Sensing Race Against Representation in the Experimental
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SENSING RACE AGAINST REPRESENTATION IN THE EXPERIMENTAL WRITINGS OF GERTRUDE STEIN: 1910–1940 by Jean L. Neely A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2012 Copyright 2012 Jean L. Neely ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe much thanks to my entire family and community for supporting me in this work. Thanks to Mike and Joshua Neely for endless grace, love, and unspeakable joy in all the craziness. Thanks to my parents, In Young Lee and Reverend Byung Sun Lee, for their unconditional love and support. Thanks to my sister, Amy Kim, for indispensable sister-love and cherished friendship. Thanks to my grandmother, Sun Ae Lee (for helping to raise us and for my first and only piano, always a source of joy and comfort); to all my grandparents for their loving faith, amazing endurance through colonization and exile, and countless sunrise prayers; all my aunts, uncles, and cousins on both the Lee and Paik sides of the family for prayers, love and all sorts of support, and especially to Miyoung Emo—anything but a “little aunt”—for all her creative and spiritual encouragement; and to all the Neely side of the family—Grandmom and Grandpop, Bonnie, Julie, Pat, Randy, Johnny, Pam, and Jeannie—for taking me into your fold. I thank David Lloyd for being the best advisor a student could hope for, in particular for all his guidance and help in the thinking through of the aesthetic (and the Aesthetic), taste (and Taste), representation, race, and poetry within reigning structures of oppression, and for always understanding and drawing out what I might have to say before I’m able to say it. I could not have begun or completed this project without his encouragement, and all my thinking throughout this project is infused with his insight and influence. Thanks to John Carlos Rowe and Pani Norindr for so graciously offering their time, helpful insight, and critique. Thanks to Fred Moten for his friendship, mind- ii stretching teaching, helpful conversation, all his transformative work and poetry, for getting my project and imparting heartening courage in fighting the good fight. Thanks also to Marjorie Perloff for her teaching in avant-garde poetics, shared enthusiasm for Stein, and resistant energy at the start of this project, and to Flora Ruiz for her endless helpfulness and patience. Thanks to my friends and family at Agape Christian Church, Lake Avenue Church, Shema Church, and InterVarsity ministries. Specifically, I give thanks for all manner of love, support, encouragement, prayers, and ever-heartening friendship to Michael and Carol Greene, Janet and Yann Schrodi, Jen and Andrew Larratt-Smith, Lynn Gill, Medalit Tay and Kito Thayne, Mihaela Gilea and Antonio Martinez, Tisla and John Sideropoulos, Rhea and Henry Sideropoulos, Ariadne Sideropoulos, Christine Kirsch, Donna Wilson, Wendi Gaines, Susan Mankarious, Alanna and Rick Creighton, Rachel and Peter Calvert, Celia Evenson, Greg and Claudia Walgenbach, Shinobu Yoshida, Julia Dare, Kristen Irwin, Renee Wherley, Beth Palmer, Susanna Law, Lora Julian, Erin Wurtemberg, Gloria Brunzell, Grace Yao, Mee Heh Risdon, Megan and Stephen Dove, Mayra Nolan, Albert Tate, Marion Skeete, Jamie Park, Sandy Chou, Mubarek Abliz, Anna and Andy Fast, Dayna and Eric Olson-Getty, Anneke Geel, Jennifer Torres Alcantara, Tiffany and Jay Ehle, Laura and Richard Vachet, Sabina and Waiken Wong, Becky Stephen, Renée Molitor, and Nathalie Appéré Ralambondrainy. For their encouraging camaraderie in the thick of it at USC, I thank Jennifer Ansley, Amaranth Borsuk, Michael Cucher, Mary Ann Davis, Mayumo Inoue, Michelle Har Kim, Stacy Lettman, Sandy Kim, Barbara Mello, Peter O’Neill, Rick Snyder, and Robert Stefanek. iii For taking the time to read through my drafts, I thank my nephew Patrick Komiske, my sister Amy, and friends Jamie and Shinobu. Extra thanks go to Michelle Har Kim for such invaluable formatting help at the end. I am also very grateful to the following people in my life: Kelly and everyone at Charlie’s Coffee House for the wonderful workspace, consistently great coffee and chai, and their uplifting company during the writing of the bulk of this dissertation; my mom, and Thanae Sideropoulos, Amalea Sideropoulos, Anne Tan, Grethel Tan, Medalit Tay, and Kendra Tay for all the babysitting help; Audrey DeVore and Susan Csikesz for their help and encouragement in all things while I was at UC Irvine; Brook Thomas for pushing me to think and write beyond the obvious in my first year of college; Suzanne Gearhart for her insight and insistent encouragement to continue in literary studies; Mrs. Elizabeth Park—for the gift of her sister’s book, Dictee; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, for beautiful work as a Korean American woman with a penchant for French; Laura Doyle for her supportive guidance at the start of my graduate studies at UMass Amherst; Nick Bromell for a meaningful and memorable introduction to grad studies; Peggy O’Brien for introducing me to Yeats and his world; Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan for gracious and patient guidance in reading theory; and Stacy, Claire and all my Amherst friends. And all thanks be to God for life and hope in Jesus, for incomprehensible motherly-fatherly care and love, for everyone above and all good things in the midst of the mire, injustice, and untruth all around, up through the highest levels of learning. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract vi Introduction: Sounding Sense: Reading Race in Steinese 1 Chapter One: Race Invisible, Language Divisible 12 Chapter Two: Representation and the Color Line: 52 Articulations of the Race Age Chapter Three: The Color of Butter 106 Chapter Four: Race and “The Rhythm of the Visible World” 159 Chapter Five: Butter and Rose 224 Epilogue 268 Bibliography 281 v Abstract This dissertation undertakes to read, hear, and feel the openly unsaid and concretely sounded, spelled, and sewn manifestations of race and racial anxiety in the writing of Gertrude Stein after 1910. It explores race as the irresistible, elusive, ever- irruptive trace of difference that resists reference and abstractive representational logic while inflecting and shaping the meaning of the ordinary everywhere. In this project I read the frequent explicit references to the racial throughout Stein’s corpus as pivotal, loosely fastening (and fattening) buttons that connect and charge Stein’s recurring vocabularies of the body and domestic space with racial significance. I begin by reviewing the critical climate of discussions of race in Stein’s writing and outlining some of the theoretical work that is instrumental in thinking, locating, and articulating race in relation to Stein and other representation-resistant forms. After some discussion of the historical contexts in which we find race pervasively saturating, infusing, and structuring Stein’s world of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century life in the U.S. and France, I consider the ways in which race weaves together and sounds through Stein’s oblique plays on the ordinary, her handling of “little” everyday words and her challenges to the limits of representation. In reading a broad span of Stein’s writings over many years, I look into the intensely intertextually connective and re-sounded, proliferative and profound dynamics of the non-negligible, structuring trace and tracks of race imprinted in and sounded through the familial-ly and materially associative potential of words as relationally suggestive rather than abstractly substitutional, as part of the embodied vi substance of the Real that constitutes everything though it always exceeds and evades communicative translation and pressures toward graspable, master-able clarity. vii Introduction Sounding Sense: Reading Race in Steinese Among the many mold-breaking, iconoclastic, and innovative writers in English in the early twentieth century, Gertrude Stein stands out as one of the most colorful and controversial. Her strong personality and singular writing have over the years incited both the most devoted appreciation from enthusiastic “followers” and disciples of sorts (especially among avant-garde poets, and feminist, queer, and otherwise institution- challenging readers and writers) and the most dismissive or vilifying criticism.1 In her time, many deemed her “mad,” and she was called a “lunatic,” a “colossal charlatan” (Rogers 18), and “a literary idiot” (Gold 208).2 It was Stein’s more opaque and disjunctive writing after Three Lives (1909)3 that provoked the most indignant and damning responses from the press and the literary establishment.4 Her noticeably !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The interesting divergence in opinion regarding Stein’s work and person was something she encountered frequently throughout her lifetime from all sides of the general public, the press, the academics, and other writers. The notoriety of her character and provocative writing style was such that by the time she returned to the U.S. for a lecture tour in 1934 (her first return to the States since having moved to Paris in 1903), she was recognized by nearly everyone she met on the street. Harvey Eagleson commented that Stein’s reputation was “[o]ne of the most curious phenomena of modern literary history” (214) and that “[f]or years her name ha[d] been almost a household word” by the time of her visit to the U.S. (Eagleson, “Gertrude Stein: Method in Madness.” (Sewanee Review, April 1936. Quoted in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein 214.) 2 Gold was also distinctly perturbed by the bourgeois decadence he saw in Stein’s personally indulgent writing as typical of “the artists of the leisure class” (210). 3 Three Lives itself is stylistically “experimental” in certain ways but relatively more conventionally readable and somewhat familiarly realist. It was also more widely praised and did not incite the kind of critical uproar that ensued from her writing after 1909, which has been more associated with and celebrated by the American “avant-garde” poets and scholars.