—Jacques Derrida "The Law of Genre"[1]

Derrida's essay "The Law of Genre" establishes a revolutionary change in the conception of structuralist approaches to literature. His argument—that genres essentially do not exist as stable formalist structures and that to name a genre is to immediately call into question that genre—challenges all notions of what is considered a genre, what is placed within a genre, and how genre formations are created. As Derrida's "law of the law of genre" states:

It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it as least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being a part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless. (55)

Notions of "contamination" and the blurring of genre boundaries are not new. And while Derridian theory seems to be a more postmodern concept of viewing literature, the literary technique of writing within several (or without) genre limits occurs well before the postmodern condition.

The postmodern era of literature, historically ascribed to the post 1960's era, does not seem so easily situated. Instead, postmodernism may be considered "a broadly based cultural dynamic that has emerged—gradually and unevenly—over the last one hundred years from within complex processes of modernization" (Berry 2). Thus, it is possible for works from the modernist period to be postmodern. Perhaps one of the greatest example of postmodern literature during the modernist era is the work of Gertrude Stein. Moving even beyond the avant-garde projects of modernism, Stein's artistry illustrates several literary techniques commonly assigned to postmodern literature.

The postmodernity of Stein's literature pervades nearly all of her work. Her fascination with language, her erasing of genre boundaries, and metafictive nature of her writing can be found easily in her poetry, prose, and lectures. Yet another of Stein's many forms of writing is drama. Over the course of her literary career, Stein wrote over 60 plays, including scenes, sketches, and operas. Throughout all of her drama Stein continually experiments with style and genre, constantly producing plays that are unlike any other. Several elements of Stein's writing could be considered "postmodern;" however her use of language and her disruption of genre—of what it is that "makes" a play or an opera—are the most obvious (and the most striking) postmodern elements in her plays and operas. Four of Stein's works—What Happened: A Play, Ladies' Voices, Four Saints in Three Acts, and The Mother of Us All, each from different periods in Stein's literary oeuvre ??—illustrate her continual manipulation and transformation of both language and genre.

What Happened: A Play is one of several plays included in Geography and Plays (1922).[2] The focus of What Happened, according to Stein, is to present just that—what happened at a given moment in time. Stein's purpose was "without telling what happened, to make a play the essence of what happened" (Lectures 208). In addition, other comments Stein makes about What Happened reflect a rather postmodern view of drama and what drama should "do":

I think and always have thought that if you write a play you ought to announce that it is a play and that is what I did. What Happened. A Play. . . . I realized then as anybody can know that something is always happening. Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives . . . everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story. What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many. . . . So naturally what I wanted to do in my play was what everybody did not always know or always tell. (207)

The notion that all of the stories have been already told, that there is nothing "new" left to write, is a particularly postmodern condition.[3] Stein's solution to this problem is to attempt to create, within the construct of a "play," something different from what had been produced before. Her focus, to make a play where the play is the play also reflects the postmodern notion of self-reflexivity. The play (like the poem or the novel or the short story) is about being a play. With What Happened Stein begins a literature that continues throughout her playwriting career—the metadrama.[4]

As a postmodern text, What Happened does several things. First, it denies itself the classification as a play in the conventional sense. There are no characters, except, possibly, the references in parentheses to (One.), (The same three.), or (Four and four more.) which seemingly signal the number of actors to speak the lines. And, of course, nothing truly happens in the play. While Stein does separate the (non)action into five acts, there is no clear progression, plot, or resolution—all elements conventional drama must contain in order to be considered drama. The language of the play, despite being delegated to the ambiguous (Five.) and (Three.) does not appear to be dramatic language. That is, the lines do not read as dialogue or speech. Instead, the text of the play reads like Stein's fiction. Specifically, the text of What Happens bears a striking resemblance to an earlier work of fiction, Tender Buttons (1914).[5] Tender Buttons presents Stein's descriptions/portraits/opinions of simple, common things (Objects, Food, and Rooms), and the text itself is a literary exercise in Cubism. Consider a passage from What Happened :

