On an extended stay in Provence in 1922, Gertrude Stein proposed a disarming homology that was to prove a breakthrough in the course of her experimental writing. Could a play be modeled on the formation of landscape instead of story? 1 Conventional theater makes a person feel “nervous” she explained in her 1935 lecture “Plays,” because of the lack of congruence between a viewer’s emotion and the unfolding of the play (LIA 245). The curtain is the first clue that there will be a discrepancy, and as she so often did, Stein theorized the problem in temporal terms. The problem with plays, she claimed, is “the problem of time in relation to emotion” because the “emotional time” of the viewer is not aligned with the action of the play: “Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening” (LIA 251, 244). In the spatial organization of landscape relations, Stein saw the opportunity to substitute the equivalence and simultaneity of composition for the chronological time of narrative. She reasoned that “if the play was exactly like a landscape,” spatial relations would replace dramatic development, and the viewer’s emotion would coincide with the play much as a viewer appears to be co-present with landscape that is simply there (LIA 263).
Stein’s insight that she might resolve a temporal problem by means of a spatial method proved enormously generative in the early 1920s, so much so that, in an excited burst of composition, she reprised not only playwriting but also portraiture with her new method. In a retrospective account, Stein described the winter she stayed on in St.-Rémy in the Provence region, working “with slow care and concentration,” as an important turning point and a period of her writing that would prove a significant influence for other writers. 2 Even a cursory survey of her work during the early 1920s reveals that Stein’s method changed dramatically when she modeled composition on a spatial homology. Clearly, she had a new formal experiment in hand, one she sustained on her return to Paris, and the writing of this period is characterized by lightness and exhilaration. Several of Stein’s most anthologized pieces date to these years including her second portrait of Picasso, “If I Told Him A Completed Portrait Of Picasso” (1923), a portrait of Cézanne (1923), and the opera libretto, Four Saints In Three Acts (1927). Contemporary experimental playwrights and directors acknowledge Stein’s plays as an important influence on their work, and American experimental theater groups including the Living Theater, the Judson Poets’ Theater, and the Wooster Group, have staged her plays and adaptations of her plays. 3
Yet much of Stein’s writing of the early 1920s has received little critical attention and continues to present challenges to readers and critics. To my knowledge, Stein’s first landscape play, Lend A Hand Or Four Religions (1922), a remarkably successful example of her new method, has never been produced. By focusing on Stein’s work in the early 1920s, I want to do something more than fill a gap in the critical record however. Although these are lively and groundbreaking texts, readers may concur with the persistent conclusion concerning Stein’s work that they, like others in her oeuvre, make no sense. Or, if they do make sense, they do so according to a system that remains hermetic and closed. In my view, these conclusions stem from neglecting what is radical in Stein’s approach to meaning and my ambition in this book is to trace her innovations in landscape writing in order to determine what constitutes meaning when making sense is understood as compositional rather than representational.
I present my analysis of this highly accomplished period of Stein’s writing as a case study modeling a new critical approach to her work. While critics have made bold claims for Stein’s transgressive modernism, no one has yet proposed that we change our critical approach from interpretation based on rationalist tenets to one that corresponds to her radical epistemology and follows her experiments even when these carry us far beyond familiar expectations. Although it is well established that Stein’s experiments with language use contest a representational theory of knowledge, in critical practice we nonetheless reaffirm its grammars and logic. In close readings, I demonstrate how we might change our critical method, in both expectations and practice, if we instead adopt Stein’s epistemology and her method of making sense. The landscape writing of the early 1920s is an ideal period to demonstrate a compositional approach for three reasons: in these prolific years she produces some of her most anthologized texts, including a broadside against conventional explanation; her style changes dramatically with the introduction of a new compositional problem; and the work of these years is self-reflexive, insofar as the experiment with landscape writing becomes a visual and spatial homology for Stein’s compositional method. By limiting my study to texts written in succession and over a brief period of time, I can identify developments in a sustained compositional problem as Stein tries first one strategy and then another using the landscape homology. In so doing, I reveal the complexity of her compositional method whereby insights garnered in one text carry over with variation to the next, and demonstrate that texts that have long been neglected as intervening or minor pieces are in fact important members in a sustained experiment that ripples with the excitement of discovery.
