The Later Short Stories

Like Between the Acts, these stories definitely had a different feel to them than most of the work we've read by her. "Lappin and Lapinova" was cute, of course, but the two that really interested me were "The Legacy" and "The Jeweller." Both of these are perfect examples of the 180 degree turn her fiction has taken later in life. I mean, if we think back to "The Mark on the Wall" and "Kew Gardens," it is astonishing to see the difference in tone, theme and subject matter in these two stories; now, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed each of them tremendously--but the gulf between them is huge. "The Jeweller" for instance reminds me very much of an O. Henry-ish ironic twist at the end. "The Legacy" is almost Poe-like in its buildup of tension before the final reveal; what's not in them, however, is the experiments with the mind that we've probably, by this point, all but gotten used to seeing; in "Lappin and Lapinova" this is true as well.

I suppose there are myriad possible reasons for this. Perhaps she was doing the same thing in these short stories as she was in Between the Acts, and writing thing she knew would appeal to the common reader. Perhaps the simple fact that it was war-time and bombs were falling nightly and air raid sirens pealed through the pre-dawn sky that she wrote, shall we say, more genre pieces? Or perhaps she simply was moving in a new direction with her fiction. She'd done the experimental mind/consciousness thing, the examination of classes and gender roles thing, all the "serious business," as we could call it...perhaps these last stories were a way for her to just have a bit of fun.

I mean let's face it, these stories are fun. Which is not the same thing as lacking in meaning or emotional weight: obviously the eponymous jeweller in his story has feelings for the duchess, and his actions are torn between the overbearing portrait of his mother and what the duchess wants him to do. Likewise, an wonderful, loving relationship is poignantly examined with a metaphysical conceit in "Lappin and Lappinova." "The Legacy" deals a lot with love too...hmmm, all three of these stories have a major theme of love...interesting. I didn't even plan to go here, but Woolf's taking a rather optimistic attitude isn't she? My original point, however, was that these stories are fun and still carry all the weight of her other works.

Hey....it's criticism time! (Article 9)

So these next two I'm going to make comment on are sources I used in my essay. There wasn't a whole lot out there that really...pertained to my topic, I guess the best way to put it is. However, Julia Briggs can always be counted on as a slam-dunk, so I checked out her chapter on Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life.
     Basically, as with the other chapters in Briggs' book, the chapter focuses on the circumstances, motivations and methods of Woolf when writing Mrs. Dalloway, starting from when it was a short story entitled "Mrs. Dalloway and Bond Street" until it was formed into the classic we all know and...er, perhaps love today. Briggs' states that "Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery, and uncertainty, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction--its comedy, tragedy, love interest, its concern with secrets, marriage and death." (Briggs, 130) (As an aside, this reminded me of a quote by awesomeness-incarnate comic book writer Alan Moore, most famous for Watchmen and V for Vendetta: "Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." I think Woolf would have agreed, heh.)  Aaaaaanyways, to do this, she was going to "[relate] events through the conscious-ness of individuals..." (134) which sounds relatively easy but, as we have seen from this class alone, this is not a simple matter of thinking and writing, otherwise maybe everyone would have been doing it, even Woolf's beloved Victorian writers.
          The chapter goes through the main characters with short little analysis of each, like Clarissa's "changing consciousness" (136) and "inconsistency" (137).  I found especially interesting Briggs' relation of Woolf's process of writing Septimus, whom everyone loves. Apparently it was quite a struggle for Woolf to impart, in tangible word form, the drifty, inane nature of madness: "'The mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it.'" (Briggs, 146, quoting Woolf). This is interesting considering Woolf's own multitudinous experiences with bouts of madness--Briggs mentions that the name "Septimus" could in fact partially derive from the "seven trips into her own inner darkeness, in 1895, 1904, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1915, and...1921." (146) And of course it practically goes without saying that the stupid doctors in the novel are based on Woolf's own experiences with psychiatrists at the time. From there, the chapter goes into more of thematic side of things; madness, of course, and past desire (Walsh and Clarissa interminable affection that cannot be requitted), and same-sex love.
        It's a good chapter; of course it is, what else would it be? And I recommend it, heck any of this book, to anyone who needs historical and mental context to Woolf's writings.

Between the acts

I think the funniest line in this book that I've read so far is on page 63 (we actually discussed the bit before it in class). Woolf writes: Don't bother about the plot: the plot's nothing. It's not funny in the "ha-ha" way, but since I'm a sucker for meta-fictional conceits, I couldn't help but be amused by what amounts as Woolf literally and directly speaking to the reader, telling them what to do, in fact. Now, ostensibly it's the thought of one of the characters, but, c'mon: it's in an entirely different paragraph, it's an imperative, and it's by Woolf, who is one of the least plot-based writers I've ever read. I guess I find it funny because it reminds me of something that happened in the comic "Final Crisis," which had a lead-in series of comics called "Countdown," which are considered some of the worst trash ever published in the industry, so bad that the author of Final Crisis, which was the comic Countdown was created to, well, countdown to, included prominently on a chalkboard in one panel the sentence "Don't Worry About Countdown." Now honestly that has really nothing to do with what I'm talking about here. It's not like Woolf had some disastrous lead-in to her novels that necessitated her writing that. But, still, it gives me a chuckle because it's the exact same kind of thing, which is Woolf anticipating reader concerns and addressing them rather pointedly.

I mean, lets face it, the entire context of the quote is in a spot in the novel where things get as close to nonsensical as they do in The Waves or Jacob's Room. Which is even more jarring considering, as we talking about in class, that Between the Acts is a lot less stylized/experimental for the most part than her other works. If she was indeed reaching out for the common reader in this novel, then it would make plenty of sense for this to be, quite literally, a purely meta-fictional moment where Woolf is gently telling the common reader not to be creeped out/confused/put off or generally overwhelmed by what's going on in this stream-of-conciousness/festival play framing narrative cluster, but to just ride it out and it would all make sense in time.

On a meta-fictional note, I've always found it a little...strange to read a work of an author that has died before it was completed. Not strange in a bad way mind you, but strange like you're caught in a time warp or something. Maybe it's the idea that you're reading something that the author was working on when he died.a That can be kind of creepy, in a way; like you're reading his last thoughts? And I'm not talking about reading stuff by writers who are dead mind you, just those who died in the process of finishing a work. It also begs the question of just how done is it. It always hangs around, like an elephant in the room, no matter what stage the book was in when printed. Like, I know the foreword note says that the MS had been completed and just not formally revised, but in the end Leonard couldn't know where Virginia was going to make changes, if she was going to make changes, or how drastic they would be. Now, if anyone was in the best position to guess how close she was to being done with the thing entirely, it would be Leonard, so I give his words I bit more credence than I would, say, a publishers, but still, even he didn't know his wife's mind's inner-workings...none of us truly knows each others' minds' inner workings...which, after much circling, leads us back to the main point, which is there is always the question of accuracy in these sort of post-mortem works. Exactly how much would have been changed if the author had had the chance to see it through? I think it's an interesting question.

Craftsmanship

Did Virginia Woolf really die in 1941? Are we sure she didn't just disappear, only to resurface later in a French guise under the name Jacques Derrida? Because I tell you, this entire essay of "Craftsmanship" (broadcast?) is like reading a proto-rumination on the differance in language. Even the example she gives: "Passing Russell Square," and how those three words have many different meanings depending on how you approach them, is reminiscent of a Derridian text I read in 310, about assumptions we make about the function of language. I think Woolf really, truly, understood, before it was espoused later, the myriad intricacies of language. By no means do I think she was the only one, however I've yet to come across an author from this period, even my beloved Hemingway,who puts it in quite such perfect terminology.

