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.