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A DEVILISH SCRIPT: THE STRUGGLE FOR “ONENESS” IN
GERTRUDE STEIN’S DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS

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ARYN E. W. BARTLEY

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A DEVILISH SCRIPT: THE STRUGGLE FOR “ONENESS” IN GERTRUDE
STEIN’S DOCTOR FA USTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS

By

Aryn E. W. Bartley

A THESIS
Submitted to
Miohigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2005

7'. Ti! ' I- " 1"! 'I I

ABSTRACT

A DEVILISH SCRIPT: THE STRUGGLE FOR “ONENESS” IN GERTRUDE
STEIN’S DOCTOR FA UST US LIGHTS THE LIGHTS

By

Aryn E. W. Bartley

In Gertrude Stein’s Doctor F austus Lights the Lights, the two main characters
obsess over their inability either to be “the only ones who know” or to access a
singularity in meaning itself. While the characters rely anxiously on deductive logic,
repetition and social consensus to secure both meaning and “self’-hood, the play suggests
that the attempt to permanently stabilize meaning cannot succeed. Doctor F austus
participates in the cultural reproduction of Faust as a canonical narrative, but
simultaneously critiques the processes by which humans attempt to determine
linguistically indeterminable categories of existence and meaning, especially in the
dramatic form. In particular, the script’s abandonment of linguistic and theatrical
conventions emphasizes the inherent multiplicity of scripts, performances, and language
itself. Confidently masochistic, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights encourages a theater
that bursts from the confines of the script, embracing ambiguity and possibility instead of

mimesis and stasis.

Cepyright by
ARYN E. w. BARTLEY
2005

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Justus Nieland, Ellen McCallum and Brian Olszewski for suggesting

productive avenues for exploring Stein’s work. And of course, thanks to my thesis

advisor, Judith Roof, for her flexibility, encouragement, and intellectual stimulation.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THESIS ................................................................................................................................ 1

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................ 3O

In the middle of Gertrude Stein’s play Doctor F austus Lights the Lights, F austus
tells the other protagonist, who has come to him to be cured of a viper bite, “Enough said,
you are not dead”(103). He repeats these words in various formations five times. “All”
on stage join in. Finally, his co-protagonist, the multiply-named Marguerite Ida and
Helena Annabel whispers “I am Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel and enough said I
am not de ” (103). This moment of growing consensus displays the power of mass
repetition — “mass” referring here to both number of times repeated and to number of
people repeating - to create a collective truth or meaning, at least temporarily. Language
in this instance creates “reality.” In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, the characters rely
anxiously on repetition, social consensus and deductive logic to secure both meaning and
the existence of the self. The play, however, emphasizes the instability of signification,
undermining the struggle to secure meaning not only within the narrative of the play, but
also in the script as a written dramatic form. The script thus invites its interpreter to
disregard it. It beckons toward a radical theater in which word and act have no obligation
to the other, one where performance constantly shifts and morphs without stable ground.

At a stylistic but not necessarily thematic remove from certain of Stein’s later
works, Doctor Faustus has been described by critics as an anomaly. In the context of
Stein’s scripts, it is a “narrative” play as opposed to her more abstract “conversation” or
“essence of what happened” plays and her later “landscape” or “lang-scape” plays.‘
Stein’s plays are notorious for their inscrutability, yet unlike her other plays, the script of
Doctor F austus lends itself to staging (albeit a “difficult” staging). The script contains
characters, stage directions, dialogue and a plot complete with climax. Because the script

in many ways conforms to traditional expectations about what a play is, its idiosyncrasies

stand out. Doctor F austus thus enacts a more compelling critique of traditional
assumptions about scripts than Stein’s more explicitly avant-garde work.

Doctor F austus directly interacts with the F austian tradition. Characters include
F austus, Mephistopheles (or Mephisto), “the dog,” “the boy,” and a counter-protagonist
whose name is “Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel.” Those who are familiar with
earlier versions of Faust will remember that, in Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles first
appears as a dog, Faust has a young male assistant, and Faust falls in love with two
women: first Margareta (or Gretchen) and then Helen of Troy, with whom he has a child.
In Stein’s play, the dog and the boy function as Faustus’ companions, and Marguerite Ida
and Helena Annabel as a single character takes on a much more active role as a
knowledge-seeker with her own obsessions equal to Faustus’s. Other characters include
a chorus, a “country woman,” “the man fi'om over seas,” “the boy” (different fi‘om the
first “boy”), and “the girl,” who appear together near the end of the play.

The play begins with an encounter between Mephistopheles and Faustus. In this
encounter, which occurs after the exchange of his soul for the knowledge of how to create
electric light, Faustus questions not only the existence of his soul, but the purpose of his
exchange. His philosophical musings pervade the first scene, and this part of the script
includes a “ballet” in which the electric lights “dance,” Faustus’s song “Let me Alone,”
and the singing of “a chorus in the distance” (94). Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’s
entrance, both expected and actual, makes F austus anxious. Having entered, she muses
over epistemological and ontological concerns similar to the doctor’s, and then is bitten
by a viper. The “country woman” enters and brings her to Faustus’s house, where she is

ambiguously “cured.” In Act II, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel sits with an

artificial viper, surrounded by a “halo . . . not of electric light but of candle light” (104).
The “man from over seas” attempts to seduce her. Mephistopheles enters behind the man
and tries to make Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel feel dissatisfied with her candle
light: “you cannot fool me by candle light, where is the real electric light woman answer
me” (109). In Act III, a woman comes and tells Faustus that there is “a woman who can
turn night into day” (112). Furious at this discovery, and now aware of his own inability
to be the only one with knowledge, Faustus asks Mephistopheles what to do. At
Mephistopheles’s suggestion, he kills his companions, the dog and the boy, so that he can
go to hell. He attempts to seduce Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel into coming with
him, but she refuses. The play ends with Mephistopheles lamenting over the fact that he
is “always deceived,” and a little boy and little girl asking him for attention. Throughout
Doctor F austus, the characters obsess over language’s ability to destabilize
epistemological and ontological certainty, and struggle to contain multiple possibilities
by securing and maintaining “oneness” in both meaning and identity.

