ABSTRACT
No one could interpellate Gertrude Stein, hail her into identifications with characters through whose specular wholeness she could imagine completion. Still, syncopation made her nervous. Dramatic time conflicted with the temporality of her spectator’s emotions. Her solution, in her ‘landscape’ plays, was to spatialize the temporal, to refuse the aggregation and accumulation by which the subject/ spectator makes meanings. Syncopation, from the Greek syncoptain, means to strike, chop off; in musical terms it refers to the placing of an accent or accents on parts of a bar that are not usually accented. If a syncopated rhythm is continued for more than a bar it has the effect of a displaced meter superimposed on the basic meter. Jazz and blues are unimaginable without syncopation; for Stein conventional theater was intolerable because of it. The bracketed time of representation accented rhythms in disturbing syncopation to her own. Stein experienced (borrowing Gayatri Spivak’s phrase above) a ‘simultaneous other focus’ that brought home, uncomfortably, the otherness of the stage object.
