A 1931 Review of The Waves

I was excited to read a review of The Waves from when it was first published, to get a taste of the responses Woolf herself might have read from contemporaries. While I found this review by Louis Kronenberger to be in many ways insightful and congruent with my own opinions, I also disagreed with his ultimate conclusion. Kronenberger praises Woolf’s imagist poetry, even titling the article “Poetic Brilliance in the New Novel by Mrs. Woolf,” but ends with the claim that the novel is “a very far cry…from greatness.” Despite its unique form, he argues that the novel’s themes are conventional and that “it is simply a marvelous description, it is not quite vision.”

This critique functions on a distinction between form and content, with content being of primary value. However, I do not believe the two are quite as distinct as Kronenberger makes them out to be. Her form is part of the content, communicating an essence, a mood, an emotion, a state of being. Take for instance her description of Rhoda’s terror in the first section of the novel:

“The others look; they look with understanding. Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even Bernard has now begun to write. But I cannot write. I see only figures. The others are handing in their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I have no answer. The others are allowed to go. They slam the door.”

The simplicity, the step by step description of this passage, brilliantly captures the slow, steady weight of being trapped in fear, confusion and humiliation in a classroom. It immediately brought me back to my days in kindergarten, left struggling over math problems when the rest of the class had finished and gone to recess. The ability to perfectly capture such an experience, seemingly mundane though it may be, is to me a feat of greatness.

Kronenberger claims that Woolf “is not really concerned in The Waves with people, she is hardly concerned in the prosaic sense with humanity: she is only concerned with the symbols, the poetic symbols, of life--the changing seasons, day and night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth and death and change.”  When I first read this comment, I felt it to be entirely accurate, but upon further reflection I feel that while The Waves is indeed concerned with “the poetic symbols of life,” it is through these symbols that she does capture humanity. He complains that “it is always sensibility [Woolf] has, never passion; we never get, in a mystical flash, the universe.” But of course, in a novel titled The Waves, there is no flash; for Woolf, life is not a flash. We do, however, get a deeply moving and carefully paced portrait of the tides of life, a macro image of the passage of time.

Virginia Wolf: A Children's Story

I never would have expected the life of lofty, intellectual, suicidal Virginia Woolf to make a good children’s story, but Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf appears to be very sweet indeed. Inspired by Woolf’s relationship with her sister, http://kyomaclearkids.com describes the children’s story as follows:

“Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, is in a ‘wolfish’ mood – growling, howling and acting very strange. It’s a funk so fierce, the whole household feels topsy-turvy. Vanessa tries everything she can think of to cheer her up, but nothing seems to work. Then Virginia tells Vanessa about an imaginary, perfect place called Bloomsberry. Armed with an idea, Vanessa begins to paint Bloomsberry on the bedroom walls, transforming them into a beautiful garden complete with a ladder and swing ‘so that what was down could climb up.’ Before long, Virginia, too, has picked up a brush and undergoes a surprising transformation of her own.”

On Keeping a Diary

In reading an article on Woolf’s thoughts about keeping a diary, I found a few key observations that strongly resonated with my own experience. I have been keeping a daily diary and a dream journal since I was fourteen. I remember early on asking myself the same question as Woolf: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?”

On the one hand, I was concerned with how my writing would sound to relatives who might read it in the future. This is not quite so egotistical as it might sound, considering that I was inspired to start writing by the volumes of diaries and memoirs that my grandfather left behind. Having lost him to cancer when I was only three, I loved pouring over his writings as a way to get to know him, and found his adventures and ponderings highly entertaining. I was very aware of the contrast between his eloquent, organized prose and neat handwriting versus my lazy scribbles and jumbled ramblings. For a while I tried to be funny, interesting and clear, pretending that I was writing to my future grandchildren. But after less than a year of this, I went back to my earlier entries and reached the same conclusion as Woolf:

“The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”

I decided I would like it to be “something loose knit… so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind…some deep old desk…in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.” While Woolf claims that this goal must still be balanced with a “fear of becoming slack and untidy,” I no longer bothered worrying myself over sloppiness at all. To this day I enjoy looking at scribbles, added  notes and drawings in the margins of entries from years ago, retracing the ways in which my mind would wander and leap as I wrote stream of consciousness.