Faust as a narrative has been reworked again and again since 1589, and has been
critically reexamined numerous times — both processes which have led to its status as a
canonical tale.2 Performances of the dramatic script, variations on the story, performance
reviews, and criticism of Faust all work together to reiterate its status. Doctor F austus
has often been interpreted as a universal symbol of humanity. His arrogant drive for
power and knowledge and his misogyny have in many ways been de-historicized and
naturalized. The play’s stance, however, supports Ellen Berry’s argument for the
“centrality of postmodern critical categories to an understanding of Stein’s fictional

experiments” (1 ). Doctor F austus Lights the Lights, while participating in the

reproduction of the F austian canonical narrative, challenges its status as a universal tale,
implying both in form and content that its “truth” is constructed and unstable. The main
characters pursue knowledge and power, the same goals as the canonical Faust, an aspect
of the play that seems to support universality. Nevertheless, the play suggests that they
can never achieve knowledge. Indeed, the instability of knowledge in the play, the play’s
language, and unstable scripting which highlights the disjunction between word and act
thwarts any struggles to attain stability in meaning. The script undercuts its own
importance.
Women, Men and Dogs:
Struggling to Create Existence through Oneness

Doctor F austus Lights the Lights is preoccupied with the interdependence of
meaning and easily shifting language. F austus is obsessed with his inability to ascertain
meaning, and the interplay between this epistemological failure and his lack of a soul.
His despair at the indeterminacy of meaning and his attempts to secure it begins with his
second line of dialogue, when he states “What do I care there is no here nor there. What
am I” (89). The lack of punctuation here, of course, creates numerous interpretive
possibilities and nuances. One reading of the sentence appears to establish Faust’s
acceptance of indeterminacy. He asks “What do I care” and either questions what he is
or states that he is “what” (a bizarre but fruitful possibility which would demonstrate that
his “self” is based on questioning, on the state of “what”!). The potential elimination of
“here” and “there” can be read as the embrace of a state of possibility, where division and

distinction are eliminated in favor of free play. While the state of existence is possible

(“there is”), however, in this quote, “being” serves only to negate possibility (“there is no
here nor there”).

The juxtaposition of the two sentences implies that the difference between “here”
and “there” is necessary in order to establish “what am I.” In a general sense, a
difference between self and other, between “here” and “there,” is necessary in order to
establish a subject, an “I” that exists. Faustus asks “what is the difference between a man
and a dog when I say none do I go away does he go away go away to stay no nobody
goes away the dog the boy they can stay I can go away go away where where there there
where” (98). This obsession with physical or metaphysical location, “where where there
there where,” reiterates the yearning for the positional existence of a self that can fit into
one or another category (here or there, staying or going). The very existence of “I” and
“he” is threatened, this last quote implies, when the difference between their two
categories is erased. “What is the difference between a man and a dog when I say none
do I go away,” Faustus wonders. The potential of “saying” to erase distinction, and
hence his existence as an “I,” a subject or individual, intrigues him. Nevertheless, in this
quote, Faustus says “no nobody goes away.” Lack of linguistic distinction does not
necessarily lead to a lack of existence as the separate beings, “I” and “he.” Rather,
anyone “can” go away, implying that the difference between self and other is chosen by
humans to be a factor that affects the ability to exist. Anxiety about this distinction is not
inherent or natural. Existence as an “I” thus depends on human definition and choice.

The play also suggests that existence as a self is determined by social consensus
and perception of the self by the other: i.e., through social interaction. Marguerite Ida

and Helena Annabel also worries about the difference between “here” and “there,” saying

“I am not there I am here oh dear I am not there” (96). Her “oh dear” implies a level of
anxiety about her ability to be only “here,” when she wants to be “there.” She would
consider sacrificing her multiple names in order to be “there”: “Would it do as well if my
name was not Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel would it do as well I would give up
even that for a carpet and a chair and to be not here but there” (96). What does it mean to
be “not here but there”? The distinction seems to be one of being perceived as opposed
to perceiving. This could be perception by the community or by an aspect of the self, in
which perception would be a mode of self-awareness. Later in the play the chorus sings
“There she is/ Is she there/ Look and see/ Is she there/ Is she there/ Anywhere/ Look and
see/ Is she there/ Yes she is there” (105). She has gained her wish of being perceived by
being defined as “there” by the “other” (the chorus). Their song implies that her
individual existence is at least partially based on being perceived within the social
community. F austus’s earlier lament that “there is no here nor there,” then, points to his
non-existence as either perceiver or perceived.3

661”

The tenuousness of Faustus’s is reflected in his questioning of the existence of
his soul, which he has supposedly traded. He tells Mephisto: “And you wanted my soul
what the hell did you want my soul for, how do you know I have a soul, who says so
nobody says so but you the devil and everybody knows the devil is all lies, so how do
you know how do I know I have a soul to sell how do you know Mr. Devil . . .” (89). In
Goethe’s and Marlowe’s plays, Faust exchanges his soul for knowledge and/or power.
While the significance of this knowledge may be questioned, its existence, once acquired,

is not. In Stein’s play, on the other hand, Faustus’s “knowledge” is profoundly unstable.

