2OO6 CONTENTS REINVENTING THE SELF SORINA CHIPER THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN VOLUNTARY EXILE / 7 REMUS BEJAN 91 REVERE STREET: THE AESTHETICS OF MEMORY / 17 RICHARD R. E. KANIA and NAME SYMBOLISM IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S OLGA MAKSIMENKO BRAVE NEW WORLD / 27 PIA BRÎNZEU POSTMODERN ARMOURS: TATTOOS IN SARAH HALL’S THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO /39 CRISTINA CHEVEREªAN DANDY SANS FRONTIÈRES: OSCAR WILDE & MATEIU CARAGIALE / 47 KÁLMÁN MATOLCSY THE SIMULATED BODY IN A GERONTOCRATIC CULTURE: HOMEOSTASIS, GENOME, AND FASHION IN BRUCE STERLING’S HOLY FIRE/55 ABA-CARINA PÂRLOG INTOLERABLE BODIES IN GEORGE ORWELL’S BURMESE DAYS /65 DANA PERCEC SHAKESPEARE AND SLENDER BODIES / 73 JOURNEYS INTO SILENCE FLORENTINA ANGHEL REACHING SILENCE IN SEAMUS DEANE’S READING IN THE DARK /85 TED BAILEY PLAYING AGAINST THE CLOCK: THE METAPHOR OF TIME IN THE FOREVER WAR AND THE DECHRONIZATION OF SAM MAGRUDER /93 DANIELA ROGOBETE PERDICIT SILENTIUM / 105 ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ TONY HARRISON AND HIS TELEVISION POEMS / 117 OTTILIA VERES UNSAYING ORIGINS IN J. M. COETZEE’S IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY / 131 TIBOR TÓTH I TOLD YOU IT IS ME, IMAGINING / 137 LÍVIA SZÉLPÁL HAYDEN WHITE’S TROPICS OF DISCOURSE. AN INTERSECTION OF LITERATURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY / 147 B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 4 NATAŠA KARANFILOVIC WOMEN’S WRITING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIMETIC MIRROR: THE PROSE FICTION OF ELIZABETH JOLLEY / 159 OLIVERA KUSOVAC AMBIGUOUS ‘NEW WOMEN’ IN SHAW’S GETTING MARRIED / 171 CRISTINA FLORES MORENO THE CONTRIBUTION OF RALPH CUDWORTH TO THE NEOPLATONIC BACKGROUND OF S.T. COLERIDGE’S “RELIGIOUS MUSINGS” / 179 CHRISTOPHER CAIRNEY RACE RELATIONS AND POINT OF VIEW IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S “KARAIN” / 187 GARRET D. ZAYIC A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM: IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT IN MARK TWAIN’S LITERATURE / 197 ~ JOAO DE MANCELOS REAL POWER IS IN COMPASSION: AN UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW WITH JOY HARJO / 205 LANGUAGE AND ITS MASKS LOREDANA FRÃÞILÃ COLLOCATIONS IN ECOLOGICAL DISCOURSE / 211 BILJANA MIŠIC´ ILIC´ THE INTERPLAY OF SYNTAX AND DISCOURSE: CERTAIN INVERSION CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH / 229 VLADAN PAVLOVIC´ MULTIPLE ANALYSIS AND GRADIENCE IN N1 TrV N2 to V N3 CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH / 241 IRINA DIANA MÃDROANE ROMANIA AND THE EU — EVALUATION IN THE BBC NEWS / 253 CAMELIA BEJAN A TYPOLOGY OF PSYCH NOMINALS IN ENGLISH / 265 SANJA KRIMER - GABOROVIC´ A NEW TYPOLOGY OF ENGLISH AND SERBIAN NOMINAL COMPOUNDS / 285 RALUCA MIU NONCE WORDS RESULTING FROM CONVERSION: TRANSLATION PROBLEMS / 289 REINVENTING THE SELF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN VOLUNTARY EXILE SORINA CHIPER University of Iaºi Widely under-read yet widely acclaimed as a towering figure of modernity, a self-proclaimed genius and a controversial personality, cryptic and highly idiosyncratic yet willing to reach the large public, Gertrude Stein is a provocative and defying writer, an intellectual who was at the heart of the artistic and historical modernity, shaping the artistic careers of others and engaging in the major historical event of her time, the First World War. Though her literary reputation derives from her experimental writings, the book that made her well-known and raised popular interest in her other works is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Written at the suggestion of friends as a concession to public taste, The Autobiography stands in an ironic relationship to traditional autobiography, and offers a portrait of the artist on a voluntary exile. This paper examines the interconnections between exile and the major (and more conspicuous) concerns of autobiography. The experience of exile has often been retold as autobiography. In the American autobiographical tradition in general, exile does not seem to be foregrounded, at least not at the time of Modernism. However, in classic modern American autobiographies such as Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams (1918), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1966), exile is relevant since the authors are on various types of exile. To put it simply, the first is the autobi- ography of an exile of the interior, of an author who felt exiled within the American society at the beginning of alienating Modernism; the second is framed by a voluntary exile of two Americans who settled in Europe and who took part in its social and cultural life, which was much richer than what America had to offer then; and the last comes from an immigrant writer, who settled in the States and who gave voice to the events preced- ing his settlement. B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 8 Exile is the experience of being “sent away from one’s native