Liberation and the historical present: Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour

ABSTRACT This essay takes up Gertrude Stein’s war writing, her autobiographical Wars I Have Seen and later play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, in several registers. The first is Stein’s record of her experience of the war itself toward the moment of liberation of her village by American troops on 1 September 1944. For Stein, this was the “Zero Hour” of liberation and new beginning—but also the end of unfreedom and compromise with the dark history of the Vichy Regime. In her third experimental autobiography, Stein reverses the form of the “continuous present” of The Making of Americans while including a wide range of historical references and personal reflections. The resulting construction of a “historical present,” while written on a historical timeline,plays with conventional beginnings, middles, and ends. Stein’s first reflections on war associate it with developmental stages of childhood, creating a ludic and a-rational account of war that allows her to distance herself from her earlier support of Marshall Pétain. The “middles” of her narrative describe the structural framework of surviving the war and the limited means for comprehending it as a present “unreality.” With the coming of Americans, its “end,” unreality becomes real and Stein’s narrative steps into the light of freedom associated with American democracy—and a new moment of media celebrity. In this historical limelight, she writes her only “realist” play, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, based on the contradictions of living within the Occupation, a vacillation between Collaboration and Resistance projected onto her characters. Stein thus fashions an historical allegory to explain to audiences at home the complexities of Occupation from her post-Zero Hour moment of triumphant Americanism.