The potential non-existence of his soul leads Faustus to doubt the meaningfulness of the

exchange of that soul for the knowledge necessary to make electric light. He regrets his
decision, claiming with longing “if I had not been in a hurry and if I had taken my time I
would have known how to make white electric light”(89), and “I who know everything I
keep on having so much light that light is not bright” (89). His desire, once sated,
disappoints. Lacking desire, he lacks meaning in his actions. If anything, what he now
desires is to desire again, to be in the position of wanting knowledge.

The seemingly disappointing trade-in of the soul for electric light speaks to the
ambiguous nature of new developments in technology. Whereas technology is supposed
to bring humanity closer to an illuminating knowledge that “light” conventionally
represents, F austus is unsure that anything has been gained by the exchange. Once one
technological development is created, it loses its appeal. More and more “electric lights”
are needed in order to sate the modern appetite for the new. This loss of pleasurable
desire, this anxious need to want again, to “not know,” parallels the loss of the soul.

Faustus imposes the ability to produce knowledge onto the electric lights and
states that he knows certain things because the electric lights “tell” him (94). These lights,
however, are in the habit of turning on and off at random, and getting dimmer or brighter
without an agent controlling them. The image of changeable light providing certainty
suggests a fragility in Faustus’s epistemological assumptions. The physical existence of
the lights is ambiguous: how do they appear in physical form? The lights as described at
one point in the play “commence to dance and one by one they go out and come in” (94).
At another point, they participate in a “grand ballet” (106). One potential presence of the
lights as immobile brightness surrounded by glass is complicated by descriptions linking

them to bodies that move, going out and coming in. Thus, even his treasured possession

can be manifested in various ways; the new, modern light that was supposed to be his
“one” ends up being his “many.”

Faustus’s fear of language’s ability to destroy his existence as a subject is
reflected in his obsessive pursuit of “oneness” in both knowledge and identity. He states,
“I am the only one who can know what I know” (90). While he berates the devil for only
knowing “one thing,” Faustus struggles to maintain his own “oneness.” His struggle to
secure first, his knowledge as whole and unlacking (as “everything”), and second, his
position as “the only one” who possesses this knowledge, link the two pursuits. The
knowledge must be “one,” and Faustus must be the “only one.” The ability to have
access to a stable, unchanging knowledge helps to secure existence as a subject.

The play, however, challenges F austus’s ability to be one or have oneness by
displaying a female character who is just as obsessed with singularity as he is. The
doctor’s ability to wield “one” knowledge is seemingly challenged by Marguerite Ida and
Helena Annabel’s two (and four, and one) names. The possibility of her name’s
existence is anxiously challenged by Faustus before she even appears on stage. After the
chorus maintains that “Her name is her name is her name is Marguerite Ida and Helena
Annabel” (94), and the dog and the boy agree that “they know” (94), Faustus replies “no
no no no no nobody can know what I know I know her name is not Marguerite Ida and
Helena Annabel” (94). He states, “She will not be . . . never never never, never will her
name be Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel never never never never well as well never
Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel never Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel” (95).
Faustus’s repetitious “never never never”s are anxious attempts to establish singularity of

his position as sole “knower” against the threatening plurality of her name.

This connection of the woman with a heterogeneity that instantly challenges
ontological “oneness” recalls lrigaray’s portrayal of women’s discourse and sexuality as
“multiple” and freeing. In support of female difference, Jane Palatini Bowers argues that
“Marguerite’s experience will not, in fact, recapitulate Doctor Faustus’s since she is a
female, and the history of her development must necessarily recapitulate a female, not a
male, phylogeny” (105) and reads the play as tracing a woman’s sexual initiation. Indeed,
unlike Faustus, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel is interpellated into a social structure
where being “one” can easily be turned into being “won”— objectified and acquired. As
readers or audience members, we wonder if Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel
recognizes the difference when the man fiom over seas states “I have won I have won her
I have won her”(108) and she sings immediately afierwards, “You do or you do
not”(108). Here, she may indeed hear “I have one,” an aural ambiguity that both seduces
and endangers her.

Is multiplicity, however, inherently female and singularity inherently male? In
Doctor F austus, every person — whether male or female — is multiple, and struggles to
refashion this multiplicity into a stable “self.” While women may have a different
relation to multiplicity than men, this is not a psychological connection, but rather a
social one. As Harriett Scott Chessman notes, “Stein often makes it possible to imagine
male or female speakers within either masculine or feminine modes of language. . . . It is
equally possible to find in much of Stein’s work the further strategy of a surprisingly
ungendered language - a language that calls attention to its freedom from any gender at
all” (6). If this a-/degendering applies in the case of Stein’s language, it most certainly

applies in the case of the characters’ obsessions in Doctor F austus.

The cross-gender desire to be singular and unique is displayed when, despite the
multiplicity her name seems to suggest, Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel desires to be
the one with knowledge as much as Faustus. Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’s first
line instantly challenges Faustus’s ability to “know” by setting up her own knowledge
against his: “I am I and my name is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel” (95). While
this statement demonstrates the existence of her name’s plurality, it establishes that she
also aims for oneness. Her statement is decidedly singular: “I am 1.” She is set up, not
as everything Faustus is not, but rather as another person with aims similar to F austus’s.
She too is obsessed with existence, knowledge, and identity, and expresses this through
questioning and longing of the wish: “I wish, (she whispered) I knew why woods are
wild why animals are wild why I am 1, why I can cry, I wish I wish I knew” (95).

