Virginia Woolf (14 page)

“Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together … Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from bank to bank, and all fulfillment of natural desire, whether it is what the male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream—would it were true, as the rhyme hints ‘like a dream’—but duller and worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent, habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank …

“But wait! but wait! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he flys, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling, dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on—(here the barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).

“ ‘It’s a very fine boy, M’Lady’, said Mrs. Banting, the midwife, putting her first-born child into Orlando’s arms. In other words Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o’clock in the morning.”
³⁷
The influence of Joyce’s Lying-in-Hospital scene in “Ulysses” seems likely. The device of invocations is repeated, as well as the midwife’s announcement that the child is born and of the much desired sex.

“Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!”
³⁸

The contemporary post-Joyceian flair for coining new words, built upon the ruins of the old, or formed only for the association of sound, holds little interest for Virginia Woolf. She prefers the well traditioned word-images of the earlier stylists to
the revolutionary inventions of Joyce and the “Transition” writers, contributors to an experimental magazine which reached its heights in 1927-28. Only once does she imitate them and then so archly that her “Rattigan Glumphoboo” appears as jocular contemporary satire. Orlando, telegraphing to her husband in an excitement of almost mad incoherence, wires in the style of “Ulysses’ ” last chapter: “life literature Greene toady Rattigan Glumphoboo.”
³⁹
Omitting all verbs and adjectives, it is the associational, topical language of the subconscious, which Joyce had popularized and which Virginia Woolf defines as a “cypher language” conveying “a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity.”
⁴⁰
Satirizing this experimental writing, Virginia Woolf again annotates: “it cannot have escaped the reader’s attention that Orlando was growing up—which is not necessarily growing better—and ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’ described a very complicated spiritual state—.”
⁴¹
The stylistic time has become the present.

Not only the history of literary influences is portrayed in “Orlando” but traces of all the styles in which Virginia Woolf has composed and is yet to experiment, are suggested and developed. The romantic, imaginative, emotionally feminine writing, discerned in her first novel, is parodied in Orlando’s early style. His conversion to “plain phrases” recalls the attempted restraint of “Night and Day” where Virginia Woolf had sought to express a profundity of thought in a structural logic. “Orlando” itself, the mock biography, follows in the footsteps of Lamb and the subjective, tongue-in-their-cheek, romantic essayists. Hints of the stream-of-consciousness, explored in the later novels appear in Orlando’s constant reminiscences of the past. Impressionism is suggested in the kaleidoscopic description, the flashes of rapid completed observations. “Orlando” is thus seen not only as the final acknowledgement of Virginia Woolf’s literary influences, but as the core of her own stylistic development.

An analysis of literary influences is incomplete, almost fruitless, unless it solves the consequent problem of originality, the problem which every poet sets himself. A complete repudiation of influences is, considering Shakespeare’s borrowings, absurd. The masterful artist is known by the influences he selects, by the unwavering certainty with which he finds the influences he needs and converts them to his own use. Essentially it is the crisis of the literary apprentice, forced to determine when, for his own
identity, he must free himself from adulation. With her reverence for the great masters, Virginia Woolf faces the problem precariously. Her first two novels appear as the trial and error stage of her development, the tasting and probing. Uncertainly, she accepts and rejects both traditions and influences. This is the stage of pendulum theses and antitheses in the formation of her style. After the uncertainty, the critical struggle, comes the thankful stage where she finds herself, where she liberates herself from servility. Perceiving where her talents and her limitations lie, she can ascertain the level upon which she stands, and walk securely among her equals. Herein lies her originality, her integrity. Despite her experiments in modern forms, her writing becomes more similar in her succeeding books; the oscillation of the first two novels has passed. She does not obliterate influences; traces of the moderns, of Bergson, Proust, Joyce and T. S. Eliot are obvious. But now they are bent to serve her needs rather than to inhibit her through parasitic worship.

Although she classifies herself with the Georgian writers, the contemporaries of the reigning king, she is too deeply rooted in the romantic past to be called a strict Georgian. Her innovations are not revolutionary enough; she does not break with the past. She analyzes the Georgian rebellion against the literary convention: “Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated”
⁴²
yet she herself retains all the formulas. The Georgians, she feels, fall short because the “convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes an obstacle and an impediment.”
⁴³
Having determined for herself the weakness of contemporary literature, she seeks to evade its pitfalls by retaining the conventions of the past. She refuses to follow the herd blindly. She rejects the urge to be modern at any cost and take hand in “the smashing and the crashing … the prevailing sound of the Georgian age—rather a melancholy one if you think what melodious days there have been in the past, if you think of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats or even of Jane Austen and Thackeray and Dickens; if you think of the language, and the heights to which it can soar when free, and see the same eagle captive, bald, and croaking.”
⁴⁴

Through her own classification of herself as well as through the evolution of her literary influences, she is seen as a transition writer, a bridge between the old and the new. English literary
style, the heritage of the classic poets and prose writers, is inherent in her word-groups, her imagery, her rhythm. And in her meditations and philosophy, she is the direct off-spring of the melancholy Englanders with their love of nature and their fear of death. She marks the end of a movement, the movement of rhythmic prose which, fresh in the hands of Sir Thomas Browne, reached its summit in the nineteenth century, in Ruskin and De Quincey. But where her denouement, her culmination of the past, marks the foundation of her writing, she is still modern, sophisticatedly modern, intellectually modern. From the contemporary French Impressionists, she derives inspiration for the structure of her later novels; her speculations on time and space, are from the Bergsonian air she breathes. Yet though she abstracts phrases and casts and even trains of thought from the contemporaries, she never fully relinquishes her earlier influences. Supplemented by the moderns, the men of the classic past persist in molding her style.

