GERTRUDE STEIN AND OPERA: A DIALOGUE WITH ONESELF Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist… Tristan Tzara In avant-garde poetry poets talk to themselves. Max Eastman There are two of Roland Barthes’ famous dittos that sound as if they had Gertrude Stein’s writing in mind: “a writerly text is a literary work whose goal is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of a text (37) and …”Even when the author is dead, the author’s ghost survives in that limbo between power and powerlessness that bounds interpretation” (ibid.) A problematic writer – reader relationship was with her a matter of very deliberate efforts. Yet she seemed to pretend she failed to figure out what was wrong with the reading of her texts. So she wrote Composition as Explanation to pretend to explain … in her trade mark style. Gertrude Stein was known for her insistence on being recognized regardless of or even against critics’ judgment, on being included in the US literary canon, on being recognized as a genius. When she said things like “Also there is why is it that in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman.” (Stein 1972a: 518), she raised eyebrows. Was this megalomania of some kind? Or was it a female travesty of the claims, often exaggerated, always scandalous, that could be found in the numerous manifestoes of the predominantly male groups of the different “-isms” characterizing the interwar period? These are very interesting questions, though not easy ones to answer. Stein’s canonic status, now that it is finally a fact, is very much part of the processes of canon dissipation going on during the last 30 years. In other words, while today she is beyond doubt part of the canon, the concept of canon itself does not mean so much any more. Another irony of her status is that what she invested a lot of persuasion in achieving in her lifetime – access to mainstream publishers and a wide audience, (serious) critical consideration – she has achieved, though posthumously. Since the 1980s at least, she has been the object of critical attention and canonic “mainstreaming” (like inclusion in The Library of America in 1998 for example), but it is critics, and an insignificant number of them, who make up her only audience today. “One of modernism’s hardest writers” is how Catherine Stimpson, perhaps her most devoted interpreter, called her. Or, in Richard Poirier’s words: That her writing is often anomalous is in part, but only in part, a reflection of the fact that she is herself an anomaly (…) not because she is a woman writer, but because while being one, she assigns herself to the role of self-designated peer of the greatest of literary geniuses, and these are, in her lists of them, always male.” (Poirier, 189) (…) “She is a usurper who, in the very process of eradicating patriarchal structures in sex and in sentences, also reserves to herself all the privileges derived from those structures.” (ibid. 191)