I also find this statement interesting: "But they combine--they combine unconsciously together. The moment we single out and emphasize the suggestions as we have done here they become unreal..." What this, and the following argument, is tantamount is basically the explanation for every esoteric and impenetrable English class we and the rest of the populace are subject to at some point in our schooling. When we, even we, yes, English majors, decry a type of criticism or an idea put forth by this type of criticism, this is what we're railing against, the notion of unconscious understanding. My AP English Teacher, may he rest in peace, put this in no uncertain terms when I was questioning the veracity of a quasi-feminist reading about Wuthering Heights--it was something about how the dogs dragging in one of the female characters was symbolic of the male marginlization and suppression of women. I was like...yeah I don't think Bronte was going for that, and that was when he explained the idea that authors, even if they are unaware of it, can imprint on the novel an unconscious shadow of interpretation. This same thing works both ways; the reader can intuit a subconscious/unconscious interpretation that affects them even if they are unaware of it--I believe this is what Woolf speaks on here. Furthermore, I believe--and this is a personal belief, but one I am vehement about--that this unconscious understanding can be grasped from any single work of fiction, self-published, genre, forumlaic, literary or otherwise. The amount of layers might be different, but as long as the tacit standards of quality are up-kept, I believe every work of fiction has something to offer to readers, leaves some indelible and oftentimes unrecognized bend to the path of the readers' lives. Which is why oftentimes when you describe a particularly dense symbolic element to someone who may have read the same book but not had the privilege of paying 5000 dollars to take a class on it, said person's eyes will light up and they'll go "Oh yeaaaah! I see that now!" See? Cause they understood it all along. It was just unconscious.

The Waves

I think Molly Hite mentioned, or at least quoted people mentioning, that "The Waves" is one of, if not the, most ambitious work Woolf attempted. Or at least, that as the sense I got. If I was correct in getting that sense, then I would have to agree. She's really pulling out all the stops on this one. She's breaking all the rules, she's flipped structure and diction on its head, and the entire definition of "narrative" has been weighed, measured, and found wanting--at least in the conventional sense. It's just my opinion, but this has to be the most experimental work that I've read of hers, and considering that she never really shied away from the experimental, that's actually quite a feat.

For starters, Hite talks about Woolf's attempt to write this in the style of classic lyrical and epic poetry, and so far that really comes through: you can see it very clearly in the repetition of certain phrases and words (banker in Brisbane), said repetition, of course, stemming from the ancient lyrical conceit in order to help the poet easier memorize the thousands of lines he was reading. The language, too, of course, is an obvious one: everything is melodious and smeared with a thick layer of purple--fortunately, it never becomes unbearable in this novel, probably because the entire experience of reading it is so surreal that you're not really sure WHAT to think anymore. The purple prose works because Woolf hasn't confined this into the normal conventions--you, or at least I, was well aware that I was inhabiting an entire different universe than the fictional ones I was accustomed to. Everything is in speak, for starters, and there's no outside narrator to fill in the gaps--the novel relies entirely on the voices of the main characters to impart the story, to the extent that there is really a story...well, I take that back: I think the story is very present, it's just presented in a unique way.

Woolf's use of the present tense is another well-done experiment; it sort of puts the novel outside of time. The only reason we're able to parse out where the characters are in their lives are by the intermittent interjections on the path of the sun. This allows the characters to simultaneously tell and comment on the story without being bogged down with the restrictions of the universe's internal time. But, the prose is not so incomprehensible that we don't know what's going on, which is in itself a remarkable accomplishment. The whole thing seems to me a trip through the unfettered mind. It doesn't matter the individual educational level or sesquipedalian flair of the characters in real life, because "The Waves" looks through their minds outside of earthbound restraints. Its more the basic essence of the characters that is talking, rather than their actual brains, which also helps uplift the tense conceit and the fact that very little actually happens: most of what we learn about the character's lives has already taken place, and the characters are just ruminating on it, such as school, college, etc.
 

Some thoughts on "A Room of One's Own"

I wanted to go ahead and post once more on this, since we're moving on after Thursday; but his has become, quite simply, my favorite work that I've read by her, even above Orlando, which I had, up to that point, had claimed the Number 1 spot. But this is just so heartfelt, so passionate, so correct, even under her attempts to disguise it for the sake of reception and consideration, that you just can't help but get caught up in the pathos. There are several points that I want to get to here, on a variety of subjects, scattered throughout the chapters.

              First, the idea expressed in the last paragraph of chapter 3, page .56: "All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him [Shakespeare] and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare." The context of this "main idea" quote is in the section regarding how people of genius mind most what was said of them, even though they shouldn't. I think Woolf is referring to many things in this quote/section, the first, most obvious of which is self-censorship. She's sort of taking a jab at herself in this manner--it's a bit of a despondent, dreary self-admission that despite the profundity, despite the pertinence, and despite the import of what she is saying, she ultimately cannot write it down (at this point, anyway) and hope to be taken seriously; she has to consider the current and future opinions held of her. She knows if she takes the gloves off here, then most people will disregard her, no matter what she says, in the future, especially in context of the controversiality of the subject matter.  However, there's another layer to the quote, which is a motif of (and pardon the word choice, it's late and my I.Q. is plummeting by the second)--but I think the best word would be applicability--which in its iteration I am regarding was coined by JRR Tolkein. See, without Shakespeare having a clear goal in his mind of trying to get something accomplished with his writing--that is, a score to settle, a grievance, a hardship, etc...then his work contains a vaccum, exists, more a less, in a dimension unfettered by the grimy ropes of human concerns. We can't narrow the impact of Shakespeare's work, we can't dismiss it as a satire against this portion of society or a railing against that (as with Ben Jonson), we can't nail it down and make it meaningless. Rather, it can say anything and everything we want, and nothing we want. It cannot be disregarded, it cannot be ignored, it must always, always, be taken into consideration, because whatever we are arguing is of the universal, and Shakespeare, according to Woolf, is the true universal: applicable to any and everything because, due to both his craft and our lack of information about him, he has no apparent axe to grind. And that gives him a freedom rarely experienced by writers of any sort, much less female writers trying to advocate an impossible position.
                Another portion that got me thinking was on or about pg. 70--she's talking about women being, like, sequestered pretty much, in their houses, unable to experience the world at large. This appealed to me because of the notion of what a writer is, and how it's difficult for a writer to exist in isolation. A writer must be detached, but interred, completely caught up in the workings of society, and yet, somehow, simultaneously, separate, if the writer ever hopes to transcribe something that could be labeled as truth. It's interesting to think, then, how hard it was for women to become writers simply due to this fact: that they couldn't experience anything. Even the greats like Austen and the Brontes, as Woolf says, were unable to really expand their writerly visions beyond the bounds of the gardens and the kitchen table. Maybe Charlotte would have written War and Peace first if she'd been allowed to tour the battlegrounds of the hundred year's war. It makes it an interesting prospect: if Emily had been allowed to fully experience life and train on it her sharp, keen writerly eye, how different would Wuthering Heights have been? How different Jane Eyre? Or Pride and Prejudice? Would they have existed at all? Would there have been more novels by them, on a veritable host of subjects, themes, and characterizations?
       A little related is page 73: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room." I couldn't help but remember Nick Greene, our old friend from Orlando (with his cameo here, of course), and his evaluations of what constitutes good lit and bad lit. What's REALLY crazy is that this idea has not entirely disappeared in literature today--it's been effaced quite a bit, and it's very hidden, but if you look hard enough, it's still there--just very subtle. One of my mother's favorite romance authors has a blog which has a quote I think pertains to this. There was a discussion of why romance is so vehemently marginalized as a genre in literature,and the author person said something like:
        "If the guy stumbled in the door with a fifth of Jack, beats his wife to a pulp, then vomits his guts and and collapses among the puke, whiskey and broken glass shards, it's literature. But if a guy loves a woman, sleeps with her, brings her to climax and then holds her tightly afterwards, it's romance? WTF?" (WTF added by me). But you can still see the masculine/feminine dichotomy in this, unfortunately very real, trope: manly man subjugates woman, quaffs strong liquor, displays over-blown feats of power and strength, collapses because of the internal tortures ripping his soul. Wussy man shows respect to a woman and treats her as equal in bedroom--no person other than a woman would want wussy man. Must be romance.
        Like I said, it's very subtle, very understated, but the opposition is, in fact, still a reality. And that really goes nuts when you talk about pathos...we had this...intense discussion in a class I won't name the other day about a book I won't name wherein the book was being criticized for being--beach-reading. Horrors. Why was the book beach reading? Because it was too much pathos, not enough logos, not enough reason and logic. It wasn't intellectual enough. It wasn't stuffy enough. It wasn't...dare I say it...masculine, enough. The problem here was not simply that the book was considered beach reading simply because it had a lot of emotion, but that it was considered beneath the intellectual auspices of the class because of it....now I'm going off a little here, so I think I need to elaborate, that in our society, classically, emotion=female, reason=male. Reason>emotion, thus establishing a facet of our beloved hierarchies. What made this so infuriating was the fact that, in the English major, which is supposed to be breaking down hierarchies, there is a male/female hierarchy that still exists that is so cut and dried and assumed that most people don't even realize it's there. And that is the marginaliztion of certain types of reading simply because they exhibit too much emotion. Most of the class bought into it, male, female, no matter (that in itself could compose a rather circumspective essay). The point, to bring it to a close, is that in our world the dichotomy Woolf mentions is still there, that Nick Greene is still very much alive, and that, perhaps most frightening of all, it's present in the very bastions where it is supposedly being broken down.
       I earmarked pg. 80 because it's hilarious. There's really not much to say about it: it speaks for itself: "I turned the page and read...I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over the the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these--'Chloe liked Olivia...." Do not start. Do not brush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."
        lulz.
      pg. 97 offers Woolf's idea of the perfect writer's mind, which I thought was interesting. I don't necessarily buy into the whole male/female mind thing, but I do understand what she is saying. And male/female notwithstanding, it doesn't do any writer good to deny a portion of himself, whether male/female or not. Writing is about truth, in its essence, which does not happen under a guise of self-denial. You have to be balanced within yourself, understand yourself, because otherwise how could you even attempt to comprehend the myriad facts of the human soul? So the idea of an androgynous mind is appealing here, not the least of which because such a mind would, as mentioned above, have more of a panoramic view than a mind cut in two and focused on one half.
          Finally, to sum up this dissertation, I would like to focus on the last couple of pages. We discussed Woolf's anger last class, and how she had to tone it down for reasons elucidated above. But, my lord, it seeps through one these last two pages...less rage, though, more scolding. I do like how she ends with a "peroration" which, instead of being directed at how bad the men have been, chides the women on how negligent they have been. She's not buying their excuses. She's not coddling their whining. She's not accepting their protestations. And, what I like most of all, she's not oblivious to the reality of the situation. Far too often we see people be hypocrites and intentionally not see what has been done in order to harp on what's not been done. But here, Woolf puts the onus on the women. Sure, the system's still hard. Sure it's unfair. Sure, it's difficult. But there are colleges, there are means, there are doors--the reason they haven't gotten bigger, according to Woolf, is less that men are holding them shut than that women are being to lazy and derelict to go through them. They'd rather whine instead. I like how Woolf ends on a rallying cry, that the fight is their responsibility, and only they can wake Shakespeare's sister.

