Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein (review)

Karin Cope's Passionate Collaborations deserves a long life, and one which extends beyond the interests of Stein scholars or even modernists. This is a daring book which attempts to locate its voice(s) within and beyond the potential restrictions of contemporary theoretical thinking. It is most certainly aware of the contemporary theoretical landscape too; indeed, in Cope's opening to the text, she admits to her own training in deconstructive and philosophical methods which have been so influential in Stein studies. Cope is also more than a little aware of the recent suspicions about Stein; recent historical and cultural critiques have cast shadows over her friendships with French collaborationists, her protection by a variety of Vichy government officials, her translations of Pétain's wartime radio speeches, and her apparent blindness to her own situation as an American Jew in wartime France. Cope turns from none of these difficulties; rather, she introduces herself (and here is the inspired part, the most dangerous, and the most exciting, since she actually pulls it off) as an imaginative subject experiencing, indeed, living with, as the title suggests, the problems and pleasures of Stein's work.

The five chapters of this dense and inventive book attempt a very complex reappraisal of Stein's writing, and of our place as critics, readers, and writers in relation to this work. 'Passion' certainly does figure prominently here; but 'collaboration,' in both senses – to work together, and selling out or 'compromising oneself' – is perhaps the more important word, since Cope is interested in what happens 'when a boundary breaks down, when two parties cannot be separated adequately, and an autonomous nation, actor, or self disappears.' Cope's difficult task is to revitalize our understanding of Stein by walking a fine and original line between poststructuralist-based readings of semiotic play, and historical/ biographical 'reductionism.' By redeploying Melanie Klein's object relations theory and certain portions of phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty's, Cope wants to reclaim the intersubjective possibilities of reading and writing, or of the relationship between writer and world, reader and writer.

The first two chapters illustrate her approach in a discussion of Picasso's and Stein's portraits of each other. Picasso admits that he cannot see the 'indigestible' Stein (stone) since she is like no other (woman) he has ever known. The 'speculative character of likeness' becomes apparent to both artists, as they take on what they cannot know from memory or knowledge of previous aesthetic or social forms. The 'oceanic' feeling, according to Cope, makes Stein and Picasso 'primitives' not only in the usual sense of being racist or misogynist appropriators of other cultures' works, but also in Klein's sense of approaching the oceanic loss of boundaries, the wordlessness and violence of an originary bodily understanding of the world. Stein's body (though not quite the body) appears again in chapter 3's discussion of her narcissism, and the unusual and long-lasting attention to her body that appears throughout the commentary on Stein. Negative comments populate the margins of Cope's text, while the two voices which appeared in chapter 2 negotiate the middle 'body' of the pages. The middle section unfolds the narcissistic struggle between Stein and Hemingway, and his mysterious 'primal scene' experience, related in A Moveable Feast, which caused his break with Stein. Cope positively reinvents narcissism as a mutually sustaining and loving means of identity creation. She elaborates further on this in chapter 4, as bodies and perceptions mark the outlines, and possibilities of insight into the other. As we recognize ourselves as objects in that world (à la Lacan and Merleau-Ponty) we are forced to see 'as the world I am looking at looks "according" to that world.' The last chapter is the most formally daring and pleasurable. It is an unplayable play, incorporating two Steins, Otto Weininger, part of Stein's preface to her Pétain translations, and, most interestingly, three academic sisters who are not sisters forced...