Geographies of Identity

Front matter

JILL DARLING

Narrative Forms,

Feminist Futures e

Contents

Introduction: The Form and Content of Cultural Identity I. LANDSCAPE

“T am I because my little dog knows me,’ or, the Landscape of Identity in Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of America

II. CRISIS

I. Landscape

As a key influence on contemporary writers, Steir's work continues to offer examples of innovative form as political content. Deborah Mix points out the importance of “recognizing Stein's presence and the vocabularies she offers” and how these contribute to the “democratizing work of redefining experimentalism and the avant-garde so that we can recognize their potential to embody a liberatory and decentralized politics.” Stein’s formal, textual strategies thus open possibilities for what can be represented or altered through language and they engage language as a socializing structure that must be challenged and dismantled. According to Mix, her “texts operate not by avoiding or encoding meaning [...] but by opening up meaning’s possibilities.” Stein’s politics operate simultaneously at the levels of form and content and critique linguistic and cultural structures that limit possibilities for identification. Further, political engagement occurs on multiple levels: between the writer and the language of the text, between the text and the reader, and between the reader and the world. Mix cites Patrocinio Schweickart who states, “[l]iterature acts on the world by acting on its readers”? Because

1 Deborah M. Mix, A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women’ Innovative Writing (lowa City: University of lowa Press, 2007), 5.

3 Patrocinio Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading (1986), in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick:

there is always more work to do, many writers continue to look to Stein’s textual politics and the ways she breaks down and rewrites linguistic and narrative expectations and engages with language as a tool for changing the world.*

My reading of The Geographical History of America sets up the following chapters and shows a political interrogation of identity by way of the experimental feminist text. Throughout The Geographical History, Stein explores relationships between consciousness, writing, identity, geography, language, and social norms and questions the difference between human nature (what might be some kind of “essential” identity) and human mind (which is responsible for thinking and writing) in order to deconstruct readers understanding of what any of these terms “mean” The process of linguistic interrogation serves to distance the reader from any assumed understanding of identity and instead makes us think more critically about what it means to identify. Ultimately, I see the work as a kind of cultural commentary focused on writing, thinking, and dismantling social organizations of language and sexuality. The formal practices of the text become strategies for enacting cultural critique in the world, and offering alternatives — such as languages, narratives, and content — to dominant modes of discourse and socialization.

Rutgers University Press, 1997), quoted in Mix, A Vocabulary of Thinking, 21.

4 For more on Stein’s aesthetic politics and how it differs from other modernists’ insistence on the separation of high and low culture, see Ellen E. Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

“Lam I because my little dog knows me,” or, the Landscape of Identity in Gertrude Stein’s

Geographical History of America

When suddenly you know that the geographical history of America has something to do with everything it may be like loving any man or any woman or even a little or a big dog. Yes it may, that is to say it does.

— Gertrude Stein'

The Geographical History, she told the reporter, was written “somewhat more clearly” than some of her previous writings. Asked about the difficulties of her style, Gertrude maintained: “I cannot afford to be clear because if I was I would risk destroying my own thought. Most people destroy their thought before they create it. That is why I often repeat a word again and again — because I am fighting to hold the thought.

— James R. Mellow?

1 Gertrude Stein, “The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind,’ in Writings, 1932-1946 (New York: Library of America: Penguin Putnam, 1998), 391.

2 James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Avon Books, 1974), 503.

Written in the summer after her famous American tour over the fall, winter, and early spring of 1934-35, The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind and the related work, What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them, come out of Steins experiences of the tour and the lectures she gave during the tour.* Before the American tour, Stein was well known but not widely read, having had trouble publishing her work. However, when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in 1934, it became instantly popular in the United States. In 1934 Stein and Toklas had been living together in Paris for nearly thirty years, and, although Stein had become a popular figure of attention in the media, she was still not taken seriously as a writer. The Autobiography was well received for its accessibility (it wasn't as difficult as much of her previous work), as well as its content (it reads like a who's who of the art scene in Paris in the 1920s). About the time The Autobiography was released, Stein's

3 See Gertrude Stein, “Entity: Really Writing in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 115-23, and Gertrude Stein, “Identity: Audience Writing (1933-1946), in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Haas, 111-14. According to Haas, Stein's post-American tour writing can roughly be divided into entity and identity writing. Identity writing is writing for an audience in work such as in Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993); and Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), among others. Entity writing is considered by Stein to be “real” writing, which was often more like philosophical reflections like The Geographical History. Gertrude Stein’s What Are Masterpieces, written around the same time as The Geographical History, takes up History’s ideas and themes and presents them in a shorter, more concise and clear manner. Ulla E. Dydo argues, however, that there was no real separation between audience and real writing over the course of the work: “Her texts do not progress linearly from one concern, say, with grammar, or with the novel, to another, nor do they go as I had earlier thought, from ‘real writing’ to public or audience writing. They never move away from real writing, and Stein’s real voice was never lost.” See Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 5.