A Room of One's Own

This was great. Really, Woolf is awesome when she affects this more conversational tone...not that she's not awesome otherwise, but there's something less--mental, I'd say, and more soulful in A Room of One's Own than other works we've read by her. In many of the others, she's concerned with matters of the mind, but in this, I think, whether she meant it or not, she's concerned with matters of the heart, and the tone really strikes that chord.

So there's a lot to go over in just these chapters. My attention was first drawn to the story of her ersatz character not being admitted to the library. I thought this was a particularly salient moment, because I think we, nowadays, tend to misunderstand just how deep the depths of this patriarchal abyss reached. The funny thing was, it was nothing obvious. It wasn't like there were splatter-pages of spousal abuse plastered everywhere. It was in the little things, things that we don't even consider today as being of any importance whatsoever. She's not admitted to the library, not because she's not a member, not because she doesn't go to the college, but specifically because she is a woman. Wow.

And I love the talk she has about money, or the politics of money, using Mrs. Seton as a bit of a launching point. But one of my favorite quotes thusfar is when she's harping sardonically on romance: "When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed?" What drew me to this quote was its similarity to a passage from Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms (I think I acutally might have mentioned this before), where he talks about how the "old words" from before the war were eradicated by it; that quote, and this one, is just more and more affirmation of how WWI really changed everything. It's hard to put society, empire, civilization on a Victorian pedestal after such wanton destruction and the harsh realities of blood and gore and mankind have been laid before you. Likewise, I enjoyed the way she described "men's anger" at women, which is not anger at all, but a sort of inferiority complex hidden in reams of superiority. That men won't tolerate women thinking because of some childish need to be superior is simultaneously pathetic and sad--and it was interesting to see the metaphor of the mirror (men use women to make themselves twice their size)--used here in its original form (I think we mentioned in in class about To the Lighthouse.). This quote, in particular: "For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks, his fitness for life is diminished." (36) How lame of men to need to oppress women to inculcate their self-worth.

So yeah, awesome first two chapters, can't wait to read the rest.

Hey...it's criticism time! (Article 8)

Now I read that article to read this article: It's called "A Splice of Reel Life: Virginia Woolf and the Cinema," by Leslie Haskins, and believe it or not, there's surprisingly little about movies in the thing. The main thesis of the essay is Woolf's struggle with emotion and sentimentality, with the former being rather disdained by the manly-men patriarchal society of which she was embroiled--Haskins references Woolf's reading aloud of her memoir about her sexual abuse in front of her Bloomsbury coterie and the...uh...less than encouraging reactions from the (progressive?) male members....whaaaaaat?

But Woolf is not one of those manly men, and neither was it prudent for her to detach her self from emotion--or even safe: "Woolf recognized the failure to feel, that immense distance from emotion, as madness." (pg...2, I think? I got this off teh internetz). Likewise, "Because Woolf experienced 'not feeling' as inseparable from death and insanity, she challenged those aesthetics which appeared to deny or distance emotion." (pg. 2) Thus, Woolf had to find ways to be "taken seriously," as it were--that is, convey the emotions necessary in her revolutionary type of psychological writing without being to overt about it, lest no one pay her any attention. And this, finally, is where the cinema comes in. Haskins references a number of things Woolf, if not learned from the cinema, then at least saw increased potential for in her own writing, a la "[The] suggestion of visual aesthetics in which the movement of abstract shapes conveyed emotional power." Like this, Woolf "developed innovative parallel strategies with words," including "links between motion and emotion and rhythm and relation."

Haskins then goes on to focus specifically on "Time Passes," and how these techniques partially garnered from cinema make their way into that particular piece of literature; for example the "elegiac quality of time." Or of "a camera like recording narrative, the narrative 'eye' which is not an 'I' records dispassionately the scene for the viewer to complete with subjective emotion." It's pretty interesting to think of "Time Passes" this way, actually. The more you think about it, the more "Time Passes" does partially seem like something out of a montage of a movie, showing the gradual decay of a symbolic object.

Another portion of cinema that Woolf actually foresees is the use of editing as an important element of cinema... I doubt this was intentional, but as Haskins puts it: "the jarring juxtaposition of this sylistic coup [the bracketed segments in 'Time Passes'] anticipated Russian film theory's influential analysis of editing as the essential element of cinema."

Overall, it's a pretty interesting article, especially when it comes down to Woolf's fight to inject credible emotion into her works without being marginalized.

Woolf's "The Cinema"

All right, it's midnight, I'm hopped up on espresso from which I am sure to crash at any moment, and my thoughts are fluttering somewhere between coffee-induced mania and exhaustion-induced lethargy. Perfect way to talk about two articles.

The first article, which sets up the latter, is by Woolf herself. It's called "The Cinema" and its recommendable to anyone who's interesting it either literary or film theory. In it, she speaks on the weakness of the still-pretty-new form of media presentation, and, in a bit of unintentional foreshadowing, the possible strengths. More specifically--she must have just watched "Anna Karenina" when she wrote this--she talks about the cinema's tendency at the moment to limit rather than expand the interpretive quality of the story: "The eye says, 'Here is Anna Karenina.' A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls....but the brain says, 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.' For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind--her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet." Her we also see Woolf's continuing focus on the interior of the mind and its workings: more or less, she's criticizing the cinema for doing the exact same things that she was criticizing Victorian writers for in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. However, her disdain is less evident, and more encouraging: she knows it is a fledglings form. Likewise, she apparently sees potential to relate these complex emotions--her example is a black spot that emerges on the film. It turned out to be entirely by accident, but Woolf nevertheless says "[I]f a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so fair failed to find expression."