Length what is length when silence is so windowful. What is the use of a sore if there is no joint and no toady and no tag and not even an eraser. What is the commonest exchange between more laughing and most. Carelessness is carelessness and a cake well a cake is a powder, it is very likely to be powder, it is very likely to be much worse. (557)

When compared to, for example, A LONG DRESS from Tender Buttons the similarity is striking:

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current. What is the wind, what is it. Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it. (467)

The two passages (and perhaps entire texts) could be interchanged and one would hardly recognize the difference. What Happened becomes a cubist experiment in playwriting. As she does in Tender Buttons, Stein continues to experiment with cubism in literature—trying to describe the world around her in varying, complex, and indirect ways. Because Stein's language in What Happened is so similar to that of her other "fiction," the play itself does not hold to conventional genre boundaries. Stein blurs the line between what is considered drama and what is considered fiction. Despite Stein's separation of What Happened into acts and her rather ambiguous allusions to character, the text is "incoherent in the purest, least pejorative sense: None of its pieces hold together" (Robinson 13). Or rather, Stein perhaps has created a new sense of what a play should be. She has re-invented or transformed the traditional notions of a play into a genre without limits of form, content, or style. This restructuring or manipulation of forms continues throughout her drama.

Like What Happened, Ladies' Voices also first appeared in Geography and Plays and was written after What Happened. The two plays share several elements—primarily their lack of plot. Ladies' Voices has as its action no action; nothing truly happens in the play. Stein seems to be doing no more than recording parts of overheard conversations. Again, the play is divided into acts—in this case four acts, with the final act having a "Scene II."[6] Ladies' Voices is entirely character-less. While Stein gives a hint to character in What Happened , none of the lines/text in Ladies' Voices are delegated to a specific character. Instead, the lines of the play are written as though Stein has just heard them spoken aloud. For example, Act 2 opens with the following lines:

Honest to God Miss Williams I don't mean to say that I was older.

But you were.

Yes I was. I do not excuse myself. I feel that there is no reason for passing an archduke.

You like the word.

You know very well that they all call it their house. (555)

The beginning of the act does appear to have some sort of progression. Clearly there is an exchange between someone named Miss Williams and an unknown character. However, by the middle of the third line the conversation shifts—or perhaps it is a completely different conversation with completely different speakers. The last line does not at all correspond to the previous "conversations."

In addition, there are some lines in the play that do not seem to belong to any of the implied characters. The first and second lines of the play, "Ladies' voices give pleasure. / The acting two is easily lead" read more like authorial commentary on the text itself. The fourth line also reads less like dialogue and more like a stage direction— "Ladies voices together and then she came in" (555). Likewise, the first four lines at the beginning of the fourth act read as though Stein has interrupted the ladies' voices (or added her own voice to the other ladies' voices) to speak directly to the audience/reader:

What are ladies voices.

Do you mean to believe me.

Have you caught the sun.

Dear me have you caught the sun. (556)

Stein asks the question that is mostly likely in the minds of the audience—what is Ladies' Voices?

Although Ladies' Voices has neither plot nor dramatic sense of action, the play is about language itself. Traditionally, theatrical language must "coexist with other competing 'languages'—gesture, scenic, space, action" (Bowers Stein 109). However, Stein refuses to partake in this "coexistence." No language can compete with the language of Stein's drama, for it is all about language—language is all there is. It is the recording of the voices, the partial conversations represented that make the action. Stein is clearly more concerned with the ability of language to act on its own, to be its own force. It is in this sense that Ladies' Voices is a postmodern text—the play takes as its subject the very method of its creation. As Bowers finds, "the language of the play is the story; as it is spoken or read, the dialogue creates the world of the play and the state of affairs in that world, or, as Stein put it, the dialogue is 'what made what happened be what it was'" (111). Ladies' Voices is self-reflexive—it is language about language.

