Excerpt from "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Pauk K. Alkon:

Past, present, and future are reversed in the reader's encounter with the illustrations selected by Gertrude Stein for her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas1. After the table of contents there is a table of illustrations that encourages everyone to look at the pictures before they begin reading. During that initial examination, the illustrations forecast what is to be discovered in the text. Expectations are aroused by photographs showing Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door, rooms hung with paintings, Gertrude and Alice in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral, and both with a car in front of Joffre's birthplace. It is natural - although, as it turns out, not altogether correct - to assume that the accumulation of paintings will be explained, that the life lived within the rooms will be fully depicted, and that conventional narrative explanation will be provided to account for the presence of Gertrude and Alice together in such disparate settings as Venice and the French marshal's home.

  • 1. For useful comments on several pictures as well as evidence that "even the book's sixteen photographs were carefully placed in the first edition," see Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 219).

    Pauk K. Alkon, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is author of Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Among his recent articles are "Boswellian Time" and "The Historical Development of the Concept of Time." He is writing a book about time in Defoe's fiction.

    © 1975 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 4 (June 1975). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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