She connects what the cinema should do with, what I think, is her own view of what literature should impart; remember, Woolf's living during a time of impressionism and post-impressionism, so when she says: "Even the simplest image...presents us with impressions of moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals," she's giving us her thoughts on the power of words--and something the cinema should avoid because it simply cannot impart the same things (also a bit of pre-Derrida differance ideology, if you want to stretch it). In the end, she compares the cinema, currently, to people who stumble upon the beach to find perfect instruments, with no idea how to play them...yet they play them anyway. But she never relinquishes this tone of pontentiality, that the cinema can, or could, do things if it grew out of its box that even words couldn't do.

Orlando

We talked about how "To the Lighthouse" is probably Woolf's most perfect novel as far as structure and form goes, and I think that's true after finishing Orlando--the difference between the two is that "To the Lighthouse" maintains a uniform structure and tone--while in Orlando the conceit of the biographer is distinctly lessened as the novel goes on, until he almost disappears altogether. You can see Woolf try to keep up the pretense--she injects comments every once in a while--but in the end it appears like she drops it almost entirely...perhaps this was intentional as Orlando gets blasted more and more by THE PRESENT. And you can't exactly be a biographer of the present, can you?

The tone definitely gets more serious here...or perhaps I should say socially oriented? Woolf seems to be taking this half of the novel to examine some societal problems, specifically those of women, using Orlando as a synecdoche; the witticism are funny, like when the sailor falls off the mast because Orlando accidentally shows TWO INCHES of her calf...wow.

Not to Mention the ubiquitous Mr. Greene, who seems to possess about the same amount of uncanny lifespan as Orlando and who is, I'm almost certain, a representation of literary thought as a whole. Notice how now he thinks that Shakespeare and Marlowe are the bees' knees, while the contemporary writers are hacks. I also like how Woolf equates the literary transformation into Victorianism with the societal transformation into Victorianism--the description of the "damp" setting in is both creepy and fitting.

Hey....it's criticism time! (Article 7)

For this weeks issue, we turn to a succinct article by one Wayne Narey, entitled "Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on the Wall': An Einsteinian View of Art." Now, while we've already covered "The Mark on the Wall" a long time ago, this article does articulate a few good points about time, its relativity, and its velocity, which is what prompted the always-generous Mylene to let me have it in the first place--which also explains the fabulous margin notes, many of which are better than the actual article.

Wayne Narey main point here is t hat Woolf "offers an artistic manifesto of an emerging concept of time and perspective." (35) He then goes on to talk about how these views were possibly influenced by Albert Einstein, whose theories of relativity were becoming popular at the time. Problem being that he has no really proof of that, so mentioning Einstein's influence is rather pointless...I think Mylene sums it up best:

"Well that's just a f'in guess!"

Narey also makes the statement that "nor would I press the Einsteinian 'influence' beyond a few of her early stories." (35) To which I made my own note, which looked something like this:

".....whaaaaaaat?"


Did this guy even READ anymore Woolf? I just find this funny cause this relativistic influence is basically what I'm doing my essay on; but apparently she stopped after her first short stories. Ha, okay--this statement had the ability to undermine his credibility, but fortunately a few insightful statements redeem him.

Now a lot of the stuff he talks about centers on text in "The Mark on the Wall." Being that we've already tread that ground, I instead focused on the stuff that would apply to most of her work. For example, on 36 Neary states: "In breaking with a literary past, Woolf gives a particular emphasis to the relationship between time and perspective." This I think is very interesting, because it's one of the myriad things she's playing with in Mrs. Dalloway. The nature of the "walks" of the characters and their examinations and interpretations of objects that cross their paths--which stretches the book--in meta-time--to a four or five hour read, even though the walks don't take more than an hour, if that; not to mention the way the objects on the walks, the wandering thoughts, play with memory, which is our clearest and perhaps only manifestation of the past.

Neary goes on; he talks about Woolf creating a time "relative to the beholder" (37), and how this "separates [her art] from a fiction where time passes equally for all characters." (37)

Then we reach another interesting quote on 39. Again, it's specifically about "TMOTW," but the canonically relative portion reads as thus: "...painting a life run on emotional time rather than clock time." This is subtly, though not intrinsically, related to perspective, and again is something she puts to great effect in Mrs. Dalloway (despite not doing so after her early short stories.......whaaaaaaat?)  This idea of emotional time is interesting, especially when thinking of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, and how their emotions effect the velocity of temporality--a la when Mrs. Dalloway dwells, in the end, of Septimus death, which stretches over a certain amount of time--I'll have to read the novel again to be sure. But the time is definitely effected both meta (time taken to actually read the book) and in-universe (time that passes in the book itself) when the characters dwell on memories triggered by emotions or just emotional reactions themselves.

Neary ends with a very nice quote: "Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" proposes a new fiction, likewise necessary, in which 'everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. There is a vast upheaval of matter.'" (42) (Actually, considering most of that was a quote by Woolf, it probably should say that Woolf ends with a nice quote). But it's interesting to see how this new fiction evolves in her later stories and novels (even though she didn't use it after her early stories.............whaaaaaaaat?), specifically Mrs. Dalloway. But each plays with it in different ways. You have the slow, melodious, measured pace of "Time Passes," the impossible eddies in Orlando. Neary's article is not great, but it is good, and it has a lot of good quotes I can use in my paper many interesting points about the relationship of time and character in Woolf's writing.








..............whaaaaaaaaaaat?

The Lighthouse

Okay, this last portion of "Too the Lighthouse" is probably them most easily understood of everything by Woolf I've read...primarily, I think, because we so thoroughly deconstructed Mr. Ramsey's character that his actions in the third part hold no ambiguity. We know precisely what is going on with him and, therefore, what's going on with most of the characters. In fact, I think it's interesting that Mr. Ramsey, for all his faults, seems, ironically, to be the central figure in this entire section. Everything revolves around him: what the characters think, their reactions, their ruminations-it's almost like, meta-fictionally, Woolf is giving Mr. Ramsey exactly what he always desired, that is the unflagging attention of precisely...everyone...that's around him.

I thought the section with James was very true to life, and I would wager was a partial representation of Woolf's own feelings towards her father. The simultaneity of both hating your father and begging for his admiration is one of life's very, very, very true and hopelessly contradictory facets--well, if you have those kinds of conflicting feelings for someone. But James wants to strike his father down...wants to, in fact, stab his through the heart like a frackin' vampire...but then he entirely desires at the exact same instance that his father just affirm him, just compliment him, one time. There's something a little more poignant about this than Mr. Ramsey's desire for affirmation from Mrs. Ramsey.

Now this ending...there's something profound in it, that I haven't quite placed my finger on. It's become ridiculously obvious that the lighthouse stands for something--there's too much talk on it, what it looks like, its positioning...James' little rumination on how the lighthouse is the same ten feet away even though it looks completely different from the isle. So they reach the lighthouse, and their boat becomes lost in the haze, at the moment, more or less, that Lily finishes her painting, and Carmichael, who seems to be a stand in for some sort of Greek God, blesses the termination of the voyage, at least through Lily's eyes. What was this journey about? Why was the lighthouse so important? Why does the book end upon the completion of the journey--ten years in the making, mind you--and the last stroke upon Lily's canvas?

Hey....It's Criticism Time! Special Super-Duper "Time Passes" Edition (Article #6)