As someone whose self-critiques always slowed down the writing process, I also found this approach served me, like Woolf, as practice for other writing endeavors. I could write essays faster by getting them out on the page before going back to edit and organize, instead of agonizing over every sentence as I wrote. My enjoyment of my past entries also gave me confidence in creative writing, and inspired me to take classes in creative non-fiction, which I greatly enjoyed. While my style and purpose are naturally in many ways unlike the literally legend, it was somehow inspiring to find these similarities in something as intimate as a diary.

On the morbid and mistaken

Sadistik--"Virginia Woolf"

A rap piece written about Virginia—or rather, loosely inspired by her death. The artist explains on his website: “For those of you who aren’t familiar, Virginia Woolf was a very famous writer from the early 1900s who ended up committing suicide by putting rocks in her dress and walking into the ocean. I always thought this was morbidly poetic and I even found myself really inspired after reading the letter she left behind for her husband, so I decided to write a song about it.” Initially I was taken aback by his error and by the lack of thorough research (his decision to read her suicide note seems oddly flippant?), but it did prove thought-provoking for me. He does a lot of guesswork and includes imagery predicated on her walking into the ocean instead of the river: seashells, messages in bottles, even going so far as to establish the disappearing coast as the last thing she saw. I’m not especially interested in bashing him for his mistake; what does interest me is the instinct to write about a tragic event that one doesn’t really understand, or the death of a person whose full history one doesn’t know, and the afterlives of famous figures in a shared public consciousness. I think there’s a kind of cultish fascination with the suicides of artists—Sylvia Plath is, I think, another example of an artist whose fame in certain demographics is largely due to shock factor and the draw of the macabre. Their deaths precede their lives and their works, to some degree. This not a unique or surprising phenomenon by any means, but I am uncomfortable with the appropriation of someone’s moment of deepest pain as a sort of creative prompt or a curiosity for grisly enjoyment, and especially as a shorthand to evoke emotions from an audience. Normally I’m deeply interested in creative ‘recycling’ and the conversations or lineages that emerge in intertexts, but when one of the ‘texts’ is someone’s life (or death? Can someone’s death be a text distinct from their life?)—and inaccurately rendered at that—I find that to be more than a little unsettling. Are we entitled or allowed to try to creatively enter someone else’s headspace when they have occupied such a visible position in the cultural consciousness? Is there an ethics to inspiration?

Thoughts on writing and private/public creation

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/25/virginia-woolf-on-keeping-a-diary/ 

This article offers some selections from Woolf’s diaries and commentary on the mental state and creative process. A quote I liked: “Melancholy diminishes as I write. Why then don’t I write it down oftener? Well, one’s vanity forbids. I want to appear a success even to myself. Yet I don’t get to the bottom of it.” Although I have always loved writing and loved even more the idea of being a disciplined diarist with journals filled with my very own words and my life neatly organized, I have had little success in fulfilling that fantasy. I own dozens of beautiful journals given to me by well-meaning friends and family who know my interests and want to encourage me to create, but most of them are empty, or else have a few pages written in (usually torn out within a few days). I love journals and the idea of using them, but they scare me with the promise of what I could create with them. I find it infinitely easier to write my thoughts down in private blogs or other online spaces, or notebooks that are cheap and ugly and unlikely to last—the temporary reduces the threat of embarrassment. I can’t bring myself to ‘ruin’ a well-crafted notebook, even if it was created specifically to hold my mistakes. They make me feel as though my private thoughts must be polished and coherent and fully-formed from the start. And my writing is irregular, precisely because of the problem that Woolf nods to above. It is all too easy to become fixated on having a literary diary which recounts stories of your interesting and sophisticated life rather than the ordinary, mundane topics of most diaries. At that point it is no longer a diary but an exhibit, something artificial, something on display. In order for me to be able to write, certain conditions must be in place to remove that obligation to exhibition. I think all of us feel that paradox she underscores of the need to overcome emotional hurdles and stressors in order to be able to write, which is only fully possible through practice and constantly writing, constantly creating.

Flowers in the river

Of all the musical intertexts we’ve encountered this semester, I believe Patrick Wolf’s “To The Lighthouse” is my favorite. I think it handles the topic of Woolf’s death with subtlety, emotional nuance, and productive energy, and it contains some interesting references as well. It’s not a mourning song, though it very easily could have been, but rather an exhortation to live and endure in a way that I feel is respectful of her experience, and even affectionate toward her. The most moving line in the song is actually a quote, the first part of a line from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas:  “Great minds against themselves conspire/And shun the cure they most desire”, which the chorus sings as Aeneas leaves Dido to her death.  Wolf deals a lot with this idea of the burdened, melancholic creative, and when I saw his name on the syllabus, I immediately assumed that we would be listening to a song from later in his career, “The Sun Is Often Out”, which a friend once showed me (with a preface of “this is the saddest dang song in the world”, and I have to say, he wasn’t exaggerating). 