Stein's preoccupation with language, clearly the focus of What Happened and Ladies' Voices, two rather early plays in Stein's dramatic career, would continue to be the preeminent focus of her later plays and operas as well. In addition, Stein's plays continue to be more postmodern than modern, relying more on self-reflexivity, parody, and metadramatics. Later in her career, after nearly three years of not writing plays, Stein produced two important plays that were set to music and produced on stage. The first of these "operas" (for here too the genre does not hold) and her largest success in the theatre, is Four Saints in Three Acts,7 followed by her attempt at dramatizing history and historical figures, The Mother of Us All (1947). Both "operas" challenge notions of genre, and both also take—more than anything else—language as their primary focus. Viewed along with What Happened and Ladies' Voices , Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All illustrate a clear progression from Stein's early cubist writing to her later, perhaps at times more accessible, drama.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein tells of how Four Saints in Three Acts came to fruition. According to Stein

Virgil Thomson had asked Gertrude Stein to write an opera for him. Among the saints there were two saints whom she had always liked better than any others. Saint Theresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola, and she said she would write him an opera about these two saints. She began this and worked very hard at it all that spring and finally finished Four Saints and gave it to Virgil Thomson to put to music. He did. And it is a completely interesting opera both as to words and music. (215–16)

Contrary to Stein's account of how Four Saints was created, her collaborator, Virgil Thomson, claims that it was he who chose the subject matter. He states that "'Something from the lives of saints' was my proposal; that it should take place in Spain was hers" (Thomson 90). Regardless, Stein's comments on Four Saints, however embellished, are "typical" Stein—calling her own work "completely interesting" and her mention of how "very hard" she worked at writing. Not only would Stein say in Autobiography that she worked hard at writing Four Saints, but the entire play/opera/libretto itself is an extended exercise in how one goes about composing a play. More than her previous plays, Four Saints is the epitome of the self-reflexive text, both producing and commenting on its own production at the same time. Never once throughout the play does Stein release her audience from this constant commentary. Four Saints ultimately has little to do with the lives of saints or the saints themselves. Instead Four Saints becomes one of the greatest examples of "a play about a play."

The opening of Four Saints does not begin with Act 1. In fact, there is no definite "act" until well into the play. Rather than begin with the conventional first act, Stein opens her play with a "narrative to prepare for saints" (581). As the lines state, "A narrative of prepare for saints in narrative prepare for saints. / Remain to narrate to prepare two saints for saints" (581). What follows, for an extended period of time, is exactly how Stein goes about preparing to write about the play and the saints within it. However, even before Stein begins the actual "writing about writing" of the play, she interrupts with "What happened to-day, a narrative" (581). This line could be a reference to her earlier play What Happened: A Play, for just as in What Happened this section of Four Saints reads more like a section of prose, not like dramatic dialogue:

What happened to-day, a narrative.

We had intended if it were a pleasant day to go to the country it was a very beautiful day and we carried out our intention. We went to places that we had been when we were equally pleased and we found nearly what we could find . . . This is how they do not like it. (582)

The final line of the narrative section on "what happened" seems to signal Stein realizing that what she has written thus far is not drama, is not "how they like it."

At this point in the play, Stein moves from personal narrative to a discussion of what the set of the play should look like. She tries to "imagine four benches separately. / One in the sun. / Two in the sun. / Three in the sun. / One not in the sun. / Not one not in the sun. / Not one." (582). In addition to her debating over benches for the set, Stein also discusses the natural setting and whether it should have "sun and sun snow" and "no water no water." This section quickly shifts to how the saints will enter on stage. She states that she must "Begin three saints. / Begin four saints. / Two and two saints. / One and three saints. . . . Four saints two at a time have to have to have to have to . . . Two saints four at a time" (583). Her indecisiveness towards how the saints should enter only reinforces the opening section as metadrama. It is as if while including this commentary in the play, Stein is simultaneously creating and adjusting the play as she goes along. The "story" of the saints is created line by line—some revised, some left unfinished.