Let's take a dive into the wide wonderful world of literary technique, shall we? I read Sally Minogue's article "Was it a Vision? Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse." What Minogue deals with most prominently is the sense of juxapostion...although she uses much more fancy and thereby obfuscating terms; basically, she's concerned with Woolf's ability to enact bathos, which is a ludicrous descent from the exalted to the commonplace, or an anticlimax, according to dictionary.com anyway. What Minogue is examining her is the effect this has on "To the Lighthouse," especially the "Time Passes" portion. She focuses on the nature of the passage itself--its fleeting view of the characters at the start--two of which are going to be dead by the end of the section--and its feel of a single act despite being divided into chapters.
            As such, I'm going to through another term at you: zeugma, which is defined in-article as "a figure of speech in which words or phrases with widely differing meanings are 'yoked together' with comic effect by being syntactically dependent on the same word, often a verb." This is where I started with juxtaposition: the comic effect comes from this two widely differing ideas being spliced next to each other. For example:
      "On September 11th, 2001, hijack planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, causing widespread destruction, panic, chaos, and the deaths of thousands of people; and worst of all, the entire day I could not get that seed out of my teeth."
       Two completely unrelated things yoked together to comic effect. But Cameron, you say, this sentence is funny--we don't know why, but it is--but it's also horrifying! And I would say, yes, the horror is what exactly makes the thing funny; see, the juxtaposition is so jarring that we have an involuntary reaction to it--in this case, laughter. Minogue argues the exact same thing occurs in time passes, including the horrific nature. It functions because "Woolf [created] a fictional world of such power that the read is, and is surely intended to be, taken in by it." (289) The entire first part of the novel is a buildup, following the pattern of bathos, culminating in the truimphant dinner and Mrs. Ramsey exuberant happiness. Then we get to time passes, whichis full of some of the most beautiful wordage in the english language, and a profound emptiness. The buildup of the novel is entirely crushed; the reader is instead compelled to focus on an empty and dying house, rotting away due to neglect, in varying stages of decomposition--and intermittent between all this are the glimpses of our characters live, all horrifying, and all hilarious in their juxtaposition and tone of flippancy. As Minogue says "Here [the brackets] carry of the force of the novelist's own apparent indifferance, her 'Oh, by the way." (290). As in "Oh, by the way, Mrs. Ramsey died. Oh, by the way. Prue died. Oh, by the way, Andrew was killed." A veritable massacre takes place in "Time Passes," with the entire emotional weight of a metronome attached to it. Minogue explains the power of the brackets in this case: "The clear implication of the square bracket in all its uses in 'Time Passes' is that what passes within them is less important than what happens outside them." (290) How beautiful the house is described, wasting away. How flippantly, the deaths of three characters that have been carefully constructed in the first 150 pages. This is bathos and zeugma at its finest.
            And the result, as mentioned before, is a jarring effect, the equivalent of a slap to the face; my God, these deaths mean nothing! "Furthermore," Minogue elaborates, "the incongruity between the stumbling Mr. Ramsey--who has in any event been largely a figure of fun in "The Window"--and the tragic figure that he should cut, seems to be endorsed by the author, who leaves absolutely no room for emotion in the sentence." (291) She goes on to talk about how Mr. Ramsey gets no chance to be a tragic figure that he deserves to be (on a side note, this is ironic, considering how much he has wanted attention in the first part), and the reader, desiring to feel sympathy, is left unable and impotent. The reader loses the power to connect--the zuegma has jarred them so sufficiently that all they can do is gape and stumble around and hope to gain some footing again; and remember, Woolf does this three times!
           The reader is effectively traumatized, his world blown apart whether he realizes it or not; or, as Minogue more eloquently imparts: "In this analysis, then, To the Lighthouse can never recover from the laconic shock of 'Time Passes," its undercutting of the human, its depersonalization of what had been so fully, if fictionally, lived." (293, emphasis mine) And, further on: "Woolf has found and perfected techniques which allow a creative balance of those contradictions, making it fully representational of the uncloseable chasm between life in all is felt beauty and death, which renders it meaningless." (294) The beauty of life is found in the perfect diction making up most of "Time Passes." The death is found in the brackets--but it is the brackets that make us remember. The beauty is lost, all that's left is the death.

To the Lighthouse

First off, To the Lighthouse is definitely the most accessible of Woolf's works so far; I had little trouble understanding it, and I only had to read some paragraphs at the most two times! Although there is the possibility that I was so hyped up on caffeine while reading it that I was experience some type of preternatural focusing and mental alacrity.

Anyway, one of the biggest things I came away with after reading this first part is this sense of contradiction. EVERYONE in this novel has conflicted feelings about EVERYTHING. Mr. Ramsey's annoyed by and unable to survive without his wife, Mr. Tansley can't decide whether he wants everybody to hate him or to love him, Mrs. Ramsey can't seem to figure out WHO she is--possibly because she thinks she has to do whatever's necessary to please Mr. Ramsey, though the more she tries the more alienated Mr. Ramsey becomes, because he's so hopelessly dependent on her...whoa, circle, circle, circle, am I right?

I think it's really interesting the progress Woolf's made on the techniques of viewpoint hopping. Each person's thoughts flow into the other's so well that you don't even realize the POV has switched unless you really stop and think about it; but even then, the transition is so smooth and unfettered that it's practically poetic. She was never really bad at this, but there were times, as we know, in Jacob's room where the rapid changes were jarring, and we got lost in the novel, forgetting who was talking and who was thinking this. But in To the Lighthouse, these blips have been ironed out, so the POV hopping is nigh unnoticeable and entirely integral to the story.

I think the character of Mr. Ramsey is fascinating, personally. He wants to control his wife--but does so because he's a useless prig without her. He hates when she asserts herself--but loves it because it means she interacting with him. One of his most common phrases towards her is "Damn you," and yet he's madly in love. He doesn't like to think of her as well read, it bothers her when she shows intelligence, and yet he gets some sort of thrill from both these things. I've read that To the Lighthouse contains a lot of Woolf's own family in it; I wonder how much of these fictional parents are, in fact, truthful.

Heeeeeeeey...it's criticism time!

All right, so, I dove right in to that convenient "Approaches" book I was graced with; it's a fortunate little thing, because not only are the articles relatively short, but the writer's aren't swimming in the ether trying to explain their concepts.

The article I read is called "The Proper Stuff of Fiction: Virginia Woolf and the Meaning of the Modern," by Lecia Rosenthal. As an "approach to teaching" book, its main focus is to provide teachers with ways to run a class on "Mrs. Dalloway." Specifically, Rosenthal explicates various methods on explaining, discussing, and interpreting the unique style of modernism in Mrs. Dalloway,while reflecting on modernism importance and its contributions to modern literature. She outright states that modernism's "ostensible incoherence, obscurity, and resistance to accepted norms of comprehensibility, constitute one of [its] most enduring and important legacies." (33, emphasis mine) I find this quote interesting because of its inversion of expected norms. She's arguing that the very things people disdain modernism for, and confuse even those of us who like the style, are, in fact, its most profound and affecting attributes.

I also like how she really defines what modernism is in a concise yet functioning way. It's difficult to really get at the point of why all this stream-of-consciousness and psychology matters, but Rosenthal identifies modernism's "self-referentiality, discontinuous temporalities, refusal of discreet and reliable omniscience, and pervasive irony that privileges ambiguity over certainty." (34) Especially interesting in this quote is the ideas of discontinuous temporalities--specifically the morphing function of time in Mrs. Dalloway, and the omniscience idea, when a third-person narrator seems omniscient but is, in fact, sometimes just as wrong as the reader or the characters are.

Most of the rest of the articles deals with things already covered: she goes into Woolf's essays, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" being the forward one, and how those relate to modernism, and then ends on wondering what the "great age of literature" reference in Mrs. Brown entails, and whether or not we're living in it. Overall, it's interesting to read because by sheer necessity a teacher has to be able to sort of define and explain modernism in a palatable way, for the students to understand why everything appears fragmented and unstable. So by doing so here, Rosenthal gives some pretty good definitions and commentary on the deeper side of modernism, like what it contributed, its functions and its relevance today.

Septimus!

All right so I freaked a couple of people out when I said I had a man-crush on Septimus. But I just like the character. I think Woolf did a really good job of transcribing the effects of such a crippling but intangible mental problem. It's really hard to put something like this into words--heck freaking doctors have trouble describing what goes through a mentally ill mind--but Woolf pulls it off just as well as anyone I've ever seen. This makes sense, of course, when you remember Woolf's own battles with mental illness--it takes one to empathize with one.

I love her descriptions of Septimus' thought processes. You can tell this is a person fully believing in his own sanity while everyone around him knows something is wrong: "So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes?"  What makes this hit home is the almost detached, tranquil tone of the sentence and others like them. This isn't a person in the violent throes of passion that leads to a suicide a la Romeo and Juliet. This is a person who in their own mind is completely rational, contemplating the reasons why he should and should not kill himself. Equally disturbing is the hallucinations of transfiguring men and hellfire. Septimus feels almost like he has a God-like insight to humanity: he can sum up humanity's entire existence in the character of Mr. Holmes, whom he calls "human nature." And boy, does he hate human nature. He feels it is responsible for the terrible burden he's feeling; on that note, I think it's interesting that "Septimus" is Latin for "seven" or "seventh." It makes you wonder: seven what? The seven deadly sins of humanity, perhaps? Perhaps I'm reaching here, but I think this may be a viable reading of Septimus character. His mental trauma makes him more attuned to the sins of humanity, to its ever-burgeoning presence. Humanity presses in on him, cutting off his air, little by little; it is only when he focuses on one thing at a time that he can hand reality, as in 140-147. Even then, it's not enough.


