Juliana Spahr
talk for Barndard conference on Stein & Performance

In this world there might be two sorts of Stein readers: those who can hear music in the repetition and the atypical syntax and those who just hear mud.

I seem to have the dyslexia that lets me hear Stein more clearly than poets known for their following of conventions of clarity. Frequently when I go to job interviews, someone says, in voice most likely filled with concern or at times disdain or both, why are you interested in all this avant garde stuff? At moments, I want to answer with a suave simplicity that resembles what Stein herself said when asked how she felt about modern art: "I like to look at it" (Lectures 59). But I think if I really wanted to answer this question I would have to tell this story that begins like this, the town I grew up in was ugly and dirty because its only industry was a papermill with several smoke stacks and my mother owned a few books because she taught English. But because the town was dirty, whenever I read poems about the beauty of the English countryside or New England woods, which was all I knew about because the only poems we read in school were a few by Wordsworth and Robert Frost, they made little sense to me. So then I went and found this stuff by Stein in this anthology that my mother had from when she took an American lit survey course at the local community college, and because I was looking for something that didn't seem to be telling some sort of weird optimistic story about nature, and because this stuff by Stein was so weird it didn't seem to be trying to cover over the smoke stacks, so I clung to it.

This is how I came to Stein outside of the classroom. I didn't have much of a chance to study her in the classroom until I went to graduate school (although I did write an undergraduate thesis on her work; but again this was my decision and because I had not read Stein in my literature classes). I think the graduate school part of my story is one that is very different. In graduate school, Stein turns into a woman who matters because she is radical, radical in a way men can be radical. But what I want to talk here about teaching Stein as a write who does not require special credentials to read her. I want to talk about teaching her not for reasons of coverage or convention, but because she brings a different and unique series of concerns to classroom, concerns about how writing engages with the world.

For years, I taught Stein as the writer who wanted us to read differently. I think this was becaues I was teaching her work in introductory literature and composition classes. I had for years amazing experiences teaching Tender Buttons to students in introductory level composition courses. The students' first response was often laughter, I also found that, when encouraged and after the laughter died down, they could produce fascinating readings of the work grounded in their own experience. Many are, like Stein, immigrants. Immigrants or not, many of them hear or speak another language at home. And they can easily take advantage of Stein's mandate in Tender Buttons to "re letter and read her" and bring their own concerns to the work (59).

Yet at a certain point, I realized that I was not conveying to students how to hear Stein, or how to hear differently, or even how to enjoy reading Stein. I was taking their intial laughter and letting it die down.

So I started thinking about my own reading of Stein. When I read Stein, I hear a certain music. And because I hear a certain music, I feel certain sensations, the sensations of interested calmness which happens when my mind and my breath are working together, when hearing Stein's work. There is something about the artfully vague repetition in her work that pleases me immensely. This artfully vague repetition caused sensations of pleasure. Certain thoughts form in the head. While hearing Stein, one can pay attention to certain emerging symbols of one's own choosing. Like the kaleidoscope's patterns or a flower opening, blooming into something full and rich with smell or the shifting patterns of traffic on a busy highway that is just similar enough to put one into enough of a trance that one doesn't remember the drive when one arrives but the patterns are dissimilar enough that one remains alert and interested in the shifting so as to drive with skill. When hearing her work, one can relax into it and let various learnings take over. One can listen to the sound of a voice, a voice that might be her voice or might be our voice coming through her words, in one's head and can form new patterns of thinking. Tuning into the rhythm of her work allows one to explore the possibilities within it.

So I was hearing Stein, yet when I was teaching Tender Buttons, I was teaching something about varities of intepretation and its limitations. I was teaching about literary criticism basically. So I began to think some about how to convey this pleasure of reading Stein to students. I wanted more fans in the classroom. I wanted to convince. The question I was wondering about was: if I hear music, what sort of music was it?

Instead of concentrating on reading Stein in the classroom, I began to think about conveying these sensations of hearing Stein. Thus I turned to performance. My turn to performance to teach Stein was reluctant. I remember sitting in a meeting at Bard one day with Joan Retallack, Lee Ann Brown, and Thalia Field-all great believers in the pedagogical possibilities of performance-and telling them how performance in the classroom made me nervous because as a shy student I had found it so painful. I worried about coercion; about students feeling forced to do things in the name of performance that made them uncomfortable but felt forced to do it because everyone else was. I worried that I encouraged students to be dramatic, not to think. [Undeniably a false dichotomy, but on my mind nevertheless.] Thalia, always blunt, said to me, I can tell you haven't read Brecht. Well, I had read Brecht. But she had a point. I wasn't thinking about performance from the right direction. I was thinking of performance as a euphamism for slam or spoken word, or when I wanted to think the worst thing possible, of those dramatic readings done by contestants who couldn't tap dance at the Miss South Central Ohio contest that I watched when I was younger. What I learned from the discussion that followed was that performance could be a way of reading in itself. One could encourage students to read dramatically, read in a monotone, read in the "intended" voice of the author, read backwards, read only the nouns, only the verbs, etc., exaggerate the rhythm, read in a funny yet nonoffensive accent, and perhaps sing to gospel tune. I also around this time picked up a book of Richard Foreman's plays. His work, so intense on the stage, read so much like the works by Stein that I was finding difficult. This also convinced me that performance might be a way into reading her work.