“I AM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”

opera Four Saints in Three Acts premiered on Broadway and was also a popular success. With the combination of these and the encouragement of friends and advisors, Stein agreed to do the American Tour. The tour consisted of a series of lectures, which she wrote to give in cities all over the United States, as well as another series on “Narration, which she gave over a number of meetings at the University of Chicago.*

It seems appropriate that Steir's success came with the Autobiography, even though the romantic/domestic relationship between Stein and Toklas was never openly discussed. According to scholars, Toklas was instrumental to Stein’s work on all levels, and their shared domestic life infused Stein’s work. Her “relationship with Toklas was the occasion for linguistic experimentation, exploration, and the expression of childlike joy,’ as Shari Benstock points out. “For Stein and Toklas, the assumption of an artistic priority is particularly important in understanding the personal dimensions of their Paris life”> Also key to Stein’s work was her love for modern art and conversations with other contemporary artists and writers of the time. Her fascination with American English became even more prominent while she lived in France. English, for Stein, was a means to deconstruct the power of language and to write “American-ness.” For Stein, Benstock explains, “everything in her adult life became a subject for and was subjected to her art. So when she speaks of her own experience living in Europe, or the need to distance herself from America in order to write about it, she is also suggesting the need to distance the facts of her personal life in such a way that she can reapproach them through her writing”* This negotiation of attention to the materiality of language and the infusion of personal experience are central to her body of work and its reception over her lifetime.

4 For more on the American tour, see Mellow, Charmed Circle.

5 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 176.

According to its title, The Geographical History of America is analogous to “the relation of human nature to the human mind” The relation between these however, is that they are not related, or their relation cannot be coherently articulated. Human nature, we are told throughout the text, “is not interesting” The human mind, on the other hand, corresponds to, has to do with, or may actually be, writing. We might interpret that the human mind is represented by writing, or that writing is proof of the human mind that thinks, writes, constructs. Writing and identity, read through Stein, are similar in that each is constructed, and discontinuous. Writing that has no beginning, middle, and end and subverts cohesive narrative structure serves as an analogy for alternative practices or identities that disrupt and call attention to social/structural norms as constructed, and constricting. The Geographical History is uneven, disparate, and non/narrative, as is the relationship between human nature and human mind. It may not be articulated coherently, though it nonetheless, according to Stein, deserves thinking, writing, and reflection as a process of discovery and learning.

Stein, as in much of her work, is concerned in The Geographical History with simultaneity, or enacting a continuous present on the page, and doing away with writing that has, as she repeats throughout, a beginning, middle, and end.” It is written using mainly present tense verbs and gerunds, and only occasionally, and therefore noticeably, is the writing in the past tense. At times phrases or fragmented ideas are used in place of sentences with subjects and predicates, and sometimes longer sentences get caught up in the sound of their words and repeat and circle around as if stalling their movement forward. Stein seems to be showing us that if a complete sentence has a beginning, middle, and end, then sentences that do not have subjects

7 Although this may not be exactly the same kind of continuous present as in work like Tender Buttons and Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, it is another kind of example of continuous present, grounded in present tense in the grammar of the language throughout, as well as on the level of the text as a whole.

