shows so that walking is an alleviation, and yet this astonishes everybody the distance is so sprightly. …One taste one tack, one taste one bottle, one taste one fish, one taste one barometer. This shows no distinguishing sign when there is a store. …Climate, climate is not southern, a little glass, a bright winter, a strange supper an elastic tumbler, all this shows that the back is furnished and red which is red is a dark color. …The change is mercenary that settles whitening the coloring and serving dishes where there is metal and making yellow any yellow every color in a shade which is expressed in a tray. This is a monster and quite awkward quite awkward and the little design which is flowered which is not strange and yet has visible writing, this is not shown all the time but at once, after that it rests where it is and where it is in place. No change is not needed. That does show design (48-50).

All of these “showings” imply a metatextual re-examination of the process and labour that shifts back from the twentieth-century tactile subject/object relations to the nineteenth century and the structure of fetishism, through a retreat in spatial terms. This is a contemplation by the artist of the finished product, and it returns this chapter’s analysis to the question of art in modernity which, as has been argued, while it experimented internally and broke down or challenged some nineteenth-century conventions, was recouped into the fetish structure through its status as a collection. The 174

collection takes the “use value” from objects only to confer them with “connoisseur value”, a value that is parallel to the value of the work of art and therefore asserts the continuing importance of that category and value to Modernist artists such as Stein.

As we have seen, Leo Steinberg argues that Cubism did not completely break down the “Renaissance worldspace concept” (84). Stein’s text maintains the structure of fetishism interimplicated in this perspective at the same time as it explores and develops a new structure. It is the overall structure of Tender Buttons, that reasserts the fetish structure of subject/object relations, which is a function of the inherent fetishizing function/effect of the work of art, experienced through the “phenomenon of distance”.

These relations between the authorial subject and the objects she is writing about is mirrored by the relations between the reading subject and the text-object/word-objects. The labour of writing and reading are thus constructed in the internal content of each poem, but are recouped by the aurification of the finished product of the labour, manifested in the text’s constant assertions that something has been “made”. Through the processes of subject/object simultaneous construction a coherent object is created—an aurified work of art—separate from a subject (that is now brought into being by the very instantiation of an object). This recurring operation continues up to and including the final paragraph of Tender Buttons which through its operations recoups the ‘ROOMS’ section, the previous two sections of ‘OBJECTS’ and ‘FOOD’, and the entirety of Tender Buttons:

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even notwithstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely 175

to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain (52).

“All this” could refer to simply the contents of the first clause of this final sentence, or the contents of this final paragraph, or of the contents of the whole of the ‘ROOMS’ section, or the contents of the whole of Tender Buttons. It is a reflexive operation—as “encircling” as the ocean—that recoups everything that has come before, “all” the statements of labour, all the negative assertions (“not even”) all the words of the text, into one final image composed of two objects: a “magnificent asparagus” and “a fountain”. On the levels of both language as referring to the material world, and language as a materiality of its own, labour is recouped as fetish object. Even at this point, however, the possibility for the processual and tactile structure to return is contained within the “fountain”, which is an object inherently about the continual movement of water; it is an image that, in a sense, combines the two structures within the material object it signifies. Fountains are often of stone, or marble, they are monuments, heavy and static, and associated with history and the passing of time, but through them moves the “fountain” of water, the fleeting, the changing, a substance we have to consume into ourselves to stay alive and out of which we ourselves are largely composed. Thus, the fetishized object and a consumptive process exist simultaneously.

The individual poems in Tender Buttons recoup their subject matter, that is, objects, through the fluctuation between the processual insistence of the internal text of each poem and the pleasure in the distanced perspective at the end of the process that gazes on the finished product, the entirety of the individual poem as a paragraph or a group of sentences. In its meta-textual commentary on its own processes of labour, Tender Buttons acknowledges the representation of tactile experience as process and labour of engagement with each object, in each poem. However the text disavows this labour by the arbitrary pleasure of the coherent object—even if that is a “new” object—through the 176

displacement of the narrative of labour onto a single object i.e. the object of the title, that continues to resonate with the reader despite the deconstructive work of the poem itself.

Another text written in the style of Tender Buttons, ‘Advertisements’, announces its imbrication in a capitalist economy and the commodity fetishism that is central to that economy. Here, too, the tension between a structure that fetishizes and an experiential structure is evident. The individual poems in ‘Advertisements’ demonstrate an excessive form of the operation occurring in Tender Buttons. They are again, like the latter text (but even more so), over-determinedly located in the economy of capitalism in which the commodity fetish holds sway; these poems are literally selling commodified objects of mass-production, as the titles of poems such as ‘A Grape Cure’, ‘Fastening Tube Roses’, and ‘Evian Water’, attest. As their internal language deconstructs the coherence of the objects, focusing on the subject’s experience in a tactile negotiation, the next or successive title recoups the idea of the coherent object and returns the aura of the noun to its fetishized form.

However, both Tender Buttons and ‘Advertisements’ contain at least an equal number of poems whose titles are not singular nouns or a conventional noun/adjective combination, but a statement, or an assertion, or an un-conventional combination of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, such as: ‘A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION’, and ‘A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS’. Whether the title is a conventional signifier of a conventional signified, or a new block of words that signify a new signified, each title forms an “object” that is the subject of the poem and that is both aurified and not-aurified. Thus, in ‘Advertisements’, Stein is selling objects that are called ‘They Do It Better Than I Do’, ‘It Is a Natural Thing’, ‘To Open’, and ‘Pleasures in Sincere Wishes’ (5-11). Stein’s “advertisements” retain their playful pleasure, and her assertion that “no companies would want them” is about her retaining the value of them as the collector- author’s items with their corresponding personal “connoisseur value”. They may have 177

no value in their supposed field but as works of art they are “priceless”. Stein retains possession of the finished product of her own labour, the works of art.16

This means, finally, that I disagree with Walker’s claim that:

…the discourse [of Tender Buttons] systematically refuses to present an authorial I/eye to serve as its origin and to guarantee its truth. “The author of all that is in there behind the door,” teasing the reader with deliberate absence (141).

I would argue that the text may lack an internal center, but has a very sure external center: the authorial subject. Given my demonstration that the impulses of collection drive the text to recoup tactile process and intersubjectivity into coherent objects that reenter the spatiality of the “phenomenon of distance” and in doing so recast both an authorial subject and a reading subject as those subjects gazing at the fetishized object from a distance, ultimately the authorial subject remains in control of the collection, because it is s/he who has “made” “the arrangement”. The line Walker quotes from Tender Buttons (“The author of all that is in there behind the door”) demonstrates that

16 Stein’s attitude to these advertisements attests to a view of the ‘labour’ of poetry very different from that expressed in Louis Zukofsky’s poem “A”-9, as demonstrated by Tim Woods’ argument in his The Poetics of the Limit: ethics and politics in modern and contemporary American poetry (New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002):

The first stanza speaks of alienation resulting from exchange and the market’s impersonal values being imposed on producers. Action here is labor that loses its product, an unsatisfying and stultifying form of activity. Enjoyment or fulfilment is divorced from labor, as there is a transformation of the product from a need into an imposed value, which leads to a loss of freedom. The producer is unable to find himself objectified, confirmed, and realized in the product. There is a loss of self in “things related as equated values” (“A”-9: 106). The world dominates the producer, and hence his freedom as well as the distance to contemplate his product is lost. The producer is no longer in control of his activity, which enables him to stand back and contemplate it. The laborer’s product is left to the determiNation of the impersonal and mechanical laws of the market. With the development of exchange, products lose all significance for the producer: Their only significance lies in their equation with other products. Any description of the object of value is in fact an identification of duplicity and falsity. What becomes important for the producer is only abstract value, exchange value… (106).

While this may be Zukofsky’s representation of the relationship between subject and object when the object is the commodity fetish of capitalism, this is not how Benjamin understands it, nor how it operates in Stein. 178

the author is deliberately remembered in the text’s construction. Equal weight must surely be given to statements in the text such as “the mind that directs an apple” (which Walker herself engages with, as quoted earlier) and “an arrangement in a system to point”. When Walker adds to her conclusion the assertion that: “By compelling the reader to confront this idea that it is a structure that lacks a center, Tender Buttons most aggressively asserts its modernity” (141), I would argue that the authorial collector- subject is the center of the text’s exploration of two different structures of subject/object relations. Without doubt the text is an engaged, intense exploration of the multiple structures of modernity and their competing aesthetics, but it has not jettisoned the author-collector subject entirely, as Walker suggests. The text “asserts its modernity” but does so by negotiating the different structures of subject/object relations that were (and continue to be) in play at the time of her writing, in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In Benjamin’s discussion of the fetish object there is a considerable amount of implicit judgement about the effects of the aurified object on the fixated subject. In the same way that the collector’s relation to objects can “liberate” them (from “the drudgery of being useful”, The Arcades Project 9), the ordinary subject can become fixated, held in thrall by the aura of the fetishized object. This creates a stasis which is implicitly seen as negative because it is the “eternal return” of Nietzsche’s theorization. Similarly, as Peter Nicholls shows, Modernism privileges as positive the characteristics of movement and dynamism, despite their potential imbrications in negative social and cultural formulations such as Futurism’s infamous complicity with ideas of destruction and war. These negative/positive inflections, value judgements about the object and its “value” in capitalism, create a false trajectory of artistic experimentation towards newer-equals- better modes of representing the world. This negative connotation is an implication of Marx’s original theorization of commodity fetishism. His analysis showed that the working-classes received wages so low that they could not afford the arbitrary market- values accorded to products they themselves had created through their labour (Volume One 76). Marx called this phenomenon the alienation of the worker from “his” own labour. But Stein, as it has been seen, took great pleasure in, and derived much from, the 179

“old” structure of fetishism, through deploying it and challenging it to greater and lesser degrees.

The ambiguity and ambivalence of the operations that aurify/de-aurify/re-aurify objects in Tender Buttons is an ambivalence that can be explained by the greater consideration of Benjamin’s attribution of positive and negative values to aspects and consequences of the aura, in his deployment of it across his oeuvre. Gyorgy Markus argues that Benjamin himself was ambivalent about the aura, and did not advocate its dissolution completely as he saw in it the pleasure that it affords, related, also, to particular subjectivities, such as that of the collector:

Thus the decay of the aura which Benjamin registers as an ongoing process is itself ambiguous: it designates an emancipatory possibility connected with the radical refunctioning of art and a danger, the disappearance not only of the privatised, empathic, autonomous, aesthetic experience, but also of the ability to imagine and experience fulfilment, the gift of happiness. The traceless vanishing of the aura would mean just this latter. … But genuine art, not in complicity with the horrors of the present, has its task in making precisely what in privatised experience unconsciously evokes the impression of auraticity into the consciously recongizable and examinable object of a potentially collective experience. At places Benjamin calls this task the transformation of aura into the “trace” [Spur]… (33).

It could be argued that the “trace” is what we read in Tender Buttons; the poems are the auras converted into a “collective experience” of the labour of process and tactile appropriation. These traces create new objects, however, with auras of their own. As has been argued, the “enchantment” of Tender Buttons does not necessarily alienate.

Judgement and negative/positive connotations become increasingly important when this thesis returns to sexual fetishism, given the amount of debate by feminist theorists over whether there can or should be female sexual fetishism. 180

Language, lesbian sexuality, and codification As has been examined, the interrelations of materiality and language in the methodology of Tender Buttons are evident in the shift in critical analysis from subject matter to language as central to understanding that subject matter. The third major strand of criticism of Tender Buttons is that of the readings of the text as a codified, yet explicit, description of lesbian sexuality and sex acts which were not culturally acceptable topics for representation in 1914. The “language surface” of Tender Buttons conceals a sexual subtext, according to the widely held view of Stein critics such as Malcolm Brinnin, William H. Gass, Marjorie Perloff, and Jayne L. Walker. The idea of codification works according to shifts in discursive readings of the text. The ordinary, or primary meanings (a discourse of literalness) signified by the words of the text form one surface of representation of material reality. Examples are the coloured flowers described in ‘RED ROSES’ in the ‘OBJECTS’ section. In a literal reading of this poem the language creates images of literal “holes”, the colour “red” as a simple adjective, and a toppling of objects is suggested by the word “collapse”. However, if the discourse used to read the language surface of Tender Buttons is shifted to that of the metaphorical signification of the body including bodily parts and functions, the meanings of the words of ‘RED ROSES’—“A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot” (14)—become sexually explicit. “A cool red rose and a pink cut pink” becomes the female genitals, “a collapse” becomes an “orgasm”. Walker has noted this:

In her earlier works, Stein portrayed human beings in terms of essential character, abstracted from their concrete daily life in the physical world. The radical reversal in Tender Buttons suggests not so much a dehumanization as a new affirmation that human existence is intimately involved with the physicality of matter and of flesh. The physical world portrayed in Tender Buttons includes the most intimate realities of the female body. “A Petticoat” shows “a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm”. And a “shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less,” an obvious transmutation of Alice (138-39). 181

This section of my argument brings together the inextricability of materiality and language, and the problematics of their imbrication. The extremes of language is a system of signs that are used according, or not, to elaborate rules, and the materiality that language is used to signify, by Steinian criticism that identifies a codified narrative of lesbian sexuality and sexual practices in Tender Buttons. These readings of the text depend, on one hand, on the multiple resonances of words to signify more than one “thing”. In terms of codification that “thing” is another, different, secret thing. On the other hand these readings require that the words really do refer to material reality (otherwise they cannot be re-read or re-interpreted), to the bodies, objects and practices within the discourse of sexuality and sexual behaviour.

The decryption of Stein’s experimental texts, so that they reveal representations of lesbian sexual practices and lesbian identity, has been explicitly critiqued by several feminist Stein theorists. Positioning her analysis of Lifting Belly Susan Holbrook argues that:

Whether in the name of regulation or affirmation, however, the decoding of Stein’s work seems to me to miss the mark; the one-to-one equivalence that encryption presumes would deny the polysemic, indeterminate trajectories of Stein’s vocabulary (751).

Holbrook, then, views decodification as an exercise that limits the multiplicity of meaning. Shari Benstock argues that Stein understood the fundamental non-referentiality of language, and used language to create meaning precisely through its ambiguities. Benstock claims that motivating Stein’s lifetime of experimental revision, subversion, and deconstruction of conventional grammar and language, were her “Sapphic impulses”. However, Benstock warns against the straightforward translation or interpretation of her elliptical language into lesbian representation: “Here I would caution against too literally “decoding” the lesbian structures supporting Stein’s writing, which risks reducing them to the formulaic and conventional” (110-11). Benstock argues that “only the most fully attentive readings of Sapphic Modernist texts could illustrate 182

the interworkings of this structural network [of self and other in the power structures of patriarchal language]”. She writes:

…such analyses reveal the ways in which structural categories (grammar, rhetoric, genre, punctuation, etc.) cannot maintain the definitional boundaries they establish. …“avant-garde” texts—such as those by Barnes, H.D., Stein, and Woolf…--position themselves structurally in the interstices, gaps, and overlaps inherent in literary orders. Working both within and outside these structural forms, they expose the fallacious terms of literary conventions. …Collectively, these texts are the “dangerous symptoms” of a system that cannot tolerate difference (114).

Further, Susan Gubar has argued that Stein was focused on “transcendence” and wanted to break down “not only the limits of gender but also the confines of humanness” (52).

Despite these numerous warnings I am going to return to the idea of Tender Buttons as an encoded text because I want to argue that Stein’s textual representation of female fetishism in Tender Buttons is one based on Stein’s pleasure. This pleasure is in contrast to the melancholy despair and death-drive that characterizes the fetishism of other representations of female fetishism in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity, such as that which I will show functions in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. In reading female sexual fetishism in Tender Buttons this is not to argue against the indeterminacy and ambiguity of the text, but to say that what the text suggests it suggests, as Stein might have said it. What it suggests is lesbian sexual fetishism on an implicit, sub-textual level, just as it demonstrates commodity fetishism on an explicit level. My reading of the text at a certain implicit level—a decodification of the kind that Holbrook, Benstock and Gubar argue against—acts not to shut down the multiple resonances of the individual words and sentences of the text, rather, it opens up the resonance of a particular operation of the text, that of the fetishizing structure of subject/object relations, across different levels of the textual space. 183

The fetishization of women and their debatable status as subjects in the nineteenth- century economy of early capitalism is evident throughout nineteenth-century fiction, and into the twentieth century, in texts that directly influenced Stein. Many of Henry James’ novels draw attention to the economies in which women are commodity fetishes. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is a particularly scathing examination of the difficulties for women of wishing to be able to act as a subject in a culture that regards women as objects. Demonstrating the ubiquity of questions about women, subjectivity, sexuality, and capitalist economies throughout western culture, The House of Mirth was written in 1905, the same year as Freud’s first mention of fetishism. Madame Bovary, the famous novel by Gustave Flaubert (who was another of Stein’s influences17), demonstrates both male and female fetishism, including examples of fetishism akin to what would be female sexual fetishism, seventy years before it was defined by Freud as an exclusively male perversion.

