With the Reader's Superficial Difficulties with the Text and Designs'

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88 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM with the reader's superficial difficulties with the text and designs'. Few would want Frye's work rewritten, but many must feel, as I do, that Blake studies remain altogether too far from the actual words and lines—and the 'superficial difficulties' they raise—of Blake's pictures and poems. The

proliferation of introductions to an already well-known Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 artist and poet (not even Wordsworth is as frequently quoted, and reproductions of Blake's work appear every- where, often in the most improbable places) seems to me to inhibit a proper appreciation and understanding of his work—precisely because it necessitates the sorts of short- cuts and assumptions of authority to which I've been objecting. Roehampton Institute ZACHARY LEADER

VIRGINIA WOOLF The Novels of Virginia Woolf. By HERMIONE LEE. Methuen, 1977; boards £5.50, paper £2.95. Hermione Lee declares her intention at the start: not to write about Bloomsbury or lesbianism but about Virginia Woolf s nine novels 'in the hope of turning attention back from the life to the fictional work'. Nevertheless she quotes a good deal from Quentin Bell's Life, comments a fair amount on the ethos of Bloomsbury and uses A Writer's Diary extensively to show what Virginia Woolf was aiming at and what she felt about her own work. Whether we judge this opportunist or wisely eclectic, it does ensure that the novels are considered as a developing life-work, a series of attempts, in Miss Lee's words, 'to find a way of expressing life (or truth, or reality; the terms are frequently interchangeable) in arf. This has the disadvantage of sometimes leaving the terms of discussion too much in the novelist's hands but it has the advantage of letting Miss Lee make intelligent and sympathetic discriminations between successes and relative failures. The pattern which Miss Lee discerns is persuasive; all the novels find their place in it and though she may empha- size she does not seem to me to distort. Much which will find its place in the later works, she says, is already present BOOK REVIEWS 89 in The Voyage Out—the satire, the 'disdain for common- place minds', the importance of Rachel's 'peculiar states of impersonality'. Her conclusion—which can also stand as an example of her ability to write both shrewdly and amus- ingly—is 'The Voyage Out does not have an integrated structure; it moves about in a hazy and ramshackle manner, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 wishing away its own plot in the interests of its central argument, and then, as if guiltily, returning itself to people and things'. Night and Day, though more committed to the comic and the daily, resembles its predecessor in that both 'explore the possibilities for individual happiness within a restrictive society, and suggest that such happiness can be achieved only by going beyond relationships to more impersonal areas of existence'. Throughout her book Miss Lee uses 'impersonal' to refer to that state of mind to which so many of Virginia Woolf's sensitive characters aspire. What she is referring to is indubitably important, but the terminology is unfortunate; it sets up the opposition: personal = relationships, jobs, politics; impersonal = private moods, fleeting images, yearnings for meaning. But the latter are very personal; Mrs Ramsay never feels so much her own person as when she shrinks to being a wedge-shaped core of darkness, and it is often the world of society which depersonalizes. We sympathize with Miss Lee in her search for a useable term to express those states which—most strikingly in The Waves—are seen as most authentic by Virginia Woolf; a less careful writer would probably have plumped for 'mystical' and we must be glad that she does not, but 'impersonal' sometimes blurs the issue. It is with Jacob's Room that Virginia Woolf makes a big step forward and it is, above all, a technical step; 'The form of Jacob's Room is the subject: an alternative to the false reality of the biography of fact*. Miss Lee analyses the prose whose manipulation is the key to this alternative, showing how the narrative floats in and out of characters and in and out of the narrator in a 'flexible interchange of voices', so that we feel convinced that 'the technique of Jacob's Room is necessary to the expression of Virginia Woolf's beliefs in the shadowiness of character and the elusiveness of relationships'. But she thinks that Virginia Woolf was right to suspect that she had failed to 'enclose 90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM the human heart'; the novel is too epistemological, so that its chief value is to open the way for the next two novels— 'the struggle for knowledge, an end in itself in Jacob's Room, provides the groundwork for the consideration, in Mrs. Dalloway, of personalities at work'.

