The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration

Abstract

A radical understanding of modernist medium-specificity would seem to account for Stein’s early abandonment of traditional generic distinctions—or their playful straddling—and the renaming of her medium as writing. The one boundary that then remains to be considered is that between writing and talking. Written out to be spoken to an audience, the four lectures that constitute Narration (1935) take up where the Lectures in America left off and intend to think out narrative in relation to knowledge and the possible merging of prose and poetry. Where the early modernist manifestos vied for attention with a bold typography embodying an often outrageous rhetoric, Stein uses other strategies to engage attention. Her rhetoric of emphasis and persistent approximation give rise to a heightened litany, a sustained oral prosody and bring out the pedagogical dimension of her insistence. Both are effects of her commitment to the process of thinking. Although somewhat inconclusive, the Narration lectures constitute one of the rare modernist attempts (with Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous “The Storyteller”) to rethink—rather than downplay it against collage or abstraction—narration in a discursive direction, thus paving the way for post-war modernism’s embrace of orality as exemplified in John Cage’s Lectures and David Antin’s talk poems.