Tuesday, July 21, 2015
leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver
I think over Powys' criticism of Woolf on the grounds of "Life Itself" and wonder if it is a) legitimate because the gap between Life Itself and life-in-fiction is a phenomenon that she often considers on the page and here is someone willing to situate her on one side or the other, but b) illegitimate because I have already seen her decide that she is making art, not life.
It would be intellectually dishonest of her to pretend that a book is "Life Itself;" that's her belief.
But tantalised, she's tantalised. "Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers," says Bernard at the end of The Waves; "Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story –" she'll concede that perfect possession of life is impossible: "Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers." Or: "Out rush a bristle of horned suspicions, horror, horror, horror — but what is the use of painfully elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan?"
The question that she asks of herself is, how should life be misrepresented?
She has already judged Edgeworth, who can't achieve the detachment that she wants from him.* She is uneasy in the face of Margaret Cavendish, "diffused, uneasy, contorted," as well as charmed by her; in the Cavendish essay she comes back and back around the other writer's inability to measure her capacities and be guided by them. "It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that was to oust all others." So there needs to be cool estimation and measurement ...
She invents other modes of symmetry or patterning. She reasserts order. It will be her own order, which she has made, in order to measure and assess and weigh, and also to contain the awareness that measurement is not possible: "How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately."
When she is dissatisfied with Richardson's Tunnel she will say that the other author does not measure and asses, "sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off, unrelated and unquestioned;" but Richardson is willing to risk the Cavendish judgement where Woolf is not; she will write from "the untilled field of her own consciousness." She will risk not being witty. A reviewer in Full Stop who has read Viviane Forrester's "strange little book about Virginia Woolf," says that aesthetes prefer wit, therefore literature will be judged for its lightness – Richardson will not do it – and she will drive herself against the sensible realisations of Woolf, about art and life – she will go into the tantalisation – like someone driving their boat down the whirlpool plughole –
* I think he's more aware of romance than she says.
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i've got some cavendish but i haven't read it. someday... anyhow, all this sounds like people trying to discover what's real. how to use a nonspecific set of phonetics to relate to what their other senses inform them of. poetry just uses the sounds as they identify specific phenomena to communicate feelgood experiences to other humans. nobody can determine what's real. there are 7 billion realities on this planet. not even physicists know what's really going on in this region of space, on this little ball of mud circling a small star on the edge of a medium sized galaxy. the result of researches i've conducted into this very question, lay though they may be, have indicated that the laws of physics and chemistry, so far as it can be determined, interact in such a way as to produce evolution, which in itself follows the aforesaid laws as they function on this planet in spacetime. time itself is dependent upon speed, gravity, and whatever dimensional location one happens to inhabit. it has no strictly universal application. hence(he says)noises made by the upper orifice of this particular species doesn't or can't do much to effect "reality". and the understanding of that is limited by our senses which don't see very much in the range of vibrations to which they are restricted. boy, enough of that. so language is like music; pretty but meaningful only in an individual context. what do you think?
ReplyDeleteI think it would depend on what you mean by "meaningful." If you mean that the words people say have their fullest meaning only within that person (and not in the ears of anybody listening, because they don't know the entire context and complexity of, oh, say, the word "home" when I utter it) then I wonder if they're meaningful even within that individual context, given that we don't know ourselves. (Not only do others not know the contexts of our words, we don't know them either. Either they're not meaningful at all, or they're only meaningful in a third space that none of us inhabit.)
DeleteIf "meaningful" means something more utilitarian then I think words are meaningful inside their own language-world: ie, if I speak English and you speak English and you say, "Bring me a knife to cut this bread," then I know what to do in response. More abstract words are another thing ("That work of art is sublime," "Life is tragic"), but they're not meaningless.
That's off the top of my head.
"how should life be misrepresented"
ReplyDeleteThat's good, that's quite astute, Woolf fully aware that she was only able to establish limited abstract ideas of order upon certain ideas about the world. I wonder if she was aware that her criticism was guided by her own (self-imposed and not) limitations about imagining/misrepresenting the world? I understand the impulse to dismiss as failures those modes of fiction that are not made according to my own particular (and of course therefore superior) vision, especially when I put on my critical hat.
guilty as charged
DeleteI think so, or I believe it was something she thought she ought to be aware of, even if she failed at it. She knew that lives could stunted by finances; she could describe cultural forces that were shaping people one way or another; she not only reviewed but she asked herself about the invisible influences that were pushing on the opinions in her reviews. "I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom" (Professions for Women.) She says that she had to be ruthless so that she could work her way past "falsehood," and this is a point in the Women speech where she could have wrapped up the lesson and stopped forever on a high note after a few words of self-congratulation re. the conquering of that obstacle, and yet she doesn't stop; she keeps going. "In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is 'herself'?" So on she goes. She is interested in the psychology of things.
DeleteAnd the strength of her reviews, as reviews, is their way of walking around their own opinions and viewing them with a but. Cavendish annoys Woolf because she is ignorant and diffuse, but Woolf is not going to let herself off the hook with an easy dismissal. The image that she draws of her is too multiply-angled to be contained by the crueller words that the reviewer herself uses. (She often encourages books to escape the opinions that she has of them.) Even at the end of the first paragraph she's telling you that Cavendish should not be judged by whatever brief conclusion can be drawn from one or two of her books, or from Lamb, or from the criticism in Pepys.
"Even the curious student, inspired by the words of Lamb, quails before the mass of her mausoleum, peers in, looks about him, and hurries out again, shutting the door. But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines of a memorable figure."
-- and the final paragraph is the image of Cavendish passing by in a carriage, a mysterious personality, "something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing," driving away, not really touched.
the psychological state wherein one is aware of an inner critic commenting on one's own ideas is fairly common, i believe. i've felt that woolf takes it one step farther, sometimes, experiencing an inner critic that is commenting on her inner critic. i have read that she had mental problems, but she might have been merely reacting to the society around her. she had self knowledge of her problems, though; i just read recently that she was convinced shortly before her suicide that she was going into yet another depression, and wrote or communicate d to leonard that his absence on a trip might be okay, as it would prevent them from having both to deal with her difficulty. i got the impression that one of the bones of contention between the two was that leonard tended to try too hard to solve virginia's problems. anyway, that last episode of darkness supposedly was material in her determination to kill herself. she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the river.
DeleteAnd the opening paragraphs of her 'Evenings Over Sussex' essay are a great example of an author writing through her inner critic, and exploiting it -- she puts it to work -- "But relinquish, I said (it is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical), relinquish these impossible aspirations ..."
DeletePerhaps it is only my strange mind, but I see allusive connections to Shakespeare's _Macbeth_. In any case, I have just discovered your very interesting blog, and I hope to return often in the future. In the meantime, I am busy getting my new blog (Shakespeare in the Library) off the ground. Best wishes from a fellow reader.
ReplyDeleteCould you explain the Macbeth connection? (I've wanted to post on Scott's blog for at least a day now to say that one of his posts on Thucydides has made "Bring Him Home" from Les Mis run through my head whenever I see it.)
Delete