Resonating Bodies and the Poetics of Aurality; Or, Gertrude Stein's Theatre

Abstract

This essay considers theories of performance, modernism, and theatricality, as well as Gertrude Stein's critical writing, creative work, and correspondence on the topics of portraits, drama, staging, and theatre. By focusing on aurality and assuming Stein's plays anticipate the physical and temporal registers of theatre, we might understand the shift from her portraits to her plays as an exploration of how knowledge evolves from sensory perception to establish a relationship between producers and receivers of sounds. Her plays deploy voice as a means to accomplish what her portraits could not: the performance of embodiment. Performance becomes a mode of encounter, an aesthetic experience that involves perceptual engagement and transaction. Even as actors' bodies may stand in for voices, appearing to “embody” the voices conventionally, we gain access to entities only through the word-sounds they utter as a mosaic of fragments that elide referential signification. The implication of this mode, in terms of how we understand and conceive of embodiment, suggests that embodiment is a sensory experience defined by both absence and presence.