1) On the back of the book is included a line from the Washington Post Book World that says: “Doty is a gifted poet whose books have won numerous prizes, but even his considerable reputation could not have prepared readers for the astonishing beauty of these opening pages…. If one book survives the AIDS epidemic, it will be this one.”   I took the last line to mean that many books written about AIDS will come and go, but this book will remain worthy.   Do you agree and why?  Also, would you really consider this book to be about AIDS or more so a perspective on grieving?

2) As we’ve been discussing in class, there is more to “life writing” than just recalling the facts or recreating a scene verbatim to tell the whole story.  If you were writing the scene where Doty meets his lover for the first time (page 52 and 53), what would you write or show if this were a film?   In the book Doty writes: “And if in fact I could reproduce here our conversation, I imagine it would be perfectly sweet but also thoroughly banal, on the surface, just like the surface of any such encounter.”  How would you somehow include or at least try to capture the feeling Doty experienced when he wrote: “And what I found myself thinking was, Here you are at last.”

3) In class we had a discussion about what is true art.  We all came to agree that Virginia Woolf definitely created art and not just literal true-to-life-story in her memoir.  I remember thinking in class, but never saying:  “It’s like saying what is a real representation of a human–an abstract human portrait by Picasso, a real photograph of a person, or a wax figure like one would see at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum?”  I remembered having thought that when I came to the lines in Doty’s memoir (bottom of page 30):  “When do we look at the plain nude fact of the lifeless figure?  Pure purposelessness–and thus, in the absence of the spirit, strangely and completely present.  Never having a chance to see it, to assimilate it our horror of it and go on to actually look, how would we know that the lifeless body is beautiful?”  The question I have is: What do you take from that section, or what are your reactions to Doty’s reflections on the lifeless body?

4) What are your reactions to not seeing any photographs included in this memoir?  Would realistic pictures have ruined the poetic fabric of the way in which this story was told?

5) On the surface we think of a person’s life as being linear:  birth, life experiences, and then dying.   Yet in telling the story of someone’s life: beginning, middle, end doesn’t always work.  Doty wrote in the PREFACE: “This book was written in the flux of change; I wrote it not from a single still point but in the forward momentum of a current of grief….  What is healing, but a shift in perspective?”  His opening reminds me that life, even on the surface, is not really linear.  That we continue to uncover, go back, or wonder about the future in any single moment.  The body may die, but does a spirit?  Is something only dead if it is fully forgotten?

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Angel’s in America, by Tony Kusner

Part One of “Angels in America”, subtitled “Millennium Approaches”, erupted on to the stage of the National Theatre in January 1992. Part Two, “Perestroika”, followed in November 1993. Since then “Angels in America” has become one of the most studied American plays, with over 30,000 copies of both parts sold in the UK alone. It has also been filmed for television by Mike Nichols, with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep – and Emma Thompson as the eponymous Angel. 

The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer

A searing drama about public and private indifference to the AIDS plague and one man’s lonely fight to awaken the world to the crisis. Produced to acclaim in New York, London and Los Angeles, The Normal Heart follows Ned Weeks, a gay activist enraged at the indifference of public officials and the gay community. While trying to save the world from itself, he confronts the personal toll of AIDS when his lover dies of the disease.

From: Shifra Sharlin
Here is an announcement from Shifra Sharlin about the new MALS online student journal.

Good Evening Colleagues,

I would like to first thank everyone for a very meaningful class discussion yesterday. I really enjoyed hearing everyone’s insights about the text and their thoughts (one great thing about grad school). Following off the theme of collective memory, I would like to suggest some  books that I felt connected like Dictee in terms of the theme of collective memory. Many of you have probably read the text or saw the movie or both.

