***** Modernism/Modernity 3.3 (1996) 69-92
Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein's "Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain" (1942)
Wanda Van Dusen
At the top of a previously unpublished manuscript by Gertrude Stein, held in Columbia University's Random House collection, Stein's editor, Bennett Cerf, handwrote the following comment: "For the records. This disgusting piece was mailed from Belley on Jan. 19, 1942." The four-page, double-spaced, typed manuscript is listed in the collection under the title, "Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain." Between 17 June 1940, Philippe Henri Pétain's first address as chief of state, and 19 January 1942, when Stein sent her "Introduction" to Cerf, the Maréchal delivered approximately sixty speeches, most of which were broadcast to the French public by radio. 1 Stein's piece raises both ethical and theoretical questions, the first of which is how much she may have collaborated with the Vichy regime to protect her and Alice Toklas's lives as Jewish American lesbians in the French countryside at Bilignin par Belley. In other words, to what extent could her narrative portrait of Philippe Pétain as the essence of French national heroism have prevented their deportation? The second question is the degree to which the essentialization 2 of subjectivity in the "Introduction" calls into question deconstructive tendencies in her earlier experimental writing. 3
The "Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain" rekindles the debate over the depth of conviction behind Stein's "anti-patriarchal" experimental writing between 1906 and 1932 4 in light of evidence of her political conservatism. 5 On the one hand, Stein is defended by critics like Marianne DeKoven, Maria Diedrich, and Lisa Ruddick as subversively deconstructive, feminist, and pacifist. 6 On the other hand, she is portrayed by some like Blanche Wiesen Cook as a Jewish anti-Semite, misogynist lesbian, and bourgeois antisocialist. 7 The question is perhaps better formulated as to what degree and at what times Stein fits any or all of these descriptions, and how they relate to her theory of human subjectivity as a combination of stable, interior "bottom nature" and shifting, exterior manifestations of what she terms mere "emphasis." 8
In her "Introduction," Stein eclipses her Jewishness by presenting herself as an unmarked American, citizen of a country that has not yet declared war against Germany. In this way, she displaces one modernist essence, ethnicity, with another, nationality. Her narrative portrait of Pétain as the heroic father of France, the fetishized embodiment of the French nation, disguises not only the racist, nondemocratic character of the Vichy government but also Stein's vulnerability as a racially marked foreign resident. At that level, her retelling of the Maréchal's "moving" 9 story may be read as the "making" of a fetish that could "save" her and Toklas from the anti-Semitic practices of his regime. In Paris France (1940), Stein's critique of Hitler's Germany as the "dead" country that has killed its music and musicians "these last two years" indicates that Stein may have been aware of the dangers presented by Vichy's collaboration with Berlin. 10 In this context, the "Introduction" can be seen as performing a redemptive fetishistic ritual that denies the existence of racism in the so-called free zone (zone libre) administered by Pétain.
Stein's conviction that an inner essence can be read at the surface of subjectivity establishes the theoretical basis for a fetishistic representation of Maréchal Pétain as France's heroic national savior. There are two dimensions to the fetishistic production of this trope in the context of Vichy's cult of the nation. First, a political leader is invested with the supernatural power of a religious figure, a characteristic trope of Western secularization since the Renaissance. Pétain's armistice "without any means of defense" (l. 76) and his success "in making the Germans more or less keep their word with him" (ll. 76?77) are represented as demonstrations of miraculous power. Second, as the one whose character was so perfect that "he never explained himself" (ll. 72?73), Pétain is a symbol of the nation highly invested with narcissistic libido and serves like the fetish as a "stabilizer of libido." 11 Replacing Jeanne d'Arc as both the symbol of patriotism and the Republic, 12 Stein's configuration of the Maréchal functions as the mirror image of masculine France, its ego ideal. 13
The Making of a National Fetish
Stein's fascination with "making," as in The Making of Americans and the fabrication of portraits, expresses itself as fetishistic image-making in her "Introduction." In general, fetishes function to grant human agency to inanimate objects. As such, they deny individual or societal vulnerability associated with the lack of power....Stein's representation of the Maréchal as prophesied defender of the nation fetishistically denies the humiliation of political and military defeat by reinscribing the armistice as an act of salvation. His promotion as an inevitable sign of France's destiny is part of an appeal to American nationalism; nationalism, after all, "thinks in terms of historical destinies." 15 Through a series of adverbial repetitions, Stein creates a sense of the inevitable: "always," "gradually," "then," "day after day," "little by little," "more and more." The term used by Pétain on 20 June 1940 to justify his arrangement with Germany to the French is "inescapable" ("inéluctable" [D, 59]). The portrait of the Maréchal as national fetish and the narrative of his "moving" story are constructed through a series of comparisons that connect past and present, France and America: Verdun/Pearl Harbor, Pétain/George Washington (and Benjamin Franklin). The comparisons are reinforced by a discourse of binary oppositions that maintains a tension between visions of threat to and salvation of the French nation: victory/defeat, faith/doubt, truth/rumors, save/ruin, everybody/no one, etc. Discursively, the comparisons are designed to incite identification with one national group by another, that is, the Americans with the French.
