Unlikely Collaboration by Barbara Will

Author:Barbara Will
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/American/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Spoken to Americans in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Stein’s message is clear. Submission to and faith in the authoritarian leader supersedes “critique” and “violence.” What matters is attending to the voice of this leader as it soothes and guides the faithful. Only this voice, transmitted as literally as possible through the passive medium of the translator, can achieve the miracle of peace.

There is little doubt that Stein’s support for Pétain was authentic, as shown by her continued postwar defense of the man. Had the Vichy regime not fallen to pieces, it is likely that Stein would have continued to be its champion. While some critics have truly bent over backward to argue otherwise, most have felt that the complex story of Stein’s wartime support for an authoritarian regime cannot be simply explained away.107 Stein believed in what she was doing and knew exactly why she was doing it. She was committed to Pétain and to his vision for national renewal for all the reasons discussed in this chapter. In every way, this commitment seems to have preceded, informed, and overshadowed all other motivations for writing propaganda in support of Vichy. This is not to deny that Stein was also opportunistic, aware that such support might have salutary radiating effects on the vulnerable personal situation of herself and Alice Toklas. Yet on balance, Stein’s Vichy activity was less about opportunism than about loyalty to a cause.

Of course, it is altogether probable that despite being its willing propagandist Stein felt real, if hidden or unconscious, unease with aspects of Pétain’s National Revolution. This is one way, again, of understanding the paralysis of imagination that seems to inform the literalism of her Pétain translations. It is likely that there were other wrenching moments in Stein’s work and activity during this time as she collaborated with an authoritarian regime. Some of this discomfort can be felt in three remarkable and almost unknown short children’s plays Stein wrote during 1943: “In a Garden A Tragedy,” “Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters A Melodrama,” and “Look and Long.”108 Situating her child protagonists in a dark world of arbitrary and inexplicable violence, Stein’s plays are haunting and uncanny: veritable scripts of unconscious anxiety. Her wartime novel about prophecy, Mrs. Reynolds, also describes a shadowy landscape dominated by two dictators—thinly veiled versions of Hitler and Stalin—and marked by ominous and often terrifying events. Both the plays and Mrs. Reynolds seem imbued, like the translation project, with a masochistic sensibility. They seem to be putting on display the tensions of a subject who has passively chosen to submit to the dominating and potentially dangerous presence of the authoritarian dictator. In the case of Mrs. Reynolds, as Phoebe Stein Davis has argued, the highly repetitive narrative form foregrounds “the tedium, terror, and uncertainty” of what Stein ostensibly valued above all else, even under dictatorship: “peaceful” everyday life.109

These literary texts clearly run counter to the pro-Pétainist tendencies we see in Stein’s more overtly political writings and comments,

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