Abstract
If the category of identity underlies and informs the representation of character in Dos Passos, it is explicit and thematized in the work of Stein. No literary modernist was more attuned to the effects that news media were beginning to have on identity than Gertrude Stein. Stein’s preoccupation with archiving her own past and projecting a public identity, but also, crucially, with suppressing or repressing certain features of her past and identity that may have troubled her, helped sensitize Stein to the peculiar pattern of representation and suppression that she identified at the base of assertions of identity in the newspaper. After the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein began to make a distinction between entities, which she defined as autonomous, and identities, which were seen as troublingly relational: “[People] know they are they because their little dog knows them, and so they are not an entity but an identity.”1 This distinction formed a platform for a series of opposed terms with positive and negative charges that Stein began to use more or less interchangeably. As Bob Perelman summarizes, “On one side there was genius, the masterpiece, the present, entity, the human mind, and on the other, society, newspaper writing, memory, identity, human nature.”2
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Notes
Gertrude Stein, “What are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in Writings 1932–1946, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 360.
Bob Perelman, The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 154.
Gertrude Stein, “Narration, Lecture 3,” in Writings 1932–1946, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 346.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Writings, 1903–1932, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 732. Subsequent references are given parenthetically within the text.
Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 13.
Catharine R. Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” in American Womens Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 153.
Gertrude Stein, “Lifting Belly,” in Writings, 1903–1932, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 424.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996), 64.
Dydo tracks the composition, form, and publication history of Stein’s texts in meticulous detail, from their origins in small carnets to more formal cahiers, and from typescript to publication. Dydo shows the ways in which Stein would begin works with erotic notes, poems, or dedications to Alice Toklas, often answered by Alice herself, compositional residues that are removed, reordered, or hollowed out in the drafting process. See Ulla Dydo with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923–1934 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 49.
Kirk Curnutt places Stein’s mid-1930s writing about identity in the context of the then-current “celebrity identity crisis,” the anxiety among celebrities that their external images did not accurately reflect their authentic inner selves. See Kirk Curnutt, “Inside and Outside: Gertrude Stein on Identity, Celebrity, and Authenticity,” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2 (Winter 1999–2000), 291–308.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993), 312. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically within the text.
Nancy Blake, “Everybody’s Autobiography: Identity and Absence,” Recherches Anglaises et Américaines 15 (1982): 135–145.
Lynn Z. Bloom, “Gertrude Is Alice Is Everybody: Innovation and Point of View in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiographies,” Twentieth Century Literature 24.1 (1978): 8193.
Laurel Bollinger, “‘One as One Not Mistaken but Interrupted’: Gertrude Stein’s Exploration of Identity in the 1930s,” Centennial Review 43.2 (1999): 227–258.
Timothy W. Galow, “Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography and the Art of Contradictions,” Journal of Modern Literature 32.1 (Fall 2008): 111–128.
Brian Reed, “Now Not Now: Gertrude Stein Speaks,” English Studies in Canada 33.4 (December 2007): 103–113.
Lisi Schoenbach, “‘Peaceful and Exciting’: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s Pragmatic Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 11.2 (April 2004): 239–259.
Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951).
Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 46.
Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 139.
Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 271.
Shirley C. Neuman, Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria Press, 1979), 48, 49.
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© 2011 David Rando
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Rando, D. (2011). Identity. In: Modernist Fiction and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119666_5
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