“I AM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”

and predicates, or that end up in a circle of repeated words, keep from progressing in a linear way. Each word represents each new present moment; there is no past and no future but only “presence,

The line famously repeated in various ways throughout the text, “I am I because my little dog knows me,” is an example of the simultaneity of formal textual strategies used by Stein, such as repetition, word play, and challenging the limits of the signifier and signified relationship, as well as the content of her cultural/philosophical investigation into the nature of identity formation and negotiation in the world. The first-person narrator in The Geographical History challenges reader expectations by subverting how we understand the voice of the “I” of the text. The words “identity” “masterpiece” and “autobiography,” as well as other terms having to do with writing and language, nature, and romance, are repeated throughout the text. Their repetition, with slight changes in usage, disorients us as readers, making us reconsider how these terms “mean” and how we are to understand their use for Stein. Additionally, the text critiques the progression of narrative by using chapter titles that do not seem to progress forward. For example, chapter and section titles often seem random: “Chapter II” is followed by “Chapter III” which is followed by “Chapter II” and these are repeated as titles throughout along with variously numbered “Acts” and “Parts.” Recognizing that language creates meaning, Stein reclaims ordinary terms that we otherwise take for granted and pushes them so that they become less recognizable, entangling the connections between human nature and the linguistic and social construction of meaning.

Identity, human mind, and human nature are in flux in this text, avoiding definition, and as concepts they become decisively unclear. Like human nature, identity as a term is always in danger of being essentialized. If human nature “just is” then identity can be considered intrinsic, that we are born with our static identities. The human mind is about writing and thinking, and the blending of mind and nature together, in often incoherent ways, seems to be part of Stein’s purpose. The line between a aa nature and the social construction of our identities, for example, is a constantly shifting one, or at best blurry, so that we can never be sure what we are born with and how we are made by the world into which we are born. It is this tension and lack of clarity that plays out through the circular “arguments,” repetition, rhetorical play, and logical fallacies she uses to draw readers into the conversation, while refusing to draw conclusions or spell out definitive explanations. The narrator's refusal to define or explain identity draws our attention to the fact that even though we use the term as if we know what it means, we really have no idea. And the repetition of “I am I because my little dog knows me” breaks the concept of identity out of the abstract box of assumed understanding. Putting identity in fluctuating relation to both human nature and human mind also puts pressure on any simple definitions: concepts become simultaneous, instead of one causing another, and we, as readers, find ourselves engaging with concepts on multiple levels and in multiple directions all at once. And each turn of each term shifts the process just enough to continue to destabilize meaning, keeping us reading for more, so that the writing is the thinking.

We can also consider this kind of writing as a queer practice. As Stein destabilizes the meaning of the identity-related terms, Butler's explanation of repetition and the destabilization of gendered identity and the lesbian subject seems especially relevant:

Through the repeated play of this sexuality that the “T” is [...] it is precisely the repetition of that play that establishes [...] the instability of the very category that it constitutes. For if the “T” is a site of repetition, that is, if the “I” only achieves the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, then the “T” is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it. In other words, does or can the “I” ever repeat itself, cite itself, faithfully, or is there always a displacement

“I AM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”

from its former moment that established the permanently non-self-identical status of that “I” or its “being lesbian”?*

According to Butler, if gender, like identity, is a performance, then we perform our identities through repetition of our “selves”; the “I” has to repeat itself in order to achieve that “semblance of identity” The potential for “trouble” comes by way of the impossibility of exact repetition. The “I” can't repeat or “cite itself” in the same way all the time so that there is a “non-self-identical status” more accurately representative of an “I” than a singular or stable performance or definition of identity. Identity is not seamless, in Butler’s terms, but always shifting, and recognizing this processual movement of identity calls out the fictional nature of sexual and other identity markers as given and stable. Butler continues,

[i]f repetition is the way in which power works to construct the illusion of a seamless heterosexual identity, if heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk, for what if it fails to repeat, or if the very exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very different performative purpose? [...] That there is a need for a repetition at all is a sign that identity is not self-identical. It requires to be instituted again and again, which is to say that it runs the risk of becoming de-instituted at every interval.”

Sexuality, or identity, is not seamless even though the normative “heterosexual” is constructed as such and believed to be coherently uniform and unproblematic both in form and content. Heterosexuality as the accepted norm is seen as stable and without disruption. However, heterosexuality, as identity, is pre-

8 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michéle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 311.