Gendered subjectivity and its relation to commodity fetishism are evident in Henry James’ works, such as The Golden Bowl and The Spoils of Poynton. In The Spoils of Poynton the negotiations are between the nature of Mrs. Gereth who—within the terms of the laws of inheritance in effect as a result of her husband’s failure to leave a will—is allowed to live among the furniture (metaphorically regarded by the law as a piece of furniture herself) until her son Owen marries and takes over all the objects including, it is implied, his mother. She, however, fights against this structuring of capitalism that invests only men with the right to property, and tries to retain possession of her collection. As an object she is not given the consideration of objecting to the arrangements Owen makes in his life, and the problem arises entirely as a result of this lack of subjectivity, of agency, that is accorded to her in the arrangements made for the other objects of the house, the items of furniture that she actually (having annexed the idea of male subjectivity) enjoys herself, as a surrogate male subject collector of commodity fetishes. To what extent she will be successful in manipulating the agency

17 Marjorie Perloff writes: “Stein herself…thought of Tender Buttons and related compositions as essentially “realistic” in the tradition of Flaubert. …And her mentor William James praised Three Lives as “a fine new kind of realism”” (‘ “Grammar in Use”’ 42). 184

of her son from a position of secret or unacknowledged agency is the question that propels The Spoils of Poynton. The strategies Mrs. Gereth deploys to try to secure her access to the possessions is to use a young woman, Fleda Vetch, over whom she has financial, intellectual, and emotional influence. Vetch is a potential “new Mrs. Gereth”. If she can secure the marriage of this girl and her son she can secure her possessions. The text is an exploration of the dynamics between the inert objects in which Mrs. Gereth is enraptured and which she is desperate to keep possession of, so central are they to her sense of self, and the process, iteration, and intersubjective negotiations that constitute the narrative of the necessary means of attempting to retain these commodity fetishes. The intersubjective negotiations are indirectly between mother and son but for the most part it is the negotiations between the young woman and the older woman that are central. In these negotiations, the place of the son is a subversion of the traditional female role—a role that Mrs. Gereth is, in fact, attempting to subvert—of the chattel, or possession, that is negotiated for and about between men. In the secret economy between the women the son is the object of negotiation and exchange that is ultimately going to determine the fate of the other objects of exchange, the items of furniture and art in the house. The text could be read as a gendered struggle for dominance in the private sphere—traditionally the realm occupied by women and over which they have control—but from which, as is evident in Benjamin’s formulation of the male collector as ensconced in his rooms like the spider in his web (The Arcades Project 45), women are erased when the male subject becomes a collector.

Stein’s own personal origins in, and references to, a similar world to that depicted in The Spoils of Poynton is reflected in her construction of female subjects in relation to their environment and the objects that surround them, a construction which challenges the Modernist notion of the subject as unconnected to, and uninfluenced by, objects. Antithetically to the notion of the subject as summarised by Lukacs, a subject who is not affected by nor engages with, his environment, Stein constructs Mabel Dodge as her environment. The portrait, ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’, constructs a female subject almost obliquely, between-the-lines of a set of relational positions of objects such as furniture. These temporal but also distinctly spatial images are strongly 185

reminiscent of Tender Buttons, particularly the last of the three sections, ‘ROOMS’, in the ways they use absence in space to construct a contradictory presence. The fourth paragraph of ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia is about place and space:

Abandon a garden and the house is bigger. This is not smiling. This is comfortable. There is the comforting of predilection. An open object is establishing the loss that there was when the vase was not inside the place. It was not wandering. A plank that was dry was not disturbing the smell of burning and altogether there was the best kind of sitting there could never be all the edging that the largest chair was having. It was not pushed. It moved then. There was not that lifting. There was that which was not any contradiction and there was not the bland fight that did not have that regulation. The contents were not darkening. There was not that hesitation. It was occupied. That was not occupying any exception. Any one had come. There was that distribution (Selected Works 529).

The constant use of negation and negatives in ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’ construct the subject “Mabel Dodge” through a composite of statements and negatived or denied statements; things that are “not” that, juxtaposed with what “there is”. “There is not that differentiation. There is that which is in time. There is the room that is the largest place when there is all that is where there is space” (530). These negotiations of presence and absence are rendered pointless, or at least are overshadowed as to the significance of whether they are there or not, by the constant assertion and negativization of that assertion. This is a move which sets up a consistent condition of contradiction and confusion around the noun or verb that is either present or absent. Lois P. Rudnick notes this when she writes:

A velvet spread is as of much inherent value as the space where a vase once stood. The portrait also achieves balance through antithesis; for many of the things and activities that “are,” are also “not.” This was equally true of the 186

villa’s hostess, whose “personality” is rendered through the evocation of objects and activities with which Stein quite astutely identified her (59).

This condition of contradiction that permeates the paragraphs serves to emphasize the noun or verb, and the fact that it is in a condition of either presence or absence, though which condition it is exactly is not clear. “It was occupied. That was not occupying any exception”. Mabel Dodge, as the subject of the title, is a subject constructed of these sentences, sentences entirely about objects. As a subject, then, she is paradoxically instated through the relationship between different objects.

The use of the negative and assertions around nouns that have to do with furniture as well as the verbs “spreading”, “distributing”, “condensing” (all of them verbs of conditions, states of being) evince a similarity between ‘Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’ and the ‘ROOMS’ section of Tender Buttons. From ‘ROOMS’:

To begin the placing there is no wagon. There is no change lighter. It was done. And then the spreading, that was not accomplishing that needed standing and yet the time was not so difficult as they were not all in place. They had no change. They were not respected. They were that, they did it so much in the matter and this showed that that settlement was not condensed. It was spread there. Any change was in the ends of the centre. A heap was heavy. There was no change (Selected Works 498).

I have demonstrated earlier in the discussion that this paragraph charts a movement from process to the solidification of that process into finished product. Within the context of the similarity between this paragraph and certain sections of ‘Mabel Dodge at the villa Curonia’ this ‘portrait’ of a subject, as Stein considered it (‘Portraits and Repetition’ 147), functions according to the same competing structures that underlie the still-life that is Tender Buttons, and it is clear that Dodge is constructed as a subject through these operations. 187

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, female subjects and fetishism have a controversial relation in the twentieth century. However, earlier than The Spoils of Poynton even, in the famous text by Flaubert, Madame Bovary, there is evidence of fetishism in the relations between men and women. Leon, who is in love with the married Emma Bovary, fetishizes her:

She looked so virtuous and inaccessible that he relinquished every semblance of hope. In so doing, however, he endowed her with a special status, detaching her in his mind from those fleshly attributes that were not for his knowing, and raising her ever higher in his heart until she soared clear away, magnificent in flight as a soul ascending to Heaven. His was one of those pure sentiments that form no obstacle to the conduct of daily life, are cultivated for their rarity and would be more pain to lose than they are pleasure to possess (119-20).

Evident here is the ambiguity of the subject’s feelings about the fetishized object—it affords some pleasure, but a pleasure derived mostly from its rarity, and the potential pain of loss is a more powerful inducement to continued possession than pleasure in the object itself. Leon is not the only fetishist here, however. Madame Bovary fetishizes Leon:

…within, she was all desire and rage and hatred. That straight-pleated dress hid a heart in turmoil, those demure lips told nothing of its suffering. She was in love with Leon; and she sought solitude that she might revel in his image undisturbed. It marred the pleasure of her daydreams to see him in the flesh (120) (My emphasis).

Madame Bovary prefers to keep Leon at a physical distance, because she has fetishized him as an idea. In this same section, in the economy in which subjects become objects in relation to one another, Emma considers her husband through a fetishistic metaphor. She thinks of Charles, her oblivious husband as “…the very obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all her wretchedness, the pointed buckle, as it were, on the complicated strap 188

that bound her…” (121). The buckle on the strap is suggestive of bondage (a practice admittedly more familiar to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century reader but already present in Flaubert’s time through de Sade’s writing), and indeed reflects the perverse, masochistic pleasure that Emma performs throughout the novel, most particularly in this very section.

My analysis of these sections of Madame Bovary assumes that Emma Bovary can fetishize Leon in the same way that he can fetishize her—that the operation of fetishization is equally accessible to, and operable on, both genders. Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in 1857, before the implications of Freud’s psychoanalytic theorisations of the “perversion” of sexual fetishism led to his conclusion that women are not capable of fetishism. My reading of Flaubert’s text is complicated by the subsequent psychoanalytic understandings of fetishism as an exclusively masculine perversion. Gender has always been an issue where fetishism is concerned, from the early religious fetishism of “tribal societies” about whose behaviour the Spanish invented the word, as these “fetishes” were only allowed to be seen by the initiated males in the tribe as the power of the fetish was in their relation to the phallus. Then, when Freud developed the theory of sexual fetishism as a perversion of the Oedipus complex and a result of castration anxiety his formulation suggested, by implication, that only male subjects could be fetishists.

Contemporary feminists have argued that while it is not useful to claim that women can be fetishists in the same way that men are according to Freud’s formulation, nevertheless, there are aspects of fetishism in female sexuality, and it is precisely their specific negotiation through which fetishism provides new possibilities for the construction of subjectivity. In contemporary feminist discourse Naomi Schor’s seminal essay on female fetishism from 1985 focuses on the fetishization of shoes in the fiction of George Sand. Indeed, clothing and shoes are well-known fetishistic items, and Tender Buttons—whose very title continually suggests the eroticization of objects—is full of them. 189

More recently still feminist philosopher and commentator on psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Grosz, argues that a lesbian sexual fetishism could be a productive way of understanding lesbian desire:

What relation does lesbianism have to female fetishism? In the case of the girl who has accepted her castration complex, there seems to be little or no relation. But in the case of the woman suffering from the masculinity complex, it may be possible to suggest some connection. Like the fetishist, she disavows women’s castration, but this castration is her own, not that of the phallic mother. And like the fetishist, she takes on a substitute for the phallus, an object outside her own body (153).

Grosz suggests, then, that female corporeality and the world of objects exist in an eroticized relation.

Grosz’s work has been used to read texts by female Modernists that depict a relationship between women and objects similar to the one in Stein’s work. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) is an experimental Modernist novel explicitly concerned with a lesbian relationship, one that can be read as fetishistic according to the “female fetishism” that Grosz formulates. Nora and Robin are in a relationship, but Robin has begun to seek out others. For Nora, left alone, the narrative of their relationship is displaced onto the objects in the house, the commodity fetishes that surround them:

In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours. There were circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old merry-go-round, venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from Munich, cherubim from Vienna, ecclesiastical hangings from Rome, a spinet from England, and a miscellaneous collection of music boxes from many countries; such was the museum of their encounter, as Felix’s hearsay house had been testimony of the age when his father had lived with his mother. 190

When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear—if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused—might lose the scent of home. Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her (85-86).

These paragraphs poetically chart the movement of the manifestations of fetishism in the relations between the women and between the individual female (lesbian) subject and objects. Initially, it is the contents of the house, the objects that fill the space of “their lives together” onto which is displaced the narrative of Nora’s trauma—the simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of their separation. They are the fetishized objects of the story of their relationship. These objects provide Nora with a perverse “punishment”, “the punishment of those who collect their lives together” (reminiscent also of Madame Bovary’s husband as a “buckle on the strap that bound her”). This external fetishism becomes a kind of internal condition in the next paragraph, in which Robin is described as a “fossil” lying in Nora’s heart, the “intaglio of [Robin’s] identity”. In Barnes’ poetics, the fossil of Robin is a gendered trace of the fetishized female subject, fetishized as a lesbian body. It creates a female subjectivity in which both subjects are both internal to each other and external to each other; Nora is caught inside the house that is the “museum of their encounter” waiting for Robin who is eternally outside. Robin is the ubiquitous maternal, external and everywhere present but also, as the “masculine woman” of the fetishized lesbian body, she is the absent phallus. But Robin is also, however, simultaneously caught inside Nora, an “indelible shadow” 191

which requires for its “maintenance” “Nora’s blood”. This is a state of stasis and suspension of the fetish, both are trapped in “eternal” time; Robin is “beyond timely changes” in her “entombment” in Nora’s heart, and Nora can think of nothing but Robin. Like Nietzsche’s “eternal return”, which Benjamin identifies as the time of the commodity fetish, the only movement of Nora and Robin is cyclical, into historicity and death. Through the backwards-movement of sleep and the unconscious they go down into the Real together.

[Nora’s] mind became so transfixed, that, by the agency of her fear, Robin seemed enormous and polarized, all catastrophes ran toward her, the magnetized predicament; and crying out, Nora would wake from sleep, going back through the tide of dreams into which her anxiety had thrown her, taking the body of Robin down with her into it, as the ground things take the corpse, with minute persistence, down into the earth, leaving a pattern of it on the grass, as if they stitched as they descended (86).

This movement is destructive, its affect is melancholy, echoing the melancholy poetics of Benjamin’s engagement with fetish objects. In this it differs from the female fetishism that can be read in Tender Buttons, in the pleasurable experience of fetishism. However, the internal-external spatial negotiations of Nora and Robin are evident in Stein’s text about Mabel Dodge. Dodge wrote of herself in the Villa Curonia:

The Villa Curonia loomed sumptuously about me, heavy, golden carried so far towards perfection, it seemed…a career in itself. …I had lived desperately and in despair into every nuance and every glint seeking to lose my desire in them. In a lack of love I had tried to pass out of longing into materials—and out of my passion I had built my house. Now I was caught and entangled in it—inseparable from it—now it was too powerful for me to tear myself out of, to go seeking mere stark delight. …some part of me leaped—pressing against the barriers, yearning outward towards the world…but another part sank deeper…allaying itself with form—decreeing I should stay in my beautiful shell. 192

So to protect and comfort ourselves do we build our prisons. (EE, p.174) (Rudnick 53).

The resemblance between Dodge’s description of herself and Barnes’ writing about Robin and Nora is striking. This aesthetic, then, is evidently one that was shared by other women writers in Modernism, though the affective relation to it differs absolutely; Barnes and Dodge construct a female fetishism that is destructive, melancholy, and stultifying—collection becomes less a museum than a mausoleum for the female subjects. Stein’s Tender Buttons, however, represents female fetishism as a pleasure of intimacy, a productive rather than destructive perversion. These connections between Nightwood, Mabel Dodge’s construction of herself, and Stein’s construction of Mabel Dodge, demonstrate a sophisticated discourse used by these women in France in the early decades of the twentieth-century, and which challenges Freud’s initial formulation of fetishism.

In the light of women’s fetishism of objects, and of other women, and as an economy between women discussed in these other Modernists texts The Spoils of Poynton, Madame Bovary, and Nightwood, Tender Buttons can be productively read also as containing not just codified lesbian sexuality, but specifically sexual fetishism. Clothes have a material relationship to subjectivity, and in Tender Buttons clothes are investigated as a mode of subjectivity through their status as fetishised objects, in poems such as ‘A LONG DRESS’, ‘A RED HAT’, ‘A BLUE COAT’, ‘A PETTICOAT’, ‘A HANDKERCHIEF’, ‘COLORED HATS’, ‘SHOES’, and ‘A SHAWL’.

In Benjamin’s Modernist collection of textual fragments, The Arcades Project, there are several selections which detail the relations between clothing, objects, and female subjects. Benjamin quotes Apollinaire on Tristouse and fashion that incorporates objects such as wood, glass and cork, thereby creating a triply-fetishized object: women wearing fashion made from objects.