Miss Lee emphasizes Virginia Woolf s 'fascinated dislike' Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 of high society and her declared satirical aim in Mrs. Dal- loway. It is not hard to show the satirical nature of much— Hugh Whitbread and his fountain pen, Lady Bruton and her lunch, Sir William Bradshaw and his son at Eton. But Miss Lee claims as satire, too, Clarissa's feelings about her clothes and servants and about the grief of women whose sons have been killed in the war so that their line dies out; indeed, she characterizes Clarissa's party as 'hollow, trivial and corrupt*. Set against this—against the clocks which, like Bradshaw, 'counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion'—is 'inner fluidity', 'an intense moment of consciousness' when Clarissa encounters Septimus War- ren Smith's death. But Virginia Woolf's technical method and, one must assume, her own conflict of feelings about high society (she does after all flirt heavily with it in Orlando), mean that she can draw the images which express the moments of intense inner experience only from the very social life which she is often satirizing. This is responsible for much of the strength of the book, our sense that Clarissa's situation is so precarious that we forgive her sillinesses and vanities and even see her party, complete with Prime Minister, as a brave gesture in the face of death. But it is also responsible for a precariousness of tone which often leaves us stranded between incompatible responses. To the Lighthouse is, for Miss Lee, the best of the novels, triumphing because the technical method stemming from Jacob's Room unites with what is in many ways a realistic and ironic story of family life. She is particularly good in her discussion of the fairy-tale, mythological associations which play around Mrs Ramsay; she teases out their significance without hardening them into a system which might fossilise the texture of the novel. She is excellent, too, where many critics are not, in showing the triumph of Mr Ramsay and his values. I can only regret that in an BOOK REVIEWS 91 appreciation which praises so justly the significance of the real world she appears to share Mrs Ramsay's and Virginia Woolf's unawareness that, of all physically and emotionally succulent dishes, a boeuf en daube is least in danger of being overdone.

But, having shown the moments of revelation enmeshed Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 with daily life, Virginia Woolf s impulse was to move on in search of some essence which would free the novel from the material. After the frolic of Orlando comes The Waves, the most abstract of her works. A Writer's Diary makes her aim clear: 'Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner. It is false, unreal, merely conventional'. Miss Lee's judgement on the disadvantages of this aim is firm: 'In thus disallowing the emphasis on relationships which was an important part of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in favour of an emphasis on the essences of personality, Virginia Woolf deprives herself of some of her most power- ful qualities'. Yes, but there is more to it than this; Virginia Woolf is not merely neglecting some of her talents; she is committing herself to a conception of people which cannot but be distorting. Miss Lee comments on the contempt for shopkeepers and the like manifested so disagreeably by Neville and Bernard, their apparent unawareness that other people might have perceptions of value, but this is only the most striking manifestation of a separation of essence from substance which inevitably makes all the characters seem, intermittently, psychotically self-regarding. We know that The Years probably cost its author more suffering than any other of her books and it is tempting to suggest that this was because so much of its substance resists dematerialization. In struggling free from the oppres- sions of Victorian family life her characters must have beliefs, ideas, reasons for their repugnance and their rebel- lion, yet Virginia Woolf is sure that the novel must have no truck with opinions. Miss Lee points to 'the unease we feel at reading a political and historical novel which continually shies away from the factual'. The unease comes most, I think, from a recognition that the technique is distorting the characters. One of the most striking but also 92 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM typical examples of this is the description in the 1891 section of Eleanor's attendance at a committee meeting; we are never told what the committee meeting is about, Eleanor is never shown thinking about the issues involved, though the obvious assumption is that its purpose is to do good to the poor. The account ends with ludicrous abrupt- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 ness: 'She pulled herself together and gave him her opinion. She had an opinion—a very definite opinion. She cleared her throat and began'. The effect of this is not merely to assert that Virginia Woolf has no interest in the issues; it is also to make us feel, whether Virginia Woolf desires this or not—and I do not think that she wants us to despise Eleanor—, that Eleanor herself has no interest, that she is concerned only with a conception of herself as a member of a committee. It is an unwanted triumph of life- style' over life. Of the last novel Miss Lee says: 'In Between the Acts Virginia Woolf returns to the methods which suit her. By contrast with The Years, her last novel is lyrical, carefully patterned and highly controlled. But its range, paradoxi- cally, is broader'. It is also, she says, 'a book about speech, considering the history of a people as created and sustained by the spoken word, and adducing its present decay through the state of language'. She is right to point out the resemblances between Virginia Woolfs preoccupations and those of T. S. Eliot at this time. Certainly the characters no longer struggle to free themselves from history; often the threat of the coming war thrusts them back to a sense of continuity and enduring rurality which, as Miss Lee points out, Virginia Woolf so much enjoyed in those threatened years at Monk's House. But, surprisingly, if the dancers of East Coker come into our minds, so does Puck of Pook's Hill. And, just as there is always something a trifle factitious about Kipling's Sussex, so there is about Pointz Hall. Alas, Virginia Woolf seems to me to have rejected the oppressive solidity of Victorianism, the enemy in so many of her books, to embrace at last a pageant of English history. It is a comical, ironical embrace with multi- farious reservations and mockery of the pageant designer, but an embrace nevertheless. To emphasise what is unsatisfactory in the last novels BOOK REVIEWS 93 rather than, like Miss Lee, to praise them for what is praise- worthy, must seem ungenerous and certainly, knowing the agonies which accompanied their writing, unkind. But it is necessary because, as Miss Lee says in her Introduction, 'no other English novelist of the period combined the theoretical analysis of the requirements for the modern Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 novel with a continuing attempt, in every new work, to match her vision of reality with its appropriate form'. The implications of this judgement are two fold: we cannot with such an exploratory writer be content with enjoying her best books and ignoring the less satisfactory, and, if Virginia Woolf is taken as a type of the modernist novelist, then the relationship between her principles and her achievement is part of a bigger debate about the nature of modernism. What is this relationship? Miss Lee, though armed for the task of relating them, rather surprisingly refuses to perform it. Immediately before the passage which I have just quoted she says: 'None of her novels has the stature or scope of Proust or of Conrad, of Joyce's Ulysses or of Lawrence's The Rainbow. She is, with Forster, in the second rank of twentieth-century novelists. Her imaginative territory is strictly demarcated by her social environment, her intellectual inheritance, her mental instability and her sexual reserve'. It is reasonable to expect that she will demonstrate these limitations within the books, but in fact she hardly reverts to the criticisms. If we compare the successes and the failures and the half- successes, it becomes clear that the real weaknesses are best defined not as limitations of experience or personality but as conceptual muddles—even though, of course, these muddles doubtless derive from personal feelings. The basic muddle is made explicit in the the essay on 'Modern Fiction' which we all use to illustrate Virginia Woolf's aims. Miss Lee quotes it at some length, making good use of it to indicate the relationship between technique and vision, though also making very sensible reservations about its adequacy either as a general guide to fiction or as a comprehensive description of what is most valuable in the novels. She is right to say that the essay needs to be seen in its historical context; there is not much point in objecting that the argument does not cover the cases of George 94 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Eliot and Stendhal (though it is possible to regret the extent to which the polemic led to much thoughtless under- rating of Arnold Bennett). But it is equally important to see that, though an impressionistic use of an impressionistic passage may help to direct attention to what Virginia

