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.