Saturday, July 4, 2015

she drew a line there, in the centre



Going back to some of Woolf's earlier essays in the first Common Reader I saw her searching here and there for ways to impregnate the landscape with the weight of her ideas, which was also the weight of time, with biography as a means to parcel out time; see (I say to myself) how many autobiographical books she reads, and how she tends to detach the events from the person's method of telling them, and then how she will re-tell the same events for her own audience, and comment on the veracity or strangeness of the original teller's own telling when she compares it to the broader view that she has created out of her fertilised imagination. "He was impervious to the romance of the situations in which he found himself." (The Lives of the Obscure.)

There she is in the first essay, The Pastons and Chaucer, returning like an elastic to John Paston's grave: "the grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a tombstone," "his father’s tomb was still unmade," "the very church where her husband lay unremembered," this focus that can locate her in any other subject she decides to discuss; and later in her writing she will, again, find a physical object where the weight of some ineffable force will hang: think of the car in Mrs Dalloway with the unknown person inside, and everyone compelled to orbit around it for a moment.

How does a person describe their own life, she wonders: but the point-of-focus idea doesn't seem to have come from any of these diaries or books of letters. It appears to have evolved out of her way of storytelling. This structural device is being used as a way of parcelling out time-in-life as well as time-in-story. (Is that a good thing -- question --)

I go back to David Ireland yet again to compare their methods of approaching the Ineffable: Woolf hanging this focal point out like a hook to find that fish (not expecting to catch it, but planning for the sight of a ripple), and Ireland, who is less scientific, making his people butt their heads blindly and stupidly in the direction of Something: they don't know exactly what. Whatever it is, they can't have it, a fact that makes him savage; this savagery is absent from Woolf's civilised holistic observations. She oversees the broad reach of time but he is inflamed by the obdurate present, that will not let his people proceed to the end-point right now; and so he is more violent than her; and so the Canoe and the Prisoner can end with bursts of destruction that, in her books, are replaced by quiet gestures of reconciliation and wholeness. "With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished." (To the Lighthouse.)


11 comments:

  1. "as if she saw it clear for a second"-woolf has the ability to see outside of time. some frenchman in the 17th c. supposedly invented the concept of "progress". i believe modern man has had this idea impregnated in his brainpan; it would be interesting to do some research into how ongoing time was regarded before this idea arose. anyway, ireland seems trapped into the common perception of time as a river whereas i think woolf can stand outside the planet and the universe to assemble her reality in more of a (can't recollect the word for an italian picture composed of little tiles)melange. i get a kick out of orlando in which she mixes up the sexuality and the time periods in a sort of cosmic jumble just, apparently, to see what happens. thats one of the things i like about "lighthouse": two separate time periods illuminated from a single point, with an overlay of familiarity and change to connect them. but none of that sequential, causal untrue stuff to confuse the issue. see august john.

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  2. One thing that I haven't mentioned is the class difference between the two authors and their characters, which is one reason for the different perceptions of time in their books -- Ireland's people are lower class and poor; they work in menial jobs, they don't hold dinner parties or go to the coast for holidays, they haven't had the kind of education that would have shown them how to work their ideas about infinity into a satisfying theoretical calmness, and they're often assaulted by loud noises and distractions. The important thing, in Ireland, is not time itself, it's that they're trapped in this noisy, brutal, confusing social mush, and they don't know how to get out. It's an immediate problem, and they experience it urgently. Woolf takes excursions into that kind of mindset (eg, "ugly, commonplace" Miss Kilman doesn't want to have slow, spacious, mind-enhancing thoughts about Mrs Dalloway, she wants to smash her, "ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees") but she doesn't live there.

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  3. good point. i sometimes forget that literature isn't only about ultimate truths and cosmic perceptions. your comments explain why i like trollope without really knowing why. just another picture of the world, explicating the problems and troubles of ordinary persons. hmmm. i guess i don't think about that enough. tx.

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  4. I'm still trying to sort this out for myself, really. I think the primary difference between them is their feeling for despair: Ireland is despairing, Woolf isn't. The transcendent moments in Ireland aren't connected to the non-transcendent moments. You surface out of the confusion briefly and then you plunge back. The confusion doesn't change. In Woolf, those moments help to illuminate the rest. There's a sense of compensation; ordinary life isn't bad; it's all connected. But if Ireland wrote with that same Woolfian interconnectivenss it might diminish the despair and uselessness that he wants to show you.

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  5. i'm currently a few pages into THE WAVE, by woolf. at first impression it seems like she's trying to create waves in the words themselves; they kind of flow up and down and back and forth. some authors, especially modern ones, don't seem to kmow the difference between the two; or maybe, because the frames of reference are practically infinite, they just see things differently. once again, i realize that every mind is a universe in itself; we all live in our own and interspecies communication might well refer to a conversation between two persons. i think maybe woolf was a bit scared of this?

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    1. I don't know. There's plenty of evidence that she believed that any communication between people was going to be incomplete on both sides, but I'm not sure that it means she was scared of it. I haven't read The Waves in a while, but I don't remember her suggesting in her other books that people should be angry at conversations for being imperfect, or that they should be frightened of them and stay away from them. Obviously the incompleteness intrigued her because she wrote about it again and again -- more than that I'm not sure.

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  6. i get the feeling a lot of WAVES is autobiographical. several of the characters can't or won't communicate, mainly due to their extremely intense personal visons/perspectives. i'm also tempted to connect the title with physics- the argument as to whether light was a particle or a wave, which was going on at that time, more or less. but if i said it seriously someone would most likely shoot me.

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    1. I don't think that's a crazy idea at all. She was interested in scientific theory. (Doing a search, I see there's a paper online called "Relativity and Quantum Theory in Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"' - might be interesting - http://zeteojournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Ettinger-FINAL-formatted-NEW.pdf )

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  7. something i didn't know. tx. finished the book, then looked up some contemporary reviews from the ny times, london times, etc., all published 1931. most of them were not complimentary and none of them gave even a hint that they knew what woolf was talking about. even when toward the end of the book, bernard started talking about the empty univers, waves in time and their effect on human lives. bernard actually goes through a mental crises leading to a sort of enlightenment, after which he abandons his personhood and creates a new personality for himself. i was entranced by this book more than i have been by any literature for a long time. that virginia was one smart cookie!

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  8. just finished reading ettinger's article. i had no idea there was a body of study relating WAVES to the quantum world. i didn't agree with everything E. said, but it was rather amazing to me. tossing a pebble into a pond, one can see many different waves bouncing off the sides. i think that was the basis for the book, coupled with what she learned from her father, leslie, who was interested in reality in that sense also. anyway, it's a fascinating business and tx for leading me in that direction. i still wonder why she killed herself; i don't think it was because of a too fluid reality, i think it was more the horror of living through two wars and seeing the destruction of her world. still thinking about whether consciousness exists or not and if not what is it... sometimes i just believe that evolution runs everything and actually is the cosmic presence that ettinger seems to indicate that it is... and the waves move on

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  9. She was smart, and she didn't relax in her own smartness, which I respect at least as much as I respect the smartness itself. You never see her stop and say, "All right, this is good enough, I've found the perfect framework for my ideas; I'll just stay here, like this." She goes on; she does something else.

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