Orients of Gertrude Stein, The

College Literature, Summer 2009 by Park, Josephine Nock-Hee

Gertrude Stein's 1914 Tender Buttons pres- ents everyday objects seen anew. The text opens by stating that "The differ- ence 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 bro- ken and mending does do that it shows that culture is Japanese" (470). This broken crock- ery 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 rap- idly disappearing world of charming antiqui- ty. 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 ide- alized "taste for imperfection," for which pot- ters fired varying clays at different tempera- tures to create a "warping or cracking effect" (Guth 1993, 58). Stein's muchmended 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 inThreeActs (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 Perloff 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 any 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)