Finally, near the end of the opening section of Four Saints Stein introduces Saint Therese, supposedly one of the "subjects" of the play. Yet even as she is introduced Stein remains unclear as to what she does or even who she truly is:

Saint Therese something like that.

Saint Therese something like that.

Saint Therese would and would and would.

Saint Therese something like that.

Saint Therese.

Saint Therese half in doors and half out of doors. (585)

At this point the end of the opening section is quite near, and at this point Stein provides the answer to a question that comes much later in the play itself—"How many saints are there in it" (610). While the title (perhaps jokingly) says there are four, and while Stein takes as her subject only two, the list at the end of the first section names 21 saints, all who come back later in the play and speak their own lines. As the play goes on, it also becomes quite clear that there are more than three acts, just as there are more than four saints.

The actual first act of the play is still not quite an "act" for nothing happens. Stein continues with her indecision of setting and placement of characters. What next follows is a series of scene or act separations that rather serve as stage direction. For example, the first official "act" of the play begins with "Act One;" however the next scene or act is marked as "Repeat First Act." What is not clear is whether one is truly meant to repeat the first act or not, especially because, technically, one is still in the first act. The text of the play continues to debate Saint Therese's position on stage—seated or not seated. Then, Stein gives the direction to "Enact the end of an act." But this stage direction/scene separation comes nowhere near the (actual?) end of the first act. Instead Stein's indecision over the position of the characters on the stage reaches its climax:

Saint Therese seated and not standing half and half of it and not half a and half of it seated and not standing surrounded and not seated and not seated and not standing and not surrounded not surrounded not not not seated not seated not surrounded not seated and Saint Ignatius standing standing not seated Saint Therese not standing not standing and Saint Ignatius not standing standing surrounded as if in once yesterday. In place of situations. (588)

The final line, "in place of situations," is most telling. Rather than put her characters in situations, rather than give them action or purpose, Stein instead provides the writing process as the situation itself. And, in order to maintain the non-action of the play, the matter of the position of Saint Therese and Saint Ignatius is never decided. They "might" be surrounded or they "might" be settled. The use of the conditional denies a solidity of the action.

The movement of Four Saints is hardly conventional and at times so circular and confusing that exactly where the play does go is no longer an issue. Act One (or what can be considered Act One) consists of (perhaps) nine separate scenes. Although whether they are separate is unclear. At times it appears that some scenes could be actual re-writes of other scenes, and Stein has included them all to further illustrate the production/creation as action element of the play. Following is a detail of how the individual scenes come in the first act:

Act One—Repeat First Act—Enact End of An Act—Scene Two—Scene III— Scene III—Scene IV—Scene II—Scene IV—Act Two—Scene One—Act One— Scene VII.

Included in what seems to be Act One is a scene titled Act Two, for after the above Scene VII the "official" Act Two begins. What Stein means to do with the repetition of acts and the disorder of those acts is of course unclear. In one sense, it appears that Stein means to give several options to each scene. However, the text of the repeated scenes is clearly not revision, nor should it be substituted. In another sense, the repetition and lack of logic of the progression of the scenes is perhaps another overt attempt by Stein to disallow any action to her play. To have an organized order, to arrange the scenes in numerical succession implies that there is an order to the whole—it suggests a progression from one scene to the next moving towards a definite conclusion.

The play continues to challenge and to question its own place as "play" throughout the text. What also remains constant is Stein's constant commentary on the text as it is produced. Scene II of Act II states only "Would it do if there was a Scene II" (594). Act II also contains further evidence of Stein's manipulation of scenes, their order, and their importance. There is a "Scene III and IV" followed by two "Scene IV"'s, and there are eight scenes of "Scene V" which are "left to many saints" and the eight one containing no text at all. In Scene VI Stein for the first time appears to give character dialogue. Until this point the text has read more like narrative than dramatic language. But Scene VI sets up the conventional two-column form of actor followed by that actor's lines. In this example, Stein appears to give Saint Therese actual lines to speak/sing:

Saint Therese. Can any one feel any one moving and in moving can any one feel any one and in moving.

