Woolf Rant on Woolf and the Past

Right now I’m reading a book of literary criticism I mentioned awhile ago, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians by Steve Ellis (Cambridge UP, 2009), alongside a very recent publication of memoirs, letters, obituaries, etc. written by Woolf on various people she knew, including herself. The latter is called The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends (the university library has an autographed copy—not VW’s autograph, of course! No, ‘just’ the editor, S. P. Rosenbaum), published in 2007. It includes some things that have never been published before. Of these unpublished tidbits so far I’ve only read the uncensored “Memoir of Julian Bell,” written upon the untimely death of VW’s nephew, Julian Bell; “JB,” a really lovely—almost sweet—satire on Julian’s views on and writing of poetry (family satires were a thing with the Stephens/Woolfs (‘Woolves’ as they sometimes appear in family letters)/Bell boys—a strange family thing); and some “Memoir Notes” JB’s mother, Vanessa, wrote upon his death, scrawled as she lay in bed. As more unpublished bits come I’ll update here.

The satire “JB” I found especially striking: it’s full of very interesting nonsense. It reminds me of how I tried to write at one point because I couldn’t find a sentence or a sense-making group of words that expressed what I thought, only I was writing that way sincerely whereas VW parodies the practice as confusion and excess. The character VW tells the character JB to find a single “image” to express what he means instead of clumping together various descriptors, and then JB tries to figure out what an “image” (simile, metaphor) means! (What is its use; where he can find an example of one; how it’s no good because it’s not GE Moore-ish enough (“how can a thing be like anything else except the thing it is?”).) This in contrast to JB looking at a “male siskin under a microscope” in an effort to compose a poem “in the manner of Gerard Hopkins” (“The siskin’s been dead a week”):

Seepy, creaking, sweeping, with a creaking kind of beating of the penultimate dorsal jutting out femoral crepitational tail. The siskin whisking round the peeled off mouldy bottle green pear tree rivers. Well, I flatter myself that’s a pretty good poem—all true to an inch.

Then there’s a big fuss about finding an image for the siskin, which in the end is arrived at by what JB has for lunch: “The siskin lies like—like cold salt roast beef the siskin lies. My word—that does it.” It’s moments like this I feel like saying “Oh Virginia Woolf, you’re the best!” I think the interesting thing about that line “like cold salt roast beef the siskin lies” is that it sounds beautiful but is being a framed in a way that makes it silly, reaching, and untrue. This is always the interesting thing about Woolf’s satirical moments, I think, and why I would say “Oh VW you’re the best”—many of them are a mixture of a form of sympathy and ridicule. Like Samuel Johnson’s satire manqué. (One of the most embarrassing things I ever passed into a prof was a response on how I sympathised with a character called “Dick Minim” in Johnson’s nos. 60 and 61 of The Idler, and those weren’t satire manqué–so some of this sympathising could just be feeble-mindedness—could be what makes me appreciate the poem in my last post in a sincere way. I think the professor thought I was a bit of a fool, which I suppose I would have to be to attribute poetic impulses to Dick Minim!)

As I was saying earlier, I’ve also been reading Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. The effect of reading The Platform of Time and VWV together is that more than ever I’m aware of the role of heredity in Woolf’s thinking. I know I’ve thought about it before: looking inside my copy of Between the Acts where I see I was desperately at 5 a.m. or so starting to simply write words I thought were important—words I had thought of or that were in the book—and circling them, I find the word “indigenous” (Woolf). Of course, BA is quite clearly about heredity (among other things), so it’s not fair to say ‘Well I’ve thought of this before—it struck me when I was reading BA!’ In any case, heredity is pretty hard to escape with Woolf. She always talks about things in terms of ‘Stephens’ and ‘Bells’--she’s always tracing things back to Clive Bell, her sister’s husband and father of two of three of Vanessa’s children—Clive is always hunting, partying, being “caustic,” refreshingly jolly, a bit of an aristocrat. Stephens are always cerebral, graceful, serious. Then, of course, VW’s literary inheritance is inescapable: her step-aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie (?) (sister to her father’s first wife) daughter to and memorialiser of William Thackeray; the Camerons on her mother’s side and Little Holland house, where they held parties with the Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson or whoever was who’s who; strolling with Henry James when she was a kid; father reading Walter Scott to them every night of their childhood; and so on. Working from the regard and interest Woolf shows in her predecessors—familial and literary—Ellis looks at how VW compared the Victorians and the modernists; the nostalgia and admiration she had for her father’s age; and the centrality of continuity and the interaction of past and present as values in her work.