‘This year,’ said Tristouse, ‘fashions are bizarre and common, simple and full of 193

fantasy. Any material from nature’s domain can now be introduced into the composition of women’s clothes. I saw a charming dress made of corks… A major designer is thinking about launching tailor-made outfits made of old bookbindings done in calf… Fish bones are being worn a lot on hats. One often sees delicious young girls dressed like pilgrims of Saint James of Compostella; their outfits, as is fitting, are studded with coquilles Saint-Jacques. Steel, wool, sandstone, and files have suddenly entered the vestmentary arts… Feathers now decorate not only hats but shoes and gloves; and next year they’ll be on umbrellas. They’re doing shoes in Venetian glass and hats in Baccarat crystal… I forgot to tell you that last Wednesday I saw on the boulevards on old dowager dressed in mirrors stuck to fabric. The effect was sumptuous in the sunlight. You’d have thought it was a gold mine out for a walk. Later it started raining and the lady looked like a silver mine… Fashion is becoming practical and no longer looks down on anything. It ennobles everything. It does for materials what the Romantics did for words.” Guillaume Apollinaire…(70).

The amazing litany of precious and banal objects used to construct dresses and items of fashion reflect (literally in the case of the dress made of mirrors) the status of women themselves as fetishized objects. Women are already objectified, then, wearing fashion which serves to enhance their fetishization and which consists of fetish objects itself (shoes, dresses, jewellery). The most extreme fashion is composed of non-fashion objects that are also fetishized commodities within culture, such as feathers, crystal, and even ordinary objects like wool and glass, creating an overall effect of an excess of fetishization.

The kinds of fetishization demonstrated in Benjamin’s citation of Apollinaire are also related explicitly to sexual behaviour in another fragment of The Arcades Project. Benjamin discusses women in relation to clothes, and the commodity fetish as an extension of female sexuality, an explicit and formal resemblance between hats and sexual organs: 194

There is hardly another article of dress that can give expression to such divergent erotic tendencies, and that has so much latitude to disguise them, as a woman’s hat. …It is not so much the various possibilities of symbolic reference to the sexual organs that is chiefly of interest here. More surprising is what a hat can say about the rest of the outfit. H Grund has made the ingenious suggestion that the bonnet, which is contemporaneous with the crinoline, actually provides men with directions for managing the latter. The wide brim of the bonnet is turned up- thereby demonstrating how the crinoline must be turned up in order to make sexual access to the woman easier for the man (80).

Benjamin notes the hat’s function as a symbol of the “sexual organs”, but argues that of greater interest is the role of the hat as an instructional preview of the actions necessary for “the man” to get beyond the barrier presented by the dress. Thus, there is a set of codified relations between the fetish objects presented here—the woman’s hat, the woman’s dress, and the woman herself.

Many of the objects whose names form the titles of the individual poems in the ‘OBJECTS’ section of Tender Buttons are objects that have come to be known as conventional fetish objects: objects onto which fetishists commonly displace the castration trauma that they simultaneously acknowledge and disavow. Taking Marx’s use of the word “fetish” in the term “commodity fetishism”, and its particular subject/object formulation, Freud gave the name “fetishism” to one form of perverse sexual subjectivity he had theorised. Freud argued that the male child developed fetishistic tendencies if he did not repress but simultaneously acknowledged and then disavowed his experience of comprehending the mother’s “castration”. Thus he substitutes an object for the “absent female phallus”:

…the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet—as has long been suspected—are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for 195

sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic (25).

Fetish objects are often items of women’s clothing, because, Freud argued, these materials are the closest objects to the boy’s vision when he experiences the trauma of the imagined maternal castration; they are the last boundary between the imagined maternal phallus and the sight of the castrated mother, and as such it is onto one of these objects that the boy displaces his acknowledgement and disavowal. ‘A LONG DRESS’, ‘A RED HAT’, ‘A BLUE COAT’, ‘A PETTICOAT’, ‘COLORED HATS’, ‘SHOES’, ‘A SHAWL’, are all titles of poems in Tender Buttons that contain objects which are conventional fetish objects, and within these and other poems eroticized relations depicted in and around these objects construct representations of sexual fetishism.

Poems about objects that can be read, through the discourse of the innuendo, the ‘hidden’ sexual meaning behind ‘normal’/standard language, as signifying, standing in for, substituting (as the fetish object does), the female genitalia, include: ‘A BOX’ (x2); ‘A PURSE’; ‘A WAIST’; and ‘RED ROSES’. The operations of fetishism and its mechanism of substitution are clearly evident on the metaphorical level in ‘A FRIGHTFUL RELEASE’, a poem mid-way through the ‘OBJECTS’ sequence:

A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged (10).

With its suggestion of the female sex organs, and the context of Stein’s identity as a lesbian, “a bag” can be read as attributing the development of a sexual fetish to a female subject. This may be read as the adaption of the Freudian fetish, a position laden with contradictions for the female subject.

As Freud identified, shoes are one of the most recognised of sexual fetishes, and 196

associated with female fetishism, and in ‘SHOES’ the sexual act is explicit:

A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less. It shows shine (16).

As Stein critic Harriet Scott Chessman has argued, this can be read as the female genitals, according to conventional associations of colour and metaphorical shape, “red” and “rose”. The coinage of “ale less” underscores the explicit personal dimension to this fetishistic operation, for, as Gass has argued, Tender Buttons is full of word-play puns on “Alice”, the name belonging to Alice B.Toklas, Stein’s lover (‘Introduction’ 15).

Such manipulations of language—Stein’s use of repetition, coinage, pun and phonetic combination—transform or elucidate the word itself as a fetishized object. This is everywhere apparent in Tender Buttons, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in ‘SUPPOSE AN EYES’ in which we see the fetishization of individual words, of objects, combined with the appearance of traditional fetish objects:

… Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. Little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles of mutton. Little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful (16).

Again, there is a phonetic pun that hints at a fetish material (“rubbed purr”, sounds like “rubber”) and simultaneously suggests the pleasure derived from it (“purr”), followed closely by potential religious punishment (in the phonetic pun of “purr get” which suggests “purgatory”). The repetition that performs the acknowledgement/denial operation of fetishism is evident here in the repetition of “little sales ladies”. Its meaning is imbued with sexual suggestion, and the repeated phrase thereby suggests the sexual pleasure gained in the repetitive nature of fetishism. The shift from “sales” to “saddles of mutton” is a shift from one capitalist market/economy to another, reminiscent of ‘Galeries Lafayette’. William H. Gass has read “sales” as the french word meaning “dirty” (Geographical History 125), a reading which creates the shift from “little dirty 197

ladies” to “little saddles of mutton”. Women are depicted as meat, as edible, ‘for sale’ in an economy of exchange. Saddles are made of leather, and, when used in “little sales of leather”, the word leather again suggests fetish material, bondage implements. The word “beautiful” is repeated fetishistically, thereby rehearsing the operation of the fetish on the level of language as well as representation. These overlappings and over-determined resonances between word, object and subject, show their construction as inextricable in Stein’s poetry.

In the poem ‘BUTTER’, for instance, the subject experiences itself paradoxically, as an object with subjectivity (an object-state), through the sexual fetish:

It is a need it is a need that a flower a state flower. It is a need that a state rubber. It is a need that a state rubber is sweet and sight and a swelled stretch. It is a need. It is a need that state rubber (49).

The primary designation “it” has the capacity to stand for both object and subject. “It” possesses a “need” for, and a need to be, the “state” of “flower”, which could be the homophone “flour”. “Flower/flour” constructs this condition of existence as the natural object/food, which transmutes into a man-made material, “rubber”, a material whose punning “state” renders it a fetishistic substance, a material of modernity like plastic, of sexual fetish and pornography, of mass-reproduction. Within the context of sexual fetishism, “need” operates as desire, and desire as an object (“it” – “it is a need”). This is reinforced by the repetition of “state rubber”, which enacts the fetish’s characteristic mechanism of acknowledgement and denial, presence and absence. Simultaneous to this process of meaning, the authorial subject alerts the reader to her own process of desire, and its location in word-objects, thereby reinforcing the connection of “state” as a personal condition and its relation to subjectivity. There is a complex of relations and slippages operating in these poems, then, between woman as commodity fetish, food as woman, and the capitalist markets. This complex is an over-determination of fetishism, including the fetishized female subject, fetishized objects, and the pleasure of the author- subject’s fetishistic relation to language. 198

Chapter Four Making “types”: uniqueness and reproducibility, mass-production and the individual subject

This chapter provides both complement and mirror to the previous one, in its concentrated focus on the subject within the complex of Stein’s object/subject operation. This turn in focus has multiple implications for the direction of the argument. Just as it is a movement from an examination of the object to the subject, it is also a turn from poetry to prose, from one work to a range of works. Finally, it is also a shift from an engagement with visual art to a sole focus on writing and its practices. This is a movement, therefore, at once broader in its discussion of a greater number of Stein’s texts written at various points over a long period of time, but it is also more detailed, in its concentration on the comparative operations of the two structures I have identified. This chapter forms, then, the culmination of the line of enquiry pursued in this thesis, in its demonstration that the two structures of subject/object relations operate in tension across Stein’s entire writing career, across the genres in which she wrote, and across the specific interests that occupied her in different phases of her life.

This culmination brings together the various strands pursued in earlier sections of this thesis, so that this chapter itself constitutes the return, reiteration, and development of the operations discussed separately in earlier sections of this work. Specifically, the discussion in this chapter will return to my argument that Stein fetishizes Nation and national subjects. The dynamics between the artist and the work of art in the fetishizing economy of capitalism will also be reconsidered. I will draw upon my earlier discussions of the specificities of the collector-subject and “his” interconnection with the artist/writer subject that, I contend, explicates Stein’s author-subject’s relation to the objects in Tender Buttons. A further aspect of the discussion of Tender Buttons will also be reconsidered in this light of this final stage of my analysis, namely that of Stein’s particular inflection of female subjectivity with lesbian sexuality. These particular forms of subjectivity also implicate, as has been discussed, the relations between sexuality, the 199

domestic sphere, the eroticization of the object, and their connections to Freudian fetishism, all of which I will take up and build upon further in this chapter. The final major re-examination and extension of a point already argued in this thesis, for the analysis of this chapter, will be my reference to the uniquely signifying status of the adjective/noun “one”, favoured by Stein in many of her pieces and which holds an inherent contradiction of the two structures of subject/object relations within itself and in the self it designates.

In examining the short-piece portraits ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ (1925), ‘Picasso’ (1912), ‘Matisse’ (1912), and ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1923), the short story ‘Melanctha’ (1905), the travel/opinion piece/autobiography Paris France (1940), the epic novel The Making of Americans (1908), and the novella Many Many Women (1910), I will be engaging with a rich area of critical work by Stein scholars. My argument uses Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of ‘axes’ of identity to build upon the existing claims by critics Paul Peppis, Lisa Ruddick, and Saunders, about the ambiguity in ‘Melanctha’. I engage with Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the poetics of iteration in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’. Ulla Haselstein argues that intersubjectivity constructs Picasso and Stein in their gendered dynamics in ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, an argument that I seek to extend within the terms of my own thesis. Lastly, Melanie Taylor and Barbara Will consider the mammoth accretions of subjectivity in The Making of Americans, and I examine their conclusions through the optic of the structures of subject/object relations I have identified.

Many of these critics identify the ambiguity and oscillations within these works, and most offer readings that explicate these ambiguities within a specific text. My contribution to this already rich debate will be to augment these critics’ claims by recasting them through the particular optic of fetishizing and processual subject/object relations that I have articulated. My project provides a different kind of resolution to that of existing accounts, namely, that of a coherent framework. However, this coherence in no way diminishes the varied and particular ambiguities of the different texts. However, the framework I establish may explain the common critical preoccupation with the 200

ambiguity of Stein’s texts. This is possible because the coherent framework I offer is inherently one of tension and unresolvable oscillation between the two structures of subject/object relations.

The Stein texts selected for analysis here represent both the styles and genres of Stein’s prose fiction, as well as exemplify her persistent exploration of subject-construction in language. Examining this range of texts across time and genres will allow me to identify the specificities of each text according to the ways in which the two structures I have established interconnect with the attendant conventions of representation in specific genres. However, examining this specific selection will also serve to further exemplify the persistence of the productive dilemma of subject/object relations in Stein’s work. The specific effects of the ways those structures operate in particular texts are those of tension, fluctuation, or competition, but cannot be said to be “resolved” in Stein’s body of work.

I will make my argument in several stages. Firstly, I will show how subjects regard themselves and each other as objects in the capitalist system as it is theorised by Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin, and which will be further explicated by reference to David Hawkes. This experience of subjects as objects functions on the conceptual level and therefore within modes of artistic representation, and is clearly seen in Stein’s texts about subjects. This is a corollary of the subject’s fetishization of the object in the capitalist structure of subject/object relations. I contend that this objectification of subjects creates certain fetishized categories of identity, those of “woman”, “artist-genius”, and “racial” and “national” subjects. Having shown how the particular formulation of the fetishizing structure operates when subjects are the focus of the gaze (specifically Stein’s authorial gaze), I will turn to the non-aurifying structure that this thesis has identified, and review the practices of iteration, “daily habit”, and intersubjectivity as the methodologies, techniques, and thematics that characterize what I have designated as the second structure of subject/object relations in Stein’s work. After these discussions of the theoretical formulations of my argument, I will examine the fetishized types I have 201

identified, as they occur either singly or as multiple types, in specific texts: “woman” in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’; “artist-genius” in ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’; “woman” and “artist-genius” in ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’; “woman” and “racial” subject in ‘Melanctha’; “national” subject and “woman” in Paris France; “woman”, “national” subject, and “artist-genius” in The Making of Americans; and “woman” in Many Many Women. In considering the fetishized subject-types within each text, and the non-aurifying structure also at work, I will demonstrate that, whatever the degree of dominance of either structure, both are in operation and together explain the ambiguities and oscillations of each text. This is finally brought to the fore by the functioning of the word “one” in the last text considered in this thesis, Many Many Women, that serves as a very particular node (though one frequently deployed by Stein) at which both structures are instated and in operation simultaneously.

Subjects objectified into “types” The capitalist economy of modernity is central to the negotiations of subjects and objects, as demonstrated throughout my thesis (in particular in Chapter Three), as the site of interconnection between the categories of clothing, banal objects, precious objects, and female subjects, through the fetishism that determines the relations between subjects and objects. Where the interactions between subjects and objects are to some extent a common site of engagement and negotiation, there is a further implication of this aurifying structure, one that is of major significance in the analysis of Stein’s texts that focus centrally on subjects. This significant extension is the operation in which, in capitalism, the structure of subject/object relations that involves the fetishization of objects becomes an ideological structure that functions to effect, the fetishization of other subjects in the mind of an individual subject. It is this function of representation of people as objects that is displayed as part of the tensions of Stein’s work. In capitalism, commodity fetishism is the pervasive underlying structure of relations not only between people and objects, but between people and people. Cultural critic David Hawkes explains the extension of the economy of Marxist commodity fetishism. He argues: 202

Commodity fetishism involves the idolization of subjective human activity, so that the products of that activity, ‘even though summoned up by men themselves, face them as incalculable forces of destiny’. Once again, false consciousness consists in idolizing ‘the works of men’s hands.’ In a diabolical irony, these products then re-enter the subject in a distorted and distorting form which issues in ‘the displacement of feelings into exchange-value.’ The process of objectification is not confined to the workplace, but becomes a habit of mind, so that people conceive of themselves and of others as objects (137).

As Hawkes argues, the fetishizing subject-object relations in capitalism lead subjects to objectify other subjects. This objectification of people as objects occurs on the conceptual level of the “idea” of people, manifesting in the form of stereotypes. This is, in a sense, effected through the coherence of the name, onto which is displaced the narratives that constitute that individual’s sense of self.

As has been previewed in Chapter Two, this understanding of people as objects is evident across Stein’s oeuvre at the level of language and the word. In the discussion of language in Tender Buttons I showed that the text collects several levels of fetish objects; both the material objects signified by the words and the words themselves, as fetishized linguistic units. I want to develop this point in conjunction with the argument I made in Chapter Two that Stein also always had a great love of the proper noun, particularly people’s names. From How to Write, to numerous other pieces, Stein loved to simply state people’s names, turning them from the subjects signified by their names into fetishized signifiers. This was demonstrated in Chapter Two in relation to the objectification of subjects. In this chapter I return to these points to develop them in relation to the specifically subject-focused texts The Making of Americans, ‘Melanctha’, and Many Many Women.

The collection and arrangement of subjects as objects in Stein’s writing is premised on a fetishized relation, that of the “uniqueness” of the proper noun that gives it an aura, an operation that was discussed in this thesis’ explication of Tender Buttons and which is 203

also occuring on a fundamental level in Stein’s typological project, The Making of Americans. This latter text is a large-scale collection of “types” of people. Discussing collection in relation to the fictional character Serge Valène in Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual (1978), Peter Schwenger argues that:

…copiousness is part of the pleasure of listing, which Philippe Harmon links to the pleasure of collecting: “the pleasure of amassing, of exchanging, of constituting a series of objects that are ‘equivalent’ and at the same time different, of managing one’s stocks, of stretching the series to saturation, of neutralising synchrony and diachrony” (8).

