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

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 con- tinually shies away from the factual'.

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