The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude St The one boundary that then remains to be considered is that between writing and talking. Written out to be spoken to an audience, the four lectures that constitute Narration take up where the Lectures in America left off and intend to think out narrative in relation to knowledge and the possible merging of prose and poetry. Where the early modernist manifestos vied for attention with a bold typography embodying an often outrageous rhetoric, Stein uses other strategies to engage attention.
Her rhetoric of emphasis and persistent approximation give rise to a heightened litany, a sustained oral prosody and bring out the pedagogical dimension of her insistence. Both are effects of her commitment to the process of thinking.
The Geographical History of America is a good example of it. Having renamed her medium writing, one remaining boundary is that between writing and talking. These four lectures were written in haste, during her American lecture tour, only a few days before they were delivered 2 and may feel less accomplished and pithy than the Lectures in America. Narrative is a problem to me. I worry a good deal about it these days and I will not write a lecture about it yet because I am still too worried about it.
In their very irresoluteness, the Narration lectures provide insight into several other generic bothers that beset Stein, some conscious, others not: the current merging of prose and poetry; the compared merits of talking and writing; and the forms taken by theory and practice—all hinging on her central concern: narration. There, through trial and error, by endlessly coining and evaluating sentences, Stein arrives at her theory of sentences and paragraphs, an important moment of her pursuit, but by no means the only one.
No doubt, her project would have been harder to grasp and her reception further delayed. All her secondary writing was produced in the last twenty years of her life, starting with the two lectures delivered in Britain in , continuing with the The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas published in and culminating with the lectures delivered during her immensely successful American tour of For the first time in writing, Stein was looking backwards: at her life in the Autobiography and at her writing in the Lectures in America which might be called an ars poetica in restrospect.