In the ways that it imitates these functions typology is, it can be argued, collection, and collection is inherently objectifying in the way it “frees objects from the drudgery of their use-value”, in Benjamin’s terms (The Arcades Project 9) (as has been previously explicated in this thesis in relation to Tender Buttons). When this analysis is extended in relation to subjects fetishized as objects—Stein’s collections of object-subjects—that are seen in The Making of Americans and Many Many Women, the “management” that Schwenger discusses becomes clear. In Stein’s texts this is a management of difference, through the author-collector’s arrangements of objectified identities.

Frequently, these subject-objects are not only gendered but nationalized. This was demonstrated in Chapter One of this thesis, in the representations of Stein’s friends and acquaintances Fernande Picasso, Wyndham Lewis and Mildred Aldrich, in The Autobiography. Fernande Picasso was shown to be functioning according to sexual fetishism of women as objects, in which parts of the body are also metonymically fetishized as the “whole” woman. Wyndham Lewis and Mildred Aldrich were shown to be defined through their relation to commodity fetishes such as shoes and furniture, and in Aldrich’s case, through body parts also. The representations of all three were demonstrated to be based on an imbrication of fetishism with nationality. Further, in this discussion of the relation between nationalism and fetishism I showed, however, that Taussig’s theorisation of the idea of the State as an aurified object to the citizen held 204

in thrall by its power, is in operation throughout Stein’s works to different effect depending on context. This operation—of an aurified idea whose aura obscures the labour required to construct it—can be seen in the functioning of another idea also, namely, the idea of “types” of subjects “beyond which” it is not possible to analyse.

Thus, the fetishization of subjects as objects can be understood to occur not only at the level of the proper name, but at the level of major categories of identity such as “woman”, “artist-genius”, and “racial” and “national” persons. These categories are fetishized because they are ideas, just as State and Nation are ideas, which deflect further analysis. Their auras obscure the actual labour—narrative, discursive, representative—required to produce them. On the level of specific people for whom these categories overlay their individual selves in representation, the idea obscures the specific discursive labour that goes into creating and maintaining a coherent idea of individual selfhood.

These subjects-made-objects in capitalism are undermined or problematized by the very methodologies used to render them. The organisational trajectories of Stein’s texts, identified in the last chapter, in which the fetishized material object becomes the ‘subject-object’, the labour that was seen to go into the construction of, and experience of, the object, thereby de-aurifying that object, is, in the texts on subjectivity, the labour of existing and experientiality. This is made manifest both thematically and methodologically through processes of iteration, daily habit and intersubjectivity. As was previewed at the end of Chapter Two, these three methodologies have been individually discussed and explored by Stein scholars: Phoebe Stein Davis, Lisi Schoenbach, and Liesl M. Olson on “daily island living”; Marjorie Perloff and Jayne L. Walker on “iteration”; and Juliana Spahr and Ulla Haselstein on “intersubjectivity”. Bringing these three approaches together and reading them as a set of techniques that Stein uses to represent the labour that is the real conditions of production of the fetishized object (the labour that is obscured by the fetish object’s aura) enables my argument to develop and extend these already-rich analyses of Stein’s texts to show how these approaches belong to a new structure of subject/object relations, which is a 205

structure in competition with the “older” structure of subject/object relations of fetishism. Thus, my argument draws on these approaches to illuminate a larger framework a particular set of relations (those between subjects and objects) within Stein’s texts. Meta-textual commentary—shown in Chapter Three to be the node at which the two structures of subject/object relations operate simultaneously yet separately—is also a major point of subject/object tension in The Making of Americans. However, by the end of The Making of Americans, metatextual commentary records the breakdown of fetishism and typological collection, and manifests the representation of subject/object relations through a non-aurifying structure. It signals the point at which iteration, daily habit, and inter-subjectivity construct the relations between the subject and object in terms of tactile experientiality, rather than in terms of reified distance.

Iteration is both a thematic and textual concern in Stein’s oeuvre, and occurs on the level of content—in terms of the representation of “living”—as well as that of literary methodology, as a style of writing that conveys “living” experientiality to the reader. Iteration, then, is a mode of representing the labour that lies “behind” the idea of the subject as a coherent self. Stein conceives of repetition, which she writes about in ‘Portraits and Repetition’ and ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’, not in the strict definition in which it means exact repetition, but as iteration, or, as Perloff calls it “permutation” (21st Century Modernism 103). I contend that iteration can be understood as labour, in terms of the fetish it is the recording of tactile experience and tactile processes of construction from moment to moment. Iteration and labour unfold across the time of the interaction between subject and object, rather than as a circuitous static time of the fetish. Through the analogous time of reading the reader experiences the “living” of the subjects as the text represents it in its most miniscule fluctuations and constant subtle change through iteration. In Benjamin’s terms of distance and proximity of the subject to the fetishized object, iteration is an abstract closeness of both the author-collector-subject, and the reader, to the objects of the text, which are the characters.

The relationship between subjects and objects constructed through iteration, then, is 206

premised on the opposite spatial relation to the “phenomenon of distance” that Benjamin argued characterizes the relations between the subject and object in fetishism. Iteration in speech and then in writing is reflected in a kind of iteration of living, for Stein. Phoebe Stein Davis, Liesl M. Olson and Lisi Schoenbach refer to this thematic content in Stein’s oeuvre as “daily habit”. As Olson argues in relation to Stein’s portraits: “Routine and habit, enacted by repetition, become more important than heightened or significantly ordered events” (‘Virginia Woolf’ 47).

Iteration and “daily living”, a literary technique and a thematic respectively, are, I have claimed, both aspects of a new structure of subject/object relations. Further, they are both methods used in the representation of intersubjectivity: the construction of subjects that only cohere in relative and conditional moments of interconnection with other subjects. Like iteration and “daily living” themselves, the intersubjectivity that these modes are involved in constructing, I have argued, demonstrates in and of itself the labour of existing (the very labour that is obscured by the aura in the fetishizing structure).

Intersubjectivity is a concept and a methodological approach that is explored in many works of literary Modernism. The gendered nature of intersubjectivity and its effect of dispersing a coherent self is evident in other Modernist texts, such as Henry James’ ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1906), in which intersubjectivity is shown to be a direct threat to artistic production due to the feminising effect of allowing the integrity of the coherent self to be mediated by others. The “lesson” of the story is that if “one” is to be a real artist, a great artist, a genius, one cannot afford to function intersubjectively. It is his marriage and subsequent need to consider his wife and children and not simply himself that disperses the creative genius of the text’s central subject, ‘the Master’. By the end of the story he has ceased to write and has married a beautiful, intelligent woman with whom he is blissfully happy. The two events are, he has previously told his disciple, related. The Master says to this disciple (the story’s hero, a young man of artistic talent just starting out as a writer) that the choice is either to engage in and with the 207

subjectivity of others, or to focus on the artistic relationship between the self and the art- work:

‘Fancy an artist with a change of standards as you’d have a change of shirts or of dinner-plates. To do it – to do it and make it divine – is the only thing he has to think about. “Is it done or not?” is his only question. Not “Is it done as well as a proper solicitude for my dear little family will allow?” He has nothing to do with the relative – he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little family may represent a dozen relatives’ (70).

The pun on “relative” here constructs inter-subjective existence—the taking account of or positioning and existing in relation to others—as the central problematic of family- life for an artist and a problematic that will, the Master argues, prevent the artist from “mak[ing] it divine”. The only way to develop as a genius and keep on producing great works of art is to reject all human relations that might require intersubjective considerations, and retain the stubborn coherence and independence of masculine subjectivity. For James, in this story, to remain a tightly coherent subject, a fetishized artist/genius subject, in order to have the distance from the objects of contemplation (themselves fetishized bits of life) that provide the material for the great works of art that then become fetishized works of art and maintain their own distance, intersubjectivity must be resisted.

Again, Lukács’ summary of the subject in Modernism, discussed in Chapter Two, explicates the model established in ‘The Lesson of the Master’. While ‘the Master’ is able to interact with his environment and does, becoming an attentive husband, it is precisely his allowing this compromising of his aurified subjectivity by intersubjective relations with his wife that he advises the younger artist against. James’ story, then, depicts the kind of Modernist summarised by Lukács, and shows the failure of the artist to achieve that results from the compromise of this subject.

As a female writer deeply invested in ideas of male artistic subjectivity, Stein explored 208

the effects of intersubjectivity—both its presence and absence—on the capacity to function as a genius-subject, in several of her works that will be discussed in this chapter, namely ‘Picasso’, ‘Matisse’, and ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’. Numerous Stein critics have argued that Stein’s work constructs intersubjective identities. In her recent book, Everybody’s Autonomy: connective reading and collective identity (2001), Juliana Spahr argues that Stein’s work constructs intersubjective relations between text and reader, often achieved, Spahr argues, through the utilisation of non-normative English that connects at many different potential points with a multiple readership:

The ephemeral tendencies of second-language speakers—which include unusually inclusive and complex sentences, phrases or incomplete sentences, non-standard qualifier and verb usage, duplicate words and/or a restricted vocabulary, and word confusion (such as spelling inconsistencies and homonym confusion)—show up in various forms throughout Stein’s work (26-27).

Intersubjectivity functions, along with iteration and daily habit, as the time of process and labour that de-fetishizes by refusing the rigid maintenance of subject/object categories in their relations to one another. Because they are simultaneously in the process of construction, such static coherence is impossible.

The type of “woman” in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ The first fetishized idea of the subject—the subject-object—that I want to consider in this chapter is the fetishized idea of “woman”. “Woman” is initially fetishized as the mysterious “other” of the (masculine) subject in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, a text that examines female subjectivity and the fetishized category of “woman”, and demonstrates the tension between aurification and tactility. “Woman” is announced by the title as the fetishized object of ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, and intersubjectivity challenges this status by constructing experiential subjects within the text itself. Ultimately, however, intersubjectivity itself is rendered into an object by iteration that cannot get “beyond”. 209

Marjorie Perloff has argued that ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ elaborates an intersubjective construction of female subjectivity. I concur with Perloff’s explication of the text but would emphasize, in line with the argument of my thesis, that the title sets up the women’s status within an economy of fetishization. Bettina Knapp identifies the presence of fetishism in the text:

The names Stein chose for her ladies, Fur and Skeene, may be viewed symbolically. The former, signifying an animal’s pelt used as a coat or to line wearing apparel, may be thick, soft, and pleasant to rub. Like a fetish, it has sexual ramifications… (94).

As such, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ can be read as initially announcing women as fetishized objects—the fur/hair, and skin/skein of wool that their names are punning on are metonymic, fetishized parts of the female body, as well as the materials conventionally favoured by clinically diagnosed fetishists (Stoller 74). According to Freud they are “the last things the fetishist sees before the trauma of maternal castration is ‘revealed’” (‘Fetishism’ 351). They are the boundary objects onto which the narrative of trauma is displaced by the future-fetishist.

I want to take up the implications of Knapp’s argument to contend that the text itself goes on to deconstruct these fetishized women, demonstrating that the women’s identities are intersubjectively constructed over time, through iteration and daily habit (which echoes the “daily habit” of Robin and Nora in Nightwood, their “lives together” that become manifest in the objects of the house, discussed in Chapter Three).

They were in a way both gay there where there were many cultivating something. They were both regular in being gay there. Helen Furr was gay there, she was gayer and gayer there and really she was just gay there, she was gayer and gayer there, that is to say she found ways of being gay there that she was using in being gay there. She was gay there, not gayer and gayer, just gay there, that is to say she was not gayer by using the things she found there that 210

were gay things, she was gay there, always she was gay there. They were quite regularly gay there, Helen Furr and Georgine Skeen, they were regularly gay there where they were gay. They were very regularly gay. To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end ever[y] day at the same time after them were they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay (563-64).

Here Helen Furr and Georgine Skeen are unravelled as the aurified fetish objects of the title, and are shown to be subjects constructed through the iterative experience of being “gay”. The iteration of being “gay there” and “gayer and gayer there” “gay there, not gayer and gayer, just gay there” shows the subject as existing in its ongoing iteration of a particular state or practice. This state of “being gay” is not a static condition, the women are constantly shifting in their relationships to it, and therefore iteration is required to explain their individual relations to it now, and now, and now: “Helen Furr was gay there…. She was gay there….that is to say she was not gayer by using the things she found there that were gay things….always she was gay there”. These shifts are also inherently occurring in relation to the environment: “the things she found there”. Perloff calls these iterations a “permutative process”, and draws attention to “the mathematical neatness” of the permutations that occur (Poetic License 148). The practice that is being iterated is literally at the level of the daily and daily habit: “they were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay”. The way that the two women end each day together is not specified (and in that mysteriousness there is the suggestion of deviance, as Perloff suggests about the opaque “mysterious” surface that the language of the text creates. I would argue that at this particular point of the text “ending every day” suggests going to bed which, within the larger implied context of the piece suggests their physical intimacy and sexual practices), but it is the sharing of this daily habit that is the relevant fact at the surface level of the construction of subjectivity. As Perloff identifies, what we know by the end of the first paragraph is only that there are similarities and differences 211

between Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene, not the specifics of what those similarities and differences are (58). The emphasis, again, is on the relations between them, not their coherence as self-contained subjects. The text, Perloff argues, effects an unresolvable question that she likens to a zen koan (61).

I would argue that Perloff’s simile of the text as a “zen koan” identifies the structure of ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ as one that establishes a problem or an assertion, the exact nature of which Perloff does not specify, but which I would claim is the fetishized status of women (the assertion is: “women are objects”), and then proceeds to, in the body of the text, consider how that assertion has come to be presented; it is, in a sense, undoing the work of obscuring the work that has gone into producing it. However, as Perloff argues, this does not produce one certain, unambiguous meaning or result. Like the koan that Perloff suggests, to a large extent the importance resides in the process of consideration, rather than in the result, or the decision, about what is meant. Perhaps then, the aura remains, in one sense. The tension cannot be fully resolved, the “mystery” that the aura provides, its surface that cannot be got behind, is evident in the veiled meanings of ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, even as the text is the narrative of labour and Stein’s language demonstrates the labour required to produce art and to produce the subject. This mystery and aura returns at the point of illicit sexuality. The narrative is a narrative of process, but does not describe the process and therefore does not enact it. Thus, an “opaque language surface” is again constructed, simultaneous with the operations that are working to break down the opaque aura of the idea of “woman” as an object. This can be understood by referring to Terry Castle’s claim that “lesbianism is the silent disavowal at the heart of Modernism”; it is the one (secret) process that cannot be represented, even as other processes of “existing” are represented.

The “racial” type and the type of “woman” in ‘Melanctha’ The mystery of the lesbian and the woman combined functioning to create an opaque surface that prevents depth of understanding/meaning-creation in ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, operates also, I will demonstrate, in ‘Melanctha’. However, in ‘Melanctha’ it is further complicated in its construction of subjects-as-objects by the use of the 212

fetishized category of “race”, as well as that of “woman”. Through a mutual undermining or destabilizing effect both of these categories deflect scrutiny of what is behind the aura of each type by gesturing one to the other.

I propose, then, that on the level of content Jeff wants a non-aurified Melanctha. He is attracted to her by her beauty and intelligence and “good brain”, but he also wants “stable living” and is defined as a character by his dislike of the “excitement” that other “colored people” are, he says, “constantly seeking” (149). Jeff wants to see, by hearing Melanctha’s own opinions on things and the workings of her mind (a kind of narrative labour), that she is “good”. As Melanctha says to him: “You always wanting to have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling” (157). But she cannot do this, because she is incapable of revealing the “real” Melanctha because she cannot ever “tell a whole story” (98). Her self-representation is constantly shifting. Melanctha’s “self” is constantly shifting because her identity is interpreted by Jeff and by the reader at a point where the axes of race and gender cross. The double site of identity location creates incessant deflection, and the aurification of Melanctha according to race and gender. This deflection is responsible for the question generated by the text: Is the mysteriousness and undecideability of Melanctha’s “nature” due to her status as “black” or as a “woman”? When Jeff is on the verge of being sure that Melanctha is what she seems to be, of authenticating his experience of her, the mysteriousness returns along the other axis.18 This is experienced as a simultaneous attraction and revulsion: “All he knew was he wanted very badly Melanctha should be there beside him, and he wanted very badly too, always to throw her from him” (143). This dilemma of contradictory impulses also becomes manifest on the intellectual level of his being uncertain:

Melanctha was too many for him. He was helpless to find out the way she really

18 This is an operation evident in other female Modernist writers’ texts, and explicitly in relation to issues of race in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing. The central character, Clare Kendry, is “passing” as white, and the ambiguity of her “self” as experienced by the other characters is due to the shifting and displacement that occurs across axes of identity. Her ambiguity on the level of race, for example, can always be attributed by a confused character to an ambiguity on the level of sexuality, or vice versa. 213

felt now for him. Often Jeff would ask her, did she really love him. Always she said, ‘Yes Jeff, sure, you know that,’ and now instead of a full sweet strong love with it, Jeff only felt a patient, kind endurance in it” (160).