In reinscribing Pétain's collaboration with Germany as heroic pacifism, he is figured as a leader equal to America's legendary hero George Washington. In popular American folklore, George Washington, who as a boy admitted to chopping down a cherry tree, circulates as a sign of speaking the truth. Pétain is said to speak the truth or, if unable to do so, says nothing, as would another American hero, Benjamin Franklin (l. 72)....
In the process of constructing an idol of French heroism, nature, a primary Steinian category, is superseded by a discourse of the supernatural that articulates the armistice as a "miracle" (l. 76)....Stein utilizes pre-Enlightenment discourse to produce him as France's predestined leader. First, the discourse of pagan prophesy dating from antiquity and marginalized by Christianity inscribes the Maréchal as a sign of supernatural protective power, a fulfillment of the "old prediction" (l. 33) that an "old man on a white horse" (ll. 34?35) would save France when the enemy reached Lyons. Secondly, he is mythified as the leader in whom all have come to have "faith" (l. 24) and who has achieved a "miracle" (l. 76).
Stein's text reinscribes the mythical thinking of the Vichy political ideology, an archaism characteristic of fascism and Nazism and symptomatic of culture's anxiety in the face of socially disruptive modernization....The ideological grounding and political practice in the Pétainist "zone libre" (l. 39) and the German-administered "other zone" (l. 39) is obfuscated by an appeal to fate, a concept operative in royalist regimes ranging from ancient Greece to modern Europe that locates the source of political legitimacy and agency outside time and history....
Stein employs the figure of the Maréchal on his white horse in both the "Introduction" and in "The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France" (1940), written within two years of each other. In both pieces this figure operates as the fetish image of a benevolent, patriarchal state behind which is masked a reactionary, racist regime, the hidden maleficium of fascism....
The foregrounding of national essence is not only a discursive tactic in attracting American support for the armistice but also a basic strategy in dissimulating both Jewishness and the anti-Semitic character of the Vichy regime: one essence, Stein's Americanness, displaces another, her Jewishness. Identifying herself as an American national she addresses her readers as "compatriots" (l. 1), and "fellow countrymen" (l. 6). Using an all-encompassing "we," she represents herself as being part of two nations. On the one hand, she is American: "We in the United States . . . " (l. 8). On the other hand, she lives in France: "We have not all of us, and I too have been of that number, over here in France . . . " (ll. 22?23). The multiplicity of Stein as a subject is reduced to participation in nationality via the evacuation of her affiliation with a threatened ethnicity and her practice of lesbian sexuality. The self constructed by Stein in the "Introduction" is politically safe, a self unified by the concept of nation. We witness what Judith Butler calls in a discussion of the Kristevian abject the "founding repudiation" by which abjected parts of the subject are either suppressed or projected onto cultural Others: "For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. This sealing of its surfaces would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject." 19 The "Introduction" attempts to achieve this "impossible impermeability" of the subject by evacuating Stein's gender, her lesbianism, and Jewishness--those cultural practices abjected by public discourse. Without these markers, the unified self presented by Stein can be safely subsumed in the dominant category of "we in France" (l. 103)....