country or home, especially for political reasons or as a punishment”, or “forced absence”, as well as “long stay away from one’s country” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 1990: 420). Being away from one’s country means liv- ing among strangers, in sites of difference that compel an understanding and evaluation of one’s self or rather of one’s identity. With Gertrude Stein, this understanding, through questioning and evaluation, verbalization and concurrent construction of identity, is paralleled by the questioning and reevaluation of the genre of autobiography itself. Stein produced a large body of autobiographical writings — The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Everybody’s Autobiography (1973), Wars I Have Seen (1945), Four in America (1947), Stanzas in Meditation (1994), The World is Round (1939) — and managed to intrigue critics by a statement made in Everybody’s Autobiography, according to which “anything is an autobiography.” (1973: 5) Against this background of personal fascination with the genre, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appears in an idiosyn- cratic ironical relationship with traditional autobiography, first of all by vio- lating the principle of personal identity underlying the author = narrator = protagonist trinity. Judging by the title, and by the plain style, much unlike Stein’s celebrated incantations, the autobiography should have been writ- ten by Alice B. Toklas. In the 1933 original edition, there was no author’s name on the cover, only a picture taken by Man Ray, called “Alice B. Toklas at the Door”. The photo showed Gertrude absorbed by her writing, pen in hand, and Alice in the doorframe, opening the door, and letting the light in. On the back cover there was a picture of the manuscript, in Stein’s writing. These paratextual clues indicate Stein as the author, but indirectly, so that the mystery of authorship is dispelled only at the end, in the closing para- graph: “About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it” (Stein 1933: 310). Apart from the delayed assumed authorship at the textual level, Stein challenges traditional autobiography by effacing the narrator’s individuality. Alice, in retelling the memoir of “my full life” — the 25 years spent with Gertrude Stein, has the function of an eye witness, participant and histor, a term coined by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (1966: 242–243) to cover 9 REINVENTING THE SELF situations when the writer describes events he has not seen with his own eyes, what he has overheard, read about, or accumulated by research through historical records. Indeed, out of the seven time spans in the auto- biography (1877–1906; 1907; 1903–1907; 1874–1903; 1907–1914; 1914–1918; 1919–1932) the third and the forth cover events that Alice could not have known, because they happened before she and Alice met. Philip Lejeune, one of the authoritative voices in the field of autobio- graphical writings, ranks it among the borderline cases of autobiography as “fictitious fiction,” a form that invents a perspective and a consistent voice for the narrator and that serves narcissistic purposes. “This type of game,” states Lejeune, “is an astute way to achieve a form of self-hagiography that neutralizes or paralyzes criticism” (Lejeune 1989: 47). Self-laudatory indeed, The Autobiography is important not so much for what it tells about Gertrude Stein as for its imbedded theory of identity, for the evocation of American expatriate life in Paris and for its occasional philosophical commentary on the 20th century culture. The notion of iden- tity is the hard core of concern in The Autobiography…, coupled with the problematics of the creative act. Stein brings into focus the impersonality of the creative gesture, and her conviction that the author is an abstraction, a ghost, a specter, creating a spectacle of the self through the use of what seems to be an external mask but which in fact merges with the wearer’s own skin. This dialogical process of performance and becoming, of constructing an impersonal mask and of ultimately identifying with it, is captured in the anecdote of Picasso’s portrait of Stein. There is a “blank” instead of a motivation for the portrait; it is left unfinished after sessions of posing, because “I can’t see you any longer when I look” (Stein 1933: 65), and finished suddenly, as if unawares, as if by a disembodied arm acting on its own like a tool, in the absence of the model, capturing an essence and foretelling that Gertrude Stein will come to be the mimesis of the portrait. Self-consciousness, Stein intimates, is the enemy of artistic creation, which depends precisely upon an emptying out of selfhood. These ideas echo T. S. Eliot’s theory from Tradition and the Individual Talent (1969: 52–53), specifically his belief that the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, continual extinction of personality, a de-duction from the contingency of daily modern, mecha- nized life, to reach the abstraction of pure ideas.