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Article Excerpt
"The Orients of Gertrude Stein" reads two well-known texts by Stein in which the Orient makes a significant appearance: Stein's portrait-poem "Susie Asado"(l913) and her opera Four Saints in Three Acts (written in 1927). The first case features an intimate, eroticized Orient at its heart, while the second presents an astonishing moment of Oriental exclusion: the Orient is both welcomed into and banished from her work. By reading these contrasting invocations of the Orient, this essay seeks to examine Stein's aesthetic habits of incorporation and rejection.
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Gertrude Stein's 1914 Tender Buttons presents everyday objects seen anew. The text opens by stating that "The difference is spreading" (1990, 461), and an entry entitled "Careless Water" provides a striking instance of a new perspective that transfigures household things: "No cup is broken in more places and mended, that is to say a plate is broken and mending does do that it shows that culture is Japanese" (470). This broken crockery invokes a vogue for japonisme: the broken and mended cup suggests a Japanese standard of beauty, widely popularized at the turn of the century when Western intellectuals crossed the Pacific to behold Old Japan, a rapidly disappearing world of charming antiquity. Edward Morse, a scion of the Gilded Age who became a self-styled expert in Japanese craftsmanship, marveled at a culture that prized "rustic simplicity" (Benfey 2004, 63). A collector of pottery, Morse appreciated the "wabi" aesthetic of the tea ceremony, an idealized "taste for imperfection," for which potters fired varying clays at different temperatures to create a "warping or cracking effect" (Guth 1993, 58). Stein's much-mended crockery, perhaps broken by "careless water," suggests the cracked glaze of Japanese pottery, artfully fissured to evoke careless nature. (1)
In "Portraits and Repetition," one of her Lectures in America, Stein insisted, "I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one's period" (1957, 177). A renewed interest in the Orient was one of modernism's myriad cultural transformations, and Stein's meditations reveal her own variant of this trend. Stein admired translations of Chinese poetry, was less interested in Japanese prints, and loved her Asian cooks--inclinations which position her squarely within her period. Stein's evocation of this particular kind of spreading difference is the focus of this analysis, which examines two well-known texts in which the Orient makes a significant appearance: Stein's portrait-poem "Susie Asado" (1913) and her opera Four Saints in Three Acts (written in 1927). This essay aims to reveal Stein's habits of incorporation and exclusion by tracking momentary and surprising intimations of difference in these two signal instances. I read these texts as limit cases for Stein's interest in the Orient, from an intimate, eroticized Orient at the heart of the earlier poem to an astonishing moment of Oriental exclusion in Stein's opera: the Orient penetrates "Susie Asado," but it is a distant and finally uninteresting specter in Four Saints in Three Acts. A fluid mode of incorporating difference governs the first case, while the second is guided by a fixed understanding which ultimately hardens Stein's own identity within the text. Stein examines her own Oriental qualities in her second autobiography. Everybody's Autobiography (1937), and my analysis concludes by considering Stein's flirtation with the Orient as a mode of registering a shifting sense of modern identity.
Oriental Phantoms
"Susie Asado," Stein's portrait of a Spanish flamenco dancer, resonates with the slippered gestures of Japanese tea-making:
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller. This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus. A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must. Drink pups. Drink, pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. (Stein 1990, 549)
In an illuminating analysis, Marjorie Perlotf reads the appearance of a "pretty Japanese tea ceremony" in the first half of the poem: she notes the Japanese sound of the name "Susie Asado" and suggests that the poem presents "an image of a Japanese geisha girl, gliding back and forth gracefully as she serves tea on what seems to be a garden terrace" (1999, 75). Perloff argues that how we read this curious poem "all depends on our angle of vision" (76)--and the Japanese angle presents one significant way in which Stein's art is able "to take words out of their usual contexts and create new relationships among them" (75).
Such new relationships within Stein's verse found an echo within her household; Stein would eventually acquire her own Asian servants, who feature prominently in Everybody's Autobiography:
We have Chinese servants now and sometimes the name they say they are has nothing to do with what they are they may have borrowed or gambled away their reference and they seem to be there or not there as well with my name and anyway the Oriental, and perhaps a name there is not a name, is invading the Western world. It is the peaceful penetration that is important not wars. (Stein 1993, 10)
The appearance of the Oriental follows a principle of "peaceful penetration," (2) and this later instance resonates with the flash of japonisme in "Susie Asado": both present images of servitude through which the Orient infiltrates the Western household. The Asian servants, however, destabilize long-cherished notions of naming and reference. Their entry into Stein's domestic life opens up a rift between being and name which defies Stein's belief that, as she states in Everybody's Autobiography, "the name made you" (1993, 10). The Japanese-sounding name of "Susie Asado" produces a portrait shot through with Japanese influence, yet such "peaceful penetrations" eventually threaten the power of the name itself in the case of Stein's Asian cooks, strangely careless men who "gambled away their reference." (3) The portrait of Susie Asado opens the figure of the Spanish dancer to Oriental associations, but the later acquisition of Asian servants leads Stein to ponder the ramifications of a fluid. Orientalized identity, in which "the name there is not a name."
Later in Everybody's Autobiography, when Stein introduces her first Asian servant, her "Indo-Chinaman" cook Trac, she sketches another crucial difference between his native land and the West: "he used to see phantoms rise up and rise and rise and rise and it was a fearful thing they used to come out of nothing and rise and rise before...
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