Jeff wants the narrative labour of “knowing” Melanctha, but in practice it becomes intersubjectivity (engaging with Melanctha means questioning and repositioning himself), which then causes him the anxiety of where the boundaries of his coherent self are, and he wants to reassert that. In doing so he reinstates not only himself, but Melanctha, too, as a coherent object, which he then wants to “throw” from him, because he is faced again with the apprehension that she is “bad”.

The experiential process and labour of the non-aurified is seen in the representation of Melanctha, who experiences life from moment to moment without the coherence of identity created by the “remembering” of a self. Lisa Ruddick argues that Melanctha is one of these adults who have not “outgrown” the relation to the world that characterizes the child, and that this, rather than sexual behaviour, is the focus of the mysterious “wandering” that defines Melanctha’s character:

James uses the term “mind-wandering”—or “wandering attention” —to describe this condition of receptiveness to sensation. Now Melanctha herself is defined as a “wanderer.” Those readers who have seen in Melanctha’s perennial “wanderings” a prolonged euphemism for sex have missed the subtlety of Stein’s intent. One might reverse the emphasis and say that sex itself stands in “Melanctha” as a metaphor for a certain type of mental activity. Melanctha’s promiscuity is part of an experiential promiscuity, an inability to approach the world selectively. Her sexual wanderings are emblematic of that indiscriminate “wandering attention” that refuses to impose a pattern upon experience and that takes life unmediated (548).

Ruddick reads Melanctha’s “wandering attention” through William James’ theorisation of the processes of identity-formation, suggesting that: 214

In James, the individual who lacks any mechanism of selective attention is ill- suited for the business of self-preservation. The survival of the fittest militates against those “exuberant non-egoistic” individuals who, careless of their own personal safety, diffuse their attention equably over experience. “Its own body…must be” a “supremely interesting [object] for each human mind”. But Melanctha has persisted in wandering on the perilous “edge of wisdom” , where personal interests are suppressed in the name of “excitement.” In the end, “tired with being all the time so much excited”, she succumbs to the social and bodily “suicide,” which, as James notes, would be the outcome of any life of wholly unselfish or unselective perception (556).

Here Ruddick’s reading meets up with the terms used in this thesis, in her use of the word “object” to denote each subject’s “own body” (in James’ words) that must, according to James, be the primary focus of interest for the subject, in order to ensure that subject is a properly-functioning one. In the terms of this thesis, then, the subject needs to fetishize itself as an object in order to become coherent as a subject. Those who do not, such as, Ruddick argues, Melanctha, are not coherent subjects, and end by destroying themselves. Within the framework established in this thesis, this can be understood as the different modes of interaction between the subject and the object. Melanctha does not take herself as an “object”, but experiences herself and objects as simultaneous processes of experiential engagement in each moment of “wandering”. Jeff, as the conventional male subject, takes himself as the object of himself, fetishizing his status as a “Subject”: a man, an upstanding citizen, a doctor. He gives himself a ‘type’’, partly that of “race” and partly that of the “virtuous” (the Good).

To take into account, however, the significant aspects of race and gender that are inextricable from a proper reading of ‘Melanctha’, Anne McClintock’s formulation of fetishism as a trope that is frequently in operation at “crisis” points in “social meaning” is again useful. McClintock argues that fetishism is an operation that occurs at the “crisis points” of social discourses: 215

Fetishes may take a myriad guises and erupt from a variety of social contradictions. They do not resolve conflicts in value, but rather embody in one object the failure of resolution. Fetishes are thus haunted by both personal and historical memory, and may be seen to be structured by recurring, though not necessarily universal, features: contradiction, displacement, embodiment, repetition, and emotional investment. As composite symbolic objects, fetishes embody the traumatic coincidence, not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction. The fetish is thus a radically historical phenomenon (6).

As discussed in relation to Stein’s fetishization of American in Chapter One, fetishism is a trope that appears when a subject is trying to maintain contradictory assertions simultaneously. In the case of Nation this was, I argued, Stein’s love of America in conflict with both her hatred of war and conflict caused directly as a result of the same nationalist discourses in which she wanted to express her affection for her own Nation, as well as her “deviant” sexuality that meant she could not live within the boundaries of a Nation she loved and therefore could not afford to be ejected from on its own terms. In the case of ‘Melanctha’, race in America was a social crisis point in this historical period (given the racial segregation resulting from the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1896). Cultural commentator on Modernism, Chip Rhodes, argues that: “…one cannot begin to appreciate the ideological field of US society in the years following World War One without dealing with the complex cultural exchanges that went on between whites and blacks” (52). Stein’s ‘Melanctha’, written a decade before WWI, anticipates the importance of race in American society. The contradiction that fetishism in ‘Melanctha’ manifests is Stein’s representation of a culture that was being forced to acknowledge that African-Americans had new and complex identity-formations related to Nation in the twentieth century, but at the same time was continuing to disavow the status of full subjecthood to African-American subjects. 216

As with the ironic tone of ‘A Patriotic Leading’, that both acknowledges and disavows the constructed-ness of nationalist sentiment, race and gender in ‘Melanctha’ are discourses in a state of “crisis” in modernity. As McClintock argues, fetishism does not resolve these crises rather it is an operation that can embody or make manifest that crisis in the one object. Both Ruddick and Saunders are, in a sense, arguing that Melanctha embodies indeterminacy and crisis. Saunders says: “Perhaps it would be more exact to say there is a perpetual contradiction between her conscious and subconscious wishes. She is doomed to frustration because she can never seek or desire anything wholeheartedly” (56). However, both Saunders and Ruddick see the crisis as one of different abstract types of “personality” (Saunders 56, Ruddick 556), whereas I have contended that the crisis is a social one, of the gendered, racialized “types” of subjectivity located in the body of one woman, Melanctha.

As Paul Peppis argues, ‘Melanctha’ does not resolve or “choose sides” of the competing structures through which the character Melanctha is represented:

“Melanctha” neither unreflectively perpetuates nor heroically transcends racial determinism and racist stereotyping. The novella at once enacts and interrogates its moment’s opposing theories of human identity: a determinist explanation that reads persons and races as having fixed characters which define their capacities and behavior; and a progressivist explanation that reads them as having unique and plastic characters that can be directed and modified through will and education. Translating these accounts into literary modes, “Melanctha” stages a contest between a determinist narrative of entrapment and degeneration and a progressive narrative of liberation and development. The text ultimately declines to choose sides in that contention, prioritising neither totalising narrative model, ambivalently sustaining both; Stein thereby dramatizes a struggle for identity in a context where neither available option—racial constraint nor bourgeois liberation—is fully satisfactory. By staging but never clearly resolving this clash between antithetical narrative modes and antithetical accounts of human identity, “Melanctha” begins deriving Stein’s particular Modernism from racialism (10). 217

In the terms of this thesis, this “clash between antithetical narrative modes and antithetical accounts of human identity” are those of the structures that determine the relations between subjects and objects. Thus, as I have shown, the identification by critics such as Peppis, Ruddick and Saunders, of the unresolvable contradictions or conflicts within ‘Melanctha’, can be understood as a representation precisely of the conflicted structures of representing subjects at this point in Modernism.

The type of the “artist-genius” in ‘Matisse’, ‘Picasso’, and ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ In the case of male subjects, Stein overwhelmingly deploys the fetishized idea of the “artist-genius”. The “artist-genius” as a fetishized category in modernity stems from the legacy of the Romantic conception of that identity category. Barbara Will’s comprehensive examination of Stein and genius in her book, Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of Genius, establishes the history of the Modernist artist-genius subject and its relationship to Stein:

For Gertrude Stein, “genius” would appear to be a term that authorizes, in the Romantic or Modernist sense: a term rooted in an essentializing logic and in a conception of the self as intentional and autonomous. It is also, for Stein, an ascriptive term: a name which designates her unique status within the social order, her identity or “type” – something she indisputably “is” (7).

In order for Stein to align herself with the category of “genius” she had to, Will argues, align her own character traits with those inherent to the “genius” type:

From 1903 to 1911, during the writing of The Making of Americans, Stein begins to recalculate the dominant traits of her character type so as to emphasize her “maleness” and homosexuality over her femaleness and Jewishness; this process of self-fashioning allows Stein to reconceive her own “bottom nature” in ways 218

that conform to the gender/sex/race norms “inherent in the individualistic concept of greatness” (7).

However, in her subsequent analysis of the operations of “genius” in Stein’s oeuvre and Stein’s own conceptions of the term, Will argues that there is significant complexity and contradiction. She claims that Stein undermined her own essentialist formulation of genius as “an index of authorial and textual autonomy” at other textual locations, where she expresses a “radically anti-essentialist” understanding of genius in which it is a “perpetually shifting dialogic exchange” (8-9). Will argues here, then, that the naturalized, essentialized (aurified) concept of genius was a category Stein claimed at the same time as she undermined its essentializing character by conceiving of herself (and therefore of the category of genius she was claiming to “be”) as processual and achieved through artistic labour. Will argues that Stein’s controversial engagement with Otto Weininger’s work on ethnic typology allowed Stein to formulate a notion of “type” that could accommodate her non-normative subjectivity:

In the end, Weininger’s greatest influence on Stein lies arguably in his providing her the terms with which to understand her own “type,” and thus, paradoxically, to move beyond her own typological project. By laying claim to “genius,” Stein is able to type herself, but in a way that allows her to shed the ties of what had earlier constrained her claim to authority: Jewishness, femininity, and the norms of heterosexuality (65-66).

Will argues that Stein’s engagement with Weininger’s book, Sex and Character, allowed her to renegotiate issues of “type”, to “rethink her own “characterology”” and, ultimately, to “move beyond her typology” (66). ““Genius” may be for Stein her type”, argues Will, “but it is a type that transcends the “ ‘I’ Problem” and thus enables Stein to think beyond “type” or “bottom nature”” (66). This means that, Will argues:

For Stein, appropriating and reworking Weininger’s conception of the “highest type” of human being, “genius” denotes both a self and a deconstructive 219

function, a type that cannot be typed, a consciousness or entity alive to the self- splitting presence of the unhabitual (66).

In Will’s account James redefines genius in modernity as the ability to be both distanced from the action and close to it. James can thus be seen to be claiming for the Modernist genius a subjectivity that can occupy both positions simultaneously. These specific terms of “distance” and “process” themselves echo the terms of my argument; “distance” connects to both my deployment of Benjamin’s claim that the “phenomenon of distance” characterizes the subject’s experience of the fetishized object, as well as my further point argued in Chapter Two that the author-subject takes the work of art as a distanced, fetishized object of contemplation. The “process” that the genius in Will’s understanding engages in reflects the processual element of the new structure of subject/object relations I have established. Thus, James’ notion of genius as Will reads it can be understood as an author-subject position, through the framework I have argued for, of the relations of the subject and object in the fetishizing structure, as well as the new relations of tacility and process that structure the subject-object encounter in the twentieth century. Stein’s conception of the artist-genius is still imbricated in the economy of subject/object relations that fetishize. They fluctuate between fetishism, and a non-aurified relation in which subject and object are constructed through intersubjectivity, process, and tactility.

The portraits ‘Matisse’, ‘Picasso’, and ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ play out the tensions in and between distance and process; the negotiations between the genius-author subject and the fetishized artwork and the intersubjective genius/object in process. The deployment of, and simultaneous conflict with, prevailing Modernist tropes of the male subject as summarized by Lukács are also played out within these texts. As with ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, Stein’s portraits of male subjects announce the aurified object-subject in their title through the proper nouns ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’. While the auras that are inextricable from the names “Matisse” and “Picasso” at this point in history radiate at a size and brightness that the two artists could only have imagined at the time, they had already begun the traditional work essential to being 220

recognised as an “unique” artist, that of accruing fame to their specific names. Both ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’ refer to the subjects of the pieces as “this one”. This is a phrase, a designator of subjectivity that is repeated over and over, instating the eponymous subject as a subject, as the, in a sense, anonymous subject that is the artist/genius (the extreme endpoint of the inherently male subject position’s trajectory), as an autonomous subject able to be at a distance, observing, as well as up close, partaking.

The tension between the fetishized identity category of genius/artist that the subjects in the texts demonstrate is reflected in their production of fetishized objects on the textual level. This is evident in ‘Matisse’:

One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one. Certainly every one could be certain of this thing that this one is a great one (209).

Thus, Matisse’s status as an aurified genius is trepidatious because of his anxieties about his processes of production, and their results in his painting. Picasso’s self-confidence, in contrast, means that even though he, like Matisse, is demonstrated as being engaged necessarily with process, for artistic creation, Picasso’s excess of self-confidence performs the work of arbitrary value assignment that aurifies the work of art. As Ulla Haselstein says, in Stein’s text ‘Picasso’ “plac[es] Picasso at the center of the text” (735), which is evident in the following paragraph:

This one always had something being coming out of this one. This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming 221

thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellant thing, a very pretty thing. This one was one certainly being one having something coming out of him. This one was one whom some were following. This one was one who was working (214).

The methodologies of process are those by which Picasso produces works of art, here he is “always” “working”, there is “always” “something being coming out of this one”, he “always had been working”, he “was always having something that was coming out of this one”. These sentences construct Picasso’s artistic identity as inextricable from daily habit and iteration. Process is also central, as habit and iteration are seen in the ongoing moments of occurring, suggested by the gerunds and the use of both past and present tense: “this one always had been working” and “this one was one who was working”. Picasso was working in the past, he is working right now in the present, and by implication of the continuing moment of the present, he will be working in the future. Being Picasso, then, and being an artist/genius, is an incessant condition of working.

Self-confidence, or assertion of the coherence of the self as an artist-genius subject, is the primary difference in the trinity between the textual “Matisse” and “Picasso” and their author “Stein”, and dictates the strength of the aura of the artworks produced, as in the circuit of subject/object relations of genius-artist to artwork discussed in Chapter Two. Matisse, in ‘Matisse’, is self-doubting and is thus less a great artist and genius than Picasso. Stein’s self-confidence is threatened by Picasso’s extreme belief in himself as “the one”, even though Stein is part of his world in these explorations, achieving similar artistic breakthroughs within the realm of literature. These degrees of self- confidence that literally maintain and perpetuate confidence in the self, and aurification of it within the category of genius/artist, fluctuate between individuals and within one individual across the space and time of the individual text.

Matisse’s ongoing doubt circumscribes the arbitrary value of the works of art that he produces, lowering their market value and crumbling/destabilising their aura. Thus, 222

“Matisse” and “Picasso” function as fetishized ideas of the artist-genius subject—a subject who is rendered an object by this aurification—and the body of each text explores the fluctuations between aurification and de-aurified experientiality and tactility, through the representation of, and methodological use of, iteration, daily habit, and process. Iteration and daily habit function to demonstrate the labour required to be a genius, but the aura of “the one” of the title, the power of the proper names serves to reinstate that aura and obscure the labour of that identity. This is a particularly forceful operation of the text at this point in history, in 2007, when the names Picasso and Matisse cannot really be de-aurified, no matter how many biographies about “the real Picasso” and “the real Matisse” are published. The claim made by such biographies is, in terms of the capitalist economies of artistic production I have examined, the claim to be able to de-aurify that subject-(object) through revealing the labour required to maintain and project a coherent identity.