There are a couple of interesting coinages Ellis has arrived at so far: “the value of obscurity” and “the pathology of the new.” The first term is situated in VW’s description of lighting and darkness in her novels; modern writing likes to expose everything in a glaring, too-present and almost hard reality, whereas shadows in the writing of the past and in writing that is conscious of the past create interesting nuances and depth. I’ve just finished reading Ellis linking this to VW’s famous essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in which I recall (and which Ellis cites) Woolf lamenting (almost complaining, but not quite) that “the old decorums” between writer and reader have been cast aside by her generation of writers. Her generation are so eager to break things, expose them to a hard glare (ahem obscenity in Joyce’s Ulysses VW says), they don’t value what I think Woolf seems to be getting at as an idea of pleasure in the reading experience: she misses days of reading a book “in the shade” (another passage Ellis is eager and right to cite). The second term, “the pathology of the new,” is really a converse articulation of the above: something to attribute to a writer who is blind to “the value of obscurity.” That’s not what we would say in my class on earlier 20th c poetry! --Well, that’s not quite true. A lot of the class was about confronting—as opposed to dismissing—the problems of literary value and difficulty that arose in modernist poetry, problems that can be traced back to the disregard of what VW calls writerly “decorums.”

Getting back to heredity. All I really meant to post today was this: There’s a lovely (what VW would call, did call) ‘scene’ in VW’s memoir of Julian Bell that made me return to Between the Acts. It’s just after VW has angered JB by sending away his Chinese girlfriend (at the request of his mother, unbeknownst to him)—“Damned Cambridge insolence” VW calls it. JB stops being huffy and starts to look at “his map of the Channel” with VW and Vanessa (“Nessa”):

Let me see, I [VW] said. And then he was interested, & showed me the currents, & I saw the wrecks of ships; & he told me that the very deep channel in the middle was the bed of an old river which had divided the land when England & France were joined. Then we smoothed our grievance.

Compare this to a passage from Between the Acts, a novel set just before WWII breaks out (England-France-Germany). Here, a small girl (who keeps forgetting her lines) kicks off the village pageant and its panorama of British history:

So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?

Come hither for our festival (she continued)
This is a pageant, all may see
Drawn from our island history.
England am I . . .
[series of funny, slightly poignant audience interruptions and repetitions; girl needs prompting]
‘A child new born,’ Phyllis Jones continued,
Sprung from the sea
Whose billows blown by mighty storm
Cut off from France and Germany
This Isle.
. . .
Now weak and small
A child, as all may see.

VW writes the JB memoir in 1937 and conceives of the basis of BA in 1938. I think the relation between the two has something to do with VW’s implicit connection between looking at the map, the point of division between England and the Continent, and her assertion that she and JB “smoothed [their] grievance.” Not 100% sure yet what this means for BA aside from something general having to do with a very personal regard for history, the historical (geographical split and what follows, what the split engenders) as an allegory for the personal, or, in the case of the pageant, history and ontogenesis as parallel in some way—the small, weak child, orphaned of her parents, France and Germany?

Woolf and the Body

I have been thinking lately about Woolf and the body. Woolf is always thought of as being incredibly cerebral—which, no doubt, she was—but always to the point that I think there must be a popular misconception that she somehow rejects the body, does not think it important or take it seriously, just as there is the popular conception that she is somehow of a parcel with figures like T. S. Eliot, or how she must always and only be egotistical, when, really, she has one of the most sympathetic eyes ever.

Thinking about this I am of course reminded of a frequently cited passage in On Being Ill, on the body as a pane of glass:

[L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes.

It just occurred to me as I lay in bed this morning, procrastinating on my papers (actually, not wanting to face the world), that Woolf’s frequent use of metaphors of glass is connected to this. Why is it sometimes that these very obvious things take so long to process or register? I remember thinking when I first began reading Woolf how much she talked about glass; this thought was confirmed by Hermione Lee saying in her biography of Woolf that Woolf sustained a fascination for glass her whole life.