Woolf is after, nevertheless the famous metaphors incor- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 porate a fallacy. 'From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old . . . Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.' This is so fine a counter- blast to inert convention that it takes a moment's thought to see that it is the mind that shapes and orders, imposing its patterns on the innumerable atoms in terms of values. To plot, to comment, to moralise is to admit this. To suggest that the patterns emerge involuntarily is to smuggle in judgements of value while the reader is looking the other way—or, sometimes, I think, to find they have been smuggled in while the writer is looking the other way. This may seem too obvious now to need saying and certainly we must sympathize with a writer whose periodical essays are cited in argument half a century later as if they were Holy Writ. But the very frequency with which this passage is quoted is indicative not only of its congruence with Virginia Woolf s practice, but also with judgements about her achievement and with widely shared assumptions about the nature of modernism. Eschewing opinions, ideas, plots, explanations, and seek- ing essences, Virginia Woolf reveals her preferences and her associations primarily through the images which con- stitute the consciousnesses of her characters and of that authorial persona who, with much use of 'one' and of the present participle, surfaces from time to time within the flow of perception. At its best this is piercingly effective, bringing us, it seems, totally within Mrs Ramsay's mind and showing how that mind has been formed by the whole of her life and her society, and at the same time directing our feelings about her. But the method has two disadvan- BOOK REVIEWS 95 tages. The blurring of distinction between the perceptions of the characters and those of their creator often gives the impression that Virginia Woolf cannot separate them from herself enough to focus on them. This is why we can never be sure how far Mrs Dalloway is being satirized; our doubt

is not a matter of changing responses to a person but an Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXIX/1/88/452948 by guest on 27 September 2021 uncertainty about what exactly is being said. The more damaging disadvantage, however, comes from the fact that, deliberately having no truck with opinions, Virginia Woolf is not obliged to confront the opinions implied by the images and the associations of the characters. That weirdly snobbish effect of parts of The Waves, the apparent lack of any sense that those outside the magic circle could be human, could hardly have passed any conscious scrutiny. If one agrees with Miss Lee that To the Lighthouse is her best work, then this must result from its avowedly auto- biographical nature. There is less blurring of Virginia Woolf's mind with those of her characters; this is particularly true, as Miss Lee well says, of the treatment of Mr Ramsay: 'In a novel which criticizes and mocks but finally finds admirable Mr Ramsay's bleak drama of endur- ance, the consolations offered for death are based on the real Mr Ramsay's principles'. Moreover, the images which furnish her characters' minds are grounded in a more physically realised world and one for which she feels a greater depth of commitment—house, furniture, garden, boat. We feel less that they have been chosen to express the characters and more that the characters have been formed by the experience which yields them. The search for inner essence continually comes up against the hard, unyielding, formative experience of relationship, the sense that other people exist.

Department for External Studies Oxford University DOUGLAS HEWITT