This piece is one that Wolf wrote in memory of a poet friend who took his own life, and though I don’t actually own or regularly listen to any of Wolf’s music, the lyrics are so powerful that they have stayed with me for years. It seems a bit simplistic to draw on the contextual placement in London and lines like “They’re throwing flowers in the river/where your body cold was found” as signs of Woolf’s presence, however quiet, but the repeated last lines are what I associate most with her and with the frequent but inexplicable concurrence of creative brilliance and incredible emotional suffering:

“Was your work of art so heavy

That it would not let you live?”

Freshwater

1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2012/may/23/virginia-woolf-play-bloomsbury-group

       I had no idea that Woolf ever wrote a play—why didn’t she write more? I feel as though they would be pretty excellent, although apparently this one is far from it. Freshwater is a 1935 play she wrote to be produced in her sister’s studio, a satire of her great-aunt’s circle and the social milieu in which she operated. The Bloomsbury group would often put on little skits and parodies at parties at 46 Gordon Square, which now houses a school of arts with Birkbeck, University of London. The English department faculty there held a reading of Freshwater last year, and you can find the recording on their website here.

In response to the content of the broadcast recording

I’ve really enjoyed listening to the recording of Woolf’s radio broadcast that people have posted here; there’s something very odd about finally hearing a voice you’ve only been able to imagine and guess at for years. But to go beyond the initial shock—her message is something that I have thought a lot about. She says there is no such thing as “brand new words”, that English is too old and too layered with memories for any writer or speaker to use an extant word without resurrecting all of its past or potential meanings. “Words belong to each other,” she says. Everything is linked and the methods we employ to try to organize language are insufficient. In this light, grammar isn’t much more than a nervous human bridle on language, which it can neither tame nor contain. She says, “our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is”. She makes some claims about literature and the mind and the ‘current’ generation that I’m not sure I think are productive or urgent for us to think about, but much of this broadcast seems to me to be the foundation of a literary feminism. Awareness of language is a first step toward dismantling systems of injustice, and her message about words and ownership and accountability resonates with me—that one cannot use words without invoking histories, and that we cannot make words our own, at least not without seriously engaged creative thought. 

Tangled Thread of Consciousness

The Voyage Out was my favorite Virginia Woolf novel throughout the course. Although, I have a feeling that The Waves would become my new favorite Woolf novel. I cannot say so for sure now because I have not completed it yet.

Nonetheless, The Waves has blown me away with its stream-of-consciousness. To best understand what Woolf has done, one could imagine a long thread; a thread that is so knotted and tangled and twisted that it is almost impossible to untangle. 

Because the thread is knotted, it would seem as if the thread, once untangled, would make one long thread. However, once you succeed in untangling it, you find the thread is in six perfect pieces. You realize that the coloring of each of the six pieces of thread is imperceptibly different. Each piece of thread represents its own distinctive characteristic, yet your mind pictured one whole thread – perfectly uncut.

That is how the six characters in The Waves are presented; although each character has their own individual traits and personalities, together they make up one individual; one consciousness. They are so intertwined, like pieces of thread tangled together, that it seems as though they make one single long thread. 

Woolf breaks boundaries as she creates a work of fiction that is not just complex fiction, but colorful poetry. She creates a maze of consciousness where fictional characters explore the depths of their Self, and their mind – from childhood to adolescence to adulthood – through vivid images, through nature, through expressed emotion; the stream of consciousness develops on its own a certain rhythm that is unbreakable and unlimited; exactly like a wave; a wave that keeps coming and coming; going and going. It washes over you and another one washes over you in a never ending cycle; a consciousness that is dependent on others but one that is also insistent on continuity. 

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” 

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”

“But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”

Why The Waves Might Be My Favorite

I have to admit that when I first started reading The Waves I looked at that opening page that was full of poetic language and thought it was maybe not going be one of my favorites that we have read this semester. I think the kind of style she is experimenting with is beautiful but I couldn't see how this could compare with the standards that we had read earlier in this semester that were clearly identifiable as Woolf. I was dead wrong however. The farther I get into The Waves the more I love it.