This period of Stein’s writing is notable not only because of her considerable accomplishments, but because she came to a startling finding concerning knowledge and representation through her experiments with landscape. As I propose, a detailed study of her work of these years reveals a developing series of experiments with the landscape homology over the course of which Stein explores differing spatial models and their implications for time sense and ultimately recasts her notion of knowledge on a spatial model. These compositional experiments with the landscape homology reprise philosophical concerns long important to her and enact a radical epistemology, a mode of understanding the interrelatedness of meaning, experience, and language practice. Stein was well aware of the stakes and implications of this compositional experiment. We find a self-reflexive analysis of explanation in “An Elucidation” (1923), a hilarious and curiously elusive text interspersed in the sequence of her landscape writing and informed by her new approach to knowledge and meaning. Understanding what constitutes explanation for Stein can be helpful for readers who protest that her texts “don’t make sense” and for critics who want a method of proceeding. As I contend, the texts are actively making sense once we understand her unique epistemology, and, taking Stein at her word, we may treat “composition as explanation” as the basis of a new critical approach, one that allows us to identify the stakes of a compositional experiment without imposing rationalist principles. 4
Perhaps the failure to recognize this new epistemology and its implications for Stein’s compositional tasks during these years helps account for what I would characterize as the persistent timidity of critical practice in the face of Stein’s radical modernism. The difficulties her work presents to criticism are well acknowledged; more than one study begins by outlining its critical approach and proposes “how to read Stein.” Of course, I am not the only Stein critic to suggest that we become self-aware of the constitutive effects of our interpretive stance and strategies. In her essay, “‘A Fine New Kind of Realism’: Six Styles in Search of a Reader,” Marjorie Perloff was among the first to suggest that readers might need to adapt their reading strategies to Stein’s writing methods. 5 And, in a brilliant reading of Stein’s method in “Lifting Belly,” Peter Quartermain claims that “the poem assaults the standard interpretive notion of meaning as an ‘essence’ that must be extracted just as it assaults the standard interpretive practice of peeling away ‘layers’ of signification through abstracting and then explicating ‘key’ words and phrases which will ‘unlock’ the text.” 6 The obstacles to interpretation are considerable, not only because individual texts can seem hermetic but also because Stein’s work changes radically over time as she addresses different compositional tasks and therefore successive texts can challenge our understanding of what it means to understand in new ways.
Stein appears to have left a minefield for critics: How are we to proceed without offering explanations of texts that she maintained required no explanation, and without practicing rationalist processes of explanation such as selection and substitution that her work so obviously subverts? How are we to interpret Stein’s experiment in portraiture, for example, without reinstating the conventions of representation her verbal portraits contest and without resorting to the rationalism underlying such representation? Anyone seriously reading Stein discovers that her innovations preempt both critical practice and the very grounds for the practice. However non-representational or non-mimetic her work is considered, however radical a modernist she is acknowledged to be, criticism of Stein most often proceeds as if it were possible to state conclusions concerning her work in the conventions of literary criticism, that is, as the product of analysis, as the result of interpretation based on rationalist premises.
By contrast, “Composition As Explanation,” the title of the lecture that Stein gave at Oxford and at Cambridge University following on this period of writing in 1926, renders composition and explanation equivalent terms and suggests that composition will serve as explanation. As Ulla Dydo among others has observed, this suggests that “Writing is its own elucidation” and we do not need to add explanation to Stein’s texts. 7 As I contend, we need instead to find the explanation at work in the compositional method. This is more easily said than done. Faced with the difficulty of Stein’s writing which can at times seem hermetic, one understands the impulse on the part of critics to gain some sort of extra-textual leverage, a key, or context, or as Dydo writes, “clues to its making.” 8 In her critical study, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923-1934, Dydo adopts a compositional stance, and yet, drawing on extensive research in the manuscripts, including the tiny carnets that Stein did not want preserved, she consistently interprets Stein’s texts in reference to biographical material. 9 Despite acknowledging Stein’s resistance to reference (“As she said over and over, she wrote literature, not references”), 10 Dydo claims that referential details will disclose Stein’s writing method: “Reading the referential details makes it possible to follow, in a raw state, what was happening to Stein, what she did and what she thought.” 11 The source material will reveal the writing process or “where composition came from and how she made it.” 12 In my view, the details of daily life do not disclose “what she thought” so readily, nor does reference unlock Stein’s compositional method. As Stein herself cautioned in The Making Of Americans, “It is never facts that tell, they are the same when they mean very different things.” 13
Introducing the personal references that Stein took pains to remove cannot help but impose conventional operations of reference and representation, and thereby block readers’ ability to track what happens to elements in composition. Notes in the manuscripts that Dydo regards as “clues to its making” will not disclose the compositional method if this is procedural and involves other elements that comprise the compositional totality. To analyze what becomes of an element as it enters into composition requires that we set aside expectations of conventional reference and instead study how the element accrues and changes meaning in composition. However, in her study, Dydo tends not to read across individual texts to discover how words or phrases enter into one or more series that form the composition. She instead reads words locally, determining meaning in short passages through extra-textual reference to biographical context, without also tracing the recurrence of elements and their variation in the composition overall.
And so the challenge for critics remains. Once we understand Stein’s critique of conventional explanation and her alternative, a model of compositional equivalence, her work undermines...