And into this cleft between the past and present, she brings the unifying force of her feminine personality.

__________

¹
“The Voyage Out” p. 121.

²
Ibid. p. 121.

³
“The Voyage Out” p. 205.

⁴
“The Common Reader”: “On Not Knowing Greek” p. 59.

⁵
“Night and Day” p. 295.

⁶
Ibid. p. 323.

⁷
“The Voyage Out” p. 101.

⁸
“Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts” p. 7.

⁹
Ibid. p. 6.

¹⁰
“Orlando” p. 106.

¹¹
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 29.

¹²
“A Room of One’s Own” p. 21.

¹³
“Orlando” p. 232.

¹⁴
“A Room of One’s Own” p. 57.

¹⁵
Ibid. p. 114.

¹⁶
The Waves” p. 166.

¹⁷
Ibid. p. 41.

¹⁸
“Jacob’s Room” p. 251.

¹⁹
“A Room of One’s Own” p. 114.

²⁰
“Orlando” p. 68.

²¹
“To the Lighthouse” p. 160.

²²
“Orlando” p. 93.

²³
“Orlando” p. 93.

²⁴
Ibid. p. 68.

²⁵
“Urn-Burial” p. 115.

²⁶
“Orlando” p. 84.

²⁷
“Urn-Burial” p. 116.

²⁸
“Orlando” p. 95.

²⁹
Ibid. p. 177.

³⁰
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” p. 28.

³¹
“The Common Reader”: “Addison” p.139.

³²
“Orlando” p. 180.

³³
“Orlando” p. 113.

³⁴
“Dream-Fugue” p. 50.

³⁵
“A Room of One’s Own” p. 152.

³⁶
“Orlando” p. 227.

³⁷
“Orlando” p. 249.

³⁸
“Ulysses” p. 150.

³⁹
“Orlando” p. 241.

⁴⁰
Ibid. p. 239.

⁴¹
Ibid. p. 240.

⁴²
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” p. 25.

⁴³
Ibid. p. 25.

⁴⁴
Ibid. p. 24.

A
VARIATION OF EXPERIMENTS
, uninhibited by criticism and doubt, is ultimately liberated in Virginia Woolf, marking her completed style. Each of the succeeding novels represents a new nuance of innovation. Lyricism, feminine sensitivity, and a love of associations remain constant; the variable is the external structure which colors her lyricism but does not impede it. Denying masculine traditions as incompatible, she uses music as a vital medium in creating as a woman.

Music is the technical foundation for the short impressionistic life of a poetic romanticist, Jacob Flanders. As in orchestration, themes of life are played in “Jacob’s Room”, the theme of Jacob’s life, his mother’s life, the life of Clara, Sandra, Florinda, all the women he has loved. And blending them into harmony, is the great unifying theme of “Life” itself, the contemporary Georgian interest which replaced the “Nature” of the Romanticists and the medieval “God”.

With contrapuntal technique, sketches of the characters are given as they move in synchronic time. As though walking through a dance hall, Virginia Woolf notes down snatches of talk, which she uses in an experimental dialogue. New characters are introduced, revealed only through their fragmentary talk, while Clara, like the unifying theme in music, passes lightly in and out.

“ ‘Please’, said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost opposite the door, ‘don’t introduce me. I like to look on. The amusing thing’, she went on, addressing Mr. Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was accommodated with a chair, ‘the amusing thing about a party is to watch the people—coming and going, coming and going’.

‘Last time we met’, said Mr. Salvin, ‘was at the Farquhars. Poor lady! She has much to put up with’.

‘Doesn’t she look charming?’ exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant passed them.

‘And which of them …?’ asked Mr. Salvin, dropping his voice and speaking in quizzical tones.

‘There are so many … ’ Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at the doorway looking about for their hostess.

‘You don’t remember Elizabeth as I do’, said Mr. Salvin, ‘dancing Highland reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks her mother’s spirit. Clara is a little pale’.

‘What different people one sees here!’ said Miss Eliot.

‘Happily we are not governed by the evening papers’, said Mr. Salvin.

‘I never read them’, said Miss Eliot. ‘I know nothing about politics’, she added.

‘The piano is in tune’, said Clara, passing them, ‘but we may have to ask some one to move it for us’ ”
¹

Thus, like a music book of small completed themes, “Jacob’s Room” is built upon little paragraphs, units in themselves, reflecting the mosaic perfection Virginia Woolf beholds in life. She sees not one law, not one great unified order, but small details, exquisite morceaux, which build in their correlation a unity of a different order: a feminine unity, a feminine aspect of life. The details, the paragraphs, stand at satisfactory rest in themselves, and in tone and context are harmoniously related to each other. With the technique of a musical rondeau, ending with the first strain repeated, the mood is induced. Sounded in the opening sentence, the theme is developed and varied until it reaches its climax, strangely deeper through the associations it has accumulated. In such meditated structure, Jacob’s conflict between his love for a prostitute and his love for philosophic study, is described.