writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

distinctions between the person writing –Stein herself‐, the narrator –Toklas‐ and the narrated “I”.
Such a blurring of generic boundaries is a common aspect of her characterization. For example, in
Everybody’s Autobiography, she begins voicing a particular person she knew in Paris, and then the
narration follows into her self‐reflective voice through the use of spontaneous reflection of that
person and her own response. In this sense, her representation of –for instance Dali and herselfbecomes
a realistic account of life writing in modernist terms. In contrast to conventional
autobiographies of her time her narration refers to the shattered mis‐en‐scéne of early twentieth
century social realities which could only be depicted with an awareness of the distinction between
inner and outer realities. To her “the thing is like this, it is all the question of identity. It is all a
question of the outside being outside and the inside being inside.” As it is seen in the following
extract, portraying Salvador Dali, the relationship between the outer and inner reality conjures up a
penetration of these two realms rather than a collapse:
He painted a picture and on it he wrote I spit upon the face of my mother, he was very
fond of his mother who had been a long time dead and so of course this was a symbolism.
He knew about Freud and he had the revolt of having a notary for his father and having his
mother dead since he was a child. And so painting this picture with this motto was a
natural thing and it made of him the most important of the painters who were surrealists.
1
As understood from the above quotation Dali’s motto “I spit upon the face of my mother”
becomes his cathartic moment revealing his Freudian unconscious. Thus, Gertrude Stein’s
idiosyncratic language depicting Dali makes it possible for the reader to gather outside and inside
while transcending an artificial reception of reality. In a similar attitude, Stein describes Matissé’s art
and his way of seeing outside reality in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
It was in this picture that Matisse first clearly realized his intention of deforming the
drawing of the human body in order to harmonize and intensify the color values of all the
simple colors mixed only with white. He used his distorted drawing as a dissonance is used
in music or as vinegar or lemons are used in cooking or egg shell in coffee to clarify. […]
Cézanne had come to his unfinishedness and distortion of necessity, Matisse did it by
intention. 2
Here, traditional terms concerned with the artificial reception of reality‐ that assumed a direct
relation / reference between the mind of the artists and the object is being questioned. Primarily,
such a perception of conventional reality is being deconstructed in order to reconstruct a Steinian or
modernist reality. Carrying reality to a pure subjective status enables it to gain ultimate freedom
from any traditional suppositions. With such freedom, now the new status of reality is only a reality
in itself. Once this autonomy is obtained on the inside, the outside reality can be recreated in varying
possibilities. This new Steinian or modernist reality is reflected through Matissé’s deformed drawing
of the human body. What Matisse did, therefore, was to bring about a parody of the traditional
realism as he represented his dispatched understanding of the outside reality projected through
human body as a common place artistic imagery. This was what Picasso did as he also chose familiar
objects fragmented into cubic shapes enabling the viewer with an immediate and direct frame of
reference. Thus, here comes a multilayered representation in terms of Stein’s autobiographical
fictions of self. Glancing back to the narrative style in the quotation above, the reader is startled with
the extend Stein goes in her technique of fragmentation. Beginning with Stein’s authorial voice, the
reader receives her comment on Matissé’s art then in the following parts of the quotation her voices
is dropped as Alice penetrates with her concrete example of cooking metaphor as she says: “He used
his distorted drawing as a dissonance is used in music or as vinegar or lemons are used in cooking or
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