In ‘Picasso’ there is a conspicuous absence of intersubjectivity and metatexuality, however, Stein’s second piece on Picasso examines intersubjective constructions of subjectivity, and in doing so points to the unsatisfactory nature of fetishized ideas of artist/genius for female “subjects” who wish to access that identity category. The inherently masculine nature of the artist/genius subject as it functions in culture is made clear in ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, which demonstrates Stein’s dissatisfaction with her secondary, even invisible, role in relation to Picasso. Haselstein argues that this portrait of Picasso is actually a dual portrait of both Picasso and Stein, and its emphasis is on the influences that flow between them and the relative, and different, positions that the culture and its gendered possibilities allow them to occupy. As I argue, it is the inherently fetishized nature of the idea of “woman” that prevents Stein accessing the self-determining coherence of the male subject position. In ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, the use of and emphasis on intersubjectivity—both thematic and methodological—breaks down the fetishized “woman” and the artist/genius simultaneously, through its reflexively circumscribing operation. This operation shows how one idea of identity is actually a fetishized idea, as it obscures the labour that has been required to produce it, and calls into question the 223

status of the other idea of the subject being employed—that of “woman”. Haselstein argues that ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ “both completes and effaces the earlier portrait of Picasso by producing a self-portrait in the guise of a portrait” (736).

The issue of faces in the respective portraits by Stein and Picasso is an illuminating one here, as it explicates the fetishizing impulses in both Stein’s and Picasso’s art. Robert S. Lubar, in his article ‘Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture’ on Picasso’s famous Stein portrait, argues that Picasso’s inability to paint Stein’s face has its reasons in Picasso’s anxieties about women, particularly about Stein and the power-relations between them. Lubar writes:

Picasso’s inability to recognize Gertrude Stein as an intelligible subject of portraiture may … be approached as a problem in representation that exceeds the traditional limits of subject-object relations (56).

The well-known story of the portrait is the one Stein presents in The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, which tells how Picasso painted Stein’s face out and went on holiday, subsequently painting-in a new face when he returned, without having seen Stein again. The resulting mask-like face that Stein, attempting nonchalance but with evident pride, sees as “the first cubist work” is, Lubar argues, mask-like because it is a fetishized face, a displacement of Picasso’s castration-complex onto an object of “woman”, of Stein. In this way, Lubar argues, Picasso solved the “problem” of her face, which he could not, in a sense, really look at. Lubar argues:

As Pablo tried in vain to secure his subject, Gertrude returned his gaze and deflected it inward. What alternative did Picasso have, then, but to stop midstream, to decapitate Gertrude and replace her head with a mask? A mask that is a sign of erasure, a violent effacement whose function is to contain and neutralize a perceived threat. An erasure, in short, that is the site of a wound, 224

one whose trace is still visible in the thin line that extends like a scar around Gertrude’s neck (59).

This “effacement” reflects what Haselstein calls Stein’s “effacement” of Picasso in her portrait of him, by actually creating within the text an intersubjective portrait of the two of them. In his book, Prosthetic Gods (2002), about the related obsessions of origins and the limits of the human subject in the work of Modernist artists, Hal Foster also identifies Picasso’s use of the “primitive” mask-face as a fetishistic displacement of anxieties about women. Foster argues that:

…Picasso displays the ur-primitivist ambivalence between a desire for desublimation and regression (“something was happening to me, right?”) and a demand for sublimation and autonomy (“to help people…become independent”). In fact, he stakes this autonomy directly against the desublimatory threat of the feminine (“women, children, babies”) as well as against the fetishistic debasement of the other (“the Negro pieces”) (32).

The significance of Picasso’s fetishistic use of the mask to depict Stein is, I would argue, an ironic one, namely, that Picasso and Stein fetishized each other—Picasso in the portrait of Stein, Stein in her first portrait of Picasso, entitled simply ‘Picasso’. Two very different subjects, one of each gender, but both experimental, cutting-edge Modernist artists, encountered problems when examining subjectivity that they “resolved” through the deployment of, and in Stein’s case the subsequent critique of, fetishized ideas of subjectivity that strongly permeated the capitalist culture of the time. For Picasso it was through primitive fetishism and its visual effects of the mask, and for Stein it was the stereotype of the artist-genius inherited from Romanticism and containing an ongoing circuit of fetishizing subject/object relations.

While Picasso did not seem to have felt the need to return to the problem of how to represent Stein, Stein herself was obviously not completely satisfied with her fetishization of Picasso as the ultimate mode of representing him as a subject, and 225

represents him through the competing structures of fetishism as well as intersubjective subject/object relations when she returned to the issue eleven years later in a second portrait of Picasso, ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1923). Haselstein argues that this second portrait demonstrates that the subjectivity of the female artist (specifically “Stein” herself) is outshined by the dominance of the male artist. This is an inevitable condition for the female artist, because the artist-genius category is gendered inherently male and therefore can never allow women the same access to its rewards of fame and popularity. Haselstein argues:

Stein seems to reproach the general public and perhaps Picasso as well for never once taking a woman’s artistic originality—Stein’s, in fact, which would make her quotable—into consideration. Of course the notion of quotation with its implied hierarchy of artistic rank always implies relations of exactitude, resemblance, and proportion as regards the original. While such qualities are highly valued in conventional portraiture, they represent an artistic verdict in the context of Modernist experiment. And as the pun on priority, patriarchy, family, familiarity, and distance once again points out (“father and farther”), the question of who comes first and who quotes whom is predetermined by gender (739).

“Priority, patriarchy, family, familiarity, and distance” are all aspects of capitalism and its gendered possibilities. “Distance” is reminiscent of the spatial inaccessibility of the fetish object upon which the subject gazes in the nineteenth-century economy—Benjamin’s “phenomenon of distance”. Haselstein argues that this portrait of two artists and their gendered experiences and subjectivities is constructed through numerous devices at the level of language and structure, whose “fractured…[nature]…suggests a heavily edited piece of private musing, punctured by lacunae and erasures, laced with mockery and self-irony”(737). Again, as in the repetition of “one” in ‘Picasso’, there is a repetition of the male personal pronoun, “he”. In the insistence of that repetition an aurification occurs in the same way that the “one” is a reified object; it becomes separated from the reasons (the narrative) that genders a person. Haselstein reads this “he” that represents “Picasso” in relation to the absent 226

“she” that represents “Stein”, and argues that: “…it is always “he,” the male who is mentioned—all of Stein’s efforts to articulate a common ground, a shared vision, and a competition have failed, as “I” or “she” is conspicuously absent, appearing in oblique fashion only in the next line, in an afterthought, as it were” (739). Haselstein’s reading, then, establishes the intersubjective nature of this portrait. In the title, ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, Stein indicates that this portrait is of Picasso in relation to herself but, as Haselstein identifies, it is Picasso whose aura radiates across the text, blinding out Stein; the gendered personal pronoun for Stein, “she”, has no space to appear. This demonstrates the power of the fetishized male artist subject to continue “existing”, ironically, even at the same time as the intersubjective methodology of the text argues that that coherence is not the way that subjects relate. The complexity of ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, then, lies in its unstoppable internal perpetuation of the operation it is critiquing.

The “national” type in Paris France The complexity of Stein’s intersubjective construction of herself in relation to Picasso in pieces such as ‘If I Told Him. A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ is not a consistent position, and her constructions of herself and other artist-genius subjects is complicated again when overlaid with the fetishized identity-category of nationality, which Stein frequently invoked for a variety of means and to a variety of ends. I want to return to the discussion of nationality and the idea of ‘Nation’ as a fetish object that was examined in Chapter One. As discussed, Stein often used a fetishized idea of nationality, or fundamentally nationalized subjects, to represent identity. While at some points Stein’s use of the “national” identity-category destabilises other categories, it also shores them up at other moments. In Paris France (1940) Stein comments on her own inclusions and exclusions in terms of national subjects:

An American who had read as far as this as far as it had been written said to me, but you do not mention the relation of French men to French men, of French men to French women of French women to French women of French women to French children of French men to French children of French children to French 227

children. No I have not and for a very simple reason, there is no relation between them, all the contact between them all is so fixed and inevitable, so definite and so real that there is no question of either nature nor choice nor mistake. There can be no mistake and they cannot be mistaken. Once in talking to the Baronne Pierlot a very old French friend she said about something when I said but Madame Pierlot it is natural, no said Madame Pierlot it may be nature but it is not natural. She is eighty-six and her granddaughter eight and it is difficult at times to know whether they are both eighty-six or whether they are both eight (26).

The comic repetition of “French” is the pleasure of the fetishized subject-objects of Nation, and emphasizes that whatever their gender or relative position to one another, “women” to “women”, “men” to “women” etc, the fact that they are “French” overrides all other categories of identity. This accounts for Stein’s next statement that “there is no relation between them all”. There can be no “relation” because the arrangement of them is never-changing because it is essentialized by its aurified status, and therefore they simply “are”. The static, fetishized status of the nationalized subject as idea is demonstrated by the assertion that “all the contact between them all is so fixed and inevitable, so definite and so real that there is no question of either nature nor choice nor mistake”. Investigating the “relations” between French women, French men and French children cannot be done, as there is nothing to “investigate”. The relations are “fixed and inevitable,” they simply are what they are. “There can be no mistake and they cannot be mistaken”. How and why the fixed relations became exactly what they are is a question that Stein will not allow—in fact, she states “categorically” that it is an irrelevant question—as none of the origins or causes for something are possible: “there is no question of either nature nor choice nor mistake”. Again, this is an issue of narrative labour, of “types”. Stein is arguing that there is no narrative to the relations between the various types of French subjects. They are simply aurified objects and the labour, or narrative work, that is required to produce nationalized subjects is obscured by the aura of their “Frenchness.” There are no origins because there can be no narrative beginning, because there are no narratives. It is a self-circumscribing argument. Stein’s 228

little “story” here about the American who has read her partially-written manuscript and asks about the dynamics between different French people is actually a story about the lack of a story. This kind of anti-narrative narrative occurs again in Paris France forty pages later in the text:

French life has elements of strangeness in it. In France a young girl is treated as a young girl, she is a young girl until she is a married woman when she is not any longer a young girl, but and, this is extraordinary, a young girl of twenty-one or twenty-two becomes a school-teacher, and in France in the country a school- teacher has to live alone in the school-house. A young girl will go into a mountain village or a village in the plains, or a village anywhere and the school- house is never in the village but well outside of it quite isolated with its living quarters for the school-teacher, and there she lives alone, she may be very young but there she is living alone in an empty school-house, doing her own work, and feeding herself and living alone. When I really realised this I was surprised and I said does not that contradict the feeling about a young girl and her protection, no they said, it is understood, and if it is understood to be so nothing happens that should not happen and very evidently nothing does. Even loneliness does not really seem to happen even though the school-house may be in a village in the mountains snowed in for long months. It surprised us but it did not surprise the French (60-61).

There is no narrative that constitutes the girl on the level of scandal, in terms of inappropriate liaisons or sexual behaviour, because that is simply not supposed to happen. Further, the individual girl herself has no narrative, her condition is presumed “even loneliness does not really seem to happen”, but it is the narrator who tells us this, not the girl. There is no description, no narrative constitution, of the individual girl.

These examples of “French” people then, are narratives of no narrative. They tell the story of how there is nothing to tell, because the genders are “natural” in terms of their nationalized identities and therefore their auras are all that there is to see. In a sense, 229

then, the narrative is about the fetish and its lack of narrative, thereby constructing the complexity of these relations. It is enacted in the stasis of the verb tenses that relate because that is the rule of grammar, the way words are: if it “should not” then “nothing does”. There is no leaking out of illicit narrative, the energy of the aura is a static one.

This absence of narrative labour and the insistence on a static “French”-ness is also a function of genre. In the case of Paris France the text is appropriating (but does not entirely submit to) the conventions of the genre of the travel memoir, which requires statements about national identity in the country under consideration. These statements are about inherently aurified subjects and objects, because they are about the idea of Nation as a naturalized thing. The Nation is an object, being observed by a distanced subject from another place. The deliberate construction of “types”, in the context of this genre, is to display the aura of whatever Nation and its subjects is being considered, to the readers, who are assumed to be from another Nation and who therefore wish to read about the fetishized idea rather than the complex narratives of individual subjects that problematize their relations to the Nation.19 The “distance” of the reader, located in another country, is both cause and effect of this structure of subject/object relations.

The “national” type, the “artist-genius” type, and the “woman” type in The Making of Americans, and Many Many Women While Stein represents herself and Picasso as artist-geniuses she also renders them as fetishized national subject-objects. Their nationalities give them preternatural insight into various aspects of their artistic explorations. For example, Picasso’s Spanishness is the reason why Cubism was “natural” to him, as Spanish houses have always had an aesthetic that resembles cubism (Picasso 11). Stein’s Americanness is the reason why she is able to be the greatest writer of the twentieth century, as this person must necessarily be an American (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). But again, these

19 Nationality is the most significant to the point of being the sole category of their identities, within the context of this genre— where anecdotes about individual nationalized subject-objects are used—as opposed to assertions about “French people…” “Germans…” “the Italians…” etc.—the individuality only serves to allow specific incidents that prove the generalised nature of the Nation, as in the example of the old lady and her eight-year-old granddaughter. 230

statements occur in a text that is a memoir, and thus follows (partly also due to Stein’s love of a good assertion) the convention of the straight-forward assertion, the bold claim, that are inherently essentializing.

There is a major difference between the operations of the type in the portraits of Matisse and Picasso, and in ‘Melanctha’, and the way those operations are manifested in The Making of Americans and Many Many Women. This difference is that between one or two individuals and multiple subjects. In Stein’s texts in which there are large numbers of characters and the focus is on plurality, such as The Making of Americans and Many Many Women, gender functions differently in terms of aurification and de-aurification, and is negotiated through methodologies of iteration, daily habit, and intersubjectivity. In a similar way to the abstract national subject-objects of Paris France—the Frenchman and his mother, the French girl in the School-house—the subjects in The Making of Americans are types, not individuals, initially cast by the title as “Americans”. Chapter One of this thesis demonstrated that The Making of Americans is an aurified work of art in the pre-mass-production sense of the word, as it is understood by Benjamin. However, it was shown further that it functions as a commodity-fetish object of Nation, a novel whose form promotes an Andersonian “imagined community”, in Culler’s theorisation, and that presents an “object of America” through its epic length and presentation of an aurified surface. As I suggested in Chapter One, this is not to say that there was no negotiation with the mass-production of the period in which The Making of Americans was conceived and written. Like many Modernists Stein considered the relations between popular and high art (Berry 36). In the context of subjectivity, I will now revisit The Making of Americans, examining its textual constructions of subjectivity (the internal level of the text, its content rather than its form). I will show that the overall aurification of the text as an epic novel, an America- object, is in tension with the internal use of a twentieth-century structure of subject/object relations, in which subjects are not objects but the author-subject and the objects of the characters, the “types”, are created simultaneously in narrative labour and process. Within the internal text itself, however, the tension of the two structures of subject/object relations is evident also, in the construction of individuals with proper 231

names, and at the same time the demonstration that these subjects are not unique, do not have unique auras, but are constructed through the processes of iteration, “daily living”, and intersubjectivity.

The tension between external context of cultural, artistic, and technological production and the internal content of the text is rehearsed in the title, The Making of Americans. Although this title could be designated a nineteenth-century “phrase” (as Stein defines the dominant form of that century) in its actual signifying meaning, it is descriptive of process, and contains the contradictory implication that this is not a static condition of identity—“being” an American—but is a process that is ongoing, signified by the gerund “making”. This is evidently in tension with the capitalist economy in which The Making of Americans is aurified into a work of art, and in which Stein must assert the suitability of her text for that reification in order to maintain her own aurified status as an artist- genius. While they are the characters in an object of high-art, the subjects in this epic novel are not coherent, aurified subjects, rather, they are constructed as being in the process of becoming American, becoming national subject-objects. This is the tension between labour and aurified finished product. Within the text characters are constructed through methodologies of iteration, and, as Stein critic Barrett Watten suggests, intersubjectivity (95).

In terms of the reading of this thesis of the operations of fetishism in Stein’s texts, the entire text of The Making of Americans functions as a process of labour that undermines the aurified status of Nation and nationality, by demonstrating that being a member of a Nation does not make one a static national subject, a subject-object of Nation, but that each individual’s negotiation with Nation is a narrative that unfurls, develops, changes, over time, through the labour of recounting itself, narrativising and perpetuating itself. This is, ironically, inherently in opposition to the other aspect of Stein’s project in The Making of Americans, which was to write about “every one who ever was and is and will be living”. The “typological” nature of this project blocks the undermining demonstration of labour that the language of the text effects, by insisting on the fetishized “types”. In ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’ Stein says: “I 232

knew while I was writing The Making of Americans that it was possible to describe every kind there is of men and women” (Lectures in America 150).