Saint Therese. To be belied.

Saint Therese. Having happily married

Saint Therese. Having happily beside. (596)

This form of character name followed by what appears to be that character's lines continues. In the next scene, Scene VII, Saint Therese is joined by other Saints who are also given lines to speak. It is in Scene VII that the question of how many saints are actually in the play first occurs. Saint Therese both asks and answers the question at once: "How many saints are there in it. / There are many saints in it. / There are as many saints as there are in it. / There are there are there are saints saints in it" (596–97). The question Stein gives through Saint Therese is doubtless the same question her audience most likely asks of the play itself. Stein's answer, also craftily given through Saint Therese, is comic and denies a true answer. Saint Cecilia will next ask the same question, and Saints Ingatius, Jan, Chavez and Plan will expand on the answer of "there are many." The specific answer to this question never comes (unless one remember the list given in the narrative at the beginning).

The question of how many saints there are begins a series of questions Stein asks of her own work. In Scene IX, Saint Therese begins by stating "To be asked how much of it is finished. . . . Ask Saint Therese how much of it is finished" (599). What follows is several of the characters repeating the question. Again, Stein provides no concrete answer to the question. What is interesting about this question is Saint Therese's line which, in effect, asks her to ask herself how much of the play is left. Saint Therese's line should be addressed to the author of the text, which here is again Saint Therese. A possible explanation for this could be Stein's own identification with Saint Therese. In Autobiography, Stein writes that "Saint Teresa was a heroine of Gertrude Stein's youth" (142). Also, as Stein would feel with Susan B. Anthony of The Mother of Us All, perhaps Stein felt a connection to Saint Therese.

In the first "Scene X" (of which there are three in Act II), Saint Therese again asks herself a question regarding the production of the play. This time, the puzzle of how many acts are in the play is discussed. Scene X seems to also have a subtitle of "Could Four Acts be Three." The short act reads as follows:

Saint Therese. Could Four Acts be three.

Saint Therese Saint Therese Saint Therese Could Four Acts be three Saint Therese. (600)

The following Scene X continues to ask the question, asking "Could Four Acts be when four acts could be ten Saint Therese. Saint Therese Saint Therese Four Acts could be four acts could be when four acts could be ten" (600). The answer to this question is multiple. On one hand four acts is three, for the play itself, while stating in its title that there are three acts, has within the text four acts. The notion of four acts being three once again calls into question dramatic form and unity. Stein's refusal to follow even her own self-imposed limit of three acts reinforces her struggle against convention. The text of the play is unreliable, for even the very title misleads readers both in number of acts and number of saints. Stein disallows on all levels of reading a traditional drama to exist.

The conclusion of Four Saints is perhaps the most conventional yet postmodern moment of the play. The last two lines state, "Last Act. / Which is a fact" (612). For the first time the play does what it says it does—it concludes where it signals it will conclude. Yet the self-reflexivity of the final two lines also makes it a more postmodern ending rather than a conventional ending to a drama. Traditional drama rarely signals its own ending—the action that has ensued throughout the play completes in the final act. Stein, however, explicitly calls attention to the end of the play, just as she continually calls attention to the process of writing the play itself throughout the text.

Four Saints in Three Acts is perhaps Stein's most postmodern and experimental work of drama. While What Happened and Ladies' Voices are also postmodern in their own way, they still do hold to some traditional modes of drama. Both earlier plays still maintain a logical progression of acts and scenes. But in Four Saints nothing holds true to conventional form. Scenes appear out of place, repeat, replace each other; characters have no true action, and the text as a whole lacks plot or progression. More than any of her other plays, Four Saints is completely about the production/writing/creating of a play while still trying to be "a play." The self-reflexivity here is beyond that of her other plays—it is inescapable from the moment the play begins to the very conclusion. The mixture of genre (narrative and drama) and the manipulation of language surely make Four Saints one of the earliest postmodern texts. However, despite Stein's near obsession with blurring genre boundaries and experimenting with forms and language, she also created several works considered to be "accessible." Her most accessible opera is one of her last works, The Mother of Us All.