Here are some examples of glass in Woolf’s work that I think accord with the above passage:

· Near the opening of Orlando, when we are getting our semi-satirical introductory portrait of him (how straight or rather how complex do we read Woolf when she says that O’s face “was lit solely by the sun itself”?):

Hi His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the windowsill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself.

· From The Waves (alright, there are way way way too many references to glass here to record—which makes sense since this novel is all-out preoccupied with the self—so here’s a random sample):

The pigeon rose. I jumped up and ran after the words that trailed like the dangling string from an air ball, up and up, from branch to branch escaping. Then like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting down the bag of flour I thought, Life stands round me like a glass round the imprisoned reed.

(I think one of the possible referents for the reed here may be Syrinx, the nymph Pan pursues, because the speaker is Bernard, the artist/writer figure. The story goes: Syrinx turns into a reed, and Pan, not knowing which reed she is, chops off a few them and makes his reed pipe which he then plays. Syrinx becomes an instrument (the implications of which we recently explored in my Brownings class, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument”). This reed analogy makes Woolf’s metaphor all the more complex—a reed trapped inside a glass? Vessel inside vessel?)

· The famous dinner-cum-work-of-art in To the Lighthouse (and this interacts interestingly with the quotation of Orlando—the relation of light and glass becomes an interesting question that probably also has to do with the relation of the self to artistic inspiration and works):

Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.

One should remember, too, how Woolf might connect glass with mirrors or the looking-glass; mirrors also appear everywhere in her work, though mostly as they do in other authors’ works, as vehicles for musing on self-construction.

Another thing that struck me as I lay in bed was that Robert Frost uses glass in “After Apple-Picking” as Woolf does in On Being Ill. Not that this is such a great coincidence or that Woolf is the only author who’s ever thought up the metaphor.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

Next time: Scenes from Hell in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book.

Aurora Leigh

Before I talk about Aurora Leigh, here’s the second paragraph of Woolf’s essay “Aurora Leigh” (read aloud in my Brownings class yesterday, said to be FAMOUS).  Keep in mind that Woolf is writing from the literary perspective of 1932.

 . . . fate has not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer.  Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place.  One has only to compare her reputation with Christina Rossetti’s to trace her decline.  Christina Rossetti mounts irresistibly to the first place among English women poets.  Elizabeth, so much more loudly applauded during her lifetime, falls farther and farther behind.  The primers dismiss her with contumely.  Her importance, they say, “has now become merely historical.  Neither education nor association with her husband ever succeeded in teaching her the value of words and a sense of form.”  In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters, where, in company with Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.

Bangs the crockery!  I can only picture EBB with her long dark hair and some cumbersome black gown heavily shifting her way through a narrow passage between kitchen tables in a dark old kitchen taking pans—I know, VW says crockery—and hitting the sides of the tables with the dullness of church bells or dinner calls and maybe also grunting!  And the peas! 

This does remind me of a passage in Orlando where an unnamed writer who will never be named but is simply known to be Shakespeare writes in Orlando’s estate kitchen.

So let’s be serious.

 

This week in my Brownings seminar we’re reading EBB’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh, something with which EBB wanted to “touch this everyday life of our age” (this in a letter we’ve looked at in the back of our Norton edition, written to Mary Mitford on 30 December 1844).  So, along with references to the Industrial Revolution and other modernizations of poetic subject matter, EBB addresses the Woman Question and the Socialist Question—titles, our professor has told us, that are respectively used to refer to Victorian debates surrounding women’s rights or the growing class divide and poverty in industrial England.  Romney, Aurora’s cousin, speaks for a kind of approach to social discontent and poverty that is, as a class member pointed out, very much in the vein of how we think of utilitarianism (though this is anachronistic, we were told; utilitarianism came after the publication of AL and EBB is thinking more specifically of Continental social theorists such as Charles François-Marie Fourier).  In a very interesting way, in Book II EBB has Aurora address Romney’s social zealotry and her struggle to be taken seriously as a woman writing through the Romantic idea of the individual: finding the universal in individual things, as Romantic poets do, means rejecting what are labelled as mathematical mass-scale social solutions, solutions which ignore the importance of sympathetic individual connections or specific circumstances in helping others.  As for the Woman Question, the Romantic Individual is taken up as a model for the fulfillment of the individual’s abilities and aspirations, regardless of sex; in refusing her cousin’s marriage proposal, Aurora answers                                             

