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Chapter 5. Talking Boundaries into Thresholds in Ida
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119 Chapter 5 Talking Boundaries into Thresholds in Ida S tein preferred not to be introduced before her lectures; reports state that she just walked up to the stage (usually down the center aisle, through the audience) and started talking without any introduction or introductory remarks (“Miss Stein Speaks”; “Princeton Dazed”; Schriftgiesser). She liked to meet people straight in, in her own terms. But Stein became an American icon during the tour, and she was happily but uneasily aware of her fame. In a December 1934 letter to Carl Van Vechten, she expressed her amazement and pleasure at being identifiable to someone who very probably would not be attending one of her free but often exclusive lectures: a reporter girl, told me and she swears she did not make it up here in Toledo that she went to the station to meet us on a train we did not come on and she asked the gate man if we had come through and he looked blank and a shabby citizen leaning on the wall said no she did not come through and the ticket man said who and the shabby man said sure I know her I never saw her but she would not get by here without my knowing her and then he said to the porter, you know her the one who said a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose you know her. (Burns, 368) Aware of the complications of fame even before setting foot in the United States, Stein describes in How Writing Is Written (1936) its dangerous effects on subjectivity: One never gets quite used to unexpectedly seeing one’s name in print no matter how often it happens to you to be that one; it always gives you a shock of a slightly mixed-up feeling, are you or are you not one. No matter how often it happens there is always this thing, but what is that, imagine what is that compared to never having heard anybody’s voice 120 Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens speaking while a picture is doing something, and that voice and that person is yourself, if you could really and truly be that one. It upset me very much when that happened to me, there is no doubt about that, if there can really not be any doubt about anything. (“I Came and Here I Am,” 68; my italics) What does it mean to look at the self from the outside? From a perspective of time and distance? “Are you or are you not one.” If you are hearing yourself speak, and watching your lips move while you talk, which one are you? Can you be two, speaking to yourself? Ida and its title character act as sounding boards for various possibilities about the self, and these ideas contribute, with much of Stein’s other writing , to a theory of personal subjectivity and social cohesion that depends upon conversation. In the novel, Stein is still interested in some of the details of speech, but here that interest is compounded with an analysis of the self. Stein wonders why a self is so fragile, who makes it, and how to avoid letting others break it. She seems finally to perceive the self as a formation of the interactional conversations that take place between voices within and voices without, but a problem arises if any of the voices become too hardened by expectation or reputation. She recognizes fame as a dilemma for the famous and even begins to see it as a troublesome phenomenon among the fans; she will explore this issue of the public as a political mass in similar terms in later works. Stein sees the cessation of verbal intercourse as an individual’s living death, but she also depicts true death as the end of reciprocal conversation, petrifying the deceased into the subject of a summary monologue. There are (of course) some thought-provokingly mysterious sections to the novel, but Ida speaks in standard phrases, at least one of which she exchanges for another in a new setting. She agreeably begins many of her sentences with “yes” (Ida, 628, 692), and Stein tells us that she says “nice little things” such as “all right” (628), “You are very welcome,” and “very well I thank you” (625). Ida “liked to thank” and “she liked to be thanked,” although Stein suggests that Ida “was not really interested” in much, including “Anything that was...