To return to and build upon my discussion in Chapter Two of the genius and the collector, I am contending that the typological project of The Making of Americans is like collection. “Types” in their kinship to collection and scientific taxonomies are inherently fetishistic. They are about separating out unique types from each other, organising the chaotic stream of a whole species, and arranging them so that their coherence is uppermost, manifested in the most striking displays of their differences and similarities. Where Tender Buttons is a collection of objects in the mode of the still-life painting, The Making of Americans is a collection of anthropological, sociological data- collection, about people. The meta-theme of collection that connects both texts, as different as they are, is evident everywhere. Hence the boy collecting butterflies, one of the few specific anecdotes in the text and one which symbolizes the text’s own project of categorization, like that which characterizes naturalism and nineteenth-century typology. The fact that the task becomes, across its nine hundred pages, an impossible one, is in direct relation to its increasing immersion in the twentieth-century mode; the closer “Stein” tries to get to her collection the more it dissipates, the coherence of character- object and author-subject breaks down, the two become intersubjective and construction occurs simultaneously in the moment of tactile meeting.

The status of The Making of Americans as a collection, in a different mode than that of Tender Buttons, nevertheless invokes the author-collector-subject (seen in Tender Buttons) as the subject presiding over the object of the text and its contents. The collector in Stein is at the forefront with The Making of Americans, and the scientific- style epicness of the scale of the project, specifically to catalogue all types of people past, present, and future, together with its extraordinarily minute detail in the differences between types (“quote”) is almost parodic of the discourse of science. Subjects in The Making of Americans are individuals, but they are also “types”. The status of the “individual” in relation to the “type” is that it is the type that is unique, within the parameters of the scientific collection, in relation to other types. This raises the question 233

of the validity of the individual specimen’s “uniqueness”. The individual is unique in the sense of its specificities and the degree of its sameness and difference to others of the same type, but this uniqueness has, in a sense, no “value”; it is overshadowed by the greater aura of the type, because of the plurality. If each individual were to be aurified the collection would be arrangeable, but not further classifiable, because valuation (the attribution of more or less value to certain types) would be impossible. This negotiation between individual subject and type is evident in The Making of Americans. The characters in the text become individuals by “repeating” aspects of their “living” to constitute an identity, but they also, in their typeness, are “a kind of men and women.” This is demonstrated in passages throughout the text. One example is the following, about Mabel Linker:

Mabel Linker had a different nature. She had her own being in her. Every one has their own being in them. Every one has their own repeating in them. Every one is a kind of men and women. Every kind of men and women is a kind of a kind of them. All the kinds of them are kinds of the two kinds of them. Sometime there will be a history of all of them (223).

“Mabel Linker” is a “unique” individual. She “[has] a different nature”. Technically, this comparative refers to Mary Maxworthing, with whom she is friends. However, the long, intervening sentences that come between the last mention of Mary Maxworthing and this assertion about Mabel Linker’s “different nature” prevent the comparative association, and leaves the claim standing alone. Mabel Linker is defined by the fact that she “[has] a different nature”. Each person, then, is an individual, “has their own being in them”. This “being” is expressed through iteration: “Every one has their own repeating in them”. But at the same time, paradoxically, every one is a ‘type’: “Every one is a kind of men and women”. As the last sentences of this paragraph demonstrate, then, the categorizational impulse oscillates between representing all specimens as “unique” and all types as sub-types of one or two original types: “Every one is a kind of men and women. Every kind of men and women is a kind of a kind of them. All the kinds of them are kinds of the two kinds of them”. Each man and woman being “a kind” morphs 234

into “the kind of a kind” and, ultimately, when all the “types” are further organized and arranged in terms of classification, they are found to be sub-types of only two fundamental types: “All the kinds of them are kinds of the two kinds of them”. This is reminiscent of mass-reproduction: the one original work of art that is reproduced en masse. The narrator goes on to say that these two “kinds” are:

…independent dependent and dependent independent. Mary Maxworthing was of the independent dependent, Mabel Linker was of the same kind of them but as one might say of extreme one end of that kind of them, while Mary Maxworthing was of toward the other end of them (223).

This is an idea of spectrum, of a range across which “types” are positioned—the value- set or arrangement of the collector. The typological classification of people in a curatorial discourse has its own further relational structures of value between subjects. The “fixed” relations or values between “types” in The Making of Americans reflects those of gender and familial relations of the subjects that Stein discusses in Paris France, in which French women and French men, and so on, “have no relations”. That the structure continues to function whatever the status of the individuals within the parameters of the collection is clear in this example from late in The Making of Americans:

As I was saying David Hersland was a dead one before he was a middle aged one. He was dead before he came to the middle of his middle living. He was then never a middle aged one, he was then never an old one. He was one of a kind in men and women. Certainly each is one of a kind in men and women. I am knowing more about being in each group of them when every one of a group of them is a young one, and an older one, an old one. I am knowing then being in some groups of men and women as it is in them when they are young men or women, older men or women, old men or women (726).

It doesn’t matter what age these “men and women” are, the narrator asserts, they are 235

always the same in their “being”. This is reminiscent of the essentializing function of the “type” in Paris France mentioned earlier, the type of “nationality” that prevents there being “relations” between different individual “French” people, because that static “French” type is fixed. This paragraph is also, however, about the divorcing of the narrative from its object, from the subject it discusses. Hersland is dead but the narrative of his life continues on without him. “He was dead before he came to the middle of his middle living”. Further, this paragraph is also about the shift in the narrator’s assertion from the claim that “men and women” are “kinds of men and women”, to the statement that “each is one of a kind in men and women”. If “one of a kind” is read as a phrase, then there is a shift to the unique, to the non-mass-produced and, further, not a type. There is only “one” of each type, “every one” no longer belongs to the “two kinds” that were established at the beginning. This demonstrates again the point about Mabel Linker. The stasis of “death” and Hersland being “dead” is the signal of his whole, objectified, status.

This fetishization according to nationality occurs through metonymy, and is significant in its connections to mass-production. Individuality and the formation of the self is an American preoccupation, evident in the work of quintessential American writers such as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.20 The loss of individuality when the citizens of a Nation are seen as parts of the “body politic” is evident half-way through the novel when “Stein” (the narrator) comments that:

Every one to me just now is in pieces to me. That is to say every one is to me just now as pieces to me. That is to say that each complete one is only as a piece to me, that all there is of each one at anytime in them gives to me a feeling of pieces not of a whole thing, that is to say I am having just now with each one I am knowing or remembering a feeling an emotion from them as if they were each one not a whole thing (520).

20 Recently, individuality in Melville has been discussed by Megan Williams (149) in relation to war and nation, and the subject in Whitman has been considered as it instates performative sexuality, by Vincent J. Bertolini (1052). 236

They are are parts of the fetishized whole that is “America”. But this shifts across into a different structure, in which there is no coherence, only the experience of engaging with “pieces”. That labour, represented as the narrative of description, is what constitutes the “imagined community”, fetishized into a Nation-object.

The relation of “Stein” as authorial subject to her collection of characters is one that begins with the confidence of the coherent male artist subject and slowly unravels across the text, ending in the dispersal of the subject of “Stein”. The threat of intersubjectivity to artistic production is evident in Stein’s relationship to her own artistic labour that is The Making of Americans, and is shown, ironically, through two techniques of narrative experientiality: metatextuality and intersubjectivity. In his article on Stein’s epic novel Barrett Watten states: “Socially reflexive subjectivity is what The Making of Americans is about and what it makes as well” (1). Socially reflexive subjectivity, Watten argues, is the construction of a subject in a negotiation with other subjects—which can be seen within the terms of this thesis to be a form of intersubjectivity. This reflexive subjectivity or intersubjectivity occurs not only on the level of the characters but on the level of the mediating narrator, who comments metatextually on the production of these characters. In her article, ‘A Poetics of Difference: The Making of Americans and Unreadable Subjects’ (2003), Melanie Taylor identifies the author-consciousness that comments on the proceedings through The Making of Americans as being a subject constructed in relation to the characters in the text, who becomes, through intersubjective construction, subjected to the rules of the text: “The narrator, initially a self-appointed medium for the typological study of human beings, is now exposed to that same process” (34). Taylor argues that eventually this leads to “the ultimate dissolution of the narrator’s subject position” because, “where conventional “meaning” is dislodged, subjectivity is destabilized and may eventually become “unreadable”” (36).21 This can be seen in Stein’s increasing anxiety about the possibility of the project

21 These operations are functioning in other of Stein’s works that examine the aurified ‘idea’ of Nation. A similar form of intersubjective identity-construction that breaks down the aura of Nation is evident in Four in America. Neil Schmitz argues that the intersubjective relations between the narrator and the famous 237

she has, earlier in the text, declared is “what I really know”. By page six-hundred and ninety-six she is not so “certain”:

I know a good deal now about being in men and women, about being in some one, in some, in many making in them each one their succeeding, their failing in being living, in being in living, in being going on being living. I know this now so that I could have it in me to know very much about succeeding and failing in men and women and yet I am not certain I will very soon be knowing really very much more about this thing. I really have not very much hope in me that soon I will be knowing very much more about succeeding and failing being in men and women. I seem just now in me to be a little, a good deal stopping in being learning about this thing in men and women (696).

Taylor uses Judith Butler’s concept of performativity to argue that Stein’s text performs the kind of “parodic” repetitions of identity that undermine notions of gender as essential: “...it could be argued that the narrative incoherence of the text describes and enacts an incoherence of gendered identity”. She argues that: “The confused syntax enacts what is in fact an unclear relation between sameness and difference, one that requires the narrator to be alert to minute variations in an otherwise changing pattern” (34). The text’s complex repetitions perform the constructedness of gender in language, then, according to Taylor, and in creating sentences that dislocate gendered pronouns, making it impossible for the reader to coherently follow a subject across/through a sentence, Stein creates “unreadable subjects”. But Taylor acknowledges that gender difference is sometimes operating to conventional effect in The Making of Americans:

male subjects of Four in America serve to undermine the patriarchal authority of history, in its failure to record female subjectivities as important to development of the Nation. Schmitz argues that: “…--for all [Stein’s] relocation of the referent, of speaker and auditor, however humorously, however ironically—Stein is actually doing Plutarchan biography in Four in America, doing The Lives of Great Men, and addressing us, if not American literature, reminding us: “When this you see remember me”” (754). 238

…generally, the signifiers “men” and “women” provide the foundational poles for the narrator’s classification of human types, and gendered pronouns appear to be used unequivocally throughout the text. Although all of these examples may, in isolation, reinforce patriarchal notions of gender, something very different happens when they are subjected to the narrator’s less orthodox observations. When the narrator informs us that David “was a boy” this may just be another example of the facile and self-evident nature of much of the commentary. On the other hand, by invoking the norm, attention is drawn to the prescriptive (and patriarchal) effects of gender and gendered language. …At one level, to articulate that axiom purely reinstates its “natural”; but stating that which does not need to be said also highlights the extent to which our experiences of identity are already determined by basic cultural dictums (37).

If Taylor’s identification of the fluctuation between conventional and experimental “gender difference” in the text is recast as a function of the two structures of representation of subject/object relations, this fluctuation can be explained as a function of the typological process itself. It is the tension between labour and stasis parallel to the tension between individual experience (narrative) and an abstract “idea” of identity (the (stereo)types). I do not want to claim that this is more important than the issue of gender, rather I wish to argue that this issue of gender is imbricated within the general economy of subjects and objects in capitalism.

The point at which the structure of fetishism is broken down and replaced by the non- aurifying structure of subject/object relations is the point at which the metatextual incursions of the author-collector-subject into the text also breaks down. Taylor identifies the trajectory of the novel as one which starts with a confident (almost smug, I would argue) narrator who is certain of her ability to record all the “types” of humans but increasingly loses confidence in the possibility of this task, and by the end of the novel has lost control of the task (has lost control of her own narrative, in a sense), and has not succeeded. Taylor says: 239

In a sustained passage of highly self-reflexive utterances (in six paragraphs there are twenty-seven uses of “I”), the narrator becomes the subject of her/his own cognitive and linguistic processes in what Ulla Dydo calls, a “scrutiny of herself in relation to her ongoing perceptions and formulations—the writer in the act of writing” (37).

Taylor attributes this to the experimentation with gendered language, particularly pronouns etc. which break down the seemingly “essential” nature of gender. I want to use Taylor’s trajectory to suggest that it is also about the author’s distance from the text; the increasing immersion of the narrator in the immense labour required to produce the text draws the narrator towards it, into the experience, into increasing commentary about the difficulties of the process. This in turn constructs the narrator intersubjectively with the text and therefore results, finally, in a situation in which the distance between the narrator and the characters—the “types” of subjects who are objects of collection and arrangement—has been broken down. Aurification is no longer possible, as they have not remained coherent, rather, they exist, at this point in the text, in the process of construction. Stein’s confidence that she could remain a coherent narratorial subject, standing aloof from the process of the text and observing and arranging her collection of types, has been gradually eroded over the time it takes to write the novel. Taylor describes this shift when she writes:

There is perhaps an unusual degree of narrative progression in the fact that by the final chapter the “I” is no longer present as a distinct identity, having apparently been subsumed by the abstractions and repetitions of the text (36).

The Butlerian performativity that Taylor uses to read the language of The Making of Americans is a theory of subject-formation. Stein’s engagement in The Making of Americans is, as has been discussed, a typological and inherently curatorial, collectional project, and as such, the “findings” of the text are about more than just subject- formation: they comment on subject-formation in relation to objects. Stein’s narrator as metatextual commentator is commenting on the process of collection and narrative 240

arrangement of subjects as objects, when that narrator breaks down in what Taylor calls a “crisis of personal and linguistic signification” (39). As Taylor notes, this breakdown is evident in the following paragraph:

I mean, I mean and that is not what I mean, I mean that not any one is saying what they are meaning, I mean that I am feeling something, I mean that I mean something and I mean that not any one is thinking, is feeling, is saying, is certain of that thing, I mean that not any one can be saying, thinking, feeling, not any one can be certain of that thing, I mean I am not certain of that thing, I am not ever saying, thinking, feeling, being certain of this thing, I mean, I mean, I know what I mean (782).

The text performs the breakdown of the “types” it is collecting through the demonstration of the labour required to produce them. Thus, the structure of subject/object relations in which labour is the focus and process and intersubjectivity is in direct conflict with the typological project of collecting and arranging aurified types—a project conceived out of a structure of subject/object relations of fetishism in which subject and object are coherent entities, subject held in thrall by the aura of the object. In one sense the attempt to “describe every type of men and women who are and were and will be living” is inherently invoking the opposing structure, of labour and process, in that it is going to require representation of the labour required to create the fetishized object, and in representing that labour the exposure of it will dispel the aura.

This breakdown is viewed as Stein’s “writing out [of a] struggle” by Barbara Will, who argues that Stein’s shifting understanding of her own “type” (that of artist-genius) occurs during the writing of The Making of Americans, in which she was engaged in trying to represent the typology of everyone else:

Melanctha’s interest both in “typicality” and in a subject who cannot be reduced to the determinants of her “type”—race, femininity, heterosexuality—exemplifies Stein’s struggle during this period to write across 241

intellectual boundaries. The Making of Americans protracts this struggle, presenting “character” as at once given and essential, compelled to repeat itself in unchanging ways, and as an unexpected and unknowable force whose dimensions are always in excess of a unified “bottom nature.” In writing out this struggle, Stein begins to employ repetition as a way of emphasizing both constancy and variety, sameness and difference; and as a marker of time experienced either chronologically or in terms of a “continuous present” (The Problem of Genius 50).

As I have shown, the intellectual boundaries Will refers to can be understood as the boundaries of opposing structures of subject/object relations, which explicates the dilemma posed in both ‘Melanctha’ and The Making of Americans as part of a broader dilemma of multiple and conflicting major structures of identity- and world-formation. The contradictions that Stein faces in The Making of Americans are those caused by the struggle between a fetishizing structure of subject/object relations and the structure of processual, iterative, and intersubjective construction, that are the two structures functioning within the text.