The play implicitly refers to Goethe’s Faust when it merges the names of the two
main female characters, Margareta and Helen of Troy, into both many and one (as
demonstrated through the “an ”). In doing so, the play seems to be parodying the idea
that the two women are represented as indistinguishable. Both serve as sexual objects to
Faust’s lusts and both are dropped as soon as he grows tired of them, Margareta to go
insane after he kills her mother and Helen to fade back into the mists of myth. The play’s
emphasis on this pointed “multiple and one” name converges two women into one, also
highlighting that in Goethe’s play the two women might as well be one, as they are both
portrayed as plot devices and sexual objects. The use of this name demonstrates that, like
in Goethe’s Faust, multiplicity often serves as a front for oneness. Because of her name,
Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel seems like she should be “multiple,” but actually

craves singularity. This seeming contradiction, then, implies that notions of an essential

10

female multiplicity like Irigaray’s fall back into “oneness.” Women can legitimately
desire oneness just like patriarchal notions suggest that men do.4

Indeed, during the play multiplicity is threateningly imposed on women, as
displayed when the “man from over seas” attempts to seduce Marguerite Ida and Helena
Annabel by attesting to his love for her. The man’s “love” menaces her in part because
he seeks to control her positional existence. He states: “She is all my love and always
here”(107). This allusion to her earlier anxieties about “being here” implies first, that he
does not perceive her as a subject, and second, that his “love” for her is more about his
desire to possess her (“She is all my”), than her wishes. In the face of his seduction,
Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel sings “You do or you do not/ You are or you are not/
I am there is no not/ But you you you / You are as you are not” (108). She first tries to
stabilize possibility in action, “You do or you do not,” and existence, “You are or you are
not,” and then reestablishes either her identity (“I am”) or that she is “there” to be
perceived. She fears the possibility of the inherently multiple paradox: “you are as you
are not.”

“The man from over seas” threatens Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel because
he seeks to impose multiplicity onto her when she wishes to be “one.” When he murmurs
“yet it would be better yet if you had more names and not only four in one let it be begun,
forget it oh forget it pretty one, and if not I will forget that you are one” (114), she
“stiffens” and repeats a line similar to Faustus’s at the beginning: “I am the only one who
can know anything about any one, am I one dear dear am I one, who hears me knows me
I am here and here I am, yes here I am” (114). Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel

“stiffens” at the possibility of “more names and not only four in one” and the man’s

ll

threat to “forget that you are one.” She asserts her singularity and her existence. It is
utterly fitting, then, that Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel sees Mephistopheles behind
the man, says “No one is one when there are two,” and faints. “Twoness” on any level —
that of the name, the identity, or of a relationship -— threatens her. For both her and
Faustus, the desire to be “one” determines their actions.

Faustus’s determination to attain oneness functions as the rationale for his actions
throughout the play, up until Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel acquires the knowledge
of how to “make night into day” with candlelight. Faustus has sold his soul to the devil
in order to make electric light, while she has created a similar effect with what is already
known. She does not pursue modern technology, but accomplishes the same goal of
“making night into day.” Indeed, she subsumes the devil’s symbol, the viper, into
artificiality, leaving light natural. Faustus realizes that “never again will he be alone”
(113) because he is not the only one who can produce light. If he cannot be alone, or “all
one,” he decides that she cannot be the only one either, and tries to seduce her into going
to hell with him. He murders the dog and the boy to secure his entrance to hell, adopts
the appearance of a young man, and tries to convince her to come with him. She,
however, resists, saying “I am Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel and I know no man or
devil no viper and no light I can be anything and everything and it is always always
alright” (I 18).

At the same time that she denies the doctor’s seduction, Marguerite Ida and
Helena Annabel recreates his anxious rhetoric. She echoes Faustus’s earlier denial of her
name by saying “you are not Doctor F austus no not ever never never” and “falls back

fainting into the arms of the man from over seas” (118). Her denial here combined with

12

her reliance on the man suggests that she is not as triumphant as might otherwise seem. It
is unclear if she will end up going to hell, repeating F austus’ mistakes (as Mephistopheles
says, “I suppose so”(115)), but the play ends with a little boy and little girl singing
“Please Mr. Viper listen to me he is he and she is she and we are we please Mr. Viper
listen to me” (118). This ending implies that attempts to control meaning are likely to
continue ad infinitum for both genders. Interestingly, it also suggests that despite their
protests, the characters are drawn to the seductive multiplicity the devil represents. The
boy and girl ask for Mephistopheles to listen to them. The devil’s active denial of
singularity paradoxically becomes necessary to determine the oneness of “he being he,”
“she being she,” and “we being we.”

Philosophical musings on “oneness” recur throughout Stein’s later writings,
which imply that the urge for singularity reflects a need to secure meaning and identity.
Stein’s “An Instant Answer or a Hundred Prominent Men,” adds up a hundred “ones” to
“make a hundred” (40).5 Similarly, “Many Many Women” (1932), constructs “many
women” out of many “ones.” This novella implies that we only know ourselves through
our “oneness”: “Each one is one. Each one has been one” (126). Being “one” allows the
human subject to be unique, separate from another. Ironically, of course, once another
person seeking oneness enters the scene, the original “one” becomes a part of many
“ones,” and inevitably loses any claim to singularity. Being “one” makes us part of a
community of other “ones,” and thus not unique: “She was that one. There are many of
them. Why are there many of them. There are many of them because there are many of
each kind there are and she was of one kin ” (“Many Many Women,” 174).

Paradoxically, it is the desire for singularity and uniqueness that establishes that a

13

person can never be “one.” In Stein’s work, being or wishing to be “one” is to be or wish
to be part of “many.” Because F austus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel cannot
explicitly acknowledge the necessity 'of multiple modes of knowing or existing, either in
a social community or in themselves, they cannot accept that their desire to secure
knowledge, meaning, or a stable existence must fail. They continue their anxious pursuit
of oneness.

