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Home , A Sketch of the Past, Moments of Being

Angeliki Spiropoulou The Modern Work of Art and the Spatialisation of Time: Painting in the Novel

This paper discusses how the modern work of art, and particularly the novel, reflects the process of spatialisation of time diagnosed as distinctive of modernity by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It focuses on a special instance of this process with reference to the thematisation of painting in ’s (1927). While most modernist fiction, and especially Woolf’s, exhibits a marked concern with space, this novel is particular: by taking up the painting of a picture (a spatial art) as one of its structural and thematic axes, it raises crucial questions about the work of art in modern times. What is at stake here is more than an examination of Woolf’s well-established ‘visual’ mode of fiction writing, or her equally acknowledged close relation with the world of art and artists, mediated especially by her sister, the painter , and her close friend, Roger Fry, a renowned artist and critic who introduced post-Impressionism to the English art scene. Rather, in this particular instance of a ‘painting in a novel’, the pictorial process becomes a metaphor of Woolf’s fictional writing and of her quests as a modernist artist, framing the novel’s text in a kind of mise en abyme. Moreover, this modernist, abstract painting embeds history, including art history, by displaying a marked concern with the material and means of art in its predilection for the abstract and the fragmentary, common to both visual and literary modernism. Simultaneously, it raises questions about its own historicity, in the context of the demise of transcendence in secular modernity, thus refuting the commonplace perception of modernism as ahistorical.

Rather than attempting a synoptic overview of the presence of painting in at large, this essay will focus on one particular instance of ‘painting in the novel’, occurring in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927),1 widely acknowledged as a landmark of modernist literature. My intention is not to offer yet more evidence on Woolf’s already well- established ‘visual’ mode of fiction-writing, which she also explicitly confirms in her autobiographical piece, ‘’ where she describes her creative process in terms of ‘scene-making’, linking the particular scene with a pattern of significance which she calls ‘reality’:

A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion [...] that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, [...] the sealing matters cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene.2

1 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Grafton, 1977). 2 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Virginia Woolf, , ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton Books, 1989), pp. 69-173 (p.156). 294 Angeliki Spiropoulou

Neither do I aim to re-trace Woolf’s equally well-noted affinity with the world of fine art and artists, mediated by her membership of the which included her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, her sister’s lover Duncan Grant, also a painter, her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, an art-historian, and her close friend, Roger Fry, an important critic and artist of the day who did much to introduce modern painting and a formalist aesthetic in England through his writings and the ground-breaking ‘post- Impressionist exhibition’ he organised in 1910.3 Woolf’s valuing of all art, as well as her pronounced belief in the interconnectedness among the different arts and between art and the world, is eloquently brought into light in the following formulation of what she calls her ‘philosophy’ as an artist:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.4

However, even though Woolf had a keen interest in all the arts, painting certainly held a prominent position in her work, as is evident, for example, in her letters and diaries as well as in the many ekphrastic undertones latent in her fiction that have been and deserve being further researched.5 The focus of the present discussion will be rather an inquiry into some of the aesthetic and wider philosophical problems raised by Woolf’s evocation of painting in this novel, in its mutual imbrication with issues of

3 On Woolf’s interaction with her sister, Vanessa, and her friend, Roger Fry on matters of art, which constituted a major source of Woolf’s appreciation of modern visual art and a lodestar for the development of her own writing aesthetics, see Diane F. Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (New York: Syracuse U.P, 1991); Panthea Reid Broughton, ‘The Blasphemy of Art: Fry’s Aesthetics and Woolf’s Non-“Literary” Stories’, in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1993), pp.36-57; Christopher Reed, ‘Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf’s Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics’, in Gillespie (ed.), Multiple Muses, pp. 11-35; and Diane F. Gillespie, ‘Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. by Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 121-139. 4 Woolf, ‘A Sketch ’, pp. 69-173 (p.81). 5 On Woolf’s knowledge of and response to painting, see, e.g., Maggie Humm, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Arts’, in Humm (ed.), Edinburgh Companion pp.1-16; Benjamin Harvey, ‘Virginia Woolf, Art Galleries and Museums’, in Humm (ed.), Edinburgh Companion, pp. 140-159; Kate Flint, ‘Virginia Woolf and Victorian Aesthetics’, in Humm (ed.), Edinburgh Companion, pp.19-34; Jane Goldman, ‘Virginia Woolf and Modernist Aesthetics’ in Humm (ed.), Edinburgh Companion, pp.35-57, and Judith Bakos, Painting and Writing: Virginia Woolf and Post-Impressionism (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2009).