Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol by Frank Adam;

Author:Frank, Adam; [Adam Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SUBJECT
ISBN: 3239939
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2014-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

4. Loose Coordinations: Theater and Thinking in Gertrude Stein

This chapter begins with a scene of mixed audience response, not entirely unlike the response that greeted Henry James at the opening night of his play Guy Domville. The performance was Gertrude Stein’s delivery of the lecture “Plays” to a specially invited New York audience of fifty at an apartment on the Upper East Side on October 30, 1934. Having just stepped off the boat from Paris the week before, Stein had not yet adjusted to her new celebrity following the best-selling success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published the year before. Seeking practice before her first official lecture (to be given two days later to a much larger audience of five hundred), she found help in a young artist named Prentiss Taylor, who arranged a dress rehearsal. According to Taylor, Stein’s performance was well received but not a spectacular success. He wrote in a letter to his mother, “She read the lecture & it was not always easy to follow. Some of it was in her nearly vague style & always she uses simple words with fresh emphases that are difficult to catch as they go quickly by.”1 Interestingly the difficulty that Taylor described echoes fairly precisely the main concern of “Plays” as Stein gave it to her audience early in the lecture: “The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say that it is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience.”2 Taylor’s lagged responses to Stein’s words going “quickly by” and his difficulty comprehending her were very much a part of the theatrical experience that she was investigating; it “is what makes one endlessly troubled about a play, because not only is there a thing to know as to why this is so but also there is a thing to know why perhaps it does not need to be so” (94). Stein’s lecture offers a close analysis of this experience, followed by her own solution to the problem: to write a play as a landscape with which anyone can keep time.

While “Plays” was the first, it was also the least often delivered of the six lectures Stein had prepared that summer in France before going on her American tour, likely because its questions were her most pressing, present, and confusing ones. As she emerged (along with Toklas) onto the stage of modern, mass American culture, Stein wondered what it would be like, at the age of sixty, to come into contact with very large audiences for the first time.3 She represented these worries to herself very clearly in a short piece written in September just before leaving France, “Meditations on Being about to Visit My Native Land,” in which she anticipated the behavior of her lecture audiences: “Will they ask me questions and will I ask them questions and which will ask the questions most and first, and will they listen to me and will I listen to them.

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