Enough Said?:

Logic, Repetition and Social Consensus as Determining Factors

While language displays epistemological and ontological uncertainties, it also
serves as a tool to contain and counter these uncertainties. Faustus’s early sentence
“what do I care there is no here nor there” demonstrates not just his uncertainty, but his
attempt to stabilize his uncertainty. Even if the distinction between “here” and “there” is
lacking, by speaking the lack of distinction (“there is no here nor there”), Faustus creates
the ontological certainty of “there is.” Thus, language not only can create ambiguity, but
can be used as a tool to determine indeterminate categories of existence and identity. The
play demonstrates how Faustus and others attempt to control meaning and identity by
using the specific linguistic tools of deductive logic and repetition.

Deductive logic offers Faustus a seductive means by which to eliminate
possibility. It implies the security of a “then” (if A, then B). He obsesses over his soul’s
existence, attempting to make a rational statement that will somehow secure the
“oneness” of knowledge he so desires, even if his logic leads to the singular knowledge
that he has no soul. And so, when F austus questions the exchange of his soul for light, he

tries to stabilize his uncertainty by asking “how do you know I have a soul, who says so

14

nobody says so but you the devil and everybody knows the devil is all lies” (89). Here,
he outlines a logical proposition that makes him anxious: if the devil is “all lies,” and the
devil tells him he has a soul, then he must not have a soul. Faustus implies, however, that
the foundation for this proposition could be flawed. If “everybody” knows the devil lies,
how does he know whether “everybody” tells the truth or not? Who should he believe,
the devil or everybody? While Faustus seeks to establish the truth of his soul’s existence,
his “oneness,” he reveals that the other “truths” he counts on are relational and unstable.
Both “everybody” and “the devil” have their own way of defining what truth is, and
hence what lies are. In a situation where truth is positional, F austus cannot rely on
deductive logic to determine the indeterminate.

The flaws in Faustus’s ability to use deductive logic expose his anxiety about his
ability to access knowledge or “truth.” For instance, although Mephisto assures him that
“yes you are you know you are you are the only one who knows what you know and it is
I the devil who tells you so” (90), Faustus rejoins “You fool you devil how can you know,
how can you tell me so, if I am the only one who can know what I know” (90).
Considering the great lengths he goes to in order to engage in a logic-based dialogue,
Faustus’s slightly flawed deduction here seems significant. Faustus interprets Mephisto’s
statement asserting he knows about the act of knowing as an assertion that he knows
about the knowing itself. Why does F austus’s knowing somehow eliminate the devil’s
ability to know that he knows? This slippage, combined with the previous discussion
which questions Mephisto’s truth-telling abilities, highlights his own anxiety about the

stability or instability of his position as knowledge-holder.

15

Faustus worries that the devil must have some access to his knowledge in order to
know its limits. That he is the “only one who can know what I know” is complicated
when he tells the devil “You only know one thing, you are never ready for anything, and
I everything is always now and now and now perhaps through you I begin to know that it
is all so” (91). Faustus states that his knowledge is “perhaps” mediated through the devil.
“Now and now and now” suggests that Faustus exists in a state of the continual present
and is demonstrating that through his choice to repeat. This further complicates his
worries about the lack of categorical distinction. If he worries about a difference between
“here and there,” between self and other, he seems also to lack a difference between past,
present and future. For F austus, “everything is always now.”

Significantly, the doctor’s repetitious “now and now and now” appears when he is
most struggling to negotiate his singularity. Marianne DeKoven writes that Stein’s
repetition demonstrates “a fixated, blocked mind struggling to free itself by going over
and over the terms of its fixation until it has mastered them” (40). While she is
discussing the “terms of [a mind’s] fixation” in terms of the content of the repetition, or
“what” is repeated, in Doctor F austus, characters repeat in order to examine repetition
itself. If “oneness” and their inability to secure that oneness is the fixation of these
characters, then repetition is the “terms of its fixation,” or the conflict between
multiplicity and singularity. At times, it transforms repetition into iteration, where each
repetition is both different and the same, is both “many” and “one.” In “How Writing Is
Written,” Stein posits that “[e]verybody is telling the story in the same way. But if you
listen carefirlly, you will see that not all the story is the same. There is always a slight

variation. Somebody comes in and you tell the story over again. . . . Of course to my

16

mind there is no repetition” (448). For Stein, there is no “repetition” because repetition
would imply “one” when there are variations.

Nevertheless, in Doctor F austus, the characters use the “multiple oneness” of
repetition in order to secure singularity of meaning from multiplicity. Like Faustus’s
“now and now and now” in the face of an indeterminate identity, and reminiscent of his
earlier “never never never” when faced with Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’s
pluralistic name, the play uses repetition to show its use as a linguistic tool for
determining meaning. While repetition seems to succeed, however, Doctor Faustus
seems to suggest that it works by covering over uncertainty and paving the ground for
social consensus. Groups collectively decide what “truth” is. Repetition helps them to
do so.

When Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel is bitten by the viper, she runs into a
country woman. They attempt to discern whether or not she has been bitten by
“repeating have I and yes it does happen”(97). The assumption seems to be that the more
they repeat, the more likely it is that they can settle the question of whether or not she
was bitten by a viper. Despite their repetition, however, the women do not determine the
answer. Nevertheless, they act despite their lack of knowledge, and look for F austus so
he can “kill the poison” (97). Thus repetition here does not secure knowledge, but helps
them come to a decision about what to do next.

While the efficacy of repetition to determine knowledge directly fails, it helps
create social consensus, which does help to determine meaning. Faustus, as Marguerite
Ida and Helena Annabel post-viper-bite gets weaker and weaker, says:

And you, you have said you are you
Enough said.

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You are not dead.

Enough said.

Enough said.

You are not dead.

No you are not dead

Enough said

Enough said

You are not dead (103).

The doctor’s repetition at first seems fi'uitless and impotent. While he states “enough
said,” his excessive repetition of the phrase ironically counters its content.

