The Politics of Subversion: The Postmodern Avant-Garde and Gender Trouble in Selected Plays of Gertrude Stein

INTRODUCTION
Theorizing the Postmodern Avant-garde Drama:
Stein as a Postmodern Avant-gardist.
The debate over postmodernism in the literary context was
inaugurated in 1959 by Irving Howe. However, this debate did not accord
the domain of the theatre the same attention that prose and poetry have
abundantly enjoyed. Moreover, when theatre finds its place in the core of
this debate, performance rather than the literary text becomes the only
focus of the debate. Yet, June Schlueter, in his essay "Theatre" that
appeared in The Postmodern Moment (1985), launches the discussion of
the postmodern tendency in drama without mapping out any theoretical
formulations of postmodern drama. Given that there is little agreement
over what constitutes postmodernism in general, it becomes even more
difficult to claim stable criteria for postmodern theatre or to distinguish it
from its antecedents and the avant-garde in particular.
Upon a careful examination, one finds that not only does the avant-
garde drama constitute a fertile ground for postmodernist tendencies, but
that postmodernism has registered strong echoes in the work of, arguably,
the most innovative avant-garde voice of the early twentieth century,
namely, Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946). Stein is commended by Peter
Sellars as "a wonderful sort of return to Shakespeare in our century" (247);
and by Arnold Aronson as the one "who devoted much of her writing to
finding an alternative foundation for twentieth-century theatre and
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literature, a structure that would accommodate twentieth-century
sensibilities" (26).
Gertrude Stein: The Famous Unknown Dramatist
Stein is perhaps the greatest unread American dramatist. For the first
half of the twentieth century, her drama went largely unperformed and was
for the most part unknown. Furthermore, Stein herself was rarely
considered a playwright during her life and has rarely been treated as one
since her death. Stein's prolific career as a playwright has been unjustly
overshadowed by that of Eugene O'Neill. However, her importance resides
in drama rather than in prose or poetry. According to Marc Robinson,
"once Stein is acknowledged as a major figure in American drama's
adolescence and is set alongside O'Neill in importance, an entire world of
drama comes into clearer focus" (3).
Stein wrote almost seventy-seven plays, many of which were
published and performed during her lifetime. When compared with
conventional drama, Stein's plays may appear so strange and so hardly
seem like plays at all. Conventional plays allow us to look through the
narrative and the dramatic world created by it; Stein's plays force the
reader to concentrate on the drama inherent in language and language-
making. Furthermore, Stein's plays embody her critique of the
conventional forms of drama. Like Robinson's, this study "attempts to tell
the story of American drama in a new way, with the acute sensitivity to
form that Stein encouraged" (3).
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The thorough reading of studies written on Gertrude Stein's literary
oeuvre will lay bare the fact that her drama has long been overlooked by
critics. Long valued for her prose, she as dramatist has yet to find a place
in critical estimation. Moreover, Stein's recent critics overlook her intense
interest in genre, and therefore they do not consider the ways in which her
texts oppose, subvert, and disrupt generic conventions. It is the
researcher's contention, here, that Gertrude Stein's texts deserve
consideration on their own terms, as drama. These texts have an interior
logic in which Stein continually works out her postmodern avant-garde
vision of literature.
The development of Stein's dramatic vision can only be fully
understood in the scope of three cultural and artistic trends of the
twentieth century: the avant-garde, postmodernism, and queer theory. At
the intersection of these major artistic and cultural trends, Stein built a
disorienting language labyrinth where almost all the conventional literary
conceptions and approaches are subverted and deconstructed. She is not
only attentive to her own texts as dramatic ones, but also introduces
historical context into skepticism and problematizes the entire question of
historical knowledge. This fundamental negation of truth and
representation in drama through the game of language becomes a
revolutionary strategy for many contemporary American writers who come
under the spell of Stein's postmodern avant-garde play writing. Hence,
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Stein's dramatic oeuvre is both a precursor of American postmodern avant-
garde drama and a landmark in American dramatic history.
The Landscape of Postmodern Avant-Garde Drama
This study introduces the concept of "postmodern avant-garde"
drama, a term that the researcher has coined to characterize the diverse
aspects of postmodernism expressed in Gertrude Stein's avant-garde
drama. Thus, the study will investigate various postmodernist anti-
paradigmatic discourses in Stein's avant-garde works through the study of
how narrative functions in these works. The focus will be primarily on
Stein's avant-garde drama, which involves many postmodern issues, such
as skepticism, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, fragmentation,
discontinuity, the language game, unrepresentationality, and intellectual
unseriousness.
Definitions remain, in studies of the avant-garde, a central problem.
Renato Poggioli and Peter Burger's seminal studies share the generic
name, Theory of the Avant-garde (1968, 1984). Each of these studies seeks
to establish theoretically a shared element – whether formal or ideological
– to connect avant-garde movements that would otherwise be connected
fairly loosely, on the basis of time period and their own claim to be avant-
garde. Peter Burger states
Partly significant differences between [avant-garde
movements] notwithstanding, a common feature of all these
movements is that they do not reject individual artistic
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techniques and procedures of earlier art but reject that art in
its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition.
