“Liberation and the Historical Present:
Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour”
In special half-issue on “Feeling in Time:
Radio Free Stein,” ed. Adam Frank
Textual Practice 36, no. 12 (December 2022)
To mark the end of 2022, and all its openings and reversals, the last thing I would do is indulge any form of triumphalism. The times do not permit it—the bare facts of pandemic and war, ideological gridlock and narrow avenues for hope are what we live. But the experience of this historical present recalls earlier moments; thus, during the longue durée of COVID sequestration, I took on a project of writing and researching Gertrude Stein at Zero Hour, her experience of exile under Occupation, in the larger context of theorizing the “end” of the war that was . . . not a new beginning but the punctual inception of the global order to come. This is a project that has compelled me over the past fifteen years, and will ultimately emerge as a book, one hopes.
The essay was originally framed for presentation at a meeting of EAM (European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), set for Leuven, Belgium, in September 2020. That meeting was canceled, so I organized, with Lauri Scheyer, a webinar colloquy in April 2021 with the title “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour.” The line-up of topics and presenters was exceptional, and many of the works found their way into print. Some time earlier, Adam Frank had been in contact about his Radio Free Stein project. In framing Stein at Zero Hour, I thought to take up her neglected play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, one of many significant post–1945 works produced in the immediate aftermath of the war. Stein was no Beckett, however; while she may have influenced Waiting for Godot, she did not have her finger on the pulse of the absurd. What she produced more of an historical afterthought, a retrospection or even a covering up of her earlier politics of “unreality” as tested by the experience of isolation and dread, and not a theatrical success. Coming to terms with Stein after 1945 turned out to be a major research project as well as detailed textual reading of Wars I Have Seen, the writing project by which she survived the war and “became historical,” on her own account. The larger argument is summarized in the abstract; for a limited time free downloads are available from the publisher (for both see below).
Celebrating the New Year, I will say I learned a lot in the process. The connections are many, especially to the project of “theoretical autobiography” I have just written about in relation to The Grand Piano and our online readings of it. One is the notion of “beginnings, middles, and ends” that Stein discussed in her writings on The Making of Americans, which too can be seen as a “theoretical autobiography” in that it attempts to write its way through a history of “everyone who ever was or will be living” as a project of subject formation—i.e., the making of Gertrude Stein. The liberation of Gertrude Stein turned out also to be a theoretical autobiography, which produced the affirmative, American, global Stein out of the isolation, doubt, and vague complicity of Stein under Occupation. As I found, Stein again deployed “beginnings, middles, and ends” in her work—the first mapping war onto stages of childhood development in their “unreality”; the second in weighing the partial realities of living under Occupation; and the third in the bright light of Liberation as “end,” propelling Stein on to destiny and fame. In our own project, too, beginnings, middles, and ends are engaged, but they could be anywhere—beginnings at the end, and ends sighted at the beginning. Throughout, the “middle” is what we live as mediated, engaged subjects.
And again the New Year.
Abstract
This essay takes up Gertrude Stein’s war writing, her autobiographical Wars I Have Seen and later play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, in several registers. The first is Stein’s record of her experience of the war itself toward the moment of liberation of her village by American troops on 1 September 1944. For Stein, this was the “Zero Hour” of liberation and new beginning—but also the end of unfreedom and compromise with the dark history of the Vichy Regime. In her third experimental autobiography, Stein reverses the form of the “continuous present” of The Making of Americans while including a wide range of historical references and personal reflections. The resulting construction of a “historical present,” while written on a historical timeline, plays with conventional beginnings, middles, and ends. Stein’s first reflections on war associate it with developmental stages of childhood, creating a ludic and a-rational account of war that allows her to distance herself from her earlier support of Marshall Pétain. The “middles” of her narrative describe the structural framework of surviving the war and the limited means for comprehending it as a present “unreality.” With the coming of Americans, its “end,” unreality becomes real and Stein’s narrative steps into the light of freedom associated with American democracy—and a new moment of media celebrity. In this historical limelight, she writes her only “realist” play, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, based on the contradictions of living within the Occupation, a vacillation between Collaboration and Resistance projected onto her characters. Stein thus fashions an historical allegory to explain to audiences at home the complexities of Occupation from her post-Zero Hour moment of triumphant Americanism.
Links and notes
The publisher of Textual Practice has offered 50 free downloads of the article, on a first come first served basis, available here: http://bit.ly/3CcnR8q.
Image: Gertrude Stein and the mayor of Culoz, September 1945, from ‘The Liberation of Gertrude Stein,” Life (2 October 1944).