In his discussion of The Mother of Us All, Robert Martin finds that the play acted for Stein as a "return to America, in spirit if not in flesh" and that the play serves as "an offering to her compatriots reaffirming her belief in a democratic America" (211). Not only is the play a "return to America" but it is also a return (although only partial return) to more conventional modes of playwriting. The Mother of Us All is, for the most part, quite understandable. There is an established cast of characters, and each character is given clearly his/her own lines to speak during the course of the play. In addition, there are clear stage directions, separated from the dialogue of the play, and the organization of scenes and acts progresses logically. At the same time, "[e]ven in this last play, so firmly, unapologetically rooted in the social world, Stein maintains her loathing of a dramatic structure built on beginnings and endings" (Robinson 26). Stein still plays with genre and with language—her characteristic repetition is still readily apparent, and her ability to deny a resolution to the play remains intact.

For the most part, the progression of the play is logical—each scene and act follows numerically, unlike the confusion and chaos of scenes and acts in Four Saints. The play begins as a classical drama would with a prologue "sung by Virgil T" (297). The progression continues until the end of the first act, which is followed by a section titled "Interlude" whose subtitle is "Susan B. A Short Story" (286). The text of this short story interlude clearly signals a shift in textual form. The rest of the play is composed of lines given to various characters; the text of the Interlude is reminiscent of Stein's fiction:

Susan B. was right, she said she was right and she was right. Susan B. was right. She was right because she was right. It is easy to be right, everybody else is wrong so it is easy to be right, and Susan B. was right, of course she was right, it is easy to be right, everybody else is wrong it is easy to be right. It does what it does, it does do what it does, if you are right, it does do what it does. (287)

However, immediately after the Interlude the play returns to dramatic dialogue, and there are no other breaks with dramatic form throughout the rest of the play.

Stein continues to be self-reflexive even The Mother of Us All, although not nearly to the extent that she is in Four Saints. In Mother of Us All Stein achieves self-reflexivity through including two characters—herself and Virgil Thomson, the composer of the music to which the play was set. They both only appear in the beginning of Act One, but it is enough. Thomson, renamed Virgil T, begins the play with the signing of the Prologue, "Pity the poor persecutor" (279). In the first scene of Act One, Stein herself (named G.S.) appears briefly to say that "My father's name was Daniel he had a black beard he was not tall not at all tall, he had a black beard his name was Daniel" (280). Stein's incorporation of herself and Thomson into the dialogue of the play is yet one more attempt at calling attention to the text as a text. With author as character, Stein creates a blurred line between producer/product, writer/text.

Lines are also blurred between history and fiction throughout Mother of Us All. In both choice of characters and the speeches given to each, Stein blends American history with (post)modernist drama. Several of Stein's characters (including herself and Thomson) come directly from history—Susan B. Anthony, Ulysses Grant, Daniel Webster, John Adams, Andrew Jackson. Of course, these characters are from several different historical periods, and Stein's orchestration of them all at one historical moment is uniquely a postmodern technique. Not only does Stein bring together historical figures from several epochs, but she also gives them comical, satiric characterizations. For example, Ulysses S. Grant, a Civil War hero, cannot stand to hear loud noises:

Didn't I say I do not like noise, I do not like cannon balls, I do not like storms, I do not like talking, I do not like noise. I like everything and everybody to be silent and what I like I have. Everybody be silent. (299)

Daniel Webster as well is transformed in Stein's drama. As Bowers notes, "the great Daniel Webster—congressman, senator, and famed orator—is comically inept at wooing; the best he can offer is weak puns" (273). In addition to her erasing of historical boundaries, Stein also manipulates language. At times, the dialogue of the play is a mixture of both actual speeches given by characters and Stein's own additions, especially for Susan B. Anthony. Her lines are so much a blending of actual speeches made and Stein's transformations of those speeches that the line between them is impossible to find.