I also feel strongly for Rezia, and I empathize with her predicament. It's difficult to deal with someone stricken with mental illness; in someways, it can be more hurtful to the people around the ill person than for the ill person himself. Rezia's torn between two desires. She has a flickering desire to just put him in a home somewhere and be done with him, but it's immediately staunched by the guilt of leaving a traumatized person to his own destruction. But what's the right decision? Should someone have to sacrifice their own sanity and life for another, especially if their little hope for recovery. Do people have to be burdened with a mindless glop of flesh lacking almost all ability of autonomy? Is that fair? But then again...what's the alternative? To stick this person somewhere and just forget about him? Isn't that the height of selfishness? Because certainly it's not the person's fault that his mind's this way; what does that make the people who decide to leave him to the dogs?

Equally accurate is Woolf's portrayal of the doctors; again, it comes as no surprise considering her own experiences, but it's still interesting to see. This doctor thinks nothing's wrong with him, he's just being silly; well, he's an idiot, so they go to Sir-what's his face. This doctor has more of a head on his shoulders, but he does little more than pull an extreme version of what the first doctor thought. More rest, more rest, more rest! Oh, and a sense of proportion. As if things could be so simplified. As Woolf wrote--and I'm paraphrasing here cause I don't remember the page--he was the type that wouldn't be satisfied until a person that went in weight six stone came out weighing twelve.

What makes this hilarious is that it's eighty years and nothing really's changed. The medicos still think the same way, except instead of rest, it's pills. Pills! Pills pills pills! Pills fix everything!Oh, you mean this pill is causing symptoms worse than the thing we were trying to fix? Well, here's another pill to fix that symptom! Oh, now that pill is causing injurious symptoms? Well here's yet another pills! Yes, Yes, guzzle your pills, twelve, thirteen, fourteen a day! Lithium depakote geodon lyrica klonopin! That'll cure you! Who needs a liver? Who needs an I.Q. over forty!? I'd almost prefer the original disorder. It's amazing how prescient Woolf is, and how well she gets to the bare root of human nature; I mean, seventy years after her death and we're still doing the same old crap that she was satirizing!

So yeah, that's why I like Septimus, cause his character is perfectly truthful, and the characters around him are perfectly truthful.

Heeeeey........It's Criticism Time!

Since we haven't finished Mrs. Dalloway yet, I thought I would check out another article on Jacob's Room. It's called "Minding the Gap: The Spaces in Jacob's Room," by Edward Bishop, and man is it interesting. It's readable, pertinent, and honestly made me think about the function of the blank spaces that we so caustically skip over in the novels we read.

Basically, it boils down to this: Bishop is making the argument that blank spaces in Jacob's Room serve a very distinct purpose in the meaning of the novel. He uses Woolf's interest in the "silence rather than...speech" (pg. 32, Woolf's quote) aspect of one of the earlier modern authors. Not to mention her interest in poetry, and the power that medium has in using the physical space of the page, i.e, where to end a line, whether to space the stanzas, etcetera. According to Bishop, Woolf "was aware o the potential of space, but [did] not use it immediately in the writing of Jacob's Room." (34). Rather, she typed the whole of the text first, and then added in the breaks as "part of the evolving shape of her novel." (34)


He then goes on and gives samples of the literally dozens of large space breaks in Jacob's Room and how they affect the text in which they are a part. The issue at play here is not just what the breaks represent, but the intentional deletion of the spaces by Harcourt and Brace, the American publishers of the novel. Bishop makes clear that there was nothing malevolent involved, and that the editors were just minimizing what to them just seemed to be random blank stretches (Woolf herself never seems to have brought up the issue), but he does put forth the idea that the deletion of the blank stretches affects the way one looks at the passages in question: whether they are separate musings or belong to a character, whether they express inner turmoil (as in one example where a four-line space is missing after Jacob sees Florinda and a man walking up Greek Street--as in a poem, the use of space here is supposed to denote that Jacob is battling out the implications of this in his mind; but the removal of the space in the American edition also removes any sign of that), and even WHO the subject of the passage is, all of which are pretty significant when you get to the level of literary criticism that we're at, where whole thesis can revolve around one word. Upon explicating another example, Bishop posits that "spatial configuration is crucial: with the gap we continue our tunnelling into the past [of the passage in question], without it we slip easily back into the unfolding present." (37)

What more I find interesting is the implications involved in understanding: we already know translating texts into other languages could cause problems, but how about minimizing the amount of line breaks? I can't remember if our edition possessed the spaces or not; but if it did not, did it make the novel more impenetrable and confusing than it should have been? It's something to think about. As Bishop says in near the end of the article: "I would argue that readers in England and America, even though they may be reading the same words, are reading very different texts."

Briggs, Jacob, and a Helping of Le Guin

Since we're finishing up our talk of Jacob's Room today, I thought it pertinent to do my second critical article on him.  I checked out the Jacob chapter of Julia's Briggs book An Inner Life, which I thought I would enjoy since it dwelt more on Woolf's writing process.
         It was surprising, then, to find that a great majority is dedicated to the historical implications and context of the novel. The very first sentence is jarring: "Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, is her protest against the First World War and the shocking impersonality of its killing machine." (84) To be quite frank, I don't know how much I can agree with that statement. I mean, to be sure, the War figures prominently in the background--but if looked at from a New Critical approach--no, no, let's take it even further. Say some schmuck picks up a copy of the novel on the whim from the library, reads it without any historical context. Would said schmuck even realize the war was featured? The death of Jacob at the end is pretty plain with a little bit of interpretation of literary legerdemain, but dates are hardly ever mention, the War doesn't even appear until the last ten pages, and then only subtly, and Jacob's death is never given detail other than the fact that it happened. Does this really constitute a "protest against the shocking impersonality of its killing machine?" I dunno, maybe. Perhaps Briggs is looking at it from the perspective of the reader-of-the-time, who would probably have the War in the background of his mind whether it's hinted at or not. Or maybe I just didn't get a portion of the novel. But I don't know...

         The main reason it's such a big deal is that this first sentence covers a great deal of the article; a large majority of it is focused on Woolf's stance on War, her actions, her beliefs about violence, etc., all in an attempt, I surmised, to encapsulate what she focused on in the novel itself. But I think such a bare-bones interpretation does little more than undo what Woolf was trying to accomplish through her new form; that is, show life in all its vagaries and intricacies--but turning Jacob's Room into a simple war elegy cut all of that out--and, in fact, is incorrect all together, or so it seems to me. I mean, if we were going to compress Jacob to its bare minimum, just from subject matter alone I'd say it's more a testimony to the oppressing power of patriarchy and how it harms both men and women...but that, too, excises a great portion of the novel. It's a lot simpler just to try not to boil down Jacob to its essence in any way; I think Vara Neverow captured Jacob well in her introduction, but lest we forget it's almost half as long as the novel it's introducing.
           I do, however, think Briggs' article gets better when she gets down to the nitty-gritty. I think one of her introductions to Jacob is a great testament to the intentions of the novel: "her hero was not to be heroic." (93) Woolf was trying to show the truth of life without all the meaningless fetters--in the post-WWI generation, this was especially necessary. One of my favorite portions of A Farewell to Arms is when Hemingway muses on how the "old words" like honor and glory had lost all significance after the war. Here, Woolf tries to take those old words out of life, too, and show it how it really is.
        The article, too, gives good insight to Woolf's conscious intentions: the "multiplying characters, many...glimpsed only momentarily, contrast with the purposeful and elaborately coincidental plot-weaving of the traditional novel..."(96) And it has a really good piece about Woolf's recognition of the need of self-censorship--especially in the realm of sex. Obviously, all the sex in the novel is implied only, and some of it is so vague that we aren't sure what's going on, i.e. the two red-faced people on the beach. And I liked the part about the "Aftermath" of the publication, especially the varied reviews--and of those, especially of Harold Bloom Mr. Bennett, whose rather arrogant dismissal of the novel comes back to bite him oh-so-hard.

