Stein’s relationship with money was ambiguous, shuttling between criticism and fascination throughout her career. If part of Stein’s anxiety about money had been the lack of money earned from her own writing-rendering her writing not only “valueless” but also not “real work”-her Stanzas resituates that value within the labor of thought, or meditation. The language of the market is embedded in Stein’s Stanzas, but in a way that undercuts its logic while also revealing a Depression-era anxiety about money that would persist throughout the 1930s. Nowhere is this more evident, I suggest, than in her 1932 long poem Stanzas in Meditation. At the same time, the formal logic of Stein’s writing works to destabilize our social and economic structures. Stein often wrote about desiring money and about her love of spending money. In this essay, I aim to pay further attention to that murky boundary between inside and outside, between the logic of the market and knowledge of the self, and to the confusing, often contradictory importance that money held for Stein. In Luke Carson’s terms, the “risk involved in success is revealed in the chiastic confusion of inside and outside that results from the circulation of the commodity on the market.”
Nothing inside me needed to be written.” For Stein, that impersonal measure of value meant the confusing of her self-sufficient, internal sense of her worth (her “real” value) with the arbitrary and external. Of course it has happened to me pretty often and I like it to happen just as often but it does give me a little shock of recognition and non-recognition.” And crucially, this change in recognition had an effect on Stein’s ability to work. Anybody saying how do you to you and knowing your name may be upsetting but on the whole it is natural enough but to suddenly see your name is always upsetting. She describes the Times Square sign as profoundly destabilizing: “we saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein has come and that was upsetting. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you. Yes of course it did, because suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. “I love being rich, not as yet so awful rich but with prospects, it makes me all cheery inside, I don’t know why it should but it does.” But this pleasure was not to last, and in Everybody’s Autobiography, written four years later, Stein painted a rather different picture of when one’s writing suddenly acquired a substantial exchange value:
“I am most pleased with everything,” Stein wrote to Carl Van Vechten in April 1933. Her arrival in her home country was announced in lights, in an electric sign circling Times Square: “Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York, Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York.” Īt first her new marketability was a welcome change. She was on the cover of Time magazine in 1933 received more offers to write for popular magazines and her name and image began to be used in advertising-Bergdorf Goodman named a gown “Saint” after the costumes used in her opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, and used a variation on her “rose is a rose is a rose” in advertisements. Against the backdrop of economic crisis, Stein was at the peak of her career. Stein came back to a United States shaken by the political and economic shocks of the Great Depression, a country that had already experienced over four years of unprecedented economic decline that kept unemployment high and revealed the chasms between profit, wages, and the prices of commodities, galvanizing a home-grown Communist movement that had been incubating for years and an equally strong left-wing print culture. But the country she arrived in was not the one she had left in the gilded years of the turn of the century. The following year she returned to the United States for the first time in over three decades for a lecture tour. Toklas rocketed Gertrude Stein out of her status as a cult figure-a writer’s writer-and into celebrity proper. In 1933 the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B.
0 kommentar(er)