So I started having students perform Stein's work. Usually I just gave them a work that appeared to make very little sense on a silent read. (I didn't want students just miming out the work-say crying when the work says something sad-so I made it a point to stay away from Stein's more easy to understand works.) And then told them to perform it in some way that illuminates. Sometimes I gave them restrictions-everyone must speak all together at some point or you must use all the corners of the room or you should think about when someone should be standing and when someone should be sitting. Most of these were more or less arbitrarily chosen by me and just an attempt to get them to add movement or something. And what I realized was that there are a whole series of works by Stein, works that I had trouble understanding, that made perfect sense when performed. These are not just the plays. I also found that this method helped me understand a lot of the work in Geography and Plays, a collection of pieces written between 1908 and 1920 and the first collection that Stein selected for publication. Geography and Plays has works like "The King or Something (The Public is Invited to Dance)" and "Turkey and Bones and Eating." "The King or Something (The Public is Invited to Dance)" begins like this:

Letting me see.
Come together when you can.
Have it higher. You mean that lake.
What was that funny thing you said.
I am learning to say a break.
I am learning to say a clutch.
I am learning to say it in french. (122)

And "Turkey and Bones and Eating" presents this dialogue:

The french language.
Who is it.
What was I saying.
You were saying that you were able to be at home.
Yes I am able to be at home.
Then this is what troubles you.
No it does not trouble me. It makes me realize that I do not wish to leave.
Of course you do not wish to leave.
Yes that was understood.
Did you say that you listened.
Were you speaking what did you wish.
I wish not to be disturbed.
Oh yes we will leave in the spring.
I am not satisfied with what is right. (250-251)

Students would repeatedly come back with little scripts of people talking with each other. They tended to see Stein's work as representing crowded social spaces when forced to picture where this language might happen. Often times they would set the work in spaces like in an art gallary or on the bus or at a party. Within this space, students would present people who are confused about how to use language or who are mispeaking to each other. There would be a lot of slap stick. Or at other times a sort of wall of sound symphany space would be created. Everyone would speak their words at once in an attempt to portray the chaos they were hearing in Stein's work.

My original thought was that these students were just seeing their own lives in Stein's work. As I mentioned earlier, most of my students in Hawaii came late to English (many speak pidgin or an Asian language as their first language). But then when reading Stein's essay "Plays" in Lectures in America, I came upon this passage where Stein talks about how Bernhardt comes to San Francisco. She writes, "I knew a little french of course but really it did not matter, it was all so foreign and her voice being so varied and it all being so french I could rest in it untroubled." She goes on about poetical plays, "you did not have to know them they were so foreign, and the foreign scenery and actuality replaced the poetry and the voices replaced the portraits. It was for me a very simple and direct and moving pleasure" (115 and 116).

This made me think some about Stein and the "foreign." The word foreign, as you may remember, was banned by CNN some years ago. This set the conservatives on a rampage. But I've always wondered if it was more a statement of CNN's sort of American imperialism rather than rampant political correctness (in the sense that nothing is foreign to America). Yet Stein was fascinated by the foreign (as many modernists were). Yet her interest is less in collecting foreign cultures and putting them in her work and more on what it might mean to be foreign, what it means to be encountering something that is foreign. Then I wondered if the reason that these works appear were appearing to be foreign to me, or hard to understand, is that I am so rarely a foreigner in my daily life.

Stein's work frequently represents anxiety about specific language fluency that might be a result of Stein's self-imposed exile in France and the linguistic cosmopolitanism she would have found there. This is why I think my students find a reflection and validation of their sense that English is unusually structured, almost as if her works had been written for the cross-lingual skills of second language speakers. Stein's work of this sort encourages readers new to English to overcome their fear that poetry is too allusive, too dense with doubled meaning for their level of language and cultural knowledge. Stein's work serves as empathic relation for second language speakers.

But it would be a mistake to read these works as merely anxious or about language anxiety. What is crucial about them is not that they endlessly register their author's anxiety, but rather that they turn the language tendencies of second language speakers into a respectful art. Stein approaches the anxiety that accompanies any venture into different language systems from a different angle than many writers of ethnically marked literature. The literature of immigrant experience has tended to either smooth over fluency anxieties and deny the signs of its existence (much immigrant literature is published in grammatically standard English) or, in more populist forms, to lampoon it with exaggeration. Instead of exaggerating the "mistakes" of second language speakers, Stein composes her works around such nonstandard grammatical variations. Stein's works enact linguistic interaction, polylingualism, and bastardization. In this context, it makes sense to read Stein's work as documenting the decline of English as a language that represents the nation of England. Her work is one among many that begin to take advantage of the rise of many different Englishes as economic imperialism and mass immigration play havoc with any idea of a linguistic standard.