              Speaking of Mr. Bennett, I wonder what he would think if he saw today that the only reason he's much remembered is that he's the guy whose vitriol inspired a classic essay which survived long after his condemnations were deemed untoward? Ah, I'm being too harsh, I'm sure he was a good guy.
               But I did like Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown the most of the essays which we read, with "How to Read a Book" rounding in second. I'll get to the former in the moment. For the latter, I just want to say, Amen! I hate when Harold Bloom critics try to use their various means of puffery to decide for us what constitutes worthwhile reading and what does not; clearly, this problem was just as present in Woolf's era. But she doesn't, however, let all books off the hook, most specifically the "fake" ones written by "fake" authors, who she condemns in typical vituperative Woolfian fashion. Also of note is this connective idea--that she asks the reader to "become" the author in a step of reading the book. My interpretation is something that I have always liked the idea of, which is a meeting of the minds between author and reader, bringing about a sort of synthesis of thought that makes reading an experience, rather than a drudgery; ones the experience is made, it is indelible, like that first trip to Disneyworld or that first makeout session; similarly, her idea of criticism, which "light[s] up and solidifies the vague ideas that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds." To take it a step further, I think all fiction does this; I think fiction puts into words our worst fears, and the things which we do not know. One of my first authors I remember reading heavily was Stephen King, (who retains his power over me to this day--it's one of the only things I really wish, is to be able to meet him). From King, before I witnessed any of this, I was introduced to the nature of true madness (The Shining), the danger of what is too good to be true (The Tommyknockers), the horror and mental scarring that comes along with the memory of atrocity (Apt Pupil), the power of childhood innocence (It),  the risks of obsession  (Misery), and the overwhelming power of the human spirit when combined in solidarity and focused on one goal (The Shining, The Stand, Cujo, etc.) What was important about all these things was, I think, not that they were in these novels, but that they solidified  these things for me, so that when I did, upon growing up, come in contact with real madness, real obsession, real atrocity, and real triumph, I was able to interpret and handle it with it damaging a sheltered psyche.
            Aaaanyway, about that other essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. It was interesting, because I was thinking about the idea of "velocity" in Woolf's work--which is becoming more and more appealing to me--and, more specifically, how it's related to time in her work. Time and its speed being, of course, one of the most ancient of foundations of Science-Fiction (or techno-fantasy), which is my favorite genre of writing. I remember reading somewhere, actually, that Woolf really enjoyed Sci-Fi. It was in the Lee biography, and it was just the barest mention of a passage--something about her enjoying the idea of a telephone with viewscreen and something. And this makes sense, as in her lifetime Sci-Fi really reached hitherto unseen heights of popularity (that most of this was pulp is beside the point).
         Anyway, time. Time has always been an obsession of Sci-Fi; Pop Quiz: what's one of the first truly sci-fi novels ever written? Ever? Yes, the Time Machine. From the beginnings of its existence, Sci-Fi and time go hand in hand. Since Woolf likes Sci-Fi, it follows that her interest in Time, and its velocity, is of an, at the very least, academic interest to her. Even in Jacob's Room, it occupies an unstated forefront, being both obviously present and completely obfuscated simultaneously. The book is supposed to describe the fleeting life of the main character---the book is only 187 pages long. Velocity is literally used as a deciding factor in length to highlight one of its myriad points. Likewise, inside the novel, the velocity hits a fevered pace and rarely slows down, save when Woolf herself, as narrator, interjects a longer paragraph. And yet most of the scenes in the novels are glimpses--like a stone skipping along the surface of Time, touching just long enough  to cause ripples, which eddy and curl into each other. Then the stone sinks and disappears forever, and like a snap of the finger, the velocity cuts to zero with the final image of a pair of shoes.
        This does have something to do with Mrs. Brown, I promise. In fact, I'll get to it right here. What does Sci-Fi and Mrs. Brown have in common? I actually recognized the name of Mrs. Brown, and the wording of some passages sounded very familiar, until it hit me, that Ursula K. Le Guin had written an essay on Mrs. Brown in her wonderful critical collection, The Language of the Night (which is so good I'm almost tempted to go out and just get the thing off Amazon, since it's out of print).
             Le Guin is one of my favorite writers, and took her place among them with surprising alacrity, seeing that I only heard of her about half a year ago or so. At her best, she a vanilla frappe on a hot day while sitting in the shade; at her worse, and that means, when her stories are barely disguised Tracts on whatever axe she has to grind, she's still like that roller coaster at the theme park that makes you sick and yet which you still want to ride again.
             In any case, her essay is entitled "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown." It was published in 1975, so just by happenstance it's dated, yet most of it's subject matter, I think, is not. She talks about whether Sci-Fi--still stuck in a critical ghetto in 1975, lest we forget--I mean, this is even before STAR WARS came out--she talks about whether sci-fi can accurately represent Mrs. Brown the way Virginia Woolf intended. On the surface, Le Guin says, Brown seems a little too round for archetypal Captains and intragalactic colonization, and Le Guin hypothesizes that Woolf herself would say that Sci-Fi would be unable to contain Mrs. Brown. Considering the Sci-Fi around before Woolf's death, one would be hard pressed to blame her. Even the best stuff--A Brave New World--had very little character, was more of a lens to possible society.
       But Sci-Fi evolves, like all art forms. So it goes from Utopia to pulp to Humanity--robots and Foundations and Asimov--but without Mrs Brown.
        But then something happens in the world of Fantasy. Something that very few saw coming and most didn't know how to interpret. An, at first, rather silly story of two short people whose entire task is to throw a wedding ring into a volcano. This, according to Le Guin, is where Mrs. Brown began to filter into Fantasy/Sci-Fi: while Frodo, himself, is not necessarily round enough to be Mrs. Brown, Frodo, Sam, Golom and Smeagol are composite enough to be her. Sci-Fi/Fantasy couldn't yet pull off a single Mrs. Brown, but it was possible for her to get in there, even through the lens of four or five characters.
           After Lord of the Rings, fantasy, and, by association, Sci-Fi experienced a sort of renaissance, where greater care was finally taken to focus on character. Le Guin sights Philip K. Dick, another of my faves, as an example. Sci-Fi had finally "figured itself out" in a way; it knew what it could do and now that it had been established, it could focus on the more difficult, portentous parts of life, such as human complexity.


         It's interesting to see this in hindsight, because if anything, Sci-Fi/Fantasy has, ironically, grown in esteem in both the eyes of critics AND the public, rather a rare thing. And the appearance of Mrs. Brown in Sci-Fi is nowadays so commonplace it's not even an event. Her name is Ender Wiggen, her name is Darth Vader, her name is Shadow, Jack Torrance, Father and Son, Bob Arctor, Arthur Dent, all of these incredible characters burned into our brains, representing a panorama of life that might, just might, make even Virginia Woolf whistle in amazement.

I think its funny--

--how Jacob Flanders is barely a character in his own novel.

Well, that's exaggerating a bit.

But not much.

I mean let's be honest, the vast majority of instances we see him is through other's eyes, and a lot of the novel is just people randomly mentioning him.

New Criticism and Kew Gardens

Something hints to me that John Oakland is a New Critical critic. I don't know what it is, the name, the subject matter, or the fact that he uses the words "unity" or "organic" or varieties of the two somewhere between 50-100 times. In fact, his entire article hinges on dispelling the belief that K.G. has "no form to it" and demonstrating the stories "harmonious, organic optimism." However, Woolf's work, I think, is designed to be disdainful of a classic new critical interpretation; the fact is, the mind is not logical, and is not unified, and is rarely even coherent except in the most broadly simplified sense--all three of these Woolf tries to put into her work, and all three make any major New Critical interpretation a difficult thing to accomplish.
         Oakland makes the effort to "fuse"--his words--the episodic structure of K.G. by demonstrating that they all share the same common elements, this in turn proving a "realization of a continuing character identification composed collectively of these moments." And he uses everything from the synthesis of man and machine to the relative basic human behavior of holding hands to demonstrate the fusion he sees in the story, thereby making it cohesive and unifying it and a bestowing upon it the New Critic's wet dream of organic unity.
      Certainly K.G.'s more inherent linearity--anything's more linear than Mark on the Wall--makes it more open to this sort of interpretation; however, I don't think Woolf's story indicates the New Critical idea of unity as much as it indicates the New Critical idea of tension, that is, juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events to create a living sort of conflict in the story that electrifies the sentence's on the page; from her, the New Critics sought to resolve this tension by finding the organic unity, but perhaps, in this case, Woolf--purposefully or unpurposefully--doesn't wish to resolve the tension between the competing facets of the story: the supposed triviality of the snail's conflict with the differing conflicts between the human characters, the bright colors of the garden filtering to the grey of the omnibuses, even those destructive points on those parasols. But the story never seems intent to unify these distinctions--instead, as we said in class, it zig-zags from one part to the next to the next to the next without any obvious separation or fluidity. If Woolf were a mathematician, she would be working with multivariable calculus instead of algrebra; the latter focuses on linearity, but the former twist and coil and fracture into a thousand different points, saved from incoherence merely by the fact that you can connect the dots--just not, I don't think, in the way that Oakland is intending.

