morela10's Full Review: Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein’s “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” shatters the conventions of both autobiography and novel-writing, standing as a hybrid of portraiture and fiction. Stein, writing in the voice of her companion, Alice Toklas, tells the story of their life together; this twice-removed tale not only skews the concept of autobiography, but also shatters the traditions of narrative by failing to adhere to conventional grammar and style. These techniques create a challenging text that slows down the reader, producing both resistance and conscious engagement.
The concept of the book—an autobiography not written by the subject—is almost gimmicky. Obviously, in technical terms, it is not an autobiography at all, but a biography. Stein, through the title she chooses and the first-person perspective (that of Miss Toklas), makes an emphatic statement about her project, which is to capture Alice’s voice in a natural way and encapsulate her conversation and personality within the scope of Stein’s own voice. As readers, however, there is no way for us to separate the voice of Stein from the voice of Toklas, especially for those of us who have read none of Stein’s other works; the question of what is genuinely a representation of Toklas and what is instead Stein produces tension throughout the book. We cannot completely trust the mimetic structure to be true to Toklas, and we are not comfortable with this distrust.
Stein amplifies the reader’s worry by breaking the normal conventions of grammar in many places. She disdains commas in spots where most writers would unquestionably place them—for example, to set off clauses inserted into sentences: “Only the other day, Elmer announced that he had had a great triumph, he had made Captain Peter and Captain Peter is a breton admit that it was a nice war.” These departures from the stylistic norm force the reader to slow down, sort out subject and verb from appositive and object, and become physically present in the text in a way that smooth-reading narrative does not require. Often, one must literally trace the progress of the sentence across the page, pinning down first subject, then action.
Stein was well aware of the resistance these traits inspire in her readers. She once said commas were unnecessary--"the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to stop and take breath.” This explains much of Stein’s style, but understanding her motivation for punctuating so unusually does not make it more natural to read. The opposite is true, for the realization that Stein expects the reader to break the sentences for themselves sets up an obligation, and the reader feels compelled not only to sort out the grammar but to consider the different ways the sentences can be read.
Reading Stein requires a halting pace. This changes the experience of reading not only because it is frustrating, but also because it renders the words themselves more tactile; the look of the word on the paper takes on a greater importance simply by virtue of the greater time the reader spends with each individual page. Choices of capitalization and phrasing become more pivotal; for example, Stein’s tendency to leave adjectives of nationality lowercase (“english, french, german”) can be dismissed as a quirk of style, but this tendency is more confusing when the reader firsts runs into “Elizabethan”—capitalized. The discrepancy indicates that there is more to the choice than arbitrary habit; Stein must, it seems, have reason for this decision. And so we are forced to engage, in ways that would not be so crucial in a more natural narrative, since often these visual and constructive things are ignored in favor of plot and sound and description.
Stein exploits our dependence on literary conventions, breaking them in order to pull the reader out of his comfort zone and into the text itself. This mirrors the cubist art movement in which she and Toklas are involved. Toklas says of the pictures on Stein’s walls: “The pictures were so strange that one quite instinctively looked at anything rather than at them just at first…It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the kind of uneasiness one felt when one first looked at all these pictures on these walls…Now I was confused and I looked and I looked and I was confused…” Toklas’ discomfiture upon viewing these paintings is a result of the fracture of expectations; she’s used to paintings looking a certain way and to techniques working in a particular direction, and the failure of these pictures to fill that space makes her uneasy—so uneasy that she tries to avoid being faced by it too quickly.
The odd grammatical constructions sprinkled throughout the text are Stein’s answer to the then-new artistic trends. She uses such taboo items as fragments. Often, the reader is left groping about for a verb, only to realize that there is none, that Stein is describing, and doing so in the way that one might talk—only the words that signify. She doesn’t set off her dialogue with quotations, nor break paragraph consistently when the speaker changes—indeed, sometimes there is more than one speaker per sentence: “What is that, I would ask Mrs. Rogers, ah that I know nothing about, it was here when I came.” She simply fuses sentences together with commas: “Picasso very lively undertook to dance a southern spanish dance not too respectable, Gertrude Stein’s brother did the dying dance of Isadora, it was very lively, Fernande and Pablo got into a discussion about Frederic of the Lapin Agile and apaches”. All of these tendencies fall outside the rubric of traditionally acceptable writing, and yet there are compensations, for the necessity of slow reading brings such small graces to light as the alliterative (and in fact probably onomatopoeic) phrase “the dying dance of Isadora”—how lovely a construction, and how fun, once the reader gives in to the unusual style and trades in his resistance for reluctant appreciation.
Even as we are reading the story and cracking open one sentence after another (some of them present challenges to rival actual word games), we can’t forget that Stein is stepping in to fill the role of another. This superimposition again mirrors the cubist technique. We are seeing not only Toklas reflected through Stein, but Stein reflected through Toklas reflected through Stein, and in several places, Toklas reflected through Stein reflected through Toklas reflected through Stein (these last being points at which Stein speaks to or about Toklas). This works loosely like the game of Telephone—how is the reader to know how garbled the end message is? How much is the original or the “real thing” and how much is inaccuracy or fiction? There is an element of uncertainty that’s not only striking but disconcerting, just as Toklas feels about the paintings.
As the reader proceeds, he is forced to make an uneasy peace with his own inability to distinguish truth from fiction. The fact that he does not know which things really happened, what statements were actually made, and who actually wandered in and out of 27 rue de Fleurus makes him tense, as does the fact that Stein does not feel bound by his cherished traditions. The freedom with which Stein bends the rules suggests that she’s likely to feel as free to sculpt and twist the truth. The reader naturally resists; it is, after all, an “autobiography,” and it should tell what happened to Toklas. The interest, then, comes from the argument that Stein’s willingness to ignore literary conventions produces a conversational tone that could never be produced by perfect grammar and ordinary stylistic choices. Just as she is aiming to apprehend a greater convention (that of conversation) by shattering the more popular, Stein is aiming to more fully illuminate Miss Toklas by taking one step back; she is, most likely, sacrificing some truth about Alice to nail down the Truth about Alice. Her removal from Toklas has the effect of a pair of binoculars; we are not only zooming in, but focusing. In a way that Toklas could never capture Toklas, or Stein capture Stein, Stein is capable of capturing Toklas. She reaches out, grabs the reader by his figurative lapels, and forces him to engage with the text, whether he likes it or not. It is the combination of position (Gertrude Stein speaking as Alice Toklas speaking of Gertrude Stein) and voice (grammatically unusual enough to be a challenge) that throws the reader off balance—and demands that he attack the text and become an active part of the narrative.
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