9 Ibid.

cisely not stable, nor is any singularly defined identity marker. The emphasis on repetition is its own undoing; where repetition fails to re-establish the system of gender/identity conformity, gaps are found in the logic and social interpellation fails.” In its excess, Stein’s repetition destabilizes the power repetition as a tool of social construction. When repetition of sexual and gender performance fails or repeats inexactly or is used for a different purpose than ideological inscription, this lends toward the undoing or deinstitutionalization of language and identity. Performing or enacting queerness entails interrogating and breaking away from perceived norms and boundaries. Stein insists on constantly pushing, even redefining the idea of the boundary itself. Earlier readings of Stein’s discussions of the relation between human nature and human mind often simplify a dualistic separation between the two.” The distinction, however, is unclearly delineated; their relation a continual process that is dynamic and in flux. As a strategy, this works against the reliance on simple definitions and binary constructions. If we cannot clearly articulate the relation between human nature and human mind, then we cannot define and categorize subjects based on who or what we think they are, and our processes of knowing ourselves and others become “queered,” opening alternative spaces for interrogative learning and understanding.

11 Im using Althusser’s theory of interpellation in which subjects are ideologically produced as social beings from Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

12 Kirk Curnutt points to the “distinction between the inner and outer self? where identity is that outer self that is tolerated and not related to the inner self that “exists independent of observation’; see Kirk Curnutt, “Inside and Outside: Gertrude Stein on Identity, Celebrity, and Authenticity,” Journal of Modern Literature 23, no. 2 (1999): 291. Also see Jennifer Ashton, “Rose Is a Rose’: Gertrude Stein and the Critique of Indeterminacy,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 4 (November 2002): 581-604, who uses the more clearly and simply delineated concepts of identity and entity from What Are Masterpieces to put human nature and human mind on separate “sides,” though, in the Geographical History, the two are in more complicated relation.

“I AM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”

Early on in The Geographical History, the discussion of human nature and human mind, in relation to the question of identity, is presented as complex subject matter, and thus the process of interrogation and discovery and begins:

Chapter III

The question of identity has nothing to do with the human mind it has something although really nothing altogether to do with human nature. Any dog has identity.

The old woman said I am I because my little dog knows me, but the dog knew that he was he because he knew that he was he as well as knowing that he knew she.*

Immediately, “identity” is disconnected from anything we think we might know about it. Stein puts identity in uneasy relation to mind and nature. If any dog can have identity, then identity cannot be an essential aspect of human nature, but it does point to our having identities as social beings. The question of identity is one of relation, of one to another: the old woman in relation to her dog who “knows” her sets up an examination of the terminology itself that will always fall short of definition. Stein creates an “unsatisfying” excess of language that will continually fail to account for itself, while we as readers will only fall short in understanding whether or not there is even any such thing as identity, let alone how we might define it. As Butler explains, making sense of identity in terms of self-understanding will generally fail. The gap between naming and identity, and being “an identity,’ limits one’s ability to narratively account for oneself:

If the identity we say we are cannot possibly capture us and marks immediately an excess and opacity that falls outside the categories of identity, then any effort “to give an account of oneself” will have to fail in order to approach being true. As we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally

13 Stein, “The Geographical History of America,” 423.

or definitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it.“

This work is excessive in its refusal to identify, Stein’s narrator highlighting the inability or failure to account for the relation between nature, mind, and identity. There is no answer that satisfies the questions presented, but instead the process of exploration, over the course of the text, allows the questions to linger, to remain open as the meaning/content that offers insight into the nature of identity formation in the world. Writing that highlights its own failure to cohere — especially in regard to social norms of language, sexuality, and representation — pushes the limits of what is acceptable and disrupts or “troubles” the system, thus opening new spaces of possibility. This further supports the importance of relationality in understanding ourselves and for “letting the question remain open” in order to “let the other live.’

In an early section, titled “The question of identity” Stein begins to play with “I” as the first-person pronoun, which represents identity, and the number one, written variously as “one” and “I.” She uses repetition of the “I” as a defamiliarizing strategy and separates herself and her reader from really knowing what the pronoun represents. For example, we can see the signs “I? as both pronoun and Roman numeral, and “one” in the following passages:

14 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 42-43. 15 Ibid., 43.

“IAM I BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME”

Part IV

The question of identity

A Play I am I because my little dog knows me.

Which is he.

No which is he.

Say it with tears, no which is he.

Tam I why.

So there.

I am I where.

Act I Scene III

I am I because my little dog knows me.

Act I Scene I

Now that is the way I had played that play. But not at all not as one is one. [...]

Scene I Tam I yes sir I am I

I am I yes Madame am II.

When I am I am II.

And any little dog is not the same thing as I am I.

Chorus. Or is it.

With tears in my eyes oh is it.