The Joy Luck Club

I remember when I saw this film as a child. This was probably the first Asian American film I had ever watched. The Joy Luck Club tells 16 interwoven narratives about the relationship between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American raised daughters. The book is composed of four parts with the first talking about the mothers: Jing-Mei, Lindo, Ying-ying and An mei, all who make up the Joy Luck Club in San Francisco, CA. They tell their stories about their lives in China,  their mothers and life in America. They all worry that their daughters will lose their cultural heritage and become immersed into the American life, losing their Chinese heritage as a result . The second set of stories are of their daughters: Waverly, Jing Mei, Lena and Rose – who talk about their relationship with their mothers. Here is where you find the disconnected relationship between mother and daughter, both who lived different experiences and lives. The daughters find their mother’s experiences irrelevant and old school, that living in China is nothing like living in America. The third section continues with the lives of the daughters and their problems with careers and marriage. This section brings together a great lesson: that regardless of where we lived, or worked, or our relationships, we can learn from one another. Just because we lived in a different time, in a different country, it doesn’t mean our memories and lessons are irrelevant. We can still learn from one another and that is what we see in the fourth and final section where the mothers and daughters finally came together in mind, spirit, and understanding. They learned from one another and understood their experiences to be relevant. This text is a fine example of a collective narrative and I share this with you not only because this is one of my favorite text but because it teaches us a very important but simple lesson…

We are not so different after all…

1. Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a very complex and somewhat complicated text to get through in one sitting. What was your strategy for reading this book? Did you think about each passage and their possible meanings as if we were reading poetry?

2. Cha starts off Dictee with a quote from Sappho, a Greek lyric poet, in which she says “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” The language she uses in the text was not only thought provoking and powerful. but also unique from other forms of life writings we have read in class. What do you think is the purpose of writing the text in the language and style she chose to? Also, do you think the text would have a similar effect on readers if it had not been written in this way?

3. The sections of the Cha’s book was broken down into 9 sections, each starting off with a Greek muse and what they presided over. The connection between each Muse and the text that follows should have some relevance to what they represent. Do you think that Cha made the connections between the women she chose, their story/stories, and the Greek muses?

4. Cha’s work is an example of a text that resembles a life writing piece on collective memory. Using important figures such as Joan of Arc and Yu Guan Soon, along with accounts of herself and her mother, she was able to highlight not only their personal struggles, but also a struggle as a woman in a male dominated society. What do you think was her reasoning for presenting her life writing in this way? What power does collective memory have in addressing the lives of many in past, today, and future societies?

5. On page 32, Cha writes “To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppression, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction… to the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernible features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.” What does this quote say to you and the way you would respond to conversations about personal or shared experiences in life?

I hope you are enjoying Dictee…

For those of you who would like a bit more support getting into the text, or getting the swing of it, here’s a great reading guide, by Professor Viet Nguyen of USC:

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~vnguyen/dictee/dictee1.htm

If we consider the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to actually be a biography of Gertrude Stein, how does Stein construct herself in relation to Toklas, her “proximate other”? If we consider the book as a biography of Alice B. Toklas, how is her identity constructed in relation to Stein? Can the book be understood as really being about one or the other?

To what extent do we trust that this biography is written in Alice’s voice? How is this different from autobiography “As told to…” Certainly Stein and Toklas have a closer relationship and know each other better than Alex Haley and Malcolm X, but should we similarly examine each’s agendas in the telling of their times, the way we did for the Autobiography of Malcolm X?

The narrator Alice often reports Stein’s judgements about art and artists in their salon. What is the significance of reporting one’s opinions through the voice of one’s partner? Does Alice become a translator of Stein, as if the enigmatic and challenging Stein could be understood best through the eyes of somebody who loves her? Or are Alice’s identity and voice being borrowed by Stein as a vehicle for self-praise and opinions?

Stein and Toklas arguably take on social roles of Genius (Author) and Genius’s Wife (Secretary, Editor) (and Muse?) In what ways does this dynamic undermine and/or reinforce sexist gender roles? How does the indeterminacy of the author inform our understanding or blur the boundaries of the gender dynamic of their relationship?

from Gertrude Stein to Alice B. Toklas

To give some fun illumination to tonight’s reading, I will spend this post pouring over Phoebe Stein Davis’s 1999 article “Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”¹

Davis notes Stein’s active choice to situate The Autobiography within a genre that has traditionally been identified with cis male voices and masculinized “mastery of narrative control” (19). (Of course, in this class, I’m sure we’ll have lively conversations about whether The Autobiography can be considered as such: does simply calling something an autobiography thus make it one? What does the ‘auto’ in ‘autobiography’ mean if the author is not the person the text is about? Or is this text more about Gertrude than about Alice anyway, and perhaps the genre fits but the title does not? Can a couple’s biography written by one party in the voice of another be considered ‘autobiography’? These are lots of fun questions, but ultimately, I’m not sure that I’m personally too concerned with what we call it so much as how we read it. Then again, let’s be realistic: what we call it has a profound effect on how we read it… Back to the proverbial square one!)

