A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women's Innnovative Writing

3. Re-Versing the Lyric: Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s Double Negative

three Re-Versing the Lyric Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s Double Negative I n her introduction to the proceedings of the 1983 “Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots” conference, Daphne Marlatt writes, “AstheQuébecwritersreachbacktoVirginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein in English literature, we can reach forward to their new writing in French with its well-developed analysis, its radical deconstruction of male-biased language, its creative invention of new words and new ways of speaking, so that, with a new horizon, we can return to and build on our own roots to develop our culture in the feminine” (13). While Marlatt is speaking of Francophone Canadian writers here, she could just as well be speaking of herself, since her work can also be located within a Steinian tradition.1 Throughout her long career, Marlatt has published numerous books of poetry, beginning in 1968 with Frames of a Story, as well as a novel, Ana Historic, and significant essays on feminist theory (now available in the collection Readings from the Labyrinth), and she has coauthored twobooks with Francophone Canadian Nicole Brossard. Betsy Warland began publishing in 1981, when her poetry collection A Gathering Instinctappeared,andhassincepublishedotherpoetryworksandanedited collection of lesbian feminist writing (InVersions), as well as a collection of “theorograms” reflecting on autobiographical, aesthetic, and feminist concerns .Bothwomenhavebeeninfluentialfiguresinfeminist,Canadian,and lesbian writing, playing significant editorial roles in feminist journals such Lifting belly. How are you. Lifting belly how are you lifting belly. We like a fire and we don’t mind if it smokes. Do you. —Gertrude Stein, Lifting Belly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 . . . Re-Versing the Lyric as(f.)lipandTessera,whichhavebeenimportantsourcesforthepublication of Anglo-Canadian and Québecoise feminist work. It is their collaborative writing that interests me here, however, particularly as their coauthored love lyric, Double Negative (1988), intersects with Stein’s work in Lifting Belly (1917). An experimental long poem written as a collaborative response to the authors’ train voyage through the Australian Nullarboor desert, Double Negative is a narrative of that physical and intellectual journey.2 Stein’s Lifting Belly was written between 1915 and 1917, first in Mallorca, where Stein and Toklas were vacationing, and later in France, where Stein and Toklas worked for the American Fund for French Wounded (AFFW) during the First World War.3 The poem was finally published posthumously in the collection Bee Time Vine, in 1953. In his introduction to Lifting Belly in that volume, Virgil Thompson describes the poem as “not a hermetic composition but a naturalistic recounting of . . . daily life” and also as “a diary” and “a hymn to the domestic affections” (63, 64). Indeed, the poem is in many ways a detailed record of Stein and Toklas’s daily life during the war, with references to the customs of Mallorca , the Battle of Verdun, the Ford in which Stein and Toklas made their rounds for the AFFW, and interactions with people who were a part of their social circle. It is also a clear representation of a romantic relationship , with numerous references to Stein and Toklas’s intimate lives—to pet names (pussy, Caesar, baby), to beauty, and even to a husband and wife. Through their integration, examination, and revision of generic forms, most significantly the love lyric, Lifting Belly and Double Negative also become extended meditations on questions of form, language, and social identity. As the authors work to deconstruct the love lyric’s traditions, they work concomitantly to reconstruct alternative strategies for articulating desire, identity, and political praxis. For both Marlatt and Warland and Stein, the love lyric offers a particularly rich site to investigate the positions of woman and women, the potentialities of collaboration and intimacy, and the boundaries between public and private. As numerous feminist critics have demonstrated, the love lyric is a tenacious form—the promise of transparency (the lyric “I” as analogous to the author), the familiarity of the conventions (the absent beloved as catalyst for speech, the speaker’s longing as worthy of admiration), and the profiles of the practitioners (Shakespeare and Donne, to name just two) all conspire to ensure its status not just in the Western literary canon but also in popular culture. With that status comes a series of sociopolitical effects, effects that ensure the primacy of male sexuality, the invisibility of the lesbian Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s Double Negative . . . 67 experience, the fixity of concepts of identity. As Margaret Homans has argued , the romantic lyric is dependent...