Nevertheless, repetition, rhythm and rhyme encourage group participation,
perhaps working as DeKoven writes, to produce an “incantatory, hypnotic effect” (40) on
the other characters like she argues it does on Stein’s readers. Faustus is joined by “All”
who intone: “enough said you are not dead you are not dead enough said yes enough said
no you are not dead yes enough said, thank you yes enough said no you are not dead.”
The scene ends when:

And at the last
In a low whisper
She says

I am Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel and enough said I am not dead (103).
Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel mimics and intemalizes the “lesson” she has been
taught. This speech eliminates possibility, and ascertains the “fact” that she is alive.

In this scene, repetition combines with rhythm to encourage mass recital, which in
turn seems to produce Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’s speech. If language can
possibly alter existence, as F austus fears when he queries the distinction between a man

and a dog, the constant reiteration of a valued state en masse can perhaps explain how

repetition and social consensus work together to bring about Marguerite Ida and Helena

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Annabel’s survival. The social and linguistic combine to create a collective “fixated
mind” that successfully uses meta-repetition as a way to “deal with the terms of its
fixation.” The characters, in effect, secure the singularity of their social narrative. They
concur that when they say “enough,” Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel will be “not
dead.” At no point after this does Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel come close to
death. The potential of being “dead” is effectively, if temporarily, eliminated.
Ambiguous speakers, however, question the existence of the entire exchange in

the next Act, asking, “How do you know how do you know that a viper did sting her.
How could Doctor F austus have cured her if there had not been something the matter
with her” (104). Just as Faustus questioned his soul’s existence, here the viper bite and
the cure are questioned. Social consensus in the form of the chorus, however,
immediately interj ects:

Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel it is true her name is Marguerite Ida

and Helena Annabel as well and a viper has stung her and Doctor F austus has

cured her, cured her cured her, he has sold his soul to hell cured her cured her

cured he he has sold his soul to hell and her name is Marguerite Ida and Helena

Annabel and a viper had to bite her and Doctor Faustus had to cure her cure her

cure her cure her. (104)
The chorus uses repetition here to determine both “truth” and plot. They insist that “it is
true” that her name “is” and repeat that not only have events occurred (the viper bite and
the cure) but they were necessary: they “had to” happen.

The play here anticipates J can-Francois Lyotard’s notion that in postmodern

society, social consensus rather than grand narratives like truth, justice, or human

emancipation legitimates knowledge.6 The play, however, ridicules the notion that social

consensus can ever create epistemological stability. Mindless hypnosis combined with

19

the temporary nature of this epistemological “quick fix” suggests that this mode of
knowledge legitimization is both cynical and nonsensical. The script immediately shifts
focus to Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’s acquisition of light-making knowledge.
The play thus reflects an urge for “oneness” that is characterized by anxious repetition
and parodies the idea that social consensus can ever create epistemological stability.
Doctor F austus(es)

Doctor F austus Lights the Lights engages with questions of meaning stabilization
on the level of form as well as content. Stein’s rewriting of the Faust myth, already
intertextually linked with earlier versions and similar exchange myths, while in some way
reinscribing “oneness” by participating in canonical reproduction, also critiques the
processes by which humans attempt to determine linguistically indeterminable categories
of existence and meaning. In its playful attention to ambiguity in language, Doctor
F austus highlights the gap between signifier and signified. The play particularly
emphasizes and even celebrates the ways in which the dramatic process prevents meaning
stabilization. By critiquing any performance’s ability to embody a script, Doctor Faustus
undermines attempts to control or pin down its meaning. The play denies its singularity,
implying that the theater lends itself to multiplicity. It suggests that attempts to control
the reproduction of meaning through stage directions or adherence to a fictional “pure”
script will prove to be just as fi'uitless as its characters’ attempts to control knowledge
and the existence of a determinable self.

Stein’s plays celebrate language as signifier lacking a stable signified] Betsy
Alayne Ryan argues that “Stein advocated . . .a return to the physicality of the theatre”

stating that this return is dependent on “a devaluation of language as it is traditionally

20

used, and the practice of theatre for its own sake and toward its own en ”(1). Jane
Palatini Bowers sets her argument up against Ryan’s, noting that “Stein’s plays oppose
the theatricality of performance. Stein’s is a theatre of language: her plays are adamantly
and self-consciously ‘literary’” (2). Despite Bowers’ argument to the contrary, these
positions are not antithetical. Stein’s play celebrates both language and performance. It
emphasizes, however, that word and act have no obligation toward each other.

Stein’s language revels in its indeterminacy, a quality which in this play affects
not only the reading of the play, but its performance.8 While the play’s dialogue easily
can be performed as grammatically sensible sentences and phrases, its lack of and
nonstandard use of punctuation can also lead to numerous other interpretations. Commas,
periods and question marks are included sporadically or eliminated altogether. For
example, F austus says: “everybody knows the devil is all lies, so how do you know how
do I know that I have a soul to sell how do you know Mr. Devil oh Mr. Devil how can
you tell you can not tell anything. . .” (89). Whereas punctuation often functions as a
way to stabilize meaning, “How do you know how do I know that I have a soul” defies a
singular interpretation. One meaning of this line would be that Faustus is asking how the
devil knows, and how he himself knows, that he has a “soul to sell,” and concurrently
challenging Mephisto’s veracity. The line opens itself to a variety of other possibilities,
however. F austus could be asking Mephisto the unanswered question, “How do you
know how?” followed by a question to himself “Do I know,” or asking how Mephisto
knows how Faustus himself knows he has a soul. Perhaps he is not asking.