Sketch of the Past and The Mark on the Wall

In a lot of Sketch of the Past, the emphasis is on the family—and while this might appear as a fairly obvious assertion—how can you talk about the past without heavily including your family? Answer, you can’t—it struck me quite interesting not only in the way Woolf describes her family but the reactions to them. The two deaths in her family, most heavily described, that is, are of her mother and Stella. The scene with her mother is stark and exceedingly well written—but throughout the whole thing there’s this sense of detachment, as if Woolf herself is not personally involving herself in the memory. For example, on page 19 she stoops to kiss her mother’s face, “she [had] died a moment before. Then we went upstairs into the day nursery.” There’s no emotional involvement in the scene; it reads rather like an eloquent list of event. She kisses her dead mother, and then, no contemplation involved, continues on describing the events of the day; she even says a sentence before, “I said to myself as I have often done at moment of crisis since, ‘I feel nothing whatever.’” But however detached she may feel, it lends itself to equally vivid prose, such as when she describes touching her mother’s skin later, and thinking it felt like cold iron. It’s interesting to note, because a certain amount of detachment is required to be a good writer—too much emotional involvement usually ends up in “preaching” and bogs down the work, as anyone who’s had to slog through Atlas Shrugged can attest.

            Stella’s death, too, holds this attachment. Notice how, as Woolf herself says, “sums it up”: she relates a story immediately after pertaining to Stella’s fiancé and how he feels about the whole thing, and how badly it’s torturing him—when she does speak to her own feelings in both these instances, they are in the form of representations. The first, upon her mother’s death, is the apparition of the man sitting on her bed; the second, she relates, is the dead, leafless tree outside the window during the talk with Jack Hills, which she takes as symbolic of the suffering they all felt—notice here the all, meaning including her: she relates her suffering through the lens of a metaphor in the latter case, and her pain and horror through the lens of a manifestation in the former. It makes you wonder, then, where else Virginia sheds her pain by focusing it into physical (or, at the least, visible) representations throughout her life: a lighthouse maybe? Or a garden? Or a mark on the wall?

            And speaking of A Mark on the Wall, I got some serious Seinfeld vibes. I’m not joking, I thought the story would be perfect as an episode of Seinfeld. And it’s really no surprise: the show attempted to show the hilarity in the most mundane bits of nothingness in our lives, and accordingly, this is similar to Woolf’s impression of what literature should be in her essay “Modern Fiction,” with or without the humor. “The mind,” she says on 287, “receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.” And, later, on 288, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display…?” This is, to a letter, what is happening in The Mark on the Wall. It appears Woolf is trying to capture the essence of the vacillations of the mind itself, a sort of controlled chaos where everything is up for grabs but, yet, has a definable through-line. So, then, the narrator sees The Mark on the Wall in all its mystery, but through just the silent and unseeable process of thought jumps from the mark on the wall to contemplations of  life, thought, and society all in a tumbling but careful planned trickle up a hill to a river and then a sea. And this is the same thing we do, don’t we? Absentmindedly or not, many times we see one thing, this sparks a thought, that thought sparks another thought, and on, and on, and on, until we end up considering possibilities that have nothing to do with what we were originally musing on—but at the same time—can trace a trace a pattern through these thought processes to see how we got there.

            So why doesn’t the narrator just get up and see what, exactly, the mark is? Why does she just sit there? If I may be so bold for a moment, I believe Woolf is discussing the need of mystery to encourage high thought and conception—she actually addresses the question in the very story, p. 152-153: “I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened!” Before tumbling into a spiel about life and death. But this is a rather odd statement—if she examines the mark on the wall, she wouldn’t be able to know what it was, because she wouldn’t know how it happened?.... This is simply conjecture on my part, but it looks like the narrator—and remember, since these are her thoughts, it makes sense they’re almost nonsensical—it looks like the narrator is juxtaposing what we perceive to be knowledge, and what we perceive to be ignorance; that simply because we think we understand something, doesn’t mean we do. She could examine the mark on the wall, declare it to be this, and that would finish the issue, but in doing so she limits herself to other possibilities to what it could be. By limiting herself, she cuts off the flow of consideration, of thought. The narrator declares that denotation of facts actually leads to more confusion than the connotation. Once something has happened, once we think we’ve learned something and that is that, all we do is make ourselves more confused, with the side-effect of being completely unsure of what happened in the first place!

            No that may sound a little iffy, but don’t worry, it does to me too it’s completely understandable. But in case we you need a little more proof, check out the ending again. When does the story end? The exact second that the mystery is solved. Ah! The mark on the wall was a snail END. And ends, too, every bit of thought that the character put into determining what was the mark on the wall, and all that pontificating and consideration and pensiveness, all that high thought, turned out to be all for naught—for once the mystery is settle, there is nothing left but facts. And facts are inherently confining—which is probably the greatest irony in the history of civilization.

Conferences

       Let's sing an ode to redemption, shall we?
      I really was serious about the modernism thing, whether or not I covered it up in so much fatuous fluff. Many of the essays throughout all three of the conferences deal with Woolf and her contributions to Modernism, as well as modernism’s effect on the process and perception of writing over the past half-century or more.

            Although, I will have to say, that my favorite conference is undoubtedly the one from 2010: Woolf and the Natural World. You only have to look at the very first essay presented to understand: Woolf and the Politics of Grass. Folks, you just can’t get any better than that. What amazes me, simply from the title alone, is the dedication this woman commands from her readers, and, simultaneously, how said readers are influenced by her works in the most…well, the most unique of ways. It truly shows, then, that there is no end to the levels of interpretation of a great work; I’m not going to say there’s an infinite amount, but it’d have to be pretty close. Even once you get past the quote-unquote “regular” modes of criticism: the characters, the themes, plot, pragmatism; even after all of this, there are myriad parts of a novel that can be examined and elucidated upon, even going so far as to create a new type of criticism: I’ve certainly never seen such a focus on the horticultural aspect of any author’s works before. And take this essay, for example: “Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf.” Eco-feminism. You have to wonder how long that has been around--but it’s through novels of Woolf’s caliber that such examinations can be made; and since Woolf is one of the more famous feminists in Western history--heck, history proper--I’m sure she would be rather pleased that her books have helped, in part, to approbate and entirely new type of feminist thought.

            But I mean, let’s go back to the dedication thing for a minute. Dr. Sparks was talking the other day about her book, wherein she said something along the lines of “I went through her books and diaries and letters looking for references to gardens.” Now, it seems innocuous at first and so we kind of brush past it. But let’s look at this statement for a second: “I went through her books, diaries, and letters”……….so basically Dr. Sparks re-read, for Christ-knows how many times, all of Virginia Woolf’s novels--12 of them--as well as 4 short story collections, 2 biographies, thirteen books of essays, five volumes of diaries and six volumes of letters, all the while keeping meticulous notes and charting when and where and in what context the garden imagery came up. This signifies two things: one, that I can never be a literary critic, because my patience is the antithesis of inexhaustibility. Two, that Virginia Woolf must inspire, for some reason, a quasi-fanaticism that keeps these conferences and findings and new ways of thinking alive and well and thriving literally all over the world. I don’t say this just to stand in awe, but to suggest that, since a lot of us have at least passing fantasies of being writers, we could do worse to not only examine Woolf in a literary manner but in an authorial manner: figure out some of the things she is doing that have such far-reaching implications. Not that there’s a formula, by any means, but there must be something there that can help would-be writers spur themselves along.