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."
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