I have a sense when reading it that the dialogue and narration of the characters should be spoken in a particular way that I can't describe. The way Woolf chooses to write allows the reader to see so much more of the characters' personalities then we get to see in her other works, not that we don't get to see a lot. Somehow her style here, having the characters' thoughts and actions described by themselves and having the characters often describe their perspective on the same moment helps illustrate the story in the way that plain narration can't.

This was kind of a rant, but I just thought I would share, and am wondering if anyone else feels the same way about The Waves. To conclude, I am so glad that I have been pleasantly surprised by it!

Women with opinions, then and now

This article made me think of the conversation my groups had on the day we walked around to the five stations in class.  At the station about art and the obstacles and societal prejudices about women in writing and in visual art--and the issues that face all young people regardless of gender, such as family's attitudes and financial stability--my group talked about how Woolf grew up surrounded by a fantastic artistic community; she had opinions, and from an early age she was surrounded by people who knew had to express their own ideas.  That intellectual heritage undoubtedly had a huge effect on her work.  I don't know anyone, though, who grew up with that sort of encouragement.  We blog, or tweet, or, if we feel so inclined to try to write a novel or a volume of poetry, or some similar larger work, we have to work to seek out encouragement and mentors.  Jenna "Marbles" is part of this conversation we all take part in, taken to its extreme (she's able to more than live off the income of doing something she enjoys).

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/fashion/jenna-marbles.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

More Woolf Tumblr-ing

I noticed that Karen made a post detailing her explorations of Virginia Woolf on tumblr. I too have ventured into Woolf territory on tumblr at least a few times, and have to agree that it's an overwhelming experience seeing so many different, enthusiastic perspectives on Woolf all at once.

In the process I stumbled upon this fuckyeahvirginiawoolf tumblr dedicated to Woolf, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about it. What aggravates me most is the site's disorderly, cluttered format. It also bothers me, though, that there's even a "fuck yeah" tumblr dedicated to Woolf to begin with. Those familiar with tumblr know that throngs of people have created "fuck yeah" tumblrs on virtually every topic, even the most mundane (i.e. fuckyeah1990's or fuckyeahhiking). These other single-topic blogs are fun to browse, but most are silly,* and I feel like Woolf deserves a little more credit and dedication than do the nostalgic popculture references of the 1990's that one finds on the fuckyeah1990's tumblr. Nonetheless, I do respect whoever compiled it for bringing together some excellent quotes, manuscripts, and photos of Woolf and those who inspired her altogether on one site. If anything, the site might introduce internet browsers not familiar with Woolf to her work, albeit in a rather strange way. The library is probably a better place to start.

*note: one exception is fuckyeahexistentialism. That one is actually great.

(also, I hope my language in this post did not offend...I really didn't see a way around it!)

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”: The Hours, Internal Conflict and Controlling One’s Fate

It was hard to narrow in on one topic after watching The Hours since the whole film felt like a culmination of the Woolf pieces we’ve read this semester.  However, I felt that the concepts of internal conflict and control over one's fate were major themes in the film as well as in most of Woolf’s novels. The first line of Mrs. Dalloway is Clarissa declaring that she will buy flowers herself, an assertion of control. In The Hours, I think Julianne Moore’s character Laura had the most difficulty with falling apart and having to constantly hide it. When she almost committed suicide, I viewed that as her discovering she finally had control over something.  Whether she did or did not kill herself, she was the only one who could make that choice. Laura’s difficulties in her life were very much internalized. One moment that stood out to me was when she cries in the bathroom while talking to her husband who, despite being only a room over, remains completely ignorant of her sadness. Her life forced her to constantly hide her unhappiness, something that drove her to eventually leave her family. Although this act was a betrayal to her family, it was one way that she could gain control over her own life.

            This control that Laura initially lacks, but eventually finds is mirrored in Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf. Virginia feels like she is suffocating in the suburbs at the insistance of a doctor who could not possibly comprehend what troubles her mind. During a heated argument with Leonard, Virginia tries to make him understand that he cannot understand.  She says, “If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know.”  This notion of solitude in thought seems to be most prominent in the Virginia and Laura characters, both tormented by their isolation within themselves, and plagued by thoughts of suicide. In the end, they both achieve the control they want; Laura chose to leave her family behind, and Virginia saw suicide as her only option for an escape from a life she did not wish to live.