This playful rhetorical ambiguity around what, in philosophical thought, is a fairly

important question — that of human’s relation to and knowledge of the soul — both adds

21

layers to the play (perhaps it implies all three “meanings”) and demonstrates language’s
instability and the variety inherent in performance. It provides levels of ambiguity that
do not counter singular interpretations, but rather offer alternate and concurrent
possibilities for meaning. Whereas the characters in her play struggle to ascertain a
singular “tru ” in meaning and identity, the visual appearance of the play’s words
undercuts these attempts to contain meaning. Doctor F austus demonstrates that written
details like punctuation lead to the illusion of a “truth” in language. Thus, just as Faustus
here questions the existence of the soul, the play questions “the rules” of the English
language itself, exposing them as yet another part of the struggle to determine meaning.

The page layout of the script also challenges the signifier-signified connection,
this time as represented by script and stage. Stein’s text does not separate dialogue and
stage directions, nor does it announce speakers, creating fundamental ambiguities about
how the script should be embodied. The play repeats common words in varying contexts.
For example, the dog repeats “Thank you” at various points during the play when there is
no logical reason to do so, suggesting that the meaning of the word depends on both the
context in which it is spoken and the variability of affective performance, which can
never be the same twice, and which depends on who or what embodies the dog.

Doctor Faustus not only emphasizes the dependence of scripted meaning on
performance, it also privileges words that cannot be embodied, especially in what can be
read as its stage directions. For example, in the first scene Stein writes “Faustus gives
[Mephisto] an awful kick and Mephisto moves away and the electric lights just then
begin to get very gay,” tabs the next line in to add “Alright then,” and proceeds to

announce “The Ballet” (91). This move raises questions about the “objectivity” of stage

22

directions, usually seen as blueprints for action. Whose definition of “awful” is this?
How would performers embody “just then,” or “very gay”? Who is “speaking” the
peremptory “Alright then”? The play employs indeterminate pronouns (as when it is
announced that “someone comes and sings” (103)) and includes verbs that alter the
ontological status of their referent nouns, such as when “the electric lights commence to
dance and one by one they go out and come in” (94). These rhetorical moves actively
oppose illusions about the possibility of mimetic performance.

Embodiment offers a visual and aural representation to an audience that will
presumably receive that representation as a sensual object. Some directors wish to
communicate a singular meaning, “the one the author intended,” and scorn interpretive
productions that they feel fail to complete this task. Stein’s stage directions imply,
however, that the designation of scripts as blueprints and the seeming mimesis of script
and stage serve as artistic and representational attempts to determine meaning, or to pin
down language through embodiment and vocal expression. The exaggerated, quirky
subjectivity of the stage directions expose the unattainability of performing a “singular
meaning.” No audience member will ever receive the exact same meaning as any other.
Not only do the stage directions challenge the ability of performance to embody a written
text, they actually disallow a “script to stage” reproduction. In effect they separate the
written text from its performance. The play’s divorce of script and stage challenges the
ability of any narrative to mirnetically represent “the real.”

The script of Doctor Faustus self-referentially celebrates its “script-ness” apart
from its socially defined status as a blueprint for embodiment. This paradoxically

undermines the power of the written text, freeing production from the illusion of the need

23

to mirnetically re-produce the script. The play’s focus on the signifier without a signified
opens the space for a focus on the non-verbal aspects of the theater. Doctor F austus
undermines illusions of controlling its own staging, thus allowing for multiple
“interpretations” of the script that create more than recreate. Hence, the play’s notorious
“difficulty” becomes freedom of interpretation. At its most extreme, her play invites the
director/cast to create an embodiment that shares nothing with the “original.” At the
most basic level, it foregrounds the inevitability of multiple interpretations and the gap
between signifier and signified, both linguistically and between script and stage.

Doctor F austus Lights the Lights emphasizes the iterative nature of performance,
highlighting the multiplicity of both scripts and performances. It takes into account that a
script is performed with actors, sets, lighting, etc. Each performance, after all is not
“one,” just as no piece of writing is one. A multiplicity of interpretations is produced by
the interaction between the performance and audience members. Thus, a dramatic
narrative is never “one,” but rather a collection of “ones” that are already multiple. This
collection of multiple “ones” shifts as more performances are produced. It exposes that
the reproduction of dramatic narrative is based on the social context of multiple
performances. A dramatic narrative, then, becomes a process rather than a result. It is a
process not of repetition or “oneness,” but of multiplicity and iterativity.

While Stein’s script reveals a multiplicity of interpretations and performance
possibilities of the written text, it implies that multiplicity creates anxiety. In Doctor
F austus, indeterminacy of meaning or knowledge is directly linked to indeterminacy of
existence as a subject. The characters try to eliminate multiplicity and create “oneness.”

They attempt to maintain the singularity of their play narratives, as demonstrated by the

24

social consensus over Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel’s “non-death.” The characters
insist that she cannot be both dead and alive; unlike Schrodinger’s cat, she must be one or
the other. They struggle to secure not only meaning, meaning being seen as the
elimination of possibility or doubt, but also their positions as the only “ones” who can
“know what they know.” Mephistopheles represents that dangerous multiplicity that so
upsets Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel: the devil means doubt, lies,
deception, and “two-ness.”

Doctor Faustus implies, however, that the struggle to ascertain any sort of
“oneness” in meaning and identity is doomed to an almost farcical degree. Stein’s play
consistently demonstrates the characters’ failure to secure “one” meaning or “one”
identity, and instead submerges oneness into multiplicity and vice versa. The division of
the script fiom embodiment challenges the “oneness” or truth capacity of the F austian
narrative by highlighting that every embodiment will be different. Every embodiment
will necessarily deviate from the script, which can already be read as containing multiple
meanings, none of which can be privileged. By foregrounding its scriptness, Doctor
F austus Lights the Lights depicts a fundamental chasm between language and act.