  Whoever says

To a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’

Will get fair answers if work and love,

Being good themselves, are good for her—the best

She was born for.  (2.439-43)

 

Anyhoo, this is all by way of leading up to what this post is really going to consist of (because it hasn't begun yet), my response on AL.  I'm posting the response because I haven’t been reading or thinking much about books that aren’t class-assigned.  And because the response is very much like something I would write here.  Though a little warning if you proceed: the response sounds somewhat confused in the paragraph about spaces.  My meaning can be worked out if you put in a little more effort that you should have to; I was writing at 5 in the morning.

 

. . . I stooped

And lifted the soiled garland from the earth,

And set it on my head as bitterly

As when the Spanish monarch crowned the bones

Of his dead love.  (Aurora Leigh 2.808-12)

 

Aurora crowns herself twice in Book II of Aurora Leigh.  After the first crowning, Aurora’s poetic ambitions are insulted by Romney, and her aunt casts Romney’s proposal and Aurora’s refusal in less lofty light than either did; Romney proposes out of a concern for Aurora’s material well-being and Aurora is no more than a contrary girl who resists her feelings (see 2.685-91).  Romney’s rival for Aurora, Aurora’s poetry, is not transcendent and eternal, but rather made transient, and low: Aurora’s aunt imagines Aurora wanting flirtatious “running knots in eyebrows” (2.663), echoing metaphors of immature poetry—“Many . . . /Hav[ing] strung their losses on a rhyming thread,/As children, cowslips” (1.946)—or else frivolous occupation—“I [Aurora] would . . . dance/At fairs on tight-rope” (2.253-4).  Upon crowning herself a second time, Aurora’s lofty poetic crown has been dragged through the earthly, the silly, the material, and is “soiled” by “the earth” on which it fell. 

The difference between the earthly and the transcendent—or rather, the way in which they are brought to bear on one another—is a central theme surrounding the usefulness or relevance of poetry as a vocation, and is the basis of Romney’s and Aurora’s debate in Book II. The time that elapses between Aurora’s first self-crowning and her second is, I think, related to the space in which earthly and transcendent intermingle.  Aurora addresses this space elsewhere as the province of the poet: “the artist keep[s] up open roads/Betwixt the seen and unseen” (2.468-9).  There is something unbearable about the lack of such of a space, a scenario in which “every heart-beat” can be set “down there in [a] bill” (2.788).   And Aurora’s alienation from Romney is pictured as a space between “divided rocks” (2.1246); it is an unnatural space that forbids communication between Aurora’s lofty ambitions and Romney’s earthly “missionariness” (1.435), “bar[ring] . . . mutual sight and touch” (2.1247).

I think it’s possible to take the crownings in Book II, and what elapses between them, as a microcosm of the novel.  In the time that elapses between one crowning and the next—between one stage of maturity and another—Aurora is exposed to that space in which the earthly and the transcendent are made to interact or are otherwise each shown to be insufficient when taken alone.  So, leading up to the second crowning, Romney proposes that Aurora “come down” and touch individuals among the multitude of earthly suffering, saying she’ll come to find in “every woman” her “mother’s face” (2.385, 2.390): it’s difficult to distinguish Romney’s vision from his accusation that Aurora’s lofty, individualistic poetry finds “A whole life at each wound” (2.187).  It’s also difficult to reconcile Aurora’s rounded poetic vision, in which “men plant tulips upon dunghills” (2.286), with her grief for her father, up in Heaven, where she imagines “Not even [her] father[ ] look[s] from work or play” to see who “‘cries’” below—Aurora (2.740-1).