The Discursive Mask: Nationality Displaces Ethnicity
Bilignin par Belley, located in the foothills of the French Alps northeast of Lyons, was the site of Stein and Toklas's country home. It was part of the French zone libre from June 1940, Pétain's armistice with Germany, until the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, after which Hitler's forces totally occupied France with the exception of a small pocket (la poche) in the western part of the country. As Jews, Stein and Toklas are reported to have enjoyed the protection of persons influential with the Vichy regime, and the "Introduction" may have been written in response to such relationships. 21 In any event, the piece essentializes Stein's Americanness and aligns it with Frenchness in a move that displaces one essence with another. In its effacement of Stein's Jewishness by her Americanness, the "Introduction" masks the author's ethnicity. In this sense, her self-representation as essentially American is another self-creation similar to Stein's identification as a male genius comparable to Shakespeare and Picasso. 22 Such self-creations are discursive masks that both reveal and conceal subjectivity. For example in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein adopts the mask of Toklas in order to relate her own struggles and accomplishments. 23
Stein's sacralization of the Maréchal as national savior and benevolent father masks Pétain's role as leader not only of a collaborationist nation but also of a colonial empire, the integrity of which Pétain attempted to defend both with and against German military forces. 24...In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein disavows any interest in African art, stating that it is too "sophisticated" for her "more savage" American taste in "primitive things." 26 However, her work, like that of her modernist contemporary and "dearest friend" Picasso, shows African influence particularly in the use of the mask. 27 The mask is emblematic not only of modernism's exploration of "contradictions of gender, nationality, and genre" but also of its implication in the contradictions of state power and colonialism. 28 Stein's participation in those contradictions is made evident in Paris France by her erasure of colonialism from the French empire, which she implicitly constructs as having ended with the Second Empire in 1870, when the Paris Commune deposed Napoleon III. 29 Her time in France, forty-one years of Stein's adult life, was, however, a period in which the French both solidified and celebrated their foreign domination, most notably with the Parisian Colonial Exposition of 1931, which marked the hundredth anniversary of the Algerian expedition. This history, however, is masked....
Missing from the Picture: Class, Race, Gender, and Sexuality
Stein's foregrounding of nation as a category effaces the importance of the actual historical events that led to the installation of the Vichy regime. 33 Pétain's past military victory in World War I is used to mask the oppressive political character of the armistice. If the nation, as Benedict Anderson says, is "an imagined political community," Pétainist France is organized around the imagination of class unity and racial purity. 34 The concept of the unification of the classes is articulated in the conventions of work (les conventions de travail) announced by Pétain on 10 October 1940 that outlaw both lock-outs and strikes: "They [professional organizations] will then avoid conflicts through an absolute interdiction of 'lock-outs' and strikes, through obligatory arbitration of the work tribunals." 35 Class unity takes the form of a mandatory "community of work" ("une communauté de travail") or state-sponsored unions dedicated to the prosperity of "the company" ("l'entreprise"). On 1 March 1941 Pétain explains: "In reality, the causes of class conflict will only be able to be suppressed if the worker, who lives today burdened by his isolation, rediscovers a community of work, dignified and free living conditions as well as reasons for living and hoping. This community is the company." 36 Pétain's corporatist vision offers "reasons for living and hoping" that religion traditionally sought to provide. The discourse of his agrarian, traditionalist National Revolution appropriates key signifiers of the industrial bourgeois ideology that it strives to replace. Enlightenment values, dignity and freedom, are to be actualized by a reified authoritarian state. The government-mandated company union, a compulsory workers' corporation with no bargaining rights, is a central organizing structure of Vichy state capitalism.
In Stein's "Introduction," the urban working class, Jews, and women are absent from her picture of the French, and the trope of the Maréchal as symbol of national unity eclipses Pétain's anti-labor, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist programs as outlined in those speeches. In Paris France, Stein takes an equally depoliticized view of unemployment as related to the demands of twentieth-century industrial productivity. In discussing how the French "always" put at least seven men on any job, she reflects: "The nineteenth century knew just what to do with each man but the twentieth century inevitably was not to know . . . " (PF, 13). In Stein, economics are separated from politics by naturalizing business as a part of daily life; social conflicts resulting from culture's incorporation of new modes of production remain part of the unessential historical.
...As distinct from the factionalized French fascists, Pétain was a traditionalist supported by the agrarian and small business sectors, those disappointed in parliamentary democracy and laissez-faire capitalism who wanted to return to preindustrial guilds, agriculture, and the patriarchal family as the bases of economic and social life. Similar themes appear in Paris France, where, however, Stein constructs "the gentle farmers" as apolitical, as knowing "life as it is" (PF, 27), implying that essential life is ahistorical. Quoting "one of the gentlest" (PF, 27), she represents the farmers as skeptical of modern urban democracy and its ambitious, calculating politicians (les grosses têtes) to the point of passive resignation:
everybody used to think that it was kings who were ambitious who were greedy and who brought misery to the people who had no way to resist them. But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power. . . . They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and they will be all the same. [PF, 28]
...It is within the context of the rise of the traditionalists to political power that Stein discusses French tradition two years earlier in Paris France: "I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was. Sometimes it is important and sometimes it is not, but from 1900 to 1939, it certainly was." (PF, 38) In Pétainist France, freedom consists in submission to the conservative values of agrarian patriarchy that extol the family and the farm as the foundations of French society....
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