In their most extreme manifestations, their primary target is
art as an institution such as it has developed in bourgeois
society. (109)
In defining the "avant-garde", one observes two interrelated problems.
First, the need for a critical apparatus for working through the highly
rhetorical claims made in the self-definitional proclamations of the avant-
garde movements; and, second, the need to establish, in terms more
substantive than those set forth in avant-garde self-definitions, the
characteristics that distinguish the avant-garde from modernism.
Modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism have come to be
slippery in the literary criticism of the last decades. Thomas Travisano, in
his Midcentury Quartet (1999) and Umberto Echo's postscript to his novel
The Name of the Rose (1984) offer ahistorical definitions to these major
literary movements. Travisano states that placing the avant-garde artists
seriously into the "modernist" period would, radically, change our view of
the period and challenge our earlier critical notions that modernists were
characterized by a nostalgia for traditional order in a fallen world or that
modernism was committed to what Travisano calls an "impersonal
poetics"(164). In other words, the artist, in the modernist literature, moves
inward, creating a conventionalized reality based on an understanding of
an inner world of emotion and subconscious workings of the mind.
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Therefore, Samuel Beckett is to be taken as the epitome of modernism
with his "impersonal poetics" to create a world even though it may be
initially less recognizable to the average reader/spectator than that of Ibsen
or even Strindberg. It is such an "impersonal poetics" that leads artists to
create either an abstraction or distillation of the concrete world.
In the same vein, Umberto Eco's discussion of these terms offers an
extremely useful perspective. According to Eco, "postmodernism" is not a
trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or
better still, "a kunstwollen, a way of operating". Furthermore, according to
Eco, what we call "modernism" can appear at any historical moment; at
any time the "past conditions us, harries us, blackmails us" (The Name 66),
leading to the desire to negate, destroy, or deface the past. Beyond the
modernist urge, he argues, "the avant-garde goes further, destroys the
figure, cancels it, arrives at the charred canvas". Postmodernism is a
reaction to the modernist aesthetic strategy. It, Eco argues, "demands, in
order to be understood not the negation of the already said" but "the ironic
rethinking" of the past or of the "already said"(ibid 68). This perspective
allows one to see the intersection of the "postmodern" with the "avant-
garde": the avant-garde can appear at the very same time as "postmodern"
and such impulses can even appear in the very same writer. In this respect,
Ellen Berry states that postmodernism may be considered "a broadly based
cultural dynamic that has emerged – gradually and unevenly – over the
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last one hundred years from within complex processes of modernization"
(2).
Under the cultural impact of the European thought, the American
avant-garde writers radically deconstructed the time-honored value
system, the integrated social/ideological order, and the habitualized
literary conventions. In this respect, Arnold Aronson, in his American
Avant-garde Theatre (2000), states that ''the fundamental building blocks
of a radical European avant-garde became mere stylistic conceits in the
hands of most American playwrights"(3). Viewed from this perspective,
American literary avant-garde is by and large associated with the traits of
postmodernism, as these two literary movements are best synthesized in
the common notion of a ''counterculture'' that can be embodied by the
''crisis of representationality''. Matei Calinescu, in Five Faces of
Modernity (1987), argues that the avant-garde is a variant of
postmodernism and that these two terms can be defined and understood as
similar in many of their facets (143).
Much of postmodernism is intimately relevant to themes that the
avant-garde writers endorsed: radical experimentation in form; violation of
and a rebellion against the accepted rules of mainstream cultural and
literary discourse; challenging subjectivity; violation of both gender and
genre boundaries – where "traditional barriers between theatre, dance,
music, and art began to crumble" (Aronson 3); deconstruction of history;
intellectual playfulness; and subversion through irony.
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The term "postmodern avant-garde", then, involves an integrated
intersection between postmodernism and avant-gardism. It represents what
Paolo Portoghesi terms as "a polycentric network of experiences, all
deserving to be heard"(26). The contention of this study is that no polarity
can exist between postmodernism and the avant-garde. On the contrary,
the postmodern may be regarded as a "superstructure" supported by the
avant-garde pillars, especially Dada and Surrealism, where conflicting
elements come to interact freely. It must be recalled that the ideological
foundation of the avant-garde itself is "heterogeneous", and as a
movement it draws on various systems and combines its borrowings to
make up its own doctrine. (Szablocsi 58)
The postmodern avant-garde writers launch their subversive attacks
against the value system and the cultural order that is based upon
polarities and binary relationships. Guided by a kind of "personal poetics",
they seek to find a divergent discourse for literature, a radical stance for
values, and an innovative means for representation, a quest that was taken
to extremes neither found in nor afforded by the preceding literary
movements centered on humanism and cultural identity. By so doing, the
postmodern avant-garde attempts to create a structure and experience that
is, to use Michael Kirby's definition of Happenings, neither logical nor
illogical but rather "alogical"(19-21). The postmodern avant-garde does
not create a world at all, at least in any common understanding of the
term. Thomas Travisano aligns what he terms as the avant-garde "complex