This “devilish” script forces the reader, like Mephistopheles forces Faustus and
Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, to acknowledge the impossibility of securing a
singular interpretation of a written text.9 The script gives readers and writers, performers
and audience members, possibilities: among them, to stifle the script’s multiplicity in
pursuit of “one” meaning, or to celebrate it. This self-conscious approach to scripting
facilitates active interpretation and evokes theatrical embodiments that are attentive to the

range of possibilities the iterative process of performance offers. It motions toward

25

performances that are free to change as they progress and that play with theatrical
convention. Just like Mephistopheles at the end of the play, the script revels in its ability
to be “Always deceived always deceived” (118). Confidently masochistic, Doctor

F austus Lights the Lights encourages a theater that bursts fi'om the confines of the script,

embracing ambiguity and possibility instead of mimesis and stasis.

26

Notes

‘ Betsy Alayne Ryan writes that in Stein’s early plays she “sought to create not the
essence of one thing, as she had in her portraits, but the essence of a relationship between
things, and to express this relationship ‘without telling what happened, in short, to make a
play the essence of what happened’” (47). Jane Palatini Bowers refers to the same early
plays as “conversation plays.” Bowers’ terms for the commonly known “landscape
plays” is “lang-scape” plays, an alteration which she argues highlights the importance in
them of “language and its relation to the performance event; they are about writing for

the theater” (25).

2 “The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus” was
first published in 1592, and has been rewritten numerous times, most notably by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1808, Part I; 1832, Part 11), Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus,
1592), and Thomas Mann (Doctor F austus; the life of the German composer, Adrian
Leverkuhn, as told by a friend, 1947). Recently, it has been adapted by David Mamet

(Faustus, 2004).

3 Ironically, of course, his physical existence never comes into being in the script; as a
character, “F austus” is a collection of words, brought into imagined existence by the
reader. If “he” is “here or there,” “he” is unaware of it. It is only through performance

that F austus can be “there,” and only in the eyes of the spectators.

27

4 This, of course, establishes my position in regards to Marianne DeKoven’s reading
of Stein’s experimental fiction as inherently anti-patriarchal. I would rather align myself
with Ellen Berry’s reading of DeKoven’s hypothesis as a compelling but limited

metanarrative about femininity.

5 I tell their names because in this way I know that one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one make a hundred. (Stein, 40)

6 J ean-F rancois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, seeks
to counter Jurgen Habermas’ notion that “humanity as a collective (universal) subject
seeks its common emancipation through the regularization of the ‘moves’ permitted in all
language games and that the legitimacy of any statement resides in its contributing to
that emancipation” (66). Rather, Lyotard argues that mass consensus is “an outmoded
and suspect value”(67) that veils power struggles over knowledge. This scene in Doctor

F austus performs and prefigures this critique by parodying the formation of consensus.
7 In The New Sentence, Ron Sillirnan argues that Stein’s “attempts to reintroduce an

anti-narrational continuous present” try to confiont the marginalization of the signifying

novel in favor of “an art with no medium, of a signified with no signifiers” that is

28

“inscribed entirely within the commodity fetish” (l4). Marianne DeKoven writes that
“accessible meaning is vital to Stein’s experimental work, but referential content is not”
(12), and Richard Kostelanetz writes that Stein’s words are “autonomous objects, rather
than symbols of something else, rather than windows onto other terrains” (in Chessman,
10). Here, however, I would like to emphasize the term “stable,” as I think that in this

particular play, her language is playfully referential.

8 This playful approach destabilizes the script’s ability to secure a certain embodiment.
It also foreshadows European theater of the late 408 and 503, in which, for example,
Ionesco can write in his stage directions for Jack or the Submission “he wears a sullen,
ill-natured expression. Around him his parents are standing, or perhaps they are seated

too,” and “All of the characters, except Jack, could wear masks” (80).

9 Ironically, the struggle to secure meaning that Stein’s characters undergo is
recreated in many academic arguments, such as this one for example. The play
comments on this process and attempts to undo it. By creating a particular argument
about what the play suggests, I reproduce the very struggle it undermines. As Doctor
F austus (and deconstruction) illuminates, however, my argument, no matter how much I

seek to maintain its oneness, is unavoidably multiple.

29

WORKS CITED

Berry, Ellen. Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism.
Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1992.

Bowers, Jane Palatini. “They Watch Me as They Watch This Gertrude Stein ’s
Metadrama. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1991.

Chessman, Harriett Scott. The Public 1s Invited To Dance: Representation, The Body,
and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1989.

DeKoven, Marianne. A Dijfirent Language: Gertrude Stein ’s Experimental Writing.
The University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1983.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Parts One and Two. Adapted by Howard
Brenton from Christa Weisman’s translation. Nick Hem Books: London, 1995.

Ionesco, Eugene. Jack or the Submission. In Four Plays. Translated by Donald M.
Allen. Grove Press, Inc.: New York, 1958.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn
Burke. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1985.

Lyotard, J ean-F rancois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. by
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1984.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Penguin Books Canada: Ontario, 1969.

Ryan, Betsy Alayne. Gertrude Stein’s Theatre of the Absolute. UMI Research Press:
Ann Arbor, 1984.

Sillirnan, Ron. The New Sentence. Roof Books: Berkeley, 2003.

Spahr, Juliana. Everybody ’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity.
University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa and London, 2001.

Stein, Gertrude. Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. In Last Operas and Plays. Johns
Hopkins Press: Maryland, 1995.

---. “An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men.” In The Gertrude Stein Reader.
Cooper Square Press, 2002.

---. “Many Many Women.” In The Gertrude Stein Reader. C00per Square Press, 2002.

---. How Writing is Written. In The Gertrude Stein Reader. Cooper Square Press, 2002.

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