The interpretation of the spaces and crownings as elements of a bildungsroman, or a küntslerroman, can be loosely linked to a basic analysis of Aurora’s metaphor of the “Spanish monarch” (2.211).  If Aurora is both the subject and object of her self-crowning, then is she the “Spanish monarch” or “his dead love” (2.212)? Can she be both? And, if so, what part of her is to die, and what to live on to crown that dead self? This crowning can be  compared to Aurora’s writing of her life, a task which also demarcates between selves, as early on Aurora claims to write for her “better [older] self” (1.4).

                At the same time, I think the self-crowning metaphor is perhaps more rich in interpretations than what I’ve suggested.  I think it may be connected to anxieties Aurora has about assimilation and agency—whether it is she or the poets who speak through her poetry (1.890-4).  And it is in some way informed by the wonder that precedes and blinds “Analysis,” in which “Being acted on and acting seem the same” (1.968).  These passages raise questions of agency that can be seen to feed back into Romney and Aurora’s debate through the opposition between individualistic transcendence and the social interdependence of the earthly state.  But I think there’s more to be thought about when it comes to the relationship of “Analysis” to the crowning metaphor—whether the individual figuration of the Spanish king and his dead love signals an analytical separation of subject and object.  Or if, in Book II, Aurora still contains herself through her self-crowning within that wonder of poetry that “know[s]not if the forests move or we” (1.970).

 Ultimately, what I’m getting at through the crowning metaphor is perhaps simply a version of the  question of what kind of perspective—on one’s agency, principles, and vocation—Aurora gets in writing on herself. 

 

 

 

 

Some More Thoughts on The Biographer’s Tale

I didn’t make clear in my last post (on Biographer’s Tale) that Phineas is a Ph.D. student in English who quits his degree to write the biography; literary interpretation is the backdrop of this novel.  It struck me tonight that, as I was reading the novel, I had a distinct sense that, aside from the humourous pokes at literary critical models (most notably psychoanalysis), the novel’s mass scheme of analogy was making me conscious of, celebrating, and perhaps even slightly mocking my desire to draw analogy and thus find meaning—to impose literary interpretation on “‘disparate texts’”*.  It was an odd mix of feelings, as I remember it now: I was conscious of doing something I had learned—as Phineas learned to do, so far from his ‘simple’ pleasure in Lord of the Rings.  I was doing something that felt almost delusional, given the infinite extension of the resemblances being presented; there were different kinds of resemblances occurring, and connections occurring between those.  I was sort of mystically elated, both by the connections, and by a sensation of delirium, of being carried along; I felt delirious when I didn’t feel as though I were doing something wrong and nonsensical, when I didn’t feel delusional!  And, in contrast to feeling I was doing something I had learned, something constructed, you might say, I also felt I was doing something that was at times very effortless or ‘natural’—which, I think, feeds into the sense of elation and delirium. 

I’m sure Byatt intends all this querying of how we construct meaning.  In the process, she’s pointing to how we assimilate—but perhaps doubt—those things we’ve been exposed to and how they influence our receptions or readings of things: if I had a knowledge of taxonomy, or Ibsen’s life, etc., I might have been able to draw more connections than I did.  Because I’m a student of literature, I got *some* of the literary references, constructed some connections around those, and was perhaps more receptive to the novel as a comment on the act of literary interpretation and its associations.  It’s possible that Byatt takes an angle on education and assimilated knowledge.  For instance, literary interpretation in the novel is inevitably associated with literary criticism—to what extent, I’m not sure—and literary criticism is, in turn, associated with Phineas’s lack of confidence, and is juxtaposed with a validation of his adolescent, naive enchantment with Tolkien.  Reading the novel as a bildungsroman, a novel of development, Phineas’s movement into sexual relationships and self-confidence is perhaps a complex fictional working-out of the idea of literary pleasure—what kind of pleasure has traditionally been allowed in literary criticism, what has been denied, what the rules of inclusion ‘should be.’ 