In the lecture delivered in America entitled ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’, her retrospective explication and examination of the writing of The Making of Americans, Stein presents a number of points that effectively constitute, I would argue, all these aspects of subject/object relations and their associations with respective centuries and countries that constructs the competing subject/object relations in The Making of Americans. In this lecture Stein draws distinctions between European and American styles, and associates the two styles with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, thus constructing a shift of progression, or development, in literature that places America in the present and Europe in the past. Stein positions the single unit of the phrase in nineteenth-century “English literature” against the bigger unit of the paragraph, with its multiple sentences, in twentieth-century America: 242

In describing English literature I have explained that the twentieth century was the century not of sentences as was the eighteenth not of phrases as was the nineteenth but of paragraphs. And as I explained paragraphs were inevitable because as the nineteenth century came to its ending, phrases were no longer full of any meaning and the time had come when a whole thing was all there was of anything. Series immediately before and after made everybody clearly understand this thing. And so it was natural that in writing The Making of Americans I had proceeded to enlarge my paragraphs so as to include everything. What else could I do. In fact inevitably I made my sentences and my paragraphs do the same thing, made them be one and the same thing. This was inevitably because the nineteenth century having lived by phrases really had lost the feeling of sentences, and before this in English literature paragraphs had never been an end in themselves and now in the beginning of the twentieth century a whole thing, being what was assembled from its parts was a whole thing and so it was a paragraph. You will see that in The Making of Americans I did this thing, I made a paragraph so much a whole thing that it included in itself as a whole thing a whole sentence. That makes something clear to you does it not (Lectures in America 158-59).

Thus the difference in grammatical structure between sentences and paragraphs mirror the thematic and methodological operations in the respective structures of subject/object relations. Where the fetish-objects of nuts and el Grecos (discussed in Chapter Two), possessed through avarice, are of the nineteenth century, so are “phrases” of that century. However, like the fetish-objects they have lost their “meaning”. In the twentieth century it is paragraphs that function to record experience, like the “daily living” and iteration on the thematic level that is a twentieth-century structure. Further, Stein explicitly links her belief in the relevance of the sentence to the twentieth century to the technology of mass-reproduction when she writes: “Series immediately before and after made everybody clearly understand this thing”. This is, Stein asserts, absolutely “an American thing”, and in claiming that she does not forget to assert her own identity as an American. Paragraphs then, are the only suitable form through and in which to express 243

experience in the twentieth century, and these paragraphs as they are made manifest in The Making of Americans are iterative, constructing experience through intersubjectivity and labour, as I have shown, and which would seem to correspond to Stein’s articulation of their function here. However, like the recouperative operations in Tender Buttons, where the titles as well as the overall structure of collection re-solidifies the representation of processual, tactile subject/object relations, Stein’s description of the way she has extended paragraphs—“…now in the beginning of the twentieth century a whole thing, being what was assembled from its parts was a whole thing and so it was a paragraph”— suggests the re-solidification of processual sentences into a unified object. In its structure and its content, then, The Making of Americans represents and performs constructions of subject/object relations that oscillate between, as well as deploy simultaneously, two structures. These operations occur within the terms that Stein herself has been shown to have established in her autobiographical texts and which have been deployed throughout this thesis, as well as in her retrospective commentary on her own processes, seen in ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’.

Nineteen years after The Making of Americans Stein investigated the issue of series production that underlies her philosophy of the importance of the paragraph in ‘The Gradual Making of…’ in another work, this time of novella length, entitled Many Many Women, that posits no “original” except the idea of the type itself, and can draw even less distinction between “one” and the “many”. In the entire ninety-six pages of this text no proper noun is used. The idea that this text is a description of “many many women”, asserted initially by the title, is further emphasized in the first paragraphs:

Any one is one having been that one. Any one is such a one. Any one having been that one is one remembering something of such a thing, is one remembering having been that one. Each one having been one is being one having been that one. Each one having been one is remembering something of this thing, is remembering something of having been that one. Each one is one. Each one has been one. Each one being one, each one 244

having been one is remembering something of that thing. Each one is one. Each one has been one. Each one is remembering that thing (126).

This iteration constructs the existence of many “one”s, and asserts the simple fact of their existence: “each one has been”. However, this is soon complexified by the text’s use of the gendered pronoun “she”:

She is one being one remembering that she is forgetting anything. She is one not objecting to being one remembering that thing, remembering that she is forgetting anything. She is one objecting to there being some objecting to being ones forgetting anything. She is one objecting to any one being on remembering that they are not forgetting anything (127).

It is unclear whether the “she” is the same “she” in each sentence, or whether each sentence refers to a different “she”, as the title continues to “mean” into the text. Apart from “remembering” and “forgetting” this “she”/these multiple “she”s are “kissing”, “living”, “giving”, “being lonesome”: all actions that construct a coherent subject. The entire text is a record of the process and labour of “living” and “being” a “one”. The “one”s and the “she”s construct simultaneously a multiplicity of women (“many many women”) and the multiple and processual labour of what becomes a coherent subject(object) through aurification. Many Many Women functions almost entirely according to the structure, then, of non-fetishizing process and labour, and unlike the individual object-poems of Tender Buttons the title does not recoup the singularity and aurification of an object, nor is the text imbricated in a fetishizing economy of artist/genius and Modernist “high-art” canonization that recoups the entirety of The Making of Americans into a Nation-object. However, the final paragraph does lean towards this operation, one that I have identified as occurring frequently in Stein’s texts:

Any one and any one, one and one and two, and one and one and one, and one and many, and one and some, and one and any one, and any one and any one, 245

any one and any one is one and one is one and one is some one and some one is some one, any one and one and one and one, any one is that one and that one is that one and any one and one, and one and one, any one is the one and the one who is the one is that one. The one who is the one who is that one, any one and any one is one, one is one, one is that, and any one, any one is one and one is one, and one and one, and one and one and one and one (222).

This final paragraph, then, insistently echoes the “one”s in ‘Galeries Lafayette’ and ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’. Both texts effect the circumscription of subjects as objects in capitalist commodity culture, as I argued in Chapter Two. This final paragraph in Many Many Women comes after ninety-six pages of similar processual recording of existing, and within this context the “one” functions to suggest an endless “series” like those in mass-production, of the same, and iterative, moments, and suggests that this kind of process is endless; this paragraph performs a tailing-off of the shifting, iterative, and repetitive incantatory labour of “being” in the twentieth century. Women do not seem to be object-subjects in Many Many Women, but are multiple, iterative, series of moments of “living”, “remembering”, and “forgetting”. In the way that Stein uses it, however, unity and coherence, a fetishized entity and a non- unique, infinitely reproducible thing, exist simultaneously within a single word. The word “one” implies a radical ambiguity about the distance between subject and object, between author-collector-subject and work of art. “One” functions simultaneously as both structures; there is both a huge distance between the object and the subject invoked, and at the same time no distance at all. “One” draws attention onto itself as a word, but at the same time signifies its material signified. It is the ultimate sign, symbol, and reality of the world as a mass of separate subjects and objects positioned in economies of value, and contradictorily, as the experience of unity of all things at once. 246

Conclusion

I have shown in this thesis that Stein’s work contains and produces meaning from large- scale oppositional structures of the economies between people and things in modernity. Layer after layer of fetishistic operations move across Stein’s texts, from the commodity fetishism in the materiality that language speaks to, to the fetishization of the materiality of language itself, to the sexual fetishism codified within that language. In both tension and conflict with these aurifying operations is the structure of subject/object relations that does not aurify, does not, in fact, allow the coherence of subject and object as separate terms but renders them simultaneously, in the moment of production. Substantial tensions such as the one I have identified and examined in this thesis are not uncommon to Stein’s writing, of course. Stein scholar Marianne DeKoven argues:

…Stein was…part of a phenomenon which we have only recently come to recognize. The reimagining, enabled by feminine cultural positioning, of all structures of dualism, including those of tradition and innovation, center and margin, canon and anticanon, self and other, sanity and craziness, symbolic and presymbolic, masculine and feminine. Stein not only calls all such boundaries into question, she creates a literary space which genuinely straddles them, bringing together the two terms of all our ultimately gendered cultural dialectics not in synthesis but in a conjunction which refuses to obliterate difference (‘Half in and Half Out’ 79).

My thesis does not seek to resolve the dilemmas of Stein’s texts—they remain inherently unresolvable, as DeKoven argues when she writes that in Stein dualisms form “a conjunction which refuses to obliterate difference”. Rather, my project accounts for the compelling productivity and creativity that this node of unresolvability holds for the critical reader: the ongoing fascination that their ambiguities provoke. As DeKoven asserts, Stein’s writing ultimately resists neat resolution. In the case of the relations between subjects and objects that I have investigated, Stein’s texts defy over-arching 247

resolution because of their complex internal struggles.

As we have seen, Stein’s writing is a site at which the two competing structures (of fetishism and of processual and tactile interaction) that came to exist simultaneously within European and American culture in the first half of the twentieth century are represented and developed. This positioning of Stein’s texts is to acknowledge the interimplication of her work within its own, as well as the current, historical situation. Time and history have not resolved the dilemmas of capitalism and the representation of the subject and the object and their relations. The two structures I identify and posit as constructing meaning in Stein’s texts continue to function in the social and cultural domains of postmodernity. The far-reaching nature of Stein’s praxis is evidenced by her contemporary resonance for such writers as the ‘L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’ poets of the 1990s, as well as feminists’ ongoing reconsiderations of women’s writing—the refashionings and reimaginings of gendered identity and experience that writers such as Stein so formidably present. The dilemma of subject/object relations encapsulated in Stein’s work has not disappeared, but has only escalated, in globalised modernity.22

I have shown that Stein’s construction of Nation operates through a fetishism that positions the Nation as eternally experienced at a “distance”, reflecting Stein’s literal geographical distancing of herself from the America she aurified. In my evaluation of Stein’s Nation-fetishism I showed that she relates these operations to her own role as an artist in relation to the Nation, thus instating a certain kind of textual subject, a coherent artist-genius at a distance from the fetishized artwork-object that he/she produces. This fetishizing structure of subject/object relations exists in Stein’s work alongside, sometimes in tension with and sometimes simultaneous with, another structure, one in which subject and object are rendered not as separate terms but together in/as each passing moment of tactile interaction. In Chapters Three and Four, through close- readings of Stein’s major texts about subjects and objects, I unpacked these two

22 The points at which Stein’s work demonstrates specifically postmodern aspects is a heavily-contested field in which particularly useful interventions have been made by Peter Nicholls, Ellen Berry, Neil Schmitz and Nicola Pitchford. 248

structures that I have identified through close-readings of Stein’s major texts about subjects and objects, ultimately concluding that in her quintessential prose-poem about objects, Tender Buttons, the internal structure of the text (including its sectional divisions, its titles, and its overall structure of a collection) recoups the internal renderings of tactile process that the individual poems enact. The ultimate tendency of the text, therefore, is towards aurification. In the case of The Making of Americans, Stein’s massive text specifically about subjects, however, I concluded that the typological imperative of the omniscient narrator is ultimately subsumed by the tide of processual experience being recorded. Yet, this too cannot be taken as an endpoint or solution in/to Stein’s objectives or praxis. For as demonstrated, the pronouns that are characteristic of a sense of series production and reproducibility in The Making of Americans function in the novella written in the same style entitled Many Many Women to encapsulate both structures of subject/object relations simultaneously. I argued this through a demonstration of the complex signifying functions of the word “one”.

In making this final point I brought together my discussion of ‘An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men’ and ‘Galeries Lafayette’ in Chapter Two, with Many Many Women, to argue that in a number of Stein’s texts the two structures of subject/object relations in modernity are simultaneously in operation within a single word, that is, the word “one” as Stein deploys it multiple times within specific paragraphs. This adjective that stands in for a noun is both unique and reproducible, suggestive of aura and devoid of it. It can be both a subject and an object at the same time, and it is both a unified totality within itself, and simultaneously one of a series of identical objects. The repetition of this word, “one”, in the works discussed creates an incessant rhythm, an incantation that performs the pleasure of repetition/iteration as a sublime joy that verges on the mystical or spiritual, the very discourse from which fetishism was originally defined in modernity.

The religious nature of the discursive origins from which Marx took the word “fetishism” infuses the Marxist theorisation of capitalist economies with a secret ontological murmur, attested to precisely by Marx’s own sense of its appropriateness. 249

The ontological suggestion inherent in traditional conceptual frameworks for understanding unity as signified by “one”, points towards a trajectory for potential further development. As commentator on Postodernism Brian McHale argues, Modernist artistic production can be seen as “dominated by ontological issues”, where Postmodernism is impelled primarily “by epistemological issues” (24). Stein’s construction of a shift between nineteenth- and twentieth-century representational modes might be productively extended through this question of the status of the word “one” in shifting understandings across the different phases of modernity and capitalism.

Stein herself makes the connection between money and religion that alludes to Marx’s famous statement that “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, when she argues, in Everybody’s Autobiography, that: “Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its solution” (102). “…of course the thing they count when they count is money” (100). Earlier in the same text she writes:

The Jews and once more we have the Orientalising of Europe being always certain that money is money is money finally decide and that makes a Marxian state that money is not money. That is the way it is if you believe in anything deeply enough it turns into something else and so money turns into not money. That is what mysticism is… (29).

Here Stein understands that the economic situation as Marx theorised it (“a Marxian state”) operates according to the same principles as religion—that is, the belief in money turns it into “not money”, into something other than money. Money is imbued with the same aura that characterizes commodity fetishes in capitalism. The relationships in modernity between economies of exchange, artistic production, and religion, are explicated by commentator on Modernism Douglas Mao, when he argues that:

For many Modernists…the test of production—and especially of artistic production—implicitly figured as the test of an individual life’s meaning in a world that seemed to furnish subjectivity no other secure source of significance. 250

This last point, of course, suggests one way in which Goods at last reunite with Gods under Modernism, and in which socio-economic assumptions come together with philosophical anxieties. For the two questions of the existential dilemma—that of how meaning can inhere in Being, and that of how human lives can be lived meaningfully—both seem to find a possible resolution in production, inasmuch as the subject appears to do something meaningful in leaving a material trace on the object world, while the object world appears to accede to meaning through the work of the subject upon it (19).

Mao argues here that in modernity objects provide the last point of meaningful interaction between subject and world, at a historical era in which the concept of stable subjectivity has been fundamentally challenged. As Mao suggests, this is a point also at which objects and spiritual forces come together. I would contend that, in Stein’s texts, the paragraphs in which the word “one” is incessantly repeated constitute a point in the representation of the relations between subjects and objects at which “Goods at last reunite with Gods”. Hence, at the most basic unit of the word lies the metonym of the dilemma that preoccupied Stein across her oeuvre.

Finally, I would argue that my reading of Stein’s work through the optics of Marxist and Freudian theories, and the structures of subject/object relations I take from them, has implications for the theories themselves. In being appropriated and deployed by a lesbian woman who claimed to be a literary genius the nature of these theories is changed. The sexual fetishism she depicts in Tender Buttons is a lesbian one, and by its very nature provides a pre-emptory challenge to what Freud would claim, thirteen years later, was a “perversion” that did not concern women. Again, whilst Stein’s gendered identity problematizes her relation to the figure of the collector, her active appropriation of this category that Benjamin understood as inherently masculine undermines its essentialism and challenges its characteristics. Stein’s over-determined collecting ranged across mediums and discourses, from paintings to the painters who painted them (The Autobiography 22), to the endless series of “breakable” objects of popular culture mass- reproduction (the china figurines that Gertrude and Alice bought) to the books that she 251

‘collected’ by writing them herself. The very range of Stein’s collection creates significantly different teleology from that of Benjamin, in its insistence on the importance of the domestic, as well as the resolute movements between private and public spheres, the house that is a salon, the decorative figurine to the transmissible recouperation of the “apocryphal or profane” in collections that reinstate their values within the culture (Ackbar 230).

Stein’s engagement with fetishism in these ways is focalised around sites of pleasure, an optic that recasts the theoretical fetishisms of Marx and Freud. Any pleasure to be got in Marx’s theorisation of commodity fetishism would be the illusory and enslaving pleasure that prevents the labourer from realising that he has been alienated from the products of his own labour by the commodity’s arbitrary value (81). In psychoanalytic fetishism Freud recorded that the way he had come across fetishism as a perversion was by accident, when the patient described the symptoms whilst in analysis for some other reason (351). The high level of satisfaction and pleasure provided by fetishism explained, Freud writes, the lack of complaints about it from those who had developed the condition, but Freud notes this only in passing, moving swiftly on to an analytical breakdown of the condition itself (351). The pleasure of fetishism that is sidelined by both Marx and Freud is conditionally recognised by Benjamin in the engagements of the figures of the collector and the author with ‘objects’. While Stein encountered the problems and dangers of fetishism, such as in her own positioning within the capitalist economy of celebrity, the pleasure of fetishism in all its discursive realms is the driving force in Stein’s literary representations of subjects and objects, and will no doubt continue to animate critical inquiry into her representations of the people and things in the Modernist world. 252

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