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.