The other interesting thing about taking BT as a comment on literary interpretation is thinking on how it draws forth interpretation and what this has to say about the idea of literature: this novel can seem sometimes just a series of facts, of documents, things you might pick up in the non-fiction section of your library.  And yet, given the narrative frame that surrounds these, the documents come to life and become ‘thematically unified’—they become the elements of a fictional text.  This reminds me of a statement Woolf made on biography, saying (and I paraphrase) that biography is the only true fiction.  Her comment is linked to ideas of the novel and biography as narratives that concentrate on individual lives.  But I think it can be applied in a more diffuse sense to what Byatt shows us in BT: I think there’s some real interest in facts and how they are represented inherent in interest in literature.  I’m reminded here of something my Victorian Lit. Professor said to my class, applying Thomas Carlyle to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and that is the idea that events have a “density” to them: in BT, a fact or a document has different aspects to it that connect to aspects of other facts or documents—it has dimension and density.  On top of that, there’s the voice in which the fact or document is communicated, and how that affects what connections we make. 

As a minor note, all of this self-conscious literary interpretation makes me think of a Nabokov story called “Signs and Symbols.”  I’ll quote an essential bit here as a taste; you might notice the interesting, permutative, and perhaps darkly humorous reference to pathetic fallacy (descriptions of weather, landscape, etc. that reflect a protagonist’s state of mind).  This passage features the deranged (unnamed?) son:

The system of his delusions had been the subject of a paper in scientific monthly . . . “Referential Mania,” Herman Brink had called it.  In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.  He excludes real people from the conspiracy—because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men.  Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.  His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees.  Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept.  Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.  (599; The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Vintage International , 1997)

 

*See my quotation of this in the previous post for context. 

On Being Ill, Attempt #2

I found some brief quotations that will clear up what is meant by 'illness' in On Being Ill and in my last post, as well as how illness is connected to Woolf's idea of the poetic process. These are taken from Kate Flint's introduction to the 1992 Penguin edition of The Waves.

-"[T]he thought of death has the capacity . . . to remove distinctions between mental and physical sensations" (xxviii). Here, I think the "thought of death" is equivalent to the indifference to life Woolf describes in OBI. The loss of "distinction[ ] between mental and physical" is the state of illness Woolf describes--something with mental and physical symptoms that are indistinguishable from each other. This loss of distinction between seemingly distinct entities also has to do with Woolf's concept of identity and how the loss of self (depersonalization) is related to poetry and indifference to life.

-"Woolf makes analogies between the sense of one's body and the use of language. When one is most conscious of one's body's materiality, one is least likely to use words figuratively or speculatively" (xxx). So, when one is least conscious of one's materiality--one's physical body, when one senses its loss of distinctness from one's mental state, and from the physical bodies of others, one is in a liminal state of poetry. At the same time, Flint suggests that Woolf is conscious of the fact that, in order to give shape to such poetic liminality, one must assume a subjective position--one must insist on boundaries between oneself and others, even on boundaries within oneself. There is, then, a relationship between "creativity and possessiveneess" (xvii), of the kind of I spoke of below, in Orlando. Words can enter into the free play of poetry, rhythm, liminality, but in order for them to take on any communicable shape of thought or form they must inevitably reduce (they must choose a subject matter, then represent only one or a few aspects of it)--representation is always linked to reduction. I think this explains why the ill spring to life at the thought of "frost about their toes": they have to live, have to insist on breaking the liminal state of illness, in order to express.

-Flint says that in "The gestation of The Waves . . . [Woolf] documented her sense of its development and progress with the close, concerned attention of someone monitering a set of 'symptoms,' as she herself called them. 'I want to trace my own process,' she recorded" (xvii-xviii). The writing process is compared to illness, having symptoms; but this is just the process. In "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf talks about 'making things whole' through writing about them, about making sense out of traumatic experience through writing about it. I think perhaps the same can be said of illness and writing. The writing process is one in which things are brought to mind, like symbols, symptoms, particular markers of a painful memory. But the written product may be something more than this (it must be given shape, as I said above). So, I think illness is a state of fluid identity and therefore fluid thought--poetic imagination, and writing is something that comes out of this imagination. The Lady Waterford, sketching her husband, is engaging in something that comes out of rather than is constituted by "anarchy and newness."