Alright, I’m back from my digression: Stein chose to wrote in a deliberately non-experimental form that had traditionally been dominated by “Great” White Cis Men. Yet, writing in her lover’s voice, I would posit that Stein carried some of her experimentalism over into the auto/biographical form. Similar arguments have been taken up by many feminist critics, according to Davis, who cites many feminist critiques that highlight “Stein’s displacement of the autobiographical ‘I’ onto the lesbian couple demonstrates that The Autobiography presents a distinctly feminist notion of identity that, with its resistance to the idea of a unified, coherent self, anticipates postmodern notions of subjectivity” (19). (This seems to me to be a highly academic way of giving a shout out to The L Word’s “lesbian urge to merge”: for all its horrific racism, transphobia, biphobia, ableism, body-negativity and classism [need I go on?], The L Word does sometimes come out [pun intended] with great one-liners.)

I like the idea of resisting unified visions of self – I prefer messiness in identities, myself – which lends itself nicely to Davis’s arguments regarding Stein’s (inconsistent) resistance to coherent national identities. Yet, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the bristling that I’m sure many feminists feel upon reading a work written by one person in the autobiographical voice of a non-fictitious (and feminine) someone else: is this giving the subject voice, or taking away their agency to express their own selves? Or perhaps it’s not so clear cut: can it be transforming what ‘self’ itself means? Or doing a mix of all of the above at the same time? Does Stein’s revelation at the end of the book that she has been writing in Toklas’s voice take away the ‘bristling’ factor? How much difference does transparency make to our understanding of the text, especially if that transparency comes into play at such a temporally late but structurally prominent place (the very last paragraph of the book)?

Davis, as referenced above, framed her discussions of feminist and lesbian subjectivity as a precursor to her arguments about Stein’s national identity politics. Bemoaning the ways that scholars tend to focus on Stein’s aesthetically experimental writing rather than on the content of The Autobiography as an experimental text that unsettles national identity, Davis argues, “[w]hile it is clear that Stein invokes an essentialist view of nationality, her repeated destabilization of the essentialist view of national identities demonstrates that The Autobiography, as a popular book, remains dedicated to decentralizing and destabilizing the terms we use to define our identities” (18). In The Autobiography, while Stein does make essentialist statements about national identity, she also explains that “where one is from need not determine one’s national identity” (22). Davis argues that Stein’s book claims national identity as an unstable, constructed, and mobile characteristic. This may not appear to be the case, of course, as Stein discusses or refers to national identity on every page of the book. However, upon closer examination, Davis asserts that Stein’s positioning of national identities alongside the gaps in what she and Toklas do not remember suggests that narratives of national identity are called upon “in place of what we do not remember, and in place of the continuity we cannot grasp” (23). Stein’s constant offering up of multiple versions of various stories – granting no versions narrative supremacy – establishes a destabilization of constant truth that, Davis argues, leaks into her accounts of fluid (yet also defining) national identity.

I do understand where Davis is coming from regarding the fluidity Stein assigns to national identity. Davis highlights, for example, that when Stein relates her poring over U.S. Civil War pictures with Picasso, she says that he “became very spanish” (16). This surely suggests a context-based arousal of national identities, and suggests also that national identities come in degrees, as when Stein is described as “completely and entirely american”, as opposed to simply, ‘american’ (forgive me, I can’t find where in the text this was). I do not know that I am convinced that Stein succeeds in transgressing essentialist national identities, because – as Davis herself points out – Stein deploys these essentialist categorizations so often, but I am intrigued by the examples (referenced above) that draw out context and degree of identity. I am also intrigued by Davis’s closing argument that Stein deliberately deployed a “distinctly American aesthetic” for The Autobiography, and this demonstrates an understanding of national identity as a narrative choice (39). These kinds of ideas surely destabilize what we generally think of as ‘fixed, constant’ identities, whether those identities are sexual, gender, national, or ability-based. Different identities emerge in different contexts, and to different degrees. I love that Stein highlights this glorious messiness, even if only in a limited way.

A final contemplation on identity, The Autobiography, and today’s date: what does autobiography mean in masquerade? What does identity mean on Halloween? To what extent is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas an autobiography of Gertrude in masquerade as an autobiography of Alice? Can autobiography ever be anything except masquerade? And is that such a bad thing, after all?

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