Even though Stein continues to play with language and other conventional modes of drama, The Mother of Us All is still her most accessible dramatic work. Even the break in form with the Interlude does not disrupt the text. Her language, though very complex and repetitive, is not completely "impenetrable." At the end of her career, Stein seems to return (although hardly completely) to a more traditional way of staging a play. The Mother of Us All is less about how a play is written and more about a re-evaluation of history. Through a cast of women characters with strong language and male characters reduced to whining or attempting to woo other women, Stein signals "the limitations of those forefathers" and calls attention to "the ways in which women have been the true revolutionaries of our country" (274). It seems fitting, then, that in order to convey this notion, Stein would need to be far more clear in her writing and her construction of the play so as not to lose the message she wished it to carry.

Gertrude Stein has long been considered one of the pre-eminent figures of modernist writing of the 1920's—and rightly so. From her salon at 27 Rue de fleurus, Stein would both create and preside over much of the modernist writing to come from Paris. Yet situating Stein as a "modernist" limits her work, especially her drama. Stein continually experimented with form and language, and the products of this experimentation move beyond what is considered "modern" art:

In all her writing, Stein's interest was to push the limits of her medium. She made printed texts which preserved and conveyed the process of their own composition, thereby defying the conventional literary sacrifice of process to product. . . . A Stein text is at once a work of art and a work of criticism; in it, the writer is at once creating and thinking about creation. (Bowers Stein 153)

These limits are clearly pushed in much of her dramatic literature, and they push her work away from the modern and toward the postmodern. Her early plays such as What Happened and Ladies' Voices signal her fascination with cubist design. What Happened reads more like Tender Buttons than it does like a play. And Ladies' Voices is a very early and overt example of Stein's insistent that language is action. But the culmination of her experimentation in drama comes in Four Saints in Three Acts—a play which so blurs the lines between drama and fiction, between order and chaos. The self-reflexivity of all of her plays reflects a postmodern concern with representing text and commenting on that text's production simultaneously. Perhaps now in this era of heading towards even post-post modernism Stein's drama can be viewed for what it truly is—the work of a visionary playwright looking toward the future.

Jason David Fichtel is currently a graduate student in English at the University of New Mexico.

Copyright Jason David Fichtel 1998.

Comments to Jason David Fichtel.

[1] This citation from Derrida's "The Law of Genre" comes from Mitchell's collection of essays, On Narrative. "The Law of Genre" was originally published in Glyph 7 (1980).

[2] All of the plays that were eventually included in Geography and Plays (1922) Stein never wished to have published until after they had been performed. Yet none of these plays (including What Happened and Ladies' Voices ) ever saw the stage before their publication.

[3] A concept expressed notably by John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion."

[4] Although What Happened was not published until 1922 in Geography and Plays, it was actually composed in 1913, a year before Tender Buttons was published. However, it seems most likely that Stein worked on both simultaneously, thus further explanation for their similar structure.

[5] Even though Stein labels the first act of Ladies' Voices "Curtain Raiser" I am here considering it as one of the five acts.

[6] Four Saints in Three Acts was originally published in transition in 1929, however it is most remembered in its later, 1934 publication.

Berry, Ellen E. Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism. Ann Arbor: U of M P, 1992.

Bowers, Jane Palatini. Gertrude Stein. London: Macmillan, 1993.

---. "The Writer in the Theater: Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts." Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. 210–25.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Law of Genre." Trans. Avital Ronell. On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 51–77.

Martin, Robert, K. "The Mother of Us All and American History." Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature. Ed. Shirley Newman and Ira B. Nadel. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. 210–222.

Robinson, Marc. The Other American Drama. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

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---. Four Saints in Three Acts. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. (1946) Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1990. 577–612.

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---. What Happened: A Play. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. (1946) Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1990. 557–560.

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