On Being Ill: Ice Within and Without

I’ve just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill (Paris Press, 2002), with an introduction by Hermione Lee (Oh I love her). I left the essay sort of confused—part of the intended effect, I think. I was trying to pinpoint exactly what Woolf was trying to say about the state of being ill. Illness is sometimes pain, and it has no existing language to express it (something Woolf says explicitly, early on). It is also a state that allows the privileged ill person to perceive something like the inexorable prehistory of Between the Acts (Woolf’s posthumously published novel). The latter state, for Woolf, seems to imply or accompany the ability of the ill person to find in words their “sensual[ ]” significance (22), their poetry, before and privileged above their grounding in meanings associated with reality and the healthy, the “army of the upright” (12).

Woolf’s notion of sympathy is connected with this army. I think Woolf is implying that sympathy is reducible to a tool of evolutionary self-preservation*: in encouraging the forging of social relations, it is linked to civilizing and productivity. Outside sympathy—or opposed to it—is the absoluteness of the metaphorical frozen landscape that abides before, during, and after all life, a landscape that is described as both within the ill person (a “snowfield” (12)) and recognized by the ill person as something that exists, absolutely, truly, outside the daily wash of so-called healthy normality. So there is an idea of things as they are, ultimately and absolutely; there is the state of illness, which allows one to recognize this; and then there is illness as it allows one to access in oneself a mirror of the above idea of things, that “virgin forest” in each of us (11).

The ending of the essay, centred around the Lady Waterford, makes of the Lady a type of ill person; she goes through the pain of the loss of her husband, for which there is no language, we are reminded. But Woolf’s presentation of the lady’s day-to-day life as a matter of (literally) sketching people from the margins suggests that women (throughout history, and in Woolf’s day) are metaphorically ill people, free to imagine and observe from outside the rush of life. The Lady sits, seemingly devoted to her Lord, sketching him in the private and figuratively exposed position of his head half-hidden in a soup bowl. Another potentially devoted picture of wifely contemplation gives us a glimpse of the lady’s internal snowfield, a thought to the world after life and death: “Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think each time, what if this should be his last?” (27-8). Woolf here elaborates on something she mentions earlier, that “in [women] the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness” (10); devotion lies side by side with the anarchy and snowfields of the ill (and, Woolf implies elsewhere, of the poets).

Woolf’s configuration of poetic imagination can seem sometimes almost nihilistic in its association with death, suicide, and things beyond death, evident in this work and in others. But I think it is ultimately oriented toward transformation rather than nihilism, toward the kinds of transformations that take place when imagination—the “anarchy” of the ill—has free range. I’m thinking here of the strange carnivalesque element in Orlando, motivated by the suspended flux of the period in which the Thames is frozen over (ice! Snow!), and correspondingly characterized by Orlando’s shifting figurations of Sasha as a fox, a pineapple, an emerald, etc.

Orlando thinks of Sasha as a fox, and pursues her—wishes to possess her—as the Lord Waterford goes to hunt his fox before he is killed. There is a tension here between the poet as some kind of hunter, someone who ‘captures,’ and the poet as someone who participates in an anarchy of symbolism (the fox, the pineapple, the emerald). In a similar and somehow related way, there’s a tension between Woolf’s imperative to live—to “wriggle”—and her idea that we live for a “Heaven” that can be produced only by the poets and the ill, those people of ice and indifference to life:

The cows are driven home to be milked. Men thatch the roof. The dogs bark. The rooks, rising in a net, fall in a net upon the elm trees. The wave of life flings itself out indefatigably. It is only the recumbent [the ill] who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon the factory and engine; the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery, some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn.[**] But with the hook of life still in us we must wriggle. We cannot stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds. Even the recumbent spring up at the mere imagination of frost about the toes and stretch out to avail themselves of the universal hope—Heaven, Immortality. . . Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. (16-8)

My reading of this passage is, however, confused by "frost about the toes." Why do the ill spring to life at the thought of frost about their toes? Why do they want to live? This could all be cleared up, I think, by looking more closely at Woolf's concept of the artistic process. (For instance, frost might be at the root of the poetic process, but one must live in order to execute it . . . ). But I won't do that now.

*This statement on Woolf's idea of sympathy may itself be somewhat reductive, I think. But she does seem pretty down on sympathy in this essay.

**Flowers are elsewhere associated with nature’s indifference; the flower bursting through the ice is not the imperative to live I’m talking about.