And there we have the whole thing.

Am II.

And if I am I because my little dog knows me am I I. Yes sir am I I.

Yes madame or am Il.

The dog answers without asking because the dog is the answer to anything that is that dog. But not I. Without tears not 1.“

The constant repetition of “T” and its interchangeability with the number one makes the reader question the viability of an “I” that knows itself or one that understands the relation between the first-person pronoun and third-person pronouns. In order to be an “I” and give an account of oneself, according to Butler, one has to be in relation to another. There is no “I” without an other, or a “you” The repetition of “I am I because my little dog knows me” seems to be a strategy of convincing, as if Stein's narrator is trying to convince herself that she has identity because she is recognized (by her dog, by others), but that the need for convincing is always a need and never a fulfillment while questions still linger (“I am I why. I am I where”). There are also questions of interchangeability: “Which one is there I am I or another one” and so if one has identity (“T”) how or why is that different from another's “I”/identity, and displacement: “But we in America are not displaced by a dog oh no no not at all not at all at all displaced by a dog””” If identity is interchangeable, and dogs and people all can have identity, then this also reduces the importance of the concept altogether, potentially creating a kind of nonidentity. If every “one” has “identity” and individual identities can be displaced, then what is the point of identity at all as a concept? It is this relation between identity and nonidentity which Stein’s narrator continues to explore.

According to Kaja Silverman, linguist Emile Benveniste argues that “language, discourse, subjectivity” are “shown to be theoretically inseparable”:

There is no concept “I” that incorporates all the Ts that are uttered at every moment in the mouths of all speakers, in the sense that there is a concept “tree” to which all the individual

16 Stein, “The Geographical History of America,” 401, 405. 17 Ibid., 401.

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uses of tree refer. [...] Then, what does I refer to? To something very peculiar which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. [...] The reality to which it refers is the reality of the discourse. [...] And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language.

As Silverman points out, “Benveniste insists that the individual finds his or her cultural identity only within discourse, by means of the pronouns T and “you.”" It is through language, by way of our pronominal relations to each other, that we are able to “find” our personal/cultural identities. According to Benveniste and Silverman, subjectivity is always already conditioned by the available discourses and understanding of one’s place in the (linguistically constructed) world. If the “basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language,’ then subjects’ abilities to form ideas and negotiate their own processes of identity necessarily work through language and discourse. Or as Silverman further asserts,

[t]he subject’s discourse is constrained by the rules of language; it can only speak by means of a pre-existing linguistic system. Moreover, “language” must here be understood in the broadest possible sense [...] every utterance must be conceived as having various levels of signification, and issuing from multiple voices. It is spoken not only by the palpable voice of a concrete speaker, writer, or cluster of mechanical apparatuses, but the anonymous voices of cultural codes which invade it in the form of connotation.?

18 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), quoted in Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 43-44.

19 Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 45.

These pre-existing rules and “cultural codes” constrain and contextualize discourse, contributing potentially to constraints on subjectivity.” Or, one might say, a speaking and writing subject is contextualized within a cultural and linguistic system that “pre-exists the individual, and which determines his or her cultural identity.” If subjectivity is formed through or because of language, then understanding and performing our identities might also be considered as both constructed and open to alteration. Through language we may be subject to ideological expectations and normalizing narratives, but in using language we might also subvert and “re-write” those.

Stein takes on the cultural and linguistic systems within which she is situated and writes through them, making an argument about the social construction of “human nature” and the false idea that “identity” is a natural part of that. She takes the material language of particular concepts (e.g., identity, autobiography, romance, etc.) and works to divorce them from their cultural significance created through discursive repetition and acceptance. The other-oriented use of repetition and refusal to define or explain brings the process of signification back into the realm of the arbitrary. If Saussure claimed that the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one, use and repetition have changed the status of this relationship to one that is more determinative. Stein challenges the signifier-signified relationship and shows that identity and subjectivity are not essential and given, but these are as constructed as anything else that is not part of the literal, natural landscape. To understand “identity; one has to understand the cultural and linguistic systems that have constructed the concept itself. And if “identity” is a construction that has no essential core, then the idea of “autobiography,’ as an account of an identity, is doubly fictional. The text then becomes a material example of an attempt to dismantle the linguistic and narrative systems that claim to offer us the tools for self- understanding. Stein uses the materials of lan-